Fresh Voices #2

These are the 3 talks selected for this Fresh Voices event:

• The Journey to Agile with Shabbir Naqvi

• The importance of Lead Time as a metric with Paulo Dias

• Open Source And Cloud Beyond Tech with Kubair A Shirazee

Each session will be 20 minutes long with 10 additional minutes for questions and feedback.

The Journey to Agile

It’s very common for established companies to perform some sort of Agile transformation. Quite often this involves hiring a consultant, giving a crash course on Agile and typically Scrum, and then suddenly mandating teams to work in that way. Development teams are restructured and processes are put into place. Does this really work though?

I offer my thoughts on the topic and use some case studies from my own experiences on how I feel it’s best to get development teams aboard trying to be Agile. I also touch on what it means to work bottom-up rather than top-down and how you can use it to facilitate change in your teams.

The importance of Lead Time as a metric

In the competitive market conditions that we live today, delivery teams generally understand the need to deliver faster. Many, however, are convinced that they are already doing work as fast as they possibly can and it is difficult to convince them otherwise.

The first stage to a successful change in behaviour is to make sure they are fully aware of their current lead time. We call this stage the visualisation stage where the team baselines their lead time, makes it completely visible to everyone and team members understand that there are in fact bottlenecks that can be optimised.

In the second stage, the team puts in place the required changes that they believe will stabilize lead time and make it better. We call this the stabilisation phase.

Once we have a number of processes and techniques in place, it is time to start the third phase where through various experiments, the team attempts to optimise lead time. We call this stage the optimisation stage.

All in all, this presentation is about bringing the concepts of lead and agile together in order to achieve high performance in business delivery through an effective measure of Lead Time.

Open Source And Cloud Beyond Tech

How could we take the strengths and learnings that make us a successful tech community to wider non tech audiences with a view of creating social transformation that addresses the needs of our societies in these turbulent times?

What can we learn from the transformation FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) and the Cloud has had on our ecosystem as technologists and how can we export that beyond tech to heal and build a stronger society?