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Leading Agile

Co-Founder, Accelinnova

801. 209. 0195

accelinnova.com

blog: pollyannapixton.com

t: @pollyannapixton

Pollyanna PIXTON

Self-organizing, self-managing

Do we need leaders?

What kind of Leadership?

what outcomes do you

hope for from this

session?

Why Agile

How Agile Works

Business Value

Collaboration

Culture of Trust

Ownership

Metrics

Agile Leadership

Agenda

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why Agile?

A set of effective principles

Recognize uncertainty and change

Ownership

Learning

Collaboration

Disciplined Delivery

A set of practices that help implement those

principles

What is Agile?

Value driven not date driven

Continuous stakeholder and customer

feedback

Embraces change

Practice Excellence

Continuous High Quality

No accumulation of technical debt

What is Agile?

faster & better

results

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Efficiencies and Effectiveness

Delight our customers

Deliver the right

business value

Ability to deal with

change, risk and

uncertainty

Drive out cost and waste

in product development

lifecycle

Business dynamics

innovate to

differentiate

responsiveness

tighter linkage to

customers

time to value

Operational dynamics

predictability ofschedules

quality

better use of resources

improve productdevelopment cycles

Project Challenges

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Project Statistics

Always or

Often Used:

20%

Never or

Rarely Used:

64%

Standish Group Study, reported by CEO Jim Johnson, XP2002

Sometimes

16%Rarely

19%

Never

45%

Often

13%

Always

7%

Technical Debt?

Anything that makes

code difficult to

change.

Cost of getting out of

debt is compounded

over time.

Defect Cost over Time

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How does

agile

help?

don’t build what we

don’t need

business driven

Delays by overzealous planning costs far more

than it saves.

Time

Co

st

Delay

Lost Value

Agile Increases Revenue Business Driven

Agile projects reach a break-even point earlier!

Time

Cost

Profit

Investment

Bre

akeven

Single

Release

Self-F

undin

g

Bre

akeven

Software by Numbers by Mark Denne and Jane Cleland-Huang

Staged

Releases

Agile Increases Revenue

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responsiveness to

market changes

Agile does this by…

Continuous stakeholder feedback

Stakeholders participate in

User story development

Prioritizing chunks

Giving feedback on delivery of working chunks

Delivering in short cycles

mitigate risk

early and often

deal with uncertainty

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we don’t know what we don’t know

As Knowledge

increases Leaders use

iterations to guide

project towards

enhanced goal

Encourage Mid Course Corrections

Planned Path

Actual Path

Actual Completion

Start

Zone of successPlanned

Completion

Incre

asin

g K

now

ledge

Hurricane Rita

8

9

5%- NASA

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Examples

Agile Examples

1 year projects reduced to 5 months with

better quality (custom systems)

Past: 3 months to develop 2 year roadmap

Present: 3 days

Financial: 50% time cut; 60% cost reduction

Improved Growth: Fortune 100 Co.

SW Revenue per DE HC $M

2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

Revenue p

er

HC

$M

E/R

as

%

Rev per DE HCE/R

Improving Productivity to Reinvest

Capacity

2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009*

HC

/ P

rod

uct

GA

SW

G R

even

ue i

n $

$’s

HC / Product GA

SWG Revenue

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Pro

ducts

& H

C/P

roduct

Improving Product Deliveries

2004 2005 2006 2007 2008

Brand W Products Brand T Products

Brand W HC/product Brand T HC/product

Non-Technical Agile

Sales department: Introduce new sales

model. Deployed in a single sales region,

learned and iterated globally.

Architecture Firm: Unable to hire enough

architects. Increased revenues by 90% while

only increasing costs y 30%.

Summary

summaryAgile defined …

Uses continuous stakeholder

feedback to deliver high-quality,

consumable code through user

stories and a series of short,

stable, time-boxed iterations.

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