#ElevateAgile2021

2021 Talks

Agile. The Past 20 Years

Mike Cottmeyer

1 of 18

About The Talk

This year the Agile Manifesto celebrates its 20th anniversary. As a document, it’s challenging to find an approach or philosophy, or way of thinking that has more deeply captured the imagination of the world of software development. The Manifesto articulated four values and twelve principles that empowered small teams of engineers working side-by-side with their customers to deliver products early and often to get maximum feedback, maximum value, and strong attention to software craftsmanship and technical excellence.

As Agile grew in popularity, it similarly captured the imaginations of Project Managers, Directors of Development, and even Senior Executives. The promise of cost-efficient, lightweight teams, working with minimal bureaucracy and overhead, delivering working tested products on regular intervals, maximizing speed and return on investment seemed almost too good to be true. Looking back over the past twenty years, now might be a good time to ask if it was too good to be true? Did Agile deliver the value it promised?

In his opening keynote, Mike Cottmeyer will explore what we’ve learned over the past 20 years about adopting Agile practices and Transforming Agile organizations. We will look at what the signers of the Manifesto got right, but why it’s incomplete as a model for scaling to larger enterprises. Mike will make a case for how we must elevate the conversation around Agile or risk Agile being relegated to that thing teams do, which has nothing to do with running a business.

Now is the time to close the gap and elevate the conversation around Agile.

Topic Areas:

Achieving Measurable Progress and Quantifiable Business Results
System of Delivery
System of Transformation
System of Continuous Improvement

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Agile. The Past 20 Years

This year the Agile Manifesto celebrates its 20th anniversary. As a document, it’s challenging to find an approach or philosophy, or way of thinking that has more deeply captured the imagination of the world of software development. The Manifesto articulated four values and twelve principles that empowered small teams of engineers working side-by-side with their customers to deliver products early and often to get maximum feedback, maximum value, and strong attention to software craftsmanship and technical excellence.

Agile Transformation and Delivery Systems at Scale

Small teams dominated the early days of Agile, often collocated and working side-by-side with onsite customers. With autonomy over their technology stack and the ability to do push button changes into production at a moment’s notice. The core organizing principle was that we had dedicated teams, working off a clearly articulated backlog of requirements, producing an increment of working-tested software at regular intervals.

Lockheed Martin Experience Report

Discover how Lockheed Martin is using Agile principles to generate disruptive innovation. In this talk, John and John will cover how Lockheed Martin is improving their processes, technology, and tools to drive Agile responsiveness and provide data-driven insights to their customers. Over the course of the talk they’ll tell you about some of the practices they put in place and the results they began to see.

John McLoughlin

Establishing a Reliable System You Can Delegate Into

For years, the Agile community has taken the approach that an Agile Transformation was about teaching people the principles, practices, and mindset of an Agile organization. While principles, practices, and mindset are incredibly important, they are insufficient for successfully orchestrating a transformation at scale. Everything about agile assumes that you have complete cross-functional teams, clearly articulated and strategically aligned backlogs, and the ability to produce a working, tested increment of software at the end of every sprint. This begs the question; what do you do if you don’t?

Understanding the Whole: Why Changing the System of Delivery is Insufficient

Most organizations view Agile as a way the delivery teams produce working software. Even when we get agile working well at the team or workgroup level, we often fail to consider how the rest of the organization will need to change to exploit this new delivery capability. Once we have a trustworthy system, one we can delegate into that does what it says it will do, when it says it will do it, what has to change companywide for true business agility?

Engaging the Enterprise at Scale: How to Get Everyone Else to Change

One of the challenges of introducing Agile into an organizational ecosystem is that the principles, practices, mindsets, organizational structure, governance, and metrics are orthogonal to how most corporations do business. Agile gets installed in the small and is instantly at odds with the current operating model. It is incongruent with how work is funded and approved and how it handles compliance and corporate governance. To even have a chance, agile is granted exceptions to these control frameworks. Still, in the end, these frameworks will limit our ability to make progress and achieve true business agility.

Ford Motor Company Experience Report

In this talk, Amy tells you about her experiences at Ford Automotive and how they used Agile principles to evolve so they could focus on services, experiences, and technology to build a better world where every person is free to move and pursue their dreams.

Calling Your Shots: Creating Safety, Accountability and Orchestrating Change at Scale

Change doesn’t happen by accident. Change must get planned, orchestrated, and held accountable. Many organizations have a Project Management Office responsible for setting standards, providing resources, managing work, and making sure the organization’s work is visible. We need to discover a similar mechanism for orchestrating an Agile Transformation, an Agile Transformation Office, if you will. If such an office were to exist, what might it look like? What might it be responsible for? How would that office ensure the Transformation was on track? And what would it do once the Transformation was over?

Brian Sondergaard

Executive Panel Discussion

In this panel discussion, four executives sit down to explore some of the key concepts and common threads covered in the Elevate Agile talks. Together, they discuss some of the history that’s led us to this point in the Agile industry and share real-world examples and stories to illustrate how they’ve elevated Agile in some of the largest companies in the world.

Brian Sondergaard