12/13/11
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Zainab Alikhan
Talk: From Team” to “Wow-Team”
Our department had been practicing Agile for three years. In the first two years, we learnt how to be really good. Then we began to plateau…complacency crept in, we drifted away from the spirit of agile and began to skip the basics. In this talk we describe how we overcame this. How we went from being a team on the slide to a “wow team” by seeing every problem as an opportunity, converting small thoughts into great ideas and finding innovative solutions for problems. Do you want to know the simple yet powerful basics that can make a huge impact and make your team a Wow Agile Team?
Zainab Alikhan works as an Agile technologist at a management consulting firm, playing a variety of roles including product owner, scrum master and coach. She helped with the Agile transformation of the firm’s IT group, and has led and coached Agile projects for the firm’s clients as well as internally for 4+ years. She has spoken at interest groups in New York and at Agile 2011 in Salt Lake City and will be speaking at the first Agile 2012 India next year.
Zainab has a degree in instructional design of technology from Columbia University and an MIS from Carnegie Mellon University.
Guarav Tiwari
Talk: From Team” to “Wow-Team”
Our department had been practicing Agile for three years. In the first two years, we learnt how to be really good. Then we began to plateau…complacency crept in, we drifted away from the spirit of agile and began to skip the basics. In this talk we describe how we overcame this. How we went from being a team on the slide to a “wow team” by seeing every problem as an opportunity, converting small thoughts into great ideas and finding innovative solutions for problems. Do you want to know the simple yet powerful basics that can make a huge impact and make your team a Wow Agile Team?
Gourav Tiwari works as a Rubyist and an agile developer at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). He is also interested in team dynamics and has experimented with playing the product owner and scrum master roles to understand what goes into them. He is a big believer in agile principles and trying to make things fun. He has presented at Ruby on Rails meet-ups in New York, at Agile 2011 in Salt Lake City and will be presenting at the ConFoo 2012 web technology conference in Montreal.
He says he is in love with Ruby on Rails and blogs about his learnings and experiences with Ruby, Rails and Agile development.
D.Andre Dhondt
Talk: Multi-Sensory Kanban
Optimizing the whole doesn’t have to stop with a Value Stream Analysis—come find out how software teams deliver when they’ve got multiple cues to remind them to integrate opinions from each other, as well as marketing, sales, and operations teams. While big visible charts with swim lanes are useful reminders, the visual channel is overloaded — so we leverage our mind’s capacity for multi-threaded perception by using different channels for different kinds of signals. For example, stop events are audible (to catch people’s attention), start events are visual (so people “in the zone” don’t get interrupted), and transitions are kinetic or post-food time (to pull our focus away from our last task). Rather than being focused entirely on cycle time, we monitor team energy and creativity levels to give us early warning signs of systemic problems. While these practices were developed in the field through team discussions and retrospectives, they are definitely inspired by the work of Weinberg, Cirillo, DeMarco & Lister, Block, Derby/Larsen, Beck, and the Poppendiecks.
For over a decade, André Dhondt has led agile adoptions, providing guidance to teams and organizations seeking shorter development cycles, higher quality, and more effective discovery of customer value. Playing various roles, from developer, manager, product owner and scrum master, he’s done everything from hiring and building teams in startup environments to coaching teams for an organization with over 100k employees. Some of his teams have seen 50% reduced cycle time, practically bug-free code with daily deployments, and improved employee morale.
After graduating from college and receiving an M.S. in Information Science from Drexel University, André has continued his lifelong committment to learning by reading about software teams and by organizing and facilitating discussions amongst local practitioners. To get community feedback on his ideas, he presents regularly at conferences, including: Agile 2011, XP 2010-2011, Agile Tour 2008-2010, and Agile France.
André lives with his spouse and 3 children in Philadelphia, returning after two years spent abroad, where he used his fluent French to help a French team.