The goal of this session is to gather experienced executives (and people who work closely with them) to discover and document agile patterns for CTOs. It builds on our previously-presented research on this subject.

CTOs are not yet clamoring for this material, but we feel that executive involvement in Agile is crucial for Agile acceptance in an organization and also for Agile to survive as a viable process category. We have submitted this session to Agile Frontiers because it is firmly in the “slow burn” category. We have seen interest in this material from pioneering CTOs, but we expect that it will be 2-5 more years before it hits the mainstream. By conducting workshops and discovering patterns now, the Agile community will be prepared when the time comes.

This session is intended for a select group of experienced participants, with the goal of pushing the edges of Agile understanding. We will design the material to scale from four to forty people. (If we get more than 40, some of them will be underqualified and we’ll be prepared to manage that.)

Session Outline:

We will start the session by presenting a review of our prior CTO research and introducing the elements of a pattern. (~10 min)

We will guide participants in using Force-Field Analysis to explore their context as executives. (20-30 min)

Next, we select common contexts and ask participants to remember what they have done in those situations and what context resulted. (5-10 min)

Finally, we will identify common themes and document them as draft patterns. (~45 min)

We will close the workshop with expressions of appreciation and discuss next steps. (~5 min)

Within 2 months of the workshop, we will publish the draft patterns online and announce their availability and location on our websites. We will pursue this material further in a future conference.