W. Edwards Deming identified performance appraisal as one of the Seven Deadly Diseases of Management.

But annual appraisals are currently a fact of life in most organizations, in spite of their negative effects. Many companies are reluctant to give them up, because they don’t see what to do instead of the annual review.

I’ll walk through the assumptions behind performance evaluation and review, and share some of the recent research on the efficacy of annual reviews. Then I’ll offer alternatives that actually help people improve and build stronger relationships.

How well are we served by our current metrics? Do metrics such as developer and tester productivity, ROI, and on-time / on-budget help us improve results? Or, do such metrics drive us towards negative behaviors? In this workshop, we describe the foundation for meaningful metrics. Workshop participants, via a series of exercises, translate this foundation into metrics that they can immediately use. This workshop results from the response I received during my Agile 2008 presentation on the CIO and agile teams. There was a great deal of interest on the topic of aligned, meaningful metrics.

Teams who have been practicing Agile, Lean and Scrum are finding that as they are maturing their practices, they appear to be Agile on the surface but never quite seem to get the benefits promised. This tutorial will teach attendees how to effectively analyze problems to find systemic fixes underlying the symptomatic causes, and grow into learning and problem solving organizations. Examples from many diverse industries will also be presented and discussed and breakout sessions will allow attendees to try their hand at creating a value stream and identifying issues. Tom Poppendieck presenting.

We are going to traverse the long and winding history of Agile at Yahoo! – beginning with the period just prior to the introduction of Agile over 5 years ago, to its current (and unfinished) state – all from the viewpoint of the Agilista in the trenches. Whether the adoption is driven from the top down or bottom up, progress hasn’t always been in a straight path. We hope that the experiences we share will provide valuable insight for others in their roll-out of Agile in the enterprise, and how the DNA of Agile can survive and even thrive in both supportive and challenging circumstances.

No normal person can focus attention on a single object or idea for more than about 15 seconds. There’s a practice, though, that you can learn so as to accommodate this fact. You can use this practice to get good at concentrating. When you can stay focused, you can work without distraction while not zoning out and losing track of your surroundings. When you can stay focused, you can work productively; when your team can stay focused, amazing things happen.

No, you don’t get to skip project planning. Brooke needs to know approximate cost and delivery date, and poor Padma need to know when the good stuff will start showing up. You yourself need to know dependencies and delays.

This is the shortest, fastest, easiest way I know to create a project plan. It’s full name is “Project Planning Jam Session”, to indicate that all roles are present for the session, from sponsor to business person to designers and testers. Thanks to Jens Coldewey for first showing this to me in 1998 – it instantly improved the way our teams developed project plans.

Given the size and scope of Google’s code base, and speed of development, typical off-the-shelf continuous integration are unable to meet our needs. So, we decided to create a continuous integration and testing system as a centralized service on an unprecedented scale. When fully completed and operational, it will probably be the world’s largest continuous integration and testing system, running millions of tests every single day.

In this talk, we will report on our experience running such a program in an agile manner and will also describe the basic design and features of the CI system.

In 2007, OpenView Venture Partners decided to adopt Scrum as best practice in software development in its portfolio companies and Scrum as the standard practice in all internal operations. The OpenView Scrum teams aggressively remove all impediments (take no prisoners). Attached is a reference model that supports best practices in management, sales, marketing, finance, development, and customer support in OpenView portfolio companies. After over 52 weekly Sprints, OpenView is the first non-software Scrum to provide a working manual on how to do Scrum outside of software development.

Three basic tools - pen, paper and a kitchen timer - will give you Agile values like…

• Constant feedback about your working habits
• Dedicated decision points to respond to change
• Opportunities on a day to day basis to improve your personal process
• A sustainable pace even when the deadlines are getting closer
• Improved quantitative and qualitative estimates
• Strategy for coping with interruptions and task switching
• Ability to regulate complexity

This presentation applies Agile thinking to critical aspects of strategy and execution at a time of uncertainty and disruption. The essential point is simple and logical: Agile values and principles are indivisible. To succeed, they must be applied not just to R&D, but also to customer and company, simultaneously. This requires reconfiguration of customer relationships, employee policy, software development, and the relationship that binds the three.