The introduction of Scrum at a CMMI Level 5 company doubled productivity and cut defects by 40% compared to waterfall projects in 2006 by focusing on early testing and time to fix builds. Systematic institutionalized Scrum across all projects and used data driven tools like story efficiency to surface Product Backlog impediments . This allowed them to systematically develop a strategy for a second doubling in productivity. Two teams have achieved a sustainable quadrupling of productivity compared to waterfall projects. We discuss here the strategy to bring the entire company to that level.

In the nature vs. nurture debate, researchers have declared nurture the winner. People who excel are the ones who work the hardest; it takes ten+ years of deliberate practice to become an expert. Deliberate practice is not about putting in hours, it’s about working to improve performance. It does not mean doing what you are good at; it means challenging yourself under the guidance of a teacher. Unfortunately, our organizations are not set up to develop experts, nor do agile practices encourage them. So how will we develop the experts we need to improve?

Even teams with good skills, appropriate technologies, and posters of the Agile Manifesto on the wall can have trouble. Giving into temptation is often the cause. Guiding values are what keep us on the straight and narrow path in the face of temptation. Teams that have strong internalized values will stick to or invent good Agile practices while teams without them will drift into the ditch.

In this talk, I’ll present what I think of as the most important guiding values:

• courage
• working software
• ease
• being reactive
• fast feedback
• naiveté
• visibility
• joy

During 2005-2009 Scrum teams were formed in churches in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Florida, Delaware, and Virginia. This experience report will show how Scrum broke out of the IT silo into finance, marketing, operations, and senior management teams. Churches have to solve difficult impediments – part-time and volunteer workers, narrow specialization, little experience with project teams, and political problems that started in 1692. Their unique contribution has been to successfully address the larger question of continuous process improvement for the whole organization.

Do you mentor, coach, teach or just help other people? Do you wonder why after your greatest teaching moments people just don’t get it? In recent years neuroscience has started to provide us with a number of insights in what happens when we’re teaching. These insights make it clear that learning is really about building and reinforcing existing neural networks. Instead of providing lots of new ideas out of the blue, we need to understand the learners existing context and work with that. Instead of focusing on mistakes and errors, we need to focus on what good solutions look like.

Conversation around Agile Software Development Practices has reached deep into the organizations in which we work, and it’s changing the way that software is built. As dev teams become more reactive to the marketplace and end-users, where does this leave marketing folks?