Agile has all these weird, expensive-looking practices: pair programming, test-driven development, regular planning meetings, moving the programmers and business people closer together, focusing people on a single project, multi-disciplinary teams. We can’t afford to go agile!

In this session, J. B. Rainsberger introduces agile practices by relating them to core business matters: compounding early earned value and reducing unnecessary costs. Learn why practice and learning are really profit centers. Maybe you can’t afford not to go agile!

This presentation illustrates, using an animated Agile Story Card Wall, the concepts of Lean’s Work in Progress, Drum–Buffer–Rope from Theory of Constraints and Systemic Thinking from Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline. The presentation, originally inspired by the MIT Beer Game, uses Flash animation to show the flow of story cards across a Story Card Wall over 10 iterations, demonstrating the effects on the team’s throughput as a result of a staffing decision made during the project. The presentation also includes an Excel spreadsheet to do ‘What If’ scenarios.