As Development VP, Rich Sheridan transformed his organization by adopting radical co-location and XP practices. Rich will share the history of this transformation including the tactics he used in selling this idea to his peers, his CEO, the Directors, and ultimately his team members. Rich now runs a software design and development company that was built from the ground up with an Agile culture and Agile processes. As the CEO of this company, Rich routinely has to sell customer executives on why they will realize business value from practices such as unit testing and paired-programming.

As more development teams adopt agile, product managers must change the way they work to keep up with faster development cycles and shorter customer feedback loops. Product managers new to agile soon realize that agile processes require more involvement from their group. Given that most product managers are already overworked, how can they manage these new activities to derive more value from software projects and products? I will share my experience transitioning to Agile, pitfalls to avoid and propose solutions to the new challenges that arise.

Are you thinking about trying agile approaches? Do you have an agile transition underway? Is your team or organization trying to become agile, but been less than successful thus far? A foundational implication – and the biggest potential roadblock – of the agile manifesto is culture change.

Therefore, to be successful with agile approaches and especially to scale them, you must go beyond agile technical practices and simultaneously tackle culture changes. This session shows why this is so, introduces a simple culture model, and gives you an opportunity to try out a culture tool.