Too many technology projects fail to deliver on the promised value and some don’t deliver at all. Traditional project management methods continue to frustrate financial professionals and offer poor risk mitigation. Now more than ever, businesses are forced to reduce their capital budgets and cannot afford to make significant investments without more surety of return on investment. How can we align incremental cost with incremental value? What are the proven practices that will enable me to get more value, sooner, with better results?

This webinar will discuss the concept of Agile business value and why companies are adopting Agile and how this reduces cash commitments to projects.

Topics will cover how to:

• Squeeze cash out of your work-in-process
• Drive risk out of the project portfolio
• Increase ROI and enhance the overall portfolio return

Attendees will learn how to apply Agile practices to:

• Reducing investment in “work-in-process”
• Accelerating business value and reducing waste
• Improving effectiveness of portfolio management

John Rudd, President and CFO of SolutionsIQ, is responsible for day-to-day operations and ensures the long-term financial stability of SolutionsIQ during our ongoing evolution as an industry-leading Agile organization. John was formerly a partner in a boutique financial consulting & investment banking firm where he led the firm’s financial practice specializing in advisory services, mergers & acquisitions and interim management. John received his B.S. in Economics from the University of Minnesota and his MBA from the University of Southern California.

Today’s economy is forcing financial and technology professionals to make tough decisions in order to free up capital, reduce cost, and increase overall project and portfolio return. Business as usual is risky. In Agile ROI Part I: The Business Case for Agility, we discuss how Agile practices offer an attractive alternative to wholesale cost cutting. In this webinar, we quantify the potential value of these innovative practices for your organization and how to demonstrate this value for key decision makers.

This webinar will discuss the concept of Agile business value and why companies are adopting Agile and how this reduces cash commitments to projects.

Topics will cover how to:

• Identify areas of benefit and how to quantify the savings
• Calculate the relevant internal and external costs of change or no change
• Estimate the timeline for obtaining value

Attendees will learn:

• Calculating expected return on Agile adoption
• Identifying potential risks and mitigations when adopting Agile practices

David Wylie is an Engagement Manager at SolutionsIQ, responsible for project success and delighting his customers. Over a career of 25 years, he has worked as a software developer, tester, analyst, project manager and consultant. The last 19 years have been focused on consulting to a wide variety of industries on effective implementations of technology. This included systems strategy, software selection, conversions, sun setting applications, business analysis, development, reporting and testing. He received his BS from the University of Missouri, and an MBA from Northern Arizona University.

Has your agile transition been effective? Is your investment paying off? Are you more productive, predictable and building higher quality products than before? Have your teams positively impacted your business objectives? Executives are demanding accountability and a return on their investment. It is your responsibility to provide them quantifiable results - this webinar will show you how to do it and the pitfalls to avoid.

This webinar will explain the Top 5 agile metrics to measure and drive agile teams along with the Top 5 agile metric pitfalls to avoid in measuring agility. Attendees will learn effective and ineffective measurements for productivity, quality, predictability, throughput and business value. Measurements and pitfalls will be provided clearly and supported by a case studies to explain how they have been applied and results achieved.

Pete Behrens is an Agile Leadership Coach and the President of Trail Ridge Consulting, an agile organization & leadership consulting firm specializing in large-scale agile assessment, adoption and implementation in highly interdependent and distributed organizations. Their clients include many Fortune 500 companies such as Salesforce.com, McKesson, Nokia, Earthlink, JDA Software, Corporate Express, Los Angeles Times, Media News Group and others. Pete is a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) and Certified Scrum Coach (CSC) for the Scrum Alliance with over 18 years experience in developing software solutions and 7 years guiding organizational-wide Scrum transformations. Pete is also an active leader in the Agile Alliance, Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN) and Scrum Alliance where he guided the establishment of the Certified Scrum Coaching (CSC) Program through his extensive work as an agile leadership coach.

Is, “you can’t manage it if you can’t measure it” true for Agile?  Metrics definitely drive behavior, and in the Agile process team members undergo significant behavioral change. Appropriate selection of driving metrics is therefore one of the most important jobs for the agile management team. Without an appropriate set of Agile specific metrics, adoption efforts are likely to fail due to the mismatch between what we are measuring and how we actually want people to behave in this new environment. In this webinar, Sanjiv Augustine and Roland Cuellar of LitheSpeed, LLC discuss Agile appropriate metrics at the customer, portfolio and project levels.

Sanjiv Augustine, President
An industry-leading agile and lean expert, Sanjiv is a co-founder and board member of the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN). He is also the author of several publications and the book Managing Agile Projects (Prentice Hall 2005); and the founder and moderator of the Yahoo! Agile Project Management discussion group. Sanjiv has assisted clients in deploying agile and lean methodologies at many institutions large and small. As a management coach and consultant, he has advised in the enterprise rollout and adoption of Scrum at several Fortune 250 companies. As an in-the-trenches practitioner, he has personally managed agile projects varying in size from five to over one hundred people and coached numerous project teams. For more information, see Sanjiv’s website: www.sanjivaugustine.com.

Roland Cuellar, Vice President
Roland has years of Agile Project Management and Lean expertise - he is a leader in helping enterprise level clients to adopt the use of both agile and lean in their organizations. Roland has helped executives prepare their organizations for agile transformation by identifying challenges and opportunities related to agile and lean implementation and developing action plans and risk mitigation strategies to insure that agile and lean initiatives are successful. Roland has prior experience leading large software development projects for IBM, Lockheed Martin, and DHL. Roland has a B.S. in Computer Science, an MBA, and is a Certified ScrumMaster and a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt.

This webcast contrasts the project management styles of two XP/Agile teams and the consequence of the PM’s behaviors and attitudes.  One team will triumph with the effective use of metrics and the other will end in a tragedy.
Learn:

• How to achieve higher performance on seasoned XP/Agile teams
• Understand how applying Lean Thinking and Agile can overcome significant problems
• What quality analysis tools to use to uncover root cause of complex impediments
• Recognize some traditional project management techniques can have some negative unintended consequences

Richard Lacher is the Chief Process Architect and Lean-Agile Practice Director for CC Pace Systems.  He has worked with both private and public sector organizations of all sizes transforming their standard practices into high performing Lean-Agile processes. Richard has introduced Lean Agile approaches to shops with no prior agile experience as well as worked with seasoned XP/Agile shops to demonstrate how they can break out to world class performance levels. Richard’s projects have had proven increases in team capacity of 147%, throughput of 150% and more than doubling of the team’s process cycle efficiency. Rick is a Certified Scrum Practitioner, a Project Management Professional (PMP) and a Lean Six-Sigma Black Belt.  He is the author of advanced Lean-Agile Project Management courses and has lectured at IT Masters programs.  Rick holds a BA in Economics and a Minor in Math from the University of Southern Connecticut and advanced studies in Lean Six Sigma programs at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Management.