Format: Lecture/experience report
Duration: 60 minutes (possibly 90 minutes if discussion and interaction with session participants is allowed)

Abstract

Come listen to how a former manager and product manager became addicted to Agile, and take part of his "ahas" and "take aways" from 15 years within software development.
Among the items to be covered are:

• it's about people, not technology (even though most technology oriented companies can benefit from improving technology, techonoly itself does not mak a company more Agile. It is much about changes in behaviour, and thus it is about people)
• learning is the key (for some people and organizations it might be possible to say "we need to be Agile" and that's it. For most this is not enough. To become Agile takes a lot of learning. Both about Agile and about how to develop software.)
  I want it early, and I want it often (surprisingly often, I have encountered resistance to deliver early and frequently.)
  feedback, a necessary tool (how to get feedback, what type of feedback is valuable and from whom. benefits of feedback and drawbacks of not getting it)
• visibility and transparency (simple ways of obtaining visibility and transparency. examing pitfalls and sources of resistance)
• inspect and adapt (tools and ideas on how to keep up the inspect and adapt mechanism)

Detailed description

Learning objectives:

• Necessary Pre-requsites for Agile.
• Benefits of Agile and Lean.
• How to get management on the Agile train.
• In the lecture I will describe my experience by telling stories and underlining the "take-aways" and "ahas" from each story.
• The stories comes from both the companies I have worked within as from the customers and clients I have worked with. In general I have been moving within telecommunications, thus most stories is from that part of industry. A couple of stories comes from other types of businesses.

Biography

Arne Åhlander is a Senior Consultant using Agile and Lean methodologies to improve product development and management for several larger software organizations.
Arne has 15 years of experience from the software industry, to a great part in the area of product management where he have held several senior positions. Arne has managed Scrum projects, helped customers start Scrum initatives, and was appointed Certified Scrum Trainer in November, 2008. He became one of Sweden's first Certified Product Owners in November 2006.

Arne is based in Malmö, Sweden, employed by Softhouse and an active member of the SW Business Improvement team. He holds a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering at Lund University, Sweden.