• Why AIB chose to go Agile – Rationale for adopting the methodology – How we did it
• The new Philosophy & Principles of ATERN – How we have adopted and integrated these – Feedback from internal customers
• What our combined process looks like – Extra PMBOK elements – Extra SOX driven sign-off & control
• How we support the use of DSDM; supported by other SDLC components – Project Portfolio approach – Sample projects – Learning points
• Our goal for continuous improvement – Where from here?

Mairéad Reid has worked in AIB for just over ten years, which she finds hard to believe!  In that time she has held multiple roles including Branch Banker, Software Engineer, Business Analyst & Project Manager.

AIB Group is Ireland’s leading Banking & Financial Services Group, operating in Ireland, USA, UK & Poland.  Mairéad works in ES&T, Enterprise Systems & Technology, a central IT function with over 850 staff.  She heads up a team that is charged with ensuring that the portfolio of change projects underway utilise DSDM as part of the SDLC methodology defined for the organisation.

"Agile" is quickly becoming the hot buzz-phrase in many organisations but Agile is simply an umbrella term for a number of specific development methods including; eXtreme Programming (XP), SCRUM, Feature Driven Development, DSDM and Crystal. What does it mean to "Be Agile"? This talk will identify a number of principles common to Agile methods and identify some common strategies and pitfalls when transitioning to an Agile method.

- Is "Agile" a silver bullet?
- What is "Agile"?
- Common principles of Agile methods
- Transitioning strategies
- Common impediments and pitfalls

Brian Swan is an Agile mentor with Exoftware, and has extensive experience in both the technical and the management aspects of Agile.
He has successfully led a variety of teams transitioning to Agile, and trained both developers and managers in Agile thinking and practice.
Brian has specific technical experience in the financial services and telecoms sectors, and his work with Exoftware and Agile has taken him to a wide range of companies.

The 'engine room' of DSDM and the new Atern has long been recognised as a combination of the key techniques of MoSCoW Prioritisation and Timeboxing.  Understand how these and other techniques can be applied in PRINCE2 and other traditional project environments to help deliver software projects on time, every time.
Key techniques:  

• MoSCoW Prioritisation
• Timeboxing
• Iterative Development
• Facilitated Workshops

David Hicks of RADTAC and Martin Freeman of Jardine Lloyd Thompson’s Profund Solutions present a Case Study of the Agile experiences of this leading supplier of Pensions software and services. The Pensions industry has seen dramatic changes in the last few years, and Profund needs to be Agile in order to prosper. However, the wider environment in which it operates is far from Agile and this presents some real-world challenges. This presentation examines the practicalities of becoming more Agile within a very un-Agile organisation and touches on topics such as: Selecting the right Agile approach; How to implement Agile methods across an organisation; Agile and the role of the Business Analyst; Agile and the role of the Test team; Agile within a traditional Project Management framework; Agile and off-shore development; Agile and fixed-price contracts; Real benefits of Agile; Lessons learned (and applied); Challenges for Agile.

Martin Freeman is Head of Systems Development at Profund Solutions, part of the Jardine Lloyd Thomson Group and a leading supplier of Pensions software and services. If you have a personal or a company pension then the chances are that it is administered on a Profund system. Martin has been the driving force in moving his organisation from a Waterfall model to successful use of an approach based on the Agile Unified Process (an Agile variant of RUP). With a variety of projects now delivered using Agile, Martin is in an excellent position to give a real-world warts-and-all account of his experiences.

David Hicks, is the Managing Director of RADTAC, and has been helping organisations move “beyond Waterfall” for twenty years. In the mid-80’s he was responsible for early Agile approaches at BIS Applied Systems and LBMS (the originators of SSADM and Prince). During the 90’s he helped organisations such as British Airways and Friends Provident adopt DSDM for their IT and business projects. He was one of the pioneers of Scrum in 1999 with his work on the Terminal 5 project and was a founder member of the Agile Alliance in 2002. Few people have as much in-depth experience of the full range of Agile methods. A frequent and popular presenter at Conferences, David Hicks has built his reputation on straight-talking and the RADTAC approach of PragmaticAgile.

This session is designed to explain the basics of Atern to those who know little about what Atern is and how it works. The session will give a brief overview of the elements of Atern, as well as highlighting how Atern can be used to complement other approaches, such as Atern + Prince2 to provide agile management and delivery capability, or Atern + XP to strengthen the Agile management.

Barbara Roberts, DSDM Director for Professional Development and certified DSDM Consultant, Trainer, Examiner, Practitioner and
Professional Facilitator, Barbara has been involved continuously with
DSDM since its inception in 1994, and has supported the introduction
of DSDM into large numbers of organisations, ranging from large global
corporates, government and civil service, to SMEs, and in a wide range
of business sectors. Most recently Barbara has been part of the team
piloting DSDM Atern prior to its public launch. This was on a major
transition program for a global company delivering new ways of working
and process change to the shop floor. Barbara had already trained over
100 people in Atern globally before the April 2007 launch.

This session presents real-world case studies (spanning several years, many industries) to help participants create a pragmatic plan for their own adoption of agile practices, incorporating:

• Gaining business stakeholder buy–in.

• Dealing with exceptions (“my teams cannot be co-located”..”there is no UI to this system”…)

• Development Management: Commitment versus Compliance.

• Prototypes, priorities and expectation management: using the prototyping process to negotiate development priorities.

• Demonstrating improvement/ disproving suspicions relating to the ‘quality’ of agile development

• Beyond the project: sustaining Agile/ DSDM practices for business as usual operations.

Finbarr Joy is Solutions Director and founding member of UPCO, a UK Systems Integrator. In this position he has been responsible for leading the evolution of UPCO’s Agile development service: UPCO Engage, and for managing the delivery of Engage solutions for UPCO's Global and UK customers in the Retail, Insurance, Telecommunications, and Leisure Industries.
Prior to joining UPCO, Finbarr was a Senior Consultant for Netscape Communications, leading pioneering e-commerce solutions.

Much has been said on how various roles have been influenced and enhanced by the introduction of more agile approaches to projects, particularly those of developer, project manager, tester and business user. In recent years the role of business analyst has become increasingly more common and discussion on how it may act in organisations taking a more agile approach is still evolving. This interactive presentation will consider the evolution of the role of Business Analyst and make some suggestions as to how it may fit, if at all, either prior to or during a project using an agile approach such as DSDM/Atern

Paul Turner is a Director of Business & IS Skills and Assist Knowledge Development. He has contributed to the development of DSDM versions 3, 4 and Atern. He specialises in Business Analysis and Systems Development and is the ISEB Chief Examiner for the Diploma in Systems Development. He is a SFIA accredited consultant with a particular interest in how the job role profiles of Business Analyst and Developer change in an agile environment.

This session presents case studies of two separate projects that each ran for over four years. In each case, the introduction and adoption of the Agile development process was relatively straightforward and very successful: the development teams rapidly got into the groove of reliably delivering valuable software in small increments. However, both projects ran into a number of issues, due to both the length of the project and the environment in which it ran, which the Agile development practices did not address.

Attendees of this session will:

• Hear true stories of highly-successful long-running Agile projects, executed in both corporate and SME environments, that ran into problems
• Learn how Agile methods do not address longer term business needs or management issues; the source of many of these issues
• Learn what practices and techniques were introduced to augment the Agile development method in order to address these issues
• Understand the model of software delivery we have adopted that applies the Agile approach to issues outside of delivering software releases

Paul Dyson is a practising advocate and early pioneer of Agile development methodologies. Paul led the first XP project run in the UK in 1997 and was instrumental in the early promotion of Agile through seminars and conference workshops. Paul has provided technical leadership on a wide range of Agile projects, especially those that don't fit within the Agile 'comfort zone' of a small team working closely with a single customer. Paul is a published author and a speaker at a number of international conferences.

Environmental Information System
Government Agency uses DSDM methods and learns from mistakes
Lots of wrong decisions were made on this project
Project Board is convinced that the iterative and incremental approach has enabled the Agency to take a much more pragmatic view to defining the standards for data submission than previously.
They say they have ‘done DSDM’. In practice they have used some of DSDM tools and techniques
With a continually moving set of requirements over time the project has been able to keep pace with change.

Tom Owens is a qualified practitioner of DSDM and PRINCE2, and a Professional Member of the British Computer Society. Tom is also a director of the International Business Systems Development Forum (IBSDF). He has successfully used DSDM methods since 1994. He is also a certified Business Analyst and a qualified Systems analyst and designer.
Tom co-authored the Offshore White paper published by the Dutch DSDM Consortium.

• Is Agile development compatible with the use of offshore resources? Does this put constraints on the adoption of Agile methodologies in real world scenarios?
• Examination of real life large projects where there were opportunities in building a model where Agile development could use both onshore and offshore teams. Introducing ‘Remote XP.
• How to make the combination of Agile and offshore teams succeed – examples and best practices for large projects where this succeeded adopting ‘Remote XP’
• The business benefits of this approach
• Key learning’s for future ‘Remote XP’ projects

Ian Wilson has over twenty-eight years of experience in the IT industry. Before recently founding Gazelle Software Solutions, Ian spent over ten years leading European e-Business and International IT organisations at a large multinational organisation. He has specialised in establishing and managing global IT Teams using a combination of onshore and offshore resources.  His experience in using offshore resources has covered Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America and a particular focus on Russia. Within large multinational organisations he has pioneered the highly successful adoption of Agile software development methodologies within a blended onshore and offshore environment.

Ian has a MA and a Doctorate from Oxford University, UK.

Many projects with technology deliverables are introducing greater and greater levels of controls, specifications, quality checks, etc, as a (misguided) attempt to provide certainty of outcome. However, experience tells us that this a) rarely works, b) is never liked even when it does work, and c) perversely actually reinforces the distrust that interferes with getting on and doing it properly. Unless we understand the root causes of the distrust, and are bold enough to honestly deal with them, we'll be having this same discussion this time next year. That's quite a bold statement, and perhaps a little controversial . . . but still true, nonetheless.

Derrick Murray joined the UK branch Munich Reinsurance in November 2003 as the Head of IT Development and has since been promoted to Director of Operations from April 2006. With responsibility for delivering top quality risk management and business development services to key UK and Ireland clients, he is responsible for managing all aspects of our service delivery. During his time at Munich Re, Derrick has been instrumental in transforming a number of key business processes including the introduction of the Agile methodology to develop a new claims system. Derrick has extensive experience of running international IT projects during his time at various software houses, GE and as a freelancer. Together with his degree in genetics and post graduate qualifications in computer science, he is well qualified to continue to help build a successful reinsurance business in the UK.

The presentation concerns the case study of a real-world implementation involving a UK Regional Government IS Project that adopted an agile development approach. This is considered to be innovative within the UK Government arena where more traditional and structured forms of development are generally applied. The presentation will:

• describe the agile approach and the rationale behind its adoption
• report on the particular areas of concern experienced
• inform on how working practices and protocols associated with bureaucratic cultures affected the project outcome
• illustrate how the actual individuals involved affected development
  
• describe the solutions put in place

Dr. Hilary Berger is an academic researcher and senior lecturer at Cardiff School of Management, University of Wales Institute Cardiff [UWIC]. She graduated with a 1st Class Honours Degree in Business Information Systems, and a first level Doctorate in Systems Development and Development Methodologies. She has published and presented a number of papers reflecting how individuals involved in a system’s development process affect the outcome of the system being developed.

• The need: - Agile ICT delivers ‘a better solution quicker’. However, to maximise the benefit, the business itself must also be agile in interacting with its stakeholders in the wider environment.
• Characteristics of an agile business: – Creating roles which design collaboration and change into the organisational structure.
• How this can work: - An example of agile organisation based on citizen / local authority communication.
• The issues: – Can experience of introducing agile approaches to ICT provide a useful insight?

Jane Searles is an independent consultant specialising in high-level business systems architecture both for organisations and for collaborative programmes. Jane was very active within the DSDM consortium during the 1990s, representing ICL and initiating and chairing the business process task group. More recently she has concentrated on facilitating strategic thinking by a novel approach and on organisational design using the Viable Systems Model.

The summer of 2007 sees the release of version 1.0 of the Open Unified Process (OpenUP), part of the Eclipse Process Framework (EPF). OpenUP is an open source software development process, supported by open source content authoring tools. Committers from 12 different organisations have collaborated to develop OpenUP, building on Unified Process roots and taking in a wide range of influences from the agile community, including DSDM. In this session, we will explore the fundamentals of EPF, OpenUP and discuss how it can help those wishing to adopt an agile approach to software development.

Mark Dickson has worked in the software development since 1990. He is an IBM-certified RUP instructor, a member of the OpenUP development team and a Director of the DSDM Consortium in the UK. Mark is an Executive Consultant for Xansa, specialising in Enterprise Architecture and software development.

Atern is the new release of the DSDM project delivery framework. It represents a significant evolution of DSDM, adding clarity and brevity to much of the material presented. It continues to emphasize the key elements which have always been central to DSDM - agility, iterative working, incremental delivery, time-boxing, alignment to business need and high quality. CMMI presents a model of industry best practices for software, systems and hardware engineering. The model is used by many organizations to measure the quality of their development processes and prioritize and drive process improvement. The two standards have the same objective - to describe how to deliver systems in a useful and effective way. Yet the CMMI is often considered radically different in approach. Atern presents a development process framework from which project centred life-cycles can be created and performed. CMMI presents a model of best-practices – a model which is deliberately lifecycle independent. This paper compares the strengths of the two approaches and seeks to identify when they may best be used by organizations to improve their systems delivery. It looks for areas where the approaches are complementary and can be used in combination to speed process improvement. Finally, the scope and coverage of the two models is compared more comprehensively to identify strengths and weaknesses.

David Piper has been working in the IT industry for over 20 years and a member of the Lamri CMMI consulting team. He specializes in helping Lamri's clients to successfully drive process change and improvement. David an SEI Authorised CMMI Trainer and is co-author of Service- and Component- Based Development which describes Select's Perspective development method.

Collaboration: playing the innovation game

• Closed innovation versus open innovation

• Moving from open  process definition to open innovation

• The Eclipse Process Framework community     

Leadership: focusing innovation efforts

• Open Innovation Practices

• Research, Development and Innovation (R&D+I) Certifications in the European Union

• R&D+I Management Systems

Agility: the stage for innovation

• Agile organizations and R&D+I Management  Systems

• Agile practices and R&D+I Projects

• Managing exploration and risk reduction with Open Unified Process

Creating a learning organization

• Building your own library of agile and innovation practices

Ana Pereira is an Eclipse Process Framework project committer, developing content for OpenUP. She is a partner at Whatever Consulting Group, helping customers to adopt an integrated set of practices promoting innovation and agility.
She founded WhatEverSoft in 1998, where she led some recognized innovative software projects (JavaOne 2000&2005; GSM World Congress 2000&2001). Prior to that, she worked for 10 years in R&D at INESC. She owns an Msc in Computer Science from IST-Lisbon.*

The rise of offshore software development poses unique challenges in communicating what needs to be built and realising a fitting solution. This presentation offers a pragmatic approach to developing business software that is team-based, agile, test-oriented and measurable with emphasis on sharing knowledge in a manner suitable for offshore software development. Specifically the presentation will cover the following topics:

1. The Challenges of Offshore Software Development.
2. DSDM Applied to Offshore Software Development.
3. DSDM: The Functional Model – A Pragmatic Approach.
4. DSDM Design & Build – A Pragmatic Approach.
5. The Business Benefits of the Approach.

Wayne Ross is Chief Technologist at BJSS Limited and has over 10 years of experience in designing, building and delivering business software using a variety of technologies and methods for clients worldwide. A former independent consultant he has mainly worked in the financial services and retail e-commerce sectors. Currently his main interest is empowering teams to deliver quality solutions through coaching in the appropriate use of modern software development techniques.

As the demand for agile adoption grows, we keep asking:

* Which agile practices should my organization adopt
* What does it mean to be agile?
* When is an organization considered agile?
* How to successfully aid an organization to adopt agile practices?
* Are there any guidelines to help with the agile adoption efforts?
* Was anything overlooked during the adoption effort?

The Agile Adoption Process Framework, which is both structured and flexible, guides and assists agile coaches and organizations in their agile adoption efforts. The framework consists of two components. The first is an agile measurement index that can measure the agile potential of projects and organizations through 5 different levels of agility. The second component consists of 4 phases; (1) Discontinuing factors, (2) Project Level Assessment, (3) Organizational Assessment, and (4) Reconciliation, to guide and assist the agile adoption efforts of organization. The framework includes over 300 questions used to assess the existence of discontinuing factors, project level constraints and the organization's readiness to adopt various agile practices and concepts.

Is an Agile Process Framework an oxymoron or is it a sign that agility has grown up enough to be achievable, sustainable and mainstream? Join us at the Agile Business Conference to learn about the Agile Adoption Framework and decide for yourself.

Dr. Ahmed Sidky is a senior agile consultant with Tangible Software. He graduated as Valedictorian with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the Modern Science and Arts (MSA) University in Cairo, Egypt. While working as an Internet Solution Developer for one of the leading corporations in Egypt, he received the award for the Best Creative Solution for that year.
With his research focused on Requirements Engineering, he earned a Masters degree in Software Engineering from Virginia Tech. Ahmed's research interests then moved towards Agile Software Development Methodologies and has completed doctorate in that field. His latest research is a process framework for the adoption of agile practices known as the Agile Adoption Framework.

The agile product owner leads and guides an agile software development project. The product owner decides which requirements are implemented and when the software is shipped. Having a strong, empowered product owner is a key success factor for agile projects – just like a strong, empowered team is.
This talk provides insights into being an effective product owner on an agile project. It introduces the three key responsibilities of the agile product owner: being the voice of the customer, managing stakeholders proactively, and acting as the value stream manager. We also discuss important product owner practices that help optimising value creation and customer satisfaction.

Roman Pichler works as a consultant, trainer and coach. He helps organisations to embrace Lean, Scrum and XP. Roman has trained and mentored many agile product owners in IT and product development organisation on both, enterprise and embedded software development projects.
Roman is a regular speaker at international conferences and has published a number of articles on agile software development. He is currently writing a book on Scrum that will be published in the last quarter of 2007. Roman is a Certified Scrum Trainer and Certified Scrum Practitioner.

The role of the Product Owner is well established and understood when working in a single team but what happens when you try and scale up Scrum? On a large scale multi-team project can the expectations of the Product Owner still be met by the Scrum Master and the Team? Similarly, is the Product Owner still able to operate effectively in their role? This experience report is delivered by a Product Owner and a Scrum Master who worked together on a complex multi team, multi discipline project outlining how they dealt with these challenges.

Richard Lyon has worked in technology for nearly twenty years across a range of disciplines. The majority of this time has been spent working in a broadcasting environment with recent large scale projects in content management, digital production systems and peer-to-peer based video on demand. Richard currently works as a Project Manager and has a wealth of experience in both traditional and Agile project management approaches.

Marcus Evans has been working for 5 years at the BBC on Agile
products taking the role of product owner on a range of projects
across a range of platforms.

BT has been able to further optimize tangible and non-tangible benefits from using Agile.  This has been achieved by using Agile Techniques in a forum, called an Agile Round Table (ART).  This forum is run as early as possible in the decision making process for new concepts or directly with the originator of a new idea.

Alan de-Ste-Croix , British Telecommunications plc. Alan is an agile consultant within BT, where he has worked in software development for over 18 years.  In this time he has done all development roles (project management, requirements, business analysis, design, architecture, development, testing, support and maintenance). He has experienced projects of all sizes from six people through to hundreds of people located in different locations around the world.  Alan lives with his wife and family in Wales where he studied information engineering at the University of Wales and the University of Glamorgan.

Peter Wisniewski, , British Telecommunications plc. Peter is a consultant with BT's Agile Consultancy Practice. He has 24 years of professional experience in systems and networks, pre-sales and consultancy. He holds science degrees from the Univ.of Edinburgh, Univ.of Wales and an International MBA from the Univ.of Surrey. Roles have included Cray System Analyst, Director of Software Integration for the ESPRIT Advanced Computer Research Initiative in France, Head of Automotive Systems for NEC Germany and GE Six-sigma blackbelt. He has worked in 21 countries as well as 11 US states.

In the fable of the blind men and the elephant each of the blind men touches one part of the elephant and develops a perception of the elephant as a whole:

• One touches the side and perceives the elephant to be like a wall
• Another touches the tusk and perceives the elephant to be like a spear
• Another touches the tail and perceives the elephant to be like a snake

… and so the fable continues.  This fable provides an excellent analogy for the perceptions of the each member of the customer community: finance, sales, marketing, operations, end-users and stakeholders; all have different perspectives and priorities. 
This session will introduce the technique of collaborative card play and outline how this technique can be used to create shared understanding when defining stories and planning releases.  You will then get the opportunity to explore and practice this technique in a fun and informative non-software simulation.

Angela Martin, Martin IT Consulting Limited. Angela Martin is a consultant with over twelve years of professional software development experience; she works directly with programmers and customers on agile projects to deliver software that works.  She is also completing her PhD research at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, supervised by James Noble and Robert Biddle. Her research utilises in-depth case studies of the XP Customer Role, on a wide range of projects world-wide.  Angela is also an Agile Alliance Board Member.

Olivier Lafontan, Exoftware. Olivier Lafontan is Managing Director Agile Enablement Services for Exoftware. Oli has over 10 years experience in programme and project management in both Agile and non-Agile environments. Olivier became enthused by Agile when he worked as a Project Manager for Egg, the world's largest pure online bank. his work on Agile Analysis has generated a lot of interest from peers and clients since it was published in 2004. Coming from a business education background rather than technical, Olivier now focuses on spreading and applying Agile thinking outside technical functions of organisations.

In the film "What Women Want", Mel Gibson plays a chauvinistic
executive who thinks he is "God's gift to women"; after a freak
accident he gains the ability to hear what women are really thinking
and is shocked to discover it does not match his perception, at all.
Armed with this new information, in true Hollywood style he learns to
change and become a "better man".
This panel will give you the opportunity to hear representatives from
the customer community: senior decision makers, end-users and their IT
guides (business analysts/UI designers) answer your questions about
what customer's are really thinking and want from their software
development projects.

Luke Barrett, ThoughtWorks. Luke is an interaction and interface designer who has worked for over nine years building and designing software applications for use by a wide variety of end-users. Working for clients, both large and small, Luke has designed applications delivered by kiosk, web, DTV as well as rich client. A consultant with ThoughtWorks he is currently focused on how best to apply design and usability thinking to Agile projects - in particular though the use of visual modelling techniques (e.g. low fidelity prototyping). Luke has also contributed to projects in the role of business analyst and is particularly interested in the intersection of design, usability and analysis.

Simon Hargreaves runs Lloyds TSB Direct Insurance business, which is focused on Home and Motor products using phone and internet acquisition channels. In addition to sales and marketing, the business is currently focused on new proposition development, pricing models, retention and business-wide continuous improvement.
Prior to Lloyds TSB, Simon was a partner with Accenture. He specialised in large programme delivery and prior to that worked as a techi for Logica.
Currently living in Surrey with his wife Lynne and four children.  When not in work or dealing with four kids, he is particularly bad at surfing, skiing and cycling.

Matt Willis performs an operations project management function for the Sky Broadband support teams which provide advanced fault diagnostics and resolution. His focus is on the identification, provision and implementation of systems solutions to improve capability and efficiency in delivering customer oriented problem resolution.
Matt comes from an operational management background; most recently for Easynet (acquired by Sky eighteen months ago) and previously in a technical operations management environment for a bureau IVR service provider.
At home Matt aspires to the country lifestyle; trying to outwit rabbits on his vegetable patch and cycling up the steepest hills he can find in the Somerset-Wiltshire border area.

Agile development practices equip teams to deliver working software reliably, but that's not enough. We all know the symptoms of the wrong choices being made: local targets at the expense of the whole, focus on internal stakeholders not the customer, managing cost not value. This session will discuss how to get to deliver value rather than code -- and how to benefit from the result.
The session will start with short statements from our invited speakers on their experiences of improving how organisations deliver.
Then we will gather issues and topics from the audience and open the floor up to a structured discussion.

Mary Poppendieck, Poppendieck LLC. Mary Poppendieck has been in the Information Technology industry for over thirty years. She has managed software development, supply chain management, manufacturing operations, and new product development. She spearheaded the implementation of a Just-in-Time system in a 3M video tape manufacturing plant and led new product development teams, commercializing products ranging from digital controllers to 3M Light Fiber. Mary is a popular writer and speaker, and author of the book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, which was awarded the Software Development Productivity Award in 2004. A sequel, Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash, was published in 2006.

John Nolan, e2X.John Nolan has been an Agile practioner since 1999 having founded and run one of the world's longest Agile
(XP) projects at Connextra (7+ years). Connextra has been used as an influential case-study within the Agile community. He has over 17 years of experience working with hardware and software in a number of domains from finance and advertising through to engineering and research. John is an ACM Distinguished Engineer , certified ScrumMaster and speaker at international conferences. John has a blog.

Steve Freeman, M3P. Steve was a pioneer of Agile software development in the UK, he has built applications for banks, ISPs, financial data providers, and specialist software companies. He has given training courses in Europe , America, and Asia. Previously, he worked in research labs, software houses, earned a PhD, and wrote shrink-wrap software. Steve also teaches in the Computer Science department at University College London. He is a presenter and organizer at international industry conferences, and was conference chair for the first London XpDay

This session tells the story of what we tried and how we refined our approach to Lean development over the last two years. When we started out, we tried to implement straight from the book "Lean Software Development". We established cross-functional POD teams and used magnetic strips on boards in our workspace to display our progress. Midway through the stage 3, we got some feedback from an agile coach and introduced complexity point estimating and velocity tracking on their recommendation. In later stages, we were able to bring Mary and Tom Poppendieck in to provide feedback on our implementation of lean. Subsequently, we made changes to approach to introduce slack to our plans and in the level of detail included in release plans for future stages.

Bethan Griffiths, HelpHire. Bethan Griffiths is a Business Analyst with nine years professional software development experience. She has worked on several international software implementation projects, in the telecoms, electronics, and healthcare sectors; and has been involved in all areas of the project lifecycle. She has been using Lean for the last year, and has previously used iterative development techniques. Bethan is currently working as a team manager at Helphire, managing a cross-functional team to deliver an end-to-end Claim Management solution, using Pegasystems.

Mike Pollard, HelpHire. Mike Pollard is a Business Analyst with over 10 years professional software development experience in Analysis, Programming and Testing mainframe, windows and web based applications. Mike is currently working as a development team manager on a project using the "Lean and Agile" development methodology.

This presentation tells you how we’ve adopted the 7 LSD principles within our Intranet Delivery process. It outlines where we were, the challenges we’ve faced and the steps we’ve taken/are continually taking to overcome them.

Gavin Fisher, LTSB, currently manages a team of 12 developers that focus mainly on intranet delivery. He has over 10 years experience in software development, which has included the design, build and test of windows and web based solutions. He has been at the forefront of implementing Lean/Agile techniques within LTSB.

Jayne Blagden, LTSB, manages the work and resource for all intranet delivery.  Jayne uses her project management experience and customer relationship skills to help the team deliver key strategic and regulatory solutions for LTSB.  Jayne helps produce key measurements for the team that lead to productivity improvements and continuous improvement.

The "Theory of Constraints" states that the throughput, the amount of useful output, of any system is determined by one constraint. Therefore, if we wish to improve the system's performance, we need to improve the bottleneck and only the bottleneck.

In this session, you participate in a simulation game to learn how to recognize constraints in your organisation or your project. Over several rounds of the game we systematically deal with the bottlenecks we discover, using the "5 Focusing Steps" and Lean techniques. We discuss how these techniques can be applied to your projects, so that you return to work with lots of useful ideas and techniques.

Pascal Van Cauwenberge, Nayima. Pascal Van Cauwenberghe has applied this agile stuff since 1999. It worked a lot better than anything he had done previously, although he didn't understand why. Trying to find the reasons and sources of agility he has come across Systems Thinking, the Theory of Constraints and Lean and lots of other interesting subjects.
Pascal co-founded the Belgian XP group and Agile Systems. Agile Systems organizes the Benelux XP Days and Agile Open conferences. Pascal has organized sessions at XPxxx, XP Universe, OT/SPA, XP Days in the Benelux, London, Germany and France and at seminars all over Europe. He's the co-author of The XP Game with Vera Peeters

Rob Westgeest has been working in software development for over 15 years. In that period he developed software and trained and coached software developers in software design and software process. In his constant search to improve software development and his own results he's had some great results in using agile approaches. Rob has facilitated workshops at XPDays and OT/SPA and he coorganizes conferences like XPDays Benelux and Agile Open.

Join us in the Open Café for a peer exchange on hot topic of applying lean thinking to the agile enterprise. This session provides the opportunity to mingle with the agile practitioners at the conference and dig into some of the deeper issues in applying agile across the business.

Willem van den Ende, Living Software BV. I am currently working as an independent consultant. My one-person company based in the Netherlands is called Living Software B.V. I assist organisations in delivering valuable software early. I do so together with a network of colleagues - we collaborate in various configurations depending on the needs of the project. I enjoy creating collaborative learning experiences. Check my weblog if you're interested in recent developments and workshop reports. http://ruminations.willemvandenende.com

Marc Evers helps developers, customers, and project managers in co-creating value through meaningful projects, by coaching, consulting, and developing software. Since 2000 he co-organizes workshops and conferences based on systems thinking, extreme programming, and agile values, principles, and practices. He has initiated the XP Day Benelux and the Agile Open conferences.