Through his earlier experiences of agile transitions with Sprint and Motorola David will describe the challenges and resistance that hampered successful adoption. The answer is to change the culture and have the new changes become the team's own changes. David will explain how he uses transparent work item tracking, data gathering, metrics, reporting and objective assessment and interpretation of indicators, along with a kanban pull system to drive a program continuous improvement. He will discuss the pros and cons of tactical management led agile revolution versus the patient approach of cultural change that leads to an agile evolution from the bottom-up.
Biography:
David has been a manager and leader of great software teams delivering cutting edge software products since 1991. He has a successful track record of building progressively bigger teams capable of hyper-productive performance and superior quality.
David helped to found the APLN (Agile Project Leadership Network) - a not-for-profit dedicated to encouraging better leadership and management in the IT sector. He is a current board member and a signatory of the PM Declaration of Interdependence, that documents the core values on which the APLN is founded.
He is a popular conference speaker and presenter, author of many articles and papers in software engineering management and writer and publisher of the popular Agile Management blog.
David entered the agile software development scene very early as an original member of the team in Singapore that created Feature Driven Development (FDD) - one of the original six agile methods. Based on his experience with FDD at Sprint PCS, he later authored the first book on management of agile development, “Agile Management for Software Engineering”. Published by Prentice Hall PTR in 2003.
Since 2000, he has been a constant innovator in agile methods adopting the use of management science and techniques such as Theory of Constraints (TOC), Kaizen/Kanban/Lean and Deming’s Theory of Profound Knowledge in software engineering projects and organizations.
As the process architect for MSF for CMMI Process Improvement at Microsoft, he became knowledgable in the application of agile techniques to the Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and has a established a strong working relationship with key people in the CMMI and formal software process community.
