My Agile Presentation

Last week I presented the concepts of Agile development to my peers and to the company’s CIO. As always, I had too many slides (my presentations are commonly and unkindly referred to as “Tor’s Slide Fests”), but I think I got my point across.

The outline of my presentation was simple:

• Business objectives
• What is agile?
• Agile Manifesto
• Myths
• Realities
• Agile Methodologies
• Extreme Programming (XP)
• Result
• Questions

(Thank you, David Hussman, for the material on Myths and Realities of Agile.)

The business objectives slides were met with little discussion. We are all living with the same challenges and business demands.

Definition of agile was followed by a little more discussion but, to my surprise, when we got to the agile manifesto section (the definition and principles behind agile), the discussion kicked into full force. Every word was analyzed and we discussed what the Agile would mean to our company, associates, and my department.

The rest of the presentation was marked by lively discussion and interaction. One of the things I wanted to cover was my Agile experience and lessons learned but, unfortunately, time ran out.

The group embraced the concept and saw what Agile could do for us a company. The discussion covered what we should do to integrate Agile practices into our way of delivering projects. We decided to fully engage our Delivery Assurance group to bring elements of the Agile practices into our methodologies and the way we deliver projects.

Overall, the meeting delivered more than I expected. Agile is a different way of thinking (and delivering projects) and we should never underestimate the changes to the organization and education Agile will require before full acceptance and implementation.

[I did sneak some time in at the end to talk about continuous integration, as well as Test First Development (TFD) and what we have done with this. (I will not spend any time talking about the subject in this post, but look for more posts covering this in the future. It is cool and provides great business impact.)]