Upcoming Agile events in Atlanta

January is turning out to be a very Agile month in Atlanta! In addition to the APLN board meeting being held here this week, there are two presentations and a couple of courses coming up that should help people working on implementing or improving Agile with their organization:

January 15th: Mike Cohn presents at Agile Atlanta on Succeeding With Agile: A Guide to Transitioning and Improving

Transitioning to an agile development process is unlike most transitions an organization may make. Many transitions begin when a strong, visionary leader plants a stake in the ground and says, "Let's take our organization there." Other transitions start with a lone team thinking, "Who cares what management thinks, let's do this." The problem in transitioning to agile is that neither of these approaches alone is likely to lead to the long-term sustainable change required. Transitioning to agile is harder than many other corporate transitions because the transition process must be congruent with development process we are trying to adopt. We cannot, for example, wish to adopt an agile process because we believe in the power of self-organizing teams but then use a transition process that is not itself self-organizing. Nor can we adopt agile because it acknowledges the inherent uncertainty in precisely planning a project but then hope to precisely plan the transition to agile. In this session we will look at eight patterns of agile adoption and how to successfully transition to agile.

January 15th and 16th: Mike Cohn is teaching a Certified ScrumMaster class in Buckhead.

January 17th: Mike is also teaching a one day Agile Estimating and Planning class based on his great book on the subject.

January 30th Mary Poppendieck presents at APLN Atlanta on Organizational Agility: What's Not in the Book?

So, you've got some cross functional teams, you're running in sprints, you're doing stand-ups - Awesome!!! Hm, but alas, it doesn't quite feel agile. What now?

In this session, we will listen to Mary Poppendieck talk about what sort of things her experience shows will help in this respect. Some examples of high performance cultures and where organizational change in thinking really occurred. What is involved in having such a change? What are those hidden fundamental organizational process and cultural changes that make the most positive impact?

The session is for all audiences, whatever your role in your software organization.

The talk will be interactive, with plenty of time for Q&A