As Agile is adopted by large enterprises, the number of transformation success stories has grown. But, transformation is an ongoing process, and maintaining organizational change is difficult. So, what happens after the success stories? What can IT leaders expect once the honeymoon is over? In this talk, Chuck Maples, SVP of R&D at Borland, will address these questions head-on, sharing his experiences in Borland’s Agile transformation. He’ll discuss the challenges that can emerge after the initial phases of transformation give way a new stage in the journey.

To enable the Agile Value “Courage”, we have to empower internal coaches, project managers, team leaders, and team members to change the organizations culture. Only a coach (or a manager / executive in his/her role as coach) is in the position to initiate and keep this process alive. Thus a coach has to be able to:

• make human systems transparent
• reduce or adjust complexity
• enforce dialogues and solutions
• set and enact clear goals
• build trust in the team and in the customer collaboration
• focus on sustainable decisions
• clarify conflicts

This report will focus on challenges we faced maintaining hundreds of builds that encompass tens of thousands of assertions. Over the past five years our development team, at Iowa Student Loan (ISL), leveraged TDD and Continuous Integration to develop software. Tests and builds quickly accumulate and maintaining them can be like herding cats. We were often tempted to neglect these tests in the pursuit of developing new functionality. We would like to share strategies that helped us maintain our automated test investments.

This session covers a successful transition to a new business model in a limited time span. Typically, Iowa Student Loan (ISL) sells bonds to fund the creation of private student loans. As financial markets deteriorated in 2008, the potential of successful bond sales diminished to the point of nonexistence. Heretofore, our systems assumed ISL as the only lender. Collaborative bank relationships changed this assumption to one of multiple lenders. A redesign of the loan program/loan type structure of our software followed to make the funding model very configurable.

Most Agile initiatives focus on delivery while neglecting the impact that such a radical change may have on the project and organization. The Agile PM must protect the team and help influence the change effort when there is no formal change management. Leveraging a military battle metaphor a lightweight technique can be used to map influences acting on a project. Participants will learn how to identify potential risks and how and where to respond. Spending minutes a day using this technique can mean the difference between an Agile change effort and the end of one Agile project.

Do you mentor, coach, teach or just help other people? Do you wonder why after your greatest teaching moments people just don’t get it? In recent years neuroscience has started to provide us with a number of insights in what happens when we’re teaching. These insights make it clear that learning is really about building and reinforcing existing neural networks. Instead of providing lots of new ideas out of the blue, we need to understand the learners existing context and work with that. Instead of focusing on mistakes and errors, we need to focus on what good solutions look like.