APLN Houston

Do the right work, at the right time, to create the right value. That's what Robbie Mac Iver told us what are planning should be more focused on. Thanks to Robbie for an enlightening look at how agile planning can work. Thanks also to Bryan Campbell, Shravan Arra, and Barbara Brown for lending a hand as Feature Retailers in the Buy A Feature Innovation Game® exercise. Take a look at the team results to see some interesting variations on our new doggie day care business!

Presentation Available Exercise Handout Team Results

We also want to thank Sysco for not only hosting our meeting but also providing such a great buffet for our pre-meeting networking session and to the folks from WITI Houston for sharing the evening with us.

APLN Houston is honored to present this event in association with the Houston Women in Technology International (WITI) chapter.  For more information about WITI please visit: http://www.witi.com/houston.

Agile Planning: It’s About Value

How long with that take? What will that cost? What is that really worth? Although we get asked these questions all the time, answering them with absolute values is hard, rarely accurate as we would like, and sometimes even a little misleading.  Agile planning answers these questions is a different way and respects the fact that we often don’t know much about a project when we get asked these questions.

Come learn about an evolutionary planning cycle that focuses teams on doing the right work at a reasonable cost, and participate in an on-hands exercise that will help identify the value of the work we take on.

Robbie Mac Iver helps organizations understand agile principles and values, and then create collaborative work environments in which agile practices can thrive. He brings business and technology teams together to create innovative business solutions by providing practical, sensible, and effective project leadership. Robbie improves both teams and processes to achieve visible, predictable results.

As the Owner and Principal Consultant of The Mac Iver Group, LP,  Robbie provides professional services in project management, agile leadership, training and coaching. He holds the PMP certification from the Project Management Institute, is certified by the ScrumAlliance as a Certified Scrum Master and a Certified Scrum Professional, and is a facilitator of Innovation Games® for Agile Teams.

In addition, Robbie is also an Agile Advisor with Corpus Optima where he is incorporating agile principles into the organization’s service offerings, delivery methods and internal operations to enhance Corpus Optima’s ability to help clients accelerate and sustain the advanced process and culture transformation practices of Superperformance.

Robbie is on the board of directors of the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN), co-founder of the Houston APLN chapter, and is serving as the Agile Adoption Stage Producer for the Agile2010 conference.

Meeting Format

• 6:00 - 6:30pm  Network while enjoying food and refreshments provided by Sysco
• 6:30 - 6:45pm APLN Houston and WITI Houston Announcements
• 6:45 - 8:00pm  Main Program

Sponsorships

Please join us in thanking Sysco for their generous support in
hosting tonight's meeting.

As a special treat Sysco is also providing food and refreshments for tonight's networking session.

1390 Enclave Parkway - Houston, Texas - 281-584-1390

Parking Guidance Has Changed:

Please park in front of either Sysco building (1370 & 1390 Enclave Parkway).

If front lots are full, park on the street along Forkland Drive and walk around to the front entrance of 1390.

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PMPs may file for 1 PDU under Continuing Certification Requirements’ “Category 4: Other Providers.”

Thanks to Tony Akins for his encore presentation at our August APLN Houston To Go event. Once again he helped us understand that we are in more control of our time than we might think, and that by using some simple techniques along with a little focus we can all make more effective use of it. Do you have your Activity Lists and Do Today Lists ready to go? How many Pomodoros is that task? How many Pomodoros can you fit into today? Try out the Pomodoro Technique today!

Presentation Available

We also want to thank PROS for sharing their facilities for this event, but also generously providing food and refreshments.

It seems in every aspect of our lives things are moving and changing faster. There's more to do and there's still only 24 hours in the day. Everyone is playing multiple different roles. We rarely get the time we think we need to get things done, and yet we still have to get things done. We have all become jugglers of time, some of us experts, most of us just hoping we don't drop too many of the important balls.

Sponsorships

Please join us in thanking PROS for their generous support in
hosting tonight's meeting as well as providig Food and Refreshments.

3100 Main Street, Suite #900 - Houston, TX 77002 

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PMPs may file for 1 PDU under Continuing Certification Requirements’ “Category 4: Other Providers.”

Thanks to Ravi Verma of SmoothApps for sharing his knowledge and personal experiences in successfully implementing Agile in organizations by focusing on three key patterns – change, personality and conflict – which form the pillars of transformation. Ravi – “the Org Whisperer” - provided approaches and tips to address these pillars to achieve successfully adoption of agile methods to organizations resistant to or unfamiliar with Agile.

Presentation available:

We also want to thank TekSystems for sponsoring Ravi's trip to Houston as well as CPP, Inc., publisher of the Myers-Briggs^® for providing food and refreshments for our pre-meeting network session.

Accelerating Agile Transformation – Reusable Patterns and Solutions

Organizations undergoing Agile Transformation encounter some common obstacles – silos with misaligned metrics, inaccessible customers and a lack of well defined release content up-front, to name just a few. In most cases, Agile teams and sponsors are not trained to remove these common obstacles. A blended strategy of “Hope and Winging It” is probably going to generate mixed results at best, with the possibility of decelerating or even destroying the Agile Transformation.

But it does not have to be so! With the right training, Agile teams can be equipped with a frame-work and techniques to remove these decelerators. Attend this session to learn about a simple frame-work for Accelerating Agile Transformation, with practical techniques you can apply the moment you finish the session!

You will be introduced to the three pillars of this frame-work-

• Patterns in Change: Based on the 8 Step Change Leadership Model by Harvard Business School Professor and Change Leadership Guru – Dr. John Kotter.
• Patterns in Type: Based on the world’s best selling Personality Type Assessment – the MBTI.
• Patterns in Conflict: Based on the world’s best selling Conflict Resolution Assessment – the TKI.

Each of the three techniques is described using real-world examples from the presenter’s own practical experience. Each section ends with an introspective challenge to the attendees.

Ravi Verma - Principal Consultant at SmoothApps

Ravi is a Certified Scrum Master and a Professional Scrum Master 1, with 11+ years experience delivering multi-million dollar enterprise class applications in giants like Cisco, Avaya, HP and Siemens. He has also worked at a startup – Voyence (now part of EMC) and in a mid-sized company – Network Associates (now part of Netscout) and is intimately familiar with the challenges of delivering software in companies of different sizes.

Most recently, Ravi was a Program Manager in Cisco’s IP Communication Business Unit and helped with the training, customization and roll-out of Scrum in a hybrid Agile-Waterfall environment. Before joining Cisco, Ravi was a Technical Manager at Avaya and participated in the Agile Transformation of a global engineering team delivering Contact Center Reporting solutions. As a Program Manager and Technical Manager at Voyence, Ravi helped design and implement a hybrid engineering methodology that contained elements of iterative software development in a waterfall environment.

Ravi has a Bachelors in Computer Science from R.V. College of Engineering, India and Certificates in Entrepreneurship and Organizational Development from SMU, Dallas and De Paul University, Chicago respectively. He is an MBTI Certified Practitioner, has a certificate in Advanced Conflict Resolution Using the MBTI and TKI, and is a Licensed Facilitator for Leading Bold Change workshops based on the writings of Harvard Business School Professor – Dr. John Kotter.

Sponsorships

Please join us in thanking TekSystems for their generous sponsorship of tonight's speaker.

For more information about TekSystems please visit http://www.teksystems.com/

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Food and Refreshments!

Also we want to thank CPP for sponsoring food and refreshments for our pre-meeting networking session.

For more information about CPP please visit www.cpp.com

For local information on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator,
see APT-Houston events or a summary of Type.

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Please join us in thanking Sysco for their generous support in
hosting tonight's meeting.

1390 Enclave Parkway - Houston, Texas - 281-584-1390

Parking Guidance Has Changed:

Please park in front of either Sysco building (1370 & 1390 Enclave Parkway).

If front lots are full, park on the street along Forkland Drive and walk around to the front entrance of 1390.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PMPs may file for 1 PDU under Continuing Certification Requirements’ “Category 4: Other Providers.”

Which of the Seven Wastes is slowing you down the most? Perhaps using the Five Whys root cause analysis will help you determine that; or maybe Value Stream Mapping can help identify all the non-value add steps in your process. Many thanks to Dr. Jerry Julian of the Julian Advisory Group for extending his stay in Houston an extra day to come talk to us about Lean Program Management.

Presentation Available

We also want to congratulate Elizabeth Kinyanjui and Bill Doescher who won copies of Jerry's new book Facilitating Project Performance Improvement.

Lean Program Management: Principles, Practices and Tools for Accelerating Value Delivery

In this session, Dr. Julian will provide a framework and toolset for systematically accelerating delivery at the project, program and portfolio levels. Drawing on over 15 years of experience working with teams to deploy lean principles, participants will have the opportunity to learn how some of the best project-based organizations in the world are using these practices to reduce cycle time, improve quality and develop a high performing learning organization that continuously improves from one phase, iteration and project to the next.

Dr. Jerry Julian is President & CEO of Julian Advisory Group, an operations & technology performance improvement firm founded in 2001. He has helped hundreds of teams in both blue-chip and startup companies alike, including J.P. Morgan Chase, Pfizer, GE Capital, Café Mom, Highline Financial, Gartner, BMW, Sotheby’s, Vanguard, Johnson & Johnson, and many others. Before assuming his current role at Julian Advisory Group over eight years ago, he began his career at Accenture as a software engineer. He then became a Vice President at Rath & Strong, a leading global consultancy in the field of lean operations improvement, where he served as Master Black Belt Coach and engagement lead. He is the author of the book “Facilitating Project Performance Improvement: A Practical Guide to Multi-Level Learning,” published by AMACOM, the publishing arm of the American Management Association. His ongoing research focuses on learning and continuous improvement in project-based organizations with particular emphasis on the application of lean and agile principles. He holds a doctorate in adult and organizational learning from Columbia University, an MBA from the UNC-Chapel Hill, and a Bachelors of Science in Operations Research from Columbia University.

Sponsorships

Please join us in thanking Sysco for their generous support in
hosting tonight's meeting.

1390 Enclave Parkway - Houston, Texas - 281-584-1390

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PMPs may file for 1 PDU under Continuing Certification Requirements’ “Category 4: Other Providers.”