Agile Matters

You’ll have seen we’ve been promoting the Agile Enterprise Forum event due to take place in London this September. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, the event has had to be postponed until next year.

Obviously this is going to be disappointing to those of you who were looking forward to engaging with such Agile and project management superstars as John Seddon, Mary Poppendieck, Don Reinertsen, Chris Potts, and Charles Handy; but in a truly Agile style, the event is going to react to the changing circumstances, and be revised to suit the new requirements.

Keep checking back for more info about the rescheduling and how you can participate in what is certain to be one of the Agile events of the year.

Following our post the other day about Charles Handy as one of the greatest living management gurus, we’re delighted to announce he’ll be appearing at the Agile Enterprise Forum as our guest speaker at dinner. This is a major coup for the forum, and we know that everyone who attends will benefit from his being there.

Charles will be at the Forum from around lunchtime, staying with us for the workshops in the afternoon, then no doubt delighting and inspiring us with his dinner time talk. We already knew we had a great line up of people at the event, and Charles Handy is the icing on the cake. Bring on 30th September!

Another of the confirmed speakers for the Agile Enterprise Forum is John Seddon. John is a well-known “management guru”, and bestselling author. He acknowledges the influence of W.E Deming and Taiichi Ohno on his work and today he describes what his consultancy firm, Vanguard, does as a combination of systems thinking – ‘how work works’, and intervention theory – ‘how to change it’.

John gained both a BSc and an MSc in psychology in the 1970s, and has been awarded the title of honorary visiting professor at the University of Cardiff.

He will be leading the final workshop of the day on 30th September, entitled “Changing our thinking about IT: spend less, get much more”.

The third of the speakers at the forthcoming Agile Enterprise Forum in London is Mary Poppendieck. Mary is one of the most recognisable figures in Lean and Agile software development, having written several pioneering books on the subject, including “Lean Software Development: An Agile Tooklit”, which she co-wrote with her husband, Tom.

Mary and Tom Poppendieck are the people behind the company, Poppendieck LLC, which “is dedicated to bringing Lean thinking to software development”. Says Mary of her book: “Our first book is aimed at people who do not understand why Agile development is a good approach. It provides the underlying justification for rapid, incremental development”.

Mary is presenting the third workshop on 30th September, “Agile Governance - tying work to value”.

Another speaker at the Agile Enterprise Forum is Don Reinertsen. He is world-renowned for his work in managing product development, going right back to 1983, when he first shot to the world’s attention with some groundbreaking work that helped pioneer the “cycle-time reduction movement”.

Before this original work with McKinsey, Don gained a BSc in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, and an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School. Anyone who has attended one of his presentations or workshops will be aware how inspiring he is as a speaker.

Don will be leading the second workshop at the Forum on September 30th, based on “Lean Product Development as if Economics Matters”.

At the forthcoming AGILE ENTERPRISE FORUM (www.AgileEnterpriseForum.com), a stellar line-up of speakers has been assembled. One of these is Chris Potts. Chris is an award-winning speaker and a highly sought after corporate strategist, specialising in helping organisations to execute their change and IT strategies. From his own website:

“His hallmark techniques, including one-page strategies, investment culture diagnoses, inverted investment portfolios and ‘expert IT customer’ operating models, have been used by industry-leading companies around the world.”

Chris is perhaps most famous for developing the fruITion strategy, as outlined in his bestselling book “fruITion: Creating the Ultimate Corporate Strategy for Information Technology”.  He will be presenting the first workshop at the AGILE ENTERPRISE FORUM in London on September 30th.