Enabling Global Business Success

Date:   Thursday July 20, 2006
Time:   2:00 PM Eastern / 11:00 AM Pacific / 1800 GMT
Speakers:  Liz, Barnett, Ross Pettit and John Guerriere

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Join Agile Journal Editor in Chief, Liz Barnett, John Guerriere of VA software and Ross Pettit of ThoughtWorks for an informative review of practical and actionable steps highly successful companies are taking to transform how they realize value from their investment in business software. In this session you will learn how the world's highest performing companies are achieving new levels of business success by applying agile methods and embracing a collaborative culture on a global scale.

1. Culture is Key - IT and business need to interact as one team with a common purpose. Companies are making significant investments in software; if the right software is not delivered when it's needed, investment performance suffers. High performing companies have realized this and are creating highly collaborative teams that cross all organizational boundaries unified by a common purpose. Durable change requires grass roots buy-in and participation backed by executive management support and commitment to a vision.
2. Agility is a Value System - Being an "agile business" means adopting a value system that seeks to constantly sense, learn, and act based on what's happening in its environment. Agile methods are the practices used to deliver software in an agile business. In high performing companies, both the value system and the practices are present as is a  commitment to continuous improvement.
3. Speed, quality, and discipline are inextricably linked: Meaningful business agility requires an organizational wide ability to make late decisions, and then act and bring them to market fast. Compressing the cycle of sensing, decision, realization requires a commitment to quality that is achieved through new levels of execution discipline that is process and metrics driven.
4. People, Process, Tools in Equilibrium - High performance development organizations need the right mix people, process and tools. The tools must support the people and reinforce the process, not dictate the process and detailed actions of the people. Because software is a social process, processes and tools need to help people communicate and collaborate. Distributed teams need to be proactive in their strategies to distributed team collaboration and look to embrace and remove all communication frication. Tradition heavy approaches attempted to eliminate the need for communication through detailed artifacts. Successful companies are proving this approach is wrong.

 At the conclusion of this live broadcast one attendee will receive an Apple iPod.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Liz Barnett is the Editor in Chief of the Agile Journal and Principal Analyst at EZ Insight Inc. Previously Liz spent 10 years as a Vice President and Research Analyst at Forrester Research, joining Forrester as a result of its acquisition of Giga Information Group. Liz held management positions at Accenture, PepsiCo, and Atelier Research. She also was the Research Director for the advanced software development and advanced network computing research services at New Science Associates, prior to its acquisition by Gartner Group. Liz holds a patent for developing a distributed application development/CASE tool. Liz earned her B.S. in operations research and industrial engineering at Cornell University.

Ross J. Pettit has over 15 years experience delivering complex development projects and managing multi-national operations as a developer, manager, and consultant. He holds a BS in Management Information Systems and an MBA. He is currently consulting to global clients implementing Agile practices as a Client Principal with ThoughtWorks.

John Guerriere is Vice President of Marketing for VA Software - SourceForge Enterprise Edition. Prior to joining VA Software, he spent 11 years as part of the leadership team at ThoughtWorks. His expertise and passion include helping business and IT leaders understand and realize how a collaborative culture combined with agile practices impacts an organization's financial performance.