Presentation: Tweet"You're Agile? So What?"

Those of us in IT have spent a lot of time mastering agility, and we are proud of our accomplishments. It can come as a huge surprise when our customers, the business people, fail to be impressed by our accomplishments. We must ask the question, does our agility mean anything to the customer? The most likely answer, it does not! The customer cares about what we do, not how we do it.

But the proper answer should be Yes, definitely! An agile IT can provide so much more than working software artifacts. Agile provides a bridge connecting business objectives - Adaptability, Innovation, Sustainability - and the IT systems that are intended to support those objectives.

There are two prerequisites: two things will be necessary before our customers will fully appreciate our agility. First, we must understand the customer perspective, understand what they are trying to accomplish, how they have organized themselves and established workflows to do it, and how they believe our software can help them. This is harder than it appears, as neither side, today, truly understands the other. Second, we, IT, need to go beyond agile - more accurately, we need to achieve what Kent Beck described as the third stage of XP, "There are three stages of XP: out of the box, adapted, and transcended."

This presentation will detail and provide the ideas, perspectives, and techniques for achieving both prerequisites.