Introduction to Agile Presentation

Article
06/18/2014

I gave an Introduction to Agile talk recently:

Introduction to Agile Presentation (Slideshow)

I kept it focused on three simple things:

What is Agile and the Agile Mindset (the Values and Principles)
A rapid tour of the big 3 (Extreme Programming, Scrum, and Lean)
Build a shared vocabulary and simple mental models so teams could hit the ground running and work more effectively with each other.

The big take away that I wanted the audience to have was that it’s a journey, but a very powerful one.

What is Agile

Agile doesn't mean fast. It means responding to change. And you'll find that when you cut the deadwood and the baggage, you speed things up. But what changes are you responding to? You are responding to continuous customer and stakeholder feedback, as you continue to learn and improve.

Here is a slide from my presentation that explains Agile in a nutshell:

Why Agile

Here is another slide from my presentation that makes the case for Agile:

Be a Continuous Learning Organization

Agile is a very healthy way to create an organization that embraces agility, empowers people, and ship stuff that customers care about.

In fact, the most powerful aspect of going Agile is that you create a learning organization.

The system and ecosystem you are in can quickly improve if you simply embrace change and focus on learning as a way of driving both continues improvement as well as growing capability.

So many things get a lot better over time, if they get a little better every day.

This was actually my first real talk on Agile and Agile development. I’ve done lots of talks on Getting Results the Agile Way, and lots of other topics from security to performance to application architecture to team development and the Cloud. But this was the first time a group asked me to share what I learned from Agile development in patterns & practices.

It was actually fun.

Embrace Agility

As part of the talk, I shared some of my favorite take aways and insights from the Agile World.

I’ll be sure to share some of these insights in future posts.

For now, if there is one thing to take away, it’s a reminder from David Anderson (Agile Management):

“Don’t do Agile. Embrace agility.”

Way to be.

I shared my slides on SlideShare at Introduction to Agile Presentation (Slides) to help you learn the language, draw the visuals, and spread the word.

I’ll try to share more of my slides in the future, now that SlideShare seems to be a bit more robust.