I’ll be doing two presentations at Agile 2016 in Atlanta, hope to see you there:

Your New Bottom Line – Delighting Your Customers

Wednesday, July 27 @ 3:45 pm, Learning Center

Organizations today want to be more responsive to their marketplace opportunities, more productive and more efficient; they want to be agile. Many have implemented agile practices for improving software development. But if you want to really make a difference it requires leadership that emphasizes creating, satisfying and delighting customers every day.

This session focuses on leadership and tactical techniques for delighting your customers that you can take back and put to use.  You will learn how a culture of delighting customers is built around a work force characterized by high levels of productivity, continuous innovation, and elevated levels of sustained motivation and job satisfaction.

Your customers are your lifeblood; it’s not enough just to satisfy them, you need to delight them. You need them sharing their delight with others, sharing opportunities with you, and coming back again and again.

Make it your new bottom line! Focus your organization on delighting your customers. Your customers will love you and so will your shareholders. It’s hard work but immensely rewarding.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the importance of delighting your customers through collaboration and always generating value.
• Learn how a culture of delighting customers is built around, and compliments, a highly motivated workforce.
• Acquire techniques for delighting customers you can put to use now.
• Learn that delighting customers applies to everyone. Apply the concepts as a way of thinking for software development and scale it to running your organization.
• See how customer delight can drive your financial performance.
• Sharpen your leadership focus on delighting customers; make it your new bottom line.

Emergent Architecture – Just Enough Just in Time

Thursday, July 28 @ 3:45 pm, Inman

With Scrum and other forms of agile software development we focus on incrementally evolving architecture one sprint or iteration at a time and avoid the potential waste of big design up front. What’s this really mean? We’ll talk about pragmatically doing just enough just in time while delivering a potentially shippable increment of working software every sprint.

So where and when do we plan, and how much? What about the big picture? How does our architecture fit within the enterprise? How does it facilitate our business objectives? How do we manage risk? And, what about all the details? What tools are we using, what standards are we adhering to, how are we managing maintainability and all the other NFR’s? Is everything integrating together nicely? And, what is role of the solution/enterprise architect in an agile world?

This session is all about helping you understand architecture in the world of today’s agile software development.

Learning Outcomes:

• Emergent Architecture is an important part of agile development
• Deliver business value each Sprint
• Big design up front is waste, do just enough just in time
• Delay requirements until last responsible moment
• Architects are active members of the development teams
• Work in slices rather than layers
• Choose popular principles, patterns, practices
• Know when you are done
• It takes smart developers to write software

Today I presented at IASA’s December 2015 eSummit with this month’s topic being Agile Architecture.

With Scrum and other forms of agile software development we focus on incrementally evolving architecture one sprint or iteration at a time and avoid the potential waste of big design up front. What’s this really mean? We’ll talk about pragmatically doing just enough just in time while delivering a potentially shippable increment of working software every sprint.

So where and when do we plan, and how much? What about the big picture? How does our architecture fit within the enterprise? How does it facilitate our business objectives? How do we manage risk? And, what about all the details? What tools are we using, what standards are we adhering to, how are we managing maintainability and all the other NFR’s? Is everything integrating together nicely? And, what is role of the solution/enterprise architect in an agile world?

This session is all about helping you understand architecture in the world of today’s agile software development

The SoCal Code Camp LA is this weekend, November 14 & 15. As I write this there are 73 session scheduled. I’ll be presenting on Saturday at 11:15 in SLH 102:

Scaling Scrum

How do you plan, launch, scale, and manage large product and software development initiatives using Scrum? In this session, I’ll describe how you can increase agility in your organization and how to scale and manage Scrum projects successfully. You will be introduced to needed practices and techniques to manage a scaled Scrum development initiative. When rigorously applied, productive scaling results.

Our Scaled Professional Scrum workshop in Irvine, August 25 & 26 has just received a really special underwriting from Ken Schwaber, co-creator of Scrum. Check out his blog post here.

You’ll get the best deal you’re ever going to see for this workshop. It will help you really move your multi-team Scrum projects into the fast lane.

I’ll be presenting Scaled Professional Scrum for Practitioners along with Richard Hundhausen August 25 & 26. This workshop will be held at the Irvine Hilton, directly across the street from the John Wayne Airport. If you are involved with Scrum on large, multi-team projects this course is for you.

As you know, Scrum is a proven successful way for individual teams to deliver value quickly. As the needs of the business expand beyond what an individual team can accomplish, however, organizations need to scale Scrum while remaining agile. The problem is that dependencies, technical debt, and integration issues scale as well.

The Scaled Professional Scrum workshop will show you how to launch, structure, staff, and manage a large agile or Scrum project. You will be introduced to the Scaled Professional Scrum (SPS) framework and walk through forming and managing a Nexus, the core development unit of SPS. You will leave knowing how to scale Scrum in order to maximize the value of your software development initiative.

Hope to see you there.

I’ve been invited to speak at Quicken Loans internal Developer Conference in Detroit. I’m really looking forward to it. We have settled on these two topics:

Agile Requirements

Agile software development starts with good requirements, just enough, just in time. So what does this really mean? Do we all have a clear vision of the big picture? How do we decompose stakeholder desires into workable chunks of meaningful work? And, when do we do it so we have sufficient detail without waste when things can change? Are we getting meaningful acceptance criteria from our stakeholders? What about estimates – at product conceptual inception, and throughout development? And, are you keeping your stakeholders engaged throughout development? We’ll address these questions and more as we help you get your arms around agile requirements.

Top 10 Dysfunctions with Scrum, Don’t Shoot the Messenger

Many organizations have tolerated inefficiencies and impediments for years. They recognize the need to become more agile; to respond to the needs of their customers and be competitive in the marketplace. They embark on adopting Scrum but struggle with successful implementation, often falling back on old habits when the going gets tough. Scrum quickly identifies these inefficiencies and impediments and requires their resolution. So, don’t shoot the messenger and try to change Scrum. This session will discuss a top ten list of common dysfunctions and help you deal with them effectively.

I’m late posting this but here are the sessions I presented at SoCal Code Camp, San Diego June 27 & 28, 2015. Thanks for the active participation to all those who attended.

Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management 2015 and TFS 2015 New Stuff

8:45 AM – Saturday, June 27, 2015

Visual Studio 2015 | TFS | ALM

The release candidates of both Visual Studio 2015 and TFS 2015 have been available for about a month now. In this session we’ll explore some of the new stuff including Build vNext, team project rename, deployment, release management, agile project management and more.

Scaling Scrum

10:00 AM – Saturday, June 27, 2015

Scrum | agile software development

How do you plan, launch, scale, and manage large product and software development initiatives using Scrum? In this session, I’ll describe how you can increase agility in your organization and how to scale and manage Scrum projects successfully. You will be introduced to needed practices and techniques to manage a scaled Scrum development initiative. When rigorously applied, productive scaling results.

Sharpen Your Scrum Skills – Open Discussion

12:15 PM – Saturday, June 27, 2015

Scrum | Agile

I’ll do a quick review of the Scrum framework, then open the discussion to the audience. Bring your questions and experiences and we’ll try to help you improve your game. I’ll wrap up with how you can learn more. Oh, and Scrum.org is looking for a few good people so I’ll talk about what it takes to become a trainer.

Ask A Microsoft MVP (Panel)

4:00 PM – Saturday, June 27, 2015

SQL | Performance | Azure | ASP.NET | Architecture | ALM | .NET

Panel member details: Dustin Davis (.NET/ C#, performance, architecture, SQL, NoSQL and Azure), Mike Vincent (Visual Studio ALM), Jeremy Clark (.NET), David McCarter (.NET, architecture, coding standards), Hattan Shobokshi (ASP.NET/ IIS and web application development).

SoCal Code Camp Fullerton

SoCal Code Camp returns to Cal State University Fullerton March 7 & 8. There are 90 sessions scheduled. I’m doing two sessions focused on moving the principles of Agile and Scrum to running an enterprise. Hope to see you there.

Moving Your Organization into the Fast Lane – Delighting Your Customers

Mike Vincent
2:45 PM – Saturday, March 07, 2015

Scrum | delighting customers | Customer satisfaction | Agile

Location: 1506

Organizations today want to be more responsive to their marketplace opportunities, more productive and more efficient; they want to be agile. Many have implemented agile practices for improving software development. But if you want to move out of traffic and into the fast lane it requires leadership that emphasizes creating, satisfying and delighting customers every day.

This session focuses on leadership techniques for delighting your customers that you can take back and put to use. You will learn how a culture of delighting customers is built around a work force characterized by high levels of productivity, continuous innovation, and elevated levels of sustained motivation and job satisfaction.

Your customers are your lifeblood; it’s not enough just to satisfy them. You need them sharing their delight with others, sharing opportunities with you, and coming back again and again.

Move into the fast lane! Focus your organization on delighting your customers on a continuous long-term basis. It’s hard work but immensely rewarding.

Agile Metrics – Measuring What Matters

Mike Vincent
4:00 PM – Saturday, March 07, 2015

Scrum | metrics | Measure | Agile

Location: 1506

This session is all about agile metrics. Haven’t heard about much about agile metrics before? Not surprising. It’s a whole lot more than a velocity and a couple of burn-down charts. I’ll cover why metrics are important, what we should be measuring (agile vs. traditional), when to do it, and what we should not be worrying about. And, we’ll talk about how we might get managers to embrace these concepts of metrics.

Finally, I’ll introduce you to the concept of Evidence Based Management. I’ll discuss why it is important to an organization’s agile implementation, how it’s being rolled out and how to use it to move agile beyond software development to the whole organization.

This week I’m moving my web site and blog from Community Server to WordPress. While I really liked Community Server and have used it for several years the change means I no longer have to maintain a SQL Server database.

It will take a while to get everything ported over and the UI tweaked to my liking.