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The Yellow Brick Road

Portia Tung and Duncan Pierce

Advanced Sessions Track
Scheduled Time: 
Monday 19 November 2007, 03:30 to 05:00
Room: 
Glaziers Hall, The River Room
Session type: 
workshop
Intended audience and experience level: 

This session would benefit greatly from an audience with a mix of project delivery experiences using a range of methodologies.

Prerequisites: 

None.

The yellow brick road is the difficult path Dorothy takes towards the Emerald City to find the mysterious Wizard of Oz to help her get home. In this session, we will help you to tap into the resources you’ve always had but never realised to complete your quest for a more Agile organisation. Here’s a chance to swap your bit part for a major role in the Agile re-telling of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ for your organisation.

Starring:

  • You as Dorothy
  • Agile as the Emerald City
  • Agile adoption path as the Yellow Brick Road
  • Session presenters (Agile practitioners) as the Wizard of Oz

This session is a self-contained workshop as well as a potential kick-off session for a year-long programme where you will learn about and practice peer-coaching to transform your way of working from suboptimal to Agile. You will get the chance to work with peers in similar organisations and draw on a wealth of experiences from how to deal with real problems to brainstorming and selecting effective solutions. We hope to create a setting where you will be able to give and receive support as you apply solutions through an iterative and collaborative process of execute-inspect-adapt.

Portia Tung

Portia is a consultant based in London, specialising in software process improvement using principles and practices from Lean Software Development and Scrum. Portia has had a number of roles over the years, ranging from Java developer and technical lead at the Financial Times to development manager at BBC Worldwide then consultant at two IT consultancies. Portia typically works in a multi-disciplined and technical capacity, helping organisations become more agile through collaboration and coaching.

Duncan Pierce

Duncan Pierce has been providing agile training, mentoring and leadership for development and management teams in the UK and further afield since 2001—probably longer than anyone else in the UK. He has worked with many well-known companies including Egg, British Telecom, Sky, HSBC, Eircom, Sun Life and Sun Microsystems.

He specializes in helping managers understand agile processes, the agile mindset and efficiency issues and helps teams master common effective working practices such as evolutionary design, refactoring, continuous integration, traceability and automated testing.

Duncan is one of the founders of the XPDay conferences and regularly speaks in Europe and the US. He is a long-standing member of the Extreme Tuesday Club (XTC) and founder of the Agile Alliance Agile Narratives programme. He has worked in the retail, internet and investment banking, logistics, insurance, biotech, consumer electronics, industrial R&D, local government, wired and mobile telecoms sectors.

He can be reached at duncan@duncanpierce.org and his homepage is at http://duncanpierce.org/. His company is Amarinda Consulting.