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Hello everyone,

As you know I have worked hard to have Jean come to our user group and I am excited with the two topics we are going to present on. We have felt that the most important goal of the night will be to expand the concepts we endorse through scrum beyond the roles, responsibilities and ceremonies for scrum and tackle areas that have been avoided in the past :-)

Below you will find an outline of the presentations, feel free to tell your colleagues about the presentations.. But if we can ask people to sign up via the meetup site so I can manage catering.

Can I also ask that people who have said "Maybe" update to a Yes or No !!

Look forward to seeing you there on Thursday night.

Regards,
Martin.

Agile, Lean, and the Project Management Office

PMOs usually think they are out of business when Agile rolls into town. But the reality is that the PMO can play a pivotal role in successful Agile adoption in large organizations. Jean Tabaka shares her knowledge about how to engage your PMO for Agile Adoption by using three primary Lean Principles: "Eliminate Waste", "See the Whole", and "Amplify Learning". Jean gives examples of how PMO members can act as the "systems thinkers" for their organizations, pulling Agile successes from the engineering group and instilling them into the entire enterprise. In addition, Jean explains the shift of the role of the PMO with Agile—how the PMO pulls standards versus pushing them, how the PMO provides product backlog prioritization guidance regarding architecture and governance, how the PMO serves its Agile community by facilitating release planning across teams, and creating and maintaining product councils. In short, Jean believes that truly Agile PMOs are the organizational servants and "big visible charts" that ensure deep, wide Agile adoption.

Learning to Lean

During the past several years, we’ve each probably been building own path of learning with regard to Lean. Maybe we started with the Agile Manifesto, moved into the Poppendiecks’ books, and then spread out from there. We may have concentrated on Womack and Jones 5 Principles in “Lean Thinking”; or the 14 principles from the Lean Thinking House in Liker’s “The Toyota Way”. Maybe we really got hooked through the 7 wastes in software development elaborated in “Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit”. In this session, I would like to create inquiry about where we have been with regard to Lean and where we may/should be headed. Is Lean a fundamental formulation for helping Agile mature? Is it different than Agile? Are we creating dangerous assumptions as we define Lean in the software development world? What are we still missing when we talk about Lean in our world?

Who is Jean Tabaka ?

An Agile Fellow with Rally Software Development, Jean Tabaka has more than twenty-five years of experience in IT. After studying DSDM in the late 1990s, Jean became an agile devotee, working with organizations worldwide to deliver more value faster through the adoption of agile principles and practices. Specializing in scaling agile practices, guiding leadership shifts, applying Lean, and building continuous planning practices, Jean uses a collaborative approach in helping organizations adopt agile. More recently, she has been applying Systems Thinking guidance into her work. A Certified ScrumMaster Trainer and a Certified Professional Facilitator, Jean is the author of Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders. You can reach her at jean.tabaka@rallydev.com.

Hello Guys,

I am sorry for the delay in getting back to you all, I have a range of excuses from an MBA Marketing exam last Saturday ( was not very nice, made us use pens !! ) to work and family commitments.

We are looking to have two guys presenting based on what was raised in the back log. They are :

6.30 pm Running Retrospectives by Gerry Gysberts.

Gerry is going to tell us the approach he had taken to retrospectives and hopefully give some really good advice

7.15 pm Reporting Progress in Scrum / Agile by Howard McClernon.

Howard is an Agile Project Manager / Scrum Master for a major program of word. Howard is going to walk through some of the ways he needs to report on agile and explain where traditional reporting may of may not be appropriate.

Both presentations will be roughly 25 mins will alot of time for discussion afterwards.

Regards,
Martin.