Talk: The final frontier: how to effectively engage business users in your agile development work

Talk description

Title:	The final frontier: how to effectively engage business users in your agile development work
Short synopsis:	In your organisation, even if everybody is fully behind your mission it can be incredibly difficult to get full, effective and enthusiastic engagement from your business managers and users If so, you are not alone. The 2017 Version One State of Agile Report identifies 'Company philosophy or culture at odds with core agile values' as the #1 challenge experienced by organisations adopting and scaling agile. Over the years, Richard has worked with this problem across a wide range of different organisations and in each case has succeeded in building an enthusiastic and engaged community of users with a high degree of ownership of the new system and its associated new ways of working In this session, he will be sharing his hard won tips and tricks on what really works in that tricky situation of building systems that are going to bring about change in organisations where the technology is a means to an end , rather than an end in itself Typically in these sorts of organisations, there are multiple stakeholders with different requirements that are often poorly understood, decision making can be slow and politics can often take over. In many of these organisations, working practices are deeply embedded and there is a reluctance to change. At the same time, managers are pre-occupied with costs and want firm commitments on timetable. And staff are not necessarily very tech savvy and are often heavily committed to their day job which makes effective participation in an agile design and development process very difficult Richard will share stories from the front line describing his successes (and his failures) in tackling these issues. He will also describe how he has taken the ideas and theories from a wide range of agile thinkers (Dave Snowden, Jeff Patton, Tom Gilb, the Poppendiecks, amongst others) and applied them practically to these challenging real world situations Most of Richard's recent projects have been in the not for profit sector which has organisations of many different types Some use a traditional 'command and control' approach to managing the business. Others have adopted structures which pre-figure the approach envisaged by leading writers on agile organisational design: networks of semi-autonomous groups with a high degree of local autonomy working collaboratively towards a shared goal So this session will be of interest to product owners, business analysts, scrum masters, project managers and others working in (or for) commercial, government and not for profit organisations, typically delivering complex services, who are bus looking for some new and different ideas for building effective and enthusiastic engagement of the 'the business' with their tech development work Max size: 500 chars
Long synopsis (optional):	Max size: 5000 chars
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