Customers & Business Value Stage

Producer: Kent McDonald
Assistant: Greg Goodman

Most teams look to agile approaches for guidance on the right way, or at least the most effective way, to develop software. When application of agile methods is limited to simply defining "how" to execute a project, teams can lose sight of the larger business picture and find themselves content with achieving success on traditional IT project metrics (i.e., time, cost, quality). While strong project performance on these measures is important, agile approaches can also be leveraged at the business value level to help provide teams clear definition on what to build and why it should be build. In other words, agile can help answer the important value-added question, "what is the right thing to build?"

The Customers & Business Value Stage will focus on the values, principles, practices, and experiences surrounding what to build, what not to build, when to build it, and why it should be built. This stage will examine:

• The issues customers, product owners, or stakeholders face when working within an agile team.
• How project teams can engage customers to understand the desired product and business value being developed by a project.
• The idea that all development projects are actually an IT component of a larger business project.

Topics include:

• Defining, measuring, prioritizing the business value of projects, features, and processes.
• Using business value as a means of deciding which functionality to pursue.
• Inventing, prioritizing, managing, and validating requirements.
• Working with customers and stakeholders.

Timeslot	Session	Speaker 1	Speaker 2	Room
Tuesday
10:45-12:15	Converting Business Value into Actual Money	Luke Hohmann		Civic Ballroom North
10:45-12:15	Establishing an Agile Portfolio to Align IT Investments with Business Needs	Joseph C Thomas	Steve Baker	Civic Ballroom South
	Using Agile for Buy vs. Build Decisions	Mike Register	Tod Golding
	Extremely Short Iterations as a Catalyst for Effective Prioritization of Work	Mishkin Berteig
10:45-12:15	Feature Injection	Chris Matts	Julie Chickering	Kent
14:00-15:30	Business Value: Discovering what it is and what to do about it	Joseph Little		Civic Ballroom North
14:00-15:30	Adventures in Agile Contracting: Evolving from Time and Materials to Fixed Price, Fixed Scope, Fixed Schedule Contracts	Teresa Franklin		Civic Ballroom South
14:00-17:30	Requirements-Driven Workshops for Large Agile Projects: Essentials for Product, Release and Iteration Planning	Ellen Gottesdiener		Kent
16:00-17:30	Business Value - Soup to Nuts	Andy Pols	Chris Matts	Civic Ballroom North
16:00-17:30	Money for Nothing and Your Change for Free: Agile Contracts	Jeff Sutherland		Civic Ballroom South
Wednesday
08:30-10:00	Toward Enterprise Agile Scalability: A New Way to Look at Accounting for Agile Software Development Costs	Pat Reed		Civic Ballroom North
08:30-10:00	The product owner team	Alan de Ste Croix	Alan Easton	Civic Ballroom South
	The Intermediate Customer Anti-Pattern	Tom Perry
	Successful Customer Collaboration Resulting in the Right Product for the End User	Sean Cohan
08:30-12:00	Barely Sufficient Portfolio Management	Todd Little	Kent McDonald	Kent
10:30-12:00	Crafting User Stories – Four Experts and The Audience Weigh In	Joshua Kerievsky		Civic Ballroom North
10:30-12:00	Building Great Products, Incrementally: An Agile Product Owner's Primer	Alex Pukinskis		Civic Ballroom South
14:00-15:30	Delivering Measurable Business Value with Scrum	Ryan Shriver		Civic Ballroom North
14:00-15:30	Prioritizing Your Product Backlog	Mike Cohn		Civic Ballroom South
14:00-15:30	Managing the Middle: Product Owners and the Politics of Backlog Management	Luke Hohmann		Kent
16:00-17:30	Prioritizing and Sequencing Features: several techniques including “Minimal Marketable Features”	Evan Campbell		Civic Ballroom North
16:00-17:30	Manager's Introduction to Test-Driven Development	Dave Nicolette	Karl Scotland	Civic Ballroom South
16:00-17:30	Release Planning (The Small Card Game)	Chet Hendrickson	Ron Jeffries	Kent
Thursday
08:30-12:00	User Story Mapping: making sense out of your user story backlog	Jeff Patton		Civic Ballroom North
08:30-10:30	Get Your Agile Project Started on the Right Foot: Requirements and Architectural Envisioning	Scott Ambler		Civic Ballroom South
	User Stories and Use Cases? Sure, it even makes sense	Jamie Allsop
10:30-12:00	Agile Planning in Action	James Shore		Civic Ballroom South
14:00-15:30	From Concept to Product Backlog - What Happens Before Iteration 0?	Gerard Meszaros	Janice Aston	Civic Ballroom North
14:00-15:30	The Customer Role in Agile Projects	Mike Stout	Lisa Shoop	Civic Ballroom South
14:00-15:30	The Aikido of Agile Project Metrics	Alan Goerner		Kent
16:00-17:30	Creating Shared Understanding with Cards	Angela Martin	Artem Marchenko	Civic Ballroom North
16:00-17:30	Energize your Strategy through Agility and Innovation	Joe Krebs		Civic Ballroom South
16:00-17:30	Exploring user stories through mind mapping	Kenji Hiranabe	Takeshi Kakeda	Kent
Friday
08:30-10:00	Product Innovation Debate: Who should drive innovation?	Thad Sheer	Luke Hohmann	Civic Ballroom North
08:30-10:00	Dude, Where's Our Release Plan?	David Hussman		Civic Ballroom South

Review Team

• Scott Ambler - IBM, Canada
• Tim Andersen - Iowa Student Loan, USA
• Brandon Carlson - Rain & Hail, USA
• Julie Chickering - USA
• Jeff Howey - USA
• Jen Kintzle - USA
• Jochen Krebs - Incrementor, USA
• Chris Matts - Accelinnova, UK
• Gene Mitelman - SmartEdge LLC, USA
• Niel Nickolaisen - Headwaters, USA
• Pollyanna Pixton - Evolutionary Systems, USA