Mike Cohn: ADAPTing to Agile for Continued Success

Please join us for this special presentation by Mike Cohn. As always our monthly meetings are free to attend and open to the general public and students. Doors open at 5:30 PM and Mike's talk will run from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM. Refreshments will be served.

Agile software has had more of an influence and has become more widespread than any early practitioner could have imagined. But some have called agile a failure. Few teams, after all, have achieved the 10x productivity or quality gains that the best agile teams have shown us are possible. And partial, half-hearted agile implementations are common. But is this failure?

No, it’s not. Success in an improvement effort is not binary. No teams are perfect, few have achieved the full benefits of being agile, but most who have begun the journey to embrace agile are better than they were.

In this talk we will look at what these teams would consider a more appropriate measure of success—that of iterating toward agility. Along the way we will see how the five stages of the ADAPT model (creating Awareness, increasing Desire, developing Ability, Promoting successes, and Transferring the implications of being agile to the rest of the organization) provide a sustainable framework for both getting started with and getting better at agile. With ADAPT as the model for becoming progressively more agile, we create a solid foundation on which to continue the industry-wide march toward greater agility and continued organizational success.

Speaker

Mike Cohn is the founder of Mountain Goat Software, where he teaches and coaches on Scrum and agile development. He is the author of Agile Estimating and Planning, User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development, and the newly published Succeeding with Agile: Software Development with Scrum. With more than 25 years of experience, Mike has previously been a technology executive in companies of various sizes, from startup to Fortune 40. A frequent magazine contributor and conference speaker, Mike is a founding member of the Scrum Alliance and the Agile Alliance. He can be reached at www.mountaingoatsoftware.com

Location

The June meeting will be held at St. Cajetan’s on the Auraria Campus in Downtown Denver. St. Cajetan’s is approximately one block south of the Tivoli Student Union building, as shown on this parking map.

See building SA and parking lot H on this map

You may park in our regular Tivoli Lot, or in Lot H next to St. Cajetan’s. Lot H is most easily accessed from Seventh Street which intersects with both Colfax Avenue and Auraria Parkway.