Wed 3/4 Mtg - Agile Offshore & Five Dysfunctions

Wed 3/4 - "Growing and Sustaining an Offshore Scrum Engagement"
Join us in March for a chance to hear one of the sessions from the Agile2008 Conference in Toronto last year. Kelley Blue Book's Edward Uy, Director PMO & Nikos Ioannou, Director, Industry Products, will be presenting a straightforward, sensible approach to implementing Scrum combined with a well-known team building model to help KBB successfully creat offshoring teams in China and India. Nikos and Edward will illustrate how and why they applied The Five Dysfunctions of a Team model by Patrick Lencioni to provide a foundation for growing and sustaining offshore teams several time zones away. They will cover examples of how employing this model has improved KBB's offshore engagements and overcome a number of challenges to improve the delivery of the Scrum teams.

Points include:

• Making Review and Retrospective meetings more effective
  
• Maximizing learnings during cross-team site visits
  
• Determining the “best types of projects” to offshore in the early stages of offshore development
  
• Overcoming productivity plateaus after several successful sprints

This presentation will also describe the important role Executive Management plays in driving the Scrum adoption for KBB and setting up these offshore offices. The presenters will review the communication channels they found most useful and the how these have changed over time.

As before, there will be a pre-meeting get together at the food court at The Spectrum from 5 - 6 PM, and afterward we'll walk to the meeting. See link to map at right.

Agile/XP SoCal Mtg - 2/18

From Paul Hodgetts of Agile/XP SoCal, an announcement for another local agile user group.

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A reminder that the next Agile/XP SoCal monthly meeting is *next* Wednesday, 2/18 at 6:00 PM.

Please be sure to RSVP to agilesocal@gmail.com so we can have your visitor badge ready and enough food for everyone.

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This month we continue our series focusing on core agile by exploring the framework and practices that make agile processes work.

Agile Project Execution
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This talk will provide you with a practical guide to Agile software development projects. We'll focus on the Agile software development lifecycle, the necessary practices, and tips to create highly productive Agile teams. Along with a deeper investigation into key process areas, we'll also address frequently encountered concerns and issues such as the different roles on Agile projects and how they relate to traditional project roles. There will also be a comparison
of Agile and Waterfall projects and how the Agile process focuses on meeting specific product and project objectives.

Your Speaker
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George Schlitz is a Principal Agile Coach and co-founder of BigVisible Solutions. He has been using and championing Agile practices on projects since 2000, with extensive experience consulting in large organizations (10,000+ employees) particularly within financial services and manufacturing industries (with recent clients including Capital Group, Fidelity Investments, Barclay's Global Investors and Textron) and he most enjoys work in challenging organizational cultures. George is a Certified Scrum Coach and Practitioner (CSC/CSP) and a certified Project Management Professional (PMP).

When: Wednesday, February 18th
Networking and food, 6:00 PM.
Presentation and Q&A 6:30-8:30 PM.

IMPORTANT! In order to have a visitor badge ready for you, you MUST RSVP to agilesocal@gmail.com

Where: The Capital Group Companies
Yosemite Building
6455 Irvine Center Drive
Irvine, CA 92618
Exit the 5 or 405 at Sand Canyon.
From the 5, go south to Irvine Center and turn right.
From the 405, go north to Irvine Center and turn left.
Take the first right into the main parking lot at Capital Group.
Park there (no permit needed), go to the main entrance, look for the
signs.

Thanks to Capital Group for providing the meeting facilities.
Thanks to BigVisible and Agile Logic for providing the food.