Levent Gurses, Founder and CEO, Jacoozi

The prospect of using Agile methods to accelerate the delivery of value to the customers while reducing feature fatigue has captured the imagination of Product Managers everywhere. In the past few years a rising number of companies have experimented with Agile practices, hoping to bring the most valuable product features faster to the market and gain strategic advantage.

But many companies have had difficulties adopting the new Agile practices. Some have faced employee or department resistance to change during the transition. Others have failed to demonstrate enough business value to keep the initiatives alive and spread it across the organization.

Clearly, companies have to rethink how they formulate their Agile adoption strategy. A five-part methodology can help:
1. Companies need to realize the importance of starting small. This is the time for selecting a pilot project for the Agile adoption. Companies will want to try and fail and learn within the pilot project before they move with a wholesale adoption.
2. Companies should define business value in very clear and concrete terms. It's all too often that projects deliver too many features, mostly useless to the real customers.
3. Activities and technologies need to be evaluated according to their contribution to the business value. Agility promotes faster business value, but not necessarily the latest and greatest technical framework.
4. the companies should carefully select and incrementally adopt key Agile practices. Agile adoption does not have to be all or nothing. Every practice should be assessed with respect to the business goals and only adopted if it makes business sense.
5. Companies should develop a set of objective evaluation criteria to measure the success of the initiative. Since it is very difficult to improve things that cannot be measured, it is imperative to develop a set of measurable goals to assess the success of the Agile project.

This Webinar will outline the principles and tools that will help companies choose the right strategy while adopting Agile. Process and methodology improvements are often faced with skepticism as they are seen as another tool for the management. It is therefore necessary to take the time to think of a transition strategy for a successful Agile adoption.

Speaker Bio
Levent Gurses is a Washington, DC-based technology consultant. He is also the co-founder of Jacoozi, a US-based technical consulting and development firm specializing in transformations through Lean and Agile development practices. As a Certified ScrumMaster Levent helps his clients develop better software through Lean and Agile. His expertise is in transitioning companies to Agile by establishing technical infrastructure, mentoring and coaching for Rapid Product Development (RPD). Through his company Jacoozi, Levent provides vital Agile resources with real world experience such as coaches, project managers, architects and developers.

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