best practices and lessons learned by these early Agile adopters. Broader, more successful Agile execution will take time, trial and error, and shaping of processes, policies, and culture, but with support locked. During sprint execution, the development team runs through the full development cycle for each user story in the sprint backlog as shown in Figure 4. Figure 4 Sprint Execution Cycle The integrated team construct. At the heart of an Agile development effort is the release team responsible for execution. The release team includes a core team composed of the project manager, product owner, tester,

greatest? Business value is destroyed only when we substitute extensive planning for execution and when we substitute execution according to plan for thinking and adapting. A Better Way to Plan: Nevertheless

the investment decision and the oversight process would form a seamless continuum wherein the execution of the initiative would yield valuable information by which the governance decision could be adjusted budget, some justifications of why we believed it was plausible, and just enough description of the execution team and its process to convince the Star Chamber that the team was capable. Then, we did something

• Turn off IMs or DND • No non-task related browsing • No bathroom breaks* • No conversations • No meetings • No eating • No preening How does it work? 1. Choose a task you’d like to get done 2. Set Set the Pomodoro for 25 minutes 3. Work on the task until the Pomodoro rings 4. When the Pomodoro rings, put a checkmark on a paper 5. Take a short break 6. Every 4 Pomodoros, take a longer break What activity requires you by monitoring how many Pomodoros you need in order to accomplish a specific task 2. Learn to protect your Pomodoro from the internal and external interruption 3. Make accurate estimations

percent divided by fifty percent, so one unit of time. Let’s call it one hour. So, on average, our task would wait in the queue for one hour before it gets worked. On the other hand, if a resource is or nine hours. In other words, our task would wait in queue nine times longer than if the resource were fifty percent idle.” I conclude, “So, for the Phoenix task, assuming we have seven handoffs, and

“Therefore it appears that the time has come to address the essential parts of the software task, those concerned with fashioning abstract conceptual structures of great complexity. I suggest: validation can only establish that a program meets its specification, the hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specificationEnvironments and tools • How much more gain Environments and toolsA Modern Take on Accidental Complexity • Yak Shaving - the phenomenon where one task leads to another, which leads to another, until you end up working on something that seems completely

delivery for large numbers teams Core values:  Code quality - can't scale crappy code  Program execution  Alignment  Transparency House of Lean: "We need to figure out a way to deliver software so

Application Installations  Route Adds – requires heightened security access  Database Data Script Execution  Load Balancer Node Disablement  OS and Security Patching  Requesting access to technology

delivered requirements within the entire development period of performance.  During the program execution phase, a high-level program estimate undergoes refinement to create detailed release and sprint-level

to a plan and also facilitate change and organizational responsiveness. It is not a conflict in execution—it is a conflict of values. In the Agile world, senior IT leadership, and the CIO in particular