Transitioning to Agility (webinar series)

To manifest agility at the enterprise level, one must learn the many reasons for achieving it,  understand their challenges, find solutions, as well as implement Agile.  This webinar series with Alan Shalloway from NetObjectives will discuss all three areas in three (3) steps.

(Step 1) Understanding the Business Reasons for Agility

To manifest agility at the enterprise level, one must learn the many reasons for achieving it.  This webinar presents several business reasons for ability:

• Speed to market translates to greater revenues
• Quicker understanding of customer needs
• Eliminating Waste
• Better project management
• Faster learning
• Better technical quality

This webinar will show why, no matter what our process, we must deliver smaller, useful chunks of value to our customers. Understanding the motivations for Business Agility is also a first step in determining how you will go about achieving it.

>>  Listen to the Webinar #1 <here>

(Step 2) Mapping Your Value Stream to Understand Your Challenges & Find Solutions

To manifest agility at the enterprise level, one must learn about an organization’s flow of work. This webinar introduces value stream mapping – a graphical method of showing how an organization’s flow of work goes from concept to consumption.

Many organizations are undertaking Agile methods at the team level, when, in fact, that is not the major impediment to the organization’s agility.  The Lean technique of 5-whys, useful to get to the root cause of errors, is also introduced.  Value stream mapping, combined with 5-whys is often essential determine where to start in your transition to agility.

Our experience at Net Objectives is that undertaking an agile transition without value stream mapping is often like looking for something where the light is better, but not necessarily where the problem is.  One significant difference between agile methods is how they approach the enterprise. Some, like Scrum, start at the team and attempt to scale up – often with little success.  Value stream mapping can provide a big picture of the problems the organization faces. It enables and optimizes the whole approach – a fundamental Lean concept.

>> Listen to the Webinar #2 <here>

(Step 3): Implementing Agile with Kanban

Now that we’ve learned that we want to achieve quick delivery and that we must attend to delays, how do we accomplish this? Agile methods provide two distinct approaches.  The more popular one, Scrum, often requires an abrupt change to an organization’s structure.  While effective when one can do this, it is often difficult to achieve on a corporate wide scale.  The second, Kanban, takes a different approach to managing transitions.  It suggests starting where you are, attending to work load limits and gradually improving productivity by removing the delays in your value stream.

This webinar presents how to start your agile transformation by understanding where you are… and using Kanban to gradually improve your value stream at a pace your organization can handle.  Kanban focuses on creating visibility to all members (business, management and teams) in the value stream while limiting the work in progress (WIP) to the team’s (and hence, organization’s) capacity.  Kanban has demonstrated it can improve time to market, efficiency of teams, and predictability of their throughput.

>> Listen to the Webinar #3 <here>

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SPEAKER: Alan Shalloway is the founder and CEO of Net Objectives. With almost 40 years of experience, Alan is an industry thought leader. He helps companies transition to Lean and Agile methods enterprise-wide as well teaches courses in Lean, Kanban, Scrum, Design Patterns, and Object-Orientation. Alan has developed training and coaching methods for Lean-Agile that have helped his clients achieve long-term, sustainable productivity gains. He is a popular speaker at prestigious conferences worldwide and an author of several books

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