Location: Okoboji Grill in Johnston (large meeting room)

Speaker: Jim Hood

Topic: BE The Coach

Are there moments on your team where you wish a super hero would swoop in and fix all the problems? Well its time for YOU to be the coach!

In this interactive session Jim Hood will share some ideas that you can immediately apply to your own team to become more-effective. Through creative use of a few simple techniques you can help lead your own team to more effective days at work. We’ll conclude the evening with a fishbowl discussing other techniques for teams.

Jim is a Technical Lead and and Agile Coach for Pillar Technology and has been writing software for fourteen years.

Please join us and plan to participate Thursday night!

Location: Okoboji Grill in Johnston (large meeting room)

Speaker: Cora Pruitt

Topic: 10 Keys to Success in Scrum

Do you hear this throughout your organization?

“Best stuff we’ve seen in 20 years”
“Amazed our own IT staff delivered so much that really works and does what we need!”
“We finally have a process that works.”
“We are confident in the quality of the product; I know I won’t have to spend time supporting it like what I have done in the past.”
“We know with 100% certainty what the business wants now.”
“We have to leverage this process across the organization!”

What is it that makes scrum successful?  Why does it work for some teams and not others?  This session will focus on the keys to success and open discussions will be encouraged.

Cora is an Agile Coach and Trainer with Sogeti and serves as their Agile Lead for the Des Moines Unit. She has 8 years of training and IT experience, the last four years focused on Agile philosophies and practice, including the Scrum Framework, TDD/ATDD, and Kanban. Cora specializes in coaching teams through agile adoptions with additional mentoring to Product Owners and Scrum Masters.

Location: Okoboji Grill in Johnston (large meeting room)

Speaker: Kent McDonald

Topic: Four Things Product Owners Wish They Knew, But May Not Realize It

Agile teams look to product owners to make decisions about what the right things are to build, and in what order.  Unfortunately the Product Owners often do not come equipped with the techniques to do this effectively.  Kent will discuss four techniques that teams can use to help their Product Owners make decisions about what to include in the product and when to include it.

These techniques include:

• How to make informed decisions at the right time
• Understanding purpose to determine when to use a unique approach
• Determining multiple stakeholder’s perspective on priority
• How to look at value to help make decisions.

Along the way, we’ll also talk about other techniques that based on experience folks have found useful for their product owners.

Kent J. McDonald is an author, speaker, and mentor who helps organizations understand their problems and implement solutions.  His more than 15 years of experience include work in agile software development coaching, business analysis, strategic planning, project management, and product development in a variety of industries including financial services, health insurance, performance marketing, human services, nonprofit, and automotive. He is co-author of Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility and currently delivers business analysis training for B2T Training, and shares his thoughts on raising the level of business analysis at Beyondreqs.com.