Agile Boston, Agile MA, Agile training Boston, Agile training MA, APLN Boston, APLN MA

Alan Atlas is a practicing Agile Coach at RALLYSoftware. Alan's experience includes working as a Hardware Development Engineer at Bell Labs and a Sr. Development Manager in Web Services at Amazon.com. At Amazon he spearheaded the use of Scrum throughout the company. While at Amazon, he and his team used Scrum for over a year to successfully deliver Amazon S3, the industry-award-winning web service that provides unlimited Internet-connected storage, in 2006.
Alan is a CSM, a CST, a graduate of Brown University (BA Psychology), UMASS (BS in EE), and Georgia Tech (MSEE).

Learn more about ALAN ATLAS here.

Presentation: ALAN ATLAS of [RALLY] on SOCIAL CONTRACTS: THE NEGLECTED ROLE OF MIDDLE MANAGEMENT IN AGILE TRANSFORMATION

Successful agile adoption is in fact cultural change. Culture includes written and unwritten ground rules. These rules are part of the core content of culture. When adopting agile practices like Scrum, new rules are in play. Understand the rules and honoring the sanctity of these rules is at the root of successful, robust adoptions. Dishonoring these rules can be a the root cause of failure.

Social contracts are plain-English working agreements by and between stakeholders and participants in any agile adoption effort.

A key point of cultural leverage is the middle manager. The line manager has relatively little cultural influence while upper management is often segregated from non-executive work.... and workers. This leaves the middle manager to "keep the culture". The middle manager with a title like AVP or Director is the point of leverage where social contracts can be put to excellent use. However, they are often left out of training and other transformation activities in favor of putting all efforts into the teams.

Middle managers can stunt agile transformations actively due to fear and distrust, or passively due to ignorance.

One way to educate middle managers is the use of social contracts to provide a framework for conversation that can be used to set expectations, and to educate the middle manager to the new cultural milieu.

Attend this session to learn:

Some common anti-patterns (and anecdotes) regarding middle managers in agile transformations
The shape of the new role of middle managers (yes, there is need for them)
The structure of social contracts for use with managers and between managers
Techniques for training a manager in Agile management practice using social contracts

01-27-2010 MEETING AGENDA:

6:30 PM: SCRUM ORIENTATION: Scrum as described by Dan Mezick

7:00 PM: Food and networking time. LIve music from BOB MAC WILLIAMS

7:15 PM: MAIN EVENT: ALAN ATLAS on SOCIAL CONTRACTS and MIDDLE MANAGERS

8:25 PM: SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION OF MEETING

LIVE MUSIC FROM BOB MAC WILLIAMS

Bob MacWIlliams plays eclectic instrumentals and songs on acoustic guitar. Bob hails from AUBURNDALE, Massachusetts and plays for us during the break

Bob MacWilliams on MySpace: links, MP3 audio, song clips, more

MEETING VENUE: MICROSOFT WALTHAM. REGISTER HERE for this meeting

NOTE: Plan to show up if you register. If you register but are a no-show, that fact will be written to your attendance record. Please do not register casually. If you register, make a commitment to attend. Those who register AND subsequently attend will get priority seating at big meetings like this one. If you register but are a no-show, we know who you are, and you will not get early seating next time.

DO NOT register casually for this meeting, as you do us a big disservice to usm by distorting the actual count for the seating and food. Registration is an explicit commitment to attend.

DIRECTIONS TO MICROSOFT WALTHAM.