I finished up presenting at the 2013 ALM Summit a little while ago where I presented “Agile Under a Waterfall.”

Agile Under a Waterfall

It would be so easy if everyone at our companies just used Scrum -- or at least Agile. No one would lean on the team for dates and deadlines, and everyone would know that change is a good thing. It'd be one great big happy project management family. But let's face it -- an all-Agile organization isn't always possible. Maybe you have a Project Management Office (PMO). Maybe you work for a government contractor. Maybe you have regulatory requirements. Maybe you're the first Scrum/Agile project at your company. Maybe your company simply *likes* it this way. Whatever the reason, Agile teams frequently report into Waterfall organizations.

Your team thinks "backlog" and your bosses think "project plan." How do you make it work? How do you ensure communication and foster trust between the two groups? How do you bridge the project management impedance mismatch? You need to find a way get everybody to ‘play nice’ so they can do their jobs.

In this session, we’ll drill into the details of the project management impedance mismatch and talk about strategies to improve communication and delivery when you need to make Agile work inside a Waterfall-centric organization.

As promised, here are the slides for the talk in PowerPoint format and in PDF.

Update 2/18/2013: The video is on Channel 9 for the talk now.

-Ben

-- Looking for help with Scrum Under a Waterfall at your company?  Thinking about adopting Team Foundation Server and Microsoft Project Server?  Want training for your teams on delivering great, working software with Scrum?  Drop us a line at info@benday.com.