Nashua Scrum Club

Atlantis:  How Agile Kept Us From Sinking

To download a copy of the presentation, click here.

A huge project intended to deliver the next generation of a web based product is approved.  Discovery and requirements gathering begins.  Scope increases. Forecast to complete increases. Time to delivery increases.  Six months in to the project the estimates for cost and time to completion are more than 2.5 times the original proposal -- and continuing to increase.  Finger pointing begins and the product team blames the development team.  The development team blames the product team.  The project is out of control....

Sound familiar?

But then something unexpected occurs - a perfect storm of opportunity. Unrelated organizational changes shift responsibilities and a proposal to try Agile gains agreement. But can an 80 person team adopt a new methodology, put in place dozens of new processes, resolve hundreds of challenges, and make an aggressive date at a reduced cost?

In this presentation you will hear the story of how a project staff went from a group of frustrated, discouraged individuals in distinct groups to a highly energized, unified product development team that delivered an outstanding product to rave reviews.  We will touch on the challenges in moving from waterfall to Agile, changing the culture, overcoming organizational obstacles, and managing a complicated product build with multiple distributed Agile teams. Team Atlantis members will share their experiences and how those experiences changed the way they look at product development - forever.

Bio

Bob Murdock is a technology executive at Fidelity Investments and had the privilege of leading Team Atlantis during the product build.  Currently, Bob is working in Corporate Technology to re-engineer Fidelity's internal Human Capital Management systems.  An unabashed 'geek', Bob has been working in software development for over 25 years.  A student of all things related to development, Bob is currently teaching himself Objective-C and Cocoa Touch in his free time.  He has an M.S. in Information Systems and a B.S. in Management Science & Statistics from the University of Maryland.