Joseph Pelrine

Cynefin – Making Sense of Agile:

Agile methods have helped many software projects to success, although it’s not always clear why and how. An understanding of the roots of agility is a requirement for adapting agile processes. Social complexity theory provides an explanation for how agile methods work. By using techniques from this new field, coaches and managers can more easily adapt agile methods to the idiosyncrasies of specific organizations.

This talk will introduce parts of the Cynefin framework, drawing on a decade of theoretical research and practical experiments to work with the reality of human decision making, and will cover:

- Complex systems approaches to the forced evolution of systems – allowing applications to emerge from the interaction of objects with people and processes; avoiding end state design.

- New approaches to project management based on the ideas of social complexity, which legitimize formal, rapid and agile design methods within boundaries.

- Gaining senior management acceptance to radical ideas.

- The application of the Cynefin framework for problem-solving in the Agile domain.

Understand Agile techniques by mapping them to the Cynefin sense-making framework.

Bio:

Joseph Pelrine is both computer and social complexity scientist, C*O of MetaProg, a company devoted to increasing the quality of software and its development process, and is Europe’s senior certified ScrumMaster Practitioner and Trainer as well as one of Europe’s leading experts on eXtreme Programming. He has had a successful career as software developer, project manager and consultant, and has spoken about it at such diverse places as IBM, OOPSLA and the Chaos Computer Club. His work focus is on field of social complexity science and its application to Agile processes.