Improve your Agile projects by observing political leaders: To Do’s and Not To Do’s

As a person coming from Eastern Europe my youth in the 90’s was marked by the intensive political changes that happened in that region of the continent . Thus, it became almost natural for me to want to be part of the civil society and to keep an eye what the politics say and do afterwards.

Along the years I spent in the project management field I start realising that the Agile methods and practices could be extrapolated to unlimited range of activities from our life and the politics itself definitely is not an exception. Thus, I would like to provoke all of you by analyzing how the politics would fit into the Agile approach (more specifically the SCRUM methodology) if some of the great political leaders nowadays had to turn into Product Owners and Scrum Masters aiming to reach specific project goals. I will show aso practical examples from real politicians around the world which are acting as experienced Project Managers and I believe the lessons provided can be easily applied by all of us in order to improve the management of our own projects.

Apart from the provided examples I will cover also the following topics:

• Agile framework: values and principles applied on a daily basis
• Comparison between a private entity (for us it will be a Drupal Web agency) and a political party: what actually they stand for?
• A Political leader VS a Scrum Master / Product Owner: similarities and differences?
• Communication channels and how to choose the optimal communication approach towards our clients?
• Do you really want to have a client involved in the project scope definition / user stories preparation: check out what the politicians’ point of view would be?
• How to close the scope of a project / define all available User Stories using some of the techniques used by the politicians?
• Sprint Burndown chart and Release Burnup chart: different point of view?
• Do NOT try that one your projects: examples of some politicians that had failed while trying to reach their projects goals.

The main goal of the session is to inspire an “out of the box” perception of Agile methods and practices which is aiming to lead to their better understanding and application as agile values could be all around us, so let's just find them.

This session is addressed to all people who are familiar with the basic and most popular Agile practices and are looking for analyzing those practices from another perspective, extrapolate the model and try to apply it even outside the rooms of our dev team.