Agile portfolio management can solve this issue by ensuring the organization is aligned and on-track without slowing down the pace of delivery or removing the autonomy that keeps your organization competitive. This session will focus on the six (6) key steps that ensure better decisions regarding your agile projects (i.e. better management of your portfolio in an agile environment) and make your portfolio-level decisions as agile as your scrum team decisions. This presentation is targeted to Product Manager, Program Manager, or Executives who want to learn how to manage an agile portfolio and ensure that agile teams are aligned with the overall corporate direction.

Learning Outcomes: Using real life examples from agile portfolio management techniques used at Synacor, this presentation will focus on six (6) key steps that ensure better decisions regarding your agile projects; i.e. are we working on the right projects? Specifically, these steps will focus on how to increase:

1. Alignment, by tracking priorities of all projects across the enterprise (use in-take process to prioritize and filter all work)
2. Efficiency, by confirming qualified backlog epics exist before work is handed to agile teams
3. Feeling of purpose, by guaranteeing agile team backlog user stories can map to features and business/architecture epics
4. Resource planning, by ensuring time and costs are estimated and tracked (compare initial estimates of both against actual)
5. Visibility, by creating a single source of truth for project status/progress 6. Forecasts, by projecting epics for the next release

These critical steps can make your portfolio-level decisions as agile as your scrum team decisions.

About the speaker:

Steve Davi, SVP Engineering at Synacor, is responsible for their overall software product development as they continue to innovate and launch new products enabling subscribers to access all their favorite shows, music, games, news, and cloud services, all in one place, any time, anywhere, on the device of their choosing.

Prior to Synacor, Steve served as Chief Technology Officer at SeaChange International, responsible for their overall software technology architecture and as head of their software engineering teams for back-office, advertising, and applications. When first joining SeaChange Steve helped architect the Axiom BackOffice product for VOD and then managed the software team that delivered SeaChange’s first VOD product, first Recording System deployment, and first ads in VOD deployment. He also managed the SeaChange, Steve served from September 1990 until November 1997 in various engineering and managerial positions at Banyan Systems Inc., a network operating system software company that specialized in enterprise scale directory and messaging products. Prior to joining Banyan Systems, Steve served from June 1985 until September 1990 in various engineering positions within the networking division at Data General.

Steve is passionate about constantly giving back to society. To that end he mentors startups through Mass Challenge in Boston, he participates in the Time to Invent effort to get young kids excited about engineering, and serves as a Steering Committee member for Project Bread (an organization that offers programs and activities to assist those in need of food). Steve is also passionate about agile software developing helping to move the entire SeaChange software engineering organization to agile. His experience at SeaChange is briefly described in Ken Schwaber’s book, Software in 30 Days.

Steve holds a Bachelors and a Masters degree in Computer Science and has more than 25 years of professional experience in the software industry. He received the Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1985 and currently sits on the WPI Global Task Force and Arts/Sciences Advisory Board to help shape the future direction of WPI’s Engineering department.