PDMA WebsiteTheo Mandel and Larry Marine present “Agile – When Theory Meets Reality” at the Rocky Mountain PDMA monthly meeting on September 16, 2010. Larry Marine, NPDP, is President at Intuitive Design Group and member of RM PDMA.

The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) is the premier global advocate for product development and management professionals. Our mission is to improve the effectiveness of individuals and organizations in product development and management. This is accomplished by providing resources for professional development, information, collaboration and promotion of new product development and management.

Session Summary: 

Agile is not the proverbial Silver Bullet. In fact, the common misperceptions about Agile processes doom many a project. In this presentation, Larry and Theo will discuss some of the common mistakes witnessed in the real world and how to avoid them.

Agile processes are development processes, not design processes. Designing products iteratively, while you develop provides rather poorly designed products. This might be great for engineers, but is not so attractive or useable by the customers.

In essence, you cannot achieve revolutionary designs with an evolutionary process. Iterative design is an evolutionary design method that incrementally improves an initial design. If the initial concept is flawed all you end up doing is designing the wrong thing, very well. Larry and Theo will discuss how accurately prioritizing what tasks your product should support for the end user helps eliminate unnecessary “features” that steal time from your project, thus ensuring you have the time to do it right.

The reality is that you need to design first, and build later. If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there. You would not let your carpenters design your building, would you? Larry and Theo will discuss how Agile processes also benefit from a clearly defined set of blueprints, and they will also go over how they used their knowledge of Agile to identify a gaping hole in Hollander’s product offering by integrating their design efforts with their new Scrum processes.Join us for a clarifying look at Agile processes and learn tools to improve your success developing new products.

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