Niels Malotaux
Niels Malotaux is an independent coach and expert in optimizing project performance. He has some 40 year experience in designing electronic and software systems, at Delft University, in the Dutch Army, at Philips Electronics and 20 years leading a systems design company. Since 1998 he devotes his expertise to helping projects and organizations to deliver Quality On Time: delivering what the customer needs, when he needs it, to enable customer success. To this effect, Niels has available numerous very pragmatic approaches like Evolutionary (Evo) Methods, Real Requirements, Early Review and Inspection, Reliable Embedded Systems Design, and Zero Defects. Since 2001, he taught and coached well over 300 projects in 40+ organizations in the Netherlands, Belgium, China, Germany, Ireland, India, Israel, Japan, Poland, Romania, South Africa, the UK and the US, which led to a wealth of experience in which approaches work better and which work less well in practice.
Workshop—Evo Planning to produce even better results in shorter time
Evolutionary Delivery (Evo) is an Agile approach allowing teams to deliver more business value in shorter time, as has been shown in numerous environments like projects for space (40 man-year saved), building automation, and banking, in waterfall projects as well as Agile and Scrum teams.
Originally, Evo was focused on how to define the ‘real’ requirements for what we’re supposed to do, how to prioritize the order of value delivery, and actively learn from feedback. In order to operationalize this further, Niels added Evo Planning, which is aimed to even further improve both successful as well as timely delivery, continuously increasing the effectiveness, the efficiency, and the predictability of what we do. Evo is actually the mother of all Agile, but most Agile approaches didn’t take the full breath and hence lack some of the benefits.
We’ll introduce the basic Evo techniques: Real Requirements, TaskCycles to increase efficiency, DeliveryCycles to increase effectiveness, and TimeLine for oversight and predictability. TimeLine exposes the real status of the work, and when we discover early that we will be late, we effectively deal with it.
You’ll run a project to deliver Quality on Time, and find out your baseline of estimation, defect delivery, design wit, and requirements recognition. If you bring a list of the most important things you have to work on in the next couple of weeks, you’ll even be able to experience yourself why Evo Planning makes you delivering better results in shorter time.
If you come as a team, you can experience how Evo Planning can make you work more effective and efficient as a team.
Managers can learn what they can and should expect from their development teams.
If you think you are already very effective and efficient, please come and see for yourself what others experienced when they thought the same.
Preparation:
Please read and prepare carefully. The better you prepare, the more you will learn. Write down:
• The Goal of your current work or project (What and why are you working on it?)
• The Definition of Success (How will you know you’re successfully done?)
• The most important stakeholder of your current work or project (Who is waiting for it?)
• The most important requirement for this stakeholder (What is he waiting for?)
• How much value improvement does this stakeholder expect (3 or 7?)
• Any deadlines? (No deadlines: it will take longer)
• What you and your team should and can have achieved in the coming 10 weeks
(Will you succeed? If yes: great. If not: what will you do about it? - Failure is not an option)
• What you think you should and can do the coming week to achieve what you’re supposed to achieve (How do you make sure that by the end of the week all of this will be done)
• Any issues you expect with the above or otherwise with your work or project
If you find it difficult to write these things down, this workshop is even more important for you. If you come out of the workshop with any change in what you wrote down, this will allow you to work more on more important things, and less on less important things. Better focus on what really is important immediately saves time. The time you spent coming to this conference can be regained quickly by applying the techniques you can learn in this workshop. This may convince your boss to allow you to attend the conference and this workshop. Perhaps he’ll even come with you.