Pete Behrens
Great Lakes Software Symposium
Chicago · November 17 - 19, 2006

Founder/CEO @ Agile Leadership Journey
Pete Behrens is the Founder and CEO of the Agile Leadership Journey, dedicated to inspiring leaders, empowering teams and driving change to improve business performance. Through education and coaching, they equip leaders to shift mindset and culture so change becomes an asset rather than a liability.
For over three decades, Pete has been guiding organizational development and fostering a network of trusted professionals that do the same. Pete is also the creator and host of the Relearning Leadership podcast. Along with expert guides and his guests, Pete explores leadership challenges, discussing paths for new awareness and growth for leaders to improve their leadership in highly complex and rapidly changing environments.
Presentations
Agile Enterprise Architecture: The role of the architect
Are you overrunning your architectural runway? Many companies struggle with their ability to retain their architectural integrity when they transition to agile methods. Emergent Architecture (the other EA) can lead to cowboy coding and ad-hoc design decisions that emerge into a poor overall architecture.
Enterprise Architecture (EA) has been a tried and true approach to address these architectural needs throughout the organization, yet this approach often leads to a heavy-handed, document-rich, control-oriented culture lacking ability to keep pace with today's dynamic business environment.
Attempting to integrate an agile process with an Enterprise Architecture approach can be like mixing oil and water - they just don't work together. This session evaluates alternatives in balancing Agility and EA and proposes an architectural approach to build an Agile Enterprise Architecture into your organization.
Agile Tooling: Team to Enterprise
“YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It)” and “Doing the simplest thing possible” are mantras of agile development. A white board, sticky notes, and flip chart paper are by far the best tools for individual teams. However, when coordinating work across 10 - 50 teams across 12 time zones, more tooling is required. Learn how agile enterprises are leveraging tooling to manage their portfolios, projects and products.
A Scrum Experience
Scrum is a very easy agile framework to understand, but is very difficult in practice. Why is that?
For one, Scrum requires compressing an entire software lifecycle into very short time increments of 2-4 weeks in length. It requires cross-functional team commitment, discipline, communication, and collaboration to accomplish their goals. These changes are difficult and often expose organizational and environmental issues that must be addressed for the team to be successful.
This session brings focus to the Scrum heartbeat - the sprint. After a brief introduction of the Scrum framework and a focus on the sprint, we will be taking an experiential hands-on journey through a full sprint with your newly formed team.