Update : the slides from John’s presentation are available! We can learn a lot about leading Agile teams by looking at the tactics and practices employed by leaders in the entertainment industry. When creating a play or movie, what are the first three rules of directing? Casting, casting, and casting. How does Saturday Night Live produce sketch after sketch of comedy? By iterating. The principles of leadership and management in the worlds of theatre, TV and film offer a multitude of lessons for those who are leading high performing Agile teams. In this talk, John Krewson will walk through the journey of creating and delivering theatrical and film productions, then show how those principles can be used to improve the process of software delivery. He’ll dive into specific approaches and methods used by performers and directors that harness creativity, develop shared understanding, empower and motivate teams, and manage focus. The session will include multiple interactive demonstrations to further illustrate the application of these principles.
Founder and President of Sketch Development Services
John Krewson is the founder and President of Sketch Development Services, a software development studio that provides Agile coaching, consulting and training. Sketch delivers software for its customers using Agile principles and practices, and helps other organizations with their Agile transformations. John has been an active member of the Agile community since 2003 as a developer, ScrumMaster, development leader, product leader, and coach. He recently led the agile transformation for MasterCard Worldwide, scaling agility to 10,000 team members across 6 continents and multiple product lines using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). He was previously an agile coach with VersionOne, where he worked with dozens of companies from startups to the Fortune 50 to help them learn, adopt, and apply Agile, Scrum, and Lean/Kanban principles and practices. John is also a certified SAFe Program Consultant and an internationally recognized speaker at Agile and technology conferences. John has been a software development leader for fifteen years; an actor and director for over twenty, having appeared on Saturday Night Live in 1997. Follow John’s blog on the Sketch website at sketchdev.io, or on twitter at @johnkrewson.