emergn Presentations at Agile2009 Conference Illustrate Importance of Defining Business Value
Principal Agile Coach Portia Tung Will Present Two Interactive Sessions on How to Prioritize and Deliver Business Goals

NEW YORK, NY, August 20, 2009 /24-7PressRelease/ -- As more organizations adopt Agile development methods to streamline IT processes and costs, they are often impeded by an inability to define clear and concise project goals and struggle to remove constraints to improve time-to-market in an difficult economy. To help Agile developers and team leaders better address these two common areas, emergn Corporation Chief Strategy Officer and Principal Agile coach, Portia Tung, will lead two hands-on game simulations at the Agile2009 Conference, August 24-28, 2009 at the Hyatt Regency Chicago Hotel.

The first session, "The Bottleneck Game: Discover ToC, Agile, Lean and Real Options through Play," will start at 9:00 AM on Wednesday, and run for 90 minutes. The session is divided into two parts, first a simulation to demonstrate the techniques, followed by a discussion on how to apply the techniques to real-world situations. The Bottleneck Game introduces participants to the Theory of Constraints and follows the theory's five focusing steps, teaching them to how to optimize the way their team works in relation to their organization as a whole:
1. Make the goal of the system explicit
2. Find the constraint that determines the output of the system
3. Exploit the constraint to get the most value out
4. Subordinate every decision to the constraint
5. Elevate the constraint

Ms. Tung's second session, "The Business Value Game: How to Build and Use a Business Value Model," starts at 4:00 PM on Wednesday, and runs for 90 minutes. This session focuses on how organizations can effectively define the business value of any given project and how to prioritize, plan and communicate that value to delivery teams. Teams of 5-7 players are tasked with devising and testing several strategies to earn as much "money" as possible for their team. Participants learn how to accurately define the business value delivered by a project by:
• Experiencing the conflicting priorities from multiple stakeholders on a single project
• Seeing the relationship between program-, project- and story-level prioritization
• Discovering the most meaningful way to estimate and apply business value to planning

"In our experience, games are a highly effective way to learn about theory and its application. These sessions are based on experiential learning to increase the stickiness of the information transmitted so that participants can begin to apply their knowledge and make tangible improvements the moment they return to work," said Portia Tung, Chief Strategy Officer at emergn. "The interactive nature of these sessions help connect people, create a sense of common purpose and increase understanding between members within a team. And, of course, making learning fun means everyone will want to learn even more!"

Portia Tung is a Principal Agile coach and Chief Strategy Officer for emergn Corporation, a sourcing strategy and Agile Enablement consultancy. As a Principal-level coach, Ms. Tung specializes in coaching and creating Agile Teams and fostering organizational change by pragmatically applying the Lean and Agile values, principles and practices. She will be co-presenting both sessions with fellow Agile coach Pascal Van Cauwenberghe at Agile2009.

For more information on Portia's Agile2009 sessions, please visit the Agile2009 Conference Web site or contact emergn.


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