Do you cringe at the thought of going to work? Do your customers doubt that systems projects will be successfully delivered, much less meet their Return on Investment expectations. Come hear about a very simple but very difficult way to address these problems, Agile processes.

Ken Schwaber, co-developer of the Scrum Agile process and signatory to the Agile Manifesto, will describe how to use Scrum and XP to solve these problems and restore our profession to credibility. However, he won't be describing a silver bullet, he'll be describing a road map to health. The start is easy and can be undertaken in two days. Then the hard work of regaining trust, restoring quality, and beginning to enjoy the challenges of developing neat systems begins.

Ken Schwaber is a Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium's Agile Software Development & Project Management Practice and a contributor to that Advisory Service. He is an experienced software developer, product manager, and industry consultant. He is one of the leaders of the Agile process revolution, as a signatory of the Agile Manifesto, founder and director of the AgileAlliance, and currently Chairman of its Board of Directors. He and Jeff Sutherland are the developers of the Scrum Agile process.

Mr. Schwaber has been in the IT industry for more than 30 years, starting as a programmer and, by 1984, managing IT for a division of Wang. In 1985, he founded Advanced Development Methods (ADM), a company dedicated to improving the software development practice. He initiated the process management product revolution of the early 1990s, when methodologies were automated and put to practical use on ADM's Mate process manager. He worked with Sutherland to formulate the initial versions of the Scrum development process and, since then, has helped numerous product and IT organizations implement, run projects, and build products using Scrum and Agile processes.

Mr. Schwaber has been a visible proponent of adaptive, lightweight, empirical processes for software development. He is the author of Agile Project Management with Scrum and coauthor of Agile Software Development with Scrum and Pattern Languages of Program Design 4 (Scrum: An Extension Pattern Language for Hyperproductive Software Development). In addition, Mr. Schwaber has authored many articles for Cutter IT Journal and Cutter's Advisory Services. He can be reached at kschwaber_AT_cutter.com.

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