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Adrian Cho, Program Director, Rational Jazz ALM at IBM Rational and author of "The Jazz Process"

 Adrian  Cho
With twenty-plus years in music and business in a variety of domains and disciplines, Adrian Cho helps organizations improve performance by developing cultures that facilitate collaboration, innovation, and agility. As Program Director, Rational Jazz ALM at IBM, Adrian manages a complex, globally distributed, agile software development project coordinating contributions from four hundred people working at twenty-five locations in ten countries. A jazz bassist and band leader, Adrian speaks regularly to university and business audiences about software development, jazz history, collaboration, innovation and agility. Combining his experiences in arts and business, Adrian developed The Jazz Process, an execution-oriented framework for collaboration, innovation, and agility that can help teams in any domain improve their performance. His book, The Jazz Process: Collaboration, Innovation and Agility, published by Addison-Wesley, has been endorsed by a diverse collection of thought leaders while reviewers have praised the book as “a huge payback for the time invested in reading it,” “a deep exploration of collaborative know-how,” and “a concept of leadership and teamwork that’s well suited for the Google-age workplace.”

Presentation: "Enabling Collective Improvisation in Agile Software Development"

Time: Friday 14:40 - 15:30

Location: Bayview

Abstract:

How can a group of jazz musicians who have never worked together before deliver a series of unique and compelling performances without preparation? How do they improvise and innovate while adapting to changes in their environment? Like great jazz musicians, a truly agile software development team must continuously integrate individual contributions, incorporate consumer feedback on an ongoing basis and deliver high quality performances on-time and in real-time. Jazz musician and IBM software development manager, Adrian Cho, will engage the audience in collective exercises while speaking about managing friction, the importance of awareness, diversity, health, and leading on demand, and demonstrating how form and rhythm provide a framework for collective improvisation. These are the things that enable truly agile teams to embrace change and conflict and deliver continuous high performance.