Dave West

Dave West is the Product Owner and CEO at scrum.org. In this capacity, he engages with partners, and the community to drive scrum.org’s strategy and the overall market position of Scrum. Prior to joining the Ken Schwaber and the team at Scrum.org he was Chief Product Officer at Tasktop where he was responsible for product management, engineering and architecture.

As a member of the company’s executive management team was also instrumental in growing Tasktop from a services business into a VC backed product business with a team of almost 100. As one of the foremost industry experts on software development and deployment, West has helped advance many modern software development processes, including the Unified process and Agile methods.

He is a frequent keynote at major industry conferences and is a widely published author of articles and research reports. He also is the co-author of two books, The Nexus Framework For Scaling Scrum and Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. He led the development of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) for IBM/Rational. After IBM/Rational, West returned to consulting and managed Ivar Jacobson Consulting for North America. Then he served as vice president, research director at Forrester Research, where he worked with leading IT organizations and solutions providers to define, drive and advance Agile- based methodology and tool breakthroughs in the enterprise.

Keynote—Moving to a Agile Product Operating Model

Agile is a response to the problem that digital opportunities cannot be easily realized with traditional, industrial project management and delivery approaches, because delivering digital value requires a different approach. As digital becomes a fundamental part of most business opportunities, agile approaches must better align with the whole organization, not just the software teams. That requires a change. Over the last ten years, organizations have wrestled with what that change embodies. Should it focus on structure, process, strategy, people, or rewards? And the answer is yes. But even when considered holistically, something is missing. “The what”.

In this talk, Dave West, CEO of Scrum.org, discusses the impact of the agile product operating model and how, when combined with a holistic, systemic approach to organizational change, it provides the true north to enterprise agility. Dave will discuss the product operating model and introduce an approach to getting its introduction.

Video