Help Needed! Introduction to Agile Presentation

Help!  As part of my personal campaign to spread the good word about Agile, I’ve enthusiastically volunteered to do an “Introduction to agile software development” presentation to an industry group here in Scotland.  It’s a very important presentation for me, career and confidence wise.

So far I’ve spent hours and hours preparing my presentation.  But I’ve now reached the point where I’m so deep inside of my subject that not only can’t I see the forest, but I’m having trouble seeing the trees too.   I think that the basic problem is that I’m trying to prove that agile is best and I’m getting hung up on the logic.  It’s obvious, when I walk through what I have got so far, that there’s too much theory and not enough practical stuff.  All of the thinking that I’ve done so far has been good, but I reckon that I would do a better talk (right now) if I chucked what I’ve done and gave an impromptu speech with a white board.

Can anyone out there recommend a good 45–60 minute “Introduction to Agile Software Development” presentation suitable for wallets rather than techies? 

I don’t want to plagiarize it, or even use it, just to read it and compare with what I’ve got at the moment.

Comments

[Stuart Roebuck]

This probaby isn't terribly helpful, but I've always found some of Mary Poppendieck's stuff to be more wallet than techie oriented.

Stuart.

[John Rusk]

Stuart,

Yes, I'd second your comments about the Poppendiecks' stuff.

Clarke,

A few random comments:

I'm sure your readers would be glad to comment on drafts of the pressentation, if you wanted to post one. Although the downside would no-doubt be a flood of somewhat conflicting suggestions! :-)

Have you considered an "agile" presentation? In which you ask the audience what they want to know at the start, answer their most important questions in an "iteration" of say 15 mins of speaking; then repeat the cycle a two or three more times. I've wanted to try this myself for some time. I haven't, but I did recently see several blog postings from people who had. (Email me if you missed them and you'd like to to try and find the URLs for you.)

Finally, I found some good material in Larman and Basili's PDF of iterative and incremental development. Not agile exactly, just IID, but that's such a major cornerstone of agility it's handy to have some good stuff about it. (My URL links to a page that points to their PDF.)

John

[Kim Leonard]

Hi Clarke,

Here's a link to a white paper by Jim Highsmith on answering objections to agile (many of which come from the 'wallets'). It's not a presentation, sorry, but you may find some of his points useful in your thinking. http://www.cutter.com/research/freestuff/AgileObjections.pdf

I'll look around a bit more...
Kim