The theme of the conference this year is 'The Naked Truth'. As agile development has been adopted by many organisations and as it begins to mature, this year's conference aims to explore the realities of agile at both an organisational and project level, in an attempt to really get behind the skin of what it takes to make agile work.

In keeping with this theme, I'm delighted to announce that I will be doing one of the keynote presentations, entitled 'IPC Media - The Naked Truth'.

In case you haven't heard of IPC, it's one of the UK’s largest publishers of consumer magazines and websites, including many iconic brands such as NME, Nuts, Loaded, MouseBreaker, Good To Know, Now, Look, Marie Claire, In Style, Ideal Home, Living Etc, Trusted Reviews, Country Life and many more!

I am currently Web Technology Director at IPC, responsible for web technology across all brands.

IPC is a large organisation, with a lot of business stakeholders and a lot of web sites. Before implementing agile methods, this presented some really big challenges for the centralised digital division, trying to manage requests from many different business units, all with their own priorities!

The introduction of agile methods across all of IPC’s development teams has transformed the way the digital division works, aligning development teams with business units, managing priorities and expectations, speeding up delivery and building a reputation for delivering on its commitments, driving growth, and perhaps above all resulting in much stronger relationships between business and technology teams. Agile methods have really helped IPC Media to transform its digital operation.

Of course there is always room for improvement and a lot of lessons have been learned along the way! My keynote presentation will take a close look behind the scenes, revealing what life was like before and after agile, how the transformation was achieved, and highlighting some of the difficulties that had to be overcome to succeed.

There are also lots of other presentation tracks at the conference, ensuring that there's something of interest for everyone!

In one of these tracks, I'm also going to be presenting 10 Key Principles of Agile Software Development. This session aims to be a useful introduction for people relatively new to agile or wanting to cement their understanding of the key principles underlying all agile methodologies.

Why not come along? If my bit doesn't suit you, there should be lots of interesting people to learn from...

Kelly.