emergn Presentations at Agile2009 Conference Illustrate Importance of Defining Business Value

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwire - August 18, 2009) - As more organizations adopt Agile development
methods to streamline IT processes and costs, they are often impeded by an
inability to define clear and concise project goals and struggle to remove
constraints to improve time-to-market in an difficult economy. To help
Agile developers and team leaders better address these two common areas, emergn Corporation Chief Strategy Officer
and Principal Agile coach,
Portia Tung, will lead two hands-on game simulations at the Agile2009
Conference, August 24-28, 2009 at the Hyatt Regency Chicago Hotel.

The first session, "The Bottleneck Game:
Discover ToC, Agile, Lean and Real Options through Play," will start at
9:00 AM on Wednesday, and run for 90 minutes. The session is divided into
two parts, first a simulation to demonstrate the techniques, followed by a
discussion on how to apply the techniques to
real-world situations. The Bottleneck Game introduces participants to the
Theory of Constraints and follows the theory's five focusing steps,
teaching them to how to optimize the way their team works in relation to
their organization as a whole:

1. Make the goal of the system explicit
2. Find the constraint that determines the output of the system
3. Exploit the constraint to get the most value out
4. Subordinate every decision to the constraint
5. Elevate the constraint

Ms. Tung's second session, "The Business Value Game: How to Build and Use a Business Value Model,"
starts at 4:00 PM on Wednesday, and runs for 90 minutes. This session
focuses on how organizations can effectively define the business value of
any given project and how to prioritize, plan and communicate that value to
delivery teams. Teams of 5-7 players are tasked with devising and testing
several strategies to earn as much "money" as possible for their team.
Participants learn how to accurately define the business value delivered by
a project by:

-- Experiencing the conflicting priorities from multiple stakeholders on
a single project
-- Seeing the relationship between program-, project- and story-level
prioritization
-- Discovering the most meaningful way to estimate and apply business
value to planning

"In our experience, games are a highly effective way to learn about theory
and its application. These sessions are based on experiential learning to
increase the stickiness of the information transmitted so that participants
can begin to apply their knowledge and make tangible improvements the
moment they return to work," said Portia Tung, Chief Strategy Officer at
emergn. "The interactive nature of these sessions help connect people,
create a sense of common purpose and increase understanding between members
within a team. And, of course, making learning fun means everyone will want
to learn even more!"

Portia Tung is a Principal Agile coach and Chief Strategy Officer for
emergn Corporation, a sourcing strategy and Agile Enablement consultancy.
As a Principal-level coach, Ms. Tung specializes in coaching and creating
Agile Teams and fostering organizational change by pragmatically
applying the Lean and Agile values, principles and practices. She will be
co-presenting both sessions with fellow Agile coach
Pascal Van Cauwenberghe at Agile2009.

For more information on Portia's Agile2009 sessions, please visit the
Agile2009 Conference Web site or contact emergn.

About emergn Corporation

emergn Corporation is a sourcing strategy and Agile enablement consultancy.
The company's unified sourcing model brings the right balance of sourcing
expertise, delivery and fulfillment capability, and industry-leading Agile
enablement services to help companies address the continuous challenges of
ad hoc project delivery and the misalignment that exists between business,
IT, and service providers. The company was founded in 2009 and is
headquartered in New York with offices in London and Guangzhou, China. The
company maintains close relationships with leading industry organizations,
such as the Scrum Training Institute, Agile Alliance, LISA, IAOP, and many
others. For more, visit www.emergn.com.