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Home » Articles » Speakers and Talks 2012 » Olav Maassen
Olav Maassen
Olav Maassen is an experienced project manager and consultant at Xebia in the Netherlands and has more than ten years of experience working mainly for financial institutions and big corporations.
Chris used his extensive knowledge of financial derivatives to develop an approach on how to deal with decision making and named it real options. After Chris and Olav ran into each other in 2005 they have subsequently extended their model to incorporate applied psychology and various other disciplines. Unlike the "traditional" Real Options approach that is based on Black-Scholes, the approach that Olav and Chris developed avoids the complex mathematics and focuses on the practical implications of options.
Their real options model (also known as the real options meme) teaches us to understand the timing of decision making and help discover new options not appreciated before.
Olav and Chris have teamed up with Chris Geary to create the first business graphic novel about managing risk on projects. In the novel the main character (Rose Randall) learns how to apply the real options approach to the way she manages her new project.
You can follow Olav at twitter.com/OlavMaassen
OlavMaasen
http://nl.linkedin.com/in/olavmaassen
Keynote: Risks and Decisions. The When and Not the How
(with Chris Matts)
Have you ever wondered why some practices feel Agile and some do not?
What do Executive Tools like Scenario Planning have in common with Test Driven Development and Retrospectives.
Why do some Agile practices like Explicit WIP Limits and Retrospectives feel right for a while but then start to feel wrong?
How do you make Agile practives relevant for Finance and the HR Department?
Why do some people have such a strong reaction against Agile and what can you do about it?
How do you stop your management from making the wrong decisions?
How can I help my executives develop a a risk management framework that scales from the top to the bottom of the organisation? How will this help you avoid frustrating methodology audits?
The answer to all of these questions is Real Options. Real Options is a process that helps you understand WHEN to make decisions rather than HOW to make decisions. Timing is everything, however deferring commitments causes stress to many people. Real options helps you manage that stress by creating bounded uncertainty in an context of total uncertainty. This is not a simple process that you copy and learn to adopt through practice. This is a new way at looking at the world around you that starts by learning to differentiate between options and commitments. You will then learn which processes adopt real options and which do not... and how to change the ones that do not.
As well as helping you optimise and manage your processes at work, real options will help you manage stress and uncertainty in your personal lives. You will hear tales about Brides using Real Options to manage their Wedding Day, and Parents who used Real Options to manage stressful times in their Children's education.
Examples of processes created using Real Options include Behaviour Driven Development, Feature Injection, Latent Code Patterns, Staff Liquidity and The Real Option Risk Management Process. In addition, Real Options explain the effectiveness of TDD, Short Iterations and many other Agile Processes.
This keynote will be delivered in Olav and Chris's popular entertaining style. The focus will be on fun, with learning dropped in as a sub-plot. There will be Tradegy and Comedy, Horror and possibly Romance ( but only if Olav is feeling frisky on the day ). Although Olav and Chris love theory, they really only value those theories that have been proven through practice.
Olav and Chris are currently working on a Graphic Novel about Real Options called "The Commitment". This ground breaking experiment will attempt to deliver learning in a format that best suits the reader rather than the writer. Olav and Chris have published many articles on Real Options and Risk Management on a number of We-site, most notably www.infoq.com. Olav and Chris are respected ( and despised ) practitioners in the Agile and Lean Community. They are first followers who have helped to form and incubate many communities including the Behaviour Driven Development and Kanban Communities.
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