In this interactive session, we will discuss:

* Why do corporate innovation programs fail?
* What are the foundational pillars of innovation?
* What conversations should you have to cultivate the right kind of innovation in your organization?

Often, when we’re building our business to business (B2B) SaaS products,
our customers might ask us for SOC2 audits or how we’re meeting common
security or compliance requirements in our industry such as HIPAA in
Healthcare IT or PCI DSS in FinTech.

Building a security program is often driven by our assets – such as what
data or access we have – and risk. It’s easy to get caught up in
arbitrary requirements from customers and regulators, which can add
overhead, slowing down and adding cost to an innovative company. Over
time, a startup might accidentally start feeling like a bureaucratic
corporation when the goal was just to do the right thing.

Fortunately, when and how we implement our security program can be up to
us if we know how to navigate the expectations effectively. In this
presentation, we’ll cover different ways to approach these initiatives
to help an organization be more strategic and  we’ll explore topics
like:

* Positioning our product and services in a way to align to industry
expectations, while still remaining innovative
* The conversations with potential customers about security and privacy
* What compliance requirements apply and why as well as how to meet them
* Understanding SOC2 – what is a SOC2 audit
* When to get a SOC2 audit and how to manage expectations before
* The value of SOC2
* Creating the environment for a successful audit without exceptions
* How security can be a competitive advantage

Have you ever felt stuck in ‘Bad Agile’, like you werent seeing the outcomes others were? Maybe you, like a majority of others, are using an established framework; but your results have just been ‘meh’ and not ‘wow’.

If this feels painfully familiar, then join me on a journey of discovery & disruption in the relentless pursuit of value. We will discuss the dangers of ‘Bad Agile’ and some tell-tale signs you might be suffering from ‘Bad Agile”. I’ll share some personal stories, anecdotes, tools, and tips I learned on my own journey from cook to chef.

Here is the story of Berti, a manager who changed her leadership style to coaching her team on modifying their Way of Work as their primary means of delivery. There are activities during this session so that participants can share their insights.

I propose that the team’s WoW determines the product’s quality, and how our customers will love this product. The more our customer loves the product, the more able the organization will be to achieve its business goal.

When Berti shifted from managing the delivery to coaching her people to modify their WoW, she enabled team learning. The faster the teams learn, the sooner they can achieve their goals.

Learning from deliberate practice is how teams grow to navigate the uncertainties inherent in product development.

By coaching her team to daily modify their WoW, Berti has unleashed a new form of relationship with her people that promoted surfacing problems and solving them.

This session can be particularly relevant if you are a manager, team leader, Scrum Master, or senior leader.

I look forward to learning from your insights.

Is your team in a rut? Is your delivery just so-so? Are story points and velocity not helping your team improve? If you are stuck and you don’t know what to do or are interested in flow, come learn how you can use flow metrics to reboot your team and improve focus. The best part is you won’t need anyone’s permission to begin.

Companies all over the world have fallen into the Velocity Trap. This is when companies only measure how fast teams are completing tasks. They forget that those tasks need to be of value to their users, customers, and their business. In fact, research has shown that 80% of software products are rarely or never used. This talk looks at what makes organizations profitable. It uses concepts from Product Thinking and User Experience to explain how you can identify what efforts are worth investing in. It also shares which productivity metrics (also known as outputs) are proven through research to promote high performance and a few common metrics that have no such correlation. Join this talk to learn how to escape the Velocity Trap!

Have you ever sat in a meeting, even one you are facilitating, and helplessly watched as the conversation ping-pongs between two participants, getting hotter and hotter? Or been in a conversation where it feels someone cannot hear you and gets more and more annoyed with you, no matter how kindly and slowly you rephrase what you want to say?
Take heart. You are not the only one! Turns out, it’s not only what you say, it’s not merely how you say it, there is another lens to view our conversations through. There is an underlying structure to our conversations that provides us with a new bag of tricks to clean up our conversational act and bring about not only better communication, but high performance as well.
If this sounds intriguing, come join us!

The working genius model is a productivity model developed by Patrick Lencioni with the goal of accomplishing a simple concept: bringing more joy and fulfillment at work! When you and your team understand where your geniuses are and how to (and when not to) use them, it can improve meetings, reduce burnout, and dramatically reduce turbulence in getting projects done. In this session we will review the 6 types of working geniuses and how they bring projects from ideation to implementation. We will discover the hidden cause of burnout and how to keep meetings, including our agile ceremonies, more focused and more productive as a whole, all with the goal of improving your life and team culture, both in and outside of work. (that’s right… ALL projects!)

In the fast-paced world of software development, effective communication is a game-changer! It can make the difference between project success or failure, team cohesion or dysfunction, and client satisfaction or disappointment. Drawing from my own experiences in the IT industry, I have discovered proven methods that can immediately elevate communication skills for tech teams. This talk delves into techniques such as The Power of TED, Speed of Trust, and strategic word choices, all tailored to the unique challenges and demands of software development. By implementing these strategies, tech teams can unlock new levels of productivity, innovation, and collaboration. Join me on this transformative journey to harness the power of effective communication in the realm of software development and revolutionize the way your team communicates for improved outcomes.

As teams begin reviewing a User Story, they first need to understand what is being requested. Once they understand the ask, the next step is for the Developers & Testers to get together and ask-answer 2 important questions: How are we going to build it? And how are we going to test it? These two questions are much more complex than anyone thinks.

A well put-together Test Strategy can help guide the ENTIRE TEAM through these difficult questions. In this presentation Mr. Eakin will walk you through the 5 W’s of a good Test Strategy: What? Where? When? Who? And HoW? What tests are needed in your full tech stack? Where (which environments) will these tests be executed in? When will these tests be executed? Who will create, monitor and maintain the tests? After you have asked and answered the first 4 W’s, you are now ready to ask and answer the last: hoW (using which tools) will these tests be executed?

With a Test Strategy in hand, your team will be ready to overcome any obstacle thrown at you by the Product Owner. And do it in-Sprint.

Agile methodologies prioritize delivering value to customers above all. But where does profitability fit into the equation? This talk will explore how to effectively incorporate pricing and profitability considerations into your Agile processes. Learn solution, economic, and relationship sustainability and why it matters for blending customer value, market demands, and financial return to create a balanced, successful product strategy.

Join us for a whole-conference facilitated exercise as we discuss what we are learning, and what we want to take back to our organizations!

Observability can be about more than pretty dashboards, it can be a powerful tool for designing better code. A part of the modern developer’s stack. Just like tests, metrics and traces can be leveraged to challenge code assumptions and develop for real-world requirements in an evidence-based manner.

Developer observability can help us write better code, improve the dev process and roll out more scalable and mature system capabilities. This session will explore practical ways in which OpenTelemetry combined with open-source tools such as Jaeger, Prometheus, and others can be integrated into the modern development stack.

The talk is relevant to any Developer or DevOps practitioner seeking to understand how to use current observability technologies effectively.

Programming and other creative problem-solving efforts are said to be enhanced through collaboration. Find out why this is true by working on some simply poetry with others. You will be given all the tools you need to construct your masterpieces along with some simple guiding constraints each round to explore different ways people can work together.

Leadership isn’t limited to management. While the Senior Executive’s role seems obvious, the most junior Individual Contributer’s role is just as important. Unfortunately, leadership is an often overlooked skill few actively develop, leaving most leaders to lead from a disadvantaged position. To avoid this, you must learn leadership lessons before you think you need them.

In today’s presentation, I’ll share the leadership lessons I learned as a junior enlisted sailor in the US Navy. The military is famously known for its rigid discipline and command structure, but it is still easy to find leadership opportunities and they are common even at it’s most junior levels. I will package these lessons for you to carry back to your daily life.

I will walk you through how I’ve applied these same lessons to my career in Data Science and Software Development. I hope you will learn how to translate these into your software, QA, or support career as well.

Finally, I will touch on my experience as a Manager. I will share how I provide my team similar opportunities to those I have had and how I encourage them to Lead Where They Are.

By the time you leave, I hope you will be motivated and equipped to take ownership by Leading Where You Are.

Professionals in Technology often push themselves to a breaking point with the pace at which we work. Given the stress of the workplace in all times, but especially in the current state, it’s crucial to maintain a healthy mind as it’s our most important resource.

Let’s discuss ways we can begin to engage and talk more about mental wellness, learn strategies as leaders, and identify resources both for ourselves and our teams.

Do you and your team have their leadership priorities in the correct order?

Help your team build a pipeline of future leaders and gain insight into the strengths, weaknesses and blind spots of the
priorities that have a profound effect on the results you want to see.

A Deloitte study found that 86% of business leaders agree that success hinges on their rising leaders. However, only
13% of those business leaders have confidence in their rising leaders. It’s not that they don’t have confidence in the people. They lack the confidence in the system / structure that the organization has in place to develop those people.

It’s mission-critical, therefore, that individuals and teams do all they can to maximize strengths, build-up weaknesses, and identify blind-spots. It’s only when leaders invest in the right priorities, while keeping those priorities in the correct order, that true potential can be reached.

The Prioritized Leader is for modern leaders who are actively looking to solve the rising leadership challenges within a business.

Do you ever wish to scientifically coach your teams so that they can daily evolve their work-practices to cope with various challenges?

This hands-on workshop uses Kata Thinking Pattern as a way for teams to resolve various challenges. This while their manager acts as coach and facilitated by the Team-Storyboard.

Team-Storyboard is the basic construct of the Kata Thinking Pattern that the team owns. It incorporates data and facts about the team including its challenge, current practices, target practice, obstacles, and their experiments. Owning the Team-Storyboard coupled with daily coaching by the manager enables deliberate practice needed to form desired habits.

Deliberate practice of Scientific Thinking serves the forming of new desired work habits that can modify organizational culture towards agility. Specifically, when managers coach their teams daily on Scientific Thinking, teams will have tools to resolve ever changing challenges.

Many of us yearn to work with teams that have a high degree of autonomy and independence. But the reality that many of us face is that the teams we work with don’t have very much of either. They’re part of a larger organizational ecosystem. Work that enters this ecosystem between the portfolio and team — let’s call this the “mushy middle” — can be especially detrimental when it’s not managed.

This session targets those who live in the “mushy middle” — middle managers, team leaders, and those who want to influence them — so they get the right work done in the right order and get more value out of Agile. We’ll examine how work enters this layer, how it impacts teams and products, and give you practical strategies for recognizing the problems this work can cause. We’ll also show you how to adapt, prioritize and sequence mushy middle work, as well as how to ultimately get alignment around those priorities. We’ll even show you how to defend that alignment. Finally, we’ll cover the metrics that you can use to show that you’ve gotten a handle on work coming from the mushy middle.

We’ve been doing all the security things and yet we’re still repeating many of the same challenges, while going through the motions checking compliance boxes. Our organizations aren’t getting more secure and many of our tactics aren’t helping us learn anything new. Embracing a culture of collaboration can help us build modern capabilities in our technology teams through DevSecOps and Purple Team Exercises, while empowering our colleagues and companies.

In 2001,17 leaders in the software development industry came together to create the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Today, 30 fifteen year olds in Denver, Colorado are tackling their English homework according to the 4 values and 12 principles that they outlined. The agile movement started spontaneously at exactly the right moment, as the pace of change in the world was accelerating exponentially. But how did it go from software development to public high school? 

Chances are, if you’ve been in the industry for any amount of time, you’ve heard the word “Agile” thrown around a time or two. Perhaps you’ve been part of an “Agile Transformation” or you have attended a certification course for Scrum or Kanban. In the 20 years since the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was drafted, “Agile” has taken on a life of its own. But what is “Agile” really, and what does it mean for you? Is it story points and two week deadlines? Is it kumbaya and “soft skills”? In this talk, we’ll get into some real truths and real talk about what it means to be agile in today’s changing world.

As organizations strive to become more product/customer they find challenges in prioritizing the work their teams are working on. How do you ensure that your teams are delivering features customers want, ensuring you pay down technical debt, and ensuring that what you deliver is tied to your organizational goals? Traditional metrics like velocity and throughput are solid metrics for team performance but they do not actually measure if the team is meeting the needs their users.

This is where value comes in. Value can help organizations identify the features that customers want and can help organizations ensure they aligned with customer needs.

Two tough questions immediately become apparent: “What is Value?” and “How do I measure it?”. These questions are made more difficult because “Value” will be from organization to organization.

In this presentation we will identify how you can identify value for your organization and then walk you through how you can build a value framework to help your organization prioritize what is valuable to hem. We will also discuss other value frameworks that are out in the

•This presentation will discuss how to cope with conversing with those from diverse backgrounds with ease and accomplish your daily connections with co-workers who come from different backgrounds with a common comprehension goal.

•Necessities that make you distinct, skills that make you stand out. The diversities that make us rare and unique, if it’s your ethnic background, race, ethnic customs, religious beliefs, sex, sexuality, or form of individuality, may also cause contention.

•Discover how to bring out that which is already within you and communicate, work with diverse individuals, and strike up a great conversation with one another.

•Also, this presentation will also contribute to your attendees fostering a positive change and cultivating a more inviting place of work.

•This presentation will discuss the impacts of diversity collectively, identifying what variety can be combined with how it affects a business.

•The presentation will assist with explaining what it signifies to be an inclusive place of work and offer comprehensive measures to assess best to what degree one’s place of work fosters inclusion and diversity.

•The workshop, through role-playing scenarios, presents ways you can take to impact positive philosophies at your place of work.

•Individuals will take an increased perception of the implications of a tolerant, inclusive and diverse place of work.

•Individuals will take personal skills, which one will utilize to develop into promoters of social change, which will build a more diverse workplace.

It seems that everyone is aflutter with DevOps, the shiny new panacea for all of our software ailments. What technical goodness can DevOps bestow upon us? What riddles does it unlock for us as technologists? How do business goals align in order to wring the true value from DevOps?

Delivering value faster is a desire of many business and IT leaders, and it often looks like a win-lose proposition to achieve it. Metrics and edicts seem to have competing interests, like the car racer being told to “go faster” and “save fuel.” Glen and Allison will share their experiences with organizations and teams embracing DevOps and how it impacted both IT and business. We’ll explore the dynamics of goals and the conflict they can incite through an interactive game to further dive into what happens when DevOps is and isn’t in tandem with agile coaching.

Join us to look at what it means to align business and IT goals for creating a successful DevOps culture and how agile coaching fits in.

Let’s travel to the Forbidden Island to learn how teams work together. On this island, a team of 3-4 people will be working together to collect valuable artifacts and then try to escape while the island sinks beneath them. Egad!

Successful cross-functional teams will learn to work together. Less successful ones will sink beneath the waves. Success is harder than you think as a bit of time pressure gets mixed in. What will you demystify as you execute and debrief this mission?

As Alistair Cockburn has said, software development is a cooperative game. By using a simple game simulation with cross-functional roles, we can see how various team dynamics play out. After running through this simulation, we’ll discuss what went well and didn’t and ways to set teams up for more success. The Forbidden Island serves as a perfect petri dish to see what team dynamics grow.

Whether you are a team member or manager, you will get valuable insights from this session.

It’s impossible to follow a leader who isn’t moving forward. They wouldn’t be a leader; they would be a stander or an observer. So, if you aren’t personally growing and improving, why do you think anybody wants to follow YOU? Personal growth is one of the most critical characteristics of being a leader others desire to follow. So how can you develop a growth mindset? What areas should you focus on growing in? What habits can develop to help you continuously grow daily? In this session, we will focus on proven, effective, and actionable tactics, resources, and tools to elevate your leadership now.

Many leaders are trying to be the leader they were pre-pandemic.

My question to the audience is: How is your leadership style working for you? If you’re trying to be the same leader you were five, or even two years ago, it’s likely not resonating with your team. We are in the midst of the Great Resignation and your people aren’t leaving for money. The real reason why employees are leaving is that they no longer have hope or trust in their boss, team, position, or company.

When leaders can understand who they are and how to best communicate with their team, they will build trust, gain loyalty and be able to empower any team to achieve great things. Based on my years of research across many demographics, I’ve found huge insights that that will transform your audience’s assumptions.

I’ve been a software engineer for my entire career. I’ve worked in various industries building and extending software that ranges from digital communication, to financial software and most recently healthcare technology.

When I first took the leap into people management, my career changed drastically. This talk covers important lessons I’ve learned as a new engineering manager and how you can apply those same lessons to your day to day, regardless of your role.

To be a successful agile team, you need to determine the right set of metrics for your context. Everything from metrics that help you understand how users are engaging with your product to metrics that indicate the overall commercial health. In this presentation, I will share some ways teams can improve how they use metrics to make smart decisions and keep focused on the right things.

You have worked hard to get where you are – paid your dues, learned from your mentors, and done things the way they’ve always been done. Now you have an opportunity to build or influence a new organization! Will you let culture just happen, or will you respond by being deliberate about the culture you want to see?

This interactive session will discuss how a new or existing organization can build or refine its existing cultural values. Big picture topics include how to provide a vision and take charge of your group’s culture and strengthen that culture into the future; tangible topics include defining a group of desired cultural values, methods to align over time, and avoiding cultural pitfalls.

Let’s face it. We don’t communicate well, and we document even less.

Is it possible to wield information well in an Agile software team?

Yes, it is!

With consideration, change, and commitment to doing your work differently, it is possible to have relevant and vibrant knowledge resources in an Agile environment.

Instead of being told, “You’re doing it wrong,” teams can move to a new model that builds on empathy and excellence.

Better on-boarding means more confident teammates, a more inclusive workflow, and a focus on continuous improvement.

No matter what methodology you use, you’ll gain practical techniques to improve your team’s handling of know-how and achieve better collaboration.

Some applications need to live for the foreseeable future, but within the world of technology, every choice is a gamble, unknowing whether or the application or tool you chose is going to last the long term or fall short. Utilizing the right technology promotes not only business growth and delivery, but also creates a good culture by providing something people want to work with, and in turn provides better and faster delivery!

The external world has seen significant changes in Abercrombie over the last few years in terms of diversity and growth, but that change is also reflected internally, trying to stay on top of internal culture and promote a workplace with up-to-date technologies, and that does lead to some significant challenges. It’s time to accomplish the ultimate tech debt: retire 20-year-old technology running the e-commerce website and use something people want to use instead. But how do we make this shift without cutting back on incoming features? How do we plan around migrating pages that fundamentally have more features than any one person, or document, knows exist? This is a story of our project from inception of measurements and their goals to pieces which are done, and future implementations all done incrementally, without going dark from the business initiatives. This review will go over the highlights of the problems and solutions found throughout the project, areas of culture improvements such as team autonomy and team accountability, and what we are all looking forward to in the future.

This presentation describes a disciplined, agile-centric approach to aid product owners, agile project managers, and scrum masters in how to receive, track, de-compose, and prioritize business ideas that deliver value to the organization.

Agility requires much more than team based iterative practices. Focusing on delivered value and using data to understand and address challenges and opportunities is at the core of what business agility is all about. Observability with an alignment of values and common desired outcomes at the organizational level elevates agility from our technology streams to realizing our shared outcomes together.

This is for the ones hungry for food AND knowledge!

Have you heard the term digital product and wondered what it really means? Take a moment while we talk through what we define as a digital product with easy and fun comparisons (like a box of Lucky Charms!)

During this brief talk we will also talk about our current digital products that exist within the Nationwide Partner Portal (partner.nationwide.com) and as well how we manage our digital and public facing API products out on our API content library.

Let’s go “Back to the Basics.”. This has been a repeated phrase since 2021 at Nationwide Technology. It is referencing a large initiative focused on teams improving their practice of Agile Principals. When Covid-19 caused a world wide Pandemic, the result was that all Nationwide employees had to shift to remote working. The pandemic has cause many changes. It has allowed for greater flexibility in work schedules and increased team virtual collaboration. It has also allowed teams to forget Agile principals and their value as remote working resulted in new daily norms. For example, “A Stand Up is 15 minutes”. You should physically stand up to remind yourself that this is a very brief meeting; Virtually dialing in to the call, people are able to sit down and easily forget that the concept is focused on ‘QUICK” updates. This can cause the very popular Agile meeting to lose it’s value. In this session, I will cover how I have helped one of my new Agile Lines focus on getting back to the basics. Some of the coaching was “big bang” style, while others involved making incremental changes each sprint. The overall objective: Educate and Coach the team to leverage Agile Practices without impacting delivery.

Have you introduced your teams to the Agile Manifesto, Scrum Framework, and other generally accepted Agile practices, and yet they still struggle to release thousands of times a day like Amazon, Google, or Netflix? That’s because there’s more to Agile than timeboxes, events, and burndown charts. In this talk, we’ll cover how the tenets of Agile Software Development are meant to be demonstrated through development practices, tools, and philosophies.

Where is the role of the Manager in Scrum? The Scrum Guide does not address this role and it can lead to confusion when organizations undertake an agile transformation. It can be difficult for traditional managers to become Agile Leaders if their organization is still running on the old, top-down, directive model. It is exceedingly difficult for team members to adopt an agile mindset if their managers don’t understand and support the shift in paradigm. Come hear the experience of these Agile Leaders and how they are navigating the changing role of Manager in an Agile Organization.

Notes and comments

Panelists:
• Bill Gubser, Manager Delivery Practices and Methods, NiSource
• Dan Kohler, Technology Manager, AEP
• Kuya Manchanja, Strategic Initiatives Project Manager, CAS
• Angel Henry, Senior Director Value Management Office, Genesys

• Hunger for wisdom
• Expect the best
• Accept responsibility
• Respond with courage
• Think of others first

Lean-Agile thought leader in transformation space. Leader in technology and business operations. Relentless problem solver and veracious study in technology and business practices. 15 years of management and technology solutions experience across a broad spectrum of technologies and operational environments. Experience in the Military as both a soldier and a government employee.

When the people of an organization embark on their quest for increased agility, they are essentially begin working on the opposite side of a paradox that has been ignored. Often times, though as they take their journey, they begin experiencing the downside of now ignoring the the traditional, control-based approach and there is an outcry to revert. A dilemma is created.

What are these paradoxes? Well, the first four you encounter are described in the Agile Manifesto’s values. If one could have both sides of the “over” statements easily, we’d take them. Successfully maximizing the appropriate upsides of each side of these values while minimizing the downsides becomes a swinging pendulum to manage. This becomes key to leading others in your organization. If you are a manager, team leader, or executive trying help your organization get traction, then this session will provide some new insights into how to balance change with stability.

These four values are just the start of the paradoxes that will emerge as you take your journey. This workshop will help you use a technique called Polarity Management to help manage the upsides and downsides of this balancing act so that you can lead people effectively. Once out in the open, dilemmas created with a swing one way or another become easier to handle and perhaps can even be avoided.

Only you can ensure that you are on great teams. And you can do it anytime, anywhere, with any group of people. And that means you can do it all the time. First, you must be willing to take responsibility for making it happen. Then you must know what to do. In this session, I’ll show you how to take responsibility for always being on great teams, and what’s required to build any team, any time, no matter your role in the group.

Agile practices are having an impact in many unexpected fields, from DevOps to marketing.

One such impacted field is business continuity (BC).

Traditional BC practices are built on the traditional, waterfall project management approach — such practices have proven inefficient and ineffective.
Learn how a new approach, Adaptive BC, incorporates lessons from Agile and Lean to better protect our organizations, IT, and communities. See how Adaptive BC hopes to align with Dr. Kerzner’s predictions for the future of PM and the future of business itself in an Agile Age.

Have you ever wondered how Agile could make a considerable difference in a 25K employee technology organization? – A question we continued to grapple knowing how well the levers of a large organization work towards maintaining the status quo. At JPMorgan Chase, we faced that exact challenge in 2014. Our leadership team recognized the benefits of adopting ‘Agile’ in our organization and our journey evolved from Scrum to Spotify to spotLess (Spotify + LeSS + JPMChase business-specific process ). We have grown as an organization taking more evolutionary approaches that have led us to become an engineering product-centric organization. In 2014 Craig Larman shared our case study at Infoq (https://www.infoq.com/articles/large-scale-scrum-jomorgan).

At JPMorgan Chase’s Consumer Community Banking division, everything we do is for the Community, By the Community, unto the Community. With Digital awareness within communities, the customer has been at the center of the transformation journey. It is increasingly evident that consumers expect the monolithic banking industry to deliver product and services that provide rich consumer experience at all touch points. We will time travel together to 2014 and would start our journey from the past. At each milestone, we will discuss what we did and the outcome of it.

I will focus on Technology aspect of this transformation along with the learning in People and Process arena. I will share how to do the initial skill gap analysis by using T-Shape skill assessment tool. Also things other than process tool, which made us successful in our journey? I learned that processes can’t compensate for the lack of relationship. Our goal is to share our learning to ensure stronger growth together as one community.

Customers are not paying for your product, they are hiring your product and are paying for positive outcomes and impacts. Agile was marketed with promise of faster value delivery to customer but as it went mainstream many organizations focused only on mastering different elements of agile frameworks and progress is being measured by vanity metrics such as velocity and burndown charts leaving customer success sideways. Organizations and teams must realize that while ‘speed to launch’ is crucial ‘speed to learning’ is even more important as they deliver features and products. How we respond to these learning’s can drive a radical change in focus from ‘Velocity of Story Point’ delivered to ‘Velocity of Learning’gained and answering the fundamental question of ‘Is our Customer Winning?’. To accomplish this mindset shift, agile teams need to learn to move their focus from mastering the art of writing perfect user stories to connecting their teams with the users of their products and the ‘problems & challenges their customers are trying to solve’. Taking teams to the next level of making the customer successful through continuous delivery of valuable product requires an alignment between the product managers, analysts, engineering team and their customers. It requires the product managers and analyst to understand the difference between product success and customer success.

Over the last decade organizations have been adopting agile at an ever increasing rate. These transformations usually involve bringing a bunch of consultants in and sending a bunch of people to training and typically focus on either agile principles or technical practices.

Unfortunately many of these agile transformations fail because they don’t take a holistic look at the entire process of delivering and monitoring software. These transformations also tend to miss the critical role that product thinking has in an agile transformation.

In this presentation we will look at the relationships between business agility/agile values, product (design) thinking, and technical practices (DevOps) and discuss why you need to incorporate all three into your agile transformation. It will cover what happens if you only adopt one or two of these mentalities and walk you through how you can begin to incorporate these ideas into your organization.

An activity-based session that experimentally simulates Agile transformation guided by universal values.

We will use Kata Thinking to experimentally implement change through redefining how managers collaborate with their people. This activity utilizes a published Agile transformation case-study and rely on commonly used Agile practices. Based on that, participants would simulate the organizational relentless journey towards business agility using Kata Thinking.

This session can be relevant to you, if you are interested in Experimentation, Lean Management, and how to sustain Agile Transformation.

With minimum lecturing and focusing on doing, you would experience the empirical mindset as a main coaching approach for Agile transformation.

Humans are horrible at estimation, and senior level resources are estimating with 10 year old stale experience. Using Organizational Development Theory’s Action Research process, we were able to quantify estimation issues that were a direct link to a waterfall annual planning process. Estimates ranged from 300%-1000% inaccurate which was devastating to our ability to commit appropriate feature roadmaps to our clients. Through this learning we developed a three phased action plan to introduce better planning process from idea to value to our customers.

Phase 1: Vertical Decomposition
Phase 2: PI Planning at a Global Scale
Phase 3: Organization Construct

Participants will learn how to identify organizational planning and construct issues, as well as how to implement PI Planning at an Enterprise level. Participants will also walk away with the knowledge of how to construct a product focused weak matrix organizational construct, which will enable their organization to maximize product delivery while enabling frameworks, standards and practices across all product groups.

Destroy the Death Star Using Agile!
(or tricks for quicker successful agile adoption)

Agile methodology is the new norm. Many organizations have already committed to the journey of full adoption and transformation, and many more are embarking on that journey. Regardless of where you are on your journey, this fun session will explore proven techniques to drive your agile transformation – delivered with a dash of humor!

One of the principles inherent to all agile frameworks is a focus on pervasive improvement. However, that implies change, and that is never as simple as it might first appear – true change is hard! Also, improvement techniques have a rich history that extend back far beyond the birth of the agile movement (hence the relatively recent resurgence of interest in Lean Thinking). So, our focus needs to be on identifying and choosing the best options for improvement, understanding and embracing limitations on the appetite for change, and making smart decisions on when/what to change. Whether you are just starting out, or a mature Agile organization, you can improve your adoption more rapidly by applying some simple proven strategies.

You have worked hard to get where you are, paid your dues, learned from your mentors, and done things the way they’ve always been done. Now your company has adopted Agile! A different mindset takes hold, and you feel lost. Your job clarity is gone; day-to-day activities are confusing; and management oversight gets lost with cross-functional teams. What now?

This interactive session will discuss how a traditional manager can adapt to be part an Agile organization. Big picture topics include how the role adds value to the staff and the organization, including how to provide vision and take charge of your group’s culture; tangible topics include introspection about leadership style and adapting everyday manager job responsibilities to an Agile mindset. Finally, we will hash out real life ideas and suggestions for how to handle every day management challenges.

Our Agile Community members asked for it. We delivered. It was awesome.

As our Agile Community of Practice got underway we started to hear a common request: “We want an Agile 101 class”. This request was successfully fulfilled by the Agility Center of Excellence. Notably, we didn’t outsource the teaching. Instead, we created and implemented our own “Understanding and Embracing Agile @ CAS” workshop consisting of several of our own unique lessons.

When planning and implementing the pilot for our Agile training workshop we desired a wide diversity of participants. We knew our students would be colleagues from all over the Technology division. This meant vastly different age groups, different levels of professional experience, and most importantly, different levels of Agility. We decided our workshop would not be a typical 101 basics class, it would be a workshop where our lessons were applicable and valuable to anyone, no matter what their Agile experience level.

During this workshop we will engage you with some of the activities we delivered for our fellow Agile Community members. Test your understanding of the 12 Agile principles by applying real-life scenarios to them, all while competing against other teams to win the Agile Quiz Bowl. Challenge common misconceptions of Agile with other group members and earn some “cents” in our Agile Fact vs. Fiction game. Intrigue your teams and get them really thinking with some refreshing, creative ways to understand and embrace Agile!

It seems that everyone is aflutter with DevOps, the shiny new panacea for all of our software ailments. What technical goodness can DevOps bestow upon us? What riddles does it unlock for us as technologists? How do business goals align in order to wring the true value from DevOps?

Delivering value faster is a desire of many business and IT leaders, and it often looks like a win-lose proposition to achieve it. Metrics and edicts seem to have competing interests, like the car racer being told to “go faster” and “save fuel.” Barry and Allison will share their experiences with organizations and teams embracing DevOps and how it impacted both IT and business. We’ll explore the dynamics of goals and the conflict they can incite through an interactive game to further dive into what happens when DevOps is and isn’t in tandem with agile coaching.

Join us to look at what it means to align business and IT goals for creating a successful DevOps culture and how agile coaching fits in.

Are you salivating over the potential of microservices, DevOps and cloud for your organization but struggling to get the business to take the leap? You’d love to fire up development teams to replace all your custom applications with code that is loosely-coupled, stateless and has 10 other essential factors. But no one has the appetite to pay for a multiyear rip-and-replace to move your current apps to another new technology stack. It’s become increasingly clear that you need to work a miracle – continuously delivering new functionality for the business while totally reworking your systems – if you ever hope to modernize your architecture, processes and platforms.

Sounds hopeless … unless you use your experience with Agile delivery to guide how you think about application modernization. Taking the example of migrating custom applications to the cloud, Kevin Fox, ICC’s Director of Enterprise Architecture, lays out practical strategies for modernizing an application portfolio without the excruciating pain of a big-bang move. Based on industry-proven implementation patterns, these strategies make it realistic for IT departments to continuously adopt the latest and greatest technology approaches while still delivering value to the business.

**Warning** – You may need safety glasses… there will be kicks, punches, boards breaking and splinters flying… with a grand finale you may never forget!!

The Scrum framework is meaningless without the Scrum values. The five values; focus, openness, courage, commitment, and respect are at the core of Scrum. These values are extremely important yet challenging for individuals and teams to embrace and live by day to day while on their agile journey. Everyone knows what these words mean, but without gaining a deeper understanding it will be difficult to truly see the value they bring to individuals, teams, and organizations.

In this session, we will talk through each of the five Scrum values while tying into examples from the TaeKwonDo martial art. By understanding the Scrum values through a martial arts lens, you will be able to explain why these values are so important and what you and your teams can accomplish by living these values!

Software development is the single most difficult undertaking we attempt. The work itself is non-compressible, brain intensive and prone to errors of understanding and construction. The problems we work on get larger and ever more complex.

In the past 35 years we’ve moved from monolithic programs to microservices. Our languages have shifted from procedural to functional programming languages. And the number of languages in play continues to grow. My cell phone has more memory than the 14 PdPs and 5 VAXes my first client used to control 100 acres of manufacturing plant.

Teams, organization structure impact our daily work. This creates differing goals, conflicting agendas and diverging activities.

What’s a developer to do so they don’t fall behind and become dinosaurs?

Come to this session and find at least one way to stay current with change and remain competent in the never ending technology and organizational shifts.

Technology—at least in theory—is improving our productivity, efficiency, and communication. Yet the average mobile user checks their phones more than 150 times per day, and 67% of cell owners find themselves checking their phone even when they don’t notice their phone ringing or vibrating. Mindful attention is a scarce resource. As one of the world’s leading experts on the connection between happiness and technology, Amy Blankson unveils five strategies that successful individuals use to find a sense of balance between technology, productivity, and wellbeing in the Digital Age. In this talk, you will learn how to move from partial attention to full intention, how to hack your distractions to achieve maximum productivity and life satisfaction, and how to rid yourself of the tech graveyard in your office drawers to create more mental and physical space to do the things you love. By rethinking when, where, why and how we use technology, we can begin to recapture our focus, deepen engagement, and find flow in our everyday activities and relationships.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

– Discover the impact of distraction on your productivity and happiness
– Establish positive technology boundaries to shift from a mindset of inattention to one of full intention
– Learn healthy habits for tech use to maximize flow and engagement
– Understand how your technology use impacts your perception as a leader
– Increase your flow and engagement by using brain-training techniques

The Problem
Published research on software project failures* reveals a short and familiar list of the common problems that can hamper or destroy your project, including underestimation of complexity, cost and/or schedule, lack of communications, cultural and engagement issues, lack of risk management and poor quality, buggy software.

Do any of these classic mistakes sound familiar? Have you or your organization been let down by agile, Scrum, Lean, DevOps, SAFe, or other expensive “big digital transformation” approaches? Are you still facing challenges delivering value in a timely manner? Are you keeping up, but need to grow to the next level?

Would you like to learn how to take control and grow your organization’s capabilities to succeed in a volatile world? The GROWS Method™ will show you how.

* (published by the International Project Leadership Academy)

The Real Fix
There’s more to modern software development and digital transformation than you think. Scrum, Lean, DevOps and agile approaches are each only one small part of the picture. To be successful in the new economy, you need more. You need to fill in the missing pieces. You need the GROWS Method™.

The GROWS Method™ helps you and your teams grow skills that will enable your organization to better adapt to today’s constantly changing needs. The current approaches we recommend are based on four underlying seeds, or central ideas:

Loops not Lines which helps teams effectively manage the complexities of the real world—going well beyond simple and inaccurate cause-and-effect thinking.

Actuals not Proxies to help quantify and use realistic data and stop relying on oversimplified proxies that can’t produce needed results.

Organic not Robotic to take advantage of your team and organization’s unique composition and interactions, and stop suffering from a misguided “one size fits all” approach.

Intentional not Accidental to help teams move beyond following a script or random, competing interests to becoming more deeply engaged in the work and experiment to discover solutions that will work for you.

While these abstract seeds are easy to understand, their application is far reaching. To help teams internalize these concepts, our workshop features experiential activities and group debriefs.

You’ll learn to explain and apply topics including fast-feedback experiments, Tracer Bullet Development, organizational learning practices, and more.

In a joint research study, Scrum.org and McKinsey & Company studied the personality traits and work values in 2 crucial roles for agile teams: The Product Owner and the Team Member. Our findings suggest that the ability to handle ambiguity and agreeableness are most important among personality traits, whereas pride in product outcomes and self-direction are most important among work values.

This research was conducted because, in today’s ever-changing world, many organizations are making the effort to become more agile. Whereas traditional organizations seem mechanical and hierarchical, agile organizations balance stability with dynamism and can adapt for an ever-changing, unpredictable future. Based on these distinctions, Scrum.org and McKinsey predicted that the characteristics of types of people that lead to success in an agile team would differ from those in traditional work settings, and wanted to understand how information about how people become successful can help. Understanding how to select and hire for this dynamic, agile future is critical to the team and organization’s future.

In this talk, Dave West, CEO and Product Owner, Scrum.org will look at the learnings from this study in terms of hiring, selecting and coaching people for agility, and the best characteristics you should be looking for. Dave will provide practical interview questions to support the interview process and good practices for developing agile teams.

Is your organization moving to business outcomes delivery model? If so, Impact mapping fits right in with delivering work better, faster and cheaper. Impact mapping is an industry standard strategic planning technique and will empower teams to get to deliver value over just delivering solutions that may or may not delivery business value. Impact maps help teams do their best work by clearly communicating assumptions, aligning their activities with overall business outcome, using a series of team determined metrics and milestones to gauge progress, and improving product roadmaps. Once the business outcome is understood, impact mapping helps realize that outcome in the most efficient and cost-effective way. This presentation will share the what is impact mapping and instruct professionals how to put this technique into practice.

The agile principle working software over comprehensive documentation has sometimes been interpreted to mean that written documentation is not needed or important in software development. I would argue that this principle simply means that documentation is not an end in and of itself – it plays a supporting role in the higher objective of developing and supporting software.

Why is documentation needed then, when is it appropriate, and how much documentation is “too much”?

In this session, I will make a case that Agile invites us to craft a practicable balance between comprehensiveness and minimalism that meets the need of a given audience and supports rather than minimizes other forms of communication. With some tact and planning, agile practitioners can apply simple but effective strategies to gain maximal value from minimal documentation.

This session will cover:
• Determining what is and is not value-added to document
• Strategies for writing effective minimalistic documentation
• The role of code as documentation

Offshoring development and testing work has become part of many companies standard operating practices. For good reasons: lower costs, increased headcount, lower costs and potential 24-hour development cycles. But implementing an offshore model is difficult and can put many of these benefits at risk. Are your costs really lower when your Managers are spending all of their time reviewing the code or test cases? Can 1 offshore tester really equal the workload of 1 FTE? Is there truly a 24-hour development cycle? And do you even want 24-hour development if it means your development team is in two locations? In this presentation we will address these and many more questions through a series of “best practices” developed over years of working with offshore teams.

There’s no time for that. Really, there isn’t time for proper story definition, that backlog grooming session, that prioritization exercise…said no agile team ever. However, we do often hear this message from others in our environment. With tight timelines, aggressive goals, and full calendars, how do agile teams break through time and stakeholder constraints in order to make progress on the important work they do?

In this session, we will discuss the value of time investment toward success. You will be armed with information that you can take back to your leaders, product owner or team to demonstrate effective time management, wrangle calendars, and ultimately deliver value. While today’s calendar may have won the battle, after this session, you will know how to win the war.

How do you coach a team from showing progress every two weeks to delivering multiple times a day? Research has shown that by utilizing the right kind of metrics can promote a generative culture – creating a space where people want to continuously improve and innovate. Allison and Qarina will blend their stories with an interactive workshop where you will leave with practices that you can implement with your teams the next day. Regardless of your job title, learn how to ally with 4 key delivery metrics to inspire new thinking and practices from your teams.

Let’s travel to the Forbidden Island to learn how teams work together. On this island, a team of 3-4 people will be working together to collect valuable artifacts and then try to escape while the island sinks beneath them. Egad!

Successful cross-functional teams will learn to work together. Less successful ones will sink beneath the waves. Success is harder than you think as a bit of time pressure gets mixed in. What will you demystify as you execute and debrief this mission?

As Alistair Cockburn has said, software development is a cooperative game. By using a simple game simulation with cross-functional roles, we can see how various team dynamics play out. After running through this simulation, we’ll discuss what went well and didn’t and ways to set teams up for more success. The Forbidden Island serves as a perfect petri dish to see what team dynamics grow.

Whether you are a team member or manager, you will get valuable insights from this session.

With SCRUM’s Ken Schwaber, Michael was the first keynote for the Inaugural
Year 1 of the Path to Agility Conference. He was among the first to
recognize the time-to-market and quality promises of Agile expressed by Kent
Beck the creator of xP, when research data began rolling into a global
database maintained by his firm, QSM Associates.

Since then, he has lectured around the world on patterns and the market
disruption potential being revealed by Agile during these times of
dramatically accelerating change. Join this talk for a 10-year recap of
scaling Agile from its inceptions, and discussions on what the future
brings.

1) Agile Productivity and Defect Patterns from the COHAA Path Year 1
Keynote.
2) The Columbus Agile Study results recap; Silicon Valley of the Midwest
3) Scaling Agile across Enterprises – what is it about SAFe
4) The Future – Disrupting Markets – Bringing Agile’s Brain to the Business
Side and Optimizing Outcomes

The competitive advantage of an enterprise in business today is their ability to sense, adapt and quickly respond to changes in a fragile ecosystems of partners, competitors and consumers. How do we create exceptional business value and customer satisfaction through continuous strategy formulation and execution through tight feedback loops?

How do we make smart investment choices by decoupling budgeting and forecasting from annual goals settings? It requires adaptive mindset and management innovation, loosely coined as adaptive management.

What are new roles needed to apply the adaptive management practices to realize business agility in this disruptive marketplace?

The talk will introduce adaptive management and its components. The need for epic stewards to be accountable for driving the success of epics (or initiatives) working closely with budgetary stewards applying dynamic budgeting and forecasting.

To be successful in disruptive marketplace, requires adaptive management leadership to create exceptional business value and customer satisfaction through continuous strategy formulation and execution.

Why do you get up every morning and go to work? Do you do it just to earn a living or to make ends meet? No, we want more than that. We want to make a difference, change the world, be a part of something bigger than ourselves. Can this kind of environment be cultivated? What does scientific research tell us about what motivates people? Is it possible to tap into new levels of employee engagement, innovation, and productivity? These questions and answers make up the Art and Science of Team Motivation.

Where do you stand when it comes to the topic of trust? Do you just walk in a room and trust everyone? Or, are you a healthy skeptic and people must earn your trust? Are you concerned that they don’t trust you?

We talk about trust a lot with regards to adopting agile principles and practices. We talk about having courage, taking risks, and learning from failure. This is really easy to say, and hard to do in some environments — trust may be damaged or doesn’t exist at all. It’s not too out of the ordinary that we see trust rifts develop between teams. Or, between management and team members.

If you want to learn about the science of trust, please come to this session. If you are ready to get serious about addressing the impact of trust on your team, please come to this session. If you want to learn a well-established approach to improve trust, please come to this session.

Many different styles and frameworks of Agile Software Development have been developed since The Agile Manifesto was written. A prevailing goal across the alternatives is to promote peace of mind for customers, users, and the development team. Unfortunately, it is all too common for Agile teams to experience turbulence rather than tranquility.

In this thought-provoking presentation, seven guiding principles that promote peace of mind will be presented. These principles provide a framework for discovering new processes and practices that will improve team productivity, communication, and performance. The goal for practitioners is to find, identify, and implement practices that work in their environment and make people awesome.

Is your experience with Agile practices more characterized by tranquility or turbulence? Regardless, these seven principles will guide you to greater peace of mind.

How can I easily show and sell the Value of Agile at Scale and Business Agility to my organization?

You have a lot going on in your organization. Always seems like there is more work that capacity. Many times, teams are not in sync, and work/solutions cause unforeseen impacts. In addition, there are always great new ideas, new requests coming in from customers, and business and technology teams. How can you understand it all? How can you and your teams quickly see, understand, come to an agreement on, and invest in / support work from a holistic picture? And, how can you see and plan for the unknowns, that you know are coming?

Come see how a few fun, interactive games, and a very large Planning Board “Wall” can easily show and sell the value of Lean and Agile to your organization!

Do you think kanban is just for complicated spaces like manufacturing and not complex spaces like software development? Do you think Scrum and Kanban are incompatible? Come learn about the principles, practices, and metrics of the Kanban Method and how to integrate them into the Scrum framework. Come hear the real world experience of a team implementing Scrum with Kanban warts and all. The target audience for this presentation is Scrum Masters, team members, leadership, Product Owners, and those interested in learning more about kanban.

It may seem paradoxical that something small leads to something big. Yet this is the case. Big changes can feel like an existential threat and cause major disruption. Tiny changes, working obliquely, evolving towards a more desirable pattern may lack drama, but get you where you need to go.  So how does this work? The same way agile does, iteratively, incrementally, with learning as you go. I’ll share some small ideas that will add up to a big change in how you go about changing your organization.

Why did your transformation fail? The often overlooked or underestimated aspect of an Agile transformation, incentives. The goal of transformation is to change behaviors. Without understanding the incentives in place and how they are driving behaviors, it’s difficult if not impossible to truly transform! Many organizations have incentives in place that they don’t even identify as incentives. For example, roles that carry prestige incentivize people to aspire to the role for the prestige alone. What types of people will end up filling that role? What behaviors are rewarded to get there? Role-based yearly competency assessments are another incentive that drives behavior. What behaviors will you exhibit if your new role is “Scrum Master” but your yearly assessment is based on the role description of Systems Business Analyst? We have all seen Dan Pink’s talk about motivating knowledge workers. When we discuss incentives, we are usually talking about extrinsic motivators that are in place. Harvard Business Review published an article titled, “Why Incentive Plans Cannot Work” and specifically talks about how extrinsic incentives only create a temporary behavior change. So the real question is, how can we change our incentives from extrinsic to intrinsic and align them at all levels of the transformation?

As leaders, we need to be aware of this factor and begin uncovering and tackling it early. Misaligned incentives or incentives driving behavior away from agility often show themselves as other symptoms. Questions we should be asking:

• What incentives are in place at each level? (Teams, managers, senior leaders, etc.)
• What roles does HR have in place for assessing people’s competency?
• How are our incentive structures enabling or inhibiting our agility?
• How can we align incentives at all levels?
• Which incentives should we drive toward if we want the transformation to sustain?

Learn some new methods to invigorate your team when velocity lags and morale dips. Let’s look for ways to help the team rebound We will investigate team collaboration, team dynamics, team motivators and how to gain momentum. Let’s try some new ways to get our team to soar!

Every agile transformation hits roadblocks. Some of these are technical but most of them are people related. Resisters not only slow your transformation down but they can negatively impact other members of your team.

People fight agile transformations for a variety of reasons and in this session I will discuss ways of getting through most of the common issues. From “Too many meetings” to the change in mindset from “Me” to “Us” we discuss how to get through to get to the root of why they are resisting and how to get them aligned with your vision.

Are you tired of executing the same tasks repeatedly? Good news, you don’t have to! Now, with software automation testing you can boost productivity, improve product quality, and reduce cost. This presentation will discuss the importance of software automation, and strategies for building and maintaining an automation test suite for your application. In addition, the speaker will share various best techniques that can be applied when you work on automation.

Metrics give us data. And data can give us knowledge. Knowledge is power. Therefore great metrics can give us great power. But with great power comes great responsibility. When metrics fall into the wrong hands, they can be weaponized to destroy projects and teams. But wielded responsibly, they can improve the well-being of our product, process, and people, while shielding them from the tyranny of mismanagement. This talk will show how to recognize and avoid the use of metrics that do more harm than good, as well as how to utilize both common and innovative metrics safely and effectively.

If you ask developers where they go when they want to get a lot of work done, few of them will say “the office”. Over the last few months, our team has transitioned from working in the office full time to becoming a remote working team. I’ll talk about why we decided to go remote, how we got there, and what we’ve learned along the way. We are loving the freedom, flexibility, and productivity we’ve found, and you might just find that it can work for your team too.

In an environment where innovation and entrepreneurship are key objectives and Just In Time Design and Minimum Viable Product are commonly-accepted practices, is the role of architect still meaningful? If so, what can architects do to promote, rather than impede, Lean and Agile practices within an organization? And above all, how can architects help an organization to keep up with the bewildering pace of technology change.

Kevin Fox, ICC’s Enterprise Architecture Practice Lead, applies his real-world experience supporting Agile development teams and organizational technology adoption to examine the characteristics of meaningful architecture in the context of Agile transformation.

‘What does a Scrum Master do all day if they just have to facilitate a 15-minute Daily Standup?’ How often have you heard that question? As someone who is a full-time Scrum Master, I’d like to invite you in to ‘A Day in the Life of a Scrum Master,’ where we’ll explore just how much more there is to this role than facilitation of the Daily Standup and other sprint events.

I’ll show off an example of a Scrum Master checklist, before delving in to the following topics: building a strong relationship with the Product Owner, ensuring that teams are maturing each sprint (and not just getting more done), growing Agile engineering practices inside and outside the team, and participating in the advancement of an Agile mindset across the organization. Attendees will hear real life examples from my own experiences with teams at Hyland. We’ll close the session with an interactive exercise that will allow everyone to work together with the four sections of the Scrum Master checklist to crowd-source some ideas on how to begin expanding their own role as a Scrum Master.

What you have heard about Kanban is probably wrong! There is a great deal of misinformation about the Kanban management method with the Agile community. Some myths include that Kanban is an alternative methodology to Scrum, that Kanban has no controls or metrics, and that Kanban can only work in short-cycle, rapid deployment settings such as run environments. All these are completely false. Come here how Kanban can make Scrum work better and how it can be used within and outside IT settings to improve the flow of work and reinforce a culture of continuous improvement with STATIK (Systems Thinking Approach to Introducing Kanban).

A recent study found that global enterprises are keenly aware of the critical importance of agile and continuous delivery to succeed in today’s app economy.  Some 81% agree that the two practices are critical to successful digital transformation.  Adding continuous delivery practices to an agile working environment improves new business growth by 63% more than using agile alone, and improves operational efficiency by 41% more.  In this talk we will discuss the many benefits of implementing the best practices around agile and continuous delivery, the roles that will benefit from a combined approach, the technology you should implement to achieve maximum benefit from an agile and continuous delivery approach and CA services available to help you achieve success.

Dozens of books address the mechanics and theory behind Scrum. And they’re great. But they offer little guidance to those who work on Scrum teams and are neck-deep in organizational dysfunction—and have no idea what to do next. This is when a team is most vulnerable and likely to slip back into old practices—including bad Scrum. Ryan Ripley helps break this cycle by taking you through the common anti-patterns that emerge when theoretical Scrum is implemented in complex organizations. Ryan explores why these anti-patterns emerge, and what we can do to “inspect and adapt” our way back to a healthy Scrum practice. At the center of these tips, ideas, and experiments are the lesser considered Scrum values—commitment, focus, openness, respect, and courage. Repairing bad Scrum implementations starts with embracing the values that bind the roles, events, and artifacts of Scrum together. Learn how to leverage the Scrum values to take your Scrum team to the next level.

Simply, “commute” is “moving people” (sometimes, with cars) and “communication” is “conveying ideas” (sometimes, with words). Put them together and get “commutication” – moving ideas with words.

Jean Baptiste Girard said, “By words we learn thoughts, and by thoughts we learn life.’ But, how are thoughts shared? How are concepts conveyed? One way is by using words. But, which words should you use? And how can you tell if your words effectively convey your thoughts? What causes miscommunication, what are its effects, and how can you avoid it? And what are the benefits and limitations of a shared language?

In this workshop, we will move from general to specific as we collaboratively attempt to understand and answer these questions. Starting with the definition of definition, we will investigate words and meaning, their properties, and their relationship. We will examine how miscommunication can occur, look at some potential consequences of it, and explore a few methods to minimize it. Finally, we will apply these ideas as we attempt to define some common terms and create a ‘shared language’. In the end, attendees will gain new knowledge and tools to help them more effectively move ideas with words.

NEVER would I EVER do what? What do you believe you would NEVER do in the world of agile? What do you think must ALWAYS be done? Words like NEVER, ALWAYS, MUST, and SHOULD mark the border of our beliefs and biases. As agile coaches and mentors, our professional beliefs and biases may collide with others, and sometimes we don’t even realize what’s happening until it’s too late. We can’t help our clients get beyond the limits of their beliefs and biases unless we’re aware of our own.

Let’s challenge our personal collections of agile never’s, always, musts and should’s. In other words – join us for an interactive session where we will play with our our agile non-negotiables. Using a new agile game adapted from the popular game “Never Would I Ever” – we will tap into the diversity of experience and beliefs of Agile2018 participants to examine circumstances where a NEVER might become an experiment in MAYBE. Along the way, we’ll examine the “why” behind our own deeply held agile beliefs and practice the art of humble inquiry (the gentle art of asking) to better understand the perspective of others.

Never would you ever want to miss this session!

Ours teams are dysfunctional. And guess what, it’s our fault! People are messy. We have family issues, health problems, bad days, professional weaknesses, and personality flaws. Put us together with all of our imperfections and it’s amazing than anything gets done. This doesn’t mean we should let certain dysfunctional behaviors and practices go unaddressed. In fact, courageously confronting dysfunction is absolutely critical to team success!

As dysfunctional people ourselves we can unintentionally make a challenging situation worse. We will discuss coaching skills that can help us navigate the bumpy, dysfunctional road towards high performance. And as with any skill, getting better requires practice and help from our peers!

In this workshop you will break up into small groups and work together to discuss, analyze, and solve real-life dysfunctions. We present the dysfunction, you utilize your coaching skills to present the solution! Warning: some of us may have been the root cause of the dysfunctions in the past!

Have you ever been in that meeting where everyone goes on and on about something, and you walk out of the meeting realising that nothing has been decided and no one knows what to do?  Now we need another meeting.

Problem-solving is one of the biggest parts of our jobs as creators and testers of products. Effective techniques to visualise the problems, solutions and discussions can enable us to do this better and to be more productive in meetings and in general.

Join for a lively and interactive session, where we will have a look at some of the problems faced in teams and organisations and present techniques for creating visibility for more collaborative and effective problem-solving. Together, we will use these techniques to unpack some of the real problems experienced in the room.

• Open and introduction
• Why is visibility important – short lecture
• Explore different problems in the room through conversations at each table
• Get teams to present problems on sticky notes. Dot vote or pick the most appropriate
• Based on the problems selected show some techniques to create visibility and explore the problem in a visual way
• Divide into teams based on 4 or 5 problems
• Get each team to visually explore the problem using one of the described techniques
• Debrief

By participating in the workshop, it is likely that each person takes away learning that applies to their own context and therefore we will cover many aspects that the act of collaborative visualisation can provide:

• The basic techniques of using visibility to solve problems
• How different roles can contribute to uncovering the blind spots and assumptions in the problem using visualisation
• Different visualisation techniques for different problems (a list of possibilities will be available for discussion)
• Basic facilitation of each technique
• Collaboration and teamwork

Since 2011, Bob Galen and Josh Anderson have been recording the Meta-Cast podcast. It’s an agile focused discussion that has literally covered every agile topic in its seven years and over 120 episodes. The podcast reaches listeners on virtually every continent and has received numerous accolades from listeners and fellow podcasters alike. In this session, Bob and Josh will be bringing the Meta-cast to you, a live audience. The podcast will be recorded and streamed live. We will gather your most challenging, interesting, and potentially exasperating agile questions and challenges. Then we’ll answer each of them with our collaborative and fun style. This session will prove to be fun, insightful, and driven by YOUR needs. So please, join the Meta-cast and try to “stump the chumps” or simply get some free coaching towards your greatest challenges.

We’ve all heard of companies that started on their agile journey, only to abandon their efforts when expected outcomes were not achieved; where other organizations have created a sustainable model, often becoming benchmarks for others to follow. What makes the difference?

Long-lasting, continuously evolving agile cultures are forged through a tenacious focus on the core values of Lean and Agile above all else.

There are many approaches to structuring and leading an agile practice transformation – identifying and prioritizing the adoption and maturity of principles before practices will guide organizations to achieving the outcomes of improved business and technical collaboration, delivering core business value sooner, and even improving employee satisfaction and innovation. Attend this session to learn the essential steps to planning, executing and sustaining an agile culture. Participants will be given a blueprint for constructing an effective agile transformation roadmap to meet the needs of their unique organizations.

Have you ever been a part of a team that attended some form of Agile training for a day or so, and then expected to go forth and be Agile?  Or, even worse, have you ever been asked to help a team improve, but the team found themselves too busy to improve?  

I unfortunately have said yes to both of these questions and for each, the result wasn’t good and as a leader of the teams impacted — I failed them.  After these and many more frustrating experiences, I set out to figure out what needs to change in order to improve the outcomes and help make people awesome.  In this session, I want to share what I discovered.

During this interactive session, we’ll brainstorm the areas that we struggle, explore the aspects of becoming good and high-performing, and we’ll establish a baseline

understanding of agile practices.  We’ll dive into the concept of deliberate practice and look at how we create an environment that enables deliberate practice to occur.  Finally, we’ll wrap-up with a group discovery of practices the we’ve used in the field to overcome the areas that we struggle.

Please join me for an outcome focused coaching session.

Learning Objectives*: 

• Be able to explain the three core components of Deliberate Practice.
• Understanding of how our mindset is impacted by the habits we have, the environment, and it’s shaped through practice.
• Know how to establish an environment that fosters and supports a learning based, Deliberate Practice environment.
• Know how to explain to leadership the value Deliberate Practice and how to incorporate it into our busy work demands.

Agile, Waterfall, and everything in between and close by starts and ends with teams. No matter what role you play on the team you have the power to unlock the team’s real potential. No – this isn’t a talk on how to get a higher velocity while working less. This session is the practical view into HOW to become a limitless team. The secret; you have to unlock your own personal power first. Sick of talking conceptually? Don’t worry this session is all about giving you real tools and techniques you can start using today to take yourself and your team to the limitless level with four easy steps.

Join this interactive discussion of the role of the manager in the agile setting. The manager role needs to evolve with the organization as agile thinking makes an impact. When the organization considers the various options for scaling for larger products or for broader impacts the role of people manager or IT team leader is critical to accelerate the transformation or can impede the transformation if not adapted to new ways of thinking. The various scaling frameworks either implement new roles or re-define the existing manager role to coordinate cross team dependencies, focus on building structure and changing culture.

Have you ever worked in an environment where Agile turned into a four-letter word? Many companies get lost on their Agile journey and end up turning it into something that leaves a sour taste in everyone’s mouths. There are many ways companies get lost on their journey from the C-Suite down to the team level.

Teams that are too big or too small, micro-managing, no Work in Progress (WIP) limits, and lack of leadership backing are just a few of the many indicators we will touch on that result in transformation hiccups and failures. Join me as I share my experiences as an Agile Coach and dive into the reasons why transformations fail and how you can avoid turning Agile into a four-letter word at your organization.

How can design thinking elevate the way we understand our business partners and determine their technology needs? This presentation will walk through an overview of the design thinking process, specifically focusing on the Empathise and Define sections in the process. Utilizing real-life business cases and key in-session activities, our audience will find tangible exercises to figure out how to craft the best problem/opportunity statement and how that can be utilized in their business planning process.

When coaches encounter resistance to agile transformations, we often treat it as a phenomenon to be overcome, confronted, or combated. But resistance is a natural reaction to change, and that reaction can’t be alleviated by violent opposition. Rather than meeting resistance head on, the clever coach will work around it by helping people recognize and resolve the negative emotions that drive it. Once those negative emotions are resolved, people are more likely to let down their guard and embrace change.

In this interactive workshop, participants will learn how to identify common “faces” of resistance–behaviors that might indicate that a person is experiencing an emotional reaction to change. Participants will then work in table groups to identify strategies for helping clients recognize the emotional underpinning of their resistance. Finally, a role-playing experience will give participants the chance to practice coaching resisters to resolve their reluctance to embrace agile transformation.

Come hear lessons learned by the Nationwide Office of Investments IT as they went through several iterations of writing it’s goal state Microservice architecture/code base.  We will talk through the evolution of the design, how to think in small services, what supporting Infrastructure is needed, how it affects a build line and much more!!

Learning Objectives:

• High level understanding of the benefits and value of a Microservice architecture
• Identify key differences and challenges when working with Microservices versus a monolith or traditionally build service based application
• Understand pitfalls and challenges that stall design and the initial framework build
• Identify skills needed by a team and organization to be successful in the long term

Scrum and the agile movement in general have created a divisive environment between traditional project management and agile roles. This divisiveness has allowed accidental agile bullies on both sides to take root. Together, let’s reset on what agility and success mean and talk through actions we can all take to repair relationships and reestablish safety across our organizations.

In an industry plagued by employee burnout, inequality, and ethically questionable products, it’s clear that many of us who work in technology have lost sight of why we’re doing all of this in the first place: to improve people’s lives. The Agile Manifesto guideline of valuing people over processes is a great start, but can we do better?

To create the most effective teams, and to deliver the most value—not just to our customers, but to the community at large—compassion is the key. Compassion adds action to empathy, presenting an optimization problem that asks us to minimize suffering for all of those affected by our work.

Allowing practical compassion to guide our everyday decisions will help us take better care of ourselves, interact more effectively with our coworkers, deliver more value to our customers, and ultimately, focus our efforts on creating a lasting positive social impact.

In late 2016, the Nationwide Enterprise Digital group began a transformation to move from a project to a product organization to further improve speed to market and increase flexibility in a highly competitive environment. Aligning portfolio work to a product/value stream model requires both managerial fortitude and a willingness of all team members to step outside their traditional roles and responsibilities to achieve a successful transition. Practices across all professions, including requirements analysis, were reviewed and realigned to meet transformation objectives. This discussion will highlight changes made during the transformation to increase visibility and flow of all portfolio work, lean out the requirements workflow, and improve cross-functional communication.

Why do we measure anything? Why do we have ‘metrics’? This session will focus not on agile metrics per se, but on the thought behind measurement, especially as it pertains to the inspect and adapt cycle that is such a critical part of agile. Attendees will develop a mental framework for understanding when it is appropriate to start measuring, what is important to measure, and importantly, when to stop measuring. We will also look at what happens when old, traditional metrics are imposed on agile teams, and how to provide what is ‘needed’ instead of what is ‘wanted’

Technical Debt is a necessity and inevitable when beginning a project, providing a fast and efficient proof of concept of a feature of high value, or simply when time is of the essence for maintenance and small features. When managed inappropriately over the course of time, the wealth initially generated moves from a slight annoyance to frustration throughout the teams. Technical debt backlogs grow instead of decrease with no end in sight. Similar to features, each step within the life-cycle of tech debt has a value associated with it. Walk away with an understanding of the varying types of technical debt and the values which causes them to appear, determine best practices to prevent unnecessary and valueless growth, and find potential solutions to finally burn down that backlog of debt.

We live in a very distracted world. These distractions have bled into the workplace and have affected our efficiency and made our teams take longer to accomplish tasks than necessary. More importantly, our ability to accomplish cognitively demanding tasks has been diminished. In this talk we will discuss data about distractions and how we as leaders and team members take action to be more efficient and more fulfilled in our careers.

Improvement is a big subject in most workplaces. Odds are the desire for new improvement ideas is a big reason you are at this conference. Many of the best ideas for improvement will never get a chance, though. When brought into the work environment you will start to hear the reasons why they won’t work. Some of my favourite’s start like:

• “That’s nice in theory, but it’s not possible to do that here because ‘¦”
• “That’s not the way we’ve always done it ‘¦”
• “Yes, but, in the REAL WORLD ‘¦”

What if you knew the only reason change is not possible is due to limiting beliefs and mindsets? The limiting beliefs of leaders and the team members. In other words, there’s a good chance its fear holding you back and not a circumstance.

In this session, you will experience what it means to be aware of and confront fear. We will explore how fear triggers the human mind and how they form limiting beliefs. You will leave with a tool you can use to safely talk about fear on your team. When you and those you lead talk about a fear you increase the power you have over the limiting beliefs you’ve created.

Leadership is one of the most complex and rewarding things you can do in life. Leaders at all levels must face their own fears while leading others to do the same. The degree to which you can see and confront fear will be the degree to which you and your team can improve.

Don’t let fear limit your growth or that of your team!

My dad looked at me and said, “Son, it’s not amazing the pig sings badly. It’s amazing the pig sings at all!” As I look back at 35 years in software development, boy was he right.

The bones of canceled software projects litter the landscape like the graveyard of the whales. Projects escaping the graveyard resemble Frankenstein as they lurch, not quite dead, but not all that useful.

Yet no one starts spending millions of dollars hoping for failure, or a Frankenstein application. What happens between the hope of creation and the reality at birth?

In this workshop, yes, you’ll be working, we’ll look at software development, what goes wrong, and how to mitigate and possibly improve the practice and art of software development.

In order to build good software, business analysts need to help drive all three of these items.  If we do not start with a solid vision from the product owner/sponsor, a number of dominoes will fall making the project a challenge. Without a proper vision, it is virtually impossible to keep the effort focused on building only the needs of the customer. Developing a minimum viable product allows us to keep things simple, while meeting the vision and needs of the customer.

Join us for this session as Brian shows how to develop a minimum viable product, the value to the organization and how to use the MVP to drive that value.

The 12 Agile Principles from the Agile Manifesto are building blocks for a successful, sustainable Agile journey – regardless of industry and/or department. Many pitfalls that organizations experience are due to oversight and lack of adherence to the Agile Principles. In this session, I will review the 12 Agile Principles, how they apply to all industries, common issues that lead organizations astray, and proven solutions to get back on course throughout any Agile journey.

Ever struggled to define what is minimally necessary? Whether it is defining a Minimally Viable Product or what is minimally necessary for a project or team, you need a way to not only brainstorm ideas, but also a way to cut the unnecessary waste out.

Pass to Perfection is a game for getting a solution, product, or project started with what is minimally necessary; in development terms, this is your Minimal Viable Product (MVP). It mashes up ‘Yes and’ thinking for co-creation, and the essence of The Perfection Game (from the Core Protocols) for negotiation and prioritization in a collaborative round-robin game format. Create ideas until you can’t think of anything else and you pass, remove ideas until you have what is essential and you pass. This workshop will have you try out the game and learn how easy it is to get people started. We’ll discuss also how psychological safety is created in its use and gotchas to watch out for so that the environment remains safe.

Join employees from American Electric Power (AEP) as we discuss bringing lean and agile to a 100-year old Fortune 200 enterprise.  We will share our journey over the past eight years, including our successes and learnings along the way.  Find out where we’ve been, where we are now, and what’s ahead as we focus on powering a new and brighter future for our customers and communities.

As many agilists know, the role of Product Owner can be very overwhelming. The largest challenge being time management, and there are practices that can help with this.  The number one practice is developing a partnership with your BSA and ensuring that they understand your vision.  Once this partnership is established, the sky is truly the limit. In turn, the stress of the Product Owner role decreases, and the effectiveness increases.  We will explore this partnership development and actions taken by each role to help Product Owners and BSAs to maximize their impact on the product.

Has your strategic consulting vendor brought introduced DevOps Engineers and DevOps teams? Or maybe you’re just hiring DevOps Engineers because more people apply? Over the past ~8 years, we’ve learned a lot about working together collaboratively with DevOps culture and practices.

In this presentation, we’ll explore DevOps anti-patterns that keep your organization from attracting the best engineers and true DevOps organizational structures that can help your engineering teams work together collaboratively without silos.

Many members of the QA community are just gaining experience testing with web APIs. Testing APIs can be intimidating compared to those comfortable GUI’s, but the world of requests and responses is full of opportunities. Perhaps your team isn’t sure where API testing fits into your SDLC or your organization doesn’t believe APIs should be tested directly at all. Even if you have no idea what API even stands for or how to being to approach testing, we will address those questions in this session.

Those in attendance will be provided with an overview on how your team should approach API testing as part of your test strategy. We will also provide working examples on interacting with services via automation testing.

If you have an online presence, you have a personal brand. Most of us didn’t intend to create a brand when we made our first websites and social media profiles. They were just fun ways to share our lives meet people. Now, they’re networking and career growth tools. In this talk, you’ll hear about people whose brands helped them become respected developers, managers, and community leaders. You’ll learn how to use your online presence to advance your career. You’ll also pick up best practices, common mistakes, and tips for balancing professional and personal content. Intentional personal branding opens the door to endless opportunities. Come see how to make that happen!

Ben will share lessons and perspective from growing up flying across remote Alaska and how that translated to helping build launch and landing sites for SpaceX and other startup commercial launch companies. Often we find that the best way to run a lean operation is to have no other choice.

Do you truly understand in your heart what it means to empower an Agile team? How much enablement is not enough, yet how far is too far? Empowered teams can be given too much freedom with no vision; whereas heavy-handed control will quash group achievement. How can you hit that sweet spot? Truly empowered teams are a beautiful phenomenon, and true understanding of empowered behavior is the first step.

In this discussion, we will answer the question of what empowerment truly means, offer a twist on the Agile Manifesto for managers, and share tools that will lead to letting go and building thriving, self-organized teams.

Joanne has been thinking a great deal about human systems, what makes them tick, what helps them be better and what gets in their way. In this talk, she will dig into human systems, entropy and agile. She will explore the things that she believes can help human systems to be better and share the things that she has seen yield results during her experience coaching.

As product owners/managers, we know how important it is to care for our products like they are living, breathing things. However, when it comes to developing winning products, the product is only as successful as the development team behind it. Because caring for the team = caring for the product.

In this session, we will discuss how to care for your product development team using real life examples and evidence from researchers on how individuals and teams thrive at work. And maybe we’ll talk about actually feeding your teams (snacks are always a good idea).

Note: While this is a Product Owner-focused presentation topic, Scrum Masters and Developers will find the material applicable, as well.

Any kind of planning is an exercise in uncertainty. Especially so in large enterprises where delivering value to the customer involves multiple teams within and across organizational silos. Although made popular by SAFe’s PI planning event, Big Room Planning has been used successfully by many organizations to connect the work of their agile teams to the overarching business strategy and to what they can deliver.

In this session, we will share our recent story on how Big Room Planning ideas were used in a large Fortune 100 company to align teams, stakeholders, leadership on desired business capabilities, surface uncertainties, dependencies, and reach shared understanding and consensus on achievable outcomes in the near-term.

It is our hope that some of the ideas discussed and resources shared in this session will help you and your teams with your near-term planning horizons, especially those attempting to drive agility in large, complex organizations.

“Culture is the organization’s Immune System.”. And the purpose of a System is NOT deduced from stated goals. The purpose is deduced from its behavior. That means that it is not a strategy that is guiding an organization, it is its CULTURE.

Are you ready to learn why CULTURE is so important in an organization? In this talk, you will learn techniques for effectively starting a CULTURAL change in your organization. You will also learn practical guidance to the secret of laying a good foundation with VALUES and will then shares the science behind why it works so well. We will discuss how experience trumps everything irrespective of industry and technology. I promise will leave all of you excited to take a new approach that is not only inspiring but a lot more fun.

“In a recent Forbes Insight/PMI Survey, 92 percent of respondents said that organization agility is critical to business success, yet only 27 percent regarded themselves as highly agile.”

Does an organization have to be new or operating in startup mode to experience business agility? Increasing agility can be challenging if your company has a long history working hierarchically with most leaders focused on controlling and managing their fiefdoms. Companies like these self-sabotage through reinforcing behaviors and cultural norms that negatively impact agility.

The challenge is not a technical one; it’s not a problem we can solve by working or trying harder. When we struggle to change, the challenge is typically an adaptive one where we need to change both what we do and how we think. You cannot use technical means to reach adaptive ends. Adaptive problems require us to challenge:

• deeply held beliefs
• values that made us successful which have become less relevant
• emerging competing perspectives

Adaptive challenges move us outside comfort zones and trigger protective and defensive responses due to fear, uncertainty and doubt. How do we move beyond this? We will explore techniques you can use in this interactive workshop designed to help you identify what’s holding you back and plan for greater agility.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the difference between technical and adaptive change
• Drill into examples and explore why desired change towards business agility may not occur for individuals and teams
• Learn about the Immunity to Change Model
•  Analyze what is inhibiting agility and build a plan to move past it for yourself and your teams

For many years, Agile Transformation has emphasized a need to get IT projects done quicker, at less cost and with better quality. Whereas these tenets still remain pertinent, Agile Transformation is now being more heavily pursued by business organizations where IT is simply a component to success versus a main ingredient. Moreover, companies are looking at establishing product versus project centric cultures to focus on making sure that maximized value is being delivered to their end customers versus simply getting a project completed on-time and under budget. Metrics, such as NPS and increased profit are now at the forefront of Agile initiatives rather than project velocity and backlog burn down.

In essence, the Agile Transformation Paradigm involves leveraging the idea that business is all about evolution, and embraces it by breaking processes down into iterative, manageable activities that maximize immediate customer value. The focus is on resolving pains rather than the multi-year “rip and replace” approach. It focuses on quickly implementing a new process/value stream and supporting technology to continually take advantage of innovation and customer need. This process of iteratively evolving a business to be better always continues.

This presentation is geared towards anyone interested in establishing or optimizing an Agile culture. Moreover, it is helpful for organizational business leaders and operational management that want to understand what is required and an action plan, i.e., roadmap, to have their business and/or functional organization embrace an Agile culture that optimizes processes as well as technology solutions. In essence, being Agile versus acting Agile.

When creating a play or movie, what are the first three rules of directing? Casting, casting, and casting. How does Saturday Night Live produce sketch after sketch of comedy? By iterating. The principles of leadership and management in the worlds of theatre, TV and film offer a multitude of lessons for those who are leading high performing Agile teams. In this talk, John Krewson will walk through the journey of creating and delivering theatrical and film productions, then show how those principles can be used to improve the process of software delivery. He’ll dive into specific approaches and methods used by performers and directors that harness creativity, develop shared understanding, empower and motivate teams, and manage focus. The session will include multiple interactive demonstrations to further illustrate the application of these principles.

Have your stand-up meetings descended into a status reporting rundown? Do the stand-up meetings take long and lack energy? If breakfast is the most important meal of the day, the daily stand-up meeting is the team’s breakfast for the day. A few strategic minutes can transform into hours of efficiency. Caffeinate your team’s day with energy and engagement using the stand-up meetings. We will walk through the purpose of stand-up, the research and how to have a fun yet effective stand-up. We will look at different patterns of stand-up, some common problem indicators and get more insight into subtle details for a fruitful stand-up.

We all want our teams to be ultra efficient, but even a touch of the cowboy coder, the hero programmer, or the freeloader can be toxic to your team. Google’s Project Aristotle (https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/understanding-team-effectiveness) found that the efficiency of a team is driven by 5 factors:

• Psychological Safety
• Dependability
• Structure and Clarity
• Meaning of work
• Impact of work

Come and learn how to use these factors to identify and eliminate the toxicity killing the effectiveness of your team. Using stereotypically terrible teams, having members like the ones mentioned above, you’ll learn why it’s so important to provide transparency, set goals, and have the necessary conversations you’ve been putting off.

Want to continue a conversation with someone you’ve just met?  Learn more about a topic covered in one of the sessions?  Or maybe you have a question or topic for discussion that’s not being covered by any of the planned programming?  Then jump into the fishbowl and participate in the discussion with other conference attendees.

Around the Path will follow a fishbowl format, where everyone will get a chance to participate if they choose.  Room facilitators will be on hand to capture learnings, questions and to keep the dialog flowing.

Leaders. Have you heard? The leadership landscape has been changing. Heck, it’s continuously changing. And one of the big disrupters has been “Agile”. It’s introduced or fostered concepts like: servant leadership, self-directed teams, empowerment, emotional intelligence, employee engagement, trust, self-selection, open spaces, and even something called a Lean Coffee. Not to mention all of the hoopla surrounding agile at-Scale and all of the associated frameworks.

Channeling his best Jeff Foxworthy, Bob Galen shares some patterns and anti-patterns that surround the leadership shift to more agile tactics and mindset that many leaders are facing and struggling to adopt. Having gone thru this massive change himself, Bob explores his personal journey towards becoming agile as a leader. Topics will include how to tackle your new role: the tactics you’ll need to change, the stance you’ll need to assume, and the role models you’ll need to leave behind. Beyond that, Bob shares the new lean, value-based delivery mindset that seems to be the right focus for delighting your internal and external customers.

You might leave this session with your mind blown a bit. But you will never think of leading the same way again.

The presentation is a brief review of what visual facilitation is and how to use it for requirements. We focus on 2 techniques in this presentation, that of Story Mapping and Dot-macracy using an interactive format.

The Modern Javascript Promise

We’ll discuss the role of JavaScript in today’s web as well as the tools powering modern JavaScript development.

Throughout the workshop, we’ll examine some of the features making their way into developers’ hands, enabling a more concise, literate, and safe codebase. Together, we’ll practice:

• Classes
  
• Modules, Babel, and Webpack
  
• Destructuring
  
• Architecting Modern JavaScript Apps and Sites
  
• Patterns for Frontend JavaScript
  
• Isomorphic and Progressive Enhancement
  
• Build Tooling
  
• Repository Organization

As Agile become mainstream increasingly organizations are looking to double down on the role of the Product Owner encouraging them to manage the intersection between technology and the business. But Product Ownership is a difficult role as it tries to balance the needs of the business with the reality of software delivery. Also, for many organizations there is some ‘confusion’ with existing roles of business analyst, product manager or even project manager. What does the product owner do anyway? In this talk Dave West, Product Owner and CEO Scrum.org, the home of Scrum, describes the genesis of the Product Owner role and how many organizations are dealing with the challenges of slotting this key role into existing product, project and release roles. He will introduce some techniques such as user centric design, and hypophysis based development and describe how approaches such as Lean Startup and pragmatic marketing are providing product owners with a tool box to do their job.

So you want to be an Agile Coach.  You want to help organizations achieve the Agile dream.  You want to help leaders see the light.

But, how prepared are you?  Will you be a good Agile coach?

Agile Coaches have become an important role in an organization’s Agile transformation effort.  In this session we will review seven deadly sins of Agile coaching and how you can achieve success as an Agile coach!

All rojects pneed to track progress, cost, quality, and other measures of success. Agile projects are no exception. However, many of the traditional metrics do not work as effectively on an Agile project. In this highly interactive session we will explore which metrics tend to work well in an Agile environment for tracking progress, cost and quality. When you should use various different metrics. And just as importantly, which metrics are generally a poor fit for an Agile environment. We will also explain what makes a metric a good or poor fit for an Agile environment.

Feedback is the core part of agile process thinking. The whole premise of this process is based on feedback, we run automated test to continuous delivery in smaller chunks to get quick feedback. AND we are awesome at it. Well! Today I am not going to talk about them, in my talk I want to focus on human aspect of the process. That is, how do we give each other a feedback? There might be several reasons for seeking feedback but if it is not given right we might end up de-motivating the person. Unhappy or de-motivated person might not be very productive at work. After all, agile is all about people over process. I would like to unpack the word feedback and what it contains. How to deliver feedback effectively and efficiently to get best outcome.

Building the right software the right way can catapult your product to the front of the line. Clean code, ruthless automation, hyper­collaboration, and Monte Carlo schedule forecasting area few of the ways my team helps our clients hit their goals and wow their customers.

Throughout this talk I’ll discuss the unique set of practices my team has used to build an FDA regulated mobile medical app with over 80 screens, localized to 18 languages, released in 32 app stores, and in use in over 125 countries.

What does it mean to cultivate and foster a culture of learning?  Join this lively discussion of how to encourage your teams to always be learning and experimenting.

Building an innovative Infrastructure and Operations team who can apply
DevOps practices and collaborate across an organization isn’t easy but
it’s not impossible. We will explore the full lifecycle of building a
team including what the best candidates look like, how to find them,
interview processes, and how to get them to want to work with you.
Leaving this presentation, you will have new ideas to take back to your
organization and act on. Learn how to build an innovative team who can
scale a distributing computing platform and keep it available.

Jenkins, originally known as Hudson, is the “leading open source automation server”.  For many organizations, it plays a key role in enabling continuous integration, continuous deployment and continuous testing.  New in 2016, in support of common DevOps trends, Jenkins version 2 introduced a robust, extensible approach to managing complex automation pipelines as code.  Offering a Domain Specific Language based on Groovy, a suite of plugins providing powerful pipeline abstractions and optimized support for common development platforms, Jenkins’ Pipeline as Code provides a solid foundation for a team’s continuous delivery practices.  Join Kevin Fox, ICC’s Enterprise Architecture Practice Lead, as he provides a practical overview of this important new capability for a popular open source platform.

Topics

• Understand the value of delivery pipelines for Agile development teams
• Recognize the role of automation code in enabling delivery pipelines
• Introduce Jenkins’ approach to Pipeline as Code
• Demonstrate practical aspects of pipeline code reuse
• Present effective options for managing pipelines for large development projects

Prioritization of work is hard across all levels of the organization. When we focus on new feature value, often the first indicator of value is dollars versus effort expended. But what about value that is not realized through dollars? Our customers do not only think in dollars but more about their needs and desires. Moreover, value definitions can miss product maturity and the associated value features contribute at different stages of the product life cycle. All these facets form the value curve of a product.

By expanding the definition of what value can truly mean, we can normalize, rationalize, and quantify value in new and different ways that make sense to all of our customers and to the maturity of our product in the industry. We can assess value at scale across programs, products, and portfolios as well as engage team members and stakeholders through interactive activities to balance what each values and its effect on the product. In a way, it’s like relative sizing to drive values that appeal to many different consumers and stakeholders of your product.

Natalie first demonstrates traditional value estimation (dollars) and the resulting feature map/prioritization. Then, we look at other types of value realization through the Kano model (relating to customer preferences) to understand customer value in relation to the product maturity in the industry. The activity provides participants with hands-on experience balancing and mapping feature value looking through a wider lens. This gives Product Owners and teams a better baseline to align enterprise and program roadmaps with their own team or product priorities – and most importantly what the customer actually values and the product actually needs!

Have a topic or question that’s not covered in one of the sessions?  Looking to have interesting conversations with fellow attendees? If any of these are true, come join us for Lean Coffee in Great Hall 2 where we’ll create our own unique agenda. It’s also a great facilitated discussion technique to take back to your workplace.

Go to leancoffee.org to see how it works or just stop by and join the fun.

Traditional definitions of leadership emphasize position, formal authority and power, vision, heroics. Those definitions might have been sufficient in another time. Organizations that need to respond to a fast-changing environment and desire continuous improvement require a different kind of leadership and a different kind of leader.

In this talk, we’ll explore a different definition of leadership: “The ability to enhance the environment, so that everyone is empowered to contribute creatively to solving the problem(s)” We’ll look at how managers can encourage and empower leadership, and how you can be a leader, no matter what your level in the organization.

Humanity has centuries of experience leading laborers and clerks, but what do we know about leading people who think for a living? We will use simulations, facts, games, and questions to explore getting the best outcomes for our organizations and our customers, instead of getting the most work out of each individual. We will discover changes that we can make in our work environment which will begin to pay back immediately (with compound interest). Come and learn a few ways to “give them the environment and support they need” (agile manifesto).