This session, delivered by Professor Richard Jolly of Kellogg School of Management, builds on his 24 years of studying organizational change and even longer time spent consulting with organizations to help them manage change effectively. During the session, we will explore the ways in which traditional change frameworks are increasingly unhelpful. We will explore why change so often fails in organizations, the four elements of an effective change process and focus on practical advice for how this relates to the agile community. Ensuring that you are effective in getting your advice implemented is critical to building the impact and influence of the agile community…

• Understand various techniques and approaches and strategies to actually ignite meaningful sustainable behavioral change by world class practitioners and educators
• Understand, integrate, reflect, plan for action
• Desire after we’ve talked about the stories / capabilities – go deeper – how do you build capability/ change behavior
• Hear, think, reflect on changing behavior – what will it take to change leader behavior to do something in different way
• Gain new perspective on change as an ongoing process of experimentation, learning, and course-adjustment

Coaching can be done at different levels. Thus, coaching at a team level can be pretty straightforward when you are the only coach with a direct focus on one team. Things, however, change when you start to scale coaching capabilities to a program, platform, or, even, enterprise level. In this case the area of focus as well as the area of impact grow significantly. Situations like that normally lead to a reactive behavior when the coaches have to tackle many requests and initiatives at the same time. This often results in extra hours which, in fact, don’t always lead to better outcomes.

Please, join us in this session where we will share a structured approach to coaching at scale that would allow you to clearly focus on different areas within your organization and deliver the outcomes you set without the stress of overworking and overcommitting.

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, organizations are constantly seeking ways to
enhance their efficiency and maximize value delivery. This presentation explores the
transformative power of Flow Metrics and the Project to Product approach in enabling
organizations to unlock their full potential.

Flow Metrics provide a data-driven methodology to measure and optimize the flow of work
across complex systems. By focusing on key indicators such as cycle time, throughput, and work
item age, organizations can gain deep insights into bottlenecks, process inefficiencies, and
areas for improvement. These metrics not only facilitate continuous improvement but also
enable better decision-making, resource allocation, and capacity planning.

The Project to Product approach, inspired by the principles of Lean and Agile, shifts the
organizational mindset from project-based thinking to product-centricity. It emphasizes the
importance of aligning teams, processes, and technology around the value streams that deliver
products and services to customers. By adopting this approach, organizations can streamline
their workflows, increase collaboration, and accelerate time-to-market.

During this presentation, we will discuss real-world examples of organizations that have
successfully implemented Flow Metrics and the Project to Product approach. We will delve into
the challenges they faced, the benefits they reaped, and the lessons learned along the way.
Attendees will gain valuable insights into the practical implementation of these methodologies
and understand how they can be customized to suit their unique organizational contexts.

Key takeaways:
1. Understanding the role of Flow Metrics in measuring and optimizing work processes and how
they differ from traditional DORA metrics
2. Exploring the benefits of adopting the Project to Product approach in achieving product-
centricity.
3. Real-world examples and case studies highlighting the successful implementation of Flow
Metrics and the Project to Product approach.
4. Practical insights and lessons learned for customizing these methodologies to organizational
contexts.
5. Strategies for driving organizational change and fostering a culture of continuous
improvement.

By embracing Flow Metrics and the Project to Product approach, organizations can embark on a
transformative journey towards enhanced productivity, agility, and value delivery. Join us for an
engaging and informative session that will empower you to unleash the full potential of your
organization.

In today’s fast-paced technological age, effective communication skills are essential for success in all areas of life, both personal and professional. One of the most critical communication skills is listening, and it is often overlooked or seen as something others don’t value.

This presentation will focus on the importance of listening skills in our day to to day lives and profession. With the ever-evolving advancements in technology, it’s essential to be a good listener so you can understand and respond effectively to the needs of our clients, colleagues, and stakeholders. We will explore the various aspects of listening, including active listening, empathetic listening, and critical listening, and how they can be applied in the context of or technology driven jobs. We will also discuss the challenges faced in developing listening skills, such as distractions and the tendency to jump to conclusions. We will offer practical tips and techniques to overcome these barriers and improve our listening skills.

Ultimately, the ability to listen well is the key to building stronger relationships, enhancing productivity, and achieving success. This presentation will provide valuable insights and strategies to help you become a better listener and a more effective communicator in the digital age.

2 Stories walk into the Alphabet Store….

What do you think they were looking for? You will find out that answer as well as some tools
and techniques on creating well-formed user stories.
In this interactive session we will talk about the user story, it’s components and the Y’s behind
it all. We will have exercises to create the pieces of the story as well as different ways of
putting it all together.
Join me so that you can learn what the Stories were looking for as well as learning how to write
a great user story.

Estimating is both controversial and a difficult thing to do for most agile teams. Learn how relative estimating in the right way can help embrace the agile mindset and focus on iterative thinking. Embracing a “directionally correct and usefully wrong” approach to the detailed day-to-day of user story estimating as well as in the very important strategic work of OKRs can ironically be the best thing you and your teams do.

Trust is a vital factor in the success of any organization, affecting speed, cost, culture, and teamwork. However, blindly trusting teams can lead to gullibility and waste. To make things even more challenging, there are also many counterfeits, behaviors we do in hopes to build trust, but bite the teams and the business in the long run. In this session we will review how many IT teams have begun to create a sense of forced or false trust, and work through simple proven strategies to flip it into real trust. Whether you are a leader or team member, you will walk away with actionable insights for building real trust in IT teams, improving culture, collaboration, and business performance. Let’s turn the phrase “Trust me, I’m an engineer” into a reality, not a punchline.

This activity demonstrates a way for product teams to adopt Lean/Scientific Thinking (L/ST) to learn how to achieve various business goals. 

You are going to participate in an activity to gain a hands-on understanding of how to use L/ST to achieve the team’s business goals.  Also, you will understand the manager’s role in coaching teams to scientifically navigate complexity. 

Many teams use a variation of an Agile framework that sometimes renders it into pointless mechanical ceremonies. The team’s outcomes and behaviors are affected by wastes injected by these ceremonies. Moreover, the experimental mindset needed for innovation is replaced by a risk-avert form of delivery.

Lean ST is a way for product teams to work together to increase the speed of learning. Speed of delivery is a by-product of enabling team learning.

I hope that you will find this activity joyful and look forward to learning from your insights.

Are you the person who plans your family or friends’ vacation? Do you ask your family or friends lots of questions? Is the word WHY in your vocabulary? Can you stand talking to people? If you answered yes to any of these questions – the role of Business Systems Analyst may be your next calling. This session will be a brief overview of the role Business Systems Analyst and how to start down the path for this very cool career. If you are interested, please join. Questions encouraged!

Five years ago, Nationwide embarked on a journey to implement agile and lean practices at an enterprise scale.  Join Guru for a look into the real-life experiences of leading this transformation across several application development and maintenance efforts.  He will highlight the integration of agile and lean practices and the importance of lean leadership to measure and track the economic value of these techniques.  Along the way, he will also reflect on the versatility of lean and his personal journey applying lean concepts.

“I get all that. BUT how is all of this agile stuff any better, faster, or cheaper than what we do today?”

Leaders must answer the “better, faster, cheaper” question if they want their agile transformation and projects to move forward.

To prepare leaders for this critical question, we explore how “better, faster, cheaper” translates to an agile organization, the metrics a leader can use to track progress towards “better, faster, and cheaper”, and how leaders can demonstrate the benefits gained from their agile activities.

In the most recent Stack Overflow developer survey, poor documentation is cited as the #2 challenge at work for developers. So how does this impact your Agile project? Imagine having your key contributors spending hours or even days each time new developers join your team to bring them up to speed on how to checkout, work with, build and test your project. Or imagine having these key contributors spending valuable time during every sprint answering the same questions about your project over and over again because there is no documentation. This happens today countless times because most development teams do not effectively document their development projects.

So, what constitutes effective development project documentation? The goals are: (1) on-board new team members quickly and as painlessly as possible with minimal assistance from current team members and (2) provide a central repository for answering questions about working with your development project. Come to this session and learn how to effectively document your development project to meet these goals.

In 2015, women made up 57% of the professional workforce yet only 25% of professional computing occupations were held by women. What is currently being done to address the gender gap? What can individuals do to help in both short and long terms? How can we retain women that have chosen this career path?  In this panel, we’ll hear from some of the amazing women who are working in the diversity and technology space. Following the panel perspectives, we’ll open up the floor for a Q&A, leading into a group dialogue centered on common experiences.

Violations of the open-closed principle (the O in SOLID) are the plague of OO programming. Unlike the Andromeda Strain before it, the symptoms of this disease, innocuous IFs and CASEs, are quietly waiting for just the right moment to render your software unmaintainable. The agents work slowly and quietly, in the shadows, like digging a hole with a soup spoon. One day you wake only to realize you’ve sunk into a pit of technical debt. OK, it’s probably not that bad, but violating the Open-Closed principle does have the potential to shorten the life of any OO code. The key is to identify violations as they are occurring so that we keep the power to extend the software without also needing to change it. This session demonstrates refactoring techniques to eliminate violations of the principle and some tips for identifying the early. Examples are provided mainly in Groovy, but analogous code will be provided in a variety of other languages.