A practical guide to setting up a new agile project team. Based on years of agile delivery and coaching experience for projects in a number of distributed and offshore models, for teams sized from 10 to 200 people, and spread across 4 continents, and 8+ locations. Some areas that will be touched on:

• People - how to organize distributed teams, cultural factors to consider, ways to build trust, and how to avoid timezone burnout.
• Process - how to communicate effectively, plan collaboratively, setup distributed practices (standups, retros, pairing, etc), effectively divide work on a common codebase, maintain visibility, and track progress.
• Tools - (tips provided as a handout) which hardware and software tools should you absolutely invest in to help overcome communication,  visibility and collaboration challenges

In the software world we have been looking for “The Methodology” to solve our software development sorrows for quite a while. We started with Waterfall, then Spiral, Evo, RUP and, more recently with XP, Scrum, Kanban, DAD, SAFe (there are many others, but, their impact, so far, has been limited).

In this tutorial, I'll show why this search for the holy grail is bound to fail--each methodology has strenghts and weaknesses that make it suitable only in some contexts--and I'll describe a different approach based on patterns and pattern languages, that teams can use to create their own methodologies to suit their specific needs, which, in my experience, has a higher chance of success. 

The approach is based on the observation that all the practices used in all modern methodologies--e.g., user stories, use cases, team self organization, TDD, unit testing, acceptance testing, continuous integration, iterative and incremental development, etc.--come from the same set. Different methodologies just mix and match them differently. All those practices can (and many have already been) described as patterns whose relationships with each other form a set of pattern languages.

The challenges in distributed agile can be seen under three broad categories viz., a) Communication and Coordination, b) Time Zone Differences and c) Issues related to People, Culture and Leadership Style. Successful teams consciously adhere to certain principles and it is their principle-centered approach that helps them face such challenges and deliver the best.

Steven Covey wrote: "Principles always have natural consequences attached to them. There are positive consequences when we live in harmony with the principles. There are negative consequences when we ignore them. But because these principles apply to everyone, whether or not they are aware, this limitation is universal. And the more we know of correct principles, the greater is our personal freedom to act wisely." This is true in all situations of life and it includes application of agile methods in geographically distributed teams too.

This session is to present the ten principles and elaborate 3-4 principles learned through experience in working with project teams and interactions with industry experts, and applied for more than a decade. These ten principles are above and beyond agile manifesto and agile principles. These are related to areas such as context-specific methodology, tools for productivity improvement, infrastructure for communication and coordination, knowledge management, focus on quality, inclusion, collaborative governance, automation, technical debt management, iteration progression and ensuring early success.

How do you effectively scale skill-based, quality training across your organization?

Over the years, I've experimented with different ideas/models to scaling skill-based training across an organization. In the last 4 years, I've pretty much settled down on the following model. Its very useful when mentoring teams on skills like Test-Drive-Development (TDD), Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), Product Discovery, Writing User Stories, Evolutionary Design, Design Patterns, Problem Solving, etc. I've successfully implemented this model at some very prominent fortune 500 enterprises.

The goal of this workshop is to explore what other successful models organized have used to scale skill-based training in their organization.

Pesentation deck is now available at http://www.slideshare.net/Managewell/what-next-31791295

Modern management methods are still based on the then seminal work by Henri Fayol some 200 years back, followed by Frederick Taylor's work some 100 years back! Sadly, those models were predominantly based on industrial work, and don't really work that well in knowledge industry and today's sociological dynamics at workplace. Classical Agile methods codify several people practices that allow for a self-organizing team to evolve, but doesn't offer a lot of guidance on how to develop and groom leadership for agile organizations beyond a software team. Management 3.0 takes this issue further and develops it into a separate discipline altogether. On similar lines, Holacracy seeks to create social technology for purposeful organizations, though not specially targeting software organizations. So, the issue of leadership still continues to be unresolved and rather left to pave its way on its own. Unfortunately, when we want to achieve true end-to-end agility, it is not enough for software teams to be charging at top speeds but leadership not evenly matched to support them well in their endeavors. We clearly have a problem at hand...

In this talk, we will study how the role of leadership has evolved and what does it look like for agile organizations at present. Many agile methods take an extreme view that limit leadership to team-level collective ownership of leadership. However, that might not be enough because of various reasons. In any non-trivial organization, whether a software organizations or any modern business employing software for business advantage, the reality is that organization units beyond a plain-vanilla software teams do exist. So, how does one go about grooming their top talent for playing an effective part in this process?

Finally, we will also try to take a shot at some of evolving paradigms. For example, all these management thoughts are still based on the kind of outdated premise that an organization is based on 'boundaries' of operations. However, already we see that model being broken down, and the future teams look more like boundaryless entities bound with nothing but a unifying purpose that brings a bunch of volunteers together for a period of time. If our success increasing depends on such teams being able to effectively self-manage themselves, what role does leadership have to play in it, and are we getting ready for it? 

"Release Early, Release Often" is a proven mantra and many companies have taken this one step further by releasing products to real users with every commit a.k.a Continuous Deployment (CD).

Over the years, I've built many web/infrastructure products, where we've effectively practiced CD. However at Edventure Labs, when we started building iPad games, we realized there was no easy was to practice CD, esp. given the fact that Apple review takes a few days.

Our main question was: As mobile app developers, how should we architect/design our apps for CD?

We were a young startup, learning new behavior about our users (kids aged 5-8) everyday. We could not afford any delay in releasing latest, greatest features to our users. To solve this problem, I believe we've built an innovative solution to enable any mobile app developer to achieve CD.

If you are building real products, which have platform/3rd-party dependencies and you want to practice CD, this session is for you.

We are from Large Indian IT Services organisation where most of the projects follow traditional/waterfall ways of working and the mindset of the senior management is also used to this way of working for all project types (Application Maintenance, Minor Enhancement, Bug Fixing and L3 Analysis space), while these methods have their own shortfalls and projects suffer because of the methodology, many leaders still believe that by following tradtional process their problems would be solved. Through this experience report, we would like to share how Visualisation and Agile Practices rescued the waterfall project from depleting Customer Confidence and Quality of Service Delivery.

The Project team of 9 members distributed at onsite and offshore was involved in maintenance / enhancement type of work for a large Investment Bank with several new features being implemented as change requests. Team’s responsibility starts from Analysis to Deployment into Production for the work comes in ad-hoc manner. The issues and challenges by project teams were

• Longer duration to complete the change requests and ensuring an on-time delivery
• Low Customer Satisfaction and Quality of Deliverable.
• Proactively manage application issues despite higher experience of team.
• Low employee morale
• Lack of senior management participation and constant fire fighting with the customer.

Project team focused on 3 areas

Business/Client IT team

• Prioritize the change requests by highest business/end user value (Input Cadence)

• ‘Drive’ the development efforts to incrementally deliver

Teams

• Focused on speed in delivering change request by eliminating waste

• Focused on enhancing knowledge sharing by Collaboration using Visualisation Boards and daily stand up meeting

• Focus to Deliver right at First Time

Management

• Focus on the value stream (cycle time)

• ‘Drive’ Continuous Improvement (Kaizen)

• Manage impediments , making blockers visible

Within 3 months of time after team started adopting the Visualisation and Agile practices the teams and senior management could see the improvement in the areas of 

1. Increase in Balance Score Card scores from 4 to 6.5 and many areas scored 7.0/7.0
2. Productivity improvement by 25%

Introducing the Kanban method through a 3-layered value system - a familiar core that stimulates and drives change, a middle layer that is about direction and alignment, and a protective outer layer of discipline and working agreements.

This humane, values-centric model aligns Kanban with the concept of the Learning Organisation and suggests ways to seek resonances with other methods. It has some practical benefits too: it can help us engage more effectively with the organisation as it currently is; it encourages us to self-reflect on our effectiveness as agents of change; it provides a convenient framework for the capture of stories.

One of the quickest ways to achieve greater buy-in, clearer communication and higher levels of engagement with team members, stakeholders, sponsors and business units is to get "visual agility". Using cards, stories, post it notes, visual charts, maps, models, metaphors - and most of all, some hand crafted "drawn-in-the-moment" visuals learn some engaging ways to facilitate with visuals in an Agile world. 

Many people speak about 'making work visible' - showing progress, visualising solutions, scoping out possibilities - having visual agility gives you the skills to step into any role at a moment's notice and help bring clarity to the problem, quicker. This can apply to individual thinking and brainstorming, or group situations when you're presenting your idea or you're working with the group to create a solution. 

Lynne Cazaly is a communications specialist and master facilitator. Lynne provides clarity to project complexity through workshops, training and visual strategy. Lynne trains, facilitates, speaks and coaches on visual facilitation, visual thinking and other engaging tools for project people, to help boost buy-in, collaboration and engagement.

Lynne Cazaly is the author of the book 'Visual Mojo - how to capture thinking, convey information and collaborate using visuals'. 

http://www.lynnecazaly.com.au/visual-mojo-the-book-lynne-caz/

Included in this session is 30 icons to use straight away which Lynne calls 'Quick Pics'.

Lynne recently ran the session again in New Zealand at an Agile Wellington Meetup - read their comments here

Can you maintain agile engineering practices with a distributed team?

Johannes is the Oslo based Chief Scientist for the Sri Lanka based company Exilesoft. In order to promote agile engineering practices, he uses remote pair programming to connect with teams halfway across the world.

In this talk, we will go through a practical approach for remote pair programming adopted for high-latency situations. We will demonstrate remote pair programming with a live example and we will discuss the advantages and usages of the approach. We will also cover the practical parts of remote pair programming, such as tools and setup.

After seeing this talk, the audience should be able to remotely pair with members of their distributed team. They will also get a lot of tips on how to use pair programming effectively in both local and remote settings.

There are, on a philosophical level, significant clashes between the agile paradigm and Quality Systems such as ISO 9000 or CMM/CMMi, this is already presented in the Agile Manifesto. Agile Development is based on what I would call post-modern paradigms when compared to the plan-driven and early iterative development methodologies which are based on a positivist paradigm.

The underlying philosophical challenges cannot be easily mitigated. But a purist agile paradigm may tend to stress a positivist paradigm as well and this can be dangerous since then agile would not be agile any longer.

While it may not be possible to completely remove the challenges between agile and quality systems, it is possible to learn to live with some tension between different paradigms. 

There are some obvious areas of conflict, for examplethe Agile methodologies strongly discourages unnecessary documentation, and questions that it is possible to provide all requirements up-front. ISO 9000 on the other hand demands requirements up-front and documented evidence of almost anything, but such practical aspects can actually be mitigated with relative ease. Other aspects may demand much more effort. In particular the internal auditing process is problematic and other means of ensuring compliance may have to be considered.

We have in my company systematically piloted a number of organisational changes in order to better support agile development. We have done this within the overall framework of our ISO 9000 system which is used a structure anda a gatekeeper. To do this we have used Action Research, which in it self is a kind of agile methodology, although of much older date than agile development.

I will in my talk focus on the practical experiences we have had of building an organisational framework for agile development and while doing that suggesting a few means to mitigate the challenges mentioned initialy.

Traditional models of management and corporate governance are failing to keep up with the needs of the modern economy. Change, both technological and cultural, is occurring at faster rates than ever before. In this climate, modern enterprises will live or die on their ability to adapt. This is where Agile, and Agile Business Management, come in. Agile is change; changing how you think, changing how you work and changing the way you interact. This is important whether you are a software developer or a CEO.

In this presentation, Evan will provide engaging and enlightening case studies of Agile beyond IT; from lean startups to large enterprises. These will be reinforced with practical approaches for the leadership of teams, divisions and businesses. 

Taking the successful concepts and methods from the Agile movement and Evan's new book, Agile Business Management is a framework for the day-to-day management of organisations regardless of industry, size or location. We will discuss processes, techniques, and case studies for the 4 key domains from Agile Business Management;

1. You, the Agile Manager - What makes a good manager and how do their responsibilities change?
2. Integrated Customer Engagement - Collaboration and communication techniques to build trust and deliver Customer needs efficiently, with minimal waste, and to everyone's satisfaction.
3. The Structure of an Agile Organisation - Efficient, transparent and collaborative techniques to manage empowered staff.
4. Work, the Agile Way - Managing all types of business functions, from software, HR, finance to legal, by using Just-In-Time planning and Incremental or Continuous Delivery processes.

Ultimately, the goal of this presentation is to make you think about your role as a leader. 

Let your hands be the search engine for your brain! LEGO® Serious Play® is a powerful thinking, communicating and problem solving technique that can help you and your team do serious work through structured play activities using a popular and playful 3D modeling toy. Through a facilitated process of building models that, storytelling and reflection, every person at the table is engaged and actively participating in the discussion, whether the topic is individual aspirations, team relationships, developing a new product or solving a wicked organizational problem. Everyone builds and everyone tells their story – all participants have equal opportunity to put their own points of view on the table, unlocking new perspectives and exposing the answers that are already in the room.  LEGO Serious Play has been used successfully for team-building and problem solving in a variety of organizations, from NASA to RBC to academic settings and public utilities.  

This presentation provides a hands-on introduction to LEGO Serious Play, so that you can experience firsthand how using LEGO to do real work unleashes creativity and enables meaningful conversations in a very short time. We will explore how to use this playful technique to collaboratively elicit information about user requirements and strategic design issues using the open source User Requirements with Lego methodology developed by a team at the University of Lugano, Switzerland.  This approach is particularly suited to Agile teams that want to get team members and stakeholders sharing their different perspectives on common goals in an open and light-weight manner.

If I say, culture is important to adopting Agile, most people will just agree without even thinking too much about it.  But what is meant by "culture"?  Why is it important?

Culture is not typical behaviour; it is not what we say we value (but don't actually do).  Culture is our basic assumptions of how things work.  Culture is the logic we use to think through and respond to any particular situation.

If you imagine a pyramid, Agile practice and any other visible behaviour is on the top, stated or written Agile values and principles are in the middle, fundamental assumptions (aka culture) is at the base.

My session is intended to expose people to the base of that pyramid.

If culture is assumptions, then to understand Agile culture, we need to understand the basic assumptions of Agile.  To do this, I have created an approach called "Think Like an Agilist" that both exposes how we think through an "Agile situation" and allows us to deliberately practice "Agile culture".

The general idea is that I won't just talk about Agile culture and values, what I'll call "culture theatre", but rather expose people, who nominally consider themselves part of the Agile culture, to their underlying thought processes and assumptions, given a relatively difficult scenario.  Those thought processes and assumptions are the essence of culture (reference Edgar H. Schein).  What is interesting is noting when the thought processes and assumptions are different which indicates that there is a different culture at play.  What I've noticed is that this difference is common between novice vs expert Agilists.

Note that it isn't even about analyzing vs doing it mechanically but more about exposing what assumptions are being used to respond.

NOTE: I will be updating the attached slides as when I created them, I was framing it more as "doctrine" rather than "culture", defined as fundamental assumptions"

A lot has been said about Kanban and how these can be implemented in Software development, but the learning remains superficial till we go deep down to its roots to understand the core underlying practices and principles and why/how these practices evolved over a period of time. Infact the roots of most of the Agile methods can be traced back to Lean/Toyota Production Systems, a set of practices and techniques used by Toyota to build great set of cars with limited amount of resources. Even though building software is much different than building a car, there are many lessons and practices that can be learnt and applied nonetheless.

In this interactive and visual talk, we'll take a virtual trip to Japan and learn some of the best practices/concepts that originated at Toyota for building "world-class" cars and see how each of these can be applied to software development. Learning about the roots of Lean should help the attendees in sowing the seeds of Lean improvement in their organizations and would help in building better software and improving the efficiency of the software delivery lifecycle.

It is not a question of if a team is going to have a conflict; it is a question of when. Equipping them to deal with conflict is more than creating agreements or having a good facilitator. We look at a conflict model that focuses on dynamics of conflict by understanding- 1. Cognitive skills:self-awareness about triggers, hot spots, emotions,behaviors. 2. Emotional skills:reading emotions, body language, balancing emotions, using curiosity 3. Behavioral skills:understanding others’ perspectives and needs, avoiding 8 destructive behaviors, embracing 8 constructive behavior. In an organizational setting, it is important to understand the source (culture, interdependence, incompatibility, personality, power, etc.) and types of conflict (cognitive vs. affective). Creating awareness about conflict processes, retaliatory cycles and building a conflict profile can empower teams engage in constructive disagreements. 

Annual software release cycles cramping the agility of the team? Too many hot fixes reducing the efficiency of your organization? Customers waiting impatientlyfor  the next cool features hot off the press? These are some of the painful and common problems faced by development teams worldwide. In today's world, most things get outdated or out-of-fashion very fast - and software is no different. Users cannot afford to wait for the next cool set of features for a year. They want a steady stream of cool new features that they can adopt and use immediately.

My team follows a development model that we like to call Open Commercial Development - where we're always connected to our stakeholders, our plans are out in the open, and we're always gathering feedback and reprioritizing. We used to have yearly releases of our product - a sort of big bang release with a host of new featres. Based on our stakeholder interactions, however, we figured that our software delivery wasn't agile enough for our customers. Users wanted new features incrementally throughout the year. They especially didn't want to wait a year for a feature that they'd requested that was critical for their business.

So began our journey to Continuous Delivery - an interesting one for sure. It's not easy to deliver new features, manage technical debt, collaborate with users and incorporate their feedback into the new features - once every quarter. To do it consistently, with quality and on time, you need to have a framework in place - a combination of planning, process, automation and team organization - that lets teams focus on the right things to get to DONE DONE for their new features, and at the same time manage their quality and tecnical debt. Over the past year, we like to think that we've put that framework in place, and that is what I'd like to talk about in this session.

Feedback is perhaps the most important aspect of the overall agile lifecycle. If the feedback is too wide and shallow, it won't give enough actionable feedback. If it is too narrow and deep, it might fail to register feedback outside its focus area. So, how does one go about designing feedbacks that enable agile learning. We call them agile feedbacks.

In this brief session, we will share an experience from designing agile feedbacks for agile trainings and workshops. The objective was to get most critical feedback in shortest amount of time to enable quick action planning. We created feedback that took a maximum of 5 minutes and enabled the most important learning in both, focussed as well as open-ended manner that allowed us to focus on the most critical items. We employed elements of Design Thinking and Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation (RITE) to improve the process and quality of feedback themselves. We will also be touching up these concepts and how effective they were.

This is an exploratory talk, based, first, on some recent insights from cognitive science, behavioural economics (which have enriched Agile folklore already) and then on, some interesting twists from culture based research in sociology and psychology. While the former will be useful in understanding the common pitfalls encountered in a scaled Agile implementation, the latter, maybe useful in understanding the unexpected twists when doing scaled agile in a distributed/off-shore environment that have different cultural norms.

While the anti-patterns and anti-paths are common across the world, the solution to these does differ. The assumptions behind what leads to a motivated, self-organizing, self-directing team will determine how to bring about a nuanced mindset to Agility, and understanding that what works in the West may not work in India (and other similar higher Power-Distance-Index countries).

While sharing my experiences in a large scale Agile transformation and working with different cultures, I hope to bring out some subtle variations that could be useful in coaching and working with and transforming Agile teams in an offshore engagement.

Are you developing new functionalities into branches? Have you ever experienced the pain of merging the changes into trunk? The so called "merge hell" is one of the first and probably the most important smell that tells you've been abusing of your source control manager branching capabilities and, most likely, hurting your productivity and your code quality as well. In order to move towards a continuous delivery approach, the practice of trunk based development suggests ways to avoid this type of issues among others like inconsistent feature sets, code that stays in an undeployable state for a long time, regressions introduced by semantic differences that arise during those joyful merging sessions, integration surprises with the other features, and the like. Even if you are not a developer on your team you will benefit from the examples and techniques presented.