Many team challenges can be tracked back to cognitive biases: our judgement gets anchored, we think we're better than we are, and we are our own favorite reference point. And even though we're encouraged to "think outside the box," there are conditions where we have a bias against creativity. If that's not a recipe for a tough team environment, I don't know what is.

Improve your game by learning about bias! You'll leave this session with strategies for identifying and mitigating bias on your team. 

Do you want to write great User Stories that provide the vehicle for conversation and confirmation that we build the right thing? Do you struggle with splitting stories so that they still provide business value but can be accomplished within a fraction of your iteration and be potentially shippable to production? We will do a quick refresher on User Story formatting to include Acceptance Criteria. Then we will dive into learning techniques for splitting stories in this interactive workshop. 

Are you a Scrum Master that has a strong affinity to sticky notes, dry erase markers, and other tools of Agile facilitation? Are you tired of seeing the same old blue painters tape on every kanban board? Want to learn some new facilitation techniques that you can use in retrospectives or to build awesome information radiators with your team?

If so, join me for my session on the Super Agile Satchel.

During the session, I’ll briefly talk about how the satchel came to be and its awesome contents.  Then we’ll jump right in to actual examples of information radiators that I created with the tools the satchel contains.  I'll discuss why choosing the right materials, colors, and sizes are critical to facilitation and creating information radiators that draw attention, are maintainable, and focus the team on what's truly important.

Does your organization find it hard to determine “the right thing” to build? You are not alone – studies show that even in very high performing organizations only 10-35% of initial ideas actually generate business value. Agile development should make it easier to obtain early customer feedback, but in most organizations Agile approaches are limited to software development teams with little connection to the rest of the business. In addition, Agile methods by themselves offer few guidelines on how to translate organizational goals and customer needs into the backlog’s content and relative priorities in the first place. As a result, there is a significant, but often underappreciated risk that Agile teams end up very efficiently building “the wrong thing right.”

In this session, we explore how Lean Discovery and experimentation can expand the scope of Agile’s “inspect and adapt” feedback loops to systematically identify and validate critical assumptions about our product’s value proposition. Based on the Lean Startup and Lean UX approach to product development as a series of hypotheses about customers’ behaviors and value perceptions, we discuss ways to derive testable assumptions from organizational goals to enable validated learning. Finally, we explore the implications of this approach on project planning and budgeting to support increased business agility.

So why does pair programming (or any form of pairing really) work? Well rather than tell you why, let's experience it! 

This is a simple 3 round exercise that you can do with your teams and managers to demonstrate the benefits of pairing. It will show the linkage between having a shared mental model through collaboration and ease of integrating the resulting work.

Static designs and monolithic structures are brittle and prone to failure. How can we progress beyond them? By understanding the nature of our challenges and applying the right tools at the right time. This talk will describe how to use evolutionary principles to foster changes in your architecture and infrastructure so that you can create antifragile systems.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb spoke to these ideas in “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.” Join us as we describe how we can:

• Move beyond planning for known failure modes and instead develop antifragile systems that are safe-to-fail in unanticipated ways.
• Leverage the Cynefin framework and its 5 sense-making domains to better frame problems and drive action.
• Employ microservice architectures to make the variability of our environments work for us, not against us.
• Gain knowledge more rapidly through multiple parallel experiments.

How do you create excited, engaged, happy, and effective teams? Start them off right by letting your engineers choose their own teams and projects! Through a proven technique called self-selection, Opower was able to turn a tribe of 40 engineers, many of whom were unexcited about continuing to work on the same old products, into six high-performing teams with engineers who were excited to embark on a new adventure, acquire new skills, and ship awesome code.

In this session we will cover the self-selection process: what it is, generating buy-in & excitement, preparing your teams, running a self-selection event, dealing with concerns throughout the process, and measuring the success of your process. This talk is for anyone who wants to create better teams including Agile Coaches, Release Train Engineers, Program Managers, individual contributors, and other organizational change leaders.

Agile reminds us that the focus of any set of requirements needs to be on an outcome rather than a collection of whats and whos.  Storytelling is a powerful tool to elevate even the most diehard requirements analyst from a discussion of individual requirements to a discussion of outcomes. Outcomes are the big picture that acts as an anchor for whole efforts and which is continuously broken down into more and more detailed backlogs. The onion metaphor that is popularly used in agile planning (Cohn’s Planning Onion) can be used to describe the evolution of backlogs. Building an initial backlog is much like peeling through the layers of an onion to get to the core. There are many mechanisms for developing and maintaining the detailed backlogs, including asking, observing, showing and all sorts of hybrids. Using the onion metaphor, techniques for developing and splitting user stories are the second layer of the onion. However, before getting to the center of the backlog evolution onion, composed of features, epics, and user stories, we need to understand the big picture. 

 Presentation:

Provide an overview of storytelling in a business context and a lean change canvas framework.

Exercise

The room will be broken into teams (aisles will be used if auditorium seating).  Each team will be seeded with a common product change scenario. Based on the scenario the teams will be asked to tell the story of the change and capture the story on a small change canvas.  The exercise and session will culminate in by sharing ideas and lessons learned.

(Note the longer workshop would break the changing canvas into epics and stories)

A well-facilitated large-scale Planning event (such as a SAFe PI Planning) can leave you feeling energized and more confident in your team and your direction. Poorly facilitated events have the adverse effect and can leave you feeling like you’ve just been run over by a Mack Truck.

There is not a lot of guidance from SAFe on how to facilitate this critical event from their website, other than an example agenda and program board. This session will focus on how information radiators and other visual tools can make a tremendous difference in increasing engagement and collaboration amongst teams in order to orchestrate a thoughtful plan with high confidence.

We will show battle-tested ways on how visuals are critical to...

• increase collaboration across teams
• reinforce development practices & standards
• track team progress through the day
• highlight dependencies
• increase the confidence vote
• motivate teams to strive for success

Participants will leave this session with some visual tools and tips they can immediately put to use in their designing their next PI Planning or ANY large-scale planning event.
“There is no magic in SAFe… except for maybe PI Planning” - SAFe authors

Software development culture has been dominated by the hero. Rock stars, ninjas, and 10Xers have been the center of attention, giving the skewed perception that great software is the result of a single amazing developer. But this couldn't be further from the truth.

In this talk, Andrea Goulet, the CEO of Corgibytes, will share her experiences using vulnerability and empathy as drivers for Agile adoption and culture building. 

Does your team treat test code differently than production code? Do you let your test code accumulate duplication and complexity that you'd normally attempt to squash in your production code? Have your tests become brittle? Are you worried that they aren't providing you the same value they used to? Have you strongly considered dumping your test suite and starting over? Are you afraid that if you refactor your test code, you'll introduce false positives?

If you said yes to any of those questions, then this talk is for you.

We'll explore the technique of "refactoring against the red bar" (http://butunclebob.com/ArticleS.MichaelFeathers.RefactoringAgainstTheRedBar), and how you can employ this technique to confidently refactor your test code. No longer do you need to let your test code have a lower standard of quality than your production code.

When dealing with metrics, most Agile or Lean teams begin with a Burndown Chart.  Unfortunately, that is also where most of them stop.  While a Burndown Chart is a great first step, it only provides a small sliver of the information the team has access to.

In this talk, we’ll be starting at the beginning with what a Cumulative Flow Diagram is, how it relates to a Burndown Chart, its advantages, and where it too ultimately stops.  We’ll then look at additional information radiators that the team can easily use based on existing data to provide transparency to stakeholders and the raw material for continuous improvement.

In his book Reinventing Organizations, Frederic Laloux describes the “Teal Organization” model. Teal organizations have an evolutionary purpose, self-managing teams with little or no organizational hierarchy, and individuals who bring their whole person to work rather than putting on a work face when leaving the house. Zappos is the most talked about organization attempting a transition to Teal.

Bob describes how his organization is becoming a Teal Organization. Since the concept of Teal is not a specific recipe, they are basing their transition on practices gleaned from other organizations and their history of helping truly agile organizations. LitheSpeed is starting the path of delegating most authority to team members including profit sharing and hiring decisions, using a Spotify Tribe model and extreme transparency, implementing a simple set of peer-based operating procedures, and deemphasizing titles.

Bob shares lessons on building the organization, culture, and systems to support the transition. Although it’s early in the journey and the road is sometimes rough, Bob is excited about the prospect of a Teal future.

Come hear the good, the bad and the ugly side of this long days journey into teal.

 Training is often the first step in implementing an Agile transformation within an organization.  Often an agile coach will corral resistant staff members in a room and sell the virtues of Agile with disappointing results.  But at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, students are clamoring to voluntarily attend full day sessions and recommending classes to their colleagues.  The organization has successfully grown the Agile Training Program to include 10 courses taken by 2200+ attendees from 25+ federal agencies.  The training is not required on anyone’s mandatory curriculum, but instead is taken because students feel it provides real value enhancing their ability to work well in the organization.  Effective training doesn’t just educate, but instead changes behavior.  

The masterminds behind the USCIS Agile Training Program will unpack the secrets to their success.  Mash Eslami, USCIS Section Chief of Agile Training, and Melinda Solomon, USCIS Agile Training Lead explore 10 factors that make students receptive to learn.  Part Experience Report, part Case-Study, this session will explore:

• How to choose your initial audience
• What to do with resistant students
• How to structure a course that changes behavior
• Ways to grow the program
• And much more…

Warning, road closed use alternate route.

Has your agile transformation stalled? Are you treading water? Does it feel like your standups are just going through the motion?  Sounds like you need a Transformation bypass.

Any agile transformation is a challenge and can stall if it doesn't get the right amount of attention. Maybe you had a consulting firm come in to lay out a roadmap. Only after they left the anti-bodies rushed back in. Or your tried to kick it off internally, to find yourself never getting off the ground despite executive support?

This session provides a playbook for re-engaging (or engaging from the get go) an enterprise agile transformation. A week by week, play by play guide for enabling the change engine to get enough momentum to keep going despite the resistance.

This playbook is based on what we are doing right now in the AOL Platform's division. From day one hitting the ground to when and how you roll out common training, to what you do next, and next and next.

Today, knowledge workers are seeking to find meaning in our lives and purpose in our work. With this new generation of employees who are as interested in purpose as in profit, it is imperative that we revisit management schemes like top down work assignment, the annual review, strict “clock punching” work hours and inflexible vacation policies; and recognize their negative effects on individual morale and team productivity.

As leaders, it is time to recognize and own our responsibility in these counter productive techniques and boldly move into the future with radical alternatives. Now, with organizations as diverse as Virgin, LinkedIn, The Motley Fool, and Zappos applying Frederic Laloux’s “Teal” system to revolutionize management, it is time for us to undergo personal transformations and to lead as well as we manage.

Join Sanjiv to learn how to create the space for a “results only” workplace with a flatter organization structure, work anywhere flexibility, participatory profit sharing, and delegated hiring and firing. Explore the leadership journey needed, with its fears, challenges and tribulations; as well as its joys, triumphs and unassailable business results.

This talk is inspired by the book ‘The Confidence Code’ by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman.

What is confidence and how do you know you have it?   While confidence is partly influenced by genetics, it is not a fixed psychological state.  However, you won’t discover it thinking positive thoughts or by simply squaring your shoulders and faking it.  It requires work and choices: less focus on people pleasing and perfectionism and more action, risk taking and fast failures.  This is why it can seem harder for women because these behaviors aren’t typically the ‘norm’ for women but generally come naturally for men.

In this talk we will explore the roots of confidence and the gender gap between men and women.  To ground the learnings, we will also hear interview summaries from four great and diverse women in agile: 

 Lyssa Adkins, Esther Derby, Ellen Grove, and Kat Conner

Often, we will use the phrase agile acquisition when we really mean acquisition for agile. Both agile acquisition and acquisition for agile are necessary to deliver efficiently across government organizations. The processes within the federal government for doing acquisition means that we may spend a year or more to award a contract for work to begin. This creates a significant delay is beginning projects or programs that impedes the speed of delivery. Instead, we need to move toward a true agile acquisition process where we change how we execute acquisition so that we can begin delivery in much faster fashion.

This workshop will examine how to change our acquisition processes to become more agile and able to support the delivery of IT services in a much faster manner. We will look at both successes and failures in acquisition and determine what changes need to be made in order to meet the quickly changing needs of government. Both contractor and employee viewpoints will be considered and discussed. We will look specifically at ways that government is trying to make these changes in the DHS Procurement Innovation Lab, the Office of Federal Procurement Agile training, as well as others and how those activities may play into your organization and procurement activities.

One of the 12 principles of the Agile manifesto states that “The best architecture, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” Why is that? and what exactly are self-organizing teams? How does a team become self-organizing? Teams that have always been used to command and control cannot suddenly become self-organizing overnight. Come to this session to learn what self-organizing really means. Understand the attributes of a self-organizing team and some of the challenges you face in getting your team there. Understand how to find the right balance between team learning and team empowerment vs. control? Leave with techniques to help you build and foster high performing self-organizing teams.

Max Weber and Michel Crozier both got it right when they described the ideal bureaucracy which is the number one impediment to Agile efficiency in the Federal government.   Perhaps a grand re-organization, accompanied by lots of "systems analysis," “customer participation," "cooperative federalism," and "interdepartmental coordination " might lead to something getting done.   Merely to state this prospect is to deny it.   There is not one bureaucracy problem, there are several and the solution to each is in some degree incompatible with the solution to every other.  There are inherent limits to what can be accomplished by large hierarchical organizations.  this though proving session faces the issue and suggests meaningful methods to approach bureaucracy as an impediment and address procedural stagnation, attitudinal fixtures, rule-bounded-ness with interventional strategies.   By understanding ecology of agile governance, strategies can be designed to evolve a system with procedural innovativeness, attitudinal mobility, rule flexibility and wider interest.   A very complicated subject, but one that shouldn't be ignored because it is hard to solve and can't be fully addressed in 45 minutes.