Organizations are applying agile strategies with large teams, geographically distributed teams, in outsourcing situations, in complex domains, in technically complex situations, and in regulatory situations.  Sometimes they’re successful and sometimes they’re not.  The Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) decision process framework is a people-first, learning-oriented hybrid agile approach to IT solution delivery. It has a risk-value delivery lifecycle, is goal-driven, is enterprise aware, and is scalable. The DAD framework is a hybrid which adopts proven strategies from Scrum, XP, Agile Modeling, Outside-In Development, Lean/Kanban, DevOps, and others in a disciplined manner.  In this presentation you’ll discover how DAD provides a solid foundation from which to scale agile, learn how agile teams work at scale, and identify several common scaling anti-patterns which should be avoided.

DevOps is a higher form of agility. It is a blueprint for a great culture and and process between the different groups involved in the delivery pipeline. The big question is how to achieve it. If you are founding a startup today, it can be quite easy to take that blueprint and use it to create your process, hire the right versatile flexible people, and start delivering without any technical/automation debt or friction. But most of us are not founding new startups. Most of us already have a running operation with people, culture, process that matured over the years and despite its flaws is currently the way we do things. Changing that is non-trivial. For things to change people need to understand WHY change, what we are changing, and we need an effective process for managing the change itself (HOW to change). So what ARE we changing to? DevOps is highly focused on looking at the whole value stream from idea to value and ensuring effective flow through this pipeline. Kanban is ONE way of HOW to change. It starts by visualizing all the work flowing in the pipeline, then managing the flow focusing on finishing things end to end rather than starting in order to stay busy. It continues to what we call the “Work in process Diet” – Straining the flow more and more in order to identify obstacles to tighter and tighter DevOps culture/operation and faster feedback cycles. You can expect to come out of this session with ideas how to take your current operation and DevOpsify it in a safe evolutionary way using the Kanban method.

Agile has a problem. When we started out with Agile, people used it because it made their lives and products better. Now people complain that Agile is about meetings, top-down mandates, and wasting time. We can do better. It’s time for a change.

In response, Diana Larsen and James Shore developed The Agile Fluency™ Model and Martin Fowler published it, “Your Path Through Agile Fluency” (http://agilefluency.com). The model describes how teams grow in their understanding of Agile over time. It's a descriptive model, because it reflects what happens in the real world, and in it's an aspirational model, because you can use it to understand how to invest in improving your teams.

We've found the model very useful for helping teams, managers, and executives understand what they can get from Agile and what they need to invest in order to get those results. The model's emphasis on concrete outcomes means executives are open—even eager—to devote the effort needed. Leaders appreciate being able to see the tradeoffs and make a strategic decision, and teams thrive when given meaningful goals and the time and resources needed to achieve them.    

In this workshop, led by Diana Larsen, together we’ll dig deeper into the model, including:

-       Agile Fluency Model Overview

-       Bringing Agile Fluency into your organization

-       Examples of Agile Fluency in real-world teams

-       Examples of organizational investments

-       Supplemental materials for metrics and assessments

-       Agile principles and practices in the model

-       New directions and support for the Agile Fluency Model