Dance with Diana Larsen along the path to Agile Fluency for your team. In 2012, Diana Larsen and James Shore refiined the Agile Fluency Modeland Martin Fowler published it, "Your Path Through Agile Fluency." (http://agilefluency.com) The model describes how teams grow in their understanding and skillful ease with Agile over time. The model reflects what Diana and Jim, and many others, have seen in real teams in the real world, and it inspires organizations to learn how to invest in teams. In this keynote, Diana will share stories of real teams as they dance along the path and energize you to find your teams' best dance.

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.

Over the past ten years, software development teams using Agile approaches to work have adopted retrospective meetings as a critical practice for learning and continuous improvement. To the extent that practitioners say, “If you’re not holding iteration retrospectives, you’re not doing Agile.”

 Agile retrospectives at the end of each iteration or work increment set aside time for the team to examine feedback from current conditions and develop targeted tactics to keep the project on track. Many practitioners experience retrospectives as great means for detecting good, poor, and missing practices; as a handle to make tacit knowledge about effective practices explicit; and to define improvement actions in order to deal with ineffective or inefficient technical, process, and teamwork practices.

However, too many teams and practitioners don’t reap the benefits that effective retrospective meetings can provide. Too many retrospective meetings receive cursory or inadequate facilitation. Too many retrospective meetings are held to  “check the box” on the project management template, rather than to focus on real improvements. For too many teams, the action plans coming out of retrospectives are never implemented or revisited. Too many teams seek to shift blame and responsibility for action through the retrospective.

In too many organizations, retrospective meetings don’t deliver the promised return on time invested (ROTI).

In this session, you’ll learn how to get the most from your retrospective practices. Diana Larsen, co-author of Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great, will introduce you to a simple framework for getting better outcomes from retrospective meetings, suggest ways to maintain the relevance of improvement to the work of your team, and provide tips and pointers to get great returns from the time your teams devote to every meeting. 

Organizations invest energy, effort and real dollars to stay in trend. Here's one of the trend: Agile is no longer a buzz word, Scaling Agile is. Terms like Enterprise Agile, Scaled Agile, SAFe, LESS, DAD, Agility Path are conveniently thrown around in meetings and speeches as organizations line up to get on the bandwagon of 'Scaling Agile'. Scaling Agile - from the team and product level to the organizational level has it's own benefits and challenges. Is scaling Agile right for you? Are you ready for it? If you've been thinking of scaling, you might be in luck. In this session, we will discuss grounds up approach of how to analyze and evaluate if an organization (or a business unit) is ready for scaling Agile. You'll create your own set of evaluation criteria specific to your organization's situation and learn steps your organization can take to be more prepared for scaling Agile and reap organization-wide benefits. The focus will remain on your context and not on promoting any particular scaling framework.

        "Scaling. Its about the context not the process." - Jeff Sutherland

PS: This will be a no slides, hands-on workshop. Be prepared to actively participate throughout the session.

Gallup’s latest Global Employee Engagement survey show that only 13% employees are fully engaged and rest are either not engaged or actively dis-engaged. Traditional Managers and leaders who command a position within organization, usually exercise a  bit of authority, power, as well as resources (rewards, bonuses, recognition, etc) towards engaging people. Leadership experts and executive coaches take a route that usually involves, motivating and inspiring people, building trust, uniting everyone in the organization towards common mission, values, and goals. These work great however, need a lot of time, effort and resources.

Agile Coaches on the other hand, are in different situation altogether. Most of the Agile coaches usually command no power and authority within the organization. Yet, they aspire and commit to missions such as creating highly collaborative, self-organizing and high performing teams, developing learning organizations, helping people change behaviors etc. Think about a team that simply won’t speak up, people who would always show up late to meetings, people who prefer to work from closed door offices, team members who prefer they can do anything but contribute on the team, architects who do not share the architecture details with anyone except the leaders. Oh Boy!! there are many such behaviors that hinder teams and organizations from becoming truly Agile.

In this session, I will share six simple, easy to implement strategies and associated instances how I discovered these strategies that I've found very powerful in my experience. Agile coaches and anyone with no power and authority can apply any of these strategies to boost employee engagement, neutralize the environment from Whilte Elephants and promote collaboration. The session will be interactive and will involve simple yet really fun activity. Get ready to cheer and make some noise!!