Coaching for "Best Fit" Agile: Applying the Agile Fluency(™) Model open_in_new

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

MicroServices: Let's Build Some! open_in_new

It is one thing to talk about MicroServices. It is another altogether to have to build them.

After a brief introduction of MicroService principles, we will watch an animation of a MicroService environment. We will start with a pre-built skeleton microservice environment (message bus plus a couple of RESTful services running against it). We will then design and implement additional services to broaden the overall functionality. These additional services can be written in any language that will run on the participants laptop. While pairing is strongly encouraged, it is not required.

In the final stage, different pairs will implement different services, yet they will all run together implementing the animation.

We wrap up with the participants making observations on what they learned (and how it may be different from MicroServices they are currently implementing, if any).

Understanding and Implementing DevOps Flow open_in_new

DevOps seeks to extend the agile benefits of Flow, Collaboration, Inspect and Adapt thinking all the way to Production. While DevOps and Continuous Delivery were born in the world of web operations in companies like Etsy, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Flickr (also called Unicorns in the DevOps community) it is now clear that Enterprise IT/Product Development companies (also known as Horses) can  also benefit immensely from the ideas and practices and achieve similar results if they manage the change/journey towards DevOps in a way that makes sense in their context. In this workshop we will introduce the concepts of DevOps and Continuous Delivery and help attendees figure out how DevOps can fit into their world as well as how a “DevOps Implementation” might look like.

Cynefin and Sense-making open_in_new

Make better decisions

Learn to engage with the unanticipated for strategic advantage. For leaders, consultants and project managers.

How to manage uncertainty in increasingly complex environments?

The ability to manage and navigate complexity is a key strategic advantage. However, many organizations are trapped in past practices and structures. Breaking through such inertia requires praxis - theory informed practice.

The Cynefin framework, and its application in managing complexity is at the heart of this training program.

The Academy of Management awarded the Harvard Business Review article, Cynefin & Leadership, the "Best Practitioner Paper". Their citation reads:

"This paper introduces an important new perspective that has enormous future value, and does so in a clear way that shows it can be used. The article makes several significant contributions. First, and most importantly, it introduces complexity science to guide managers’ thoughts and actions. Second, it applies this perspective to advance a typology of contexts to help leaders to sort out the wide variety of situations in which they must lead decisions. Third, it advises leaders concerning what actions they should take in response"

Cognitive Edge has developed a modular training program that allows participants to understand the theory of complexity and how to put it to practice.

Crucial new knowledge for:

• Project management
• Change management
• Innovation and development
• Risk and crisis management
• Shaping culture
• Safety management
• Knowledge management

The Agile Team Facilitator; ICP- ATF Certification open_in_new

When you dissect most Agile practices (e.g. Iteration Planning, Retrospectives, Group Estimation Sessions, Backlog grooming sessions, etc.) you will notice that they are basically collaborative meetings/work sessions where a group of people need to creatively produce an outcome that they agree upon and can all commit to. One of the main duties of ScrumMasters and Team Facilitators is to design these agile practices and run them. Professional Facilitation tools are extremely valuable tools to help ScrumMasters, Product Owners, and Team Facilitators engage all the participants in the meeting, probe into their creativity and help bring them to consensus. Unfortunately many ScrumMasters, Product Owners and Team Facilitators are not aware yet of some of these facilitation tools and skills they need to design Agile practices to truly serve their teams. In this 2 day highly interactive workshop Ahmed will briefly introduce some of the basics of facilitation and some key facilitation tools and techniques such as Home and Away, Brain-writing, Nominal Group Technique, etc. During the workshop Ahmed will engage the audience in the "art" of facilitation and designing new innovative agile practices that can serve the team in the most effective way possible. All the tools introduced in this session will be applied to real agile practices and examples from real-life sessions will be incorporated to show the audience the practicality of the tools and that it is not just theoretical. For example he will show the participants how to use small groups and large groups facilitation tools to engage 50 people in a group estimation session for 300 stories where everyone participated and we finished in 90 mins.

Succeeding with BDD open_in_new

Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) is a set of practices and tools that enables business analysts, developers and testers to collaborate on a single source of truth: Executable Specifications.

Executable Specifications are living documents that serve several purposes.

• For business analysts they are a concise way to express how they want the software to behave
• For developers they are unambiguous requirements that guide and validate the implementation
• For testers they are automated regression tests

Executable Specifications are easy to read by both humans and computers. They are great for building a shared understanding across different roles on a software project. This shifts the focus from finding bugs to preventing them.

Product owners and business analysts are encouraged to join this session even though the second half will involve a little coding. Non-technical attendees will be paired up with technical attendees to create executable specifications together.

Passionate ProductOwner (CSPO) open_in_new

Using agile thinking and the Scrum Process framework to build products to be proud of.

Passionate Product Ownership combines **the best of Scrum and agile** iterative and incremental thinking with solid **product management**, and pragmatic **user experience design** practice.

The result goes beyond the standard 2-day process course to an experience that will expose you to new ways of thinking and working. You will leave with tools that will help you make better choices about what software to build, and ways to plan and execute software delivery that speeds learning and time to market.

Agile Infrastructure open_in_new

Roll Your Own Platform as a Service (PaaS) with Docker

You're convinced you need to run your own platform as a service (PaaS) . You’ve told your company that in order to save cash and comply with regulations for your sector (HIPAA etc), deploying a virtual, private platform on infrastructure you control is the way to go.

This workshop prepares us to build our own PaaS from scratch and deploy loosely-coupled applications with Docker.  We will learn how to:

• Assemble a PaaS from the ground up
• Create golden images for running Docker containers.
• Package up a complex application(s) into a Docker image
• Release the Docker image
• Deploy Docker containers to multiple hosts with Ansible
• Run and monitor Docker containers with Systemd
• Use Consul for service discovery, configuration and health monitoring

#NoEstimates - How to improve software development predictability and profitability by focusing on what matters open_in_new

Stop wasting time and money

#NoEstimates is an approach to software development that arose from the observation that large amounts of time were spent over the years in estimating and improving those estimates, but we see no value from that investment. Indeed, according to scholars Conte, Dunmore and Shens [1] a good estimate is one that is within 25% of the actual cost, 75% of the time.

This is the same as saying: give us your money, we promise not lose more than 25% of it (with a 25% probability that we will lose a lot more). We don’t find that acceptable or productive for our industry. There must be better ways to manage software and product development.

In this workshop we will review and analyze why we do estimates and how we can improve software and product development while reducing the time and money invested in estimating.