In today’s fast-paced business environment, a traditional approach to budgeting and funding initiatives doesn’t cut it. Instead, there is a need for an adaptive and responsive approach to managing the pipeline of work to be done. An approach that constantly measures the investment against the potential and actual returns and rapidly changing direction, without disrupting the flow of the organisation.

This is where Agile Portfolio Management comes into play. This class combines the latest thinking with tried and true methods to provide you with tools and techniques to ensure you’re able to help maximise value returned to your organisation.

This one-day course will provide you with an understanding of ways to identify value, how to evaluate and align initiatives with an organisation’s strategy and goals, and ways to view and categorise initiatives across a whole portfolio. It provides some tools to measure value over time, techniques for budgeting and forecasting both costs and benefits.

Agile Portfolio Management draws on ideas from: enterprise analysis; Management 3.0; Beyond Budgeting; sustainability; incremental delivery; building for learning versus building for delivery; and Lean Start-up among others to provide a rounded understanding of how to build, maintain and manage an agile portfolio across an organisation.

The course explores how an adaptive funding model creates an environment where the organisation can respond to change at a tactical and strategic level while maintaining predictability and ensuring good governance processes are followed.

This course does not focus on the technical practices of product development, rather on the guiding and leadership aspects needed to ensure the right initiatives are funded, and how these practices fit into an agile management framework

Direct URL:

After a whole century of Tayloristic management of hierarchical and bureaucratic organisations, it's time to evolve farther.

Let's learn how to have leadership and competences emerge, to let merit really count and be a compass for the entire group. Let's allow our ancient ability to behave as a unique organism to show its effectiveness in complexity, instead of trying to fit within mechanistic organisational rules. 

The time has come for adaptive organisations to evolve how we perceive and live work. This is the time for liquid organisations to show how principles can be the only "boss" in the governance of human systems, decisions can be taken damn close to their application point, systemic learning can happen in fast and continuous iterations. This is what LiquidO is all about.

All this can be done. We have been doing it for years now. It works amazingly well. Come and see how.

Direct URL:

This full-day workshop focuses on applying Agile engineering practices to web development. We'll look at practices such as build automation, continuous integration, test-driven development, refactoring, and incremental design and see how to apply them to front-end web development. We'll cover topics such as cross-browser testing, JavaScript, and CSS.

Audience: This session assumes familiarity with Agile engineering practices such as test-driven development and refactoring. Experience with JavaScript, CSS, and other web technologies is recommended. Come prepared to code.

Direct URL:

Disciplined Agile (DA) is an IT process decision framework for delivering sophisticated agile solutions in the enterprise. It builds on the existing proven practices from agile methods such as Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), Lean software development, Unified Process, and Agile Modeling to include other aspects necessary for success in the enterprise. DA fills in the gaps left by mainstream methods by providing guidance on how to effectively plan and kickstart complex projects as well as how to apply a full lifecycle approach, with lightweight milestones, effective metrics, and agile governance.

The one-day workshop is not technical and is suitable for all team members. Many group exercises reinforce the principles learned. The workshop is also valuable for management tasked with moving from traditional approaches to agile.

Direct URL:

The CIO invited me into his office and closed the door. Before he took me for a tour of his operation, he had a few stories to share. Important stories. Last year’s project was a disaster. Late, lots of quality issues, in short, a failure in every dimension. His boss, the CEO, had just presented him with a very personal ultimatum: deliver the next project by April 4th, "or else". 

"Or else what," I asked?

His team was burned out and scared. They were a hard-working and dedicated group, but fear and demoralization had set in and he didn't know what to do next. That’s why he wanted to talk to me, he had heard things about my company, things that seemed too good to be true, but he had to hear them firsthand. He wanted hope, inspiration, and a practical way to get there.

I told him about my own journey from joy to fear to disillusionment back to joy. It was simple, but, of course, simple isn’t easy. I wasn’t sure he and his organization were ready; "manufactured fear" is a powerful drug.

In this talk, I will share with you what I shared with him. I will explore what an intentionally joyful culture must choose as its focus. I will discuss what joy looks like, feels like, how it is organized. Along the way, you will be confronted by paradoxical approaches of how workplace noise increases productivity, how two people at one computer outperforms hero-based organizations 10-to-1, how rigor and discipline emanate from a shared-belief system, how transparency conquers fear, how all of the disciplines you study including agile, lean, and six sigma when done well are really about building human relationships at the intersections of business and technology, between project management and software development, between development and design and how quality can be a natural result of a team built on trust. This is not a theoretical talk, but rather a talk built from well over a decade of experience of leading a team focused on “the business value of joy”. There will be lots of room for discussion with the audience. The audience will begin to understand why thousands of people make the journey to Ann Arbor, Michigan every year to see The Menlo Software Factory firsthand, and why so many more are reading about it in Joy, Inc. – How We Built A Workplace People Love.

Direct URL:

After a whole century of Tayloristic management of hierarchical and bureaucratic organisations, it's time to evolve farther.

Work is deeply evolving. We now have the possibility to let leadership and competences emerge, to let merit really count and be a compass for the entire group. We actually have the responsibility of doing so. Today, effective work systems need to behave as a unique organism to show their effectiveness in complexity, instead of trying to fit within mechanistic organisational rules.

The time has come for adaptive organisations to evolve how we perceive and live work. This is the time for liquid organisations to show how principles can be the only "boss" in the governance of human systems, decisions can be taken damn close to their application point, systemic learning can happen in fast and continuous iterations. This is what LiquidO is all about.

All this can be done. It works amazingly well. We have been doing it for years now. And we're not alone at all.

Direct URL:

How do we actually know if our teams are doing well? Is gut instinct enough? Furthermore, in a rapidly growing organization such as Spotify, how can we ensure some sort of consistency in our baseline level of Agile knowledge across the technology, product, and design organization? 

In this talk, I’ll discuss techniques we have developed and use at Spotify to benchmark health and performance for our teams and some tactics we use to bring them closer to—and beyond!—being the best teams they can be. I’ll explain frameworks that can be used to give us tangible evidence about how we’re doing as teams, as Agile Coaches, and as managers of people and product. Furthermore, I’ll tell you about the organization-level methods we use at Spotify to share knowledge and maintain alignment of our agile practices as we scale in order to bring music to people all around the world.

Direct URL:

In our coaching/consulting engagements we notice that when organizations embark on Agile transformation, typically they focus on the mechanics, ceremonies, tools - addressing 'what' to do and 'how' to do. There is less focus on 'why' certain practices should be done - the fundamental rationale behind Agile. Without understanding the rationale, instead of applying the Agile Principles & Values in the right context, organizations tend to make it a prescriptive process. Such Agile implementations are sub-optimal, often counter-productive, as true culture change does not happen.

This talk brings focus on 'why' aspects of Agile - fundamental rationale behind Agile. It shows how the traditional software production was influenced by the Industrial Era thinking, the changes needed in Knowledge Era context and how Agile provides the scaffolding to build true Knowledge Enterprises. 

Direct URL:

Agile has had an unbelievable impact on the way we develop software. But has it really improved the organisations adopting it? Both Nokia and Yahoo were the envy of the Agile community in the early 2000s. Neither of them have really taken over their respective market segments.
There are however a few very effective organisations, some of which have adopted Agile and some of which have not. They are from a diverse set of industries – nursing, tomato processing, banking and gaming, among others. And even though they are very different companies, you can discover patterns. In this session, we will discover what is needed beyond adopting Agile to not just survive, but to thrive in the 21st century.

Direct URL:

Traditional Performance Management systems are in deep crises. Their industrial era approach is unable to meet the demands and thinking of 21st century people and organizations. Join this interactive workshop to discuss how Lean | Agile enterprises can push the reset button and move from an administrative Performance Management process to a successful iterative performance flow.

 This is a highly participative open space session and we will cover questions like:

• Why is there a need to push the reset button on Performance Management?
• How do we approach goal settings in an agile environment? What is the best balance between collective vs. individual goals? Can you align individual goals with agile thinking?
• Why is there a trend to eliminate employee appraisals? Are 360-feedbacks the new employee appraisals? Can we still promote people without appraisals and less/no hierarchical structure?
• How valid are traditional bonus models or are there better ways for remuneration and acknowledgement?

Direct URL:

You will be surprised to learn that Improv Teams and Software Teams have many similarities; The same techniques Improv Teams use to turn a group of random individuals into Great Team Players can be used by Software Teams to improve Collaboration, Creativity, Communication & Trust.

This unique workshop will have attendees out of their seats and on their feet actively practicing the concepts Improv Teams use to develop Great Team Players. Practicing the four essential qualities of a Great Team Player: Collaboration, Creativity, Communication and Trust, not only shows attendees how they can become a Great Team Player, but also how to train others within their organization. This hands on workshop provides actionable material for participants to use immediately upon returning to work.  A flier with the top 20 games is included for every participant.

Direct URL:

We need good agile managers, if we hope to sustain rapid adaptation and innovation. Agile managers deliver coherent chunks of value, rapidly adapt to changing circumstances, and experiment with new approaches. Because they depend on their teams to support their own agile needs, they demand agility from their teams.

Management talent is rare, and agile management talent even rarer. Gallup has surveyed thousands of managers, finding that low-talent managers, unfortunately a majority, create dysfunctional teams, build unsupported products and produce little sustained value. So developing high-talent agile managers matters.

Agile managers adopt five agile base patterns for themselves: they measure economic progress, proactively experiment to improve, limit work-in-process by time and cost, radiate collective responsibility, and collaboratively solve systemic problems. It turns out these patterns have analogues in high-talent (non-agile) manager talents. That’s a relief, because we can focus agile manager development on extending the talents good managers already have.

In this workshop, we'll explore agile manager characteristics, and management dysfunctions. We'll create approaches to move good general managers to good agile managers. We'll explore strategies for dealing with mediocre managers, whether they are peers or superiors. And we'll learning how to improve our own management agility.

This talk comes from well-documented experience. I have held management roles from Team Lead through VP Engineering and CEO. At Citrix, Skype, Amway and other large companies, I used agile to help manage a 24-member user-experience department, three different agile coach teams and a 50-member data science department. Much of this work has been described in conference papers and detailed blog posts.

Direct URL:

This workshop will take the participants through an exciting journey of leadership that adopted scrum as the core philosophy to its glory to organizational agility. 

The journey begins like an ordinary one with teams adopting to scrum. But eventually it takes a turn to impact orgnaizational boundaries, gets the touchpoints with organizational values, philosophies and becomes a strategic enabler. 

The journey starts from getting scrum into the organization as an alternate to traditional product development patterns. Then the journey becomes rough ride for the organization due to organizational boundaries. Along the rollercoster ride, the leadership realizes the power of scrum as a tool for effective decision making, leadership showcase and eventually a strategic enabler. 

This workshop will share the journey line, leadership conundrum, organizational values and value mapping/amalgamation, and finally the sacrifices behind the achievements.

Direct URL:

Much of what we've learned about management and motivation isn't necessarily wrong, it's just inappropriate and ineffective for knowledge work. To create a truly impactful knowledge work environment, you need to use appropriate leadership styles and create an environment that allows people to achieve their highest potential. Doc takes a look at types of work, the management styles that work best for them, and the qualities necessary to create a high-performing knowledge work culture.

Direct URL:

Business Agility is the latest buzzword – what does it really mean? In this talk Shane examines the underlying drivers and motivation for adopting agile approaches, explores what an agile mindset actually means and shows how the ideas embodied in the Agile Manifesto are applicable in areas of the organisation within and outside information technology. Drawing on current management theories and emerging practices shows how ideas from different sources complement and enhance each other to deliver better organisational outcomes.

Direct URL:

The #NoEstmates twitter hashtag was intended by Woody Zuill "..for the topic of exploring alternatives to estimates [of time, effort, cost] for making decisions in software development. That is, ways to make decisions with ‘No Estimates’."  Based on twitter traffic it has been successful at generating activity.  It's a bit debatable as to whether it has really spawned much exploration.  In this talk Todd will actually do some exploration using real data from over 50 projects at companies ranging from startups to large enterprises.  In addition to the analysis of the data, Todd was able to build a simulation model of the software development process to both replicate the data to and explore the conditions under which estimates add value and when they do not.  Based on the findings from the data and the simulations, along with an analysis of the types of business decisions that organizations need to make, Todd will provide some pragmatic advice for estimators and #NoEstimators alike.

Direct URL:

One of the keys to a successful enterprise agile transformation is the support of Executive Leadership, which is more than simply providing approval. The Agile Executive enables, empowers and engages rather than controls.

According to one recent survey, more than one in three organisations claim that the lack of Executive Leadership engagement within their businesses is plaguing current journey towards sustainable organisational Agility.

With a special focus on Executive teams, Dipesh will be drawing upon more than a decade of Agile transformation experiences across multiple organisations, and share real-life case studies and insights to illustrate the following key things that Agile Executives need to do differently:

1. Stop Starting, Start Finishing
2. Slow Down to Go Faster
3. One Team, One Dream
4. Foster Fully Capable Teams
5. Fail Early & Fail Small
6. Deliver Business Value, not just Projects
7. Servant Leadership

Awareness of the above principles is important and may sound simple; however turning the awareness of these elements into the inner workings of our daily routine takes discipline. With that in mind, all attendees will also be given ‘The Agile Leaders Checklist' that will assist them in making such behaviours habitual.

If you are an Executive or a Leader of an Agile team, this session will provide clear implications for where to focus your efforts in order to unleash the full potential of Agile methods to gain a competitive edge. You will be inspired by knowing what serves to catalyze and nourish progress – and what does the opposite.

Direct URL:

The role of Leadership in organisation's Agile transformation is a critical piece. Yet many organisations struggle to find the right balance between top-down vs. grass-root transformation. I would like to share an experience where we were able to achieve fairly good grass-root movement, but had serious challenges building the agile mindset at the leadership level. While the leadership was trying to help with the best of their intentions, certain actions, behaviours and patterns did affect the spirit of agility. If you are keen to hear about typical leadership anti-patterns during agile transformation and some pointers on how to avoid them, this session is for you.

Direct URL:

Most Lean/Agile team have had limited success in establishing a culture of Continuous Improvement. Retrospectives are done but in most cases they are done without a goal, a vision. Toyota Kata, as codified by Mike Rother, is an approach to put an culture of Continuous Improvement in a team/organization.

Direct URL:

Getting teams to do agile is a beginning; getting it scaled to enterprise is progress; becoming agile at the portfolio and business level is success. How do we get pass the team level to program management level. Scaling agile frameworks comes to the rescue. Or do they ? Many product companies are tied down by stage gate processes coming from the era of Cooper's product development aproaches. They are good and are needed. But they can be an obstacle if they hamper business agility. 

Understanding the purpose and spirit of stages, gates and milestones are key to aligning with Agile. Often they are linked to project management controls and the need for marketing to be sure of meeting target dates. But these become counter productive if its still a scrum-fall at the ends. Since regulated industries still require stage-gated approaches to conform to constraints in their QMS and business needs, agile principles and the stage gate need to exist side by side.

In this experience report, you will get to learn how the advantages of stage gates can be leveraged while at the same time achieving the goals of agile in an effective way. This is not agile at the team level where we have teams executing agile, but at the product development - portfolio level. How are the efforts and releases coordinated and orchestrated keeping in mind the constraints of stage gates and milestones.

Direct URL:

We have been discussing a lot regarding Agile transformations and how such transformations can help organizations. The key is to base such a transformation on the concepts of agility such as self-organization, intrinsic motivation, collaboration, etc. But still the puzzle of how those can be used in practice is less discussed. This is where the emerging concept of "Learning Organization" from Peter Senge can help a lot.

The five disciplines of a Learning Organization lies in the heart of an agile organization. Therefore, exploring the learning organization within agile organization aids us find the "truly" agile organization.

This is an experience report of a journey where a mid-size offshore software development organization moving towards to become a learning organization.  

Direct URL:

What started off as a trial-and-error approach to improve the state of software development by a bunch of tinkerers, is today dominated by management consultants, "Thou-Shall" codified frameworks and rigid, expensive tools. Over the last 20 years, we've gone from, "I'm not sure, let's try this in a small-safe environment" to "you/your-team sucks; you guys have a very poor agile maturity because you are not doing _x_y_z_ (not conforming to the standards)." Along the way, we've lost the purpose of being agile .i.e. to embrace uncertainty via simplicity. Instead we've been forced to believe that consistency via top-down standardisation and predictability by increasing the rigour on process is our eternal quest. Anything that sounds simple and works 80% of the cases is discarded as being naive. What once drove thought-leader into agile, is now driving them insane. This is the unfortunate fate of Agile.

Luckily there has been some fresh perspectives from Nassim Taleb, author of Antifragile. His work explains how some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. More importantly why antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness.

In this talk, I'll use some of Nassim's thoughts (and some of my own) to explain what is wrong with our current approach to Agile and how we can bring life back into Agile. Particularly how we can leverage Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity to make product development more antifragile.

Direct URL:

I want to be controversial for a moment and propose an end to IT projects, project management & project managers. I propose that the entire project process is flawed from the start for one simple reason. If you need to run a project, you've already failed.

By definition, an IT project is a temporary structure to govern and deliver a complex change (such as a new product or platform) into an organisation. However, to be truly competitive, an organisation needs to be able to deliver a continuous stream of change. Managed properly, this negates the need for a project and the associated cost overheads.

This is fundamentally what #noprojects is. The approach, structure, tactics and techniques available to successfully deliver continuous change. At its core, #noprojects is predicated on the alignment of activities to outcomes, measured by value, constrained by guiding principles and supported by continuous delivery technologies.

This presentation will introduce you to #noprojects. You will learn how to define an outcome and create an Outcome Profile. You will also learn how to manage change within the context of an outcome through the Activity Canvas.

Direct URL:

Direct URL:

It's great to come to conferences and hear all the good advice from lost of smart and experienced people.

But how likely are we to take our insights back and drive real change? What stops us from really changing the world?

It's a truism that an inpidual can't beat the system, right? So how do we go about making change a collective agenda? How do we encourage leadership everywhere? We start by focusing on others rather than ourselves.

In this interactive session I lead a series of small activities that model how we can go from a discussion with our friend about how things should be to leading change across the organisation. 

I run three small discussions. Each one is designed to teach a method for increasing influence and effecting organisational change.  We pick the theme of "When I saw someone do something great/amazing at work" and each iteration we increase the number of people in the discussion, and make the stories more personal.

This shows how in just three iterations of a discussion we can totally change the way we interact with the environment (i.e. the people in the wider business) and drive braver conversations.

Direct URL:

Do you find your work exciting and fulfilling? Is your team rewarded for finding better ways to work? While many organizations have adopted Agile approaches at a project level, few have effectively aligned their HR processes with Agile values, or made finding better ways of working a truly rewarding and exciting proposition for their teams. With a new generation of employees who are interested equally in purpose as in profit, it is imperative that we revisit schemes like the 360⁰ annual review, and recognize not only their limitations, but also the damage they cause to individual morale and team productivity.

Join Sanjiv to explore the subject of creating a holistic performance management system that not only adheres to Agile principles, but actively promotes individual drive and team innovation. Learn how delink merit pay from feedback, the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation; and how to create a “flow state” on your agile teams to enhance performance and spark innovation.

Direct URL:

On Agile teams, collaboration is the way of life. Our leaders want their team members to work closely with each other, have shared goals and even think as one entity. Why? Because we believe that collaboration leads to happier, more productive teams that can build innovative products/services.

It's strange that companies use the word collaboration very tightly with innovation. Collaboration is based on consensus building, which rarely leads to visionary or revolutionary products/services. Innovative/disruptive concepts require people to independently test out divergent ideas without getting caught up in collaborative boardroom meetings.

In this presentation, Naresh Jain explores the scary, unspoken side of collaboration and explains in what context, collaboration can be extremely important; and when it can get in the way or be a total waste of time.

Direct URL:

Among the traits that distinguish a good team from a great team is their ability to innovate. Despite the rhetoric in favor of innovation, most organizations are stuck in an implementation mindset, stifling creativity, excellence, and the resultant innovation. The experimentation mindset frees us from self-imposed constraints, allowing us to continually learn and improve. In this session, we'll talk about how we learn as individuals and how we learn as organizations. We'll take a look at some examples of the experimentation mindset happening in the agile community today and we'll talk about how you can foster such a mindset in your own organization.

Direct URL:

This is about agile “anti-patterns”: “something that looks like a good idea, but which backfires badly when applied” (Coplien). Todd has been around agile development from before it was called agile.  In that time, he’s seen teams fall into the trap of many of these anti-patterns, becoming stuck without ever realizing it. Frequently, this is due to a dogmatic understanding of what is right and wrong about Scrum and agile development. The first step to getting unstuck is to be able to detect these “sins.” The presentation aims to expose teams to these common pitfalls and then also provide a vision for a virtuous path to take them to the Promised Land.

Direct URL:

Great teams make great products, but what fuels this greatness? It's the common understanding and passion for the product but more importantly the singularity of purpose and the feedback loop and how the users are responding to the teams work. 

The new world of product development is no longer about scope management and delivering the project on time and within budget but it's now more about hypothesis validation and learning from the users and their behaviors.

The dynamics of product development is changing.  As more and more organizations are moving towards maturing their agile software development approach the traditional barriers of roles are being broken creating new opportunities and fostering a shift in the mindset. Instead of being tied down to scope management and delivering the project on time, Agile teams are focused and inspired by hypothesis validation and learning from the users and their behaviors.

In this case study we will go over how a portfolio of 12 SCRUM Teams adopted a more outcome approach and how they shifted their mindset from project delivery in Agile way to adopting the Experiment-Measure-Learn-Repeat loop which plays a crucial role in teams overall motivation, performance and moved from being SCRUM Teams to "Product Teams".

We will also see how we experimented with different team formats and how exposing the team members to different events and user research changed the way they perceived the information of the problem they were solving via features and user stories.

Direct URL:

Direct URL:

If you've never worked at or seen a high performing team, it is difficult to know what to do to get yours started. This talk will give you a basic recipe for forming the working agreements that can lead to a high performing and self managed team. By weaving together both theory and the practical experience from Spotify's way of doing things, we will go on a journey that will give you both the ingredients and the techniques to get cooking. 

Direct URL:

There are so many organizations and product teams that are embracing agile implementation methodologies as a means to accelerate product development for competitive advantage and customer delight. Agile is now more than a fad or a buzzword.

Despite all this pervasiveness and penetration, there are only some teams for whom agile works well, whereas it doesn't work so well for some of the other teams and it fails for the rest. 

But, is the problem really with adopting agile or is it something else? After all, agile is a mirror.

As Leo Tolstoy once said, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” There is a lesson to learn from every failed implementation.

From the 9th "State of Agile" survey done by VersionOne in 2014, in cases where agile projects were unsuccessful, 44% of the respondents pointed to lack of experience with agile methods.

Drawing from my experiences through my journey as a lean agile coach, this is an attempt to collate the anti-patterns (sins) associated with "lack of experience with agile methods" within the teams implementing agile and possible solutions (epiphanies) to overcome them. I believe that addressing these anti-patterns and preventing them from happening in your teams would significantly enhance the probability of succeeding with your agile implementations. Establishing the purpose and aligning the teams with the organization strategy is one of the key determinant of success. Due to time constraints, I would be focusing on 3-4 anti-patterns (points 1,7,8,9)  that are commonly seen while touching on the rest of them briefly.

 Details are given below:

1. Square pegs in round holes- These are role anti-patterns and arise by looking at Scrum Master / Product Owner as positions to fill rather than identifying and assigning the right person for the job and abrupt transitions from PM / architect to SM / PO creates this anti pattern. It is important to ascertain the fitment and identify the right person with the attributes of a servant leader who can influence the team without authority, empathize, ask the team the right questions which would empower and enable them to become more self-organizing and step back when required. In cases where a transition is involved adequate training / coaching needs to be provided to smoothen the transition.

2. Ineffective retrospectives - Retrospectives are treated more as a ritual with no feedback loop to the planning process. Ineffective retrospectives are good at addressing the person and not the problem, creating actionable without owner(s) and timelines, have no focused outcomes and create a "blame game" culture.

3. Sub-optimal local execution - This is reflected in product teams / modules / component not aligned at the global / program level and is primarily due to misalignment of the teams during planning, no vertical slicing, poor dependency management,  inability to create cross functional teams, no single product backlog, infrequent touch points across the teams with no day to day interaction. This typically results in teams following the sprint cadence but not creating any working deliverable at the end of the sprint.

End to end optimized execution is possible only through creation of flow across the entire product line. As a first step, it helps to visualize the workflow and understand the work in progress across the various sub-systems to surface the bottlenecks. Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD) is one of the powerful tools that help identify bottlenecks across the system.

Some general techniques that help address bottlenecks are identifying the right features (Kano model and user satisfaction matrix) and then vertical slicing to create a working deliverable every sprint, having a single Chief Product Owner (Scaled Scrum) who owns the overall product backlog and ensures priority and value alignment with each team's backlog, synchronizing the iteration time-boxes to ensure that dependent user stories are delivered in the same sprint as much as possible, investing in building relationships and trust among teams (investing in kick-off meetings and face to face engagement), creating a scheduled daily cadence for points of alignment like daily scrum of scrums (weekly inter-team sync-ups would be a killer for teams working on 2 week sprints), usage of tools like Design Structure Matrix (http://dsmweb.org/) for the right development sequence during planning / accurate impact analysis and complexity assessment alleviates this anti-pattern to a large extent.

Other aspects to address include the team structure and alignment. Executing cross skilling plans levels out workload and integrating business + dev + QA ensures that the right product is built right and reduces failure load significantly.

4. Dysfunctional team  - This typically happens due to trust deficit. There is typically no daily engagement with the team and team is comfortable with conflict avoidance. Understanding the team (Use tools like Pat Lencioni's 5 dysfunctions of a team), managing conflicts effectively, creating conditions for constructive confrontation, rewarding team collaborative behaviors goes a long way in creating trust, confidence and collective responsibility.

5. Dis-engaging Daily Standups - Typical anti-patterns here include scrum meetings that overrun significantly beyond stipulated time, team members reporting status to the Scrum Master and not the team, impediments not raised in the meeting, dis-engaged team members. Visualizing the work, raising and tracking impediments, being sensitive to the time zone differences and accommodating them, investing in technology that helps enhance the engagement / involvement levels of the complete team helps make the daily scrums more effective.

6. Unaligned Process model - Team members frequently pulled into firefighting and production support activities with no regard to the commitments made. There is a need to introspect if time boxed sprint is the right way to go for teams in this case or would a different approach like Scrum+ Kanban (ScrumBan) work better ? There are also cases where heavy weight ALM tools are used for short duration engagements or small teams just because of the availability, without any training or regard to the ROI.

7. Product Owner - Team misalignment: This is typically manifested in busy product owners (Example -: product owner spending time in too many  discussions with the client, Product Owner for multiple teams) for whom this is an additional responsibility apart from their day jobs, mismatch between the product owner's expectations and the team's expectation, disruptive product owners who do not appreciate or understand the team's challenges, team's velocity not factored in release planning by the product owner. Ensuring that a product owner is not assigned for more than 2 teams, business analysts in the team interfacing with clients to see what the market needs leaving the responsibility of the technical product to the actual product owner, proxy product owner who is empowered to take decisions in the product owner's absence are some of the strategies that ensure enough bandwidth is available for the POs to collaborate effectively with the product team and focus on effective product delivery.Appropriate budgeting for PO during the pre-planning phase, sensitizing the product owners through more face time with the team, identifying  chief product owners for alignment across multiple teams (scaled scrum), proxy product owners are also additional strategies that can address this situation.

8. Not building the right thing - As Drucker said "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all". . Appropriate widely used techniques / frameworks (Value Stream Mapping, Value-Risk mapping, Risk Based Testing, Design Structure Matrix, Product-Market fit decision frameworks, Kano model) for identifying the right thing to implement, prioritize and eliminate waste would help tackle this antipattern.

9. Cultural anti-patterns - Typical issues observed here includes -Teams not aligned to the organizational goal / purpose of the program,  non-collaboration across teams, offshore team treated as a "B" team,lack of T shaped skills, inappropriate performance / R&R systems that reward individual success over team success, irregular or inconsistent sprint cadence, student syndrome, using velocity as a tool to compare performance across teams, abrupt transition from project manager to scrum master role, management looking at agile as a tool to overwork the teams, poor ALM tooling strategy and non-alignment across the teams.

Why is alignment important ? Because one of the important components of ownership is knowing "What to own ?". In surveys with the top management misalignment of the team's goals with the organizational goals comes out as a top response.

Some symptoms of a poorly aligned team include: poor or failed execution, lack of clarity about priorities, low morale, absence of healthy debate, lack of ownership or follow through, underground communications (gossip, “us versus them” thinking)

Usage of surveys like the team alignment questionnaires, Scrum Butt questionnaire, team assessment versus the 12 agile principles surfaces points of mis-alignment and dysfunction across the teams

Some solutions to address cultural dysfunctions include usage of purpose alignment matrix and four questions (who do we serve ?, What do they need and want most ?, What do we do better than anyone else to meet those needs and wants ?, What is the best way to deliver these products / services ? ) to establish the team's purpose, creating cross-functional teams that can get to “done” in each location, recognizing and rewarding adaptive collaborative change behaviors (cross skilling, taking initiatives in supporting team to overcome impediments, helping others cross skill, breaking boundaries for effective problem solving) to reinforce these behaviors,  assessing current project managers and ensuring an effective transition into agile roles through 1:1 coaching (for transforming  smoothly from command and control to servant leadership), effective management of time zone differences in distributed teams to ensure appropriate rotation of meetings / discussions so that one of the teams does not burn out, top down approach to sensitize management and make necessary changes to the organizational structure and career roadmap  for accommodating agile roles like Product Owner, Scrum Master, agile program manager etc.. , adopting objective metrics like Time to Market (TTM) and business value accrued to measure effectiveness.

As Eliyahu Goldratt once mentioned "Tell me how you will measure me and I will tell you how I will behave". Therefore, look into your performance systems first if you come across any dysfunctional behaviors. One cannot expect a person to display collaborative behavior, if the performance system encourages and rewards individual success over team success.

10. Surfeit of Metrics  - Team tracks too many metrics that are not relevant and are inherited from waterfall mindset. There is also an obsession for effort tracking at the individual level and % complete’s. Burn-up charts, velocity, committed vs achieved ratio, defects per sprint are just enough metrics for effective tracking.

11. User story anti-patterns - Teams do not put in efforts to refine the product backlog as it is seen more as a cost than an investment. There are multiple product backlogs and definition of ready is not agreed between the PO and the team. This results in large user stories that cannot be completed in a sprint, wait times for clarifications and things getting put on hold a few days after implementation due to lack of adequate inputs. Agreeing on a Definition of Ready (DoR) and coaching the team / PO on patterns for splitting user stories helps overcome these barriers

12. Agile Manifesto Delusion - This typically manifests as no documentation, no Definition of Done, multiple disruptions during the sprint to accommodate changes etc... Helping teams understand and interpret the agile manifesto and principles in the manner in which they were intended creates clarity and helps obliterate this anti pattern. 

At the end of the day, it is all about delivering valuable working software in an incremental manner. Hence principles should always take precedence over practices and tools. We, from the agile community have a big part to play in helping to realize the above and breaking the above barriers for successful agile adoption. 

Direct URL:

One common problem any delivery team struggles is to have a common understanding of "why" a product or feature is being built. The documents such as Project Charter, vision document etc. tries to solve this problem, but it’s common to see such documents exist in the repository, hardly known or read by anyone in the team. And this document rarely gets updated too. Ask your team members what is the goal of the project? You may be surprised to know how many actually know about it.

The so called "vision" or "goal" usually rests within Product Manager/Owner or any other stakeholder. There is no forum to converse about these goals or ideas as a team. The planning meetings [iteration or release planning] are supposed to take care of this, but there is no standard guidelines defined which would help to brainstorm these in a typical release/iteration planning meetings.

This is where Impact Mapping comes into the picture. It is a "Strategic planning technique", defined by Gojko Azdic, explained in the book Impact Mapping. It is a very simple technique based on the idea of "asking the right questions" which are:

• Why are we building what we are building? i.e., Goal(s) of the product
• Who we think are the actors who’ll get impacted?
• How do we expect to change the actors’ behavior?
• What are we going to do to create the impacts? i.e. the feature list / deliverables

Finally, by connecting the deliverables to impacts and goals, a map shows a chain of reasons that leads to feature suggestion. 

Fundamental of Impact Mapping is that Impact means a change in behavior of an actor which usually results in a positive impact either by Reduction in the Cost or Improvement in ROI for the business.

If you closely watch the sections in Impact Mapping, what to build i.e. the features or the so called backlog comes only at the end, whereas in the typical planning meeting we usually start with a backlog.

The above questions need to be answered by the entire team [the IT team, the business people and any other stakeholders, if any], and avoids the common anti-patterns during planning meetings:

• Ad-hoc planning
• Wrong Assumptions
• Pet features

The hands on workshop will cover the above mentioned concepts of Impact Mapping in detail along with exercising the same.

Below are a few comments that we received from our customers after being part of the Impact Mapping session:

• “It made me think about the real goals my product has to achieve during the initial launch.”
• “Wow, this is a great way of visualizing”

Direct URL:

At Philips, we have been focusing on shifting organizational mindset and behavior and incorporating an Agile mindset.

It is a normal practice for organizations to adapt Agile by first conducting Agile training for teams, adapting Scrum ceremonies and mechanically applying Agile practices. The biggest challenge that an organization faces is on how to shift the mindset of the team and the leaders towards Agile. Moreover how to shift the people practices, that have been strongly aligned to traditional set up.

It is important for organizations to understand that Agile is a cultural shift and additional interventions should be introduced to make this cultural shift. 

At Philips we looked at various aspects to bring in a holistic shift in the culture, mindset and behaviors :-

• The first step was towards building a purpose driven organization with a strong vision that intrinsically motivates people towards creating customer value – rather than being too focused on financial results and internal metrics.
• Secondly, for Agile teams to be successful, focus is on mowing the ownership to the teams. This includes teams to not just acclimatize Agile values and principles but also to start driving the change. This involved creating change practices and interventions that facilitated this process.
• A culture change is a transformation in team behavior and competence. The team should be able to adapt and give feedback to each other on these competencies. Feedback souk is now getting embedded as a regular ceremony.
• To shift the ownership to the team, the traditional organization structure needs to change. Traditional hierarchical structures represent flow of control and authority that is top down. Lateral Career paths are making way to Career Lattice. Managers have started playing the role of facilitators and performance coaches. 
• The people practices like hiring, performance management, learning and development, recognition practices, decision making process are getting transformed to allow a bottoms up approach.

We are seeing that the real shift in culture happens when organization become truly external and customer  focused and shifts its focus from internal controls to more flexibility.

Direct URL:

Direct URL:

In May 2015, I got involved in coaching a products organization in improving their agile practices. This was a unique coaching experience for me because of some interesting experiments that I did:

• I focused on coaching and literally zero consulting. 
• My coaching stance was only limited to showing them the way, initially training them on the essence of agility, and later on to simply shine light on areas that needed their attention, and if needed, share ideas from the industry.
• I spent just 1day every month with the teams to only focus on my coaching sessions, and a few hours during that time to review the progress.
• The teams and the leadership would decide on what they wanted to do, and how much they wanted to change.

In ~6 months that I coached them, I found that the team has matured to a very high level of self-organization. They changed their process, their key roles and responsibilities, and self-organized into a very high-performing teams (which was corroborated not just from the high-energy levels of their teams but also the project metrics).

I call this model Minimum Viable Coaching, and it was helpful in demonstrating how a coaching could be made extremely effective if there is a client who is willing to trust its team in their ability to self-change, with minimal guidance (more of direction than really support) from an external coach. It also requires a coach to think in terms of minimum self-interests (read commercial interests) but focus on what will make the client successful in the long run.

In this experience report, I will share my approach and experiences, and offer some ideas on how the coaching can be elevated to a true coaching where the enterprise becomes self-organizing on their own.

Direct URL:

Consider an agile utopia executing a lean build-measure-feedback loop for software development. How would you feel if your biggest strength of receiving early feedback from your end-users turns out to be your Achilles heel? Recently I faced this dilemma where my end-users unfortunately were a group of introvert individuals. This led to Monger project’s MVP almost declared as a failure since it did not fulfill the end-user’s requirements. 

Many a times, projects transform their delivery mechanism from traditional models to agile with a myth that agile is a recipe for success. In reality many projects fail since agile is not well understood by the teams. A few times (like in this case) the agile process falters not due to incorrect implementation but due to incorrect participants responsible to execute a part of the process.

Experience with me what happens when your end-users falter your feedback loop just because of the nature of individuals. If you’ve ever been a part of a group (or may be in the future) where your end-users are introverts, learn from this experience report how we overcame this problem on the Monger project by strengthening our anemic reviews. At the same time, if you as a participant have been there and done that, I would love to hear about it.

Direct URL:

What is it about?

This is a story about building appreciation and feedforward culture in the organization.

I am going to talk about a bottom-up experiment based on Jurgen Appelo's Merit Money, conduced in the biggest e-commerce company in Poland - Allegro Group. It is a story about learning throughout an Agile experiment to get the most out of it. Primarily the experiment was intended to challenge the existing bonus system based on forced ranking. It turned into appreciation and feedback system with some sweets involved. 

This feedback system has grown to more that 230 people involved from 3 different physical locations and still grows virally. We made a structure in which there is a coordinator in each location. If at least part of scrum team plays the game, SM is the first line contact. He distributes credits and exchanges them for sweets. Also cooperates with coordinator who is responsible for making sure system works well in his location.
Iterations are now 2 weeks. We introduced a requirement that credit has to be filled in with short description what you thank for, in order to be exchanged. This was to promote written thank you’s and avoid situations where people hand over credits just to get sweets.
Also every quarter we change credits appearance so that the previous credits cannot be exchanged for sweets. This is to set a time box and “flush the system”.

Is it for me?

Do you feel your team could be more engaged in their work? Trying to get rid of silos in your organization? Then this is for you.

Get inspired by this simple game, in which there are several instant feedback loops, fun, gambling and sweet prizes.

Oh, I forgot... and you'll find an answer on why we call it Fudge Candies.

Direct URL:

Agile development isn’t any longer considered to work for small teams only. Also large teams, projects and organizations are asked to focus on delivering value. So the question arises, how to adhere to the agile principles when applying them in the large.

In this workshop we want to use the agile principles as a guideline for scaling. This is basically by understanding agile as a value system, a mindset, a culture – and not as a tool. So be prepared to being asked to think for yourself and to balance forces based on your own needs and requirements instead of finding a recipe that assumes that one size will or can fit all (organizations, projects, products, or teams). Thus, this workshop is not about providing or defining a framework for the enterprise or the organization, scaling scrum or using other existing methodologies at different organizational levels. It is about examining the agile principles according to their effects and application when scaling up. For example, we will discuss what a principle such as "self-organizing teams" means when it is applied to a team of more than 100 developers or to the enterprise level.

The workshop is based on the necessity of large-scale Agile to give and get frequent feedback in order to deliver the highest business value to the customer at all times besides learning and getting better continuously.

Direct URL:

A number of agile brands downplay the need for business analysis and requirements management on agile projects, putting large store in the role of the Product Owner.  This paper tackles some of the problems this misconception can result in and shows how effective product ownership almost always requires a team with a variety of skills and backgrounds to be effective.

Product Ownership requires clarity of vision, alignment with organizational strategy, understanding of the development process and the ability to communicate with a wide variety of stakeholders across all levels both inside and outside the organization.  The complexity of the role is most often more than a single person can (or should) cope with – effective product ownership requires a teamwork approach covering a variety of skills and knowledge.

Direct URL:

Whether a team is brand-new or seasoned veterans at working together, explicitly defining and/or refining a team working agreement will help the team to align on how they will work together effectively to meet their common goal. In this fast-paced hands-on session, participants will go through the process of building a team working agreement using LEGO Serious Play (LSP).

Creating a team working agreement helps team members set the stage for effective communication and high performance by making assumptions about ‘what really matters to us’ and ‘how we will work together?’ explicit and negotiable.  Great working agreements address some difficult topics - what values do we share? how do we want to deal with conflict when it comes up? how will we handle problems within the team? - which are often challenging to discuss openly and honestly, especially when a team is first assembled.  

This session will show you how to use LEGO Serious Play to encourage a frank and fearless discussion in order to kickstart these discussions so that a team can quickly create a powerful set of simple guiding principles for working together.  Participants will learn about the importance of team working agreements in creating team cohesion and common understanding of shared values and operational guidelines, and experience hands-on how to use the LEGO Serious Play cycle of build-share-reflect to have a participatory discussion to identify shared values, explore reactions to conflict, and build a set of simple guiding principles.

Direct URL:

Direct URL:

Many Agile teams focus on Velocity as their measure of progress. They build burn-up charts to track it over time and make it the focus of much of their discussion during Sprint Planning and Retrospectives. Is the strong focus on this metric truly in line with the principles of Agile Software Development?

Join Ardita as she leads us through a hands on workshop to explore this question. In this workshop you will discover how a focus on Value first, instead of Velocity, changes how the team approaches the work to be completed. Through a series of structured activities you will work with a Story Map for a fictitious project and assign value to the discovered stories. You will learn the practices and skills necessary to track Earned Value on your project and also learn the valuable lesson on how to discover what not to build. The outcome will be a set of new skills that you can take back with you and immediately apply to your current team development planning efforts. This session will be fun and educational. This is one workshop you don't want to miss.

Direct URL:

Direct URL:

What does John F. Kennedy's "We choose to go to the moon in this decade...", the recent organizational change that you had, and your latest update on social media have in common? Have you ever thought why well-intended, perfectly valid logical ideas fail to appeal to people?

One of the best ways to communicate with people is through a story. Stories or narratives help you to connect with the hearts and minds of your audience. An emotionally engaging story affects more areas of the brain than rational, data-driven messages - meaning that they are far more likely to resonate with people you lead. Realizing this, the importance of storytelling as a tool has gained prominence in organizations.

So what sort of stories can you tell in a business context? And an eloquent leader uses different narrative patterns of storytelling to achieve different outcomes. Learn about the skill of storytelling to communicate your vision, spark action, have people collaborate at work and transform your organization.

Direct URL:

Are you interested in succeeding with Agile in large, complex distributed development projects? Being Agile in a distributed environment has been a subject of controversy over the years, which is not surprising given the importance placed on face-to-face communication in the twelve principles of the Agile Manifesto.

This workshop will address the opportunities, challenges and concerns that are commonly faced by organizations in keeping to this manifesto when their Agile teams are geographically distributed.

Agile teams need to work together very closely as cross-functional teams, instead of silos with hand-offs after long project phases. Agile teams also need to engage customers and stakeholders frequently to ensure that they are meeting customer needs, adapting to changing requirements and delivering high-quality software. The transparency inspired by Agile makes any challenges related to this level of daily communication, collaboration and teaming, painfully obvious to teams and individuals. However, many large-scale and distributed Agile teams are successfully and boldly rising to meet the challenges with great success.What makes the difference between thriving versus just merely surviving?

 In this session, we will explore how organizations can create cultures, nurture individuals, and build teams to create high performing Distributed Agile teams in a globally competitive world. Dipesh will also share some innovative ideas in addition to tricks, tips, and proven methods that have inspired and helped people and organizations to 'be Agile' rather than just 'do Agile'.  The Agile Manifesto puts more emphasis on individuals and interactions over processes and tools and we want to keep it that way no matter where they are!

Bring your greatest distributed teaming challenges and and be ready to be inspired during this active and engaging session.

Direct URL:

Scrum is now 21 years old and has become the most popular Agile framework in our industry with +90% of Agile projects saying they are using Scrum. Scrum has become the de-facto team based development approach. Even the next generation of Agile methods such as DAD and SAFe still encourage teams to use Scrum. But has Scrum fulfilled it potential? What is next for Scrum?

In this talk Dave West, former Forrester Analyst and now product owner at Scrum.org describes the challenges that Scrum has not addressed and what the future of Scrum looks like as it helps individuals, teams and teams of teams deliver software just a little bit better and improve the practice of software development. In this talk Dave will introduce 3 new initiatives for Scrum in the areas of assessment, scaling with Nexus and expanding what done means with DevOps and Evidence Based Measurement. 

Direct URL:

The brilliance of early Agile methods was their non-conformity. They rejected conventional wisdom about how software should be created and substituted a new reality: one where collaboration, adaptation, and continuous improvement were more important than rigid processes and plans. At first, many people rejected these innovations, but Agile stood the test of time. Now it's won the day.

When people talk about scaling Agile, they forget those insurrectionary roots. They focus on what's palatable to the "enterprise:" how to make Agile safe, non-threatening, and acceptable--how to make it more conventional and conformist. In doing so, they risk losing the innovations that make Agile work so well.

What if we stopped worrying about what's safe and acceptable? What if we went back to those innovative roots? What would Agile look like if we scaled beyond the enterprise?

Come find out.

Direct URL:

An agile enterprise increases value through effective execution and delivery in a timely and reactive manner. Such organizations do this by streamlining the flow of information, ideas, decision making, and work throughout the overall business process all the while improving the quality of the process and business outcomes.   This talk describes, step-by-step, how to evolve from today’s vision of agile software development to a truly disciplined agile enterprise. It argues for the need for a more disciplined approach to agile delivery that provides a solid foundation from which to scale. It then explores what it means to scale disciplined agile strategies tactically at the project/product level and strategically across your IT organization as a whole. Your disciplined agile IT strategy, along with a lean business strategy, are key enablers of a full-fledged disciplined agile enterprise. 

Direct URL:

Scrum, XP, and Kanban are familiar agile methods. Now in the second decade of their adoption, agile methods continue to help organizations worldwide respond to change and shorten the time to deliver value. An overwhelming 88 percent of executives cite organizational agility as key to global success. So, in recent years, many have begun scaling their early agile adoptions beyond individual teams to programs, portfolios, and the enterprise. Even though today’s scaling techniques are not yet fully understood, new scaling frameworks continue to emerge. Join Sanjiv Augustine to explore this exciting area and discover approaches to scale agile in a way that makes the best sense for your organization. Learn about scaling frameworks including the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), as well as the simple Scrum-of-Scrums meeting. Join Sanjiv to explore how you can develop a straightforward scaling strategy for your organization.

Direct URL:

Inspired, empowered, and engaged people are the heart and soul of Agile – and HR.

Transforming your organization into an agile enterprise is no small deed. And it does not matter where you are on your way towards embracing agility on all levels. There will be a time when you need to align your people solutions with the mindset and demands of agile people and organizations. We will talk about how to turn your Human Resources into Agile People Operations and boost your agility. 

Join this session to

• gain valuable insights into the world of Human Resource Management
• recognize the impact of Agile HR practices through stories and examples
• discover why Agile needs HR and vice versa
• learn about People solutions in Agile Enterprises

Direct URL:

Enterprise Agile Transformation initiatives are BIG. Change at this scale of thousands is tough. 

The Leaders and Executives involved in these initiatives are going through their own personal transformation. Change at this scale of one is equally tough. 

Siraj Sirajuddin (SPCT) has worked with hundreds of executives leading enterprise agile transformation initiatives. These are their stories of personal growth and individuation. We will hear how transformation at a personal level is the leverage for transformation at a collective level. We will also learn of unique methods that activate personal transformation for leaders who are ready to step into their leader persona but are unable to get that from traditional leadership training and coaching methods.

Direct URL:

In this session, we will study how two scaling approaches, LeSS and SAFe, affect the fundamentals of the organization: leading flow, unity, and learning. A critical choice is the balance between program execution and long term evolution. We will give valuable thinking tools for choosing the correct approach.

Scaling Agile is easily misunderstood. Do you want to handle bigger programs and more teams or do you want to have more value with less hassle? Or do you want to widen the Agile adoption to the whole of the organization: culture, business, and leadership.

Both Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) have a history with Nokia and use it as a reference. The pattern of Coordination Chaos (http://www.slideshare.net/gosei/coordination-chaos) was one of the main reasons leading to the infamous “Burning Platform” of Nokia Mobile Phones. It is a core challenge in scaling. Most big organizations around the world face similar problems. Nokia provides a relevant story to understand and compare what these approaches offer.

Another challenge is learning. Big corporations often use the machine metaphor for the organization. This management thinking optimizes resources and cost, locally and in the short term. It treats learning as cost, especially learning outside of one’s special role. Let’s contrast this with a Scrum team (the team + the product owner + the Scrum master). It cross-learns inside the team. It inspects and adapts at the market. Here learning creates value. This is what you want to scale up.

We will look at the approaches by using organizational control theory created by William G. Ouchi where he defines three main control mechanisms; bureaucratic, market and clan control. This explains why teamwork is the only way. Even having the same basis the frameworks differ how control is achieved, and it has an impact on long-term sustainability.

The flow of work is analyzed looking at batching of work, length of detailed planning horizon and organizational structures.

Finally, we will point out the main questions you should look at when selecting LeSS or SAFe. What is their transformational power. Are they aiming at a fundamental change from Taylorian organization to Lean and Agile.

Direct URL:

Generation after generation we humans devise and create what we need in order to evolve as a whole, as an adaptive system. We extend our bodies and consciousness in order to fly, to compute, to communicate, to be faster, to reach further, and so on. Good or bad is not of interest here. This is just how it works. This is how we have created all of our tools and technologies, or "media" as Marshall McLuhan would say. To extend ourselves.

Nevertheless, tools and processes are the fastest layer in the evolution of a human system. If you observe and study them, it is very difficult that you'll understand where the future is headed. In times of concentrated change like the one we're living through, if you focus on tools and processes, you'll be observing the results of a change in people that has happened yesterday. It is, at best, the present of work. It might not be mainstream yet in some aspects, but from a systemic point of view, it is already all here.

If you want to really have some sound insight of what the future of work holds, you have to look into people. Let's see how, and what this shows.

Direct URL:

About the company

Philips is a healthcare multinational company that focuses on building complete health care products and solutions for emerging markets, in addition to developing solutions and products for global markets, across the three sectors Healthcare, Lighting and Lifestyle. Using the expertise of its nearly 2000 engineers in Bangalore and aligning the marketing and sales teams the campus is responsible for creating and rolling out a complete set of products that include a whole host of solutions for global customers. It also contributes to global solutions in critical health care component development for connected consumer devices and renewable energy.

Executive Summary

Beginning of 2014, an external survey brought out the issues wrt time to market and code quality. Taking the survey results positively, the Leadership embarked on an Agile/SAFe journey with pilot projects. The results were amazing and with the currently learning from the pilots, the organization is running 25+ deployments within. The journey has started and Agile release trains are delivering periodic value to our customers at defined frequencies.

Background Objective/Challenge

Product quality, consistent & predictive delivery and quicker time to market are the key challenges the organization is trying to address today. Continuous Innovation is constrained due to the above issues and hence there is need to find a new way of product development which can meet the dynamic business needs, foster people engagement and deliver meaningful products to the world.

Target

ScaledAgile has been used as a framework for product development across the organization global. The whole organization is undergoing a transformation from waterfall way of working to the SAFe agile way of working and roadmap is till 2019.

Agile Initiative

The Framework used for the transformation can be summarized into 4 major steps

1. Develop products in the Agile way with focus on Basic Agile practices (Scrum)
2. Establish Product Ownership with focus on Enabling Scaling aspects (SAFe practices)
3. Establish a release pipeline with continuous integration (supported by Automation)
4. Adopt a DevOps Culture with focus on Continuous delivery (to production environment)

This includes a comprehensive diagnosis of the various business processes, agile practices and behavior, engineering practices, delivery maturity and recommendations for the transition. A coaching and tooling plan is also an outcome of the diagnostics.

 Measurable Impact

• Predictable Releases to customers (hitting the market with features every three months with features and business criticial bugs with less than 2 weeks with all the regulatory compliance)
• Capitalization
• Feature planned vs Feature delivered per program increment > 80%lose
• Defect reduction co t 45%
• Team velocity – Baseline vs actual.
• Very high sense of ownership and high levels of engagement

Transformation team Profile

Global team

• Agile Capability program manager -1 FTE
• Agile Deployment Program Management – 1 FTE
• Communication expert – 1 FTE (Today we are 0/1)
• Coordination - 1 FTE
• Enterprise Agile Coaches – 16 (Today we are 9 /16)

Direct URL:

Success of an Agile Transformation depends a great deal on how effectively it gets initiated.
This experience report presentation will discuss a 5-Step approach deployed for successfully initiating an Agile Transformation engagement at a client location.
The practices that ensured effective identification and execution of two pilot projects will be shared.
We will also talk about how using a customized version of  Comparative Agility™ Assessment  Framework, the impact of the Agile way of working on these pilot projects was measured.

The impact of Agile on pilots was presented in terms of quantified measures (metrics) of benefits and areas of improvements to the leadership team. The results were encouraging enough for them to continue with the Agile Transformation exercise by bringing the rest of the projects in the organization into its fold.

Direct URL:

Direct URL:

Abstract: Design Thinking refers to the methods and processes to investigate complex problems in highly uncertain systems. This workshop is about how to use this iterative process of observation, ideation and implementation to better understand organisation's culture and create reasons for people in the organisation to embrace Agile. Design thinking is commonly used to create empathy for the context of your customers, but this time we'll use design thinking to create empathy for the context of your staff. 

Direct URL:

Scaling Agile across the enterprise can also scale up or create new organizational conflicts: groups that are accustomed to working in their own silos struggle to find ways to identify their shared interests and collaborate effectively.  Equipping team members with effective conflict resolution skills is important in helping everyone navigate change successfully.

Conflict isn’t inherently a bad thing – it’s inevitable when people are working closely together on things that they care about. In fact, diverging viewpoints can bring new insights to help teams move forward and create something new. Dealing with conflict head-on is challenging for many people, yet few organizations and teams spend time explicitly considering “how will we work together when things get rocky?” Teams need to build the skills to be able to navigate through rough times together and come out with win-win solutions.

This workshop will present useful models for considering conflict supported by games teams can use to develop and practice conflict resolution skills. The models address underlying drivers of conflict, modes for responding to conflict, assessing conflict severity to determine appropriate interventions, and the patterns of principled negotiation. The games build on the concepts to help participants gain insight and develop important skills in a non-intimidating and memorable way.

Direct URL:

With over 5 years in the practice of tango, I would like to use tango techniques to explain the nuances in communication between product team and dev team. It's not often straight forward or easy. 

Tango is an extreme dance in coordination and non verbal communication where both dancers decide how fast or how slow they want to take it. It is also one of the few dances where pauses are encouraged and takes the form of regrouping. 

It will be an experiential learning experience. I will be using tango moves to explain communication techniques and considerations. 

(Note: It's not a session to learn tango, but a session to learn communication through tango.)

Direct URL:

In this highly engaging workshop attendees will experience estimating, planning and delivering a new product and product features. The uncertainty in value and costs will be resolved through rolling dice based on the stories that the team selects and prioritizes.   The teams will run through 3 iterations of story cost, value estimation, and product feature delivery. Points will be scored for delivering product features and meeting release and iteration commitments.

Dealing with uncertainty is one of the largest challenges that teams face. The simulation aims to have levels of uncertainty in value and delivery that are commensurate with those found in software development. Some of the key tools for dealing with uncertainty are integrated into the simulation.

Attendees will come away with a better understanding of the challenges of working with uncertainty in software projects, and will learn some of the tools that are at their disposal for managing this uncertainty.

Direct URL:

Direct URL:

In 1995, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber introduced Scrum, today the most popular Agile methodology, according to every Agile report. 

20 years later, that same collaboration, led by Scrum.org, produced Nexus, the proposal from the Scrum creators to Scale Scrum in large Software development initiatives that include hundreds of people. 

Over 45 minutes, we'll explore the Nexus framework, its artefacts and roles, as well as some practices, differences and similarities between Scrum and Nexus. The underlying philosophy will be displayed and discussed. 

We'll also take a look at real organisations already using Nexus to scale their software development efforts using the Scaled Professional Scrum program from Scrum.org to transform their product development

Resources: Nexus is free and available for download on https://www.scrum.org/Portals/0/NexusGuide%20v1.1.pdf

Direct URL:

We were at the forefront of scaling Scrum and Agile. Past tense. This talk will explore lessons learnt, and how to increase the probability of success for your scaling efforts.

To be clear, this is a failure story. However, failure inevitably leads to learning. And I would very much like to share my learnings with the wider agile-community.

This talk is divided into the following sections:

• How we implemented Large Scale Scrum and were proud of it
• What we tried that went well and you should try, too
• Things we tried that didn't work - but may work for you
• What we tried that failed - and you shouldn't try either
• General advice on what to look for in scaling frameworks

Direct URL:

How much does one story point cost? Is Sprint 0 an expense or an asset? Can you run Scrum with a fixed-cost contract? Agile challenges the existing approach to financial aspects of running projects: i.e. budgeting, forecasting, financial planning and vendor contracts.

Applying new financial models becomes increasingly important for larger organisations adopting Agile. While they are going through an Agile transformation, they also need to maintain transparent financial governance and reporting. Shareholders would not be too excited about messy Annual Financial Statements.

Join me if you would like to know more about Agile Economics. No financial degree is required and all the content explained in plain English with plenty of pictures!

Direct URL:

Agile adopts an empirical approach to software development. One of the key aspects of a successful Agile Implementation is how quickly we can react to change. For this, we need to ensure that data flows seamlessly from customer to the Agile team. This data should form a critical part of our decision making.

• Is the customer successful in using our product or service?
• Which features are customer most interested in?
• Where are the friction points in usage?
• Where are the failures happening in our product?
• How is the customer engaging with our product over time?

and many more similar questions.

In this talk, I discuss best practices in data collection, analysis and visualization and how data can make your Agile process and thereby your business more effective.

Direct URL:

Direct URL:

Organizations are frequently embarking on large scale product development initiatives involving hundreds, sometimes thousands of team members. Scale brings in additional complexity, non-linear behavior and risk making top-down and plan driven approaches ineffective and useless.

In this session Kamlesh Ravlani will discuss a case study of developing a product with multiple teams spread in two sites implementing Large-Scale Scrum (Less) elements.

Large-Scale Scrum is Scrum applied to many teams working on one product. LeSS is well balanced between empirical process control and defined elements to work with 2 to 8 teams. LeSS enables scaling the value delivery by descaling the organizational structure and optimizing the whole system.

We'll discuss, how did the teams organize their work and accelerate value delivery? How did leaders contribute value? Which experiments worked and which ones didn't?

PS: Interested participants are encouraged to visit https://less.works/less/framework/index.html and familiarize themselves with the LeSS Framework before the session. We will not cover the LeSS Introduction in this session, rather we'll directly jump in to the case study.

Direct URL:

Spotify model is widely known model for scaling agile to get to fast releases and to promote creativity and innovation. In this session, we discuss about how Spotify model has been adapted outside Spotify in a major organization wide transformation to agile.   The session begins with a brief overview about the Spotify model. Then we discuss about the case study of implementing Spotify model across three continents in an onshore-offshore model.

Spotify model encourages team independence from outside forces to promote new ideas. It encourages a marketplace of ideas to float in the organization so that the best ideas can be generated from the bottom instead of the top. Any dependencies between teams are well known by public contracts.

We will discuss, how the team structure changed along with their responsibilities? How the change in the software team affected the organization?  How did leaders contribute value? Which changes were successful and what were not? What were the effects on software development team itself?

PS: Participants can learn more about Spotify model at the link http://ucvox.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/113617905-scaling-agile-spotify-11.pdf

Direct URL:

New competitive threats often require organizations to build increasingly complex, interconnected and sophisticated software and systems, faster, better and cheaper. Most organizations are not equipped to meet this new challenge! Meanwhile small, nimble competitors, like Airbnb and Uber are taking a big bite on the profits of the giants. 

So what’s the answer? What have we learned in the past decade from our adventures in agile and our attempts at scaling? What does the future hold?

In this talk, Richard Knaster, Principal Consultant and SAFe Fellow, discusses a more scalable and modular lean-agile approach that enables even the largest enterprises to compete with smaller and nimbler competitors that are disrupting companies in all industries. Richard is a Principal Contributor to the Scaled Agile Framework and previously worked at IBM where his roles included Chief Agile Methodologist. World Wide Agile Practice Manager and various product management roles in the Rational Brand.

Direct URL:

Most transition or transformation involving a large scale has been lead by initiatives supported by change groups. Agile has been no different as most large organisations has invested into Agile CoEs to enable the change. The question however remains are the Agile CoEs effective in brining about the desired change. The panel discussion will attempt in understanding the challenges and various ways in which organisations are dealing with them to overcome them.

Panelists:

1. Arvind Rathore: Head of Agile Transformation -  Societe Generale
2. Rani Malli: Senior Director, Business Transformation  - Philips Software
3. Nagendra Kumar: Agile Change Agent -  McAfee

Moderator & Devil’s Advocate: Ravi Kumar

Direct URL:

Sure, we have all thought that continuous delivery is important in software delivery... now we have data to back it up. Dr. Nicole Forsgren will present new research that shows the central role that CD plays in Agile and DevOps, the key processes that contribute to it, and how it can not only impact your IT teams and company success, but how it can also make your work feel better. This extends her prior research showing why investments in IT are now impacting teams and organizations, how we got here, and what’s next. The presentation includes the data to help you prove your case (to management or even yourself) about why CD and DevOps are essential to winning, as well as great stories and examples to really bring these concepts to life. Nicole invites all DevOps practitioners to build their teams up so they can lead high performing organizations, and think about what they can do to affect change beyond their teams and their organizations.

Direct URL:

Continuous Delivery is a amazing practice when compared to slower release cycles. But it shouldn't be the end goal. Continuous Deployment, safe automatic deployment of frequent small commits, is the next step. To get to a fully automatic release process the way that your team writes and releases features will need to fundamentally change. The tools, learnings and techniques presented will be widely applicable regardless of how far along adopting continuous practices you are.

Direct URL:

Direct URL:

It wasn't long ago that everybody thought "Continuous Deliver" was only for tech companies.  It is amazing how much things have changed over the past two years.  More and more enterprises are exploring what it will take to achieve Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment for their core customer facing applications.  The challenge for these companies is that many of the practices and processes they have put in place over the years stand in the way of achieving this goal. From rigorous engineering practices, to a very different view on product ownership, to organizational restructuring, to streamline the software development pipeline, Continuous Delivery .i.e. the ability to reliably release software at any time requires a significant shift in the mindset.

Join Cheezy as points out several Continuous Deliver anti-patterns and how to avoid or eliminate these patterns within your organization in order to align your development value stream, operations, release management, and product owners.  If you want to know what it takes to achieve Continuous Deliver then this is one talk that you will not want to miss.

Direct URL:

Ever solve a jigsaw puzzle?  Do you typically design and document all your pieces before assembling the puzzle or know anything about the kind of picture formed by the puzzle?  Hardly.  Usually, the specifics of the puzzle, as they emerge through the process of solving that puzzle, affect our tactics for solving it.  

This analogy is at the heart of Exploratory Testing (ET) - a fun, focused and powerful approach to testing that has been gaining in popularity in recent years.  While not a new idea, it is often misconstrued as being a random, flailing at the keyboard approach to uncovering problems.  Not quite.  ET is a disciplined practice that involves simultaneously learning about the software under test while designing and executing tests, using feedback from the last test to design the next.  It leverages traditional test design analysis techniques and heuristics, but design and execution become a single inseparable activity.  Within the agile context, there is a need for agile teams to augment their scripted automated tests with a manual testing practice that is adaptable, and ET provides the right fit.

In this session oriented towards beginning explorers, we will gain a deeper understanding of what ET is, what it isn't, and discuss the essential elements of the practice with practical tips and techniques for: learning the system under test and capturing our understanding to design tests; designing tests on the fly using heuristics; executing tests and observing results; and finally, integrating ET into the cadence of an agile process.

Direct URL:

Fred Brooks once stated so wisely "How does a project get to be a year late? … One day at a time." Lean Development and queuing theories offer help so that this won't happen. The suggested remedy is to implement a steady flow in order to achieve maximum productivity. However, most teams and organizations are far from reaching that goal and moreover it is often unclear which approach leads to what kind of delay. In-depth examination shows how generally accepted concepts such as Definition of Ready, Clean Code, or experts in a team can lead to costs of delay. In this session Jutta presents simple tools and methods for uncovering hidden costs of delay. These tools and methods can be applied in various contexts: In small and large teams as well as in co-located and distributed teams. Using an agile approach will help to make these cost visible.

Direct URL:

Containers will not fix your broken culture. Microservices won’t prevent your two-pizza teams from needing to have conversations with one another over that pizza. No amount of industrial-strength job scheduling makes your organization immune to Conway’s Law.

Does this mean that devops has failed? Not in the slightest. It means that while the unscrupulous might try to sell us devops, we can’t buy it. We have to live it; change is a choice we make every day, through our actions of listening empathetically and acting compassionately.

Making thoughtful decisions about tools and architecture can help. Containers prove to be a useful boundary object, and deconstructing systems to human-scale allows us to comprehend their complexity. We succeed when we share responsibility and have agency, when we move past learned helplessness to active listening. But there is no flowchart, no checklist, no shopping list of ticky boxes that will make everything better. “Anyone who says differently is selling something”, as The Princess Bride teaches us.

Part rant, part devops therapy, this talk will explain in the nerdiest of terms why CAP theorem applies to human interactions too, how oral tradition is like never writing state to disk, and what we can do to avoid sadness as a service.

Direct URL:

Building a Test Automation Framework is easy - there are so many resources / guides / blogs / etc. available to help you get started and help solve the issues you get along the journey.

However, building a "good" Test Automation Framework is not very easy. There are a lot of principles and practices you need to use, in the right context, with a good set of skills required to make the Test Automation Framework maintainable, scalable and reusable.

Design Patterns play a big role in helping achieve this goal of building a good and robust framework. 

In this talk, we will talk about, and see examples of various types of patterns you can use for:

1. Build your Test Automation Framework
2. Test Data Management
3. Locators / IDs (for finding / interacting with elements in the browser / app)

Using these patterns you will be able to build a good framework, that will help keep your tests running fast, and reliably in your CI / CD setup!

Direct URL:

The role of “Architect” is sometimes frowned upon in the Agile community as a central command-and-control authority who bottlenecks decisions and limits team empowerment. Or at least, that is what we thought. Follow the real-life journey of our teams as we discovered how the role of an architect is compatible with Agile principles. We will explore our failures, and how we learned that an Architect can bring immense value to the organization through a focus on transformational leadership. In this presentation you can see how an Architect as Leader can help a project scale and can help create a truly self-sustaining organization.

Direct URL:

Over the past decade, eXtreme Programming practices like Test-Driven Development (TDD) & Behaviour Driven Developer (BDD), Refactoring, Continuous Integration and Automation have fundamentally changed software development processes and inherently how engineers work. While TDD has seen a great adoption on server side, developers still find it hard to apply TDD for developing UI components.

In this hands-on, live coding demo, Naresh will build a web commenting and discussion feature (like Disqus) in React.js, 100% test driven. He will also demonstrate how TDD will help us drive an object-functional design to strike a pragmatic balance between the Object-Oriented and Functional Programming paradigms.

Direct URL:

No one has escaped the "Microservices" wave recently. As every architecture brings with it a lot of good practises, microservices brings success by helping us achieve a faster to market releases. Though the concept of "two-pizza" teams has been prevalent from early 2000’s, we now have many successful poster children to learn from. The success in this journey depends on infrastructure, automation, architecture and process elements. These includes good CI practises, different testing approaches, dynamic service registration & discovery, orchestration, logging and tracing. Though they are familiar, we all know that it is not as easy as it sounds, let us see what we need to consider from start to finish to make Microservices journey a real success in a 'show and tell' format.

Sneak Peek of what to expect: A bit of many concepts with corresponding tools including CI, Microservices, Docker, Consumer Driven Contracts, Service discovery, Consul, Registator, Multihost deployments, Kibana, Elastic search, Prometheus

Direct URL:

You’re probably here at this conference because you want to become a better developer, but I’m here to tell you that that you’re focusing on the wrong area. The difference between a good programmer and a great one isn’t the ability to write a kernel module in LISP, but the ability to communicate with your colleagues and customers. Skills sharing, collaboration and functional communication are critical for the success of any software project, and yet usually overlooked and undervalued.

Developers who strive to be great, cannot afford to neglect their professional development in these areas. You don’t to reinforce the dreadful stereotype of the shy, stuttering, geek, do you?

This interactive presentation will examine a few of the critical “soft skills” that are needed to thrive in corporate team environments. For example, how you can:

• write effectively and speak clearly; i.e. get to the point,
• move beyond your technical silo to work effectively as a team,
• build trust and rapport with your project customers,
• mentor, motivate and encourage others,
• mediate or negotiate between competing points of view,
• lead others and manage vendors