While it is true to say that people’s attitudes and beliefs are key to implementing an agile project, or Agile in itself, much of the use of the term ‘mindset’ implies a mental model that can be defined and engineered. In this presentation, we will look at how we can measure attitudes within an organization and use multiple small actions to trigger the rapid evolution of organizational culture, so that it can sustain agile developments. Mindset and the alignment-based ideas of some on the Agile movement too often imply creating homogeneous beliefs and values that will lead to full alignment. In practice, this damages resilience and can be dangerous. This presentation will introduce the idea of coherence instead of alignment - the celebration of cognitive and behavioral differences that can align if needed to support the delivery of sustainable solutions.

This talk is about my journey to become an ICF certified coach and how I apply those skills both to my role as a strategy consultant and business leader.

Coaching is a powerful discipline that differs from mentoring, teaching and consulting. Applied correctly it can help you have better, more powerful conversations and allow you to overcome difficult challenges.

I'll talk through the skills what I learned and where they align and differ from Agile coaching practices.I'll talk to the most powerful tools I learned that I now apply to all my work such as logical levels. Throughout this, I'll do a couple of simple exercises for the audience to take with them and use.

These skills are valuable to people at every level of the organization and equally, can be applied to all aspects of your life.

Mike Cohn advocated writing user stories in a “As a <user> , I want <action> so that <benefit>” template because it put the system requirements in first person, thereby bringing an inherent user perspective to design and helping product owners prioritize effectively. However, the user perspective has so far not captured the user state of mind or mood resulting in terribly designed interfaces and bad user experiences.

Let us look at a couple of user stories to understand this concept.

a. As an entitled-to-support user, I want to enter my broken in-warranty hard disk details so that I can create a support ticket.

b. As a valid user, I want to like my friend’s post so that he gets fake internet karma.

For a development team, these user stories mean fields, buttons, backend, fancy CSS and that is all. But if you look closely, user in story 1 is not just an entitled-to-support user but a ‘frustrated and dejected” user whereas the user in story 2 is a ‘happy’ user.

How about rephrasing the user stories in the experience template

As a <user> , I want <action> so that <benefit> becomes As a <mood> <user> , I want <action> so that <benefit>

Since the purpose of user stories was to initiate and enable team discussions on features and not be the actual task set in stone, I strongly believe that capturing user mood in the story would enable better design discussions and even sharper prioritization.

Every person working in an agency that delivers digital services or applications to their clients has faced the typical customer that wants a fixed price project delivered yesterday.

With these kinds of requests, you are facing a situation where two corners of the famous iron triangle are already set in stone but you still have to deliver on your high-quality standards. You are left behind with the question of how will I deliver this project in an agile way?

This is one of the problems we were facing with our agency when we decided to move from a waterfall to an agile project approach.

Recent experience with a delivery model that seems to be waterfall to the customer but is still agile following a scrum approach shows the benefits of a hybrid model for both clients and agency.

I will walk through the process of adopting an agile approach for a digital agency with multiple teams and timezones involved that transitions from a waterfall environment into the agile world.

The learnings from the agency can be transferred to other organizations where the management primarily is used to fixed budget waterfall projects and tip their toes into the agile world.

The session will bring insights and help to teams that deal with fixed and scopes, moving scopes and teams and organizations that go on the journey from waterfall to agile in a distributed SMB organization.