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.

Any organization’s ability to focus on what matters most to their customers is directly related to their ability to get valuable feedback from them. While more and more organizations embrace agile practices during the development of their services, they often lack in how they collect feedback and therefor don’t get the benefits they are after. After all, what is the upside to investing in being able to pivot, if there is no information available to guide the direction of that pivot?

The fact that many roadmaps leave little room for flexibility significantly contributes to this and building powerful roadmaps is a really hard task. How does one get feedback about a house without building it completely? How does one give feedback about a car without being able to drive it around the city for a couple of hours?

This session will provide you with practical techniques on how to build a powerful roadmap for your product or service, one that allows any organization to get valuable feedback from their customers. The session is based on ideas from the draft book Powerful Roadmaps.

TACO is an acronym I use with clients to help them map controls from their software delivery pipelines to the organizational controls.

TACO stands for Traceability, Access, Compliance, and Operations.

The approach consists of a base list of 25 automatable controls that are documented and the control activity, artifacts and SOR identified. After mapping how these controls are handed we map them to the organizational controls and identify any gaps.

This model allows for the creation of opinionated pipelines and helps create a common understanding across teams as to what is required in order to be secure.

Taking a TACO approach can be considered a part of implementing a DevSecOps program and I’ve used this approach at multiple banks. I’ve given the base talk at three conferences and multiple times to internal teams. It helps build organizational confidence in the automation of software delivery.

During the talk, I’ll run through the different categories of controls, how they are implemented, what the purpose of them is, how to create robust feedback loops for controls such as SAST and how to handle long-running processes such as DAST.

Content is fairly high level but I can dig into specifics of each given area as questions arise.

The success of agile practices has impacted the masses’ understanding of what’s really happening behind the scenes. This too often leads to blind adoption and mediocre results. In order words, for many teams agile practices have become the new waterfall.

With a deeper understanding of the core tenets of the agile mindset and a simple process to help you think in an agile way, you will become a master of sustainable improvement with tangible results and with a lot less frustration.

Expect this session to energize you with a healthy combination of theory and practice.