Roadmapping is a flawed concept in the age of Agile. Maps, by their definition, are linear and we don't build linear products and services any more. We build continuous systems. Nevertheless, we have to be able to create and provide some plans for our teams, leaders and customers to set expectations about the ongoing improvements and future of the services we build. How do we communicate that effectively in a continuous world? How do we ensure the voice of the customer is included in these plans?

In this talk, Jeff Gothelf will discuss the concept of outcome-based product planning. Using specific examples and detailed tools, Jeff will show how taking a customer-centric look at product strategy and creating continuously improving plans ensures the teams maintain their agility, customer-focus and ultimately, the success of their product.

Every organisation has problems to overcome. At first glance they seem daunting: software bugs, financial issues, staff troubles, operational woes.

However: what if all these problems weren’t disconnected, but actually stemmed from the same underlying cause? What if - by tackling that underlying cause - we could make all those obstacles disappear in one go? And, what if it was surprisingly simple to find that underlying cause?

This talk draws on the Theory of Constraints and aims to provide you with the tools you need to understand and uproot the cause of complex, cross-functional problems that cause widespread pain and all too often go unaddressed.

In this presentation Jessica and Roslynn will present how agility can transform the modern education system to purposefully teach students the skills that they will need to find success in the ever changing economy. 

   Jessica and Roslynn have brought Agile into their middle school classrooms and found incredible results. Students were able to cultivate their own agile mindset, build their own kanban boards and employ project management skills to design and process their own projects. Along the way students also built time management, leadership, organizational and communication skills, which are all highly necessary to navigate an ever evolving economy. 

Are you interested in learning more about self-management and how to share authority within an organization? Then this talk is for you! We will discuss the basic patterns and processes of sociocracy, a system of self-governance that can be used in combination with agile practices to scale self-organization across all decisions made in an organization. This interactive class will cover topics such as patterns of organizing and consent decision-making. So come prepared to learn and participate in the discussion!

As per IDC, 81% of enterprises are using multiple public clouds along with one or more private cloud deployments. Opting for a multi cloud strategy is becoming a necessary requirement for most organization driven by many business imperatives such as: leverage best-of-breed services, address business continuity, avoid vendor lock-in etc. 

Most enterprises struggle with the complexity of multi cloud strategy when they approach it as a reactive response rather than a strategic initiative. We propose a structured framework for building a successful and long term multi cloud strategy which consists of 3 critical lenses: 1) assess the workload  2) select technology and topology and 3) establish cloud operating model. In this session, we cover this multi cloud strategy framework along with pragmatic tips on working with multi cloud. 

As a startup scales (whether it's a product or a service company), operational efficiency plays the crucial role! It could be the defining point between a drop, plateau, linear or exponential growth.

Much to chagrin of most founders, funding doesn't help in scaling operations, the operational efficiency does! Money helps but only if it's deployed for strategic growth!  This talk is about scale of an enterprise

Operational efficiency is divided into 3 parts: Operations, MIS and Finance! Different tools & processes, security paradigms can make or break your company as it scales to 30, 300 and even 3000 people.

The aim of this talk is to introduce a technique of imparting knowledge about Agile Tenets to the non-initiated and/or team members who need reinforcement in their understanding of tenets of agility in teams, collaboration, XP practices and dependency resolutions in an agile par lance. The modus of operandi is to take a popular movie, which in this case is Lord of the Rings, and derive analogies from the movie that defines some core concepts of an agile journey with team, dependency resolution and a couple of agile engineering techniques including XP practices that are result driven in this era of distributed agile teams. The intent is to make it a fun session with an audio-visual link for deeper entrenchment and retention of the understanding it intends to impart. This sort of immersive learning with audio visual aims at connecting the learnings to existing neural pathways to create an understanding of the tenets of Agility in a language that everybody understands - "Movies and Fun".

The role that we play in the community is important. Our impact on the environment matters. As we adjust to an increasingly automated world, it is crucial that we retrain our employees and give them new opportunities. In our endless pursuit of shareholder value, we become "lean" only to become "mean" and lost sight of our original purpose?

Today, more and more people are concerned about the negative impact that corporations can have on society. In response to these concerns, a group of 181 CEOs signed a statement in August 2019 that outlined five pillars of corporate responsibility. However, despite this commitment from Corporate America, many employees still don't feel connected to their company's social responsibility policies. One way to address this disconnect is by applying the principles of lean and agile to the area of corporate social responsibility. This would involve investing in employees, delivering value to customers, dealing fairly and ethically with suppliers, supporting the communities they do business in, and generating long-term value for shareholders. Additionally, it is important for corporations to remember their responsibility to manage their impact on the environment. By taking these steps, corporations can begin to rebuild trust with the public and create a positive impact on society.

In this workshop, you will learn how to use a case study in order to improve your work. You will be placed in breakout rooms with other participants in order to share ideas and results. By the end of this workshop, you will have new tools and techniques that you can take back to your workplace.

What makes champions perform better than others?

Champions like Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Michele Jordon, Usian Bolt, Stefi Graph, Michel Jordan, Serena Williams. Pele, Muhammad Ali, Sachin Tendulkar, Ayrton Senna and many more accomplished people in other fields have some things in common. One of them is it is not just they become champions once they achieve results, they are much before, it is a function of who they are being.

It is not just their skills (doing) and experience (knowing) that determine how they perform but it is also a function of how the situation 'occurs' to them and who they are 'being 'at that moment. This workshop is based on the Ontological/phenomenological models. Ontology is a branch of philosophy interested in studying the nature of 'being' itself. It is also underpinned by the works of  Tim Galloway's - Inner Game of Tennis and Steve Zafforon's Three Laws of Performance. 

In this workshop, we will explore the mechanism to access the being and experience how we can significantly elevate the performance by shifting our ways of being. 

The inner game is based on our two selves, the first one (teller), which instructs, directs,  and judges continuously and the other 'self' obeys the first self, which is part of the un/subconscious mind. 

The Three Laws of Performance are:  

The First Law states: “How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them”. 

The Second Law states: “How a situation occurs, arises in language.”

The Third Law states: “Future-based language transforms how situations occur to people.”

Through language, we can influence our being.

Refernces: 

Though these concepts might look theoretical they are backed by extensive research and application of these practices (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1681682) 

The Handbook for Teaching Leadership. Knowing, Doing, and Being. First Edition. Edited by: Scott Snook - Harvard Business School, USA

Snook, Scott, Nitin Nohria and Rakesh Khurana, eds. The Handbook for Teaching Leadership: Knowing, Doing, and Being. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2012

In this workshop, using ontological and phenomenological models the participants can first-hand experience the concepts and figure out actions for breakthrough results inside their current situation.

“I feel the need – the need for speed.” 

The words of Tom Cruise as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun in 1986 rang true for fighter pilots and race car drivers back then. In 2021, the words stand true for the software product development world, where organizations feel the need to go many times faster than they operate today. Delivering software quickly, reliably, and safely is at the heart of technology transformation and organizational performance.

Since the beginning of 2021, am researching and consulting on achieving a strategic objective i.e. As an org how can we go faster by 2X. This statement is heard differently at different levels in the organization. For leadership, it is essentially about faster speed to market. i.e. faster GTM. For mid- management, this translates to improved productivity on ground and for scrum teams/squads it simply means improved Cycle time / Lead Time to change / velocity.​ Challenges increase manifold for highly regulated fintech world. But excellence is possible -  for those that execute on key capabilities see the benefits.

In this session, will share about the role played by an integrated approach of adoption of Agile, product thinking and fine engineering practices by leveraging Google’s DORA, SRE.  Data Driven BizDevSecOps. We lead with measurement and establish a culture of continuous improvement where on-ground teams continuously progress towards achieve their ‘North-star’ aligned with organization’s strategic objective.  

In today's world, it's more important than ever to be able to navigate through chaos, complexity and uncertainty. This session will give you the tools you need to understand where these conditions come from, why they emerge and how to use them to inform your own decision-making and actions. With this knowledge, you'll be able to lead effectively through complexity and transform turbulence into possibility.

What do you think about our current state of Agile? 

Socrates says an unexamined mind is not worth living. 

The current state of Agile is struggling to go beyond some core values and principles. There are practically dozens of frameworks but very less agility than we see in practice. One of the reasons might be there is no sound theoretical underpinning for the body of knowledge around Agility.  Most of the Agile literature seldom passes the norms of the scientific method. It mainly employs casual and sometimes self-serving empirical evidence; it is rarely grounded on well-established theoretical tradition. Lacks intellectual rigour.

Why we should look at philosophy to address the current state of Agile?

May be the current scientific methods are not suitable for developing a solid basis for Agility. May we may have to start from the fundamentals, the first principles. 

In the session, a very brief introduction to Philosophy (as relevant to the agile community) will be shared. Philosophy is the love for Wisdom (Philo - love, Sophi - wisdom). 

What is ethics?  (moral philosophy) 

Where do our ideas of right and wrong come from? 

For example - our notion of freedom  (or free speech) is not the same across the globe. 

Another example. " Is it okay to provide a critical and negative review comment on a public/social media platform"?"

The notion of right and wrong - comes from our preferences.  A group of people debate, and critique an assertion and that group agrees that the assertion is good for the community that becomes a law. As the preferences of the community undergo change the laws get amended or changed or replaced by a new one. 

The scientific method is based on pure rationality maybe there is a need to re-look at this aspect. 

The world of Ethics is not black and white like the world of rationality. 

Some of the challenges in creating a framework for "Ethics in Agile" can be understood better if we have clear idea of ethics. 

three main types of ethical theory: deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics. 

Deontology : This is an ethical theory that uses rules to determine whether an action is right or wrong. It’s a way of thinking about ethics that emphasizes our duty to follow universal moral rules that apply equally to everyone.

You can observe this in religious doctrines. Example: You don't lie always tell the truth no matter what. 

consequentialism: it’s the theory that determines whether an action is right or wrong by looking to its consequences. It’s what people are talking about when they say that the ends justify the means.

It is based on context and consequence. If a gunman has attacked the school and asks where the children are hiding you lie (you don't tell the truth) to the gunman to save the children. 

virtue ethics: takes an entirely different approach. Here, the focus is not on doing moral actions, but on developing a moral character. 

For example, instead of getting hung up on the idea that everything you say has to be true, instead just focus on generally being a more honest person. 

Aristotle believed that humans have the latent potential to develop social virtues that benefit society, like honesty, courage, and patience – but these virtues don’t just arise naturally or spontaneously. We all know that we also have a latent potential to be lazy and selfish! So, virtue ethics proposes that we cultivate social virtues through education and practice.

Now, what do you think are the challenges in "Ethics in Agile"? Why do we need to think of "Ethics in Agile" or we should all practice ethical Agile? 

In the nature vs. nurture debate, do you believe that who we become is predetermined by our genes (nature) or is a consequence of how we are raised (nurture)? Research suggests that a person’s belief in whether intelligence and talent come naturally, or are developed over time, dramatically impacts their performance at work.

This talk is on the mindset. Understand the fixed and growth mindsets, factors that drive each mindset, the pitfalls of the fixed mindset in agile organizations, etc. 

We will share three powerful habits, proven by research, to develop a growth mindset. These can be effectively applied to improve the feedback and agility in your teams to a great extent.

"When I want to, I perform better than when I have to. I want to for me, I have to for you". Self-motivation is a matter of choice. If people are really going to perform, they must be self-motivated. Leaders who adopt a coaching mindset will enable this to happen.

This is a case study on how we have embarked upon this journey, specific techniques that helped us greatly, things that did not work, and practical advice for leaders building high-performing teams.  We will cover:

1. How to adopt different leadership styles to solve different problems?

2. Agile mindset & Maslow Theory

3. Practical techniques for building a high-performance culture - do's and don'ts

4. Applying the GROW Model to transform teams

5. Case study