More and more organizations and teams are adopting Agile, however most stay focused on just the development part. They maintain a Big Upfront Requirements/Design (BRUF) phase and still have a long test and deployment phase. This approach results in more of a mini-waterfall approach rather than an Agile approach where we actually place valuable products in our customers’ hands. The old risks and pain points are still there: are we building the right thing? Is it valuable and usable? Does it work? So the true benefits of an Agile approach in terms of quality valuable products and higher ROI is never achieved due to our long cycles and slow feedback loops. Come to this session to see how Lean Discovery and Agile Delivery combined with a DevOps mindset, can make actual delivery of customer value sustainable. We will look at how Lean Discovery replaces BRUF and ensures the team is constantly building the right thing. We will also see how applying Agile Engineering practices ensure that the team is building the thing right and how a DevOps mindset ensures that the product the team builds actually gets delivered to the customer early and often.

As a business analyst on an agile team, do you spend your time gathering decisions from product owners and passing them on to development teams? Are you tired of simply being a “proxy without power?” As a product manager, do you feel like you are just collecting stakeholder opinions and filtering them for the team? What can you do to boost your impact to your team?

Be more than a proxy.

By definition, a proxy means doing a thing “by the authority to represent someone else.” That job can be important, especially when stakeholders and customers have limited available. But teams need more.

In this workshop, Diane Zajac-Woodie demonstrates how you can be more than a proxy. Through some experiential exercises, you will learn what impact collaboration has on results and why requirements are just as important as ever. Diane also teaches you how to document requirements so people will actually read them. Using acceptance tests, you will practice writing requirements that describe the exact behaviors that you expect in a format that everyone understands.

Be inspired to embrace your role in an agile environment and leave with new techniques that ensure that you will be more than a proxy when you head back to work.

FeatureBan is a simple and quick simulation that introduces several of the key concepts of Kanban, including visualization, feedback loops and limiting work in process and that lets participants learn by doing.  The simulation is also useful because it lets organizations who are curious about Kanban quickly learn about it before investing further.  Mike Burrows invented the simulation, but in this session we will present a modified version that we have used with both technical and non-technical audiences.

Situation A: Your team is great. You’ve met all your sprint goals and your Product Owner is pleased with the results to date. Yeah!

Situation B: Your team sucked. Zero story points completed last sprint. Team members are complaining and blaming each other for the failures.

These two situations demand two very different retrospectives. The right retrospective can make a good team great and turn a bad situation into a learning opportunity. A bad retrospective can set a team back and create a non-safe working environment.

In this session, attendees will explorer retrospectives techniques and examine the pros and cons of the techniques. The workshop will then explore scenarios and examine how to effectively run retrospectives across a variety of scenarios.

Coming out of this sessions, attendees will have an understanding of applying the right retrospectives based on the state and needs of the team and projects.

In the agile community, we celebrate failure as well as success. On our journey to plan @ scale, the Agile Program Management team at Opower had a lot of early failures, but then we started succeeding. How? By not only listening to our stakeholders, but co-creating solutions with them. In this talk, I focus on how process co-creation is helping Opower scale. I’ll describe a specific case study, then we’ll try co-creation together. By the end of this talk, you’ll have specific tips and techniques on how to successfully co-create solutions with your teams that you can take back and use with them tomorrow.

Are you overwhelmed and/or confused as to which metrics can reveal insights to make fact-based decisions to properly manage your agile software development portfolio.  Join us for a the story of a journey, where we will use the metaphor of “going on a road trip” to explain and demonstrate simple yet effective metrics for agile portfolio management.  As we go on our road trip, we’ll highlight the importance of defining and then using quantitative “roll-up” metrics to enable leadership to make informed strategic decisions without slowing delivery team activities while at the same time providing a foundation for team self-management and autonomy.  We’ll use the road-trip metaphor to depict the challenges that teams and organizations encounter attempting to manage their portfolio without effective portfolio metrics defined.  Think about what driving on a road trip would be like if your car didn’t have a check-engine light or a gas gauge, sound risky???  The good news is: it doesn’t have to be that way, and believe it or not, if you have measurements at the team level creating actionable portfolio-metrics is easier than you think.  As we recommend simple portfolio-level metrics to guide our road trip, we’ll define them, share how to interpret them, discuss the insights they provide, and offer guidance on how to gather or aggregate them from team execution data.  We will also touch on why and how the use of an easy to understand metaphor has aided significantly in creating and sustaining engagement amongst stakeholders for portfolio inception and governance activities.  Participants will leave having learned how to successfully navigate their next enterprise-wide initiative using quantitative data to promote alignment, maximize return on investment, foster engagement and reduce risk - everyone attending will receive a printed guide (worksheet) summarizing recommended metrics for agile portfolio management discussed.

Gerry Weinberg once said of consulting “There is always a problem, and it’s always a people problem.” The world of DevOps is emerging rapidly, and just like the early days of Agile, is still working on refining exactly what DevOps means.  So often, the focus is either on the technical aspects of the various tool, or on the people problem of “bringing Ops into the room”.  But what is the problem that DevOps addresses, and is that problem more of a technical problem, or a people problem?  We will explore this, and look at the possible intersection between the two “problems” and how a DevOps approach can help overcome them.

When design is based on random choices, the end product is an assembly of random elements that have little or nothing in common. But when design forces all elements to work together then it makes a single, powerful, and meaningful impression to the user. While agile can get the job done faster, it doesn’t help guide design choices for a software product.    

This session presents a design driven approach called Strong Center Design that incorporates design into an agile workflow.

If you have an interest in improving design of your software products, then this is the session for you.

The government is seeing the merit of using agile practices to develop software.  However, the fallacy that you can’t estimate projects using agile in the government still exist.  The result is that many projects that want to use Agile begin in a very waterfall way developing the initial plan and are forced to stick to that plan throughout the project despite using sprints throughout the ‘development phase’.  Many falsely believe they are stuck in the tradition of estimating everything in the beginning.  During this presentation, through lecture and based upon real experiences, we will demonstrate techniques for developing a project plan and estimating techniques to satisfy the typical government compliance requirements using Agile practices and principles.  In essence, we will together learn how to build the bridge from the traditional government practices to a brave new world where we can plan, estimate and still inject agility.

Why does the Agile community encourage cross-functional teams?  So many large organizations have naturally organized into system-specific teams.  This is a very common and logical approach.  At scale, though, it creates serious impediments to organizational agility and getting things done.  We'll discuss the roots of that phenomenon, one of our key interests in cross-functional teams, patterns for enabling such a team structure, some failure modes, and how to prevent them.  Please join us!

More and more organizations have already reached some level of Agility. Some of them reached what we call Stable/Recharge which means they stabilized some structure/process that works for them. They had a couple of months or even years to “digest”/”recharge” and are now waking up hungry for the next level. Others got stuck along the way with some process that frustrates them but they didn’t really know what to do with it and just continued to suffer. These ones typically have a grudge towards agile when we meet them. People in these two groups have some common ground - they have a lot to benefit if they get exposed to some practical tips and tricks from the trenches that can help connect “by the book” agile to the day to day reality in the typical organization.

In this "Agile Boost Camp" session we will give participants ideas/tips for working through typical boost/reset challenges. These tips/ideas are inspired by working in the trenches with real world organizations.

Each time this session/workshop runs is different because the workshop runs in an agile form where the participants act as the “Product Owners” choosing and customizing the agenda. The trainer brings in the experience and best practices as well as orchestrates the workshop experience.

Ready for your Boost?

We've all see Project Charters.  Project Charters usually state the vision, mission, roadmaps, and is hand top down to the teams.  However, how many of us have Team Charters in place.  Team Charters are one of the most powerful tools a team has when it comes to being able to work effectively together.

This workshop explores the dynamics of creating a team charter, the definition of ready, and the definition of done and how all this works together to create software that is ready for review, to potentially shippable, to released into production.

A build pipeline is such an important aspect of a software project.  It saves a ton of manual, error-prone depoyment work, as well as results in higher quality software that can be released more frequently.    

However, I have been on multiple projects where one of the steps in the continuous integration process was failing (red), often for multiple days or even perpetually.  So much of the benefit a build pipeline provides is lost when this is allowed to happen.  Bugs are not caught by automated tests; additional tests break without being fixed because no one notices; the culture of keeping a green pipeline diminishes and faith in everything from the pipeline itself to automated tests reduces.  Developers learn bad habits.   

Building the pipeline and getting all steps working (keeping it green!) is no small feat in the first place, and keeping it that way can also be a large undertaking. One way I have tried to combat this is to institute some specific process for the Scrum team, pertaining to monitoring and maintaining the build pipeline.  There is also an aspect of convincing the team and management that it is worth spending the time, and dropping everything to maintain a fully functional pipeline.  

Join me for a common sense, tactile approach to keep a build pipeline green that has worked on small and larger projects with multiple teams.  

Are you struggling with delivering a potentially releasable working product every iteration? Ever wonder what one of biggest reasons we have difficulty getting things done at the individual, team and organizational level are? Do you keep doing something even though you know it reduces your productivity and lowers quality? We are going to run an exercise that highlights one of the major culprits that you have all experienced and continue to experience. The exercise will likely ignite a fire that will help you, your team and your organization to become more productive and improve product quality. We will discuss ways to improve this at the individual, team and organization levels.

Knowing this will help anyone to understand the consequences of not prioritizing and increase their desire to. This will lead to producing faster, higher quality products that should lead to delighted customers.

“Agile doesn’t have a brain.” This quote from Bill Scott, ‎VP, Business Engineering and Product Development at PayPal, is provocative for sure, but it highlights the perception that in most organizations Agile is primarily applied as a downstream engineering approach. As such, it isn’t inherently concerned with optimizing product design and user experience, the biggest drivers of customer satisfaction. The feedback cycles that form the basis of Scrum provide verification and validation of stakeholder needs only as they are expressed in the backlog’s user stories. Even if a sufficiently empowered and accessible Product Owner is available, agile methods offer little guidance on how to translate organizational goals and customer needs into the backlog’s content and relative priorities in the first place. As a result, the danger persists that agile teams end up very efficiently building products that implement an incomplete and subjective perception of the wants and needs of both the organization and its customers.

In this session, we will explore how Lean thinking expands the “inspect and adapt” loops of agile development and helps systematically determine which features and design choices really provide the greatest organizational value. After a brief introduction to Lean concepts, we will discuss how Lean approaches product development as a series of hypotheses about customers’ behavior and value perception and builds on Agile’s rapid iterative delivery of working software to test these assumptions. Finally, we will examine ways to derive testable assumptions from organizational goals, such as the Lean UX Hypothesis Statement template and Gojko Adzic’s Impact Mapping.

The retrospective is one of the most powerful Agile ceremonies. They require you to learn from your experiences and challenge you to continuously improve.

In this interactive session, you’ll explore retrospectives in depth, including activities to bring out different personality types and patterns for different levels of team maturity.

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Context:

Scrum has gifted a few Scrum Ceremonies to the world: Sprint Planning, Daily Standups, Backlog Grooming and the Sprint Retrospective. The Retrospective is one of the most important and the most powerful Ceremony.

Retrospectives are required to learn from the experience and improve upon. To he ever-growing competition, the Organizations need to learn a lot from their experience and change accordingly (Charles Darwin: Survival of the fittest).

If it is performed well, it can yield wonderful outcomes to improve anything/everything.

Over a period of time, the teams start feeling bored about the same Old Retrospective (Glad, Sad or Mad, etc) so a lot of Fun/engagement part needs to be added to the same.

In the current times, Retrospectives need a rebirth otherwise Retrospectives will die and the Learning curve will die as well!

We've all heard how we need to collaborate better, but what does this really mean?  What results can I expect to see with better collaboration?  

This workshop will demonstrate how productivity increases with greater collaboration and how to create better a more collaborative environment.  In the session you will not only have an opportunity to experience this relationship with a relatively simple learning game, but we'll look behind the curtain at the science and how some various behavioral models explain why this relationship exists.  We'll then explore some tactics you can use to help teams collaborate better and close with an exploration of what either helps or hinders collaboration and how you can use this information as well as the game with your teams.

If you have an interest in improving productivity of your team or the teams you serve, then this is the session for you.

Can a federal agency’s PMO support Agile teams that are focused on delivering working software frequently? What about all the needed documentation, reviews, and sign-offs from a myriad of groups including systems engineering, privacy, PRA and cyber security? In this session we’ll look at a federal agency’s PMO processes and the concept of minimum viable bureaucracy. We’ll explore the roles and relationship between the PMO, PM, Product Owner, ScrumMaster, and team. We’ll see how projects get initiated and the decision criteria needed to start or defer a project. We’ll walk through a lightweight gate review process and the activities and deliverables of each phase. We’ll also see how gate reviews can co-exists with a continuous delivery pipeline. We’ll share lessons learned and take a look at the challenges ahead. Come to this session to see how a lean PMO is operating in a Federal Agency.

So you want to transform your organization? How should you get started? Am I throwing everything away?

Understanding how to co-create your organization's aspirational characteristics creates a great start to your Agile journey.  This allows the people to internalize what agile means to them in their context; doing this will allow greater alignment and commitment during the transformation. We'll explore a technique that allows you to do this invented by some coaching colleagues (Michael Sahota and Olaf Lewitz) and that I've utilized in Federal and commercial clients.  

After performing this short exercise, we'll discuss next steps of selecting strategies using Appreciative Inquiry to help find and build upon your organization's strengths. Along the way, we'll learn a bit about what Appreciative Inquiry is and how it complements other change management approaches one can take. Don't throw out everything, build on your strengths!