In the simplest of terms, software development decisions for commercial organizations can be reduced to a calculation of whether the cost of developing the software will be outweighed by the estimated revenue generated or costs saved by the software.  However, as Mark Schwartz points out in his book, “The Art of Business Value Paperback” this simple explanation is insufficient for commercial organizations, and not applicable for government and other non-commercial organizations for whom the impact of software isn’t primarily measured in terms of revenue.  

In this session participants will experience a simulation that has been created to explore these question of how to make decisions about investments to deliver mission and business value by examining the impact of these decisions on the performance of organizations in changing environments.

Agile methods help to build a repeatable and reliable pipeline of working code to production. Unfortunately, complex enterprises, including the US government, consider agile the solution to finding and solving all their copious and complex problem. In this space, agile alone is not enough. Reliable enterprise problem-finding and solution-creation techniques aren't yet embedded in the agile toolkit, but nonetheless that's the toolkit brought to bear on critical, complex organization-spanning issues. Typical problem/solution methods can create a local optimization (look at this great thing the team delivered!) but create a global failure (the team didn't consider the other systems and teams involved in the process, and broke them). This is the norm, not the exception, and why large project solutions are typically "meh", not "wow". Given agile is now the de facto approach, now is the time to focus on being exceptional.

In this talk, we'll cover three years of the fight to achieve agile success on a critical project at the Department of Veterans Affairs: the struggle to enable an agile environment and the realization of what agile at scale REALLY means; the tactical and strategic efforts to identify the fundamental, success-blocking problems of the enterprise, and how to solve them; and what it takes, from discovery, analysis/design, code/test, and release to production, to deliver actual value, and not just "working code."

This talk is inspired by the book ‘The Confidence Code’ by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman.

What is confidence and how do you know you have it?   While confidence is partly influenced by genetics, it is not a fixed psychological state.  However, you won’t discover it thinking positive thoughts or by simply squaring your shoulders and faking it.  It requires work and choices: less focus on people pleasing and perfectionism and more action, risk taking and fast failures.  This is why it can seem harder for women because these behaviors aren’t typically the ‘norm’ for women but generally come naturally for men.

In this talk we will explore the roots of confidence and the gender gap between men and women.  To ground the learnings, we will also hear interview summaries from four great and diverse women in agile: 

 Lyssa Adkins, Esther Derby, Ellen Grove, and Kat Conner

Empowerment. All of the agile literature focuses on it being a key characteristic of a successful Product Owner. Necessary to ensure decisions can be made quickly and representative of business value. Yet in most environments, particularly in the public sector, the notion of a single Product Owner empowered to represent the multitude of stakeholders isn't feasible. In this session, if you have a situation where you are a Product Owner, or know a Product Owner, who is not in that ideal textbook situation (and even those who are), learn how we can harness the power of classic and emerging innovation methods to put you in a position of success.