Learn about the latest developments in brain research, and the practical exercises they’ve produced for facilitating conversations (even the most-difficult ones) and turning them into concrete action plans.

Have you experienced any of the following?

• Witnessed two people arguing the same side of an issue, at each other?
• Reached the end of a meeting with no decisions made?
• Been told, “That’s not what I thought I was getting.”?
• Had a great idea, but couldn’t get anyone to listen?
• Had anyone shout in your meetings?

Even if your teams aren’t necessarily in conflict, the techniques discussed in this session will deliver an repeatable way to discuss complex, multi-sided issues, in an organized way that respects all participants, makes sure everyone feels heard, and produces tangible results that everyone can be proud of.

Change is hard (duh!) but the book Switch changed my life. While there are lots of change management models out there, Directing the Rider, Motivating the Elephant and Shaping the Path is the one I follow.

Scaling is hard too. But if we think about Change and Scaling together in the right way, maybe they don’t have to be quite so hard.

Recent polling of thousands of Scrum practitioners in the U.S. and Europe indicate that 66% of organizations are at the beginning stage of scaling Scrum. The State of Scrum report says 52% say their "organizational design and culture made it difficult to adopt and further scale Scrum". The State of Agile report says 63% say their "Company philosophy or culture [are] at odds with core agile values"

Think about your organization. Are executives disengaged? Are the agile teams executing independently like feral cats?

Come and learn three actionable things to make your scaling more successful, three things you can implement tomorrow to Direct the Rider, Motivate the Elephant and Shape the Path.

Our roadmaps and backlogs are usually littered with pet projects, squeaky wheels, and recent ad hoc items that gain priority simply because they are the latest shot across our bow. Impact mapping is a powerful practice that helps us identify and align our work to the most valuable business goals and mission objectives and avoid many of the common challenges that arise from an unfocused set of work priorities.

Impact maps help us visualize quantifiable benefits that deliverables should produce towards our business objectives. They allow us to focus our work on those deliverables that move the needle the most, not just deliver features. The practice is a great way to communicate assumptions, create plans, and align stakeholders as well as aid in strategic planning, roadmap management, and defining measures of success and quality.

This workshop will provide an appreciation for the power of impact mapping by walking you through building your own impact maps and the facilitation process for doing so in your own organization. You will leave the workshop having participated in a tangible example of the technique, and having gained an understanding of best-practices for facilitation with a focus on an impact map’s outputs and how they lead into the creation of actionable user stories when completed. Hands-on collaboration with your fellow attendees will help encourage your own application of this technique in your real world road-mapping and backlog refinement activities.

Agile and Lean Startup are concepts often associated with software, for-profits, and entrepreneurship. Yet with thoughtful and creative application of agile and lean startup ideas, nonprofits can create nimble, human-centered organizational processes and design flexible, mission-driven programming that puts beneficiaries' needs and interest front and center. In this session, participants follow one nonprofit educational theatre company's adventures in sailing the choppy seas of the current nonprofit climate, discuss successes and challenges of applying lean and agile ideas for nonprofit aims, and brainstorm ideas for applications in their own agile nonprofit adventures.

Agile delivers a huge jump in team productivity. Explaining this in words to someone who’s never seen it in action is often hugely difficult, if not impossible. This 10-minute simulation allows participants to experience Agile and immediately see the benefits. You’ll also be able to immediately take this exercise back to your teams. All you need is a deck of cards. (Cards will be provided for this session!)

Everyone wants to know which Agile metrics really count, and why. But a lot comes down to context: who's asking, what decisions are on the horizon, how you communicate, and so forth. Add scale, and you've got a major challenge.

David Bujard, Dante Vilardi and Nate Conroy have spent the last few years trying to figure how to make agility measurement effective at a big federal program. In this talk they will discuss lessons learned from numerous experiments -- those that produced results, and those that didn't.

David and Dante are Agile coaches who support a transformation program at USCIS.

Most organizations are embracing the desire to be lean, at least espousing the desire.  But what does lean mean in different contexts? Is embracing lean as a startup different than lean delivery as a midsize company or a large organization or a government agency? 

This talk will explore what it means to be lean in various sized organizations, what is the same and what is different about lean implementations based on the size of the organization.

Almost everyone has to deal with bad legacy code at some point. Not just legacy code that you inherited and obviously would have been better if you had written it, but legacy code so ugly and ill-conceived that it makes you want to hunt down the person responsible just so you can scream at them (or worse). And then replace it with a one-line library function that does the same thing.

We'll show some examples of the worst code I've seen, and we'll have a chuckle or a groan. The names, projects, and check-in comments have been changed to protect the guilty, but, unfortunately, these examples are all too real.

Innovation Labs often don’t create the impact they’ve promised and many eventually fail. Capital One’s Innovation Lab, founded in 2011, has evolved to stay relevant throughout the years. In this session, Amber King, Senior Manager of Accelerator Operations talks about how the Labs' operating model has changed over the years, the details of how the Lab's new accelerator model works, how we incorporate Lean Start-up, Design Thinking, Google Design Sprints, Scrum, and Kanban techniques on our teams and what has triggered the need to reinvent the Labs' model in order to continue to push for disruptive innovation.

Why do we talk? How useful is it?
Let's work together in small teams to make products in complete silence, experiencing how talking both benefits and stifles collaboration.
What does collaboration really mean? How can this experience improve your collaboration?

In this experience, which is modeled after experiments run by Dr. Sallyann Freudenberg and Katherine Kirk, participants will experience a
* 90 minute period of complete silence while working together to build prosthetic hands for charity, noting down each time they have the urge to speak
* 45 minute review period where our facilitators will help us look at what we wanted to say and what happened instead, along with summarizing the outcomes we experienced through silent collaboration so that participants can take back with them these enlightenments.

We will pay particular attention to re-evaluating our model of collaboration and deep diving on the things people still felt like they wanted to say -- Did they really need to? What happened when they couldn't? How did that affect the outcome? We were moved by this experience when we participated in it at Agile2017, and are excited to provide the same experiential learning and awareness of silent collaboration to our community back in DC.

Probably few topics in Agile generate more philosophical polarization, strength of opinion, and catch phrases than how to scale Agile, and nothing represents that fact better than comparisons of LeSS and SAFe. But if we step back and take a dispassionate look - or try to - what do we find at the next level of specifics? If you sift the data, what are key differences in terms of practice and structure, and the two or three key differences in principles or philosophy that drive them? What shakes out. And - what we rarely or ever dwell on - what is the same or similar about them, and what if anything can we learn from that? These are the questions we look at and results we share in this presentation.

HOW you introduce a new practice to your organization is ten times more important than WHICH new practice you introduce. When is the right time for SAFe, DevOps, Lean Startup, or Usability Testing? Using learning from the “Teal” playbook, learn how to assess the current state of your organization and build a roadmap for introducing the right initiatives at the right time.

TSA Agile Services (TAS) began on January 4th, 2017 after extensive collaboration with contracting officials, various bids, and the Agile community. Come hear the aspects that have enabled successful delivery within a government agency. TAS encompasses over 65 applications supported by a team of 80+ people. Also - because transparency is a large key to our success - we will cover the failures we have experienced and the struggles we are still working on. Lastly - it is important for contractors and government to work closely together - this presentation will be co-presented by two Agile Coaches: one is a federal employee and the other a contractor.

“Hey John, we don’t just want to help our customers be Agile, we want our firm to be Agile too.”

These words from our CEO kicked off our journey to transform Sevatec into an Agile company.  Business Agility is still a new idea for companies to embrace and as such, few companies have yet to align with the Agile principles, mindset, and practices.

Agile companies have happier employees, create greater value, make more immediate impact, operate efficiently, continuously improve, and provide a work environment that is motivating and allows employees to feel trusted, empowered, safe, and whole.

This session will include our experience with some of the practices we employed such as Impact mapping • work visualization • experiments • fast feedback loops • continuous improvement • cross-functionality • ChatOps • Communities of Practice • Lean Coffee • value-driven • data-driven • empowerment • and Organizational Change supported by Integral Theory/AQAL, Design Thinking, and Neuroleadership.

Through this session, you will understand what Business Agility is and learn approaches, practices, and tools that provide immediate benefit as well as cultivate the seeds for cultural change.  You will hear stories and see examples of our journey to Business Agility delivered firsthand by members of our business teams such as HR, Finance, Contracts, etc.

The VersionOne 11^th Annual State of Agile Survey for 2016 found that enterprise agility is increasing throughout organizations and across almost all industries at an accelerated rate.  Respondents from very large organizations, employing more than 20,000 people, also increased.  Scrum and scaling frameworks are getting a lot of attention at these large organizations as a way for them to do Agile, but the focus is getting the processes and tools up and running over the individuals and interactions.  Once these frameworks are deployed, the leader responsible for bringing the process change into the organization declares success and slaps the Agile label on their process and there is a belief that implementing Agile methods will generate culture change.  The culture remains one of compliance to the process over customer satisfaction, self-direction and continuous improvement. 

In smaller organizations, having a clear line of sight between the employee’s daily work and the business value they are delivering is easier to establish and communicate.  In the larger organizations, the line of sight to the customers becomes much more elusive.  This lack of line of site to the customers puts the employees in silos of work that gets prioritized by urgency versus importance and often quick hits versus real business value.  Without clarity and alignment, people begin to disconnect from the purpose of their daily work and become order takers. 

In this session, we will discuss the role of the agile leader in creating the culture where people can be successful in their jobs. A culture where everyone is aligned, engaged, and continuously improving so agility can take hold and thrive.  We’ll discuss using high alignment to create an engaging environment with Autonomy, Mastery, and a shared Purpose that values Individuals and Interactions over Process and Tools. 

In today's IT industry, Agile methodology has become a household word. My 6th grader talks about Agile principles that they learnt in elementary school. Self-organizing teams is one of the principles of Agile methodology. Yet, time and again, I hear Scrum Masters and Agile teams doubt the existence of these said "self-organizing" teams. Can teams really self-organize? What do self-organizing teams look like? What process should I follow to make my team self-organizing? Join me for a talk to decide for yourself.