Product owners face a challenge: potential new markets are vast and full of unknowns. Current thinking in successful product management recognizes the importance of learning about potential customers
and adapting product decisions to reflect those insights. However, many exercises and workshops
geared towards product owners treat target products and markets as a fixed, concrete objective—failing to include any market feedback

Dicey Markets is a product owner simulation designed to reflect many of the forces driving product owners, including unknown information about the market, competitive pressure, and technical debt. The simulation
emphasizes the role of rapid regular feedback in creating successful products in the face of uncertain markets.

For a long time multitasking has been considered a must-have skill when, in fact, it makes us less productive and more prone to error. But even with plenty of studies and papers supporting that idea, it can be hard to convince managers and stakeholders that we should be taking on less at a time. In this lightning talk, we'll run through one very quick, lightweight simulation (Multitasking is Evil) you can use to help make that case and show that lowering work in progress is the way to go!

Imagine you were hired to provide consulting assistance for a new team just starting out with Kanban. The team has been struggling with their implementation and is looking forward to your expert guidance, support, and advice. It’s your first day and you just walked into the team room to look at their board. You want to make smart observations and thoughtful interpretations so you can have meaningful conversations with the team members. The team starts assembling in the team room for the daily standup and you plan on making some comments afterwards.

What comments would you make? What thoughtful questions would you ask?

This interactive presentation provides a detailed look at how to interpret and thoughtfully observe Kanban Boards to better understand the work of your teams. We will start with an overview of the Lean Kanban Method and then proceed through a series of interactive exercises that give you an opportunity to review and interpret various Kanban boards. The exercises will increase your understanding of Kanban systems and provide opportunities to practice interpreting various board setups so you can have thoughtful and meaningful conversations with your teams.

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.

Good retrospectives (you know, the ones that actually lead to real change?) rest on three pillars:

1. people,
2. process, and
3. follow-through

What makes retrospectives so difficult is that if any of these three pillars starts to crack, it's next to impossible to succeed. Ultimately, getting the right people in the room, utilizing a good process to facilitate the conversation, and following-through on the learning outcomes depend on having an organizational culture that encourages learning, transparency, feedback loops, and continuous improvement.

If this sounds like your company already, then great! This talk is not for you. For everyone else, join us to explore the current trends of employee engagement, how they overlap with agile retrospectives, and the true opportunity each team member has to improve the quality, speed, and outcome of their work. 

Tired of Agile As A Lip-service?

Feel like Lean is getting lost?

Being asked to improve everything without changing anything?

Do you want to know what you can do about it?

If so, this talk is for you! Join Trent and Matt as they use Institutional Theory to examine the current state of Agile adoption, what it means for our work today, and what it suggests for the future.

They’ll explain the increasing emphasis on frameworks, the move away from lightweight methods, and the paradoxes we’ve all observed in Agile adoptions. These developments follow clear and established patterns; they’re not unexpected. Come explore why we are where we are, and what we can do to move beyond Agile Despondency.

Confused about Continuous Integration vs Delivery vs Deployment? Not sure how to take the next step towards Continuous Deployment?

In this session, Nayan will remove the confusion around the "Continuous" terms. He'll then show you how to go from Commit to Production with no manual steps, while remaining confident that your production system remains stable. We will do this with a variety of open source tools -- from traditional build & integration tools to modern deployment environments & monitoring. You'll leave the session inspired and ready to build your own Continuous Deployment Pipeline when you get back to work.

Are you sometimes overwhelmed by the never-ending stream of Agile teachings you’re supposed to know and have at your fingertips to address every possible situation in the proper Agile way?

Sure, Agile is a “mindset” and you’re supposed to “own your process” but the reality is, that’s not how we teach or learn or usually even talk about Agile. Instead, we are bombarded with ever more retro formats, technical practices, prioritization techniques, facilitation tips, and other snippets of wisdom that we should all know before we can be considered good Agilists. And if your job title is Scrum Master or Agile Coach, the range of things you’re expected to master only expands.

In this session, Mathias Eifert will share how he found his footing in a vast sea of loosely connected Agile rules, processes, techniques and tools by recognizing that a small number of fundamental concepts can help with finding answers that are “good enough” as a starting point to tackle most new contexts or problems. Together, we will examine how many established Agile approaches can be traced back to these essential concepts and hopefully help each attendee a little further along on their journey from rules-based Agile to fundamental understanding.

Is your Product Owner available to the team, empowered to make decisions, knowledgeable in their business domain, engaged in the product and leading the way for delivery of value? This session does a deep dive in the these ideas.
The session starts with a brief Seinfeld video to demonstrate the importance of Product Ownership. The session then discusses 5 key attributes to look for in a Product Owner:

1. Bandwidth
2. Power

3. Knowledge
4. Interest
5. Vision

After that discussion, we will have an interactive exercise to identify what a Product Owner does day to day. The debrief will identify the balance a Product Owner must have between working with stakeholders, end users, customers AND working with the Scrum team AND product backlog refinement.

The session concludes with the presenter sharing a Product Owner persona sheet. This persona sheet measures product owners across the 5 attributes mentioned above and presents a narrative on their core strengths and risks.

Do you want to write great User Stories (a.k.a. small features that are part of a product) that provide the vehicle for conversation and confirmation that we build the right thing? Do you struggle with completing stories (of business value) that are potentially shippable within a fraction of an iteration/sprint? During this session we will do a quick refresher on User Story formatting to include Acceptance Criteria. The reason for the refresher is that over the last few years, despite people using User Stories, I have experienced their usage far from the intended purpose.

After the refresher, we will learn at least 2 techniques for splitting stories in this interactive workshop.

One of the struggles I have seen when organizations transition to Agile in relation to the Agile principle "Customer Collaboration Over Contract Negotiation" is: When and how do I involve the right customer.

Goal of this presentation:

• Provide tools on how to involve different types of stakeholders
• Tool to identify different types of stakeholders

In the presentation I will explain the 2 step process of:

• Step 1: map out the players for a value stream, product, or feature(set) in a simple 2x2 Stakeholders Matrix (influence/power and interest)
• Step 2: Learn about the tools and techniques to involve players in each quadrant based on their specific strength or opportunity

So you are considering getting a coach to help you in your transition to Agile. Or perhaps you are an Agile practitioner considering becoming an Agile coach. What do these Agile coaches do? What makes them different?

This session will enter the foyer of the house that describes what coaches do and considerations one can have when they think about coaching (including hiring one). Prepare to be challenged and to learn a bit of what it takes to be or work with a coach; it has little to do with courses or certifications, though they may help. In covering what coaches do, one can now begin to think along the lines of what the skills one may need to improve.

Losing good people during your transformation? Getting more resistance than you expected? You may be producing unwanted reactions in the way you are leading your people through change. If you want your Agile transformation firing on all cylinders without the harmful side-effects, people at all levels need to become Catalysts.

Catalytic leaders help lead continual improvement - change. How can we do that? How can anyone be a leader? This workshop will mix presentation with exercises to help you understand practical things you can do to lead change effectively.

Journey with us to discover how to unlock the maximum potential of others and yourself by revisiting how you engaged the world as a child and learn how to tap into it to ignite mindful innovation in your organization. You will learn how children naturally manifest virtues of agile/lean/UX and understand how you can leverage them to bring people together and elicit a mindset that deepens your organization's understanding of tangible value for an innovative ecosystem—one that moves you beyond merely keeping up, towards breakthrough organizational exploration & generative customer discovery.

You work in an organization that struggles to prioritize work.

There are too many handoffs to get things done.

Issues snowball downhill, impacting what teams deliver.

You feel blocked by issues above your paygrade.

Sound familiar?

Come join Matt Barcomb as he introduces Strategy Deployment, Portfolio Planning, and Organization Design. He will explore how these topics are interrelated, as well as their typical organizational impacts.

Attendees will leave equipped with practices to sense these impacts and build the business cases needed to influence senior leadership—no matter where you may fall in the soul-crushing hierarchy of your organization.

How frequently does a good agile team deploy to production? Not every team is capable of deploying "on every commit". What does it take for a team to even start deploying at the end of each sprint, or each week, or each day?

Most companies don't realize that deploying more frequently often requires both significant technical change as well as cultural change. In this talk, I'll guide you through what it takes to deploy more frequently, both from the technical side of setting up pipelines as well as the organizational side of removing red tape. I'll draw on the unique challenges that teams must overcome at each step of the way, from deploying once a month all the way down to full continuous delivery. If your team has been struggling to go faster, come see how you can change to get there. And if you already are at full continuous delivery, come see how to go even faster than that!

As we have seen from recent reports in the news and elsewhere, cyberattacks come many sources. How can we use Agile practices to improve organization's information security posture?

In this session, Dan and Paul will discuss techniques that can help make information security an important part of software development and speed your response to threats. The use of hardening pipelines, dark stories, and user stories/acceptance criteria that map to policy guidance based on NIST 800-53 controls will be discussed and how each approaches improving your security posture from a different angle.

You've sent the managers to Scrum Master training. The development team is getting pretty good at writing automated tests and have most of the release process automated. Your CIO is recognizing that Quality Assurance, Security, and Independent Testing is going to need to change to take advantage. But something isn't right. Specifically, you're still not producing products that delight customers. Or, you are producing products that delight customers, but they can't see the light of day because of other stakeholders.

The dirty secret in Agile Transformation is that for all the talk about how the IT organization needs to change to engage with customers and produce working software, what gets less talked about is how comfortable the customers, or the proverbial "Business", has gotten with the status quo before Agile.

In this talk, we explore who are the stakeholders that comprise "the Business", what barriers they often face in adapting to Agile, as well as some practices that can help you ensure that they have seat on the Agile Transformation train.

Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches wear many hats, but one of the most important is that of the Change Artist. Understanding what people need in order to move through a change curve is critical to success, but often overlooked in the toolkit is the role of Identity. Our self-perception, both as individuals and within the context of a group, is foundational to our psychology, and can be leveraged to affect and nurture powerful, long-lasting change.

For years, software development and IT teams have used the agile mindset and the many associated practices to continuously improve, and to deliver value better and faster in pursuit of their objectives. Inevitably, such powerful concepts spread to new domains as others seek every advantage in their own pursuits. This decade is likely to be viewed as the one where agility truly expanded beyond its humble manufacturing and technology roots, and became a fundamental strategic consideration across entire enterprises in nearly every industry and sector. From Fortune 500 companies and government to PMOs and HR, the potential of agile is convincing leaders and organizations to rethink how they approach their structure and delivery to better satisfy their stakeholders in increasingly demanding and competitive environments.

In July 2017, Excella Consulting (Agile IT) partnered with Silverline Communications to help them with their own agile transformation goals, providing them coaching support to transform Silverline into a true agile marketing firm. While many presentations cover coaching and transformations after-the-fact, this talk will provide an active, ongoing case study at the three month mark of the effort. This "In Progress" perspective will give the audience a view from the trenches of how agile can be applied outside of IT, as well as some of the early successes and challenges that can help provide fresh perspective into their own ideas, opportunities, and initiatives.