In this lightning talk, we explore the 5 attributes to look for in a ScrumMaster:

• Knowledge - Deep knowledge in Agile and Scrum
• Experience - Deep experience with Scrum teams and in Agile environments
• Coaching - Deep understanding of Coaching concepts and techniques
• Facilitation - Deep understanding of Facilitation concepts and techniques
• Servant Leadership - Deep understanding and desire to enable success for the teams and the organization

From there we look at the ScrumMaster's progression for removing impediments and addressing issues:

• Did we talk about it in the Retrospective?
• Did we discuss the impact?
• Did we identify root causes?
• Did we come up with solutions?
• Have we tried the solutions?
• What were the initial results?
• What are next steps from here?

We use the steps above to ensure:

• Our teams are not making the same mistakes time time after time
• Our teams are not having the same issues arise time and time again
• Our teams are not stagnating but rather are getting better over time

This session will arm session attendees with what to look for in a ScrumMaster and discuss how the SM uses the impediment progression to ensure we have a continuously improving team.

Want to find the perfect Product Owner? It's easy, all you have to do is find one with the time to do the job, the power to make decisions, the knowledge to make smart decisions, the interest in doing the job, and the Vision to build the right product. Easy, right?

Via a story, the session will start by exploring 5 key attributes of being a Product Owner:

1. Bandwidth
2. Power
3. Knowledge
4. Interest
5. Vision

After that discussion, we do an exercise to identify what a Product Owner does day to day. The debrief will identify the balance a Product Owner must have in working with stakeholders, end users, customers AND working with the Scrum team AND product backlog refinement. We will also touch on client/vendor relationships and identify if the PO should come from the client or the vendor (and how technical should the PO be).

The session concludes the attendees being given a Product Owner persona scoring template. The attendees can use this template to score their Product Owners and we will discuss how to identify their Product Owners areas of strength and gaps areas.

In our follow-up session to last year’s Kanban in Action: Thoughtfully Observing Flow, we are excited to bring our newest installment of the series: Kanban in Action: Thoughtfully Creating and Discussing Flow.

This session puts the attendee in the driver’s seat to create their own Kanban board configurations. We provide seven business scenario exercises and ask the attendees how they would go about configuring their Kanban board given the unique constraints of each scenario. Each team/table in the room will spend a few minutes discussing how they would configure their board using the provided flip charts, markers, and stickies. A debrief with the entire room follows as each team shares its concepts. The instructors will also share their own board configurations and ideas.

These exercises will increase your understanding of Kanban systems, give you practice interpreting and creating board configurations, present multiple implementable ideas for any given scenario, and provide you with approaches for meaningful engagement. They are great for aspiring coaches, managers, and leaders who want to have more valuable conversations with their teams and improve Kanban implementations.

We all know the story of how the Agile ‘Software Development’ Manifesto emerged out of Snowbird in February of 2001. And we all know that Agile is still the current best practice for software development. What remains to be fully realized is that Agile has evolved to a best practice for business in general; a way of life for that matter.

I had the privilege of bringing Agile into business over the last couple years. In that time, I introduced my executive leadership team to Business Agility. After getting executive participation in the inaugural Business Agility conference in Feb 2017, we partnered together to seek the benefits of a comprehensive Business Agility adoption.

Using our corporation’s strategic planning and execution effort to exemplify, I will share with you how the Agile mindset and practices apply to business and drive the highest impact possible towards the most valuable goals and initiatives. Modern leadership and business practices such as those under the Business Agility umbrella bring a value-driven, data-driven, efficient focus on impactful delivery.

• Revenue and growth accelerate as we focus the company’s resources on delivering in the most valuable way
• Corporate processes lean out as we remove wasteful bottlenecks, saving money, time, and providing competitive advantage
• Employees are more capable as corporate practices are more meaningful and less taxing
• Back-office tools and data are integrated into a unified experience allowing real-time awareness and predictive analytics, increasing effective decision-making and enabling empowerment at lower levels
• Employees are happier. Customers are happier. The corporate bottom-line reflects this happiness.

I am enthusiastic about the spread of Agile beyond IT. And as such, I am excited to illustrate the brilliance of Business Agility to session participants, adding examples from my most recent corporate transformation effort to exemplify the mindset and practices presented. It is my interest that participants come away with an understanding of how Agile mindset and practices benefit the corporate back office as much as they do software delivery, and how their companies can begin to benefit too by applying what they learn from this presentation.

I spent January in Antarctica hanging out with penguins, whales, and seals. It was about as different from my day-to-day work as can be. And yet, on my long flight home, I couldn’t help but reflect on how well my trip aligned with one specific value of the Agile Manifesto: “Responding to change over following a plan.”

Antarctica is a place that truly drives home why we need both planning AND, even more importantly, the ability to respond to change. This trip helped me fully appreciate how true this value is - and not just in software development. And after being stuck in Antarctica six days longer than planned, it also built up my empathy for team members struggling with dynamic situations!

Did you know that your brain tells you stories all day long, and that if they are good stories, you believe them? Come to this entertaining interactive session to experience some "cognitive illusions" for yourself, and learn what they demonstrate about how our brains' work. Cognitive science and behavioral psychology offer important insights for agilists, insights that can help us work more effectively with our co-workers and clients. You will learn how awareness of our brains' tendencies is a powerful tool to overcome our own innate cognitive bias, and the cognitive bias of others. This newfound awareness can open you to more varied perspectives in order to tell yourself a story that is both richer and more nuanced -- and closer to being "a true story."

Does your team have a "me first" mentality? Are people so focused on getting their own work done, their tickets closed and moved to the right, that they seldom look up to see what is happening with others? What about your division--do teams appear to be siloed, concerned about only themselves, not looking around to see how their work affects others? Let's change this!

Collaboration is not just working together. We can achieve real collaboration, the type where we inspire one another, challenge the way we work through problems and tackle work, do the things that scare us by making selflessness a daily practice. By making questions of "What did you do to help another person or team?" or "What did someone do to that really made a difference in how you worked?" into our retrospectives and mindset, we can build selflessness into the very fabric of the team. By bringing selflessness to the forefront and making it a talked-about, key ingredient to how our teams function, we can go from wishing for more opportunities to work together to achieving true collaboration.

Is your team constantly missing delivery dates? Is the velocity decreasing from sprint to sprint while the development costs are rising? Are customers complaining about the increasing number of bugs and the long time it takes to add new features? These are all signs that you are mired in technical debt and probably on your way to bankruptcy or a complete system rewrite. Technical debt is inevitable, whether intentional or unintentional. However, not managing technical debt can paralyze your organization. Fadi Stephan expands on the technical debt metaphor and introduces a technical debt management plan that enables executives and teams to make prudent decisions on code quality and technical debt. Come learn how to measure the quality of your code base and determine the amount of your debt.

Ever struggled to define what is minimally necessary? Whether it is defining a Minimally Viable Product or what is minimally necessary for a project or team, you need a way to not only brainstorm ideas, but also a way to cut the unnecessary waste out.

Pass to Perfection is a game for getting a solution, product, or project started with what is minimally necessary; in development terms, this is your Minimal Viable Product (MVP). It mashes up ‘Yes and’ thinking for co-creation, and the essence of The Perfection Game (from the Core Protocols) for negotiation and prioritization in a collaborative round-robin game format. Create ideas until you can’t think of anything else and you pass, remove ideas until you have what is essential and you pass. This workshop will have you try out the game and learn how easy it is to get people started.

By day I'm an Agile Coaching and trainer, but in my volunteer time I'm an EMT and run a Search and Rescue Squad. Very differnt worlds, but they both involve getting large numbers of people to work together in teams in rapidly changing situations, with limited information, in a high stakes environment.

This talk shows how I used my knowledge as an Agile Coach and ScrumMaster in a situation well beyond IT. We will talk about how Agile/Scrum concepts like breaking work down into smaller increments, using self-organizing team, frequent planning, and retrospectives all are being used in the emergency services field. We also explore how agile principles are incorporated into the cultural aspects of volunteer emergency services -- often thought of as hierarchical and command-and-control, there is actually a culture of of self-organization, decentralized decision making, outcome-based focus, andholding each other accountable -- and it illustrates the underlying cultural principles that are the heart of agile which holds teams together and form high-performing teams that apply in product and software development teams as well.

This fun and fast paced talk walks the participants how a high-urgency search for a missing child is run using agile principles and relates each practice back to a similar approach in Agile/Scrum in the product development world.

Agile Quality Management (AQM) at Sevatec was born out of a need for the quality department to add value to our organization. Sevatec is a contractor to the Federal Government with specialties in Agile, DevSecOps, Cloud Solutions, Data Storage and Cyber Security. The hypothesis was that we could meet and exceed all of our industry standard quality objectives through adopting an agile mindset tied to modern leadership practices.

Prior to the creation of the AQM office, Quality was driven by a single person behind a desk. There was no collaboration and the focus was on checking the box for the sake of maintaining quality designations. Data showed that there was little to no improvement as a result.

Our new approach to quality derived from implementing business agility practices, with the belief that our ISO and CMMI requirements will be met and exceeded through the holistic application of agile principles. This provided an added value to the company, in that quality is baked in to every aspect rather than being led by someone sitting behind a desk churning out excessive documentation. Typically, discussions of quality in the agile environment are tied to code, but in our experiment, quality was embedded into all aspects of the organization, not just service delivery.

Ultimately, our auditors spent more time asking us about our AQM approach than actually auditing us and were very impressed with the people, processes and tools we adopted. We believe that our holistic view of business agility will set us apart in the marketplace and drive our organization to its next level of excellent quality, in which all aspects of the business are operating in a lean, agile manner. Our focus on experimentation and continuous improvement lends itself to a fun, collaborative environment in which learning is expected, play is encouraged and quality is an outflow of our working culture.

Product Owners have the challenging task of choosing which items their teams should focus on next. By combining their experience, conversations, and intuition, they often have to make decisions based on a set of imperfect data, which is hard to do. Adding to this, that they may have to justify their reasoning, making the task of prioritizing even more difficult.

In this workshop, participants will explore the Kano Model, an approach that takes into account satisfaction, functionality, and categorization to best identify the most important things based on customer response. This model gives Product Owners real data and insights to aid their decision making process, vastly improving on "this is important because I said so!"

Want to help your data and analytics teams embrace Agile but don’t know where to start? Wondering why your data team seems to struggle with creating manageable yet valuable stories? Curious why we think Agile for data teams is a distinct challenge?

Data work is often structured more like a pyramid than the familiar “layer cake” metaphor due to the state of data infrastructure technology, common industry practices, and the heavy lift to integrate data before it can be analyzed and visualized. Prevailing Agile wisdom of cutting work into “vertical slices” thus presents significant challenges for Agilists working on data teams! Typical full-stack vertical stories in this environment can easily become too complex, interdependent, and unwieldy to fit into fixed-length sprints. Technical stories can encapsulate smaller work increments but risk becoming too abstracted from the customer’s core problems and trap the team in infrastructure work for too long. An additional impediment to traditional user stories is the highly exploratory nature of advanced analytics and data science projects where in many cases end users lack awareness of what kind of problems can even be solved and technical experts can’t initially predict which solutions will actually be possible.

This session presents successes and lessons learned from applying alternative story decomposition and writing techniques on several data products across multiple teams. Returning to one of the fundamentals of what makes Agile valuable, namely to obtain feedback on feasibility and end user value as quickly and systematically as possible, our approaches strive to ensure teams have small, independent stories while still maintaining a value focus. We discuss ways to decouple the technical stack through stubbing and gradual tightening of the Definition of Done. This technique accommodates the necessary foundational work in the background while also obtaining early feedback about the value of the eventual product delivery options. A second approach incorporates Lean Startup concepts and centers on replacing traditional user stories with testable hypothesis statements that allow for explicit experimentation and risk trade-offs towards relevant milestones such as model quality, performance, predictive reliability, etc. in the context of extreme uncertainty.

Join us as we discuss some of the friction Agilists can encounter on data teams, as well as some validated ideas for meaningful solutions.

The federal government loves modernizing software systems and it isn't wrong: stale, decaying software leads to major headaches and eventual catastrophe. Modernization efforts, however, have big risks and big failures.

There is an alternative: software renovation. That is improving, updating, and upgrading the software system one piece at a time while it continues to operate.

Dane has participated deeply in three US government modernization projects. Each project followed a pattern of pitfalls, scary "go-live" transitions, and unpleasant trade-offs.

Renovating legacy software is frequently a better option. The software system continues to gain functionality at the same time that its design and performance are improved.

You’re a new coach. Now what? This session will help you get started on an agile transformation assignment with a coaching backlog. This session will inform new coaches on “where to start” as an Agile Coach. The session will begin agile transformation challenges followed by common agile impediments, conditions for success, an agile readiness checklist and a coaching backlog including Epics, Features and Stories.

Agile at the team level fosters self-organization by leveraging constraints. Timeboxes, Work in Progress (WIP) Limits, and clear operational definitions are excellent examples of the kinds of constraints teams regularly employ to deliver reliably. Are you familiar and comfortable with these ideas, but uncertain how to apply them at larger scales? Are you looking for techniques that will allow you to harness the creativity of your teams to enable self-organization at scale? If so, this session is for you.

I’m passionate about applying concepts from Complex Systems Theory (as developed by Dave Snowden, Alicia Juarrero, Bob Artigiani, etc.) to the work of software teams. My colleagues and I at Excella have been exploiting these ideas by using a variety of patterns borrowed from different theories and frameworks to allow our teams to grow like healthy plants in a garden. From Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) we leverage the concepts of a single product backlog and a shared cadence. Kanban principles of visualizing the work and limiting WIP help align the teams and foster greater collaboration. Dave Snowden’s emphasis on Homo Narrans—the human as storyteller—has provided a framework for clarifying and promulgating common values, which are essential for decentralized decision-making. Collectively, these mental models created an environment that helped us scale one of our engagements from three teams to eight over the course of a single year.

Shipping code is hard and it is rough! It doesn't have to be. Using Docker, Heroku and CircleCI you can set up a world-class Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment pipeline in an hour with advanced functionality like Heroku preview apps, provisioning servers on-demand for to scale and containers that leverage layering to enforce Enterprise requirements, while giving developers access, flexibility and speed to get their work done. With duluca/minimal-node-web-server docker image and how you can tailor it to build your micro-services or web servers in a matter of minutes using Docker and deploy your web app on the cloud.

Customers weren’t satisfied! The process took too long! The end product didn’t perform to specifications! Does this sound familiar?

A century ago, the U.S. Navy’s ship design process had serious problems, ones we would recognize and understand today. Come learn how these problems were solved in a large, real-world, organization through minor changes in structure and process. These changes illustrate the importance of:

• Gathering early feedback
• Rapidly iterating to expose unknowns
• Using multi-disciplinary problem-solving
• Employing Agile techniques outside of IT

Are you excited by the idea of Business Agility, but unsure how to create it? Learn new techniques by looking back. In the early 20th century, the U.S. Navy successfully leveraged Agile approaches to harness new technologies, encourage organizational learning, and develop a sustained pace of innovation, all key aspects of Business Agility. Find out how!

I’ll describe what the Navy achieved, explain why it worked, and illustrate how similar approaches can be used today to create greater Agility in our businesses and organizations. Some specifics include:

• Fostering innovation by the use of regular feedback.
• Employing safe-to-fail experimentation.
• Promoting evolvability through loose coupling and bounded autonomy.
• Balancing exploration and exploitation to identify and harness new ideas.