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.

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.

Are you involved with teams? Want to be able to shape team dynamics toward more productive outcomes?

Come dive below the surface of personalities and words to discover the perspectives that shape them.

We’ll learn together and from each other through facilitated hands-on experiences.

You will be able to apply what you learn immediately and directly to improving the quality of interactions.

The efforts of teams is widely regarded to be a competitive differentiator. Being a member of a high-performing team is often reported as a life high point by those who experience it. All around us there is a growing emphasis on teams and teamwork.

Yet effective teams remain elusive. More often groups of people who come together simply cooperate rather than collaborate. They avoid productive conflict, instead engaging in counterproductive discourse.

We can do better. As coaches, we can learn how to read the underlying dynamics that drive team behavior. To enable them to understand what drives their interactions (hint, it’s not the individuals!).

Facilitators will guide the group through a series of experiential activities to teach David Kantor’s Four Player Model and David Kolb’s Experiential Learning Model. Both models are robust and have been thoroughly researched and widely applied.

This may very well be the answer to getting your stuck teams to move beyond their perceived issues toward collaboration and creativity!

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.

This session looks at four team-based improv & collaboration games that help teams embrace "failing successfully." Rather than glorify failure, we should understand that its power is not in failing alone, but rather the learning that emerges from it and the power that such learning has to unlock otherwise unforeseen opportunities. Our goal is to relinquish our fears of failure, break us out of our comfort zone and accept the prospect of failure with the ultimate goal of using it to better understand what success looks like, and how the struggle and pain of failure, and the learning that accompanies it, opens our mind to new possibilities we wouldn't have otherwise seen. These games create comfort with failure and build up our actionable learning muscle (insight synthesis, etc) that should accompany every unsuccessful attempt at success. Failure and learning for the win!

“What went well? What could be improved? What change will we make for out next sprint?” Does every retrospective just answer these three questions and get to done? Many teams go through the motions for retrospectives and have a focus on efficiency over effectiveness.

Stories are a primary method of conveying information and cultural norms. Stories are also a good way to enliven retrospectives and make them more effective at process improvements. Josh shares his experiences using different story techniques for improving retrospectives. Josh guides the room through the Pixar Pitch technique for retrospectives. This technique is based on the Pixar Pitch that every Pixar movie follows. You experience these six simple prompts and how to transform this into a retrospective, then take it back to make retrospectives more exciting and engaging with your teams. Additionally, Josh shares other techniques and ideas that can be used for use of story in retrospectives.

Our Agile transformations can feel like Sisyphean efforts – but do not abandon hope! In this talk we will discuss nine circles of Agile Hell. Each hell is an example of a common problem programs encounter.

We'll ask the audience to prioritize their pain points, and focus on the six Agile hells closest to their experience. We will discuss real examples for “escaping” out of each Agile Hell - from Agile Coaches that the Dave(s) know.

By attending this event, Agilists will expand their toolbox of techniques to help their organizations.

Retrospectives are sometimes viewed as stressful and about complaining. Retrospectives should be rewarding and fun! We'll introduce four "games" in a somewhat narrative romantic story (break up, self worth, honeymoon planning, fixing a home). These four games cover internal and external concerns as well as individual and collective (it, I, we, its). We will explain the value of picking a retrospective that fits a team's need. Finally - we will have a funeral for the old ways of doing retrospectives.

Specific organizational patterns are the villains of agile adoption, setting unreasonable expectations and sabotaging progress. We’ll explore these villains, and give real examples how federal organizations overcame them.

Participants will see the power of metaphor first embraced by Extreme Programming: a system metaphor or (for transformations) a cultural metaphor to name and avoid common anti-patterns in Agile adoptions.

Leaders in government programs or large organizations will recognize common challenges patterns: setting schedules by fiat, limiting the availability of product owners, balancing responding to emergencies with focusing on consistent prioritizes, just to name a few. Coaches and champions supporting Agile adoptions will be equipped with counter-examples to avoid these challenges.