Despite thinking that organizations are slow to innovate, innovation actually abounds at many companies. Kodak, DEC, and Xerox did not fail due to lack of new, cutting-edge innovation; they failed because their organizations were tuned to their traditional markets, and a failure to change their business models and organizations led to their eventual disruption.

The key to achieving business agility lies in leadership that transforms organizations. Transformational leaders succeed by changing the system, leading with purpose, and steering from the edges. They own their responsibility and boldly lead their organizations into the future. As leaders, we can accelerate this evolution by enabling true self-management and team-based governance.

Join Bob and Sanjiv to learn how leaders can transform organizations with a flatter organization structure, work anywhere flexibility, participatory profit sharing, and delegated hiring and firing. Explore the agile leadership journey needed for true business agility.

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.

Experience Report: Applying Lean UX to New Hardware Development

We often hear how Agile and Lean UX techniques are applied to software development, but there is much less information available on how to use these same ideas to develop new hardware solutions.

In this experience report, Matthew Maddox, VP of Digital Strategy at Mirion Technologies and Roland Cuellar of Lithespeed will show how Lean UX techniques were successfully applied to the design of new and highly complex integrated hardware and software products.

Mirion makes complex, highly regulated equipment that is focused on radiological safety for national security, first responders, and nuclear power. Mirion’s radiation detection equipment is used to protect people from radiation exposure, secure major events, and track down illicit radiological sources. Over the past year, Mirion has been experimenting with agile and lean UX techniques to design it's next generation radiation detection hardware and software.

In this experience report, we will hear how Matthew utilized rapid, lightweight, lean UX techniques to quickly develop hardware prototypes, gather feedback from past and potential new customers, and quickly pivot initial designs based upon feedback from customers.

As a result of this important process innovation, Mirion is now embracing more modern digital and agile techniques to more quickly bring innovations to market that are more closely aligned with customer desires.

Matthew Madox is the VP of Marketing & Digital Strategy, and lead the field research, primary design and customer validation phases of the next generation Personal Radiation Detector (PRD).

Topics Include: Agile Hardware Design, Lean UX, Hardware and Software Design Integration, New Product Development, Engineering Culture Change

Agility is about adaptation, challenging the status quo, experimentation and learning. HR has historically hewed closer to compliance, but that has been changing rapidly.

Today's nimble teams and workers will no longer tolerate stifling, staid environments and management practices. The newly popular label "people operations" implies an emphasis on human engagement over bureaucracy and regulation, and indeed many organizations have been moving this way.

Be inspired by some of the most daring advances in human resources while also learning some practical approaches and techniques that can be applied to start leading your business down this path. We'll discuss new approaches in hiring, performance management, learning and development, and even the structure of HR groups and roles. Participants will also enjoy a few exercises that will illustrate some interesting techniques.

Prepare yourself for HR in the next generation.

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.

Leading a large-scale agile transformation isn’t about adopting a new set of attitudes, processes, and behaviors at the team level… it’s about helping your company deliver faster to market and developing the ability to respond to a rapidly-changing competitive landscape. First and foremost, it’s about achieving business agility. Business agility comes from people having clarity of purpose, a willingness to be held accountable, and the ability to achieve measurable outcomes. Unfortunately, almost everything in modern organizations gets in the way of teams acting with any sort of autonomy. In most companies, achieving business agility requires significant organizational change.

Agile transformation necessitates a fundamental rethinking of how your company organizes for delivery, how it delivers value to its customers, and how it plans and measures outcomes. Agile transformation is about building enabling structures, aligning the flow of work, and measuring for outcomes based progress. It's about breaking dependencies. The reality is that this kind of change can only be led from the top. This talk will explore how executives can define an idealized end-state for the transformation, build a fiscally responsible iterative and incremental plan to realize that end-state, as well as techniques for tracking progress and managing change.

Colors Personalities: Lead with Your Strengths | Communication, Interaction and Collaboration

In the workplace there are so many different personalities. By understanding your color personality signature you will get to know your strengths, pre-conceived “weaknesses,” and how understanding your personality may impact you as a team member and as a leader. By knowing these personality types you can identify other personalities within your organization and then more effectively communicate or interact with others as a team member or as a leader.

This session will be interactive. It will begin with a Color Personality assessment to learn your Color Personality Signature. It will go through each colors’ strengths, how others view your personality as potential weaknesses (and how they are not), how your personality makes you a good team member or a good leader. Finally, by learning about these four personalities and their traits, can you identify how to interact and communicate differently with team members? Your boss? Your direct reports?

Enterprises want to deliver more value with higher quality at a faster pace. Many development teams have adopted agile frameworks to improve their ability to deliver software. This has led to a local optimization for the development teams and they have become good at delivering potentially shippable increments of their products, but from there, they typically see organizational constraints in moving it to the customer. The development organization is quickly adding features to the queue waiting to be released, but the operations teams are struggling to support fires in production, maintain stability, and provide the environments and infrastructure needed so development teams can move their new functionality forward. The operation team’s focus on stability usually minimizes the number of changes in production thus creating infrequent, large batches being deployed at a planned date. Can Agile and DevOps bring the development and operations teams together to remove the organizational constraints in moving the software to the customer?

In this session, we’ll talk about the relationship of Agile and DevOps, not as an intersection, but as a progression of capability with development and operation teams working together to remove those constraints. We’ll discuss how using Agile and DevOps practices together, teams can release value faster, with higher quality, and in more stable environments making it safer to deploy.

Are you or your Agile business partners struggling to vanquish their Agile nemeses?

In this beginner-level session, we'll examine how different super heroes have dealt with difficult business challenges. We'll take cues from these heroes to discuss some basic techniques that can be applied to overcome these difficulties.

We have all been there, a shiny new and improved framework is released and we must implement it, but is this always the answer to improve your Agile organization? Frameworks are needed and provide guidelines for teams but if the teams/companies do not follow the principles and fundamentals of the Agile Manifesto it makes it very difficult for the framework to be successful. The belief is that switching up the specific framework is the answer but they soon realize that the framework is not the main issue that is the driving force. This can leave the teams/companies in a tough situation after committing to a framework that they are not ready for.

I will be sharing my experiences across multiple different companies on how this assumption has let them down and how we had to return the teams back to the fundamentals to solve the issues they are experiencing.

Have you ever worked in an environment where Agile turned into a four-letter word? Many companies get lost on their Agile journey and end up turning it into something that leaves a sour taste in everyone's mouths. There are many ways companies get lost on their journey from the C-Suite down to the team level.

Teams that are too big or too small, micro-managing, no Work in Progress (WIP) limits, and lack of leadership backing are just a few of the many indicators we will touch on that result in transformation hiccups and failures. Join me as I share my experiences as an Agile Coach and dive into the reasons why transformations fail and how you can avoid turning Agile into a four-letter word at your organization.

How do you promote mastery of practice areas? Danial H. Pink tells us people are motivated by autonomy, mastery and purpose. Small Agile teams promote autonomy while value streams and corporate missions promote purpose. Communities of Practice can be a great way to promote mastery, if formed correctly.

Communities of Practice are more important today then they’ve ever been before. We’ve learned cross-functional teams are the best way to produce customer focused products but as we put people into value streams and product teams, are we creating silos where practice domains don’t communicate as often and knowledge gaps are widening? There’s a reason why most Agile Frameworks recommend forming Communities of Practice.

In this workshop we’ll talk about forming masterful communities and you’ll create a handy pocket guide to take with you.

Come learn how to form Masterful Communities of Practice and lead your organization going forward.

Today many organizations are going through Agile and DevOps transformations and are adopting frameworks like Scrum, SAFe, or Kanban to try to keep pace with the rapid delivery that is needed today. But these organizations aren’t getting the benefits that they expected, especially as it’s related to quality and sustaining their pace of delivery. As organizations begin to adopt one of the agile frameworks, they usually begin with making sure the teams are doing Scrum or Kanban well and forget about the engineering practices that are needed to sustain or accelerate their technical agility. The lack of engineering practices constrains the organizations and eventually can cause it to take longer for each feature to be delivered. This talk is about why software development organizations should embrace the technical practices and provides some examples of practices they can use and the benefits they will receive.

Overview

“Three Amigos” sessions are a common occurrence on many agile teams – with three or more team members exploring all aspects of a user story from the Business Value, Development, and Testing perspectives. While this helps identify gaps in user story acceptance criteria, it may not address how the respective criteria will be tested. How do we measure if we’ve “done the thing right” during development, while adding business value and considering the effectiveness and speed of testing the system?

This session provides 1) an exploration of using a Three Testing Amigos approach in agile; and 2) an interactive activity for the participants to explore potential biases and gaps in determining how a user story should be tested.

Target Audience

Agile team participants at any level of transformation.

Prerequisite

Basic understanding of Agile team ceremonies and user story generation.

Scaling frameworks can still be a polarizing topic. This session compares three of those frameworks on a factual basis:

• Where are they similar
• Where are they different

In terms of their own stated

• Principles and sources
• Structure, and
• Practices

As Lyssa Adkins noted, "...When we argue about this framework, that framework, the other framework; when we snipe at each other on social media; when we allow our Agile values to be compromised... those are from a bygone era and they are not worthy of us, not anymore. That’s not who we are... We're headed toward something else." (We are the Leaders We Have Been Waiting For https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6pPQ3W7npY&feature=youtu.be) (she also makes some other direct observations in this vein).

Following in that spirit, the purpose of this presentation is to present a fact-based comparison of the key elements of SAFe, LeSS, and [email protected]. It's not to feed you any pronouncements on the relative strengths or weaknesses of these three popular frameworks, or to assert which, if any is appropriate in what situations. Rather, the idea is to put you in a position to make your own informed judgments these points. And in doing so, perhaps deepen your understanding of the key issues and options associated with agile scaling.

Many companies are struggling with Agile. They have lost sight of how the teams at the center of an Agile transformation are only the first drop in the lake. That first drop will create a ripple effect that must be allowed to progress throughout the entire organization in order to unleash the power that Agile promises and to achieve top performance. Holistic Agility provides a perspective on how to create a healthy and whole organization that is unified and adaptive to change. It aligns the inner workings of the organization in a way that enables them to create harmonious and symbiotic relationships with each other and their customers - relationships that work to the benefit of everyone involved.

In a diverse company full of schedule-packed consultants and engineers, how do you continually find ways to engage employees and create a more inclusive environment? Khadijah and Lizzie knew they had the support of leadership – and the interest of the employees – so all they had to do was come up with a way to learn quickly, fail fast, and prototype.

Come hear how Lizzie and Khadijah, along with their fellow Blackstonians, applied Agile Principles to solve a decidedly non-IT challenge.

What is the Urgency Index? Organizations that adopt scrum, kanban, SAFe, or other agile methodologies get access to a bevy of new metrics: velocity, predictability, cycle time, variability, and many more. These metrics can help an organization incrementally improve, focus their transformation, and produce better outcomes – or they can just drive the teams to misery and organizational results to pot. So how do you get it right? First, track the urgency index.

Those who join this session will walk away with a new way to use the many new metrics that agile methodologies enables – one that drives the right conversations and results. This session is fun and interactive (with white board interaction, not slides), and always includes lots of engagement and participation. It’s not a lecture, it’s a discovery session – and I always learn as much as the attendees!

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.

Why does testing always get the shaft?
Any DevOps initiative that expects outcomes of speed and quality requires an investment mindset. Tests (unit, acceptance, non-functional, and regression) of all types are investments that can return incredible value when integrated with a software delivery pipeline.

We will explore the following questions:

How do I build an organization that mines and releases the value in automated testing?

How do I, as Quality Leader in an organization, help shift the culture in my company to value consistency and predictability associated with a strong testing practice?

You may ask why this a business perspective and not a code and test perspective? This is about taking and investment mindset to testing.