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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

Does your Scrum team start all its stories on Day 1 of the Sprint? Do stories sometime carry over into the next Sprint? Or perhaps testing always gets crammed in on the last day of the Sprint? If any of these sound familiar, your team may benefit from improving its flow.

Flow metrics are common with Kanban, but can provide tremendous value to any team, including those using Scrum. In this session, we’ll start by exploring the value of achieving a smooth flow of work (versus simply achieving maximum utilization) and give simple ways for your team to measure its flow. We’ll look at examples of metrics including lead and cycle time, throughput, and the cumulative flow diagram (CFD), reviewing what each represents, easy ways to collect them, and how they can be used in both a Kanban and Scrum context. You’ll leave the session knowing how to interpret and capture all these valuable metrics, so your agile team can measure and improve its flow.

Story point is an arbitrary relative measure used by Scrum/agile teams to define the effort required to implement a story or feature. This is a metric to measure the cost related to the implementation of story points. This metric is called Story Point Cost. It should allow to track development costs and also make the Scrum team aware about the budget issues of their project and for product owners to easier compare cost to gained value.

Agile is an incremental and iterative approach to delivering value to our customers. But too often we assume it’s really all about ways to slice work into smaller batch sizes and that both approaches are fundamentally equivalent. However, there is a crucial difference and this lack of awareness is a major contributor to projects and teams that are AINO (Agile In Name Only)!

In this session, we will discuss how to differentiate between incremental and iterative approaches, their strengths and weaknesses, and why you really need both. We will explore the many ways in which iteration shapes the core of Agile practices, how it supports and enables the benefits of agility, and how understanding its awesome power is a key step in moving from “doing” Agile to truly being agile. In addition, we will take a close look at the practical implications of when to use each approach by discussing real world scenarios, highlighting common Agile anti-patterns and (re)examining familiar story slicing patterns.

You will walk away with both a better understanding of one of the most important underlying principles of agility and immediately applicable insights for your daily work!

Are you struggling with delivering a potentially releasable working product every iteration? Ever wonder what one of biggest reasons we have difficulty getting things done at the individual, team and organizational level are? Do you keep doing something even though you know it reduces your productivity and lowers quality? We are going to run an exercise that highlights one of the major culprits that you have all experienced and probably continue to experience. The exercise will likely ignite a little (or big) fire in your belly that will help you become more productive and improve the quality of your work. From this, we will discuss ways to improve this at the individual, team and organization levels.

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, managers at all levels should focus on becoming Catalysts. Much like a chemical catalyst, your job is to help boost organizational performance by creating a healthy environment and providing the needed support.

In this interactive presentation-tutorial, we’ll explore how you can do that through some simple techniques that anyone can do; extracted from Fearless Change and Liberating Structures. We'll relate these techniques to how trust works and give you some powerful ways to improve your organizational trust.

The best way to learn Scrum is by doing, but it can be difficult to simulate Scrum and see how well Scrum helps team overcome technical hurdles without actually building something technically challenging. Lego's have always been a fun option for introducing Scrum, but it's difficult to recreate technical impediments, the need for spikes and managing technical debt with our tried and true friend, the box of Lego's.

Arguably, a better alternative might be Snap Circuits, a toy designed to introduce children to electronics in a fun and easy-to-understand format. Like Lego's, adults gravitate toward Snap Circuits because they are colorful, quickly understood and snap together with ease.

But, Snap Circuits have the added advantage of requiring a small amount of technical learning during the simulation that make it a closer match to the technical obstacles faced by a typical Scrum team.

In this workshop, you'll learn one "Scrum in a Snap" simulation exercise. In addition, we'll provide you with a few other "Scrum in a Snap" ideas and encourage you to experiment on your own. Four lucky attendees will also win their own Snap Circuits kit so they can develop their own Scrum games.

Past participants in "Scrum in a Snap" have said "The best Scrum exercise I've ever done", "I can't believe how much it's like coding - without actually coding", "What a blast - I'll never forget this activity!" and "Where can I buy one?"

Attend this workshop to see why.

Have you ever been in a technical interview, stuck at a whiteboard or solving a brainteaser, and thought “there must be a better way”? Good news: there very much is.

Agility and adaptability are crucial for a development team's success, but how often do we target for agility when considering who to bring into our team? And how do we set expectations for agility from the first time this potential new hire begins evaluating our team?

In this talk, I walk through my philosophy & provide practical tips for running technical interviews that are primed for success.

Sure, we would like everyone to have an agile mindset and focus on continuous improvement, but sometimes as Agilists we need to work with stakeholders who don’t agree with our priorities or our methods. When you need to get something done in a bureaucracy, how do you adapt? Every place you operate has a unique combination of people, processes, and problems. We'll discuss general principles that will help you navigate successfully.

Over the last 5 years, Agile approaches have seen widespread adoption across the US Federal Government. Where real commitment is given to proven Agile frameworks and techniques, programs do see significant improvement in value delivery and speed. But unfortunately often, ‘Agile’ nomenclature is used while perpetuating behaviors that make real improvement impossible, and may actually make the lived experience worse for participants or stakeholders. And where Agile approaches fail, they add to a narrative that real methods won’t work in this environment. Many of the anti-patterns I’ve seen working as a Coach in the Public Sector are rooted in decision-makers clinging to 5 myths about Agile in Government. This talk will explore these 5 myths, where they come from, and some ways out of them.