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

In 2001, a group of software developers got together in Snowbird, UT, and created the Agile Manifesto. The Manifesto was a statement of core value and principles. The core values are:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

These four values are supplemented by 12 principles of agile software. The original 17 signatories were joined by thousands of additional people with the ability to sign cut off in 2016.

These principles are the foundation of much of the work in agile that has occurred in agile development, but have been mostly frozen as practices and agile has evolved.

Modern Agile has been created recently to update the underlying foundational values and to provide a focus beyond software delivery. Those four values are:

• Make People Awesome
• Deliver Value Continuously
• Make Safety a Prerequisite
• Experience and Learn Rapidly

This talk will walk through this reimagining of the agile values and what they mean for delivery within a government context. We will take each value and look at government cultural and technical challenges and opportunities to advance modern development practices.

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.

Do your teams struggle with silos, multitasking, under performing, and not truly swarming to work with an understanding of shared responsibility

Based on the Swedish public domain game "Yatzy", we turn a familiar roll of the dice into a team building, learning exercise. This game is designed to not just talk, not just show, but to deliver a firsthand experience of what works and what doesn't in terms of incremental delivery.

This game is designed to teach:

• How multitasking costs time & reduces quality
• How silos disrupt the collaborative power of Agile
• When one member of our team under performs, we all underperform
• When we swarm to work, we all individual look better than we ever could on our own
• How working as an Agile team in earnest is addictive & once you go there, you'll never go back

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.

Using metrics for punitive reasons is a problem as old as time. In software, this is further complicated by the fact that people rarely agree on why we are collecting metrics in the first place. In this session we will explore how we can use metrics for good instead of evil.

By focusing on the goal of system improvement, rather than individual performance, we can begin leveraging data to make a positive difference in how we work while also delving into why we work the way we do.

This session will include real-world examples of problems that organizations create for themselves by using metrics for the wrong intent. We will also discuss examples of good metrics and how they can be used to make our lives better.

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.

There is a need to collect data which demonstrates progress and measures improvement within an Agile Enterprise, but where does one even start? Common Agile metrics approaches do well at measuring team velocity and throughput, but can sometimes overlook the requirements of executive sponsors, product management, and other key stakeholders. This problem is often rooted in a lack of understanding about what business goals are driving decision-making throughout the organization and what questions we should be answering with the metrics we collect.

During this session, we will explore the Goal Question Metrics (GQM) approach and show its effectiveness in identifying the key information your enterprise needs to know at the Executive, Portfolio, Program, and Delivery tiers. We will discuss case studies where GQM was implemented at scale and the lessons learned along the way. We will also explore sample metric sets for each tier and explain the goals and questions that drove us to them. At the end of this talk, the audience will understand not only how to ask the right questions for their context within the Enterprise, but specifically what metrics can be used to answer them.

Is that it? Are you wondering if your agile transformation is living up to all the hype. Granted, many have used agile approaches to increase visibility, and release small wins. But often the transition leaves organizations with increasing customer demand, and no change in costs or employee retention scores. What gives?

It turns out, the problem is you and me.

In this hard-hitting talk, leadership coach Jesse Fewell reveals well-intentioned leaders at all levels fall victim to several common anti-patterns. From being spread too thin, to banging your head against constraints, to forgetting about your own internal growth, these issues will sound painfully familiar. Instead of introducing a transformation methodology, the key insights will center around looking in the mirror.

Come join this provocative conversation, where you will hear recommendations that pull no punches for team leads, managers, department heads, and executives alike to become the leaders that drive true excellence.

Can organizations implement SAFe safely? There are many organizations attempting to scale agile practices to a large number of teams and teams of teams. As I'm sure you know, there are many competing frameworks that are available to help in this regard (SAFe, Disciplined Agile, Nexus, LeSS, [email protected], etc.). If you read the blogs, you've seen lots of folks talk about concerns they have with SAFe being too big or prescriptive or . Rather than survey all frameworks, this session will focus on the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and provide practical tips and tricks for how organizations have successfully implemented it minimally, incrementally, and pragmatically without experiencing the potential risks you might have read about.

The session will cover practical tips, tricks, examples, and approaches to implementing SAFe in a way that helps ensure the success of your agile transformation.

Is your agile stagnant? Are your teams "stable", but uninspired? Have the fancy new frameworks left you wanting more? Then this session is for you.

When we started our agile journey, experts offered several warnings and checklists for bad practices. From seven agile sins to Scrum-butts, we all know what we must absolutely avoid. But what if the most common anti-patterns are a fertile ground for exploring high performance? What if the sporadic standup is a sign of deep democracy? What if your erratic velocity reflects a self-driven team that jumps on opportunities?

In this hands-on workshop, participants will confront their deepest held agile convictions, and discover which practices have been holding us back this whole time.

Studies ubiquitously show that Leadership and Culture are among the top factors for a successful Lean Agile transformation. What specific actions should leaders take to structure Lean Agile transformations? How does leader style enable cultural change? This session provides 1) a practical set of actions to start or improve your transformation and 2) a specific list of behaviors to do and NOT to do in setting the right culture as a leader.

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.

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.

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.

Often times, us Agilists can often be in our own world, stuck doing one set of exercises or approaching situations in one specific way. What if we actually listened and responded to our audience in real time, driven by the needs of who is directly in front of us?

As a seasoned life-practice artist and improviser, I will model a few techniques rooted in the improvisational performance world that can help you better listen and respond accordingly.

Retrospectives are a key component in assisting you teams to improve. Most Jedi, er, Scrum Masters know how to facilitate a retrospective. However, many do not consider how to SELECT a retrospective based on the needs of their teams. Different types of retrospectives will be considered, such as the 6 Thinking Hats, Appreciation, Sailboat, and in addition, two Custom retrospectives. Have you considered which retrospectives you would facilitate for your team based upon their needs? For example, if you are with a new team, what would retrospective would you select? If your team seems to have trouble working together or communicating, which retro? How could you customize a retrospective to address the needs of your team?