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.

Are you “going Agile” but your executives are still asking you for Gantt charts and delivery dates? Here’s an exercise to do with them instead. Usually, they just want to know when to check back on “the project”, and whether or not their money is being well invested.

To answer the last question, many teams have discovered the “Weighted, Shortest Job First (WSJF)” method of project prioritization. Basically, if you have two items of equal effort, but one has twice the return on investment (ROI) of the other, do the one with greater ROI. And if you have two items of equal ROI, but one can be done in half the time, do the shortest job first. But that’s not enough. We all know of projects that had great promise, but customers wouldn’t pay for it.

Lean Startup has discovered that emotions are one of the best leading indicators (predictors) of future product success. Emotional-WSJF (eWSJF) balances customer demand with Minimum Viable Products (MVPs), i.e. "this only has true business value if we can deliver within 2-3 sprints."

I use eWSJF within my teams to prioritize Epics, and I’ll show you how to use it to keep your executives happy! It replaces the conversations about “Show me a Gantt chart,” and “When will this be delivered?” My executives instead ask, “Have you talked to any customers?” or “Can you build it faster?” To which my teams respond, “Yes we have talked to customers, and they’re even helping us beta test it!” and, “The next version will be delivered in two weeks, and here’s what it contains.”

Creating systems that accommodate users with disabilities is a requirement of all federal agencies, as indicated by the Americans with Disabilities Act, Section 508. But, it’s not just a federal concern, but instead a challenge for all organizations that seek an inclusive experience for their customers, patrons, or constituents. In the process of moving to agile development models, often times accessibility testing can be forgotten or overlooked. This can result in non-compliant code being pushed to production and a remediation plan that batches Section 508 fixes in a later release. This creates a frustrating experience for users who need accessibility features to access content and complete functions. United States Citizenship and Immigration Services recognized this problem early. They have been taking a multi-pronged approach to ensure their systems provide a high quality user experience for everyone. Come hear about some of their methods.

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.

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

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.

This case study describes an actual roll-out of an Agile Transformation across 7 product lines, and 18 scrum teams in a local commercial organization. It maps out 4 levels of industry best practices, and describes what techniques worked, why some techniques failed when they were introduced, and what other techniques had to be mastered before they could be re-introduced.

We will also talk about assessment models, and give examples on how to design good metrics for each level of performance. At Level 1 we have 6 core metrics that all teams must report. When the teams start Level 2 we ask them to design their own metrics, based on their products’ business models, to show how they impact income, overhead, strategy, and risk. When teams reach level 3 they are ready to start advising executives on corporate strategy, with a track record of proven performance.

To motivate teams we’ve mixed in several elements of gamification (rather accidentally, to be honest), that inspire teams to complete their assessments, “level up”, and engage in healthy competition. But it’s also not a winner-take-all culture. We leave room for multiple teams to receive rewards and appreciation for their unique achievements across 5 different performance categories.

The design of this Agile Transformation program is based on the principles of Teal Management, drawing on techniques from DevOps, Lean Startup (R), SAFe (R), and more, and combined with practical, real-world techniques, honed over years of practice. (You do not, however, have to be a “Teal” organization to use this model. Rather, this program is a map of “the road to Teal”. And while Teal Management will be referenced in this case study, it will not be talked about in depth.)

An Agile Transformation is very difficult. We found that each team needs to travel at its own speed, and one size does not fit all. This case study is how we make that happen, show appreciate for the uniqueness of each team, and ensure consistent, measurable, overall success.

Your team process is getting Agile, but is your code Agile? How long does it take you to add a new feature? How about a logger that listens to every object in your application? For me it’s a just a few lines of code.

After designing software for over a decade for the DOD, the FDA, NASA, the DC Metro, multiple startups, and more, I discovered the architecture that made me truly Agile, and it became the foundation for my next decade of work. It was designed through what I call “looking back at the present from the future,” which is a long-winded way to say that it was designed around what would make an application easier to maintain, since on average 85% of the cost of any application is during its maintenance phase. Turns out this makes it easier to build applications from scratch too!

Property-Invocation Programming is like Story Splitting in code form. Each step of your workflow is encapsulated in a function, and the init() function for your object shows a map of how all those pieces come together, and in which order. With this map, you can have multiple developers working on the same object, and even the same file, without merge conflicts. Integration testing is just a matter of executing your functions in the correct order. And a year from now, when your Product Owner needs changes, but you’ve forgotten what you wrote, it’s all mapped out neatly in your init() function. No hunting for code. Just read what you wrote, add new functions, and insert them in the right order.

In this session I’ll show you the four simple rules at the heart of Property-Invocation Programming, and how to leverage them to create truly Agile software architectures. We’ll also look at how to build a new cross-platform (mobile and desktop) application from scratch that can handle anything your Product Owners throw at it. Plus I'll walk through the 5 Pillars of Modern Application Architecture that I used with my teams.

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.

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.

Many successful Agile Coaches consult with a sense of calm. Listening to customers, empathizing with their particular challenges, and guiding change in an assuring manner.

If these soft skills do not come easily, how does one develop these intangibles? Zen practices have been around for millennia helping to bring serenity to tumultuous situations. Learn a few techniques for when "a nail won't speak with a hammer".

This Talk will cover:

1. How to relate to your team with a calm approach
2. How to diffuse tensions found in collaboration
3. How to develop a meditation practice of your own; in or without an Agile context