Elevator Pitch

Sometimes teams need more than just questions. They need scrum masters and coaches who are courageous enough to have the hard conversations, challenge their decisions, push them to the next level. During this session we will introduce participants to some anti-patterns that have arisen in the scrum master and agile coaching communities and discuss ways to break free!

Description:

Coaching Agile Teams is all about asking questions and allowing them to self organize, right? Well, that's just part of the mission. During this session we will introduce participants to some anti-patterns that have arisen in the scrum master and agile coaching communities and discuss ways to break free!

Sometimes teams need more than just questions. They need scrum masters and coaches who are courageous enough to have the hard conversations, challenge their decisions, push them to the next level. However, sometimes we push our teams a bit too hard and create negative conflict. It's times like this when we need to demonstrate how to reach out and make the first move to repair the relationship. We will introduce the concept of repair bids to help in this area.

Lastly, we learn a model to put into practice to create a coaching alliance with teams so you can be in agreement on how you will work together for their best interest and improvement over a period of time.

The reason we chose to create this session is that over the past few years we have noticed that as people are learning more about coaching they are getting out of balance and believing that the only thing that coaches are allowed to do is ask questions. We've noticed that scrum masters lean so far in the direction of self organization that they no longer believe they can challenge teams to grow or to move beyond where the team decides to be. We believe that the root of the problem rests in the fact that people are learning a bit about coaching but not actually learning how to be a coach. We would like to introduce to the attendees the more direct coaching methods that are available for use such as 1) direct communication, 2) challenging, 3) courageous questions that push the edge of the comfort zone, etc.

Session is collaborative and includes interaction with the participants throughout. Also has collaborative exercises.

When organizations move to agile for software delivery, there is often tension with traditional portfolio management. This talk will illustrate how an organization can move from traditional portfolio management approaches to one that embraces agile software delivery. Doing so enables organizations to become predictable, improve the flow of value delivered, and pivot more quickly if necessary.

We will demonstrate the use of governance that allows a more adaptive portfolio management approach. We will cover topics that enable agile portfolio management including:

• Lean techniques for managing flow
• Effective prioritization techniques
• Long range road-mapping
• Demand management and planning
• Progressively elaborated business cases
• Validation of outcomes
• Support for audit and compliance needs

These topics will be illustrated by real-world examples of portfolio management that have been proven over the last five years with a wide range of clients.

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.

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.”

Elevator Pitch:

Agile Transformation is harder than it needs to be because we often find ways to consciously or subconsciously sabotage our efforts if we can recognize this behavior it is possible to intervene and make a change for the positive.

Abstract:

Have you ever been on a project where it seems like team members are preventing the team from getting better? Why do they do that? I don’t know either- a psychologist might have to answer that. What I can tell you about is my experiences in seeing teams become their own worst enemies and unwittingly sabotaging the projects they are trying to make successful. My goal is to help you realize when you or those around you are behaving in a way that is going to lead the team plateauing or even failing. I have often found that many teams can get stuck, or plateau, at a certain point along the continuum of agile maturity. These teams can meander around without getting better or even changing anything for long stretches of time. I have also worked with teams that put so many hurdles in their own way that they had no option but to fail. They often fell back into old patterns and gave up hope that things can get better. As an Agile Coach, I have often felt that one of the most valuable things I can share with the people I coach are my failures. I have worked on Agile projects for a long time, and I have failed in many different ways. Having been through failure, I have learned that to keep getting better you have to recognize the things that you do that lead to plateaus and failures to overcome them. This talk is for coaches and team leads who want to make sure their team isn't getting stuck in a rut, or who are trying to get out of a rut with their health and sanity intact.

Failure signs and examples

No process is defined and followed

• ex. Projects that claim to be agile without any experience or training, or doesn’t have basic agile practices such as retrospectives, I.e. we are agile because we have hour long daily standup meetings.

Process practices are ignored or removed with no compensating practices

• ex. Agile practices hold each other together, supporting each other by the value they bring to the project, some teams decide to not do some practices without doing something else to get that value, for instance pair programming provides code review and knowledge transfer, many teams don’t pair program and don’t do code reviews and or knowledge transfer.

Automation is not valued or planned into work

• ex. We will automate tests later. Often that later never comes and the team is left with a code base that is hard to maintain and change because you don’t know what your changes break.

No stakeholder expectations management

• ex. The only way a project can negotiate scope and or schedule is to actively manage stakeholder expectations. An example of unmanaged expectations is the PO that never says no to a feature request or the executive that decides what must to delivered and when it must be delivered.

Quality and testing practices are an after thought or short changed on schedule

• ex. Teams that don’t complete sprint commitments because the testers get coded stories too late in a sprint to do all the required testing and the rest of the team isn’t held responsible to help test.

No negotiation allowed in deliverables and or schedule

• ex. Executives that dictate all of the terms of a project before a team is even selected.

The team doing the work didn’t estimate the work but are held to an estimate

• Many government projects have such a long procurement cycle that no one from the proposal team is put on the project.

Part time team members are in the critical path

• ex. Sometimes people with special skills are needed for a part of a project. If the person is part time but their work is in the critical path the project is in trouble.

Heavy team turn over

• ex. Heavy turn over is a sign of a project that isn’t on track, even if it hits its deadlines the quality and output will suffer.

Political motivations more important than team’s ability to do work

• ex. If the team is setup to fail for reasons outside the team, they will most likely fail.

Distraction from issues outside the work that needs to be done

• ex. Scrum Masters that don’t shield the team from issues outside the work that needs to be done during a sprint will end up with a team that doesn’t hit the mark.

Examples of what can be done to avoid failed projects:

Focus on shielding the team from outside influence

• Have the team focus on the things they can control and prevent outside issues from distracting the team.

Negotiate delivery with the team

• The team can develop an understanding of what it can deliver. Trying to make the team do more is going to lower quality and potentially make the project take longer.

Management of stakeholder expectations

• Stakeholders always want more, that is their job. Let them ask for anything but set their expectations on what is really going to happen.

Focus on technical excellence, quality, and automation

• If you want your teams to get better, have them focus internally on things they can control like technical aspects of the project including quality and automation.

Hire motivated team members and make it possible for them to work

• People who care about what they are doing will always be better than the cheapest people that don’t care. Hire people who care.

Maintain a progressive planning pace for getting requirements ready

• Agile requires planning at different levels, skipping a level for any reason means there are going to be disconnects between your stakeholders and the people doing the work. Disconnects means the project will not product the results you want.

“Test-driven development (TDD) is a programming technique in which the tests are written prior to the source code. It is proposed that TDD is one of the most fundamental practices enabling the development of software in an agile and iterative manner. Both the literature and practice suggest that TDD practice yields several benefits. Essentially, it is claimed that TDD leads to an improved software design, which has a dramatic impact on the maintainability and further development of the system.” (Reference: ieee.org)

Fannie Mae, a government sponsored entity (GSE), is in the fourth year of it’s agile transformation. Teams use an Agile Maturity Matrix as a roadmap for optimizing their agile capabilities as well as technical engineering practices.

As long-standing teams, we have a long track record of trying to incorporate persistent TDD practices with varying degrees of success. But it was only after the LDNG teams collectively matured their agile mindset and focused on optimization, implementation of TDD took flight.

Past year, 4 teams comprising the Loan Delivery Next Gen were recognized for being the first teams in organization to complete highest agile maturity model’s category, hallmarks for which include: Feature level BDD, Test first mindset & All layers of testing are automated and executed on every check-in.

• Do you want a real world example of implementing TDD in a large program?
• Are you unable to grapple with the challenges of TDD? Is TDD frustrating you?
• What are some misconceptions about implementing TDD?
• How do you get a good ROI (Return On Investment) by developing TDD capability?
• By the way what’s the big deal about TDD? Is it really helping or just another hype??

This talk is intended for the technical members on a cross-functional team (responsible for the “how” who are faced with implementing TDD) as well as well as Scrum Masters and Product Owners who are interested in understanding the benefits of TDD and why they should be advocating for / insuring there is capacity to develop and mature these practices as part of the team’s work. Unlike most TDD training sessions, this focuses on the subtleties and challenges of implementing TDD in a pragmatic manner that address everyday concerns of a large organization.

Join us to get answers to all these questions based on our real world experience as well as see a live intuitive demo.

While we are not experts in this field (at least not yet), we will share our journey and practical learnings. How does that sound?

Our presentation shares experience of Loan Delivery teams. We will share our journey in adopting TDD along with moving away from testers in team, to training developers with test-first mindset. We will also cover misconceptions and touch a little on testing techniques for developers. We would like to cover the non-technical blind spots that most TDD trainings might miss, based on our real world experience.

Also in the spirit of Agile, we will present practical real-time example of TDD in action that addresses a number of concerns, but mainly how to re-factor code using TDD. We will use personal laptop to demonstrate a loan calculator example.

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.

Many software developers (especially in larger organizations) are unhappy in their jobs. They are in a never-ending spiral of increasing code cruft, and their management does not allow them time to remediate technical debt or keep the code base clean. They feel helpless, beaten-down, defeated. They can't imagine that improvement is even possible. They respond to any suggestion to improve the status quo with comments like, "In an ideal world, maybe," "That will never work here," "You don't live in the Real World®," etc. They don't know their own power. This session is meant to show them that power.

A well-defined Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is a requirement for many government institutions. However, the typical SDLC process is very "Waterfallish" by nature of it's phase gates and documentation requirements. This talk will explain how the SDLC at Fannie Mae has evolved as the company has transformed from a Waterfall to a lean Agile organization in alignment with Agile best practices.

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.

For many Agile teams when it comes to testing, it’s all about automation. In this session we’ll learn more about why it benefits teams to develop a non-automated complementary practice of risk-based exploratory testing. Dive into into some use cases where risk-based exploratory testing can provide the most value and discuss some patterns to make this a valuable experience. Take part in a mock exploratory testing planning session focused on testing some of the autonomous driving features available in late-model automobiles, and have a little fun learning by doing!

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.

Now that Agile has “crossed the chasm,” according to the 2017 State of Scrum Report, and become mainstream, is it losing its way?
Join a provocative discussion on whether new Agile methods are starting to mirror the old project management dogma that helped fuel the Agile revolution in the first place. Bring your cell phone for interactive polling and help steer the discussion.

We will discuss the following challenging scenarios and ways to respond that are consistent with "being agile."

• The impact of executive mandates for the use of Agile frameworks on all new projects. Does it work?
• Are some people not able to make the transition?
• Use cases of anti-agile behavior done in the name of agile transformation .
• Government contracts asking for offers to deliver 400 points for the lowest price.