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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The process of rapidly addressing cybersecurity attacks and data breaches have become a big challenge for Federal Cybersecurity teams. The agile methodology has been known to work well for Federal software development projects. But, its time for cybersecurity teams to fully adopt agile and the DevSecOps approach to effectively increase transparency, promote security readiness and better secure data within Federal systems. Let's protect the public's data through reducing vulnerabilities, reducing insecure defaults, and increasing code coverage. If cybersecurity teams adopt agile they can begin to break team silos and enhance their risk management processes.

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.

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!

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.

When organizations are ready to adopt Agile at the enterprise level, people are resistant to organizational changes and have a fear of change due to loss. Use NLP and Logic Level to deal with the fear.