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.

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.

Agile encourages us to eliminate activities that don’t add value and find the simplest solution possible to solve our business needs. For many teams, that can lead to a state where collaborative design no longer happens or is discussed on a whiteboard that gets erased after the conversation.

How then, can you share the knowledge with team members who don’t work on that feature, or join the team after the feature is built? What about distributed teams, are they unable to have collaborative design because they don't have a whiteboard?

I had those same questions in 2012, when Ron Garton of the Agile Coaching Network showed me a lightweight solution and we stopped creating traditional design documents. Ron provided me permission to bring that solution to the agile community through sessions like these.

This solution helps everyone on the team understand what they will create or change in the current systems before it’s built, which can also be retained to increase the domain knowledge for that system later. Though the template itself can be helpful, like many agile tools, it’s the conversation that it starts that’s truly powerful.

Your in a predicament. The system needs re-architecture. There are a lot of bugs to stamp out. You need to turn it off, but you can't - it's mission critical to your business.

When most of us learn about Agile, the examples and stories we are told are from a Greenfield perspective; Greenfield meaning new development. Most organizations that aren't start-ups have many applications already in use; this pristine start just doesn't exist. Existing software needs to be maintained and continuity of operations is the highest priority; these are the circumstances of Brownfield development. This is essentially any application past its first release. Making this more difficult is that teams need to maintain legacy code and update antiquated architectures.

This session will cover techniques you can use at the team level to help this maintenance activity. We’ll specifically look at the use of the Mikado Method, Kanban, and some indicators you may want to use to analyze your application portfolio from a maintenance perspective.

Are your agile teams struggling with committing to sprint objectives? Are they struggling with conflict? Are they struggling aligning with each other? Is the stress rising when you get close to that deadline? Do they feel they are not at a sustainable pace?

Research has shown that leaders who’s brainwaves are in coherent states not only demonstrate higher productivity, but those with the strongest coherence also entrain the brainwaves of colleagues the same levels.

Laughter is one of the quickest way for individuals, and team to reach coherence. Learn how to harness laughter and play to positively disrupt habitual behavior, boost levels of innovation, engagement, and creative problem-solving, and forge team coherence in the face of high stress.

No experience necessary, just a willingness to step out of the box. Are you ready? Come PLAY!!!!!

Join Joanne and Barton as they provide a slice of their one-day workshop: Laugh to F'in' Freedom to learn how we can utilize laughter to help create high performing teams.

As agilists, how are we personally affected by our relationships with transforming organizations? Organizations treat an agile transformation as a singular event. A budgetary line item, a noun, a one-time metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly. It is easy to forget that we too are affected by the changes going on around us.

In this interactive workshop, Allison and Barry will lead a introspective look at your personal transformation journey and facilitate a discussion on our personal experiences with transformations.

Join as we explore how each of us is transforming through agile transformations.

Psychological safety is one of the newest buzz terms in team dynamics but what does it really mean for an Agile team? No need to reinvent the wheel here - whether you’re using Scum or Kanban, they both have safety built in. You can find it hiding in plain sight - in Scrum values & Kanban principles.

Let’s learn how to use these concepts to develop trust in our teams and where to start.