Want to Deliver Quicker with Higher Quality? Stop Starting, Start Finishing!

Are you struggling with delivering a potentially releasable working product every iteration? Ever wonder what one of biggest reasons we have difficulty getting things done at the individual, team and organizational level are? Do you keep doing something even though you know it reduces your productivity and lowers quality? We are going to run an exercise that highlights one of the major culprits that you have all experienced and probably continue to experience. The exercise will likely ignite a little (or big) fire in your belly that will help you become more productive and improve the quality of your work. From this, we will discuss ways to improve this at the individual, team and organization levels.

 
 

Outline/Structure of the Workshop

1. Introduction (2 minutes)
2. Run exercise (20 minutes)
3. Debrief/discussion (10 minutes)
4. Ways to improve (8 minutes)
5. Q&A (5 minutes)

Learning Outcome

  • Gain an understanding, through an exercise, of the cost to productivity a common habit has, that many of us indulge in
  • A new found desire to fix one of the major issues that reduces productivity and quality
  • 2 approaches to fixing the issue

Target Audience

Project Managers, Program Managers, Scrum Master, Developers, Senior Executives, Product Owners

Prerequisites for Attendees

Nothing Required.

Slides


schedule Submitted 4 years ago

  • 10 Mins
    Lightning Talk
    Intermediate

    In this lightning talk, we explore the 5 attributes to look for in a ScrumMaster:

    • Knowledge - Deep knowledge in Agile and Scrum
    • Experience - Deep experience with Scrum teams and in Agile environments
    • Coaching - Deep understanding of Coaching concepts and techniques
    • Facilitation - Deep understanding of Facilitation concepts and techniques
    • Servant Leadership - Deep understanding and desire to enable success for the teams and the organization

    From there we look at the ScrumMaster's progression for removing impediments and addressing issues:

    • Did we talk about it in the Retrospective?
    • Did we discuss the impact?
    • Did we identify root causes?
    • Did we come up with solutions?
    • Have we tried the solutions?
    • What were the initial results?
    • What are next steps from here?

    We use the steps above to ensure:

    • Our teams are not making the same mistakes time time after time
    • Our teams are not having the same issues arise time and time again
    • Our teams are not stagnating but rather are getting better over time

    This session will arm session attendees with what to look for in a ScrumMaster and discuss how the SM uses the impediment progression to ensure we have a continuously improving team.

  • 45 Mins
    Tutorial
    Intermediate

    Want to find the perfect Product Owner? It's easy, all you have to do is find one with the time to do the job, the power to make decisions, the knowledge to make smart decisions, the interest in doing the job, and the Vision to build the right product. Easy, right?

    Via a story, the session will start by exploring 5 key attributes of being a Product Owner:

    1. Bandwidth
    2. Power
    3. Knowledge
    4. Interest
    5. Vision

    After that discussion, we do an exercise to identify what a Product Owner does day to day. The debrief will identify the balance a Product Owner must have in working with stakeholders, end users, customers AND working with the Scrum team AND product backlog refinement. We will also touch on client/vendor relationships and identify if the PO should come from the client or the vendor (and how technical should the PO be).

    The session concludes the attendees being given a Product Owner persona scoring template. The attendees can use this template to score their Product Owners and we will discuss how to identify their Product Owners areas of strength and gaps areas.

  • 45 Mins
    Workshop
    Intermediate

    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.

  • Brian Sjoberg
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    Brian Sjoberg - What Has Caused Your Retrospectives to Suck and What to do About it

    Brian Sjoberg
    Brian Sjoberg
    Agile Coach
    Excella Consulting
    schedule 4 years ago
    Sold Out!
    45 Mins
    Workshop
    Intermediate

    Have you sat through a retrospective that feels like Deja vu? Didn’t we already come up with a plan to fix this thing we are talking about, AGAIN! Are you in yet another blame/complain session with no apparent way to fix the complaint? Time and again this happens in retrospectives and before you know it, the team thinks they should cancel them altogether because they aren’t effective. Fortunately, there are clear steps you can take to fix this and make your retrospectives highly effective.

    In this session we will cover the common patterns that typically lead to ineffective retrospectives. The downsides to the team when retrospectives are ineffective. Then I will give you a very effective format to follow along with some different techniques to help get your retrospectives to be very effective.

  • Julie Wyman
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    Julie Wyman / Wm. Hunter Tammaro - Breaking Up is Hard to Do: How to Split a Team (Without Breaking It)

    45 Mins
    Experience Report
    Beginner

    Struggling to fit your Agile team into one room for ceremonies? Daily stand-up meetings dragging on? Finding it harder to keep the whole team informed? It might be time to split into the three- to nine-person teams the Scrum Guide recommends for better communication, collaboration and decision making. But abruptly changing the team structure can disrupt the larger group's dynamic and culture, and by breaking existing lines of collaboration, hurt the sense of team and organizational unity that already exists. By sharing our experience working with a large team at a non-profit client, we will illustrate the challenges that can face an Agile transformation when a team already has a culture of collaboration worth preserving. The lessons learned from our story will highlight not just the principles for nurturing Agility in a team's culture, but also specific strategies we used to overcome challenges and ensure the journey was one all our teams could embark on together.

  • Julie Wyman
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    Julie Wyman - Responding to Change over Following a Plan: Agile Lessons from Antarctica

    Julie Wyman
    Julie Wyman
    Agile Coach
    Excella
    schedule 4 years ago
    Sold Out!
    10 Mins
    Lightning Talk
    Beginner

    I spent January in Antarctica hanging out with penguins, whales, and seals. It was about as different from my day-to-day work as can be. And yet, on my long flight home, I couldn’t help but reflect on how well my trip aligned with one specific value of the Agile Manifesto: “Responding to change over following a plan.”

    Antarctica is a place that truly drives home why we need both planning AND, even more importantly, the ability to respond to change. This trip helped me fully appreciate how true this value is - and not just in software development. And after being stuck in Antarctica six days longer than planned, it also built up my empathy for team members struggling with dynamic situations!

  • Lisa Cooney
    Lisa Cooney
    Principal Agile Coach
    Axios
    schedule 4 years ago
    Sold Out!
    45 Mins
    Workshop
    Intermediate

    Did you know that your brain tells you stories all day long, and that if they are good stories, you believe them? Come to this entertaining interactive session to experience some "cognitive illusions" for yourself, and learn what they demonstrate about how our brains' work. Cognitive science and behavioral psychology offer important insights for agilists, insights that can help us work more effectively with our co-workers and clients. You will learn how awareness of our brains' tendencies is a powerful tool to overcome our own innate cognitive bias, and the cognitive bias of others. This newfound awareness can open you to more varied perspectives in order to tell yourself a story that is both richer and more nuanced -- and closer to being "a true story."

  • Clare Stankwitz
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    Clare Stankwitz / Mathias Eifert - Making Agile Work for Data Teams: Writing Effective PBIs for Data Products

    45 Mins
    Talk
    Intermediate

    Want to help your data and analytics teams embrace Agile but don’t know where to start? Wondering why your data team seems to struggle with creating manageable yet valuable stories? Curious why we think Agile for data teams is a distinct challenge?

    Data work is often structured more like a pyramid than the familiar “layer cake” metaphor due to the state of data infrastructure technology, common industry practices, and the heavy lift to integrate data before it can be analyzed and visualized. Prevailing Agile wisdom of cutting work into “vertical slices” thus presents significant challenges for Agilists working on data teams! Typical full-stack vertical stories in this environment can easily become too complex, interdependent, and unwieldy to fit into fixed-length sprints. Technical stories can encapsulate smaller work increments but risk becoming too abstracted from the customer’s core problems and trap the team in infrastructure work for too long. An additional impediment to traditional user stories is the highly exploratory nature of advanced analytics and data science projects where in many cases end users lack awareness of what kind of problems can even be solved and technical experts can’t initially predict which solutions will actually be possible.


    This session presents successes and lessons learned from applying alternative story decomposition and writing techniques on several data products across multiple teams. Returning to one of the fundamentals of what makes Agile valuable, namely to obtain feedback on feasibility and end user value as quickly and systematically as possible, our approaches strive to ensure teams have small, independent stories while still maintaining a value focus. We discuss ways to decouple the technical stack through stubbing and gradual tightening of the Definition of Done. This technique accommodates the necessary foundational work in the background while also obtaining early feedback about the value of the eventual product delivery options. A second approach incorporates Lean Startup concepts and centers on replacing traditional user stories with testable hypothesis statements that allow for explicit experimentation and risk trade-offs towards relevant milestones such as model quality, performance, predictive reliability, etc. in the context of extreme uncertainty.


    Join us as we discuss some of the friction Agilists can encounter on data teams, as well as some validated ideas for meaningful solutions.

  • Trent Hone
    Trent Hone
    Excella
    schedule 4 years ago
    Sold Out!
    45 Mins
    Talk
    Intermediate

    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.

  • Doguhan Uluca
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    Doguhan Uluca - Ship It or It Never Happened: The Power of Docker, Heroku & CircleCI

    45 Mins
    Talk
    Intermediate

    Shipping code is hard and it is rough! It doesn't have to be. Using Docker, Heroku and CircleCI you can set up a world-class Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment pipeline in an hour with advanced functionality like Heroku preview apps, provisioning servers on-demand for to scale and containers that leverage layering to enforce Enterprise requirements, while giving developers access, flexibility and speed to get their work done. With duluca/minimal-node-web-server docker image and how you can tailor it to build your micro-services or web servers in a matter of minutes using Docker and deploy your web app on the cloud.

  • Trent Hone
    Trent Hone
    Excella
    schedule 4 years ago
    Sold Out!
    45 Mins
    Case Study
    Beginner

    Customers weren’t satisfied! The process took too long! The end product didn’t perform to specifications! Does this sound familiar?

    A century ago, the U.S. Navy’s ship design process had serious problems, ones we would recognize and understand today. Come learn how these problems were solved in a large, real-world, organization through minor changes in structure and process. These changes illustrate the importance of:

    • Gathering early feedback
    • Rapidly iterating to expose unknowns
    • Using multi-disciplinary problem-solving
    • Employing Agile techniques outside of IT
  • Julie Wyman
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    Julie Wyman / Wm. Hunter Tammaro - Measuring Flow: Metrics That Matter

    45 Mins
    Talk
    Intermediate

    Does your Scrum team start all its stories on Day 1 of the Sprint? Do stories sometime carry over into the next Sprint? Or perhaps testing always gets crammed in on the last day of the Sprint? If any of these sound familiar, your team may benefit from improving its flow.

    Flow metrics are common with Kanban, but can provide tremendous value to any team, including those using Scrum. In this session, we’ll start by exploring the value of achieving a smooth flow of work (versus simply achieving maximum utilization) and give simple ways for your team to measure its flow. We’ll look at examples of metrics including lead and cycle time, throughput, and the cumulative flow diagram (CFD), reviewing what each represents, easy ways to collect them, and how they can be used in both a Kanban and Scrum context. You’ll leave the session knowing how to interpret and capture all these valuable metrics, so your agile team can measure and improve its flow.

  • Jaap Dekkinga,
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    Jaap Dekkinga, - Story point cost. How to calculate it and how to use it.

    Jaap Dekkinga,
    Jaap Dekkinga,
    Agile coach
    Excella
    schedule 4 years ago
    Sold Out!
    45 Mins
    Talk
    Intermediate

    Story point is an arbitrary relative measure used by Scrum/agile teams to define the effort required to implement a story or feature. This is a metric to measure the cost related to the implementation of story points. This metric is called Story Point Cost. It should allow to track development costs and also make the Scrum team aware about the budget issues of their project and for product owners to easier compare cost to gained value.

  • Mathias Eifert
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    Mathias Eifert - Iterative vs. Incremental – What’s the Difference and Why Should You Care?

    45 Mins
    Talk
    Beginner

    Agile is an incremental and iterative approach to delivering value to our customers. But too often we assume it’s really all about ways to slice work into smaller batch sizes and that both approaches are fundamentally equivalent. However, there is a crucial difference and this lack of awareness is a major contributor to projects and teams that are AINO (Agile In Name Only)!

    In this session, we will discuss how to differentiate between incremental and iterative approaches, their strengths and weaknesses, and why you really need both. We will explore the many ways in which iteration shapes the core of Agile practices, how it supports and enables the benefits of agility, and how understanding its awesome power is a key step in moving from “doing” Agile to truly being agile. In addition, we will take a close look at the practical implications of when to use each approach by discussing real world scenarios, highlighting common Agile anti-patterns and (re)examining familiar story slicing patterns.

    You will walk away with both a better understanding of one of the most important underlying principles of agility and immediately applicable insights for your daily work!

  • Paul Boos
    Paul Boos
    IT Executive Coach
    Excella
    schedule 4 years ago
    Sold Out!
    45 Mins
    Tutorial
    Intermediate

    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.

  • Sean Killeen
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    Sean Killeen - Level Up Your Team's Agility with Better Technical Interviews

    45 Mins
    Talk
    Intermediate

    Have you ever been in a technical interview, stuck at a whiteboard or solving a brainteaser, and thought “there must be a better way”? Good news: there very much is.

    Agility and adaptability are crucial for a development team's success, but how often do we target for agility when considering who to bring into our team? And how do we set expectations for agility from the first time this potential new hire begins evaluating our team?

    In this talk, I walk through my philosophy & provide practical tips for running technical interviews that are primed for success.

  • Sharyn Horowitz
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    Sharyn Horowitz - Unraveling Red Tape – Being Agile in a Bureaucracy

    10 Mins
    Lightning Talk
    Intermediate

    Sure, we would like everyone to have an agile mindset and focus on continuous improvement, but sometimes as Agilists we need to work with stakeholders who don’t agree with our priorities or our methods. When you need to get something done in a bureaucracy, how do you adapt? Every place you operate has a unique combination of people, processes, and problems. We'll discuss general principles that will help you navigate successfully.

  • Dr. Patrick McConnell
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    Dr. Patrick McConnell - 5 Myths Killing Agile for Government

    45 Mins
    Talk
    Executive

    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.

  • Wm. Hunter Tammaro
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    Wm. Hunter Tammaro - Benjamin Franklin Invented Scrum

    Wm. Hunter Tammaro
    Wm. Hunter Tammaro
    Lead Consultant
    Excella
    schedule 4 years ago
    Sold Out!
    10 Mins
    Lightning Talk
    Beginner

    It’s hard to overstate Benjamin Franklin’s contributions to the world. A true polymath, Franklin is best known for his statesmanship and diplomacy, his scientific insight, and his creation of the Scrum software development methodology.

    Wait, what?

    Okay, Franklin was ahead of his time, but he wasn’t telling us how to build software more than 200 years ago. Yet like the founders of Scrum, Franklin was obsessed with finding better ways to work and shared his productivity strategy in his autobiography. His to-do list is one of the first in the historical record, but the way he used it anticipates Scrum – and Agile principles in general – in many ways.

  • Wm. Hunter Tammaro
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    Wm. Hunter Tammaro / Julie Wyman - Limiting WIP: Doing Less to Do More

    45 Mins
    Talk
    Intermediate

    Limiting work-in-progress, or WIP, is a core principle of Kanban, and is a common recommendation to teams using Scrum or other frameworks as well. Yet the idea that working on less can lead you to get more done seems to defy common sense. Even those who understand the reasons for limiting WIP can struggle with resistance from team members or leaders when putting the theory to practice. This talk will review the concept of WIP and explore in depth the reasons for limiting WIP: enhancing focus, reducing cycle time, optimizing flow and making bottlenecks visible. We will give strategies for starting out with WIP limits and suggestions for what to do when a limit is reached. Attendees will also participate in a short simulation that will illustrate the concepts in practice, and that attendees can use on their own projects to help overcome skepticism of WIP limits in their organizations.

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