2019 will be the year of Big Agile, where large adopters like General Motors, the Department of Defense, the State of Michigan, Lockheed Martin, and others, who have combined IT budgets exceeding 100 Billion dollars, have all announced their desire to “go agile” at a scale not yet seen in our community. Are technology leaders who cut their teeth in a low-trust, command-and-control, high-documentation environment prepared to make a successful transformation? What will Big Agile look like, and how will it affect the rest of the community?

This will be our industry’s biggest challenge, and I've been studying it for years. As the large adopters in the federal government and corporate sector begin to adopt agile, they’ll bring their habits, culture, and bureaucracies with them, and they need to get in front of the wave.

One of the things I like about AgileDC is that I see a lot of familiar faces. Not just familiar from previous AgileDC events, but from other Agile events in town, other conferences, Meetups and such. I also go to local DevOps events, and I see familiar faces there too, but I don't observe much overlap between the two. In this talk I will discuss whether this division is real, or perhaps just a figment of my imagination, whether we as an Agile community should care, and what we should do about it.

One of the key advantages of Agile over plan-driven approaches is that an Agile mindset acknowledges our ever-diminishing ability to usefully predict the future and focuses our efforts on managing change instead of trying to suppress it. This “new reality” has become pervasive enough to drive its own buzz word – VUCA, which stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity. But beyond the hype lies a truth that Agile leaders need to understand and embrace – that certain problems really do respond differently to our attempts to manage and solve them. Why does this matter? Because problem contexts that defy straightforward cause-and-effect expectations significantly impact productivity while simultaneously presenting much higher risks to success. Even worse, applying leadership approaches that aren’t matched to the problem context dramatically increases the danger of catastrophic failure.

In this session, we’ll examine how the Cynefin framework helps us make sense of what kinds of problems we’re dealing with and how we should approach them. We will then look at ten ways in which Agile frameworks, approaches and technical practices help us manage or even reduce complexity and one where they fall short. You will walk away with a deeper understanding of how - and why - the things we do as agilists increase stability and reduce risks for our teams.

People don't like being told what to do, especially knowledge workers. Yet in many work settings we give feedback that is directive in nature. What would it be like to receive feedback that, instead of making us ashamed of our failures, helped us to learn and grow? What would it be like to give feedback that enabled deep and sustained learning and growth in another person, while still being perfectly honest?

During this talk you will learn about Developmental Feedback, which enables the giver of the feedback to be clear and speak truth, and enables the receiver of the feedback to absorb it without defensiveness, and with a sense of invitation to learn and grow. You will learn about a variety of feedback types, how to have a "shared sensemaking conversation," what Impact Feedback and "The Story I Tell Myself" feedback actually are, and review sample dialogues. We will explore the conditions necessary for effective developmental feedback conversations, such as psychological safety and timeliness. You will emerge with a practical tool you can use with anyone (not just at work) to speak your truth while respecting the other person’s humanity, leading to lasting change and deeper relationships.

CMMI and agile haven't shared many beers at the bar over the years. But there is no reason they shouldn’t be best of friends. They both long for continuous improvement, creating learning organizations that strive to reduce risk and increase quality. I believe that a major cause of dissonance is the lack of perceived value in the way the CMMI models have been applied and appraisals performed in the past.

So, what would it look like to implement CMMI and prepare for an appraisal focusing all of our effort into creating value and removing waste, instead of adding it? That was the question we tackled this past year and are seeing a completely different practice and outcome given our approach, including enthusiasm and appreciation from the project teams for this approach as opposed to the more typical dread.

Participants in this presentation will hear from both a CMMI Lead Appraiser and an agilest who lead this value-driven approach to CMMI. They will learn how agile mindset, practices, and tools can be used to apply the CMMI model to our delivery, with intentional focus on creating an ever-maturing practice that reduces risk and increases quality. Participants will also hear how agile was used in the appraisal preparation, enabling continuous improvement across the organization and even reducing the amount of time and effort needed for the SCAMPI A appraisal.

How do you get people to agree on priorities when they may have different objectives? You may be facing an issue now where stakeholders are pushing against each other in order to get their work done first. What would happen if we could create an open dialog among stakeholders and have them understand different perspectives and focus on the goals of the greater good instead of just their own? Let’s face it, proper prioritization is the difference between writing code and developing valuable solutions.

In this simulation style workshop, you’ll learn practical methods for bringing stakeholders together and openly discuss their different priorities to agree on what’s most important overall. You will see first hand how a combining group discussion with proven prioritization methods such as Weighted-Shortest Job First and (WSJF) and Must Have, Should Have, Could Have and Won’t Have (MoSCoW) work.

Presentation Overview: (What is the “message”? What key points will you make?)

Change is hard – Staying motivated during change is even harder! But you can help your teams identify what things about the change are working for them and what they need to do to make small shifts that can keep them motivated.

Is your team or team member facing a big change decision? Moving Motivators can help you identify the best choice by looking at how the factors in the change impact your long term motivation.

Learn to discover and prioritize your motivators so you will understand how change today might impact you in the long run. See which choice is better when there are multiple options. Make conscious trade off decisions in a logical way with long term thinking in mind.

Many times, meetings are called to figure out what to do.

Many times, these meetings fail to do just that

On my current project, we use "scarecrows" to make sure that we focus on getting a solution and getting everyone's input

Government Agile transformations can feel like overwhelming efforts – but do not abandon hope! This interactive, audience-driven presentation reviews how government and large organizations ESCAPE common Agile adoption challenges.
You - the audience - will prioritize your pain points; we’ll focus on the five Agile hells most highly prioritized. We will discuss real examples of “escaping” out of each Agile hell, with pro tips and success patterns you can apply.
The Agile hells we've escaped include:

• No Transformation hell - A federal program or department wants to change but can’t start or can’t finish
• Too Fast hell - Newly Agile federal programs sometimes respond TOO rapidly, too often changing priorities.
• Technical hell - Programs can become bogged down in technical debt and manual processes.
• No Trust hell - Government delivery can be slowed by lack of trust between contractors and feds, between business and IT, or between compliance and delivery groups.
• Product Owners hell - Government Product Owners can be unavailable, think they are managers, aren’t empowered to provide vision, or struggle with prioritization
• Too Big hell- A frequent pattern in federal Agile! Large batches produce slow progress, low visibility and high complexity, seen in big programs, big deployments, and big contracts.
• Collaboration hell - Government teams can struggle with collaboration within the same organization across roles and across the fed-contractor divide.
• Stove-piped hell - Government organizations can struggle to collaborate across contractual or organizational boundaries within the same enterprise
• Leadership hell - An organization can only be as agile as its leadership. In the government, how can you work with leaders who aren't ready to be agile?

For each Agile hell, we focus on successful techniques to escape from these common dynamics. Unlike other presentations, we won't be doing a deep dive, but we will cover the most important challenges our audience face.

The talk walks through lessons learned from a specific government project, jumping head-first into agile, open source, and (oh dear) the cloud. In the jet plane metaphor, it's not about the theory of why a plane should fly (as a physicist), but about the big and little forces that will act on it in practice (as a test pilot).

On average Agile transformations get into trouble at about 14 months from the time they start. Have you ever wondered why?

Is it because you started from 'the bottom up?" Or is it because you spend time, money, resources and people creating great teams and didn't pay attention to having a professional, empowered Product Owner organization?

Agile transformations that target department level and not the organization have a very low success rate and you end up with an agile department enveloped by a traditional organization. That leads to dark work, decision delay and dysfunction.

So, what can you do?

Come and learn some of what I learned the "hard way" over 7 transformations.

Kubernetes married with a cloud provider elastic, highly available infrastructure. Many CI engines today (Jenkins, Bamboo, Gitlab, CircleCI), provide native integration with kubernetes so that your build and deploy workload can be elastically executed. This allows your pipeline to meet the needs of your schedule, be it the 4pm pile on to commit code before going home, the mad rush to get a hot fix to production, or the surge of an unexpected customer ask. Gone are the days of the build queue growing and you CI engine collapsing under the weight of a hundred build requests. In order for a pipeline to leverage this capacity changes must be made to the pipeline architecture. Tools must be dockerized, the ephemeral nature of running docker must be considered, kubernetes specifications or helm charts must be generated for the application, automated testing must be adapted to work in the new architecture, and then there is the database. Each one of these issues, plus many others I’ve missed contained unfortunate, unforeseen pitfalls that translated in schedule delays. Join Glenn as he helps you short circuit the pitfalls of migrating to kubernetes off of your static in-elastic virtual infrastructure.

What happens when 25 product owners, developers, and quality engineers reflect on their previous sprint through the eyes of a child?

Playdoh took my teams, remote and collocated, from showing up to an obligatory meeting on their calendar to intentional interpersonal and intrapersonal dialogue.

Between the carpet and the sticky fingers, adults are usually cleaning up more Playdoh than playing with it themselves. Even to my own surprise, in this “Play Retro,” our team members connected, not only on a professional, but also on a personal level in ways they had not done before.

This session will give an overview of our experience using a “Play Retro” and leave you with tips and things to consider planning a retrospective.

Many agile talks are about the benefits of cross-functional teams and integrating them with your business and changing their structure to better align to the value delivery. And amazing things happen with you get all of this stuff working together. There are industries and organizations that can't do this. Not because they don't want to or that they are not interested in the modern ways of working, but because they don't have the skills in-house and the cost of bringing all of those skills into the organization are inhibited by constraints of one sort or another.

The use of contractors and outsourcing of IT development was a major push for many years as businesses focused on their core capabilities. Industries like government couldn't compete with the marketplace for IT skills and so turned to contractors to fill the needs in many organizations. Now, these same organizations feel they need to bring the modern agile ways of working to their organizations. So how do they actually get the benefits of modern agile ways of working and delivering products while continuing to use contractors for most of the work?

This talk will focus on 3 areas of achieving most of the benefits of modern agile work while continuing to use contracted work. First, how to decide what to outsource. The decision of which pieces or work to use contractors for is the most important. Second, how to actually hire contractors. The procurement process can be evolved to be more agile and to encourage finding contractors that will drive toward the desired collaboration. Finally, how to manage and work with contractors. The day to day grind of working where real delivery will be accomplished.

Getting benefits from an agile framework and delivery is important and can still be achieved when some of the work is outsourced and the importance of defining and finding the right contractor are vital to achieving the desired success.

My team was asked to build an integration with an old legacy application which had no programming API whatsoever, and we were so excited. How did we tackle that challenge? Did we succeed? What happened next? Come and listen to find out. And I promise the ending will surprise and/or depress you.

As Agile coaches engage in enterprise transformations, there is a common theme among the organizational barriers and impediments seen across most clients. Oftentimes going into new account, organization, or team, it seems like a bit of déjà vu with the type of issues seen, despite how unique each company describes themselves. Usually through some sort of an assessment or an inspect and adapt, the clients all seem to have similar cultural, organizational, environmental, or personnel issues impacting their transformation. While every account does have a unique piece to it and our approach to these common issues can be somewhat standardized, coaches really show value by providing the best solution to their situation.

Some common areas encountered include:

• Annual project and funding approval process
• Lack of visibility into work going on at the enterprise level
• A disconnect between strategy and the actual work being executed
• Culture of fear causing lack of transparency

This lightning talk will review a couple of these impediments, define them, and show how a coach can address and move through them. It’s incumbent upon coaches to help the client understand that these impediments aren’t insurmountable, they just need to be tackled piece by piece. Value can be added in both small and big chunks, but coaches need to ensure they're doing that continuously and pragmatically.

Sometimes, a good debate is what’s needed. Conventional wisdom is boring. Agile is old enough now to inject some alternative thoughts. This session seeks to use the idea of the French Salon. A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine the taste and increase the knowledge of the participants through conversation. The intent is to combine learning, good manners, and conversational skill. Salonnières provided a place to gather, a topic, a structure or starting point for the gathering, and ensured that there would be a good mix of opinions among the guest list. “Salonnières therefore had to perform a difficult balancing act, cultivating individual merit without letting one guest overshadow the others.” Therefore, the goal is to facilitate the topic of Long Term Planning in Agile and whether there are any responsible ways to perform and execute it. Participants will bring their ideas along with an open mind to developing new possibilities.

The federal government, and many local governments, have embraced agile. This has been helpful in terms of incremental progress for the "how" of building software.

However, it's not enough.

The next big shift is when government agencies lift their focus from IT project delivery to digital product management - focusing on the "what" should be built and "why" it should be built. Such a shift will move agencies from incremental progress in delivering mission value to a ground-breaking shift in how missions are supported via technology.