Today, top performing agile teams exist in organizations worldwide. However, they are hamstrung by legacy bureaucratic management - the remnants of a waterfall phase gate governance approach.  True end-to-end, business agility requires a bimodal approach: continued care and feeding of agile teams done in parallel with a systematic middle-management transformation.

Join Sanjiv Augustine to explore 3 steps that enable rapid value delivery, increase decision velocity, enable portfolio prioritization, link strategy to execution and delink funding from projects:

1. Set up end to end Value Stream Teams
2. Set up an Agile Value Management Office (VMO)
3. Move from Yearly Budgeting to Fixed Funding   

We’ll cover case studies of how this approach has unshackled agile teams and liberated managers to deliver positive customer outcomes.

Technologists created Agile to deliver software more quickly, predictably, and successfully.   Traditionalists argue that agile is for tech-only. 

In this presentation, Alan Zucker argues that Agile is everywhere.  The values and principles are organic and align with natural ways of working.  Its practices are broadly applicable across professions, industries, and business domains.  All organizations, from non-profits to high-tech, can benefit. 

The Manifesto of Agile Software Development presents a set of values and principles for delivering working software quickly and providing value to customers.  Small changes extend the Manifesto and make it universally applicable.  All knowledge work domains and even some traditional ones can benefit.

Agile practices and tools enable and empower all.  Examples demonstrate how practices can be applied to traditional industries such as the military, construction, education, and non-profits.  Agile provides a framework for solving complex problems with creativity and innovative thoughts.  They allow us to harness our energies, improve our focus, and achieve greatness.

Installing Scrum, SAFe, or LeSS is insufficient. Methodologies and frameworks alone won’t achieve Business Agility. Directing leadership to become servant leaders isn’t a silver bullet either. Empowered and autonomous teams won’t emerge just because you want them to. These truths are self-evident. Agile has existed for over 20 years now, and organizations are still struggling. So much so that many businesses have concluded that Agile doesn’t work. It’s our fault. We’ve sold these businesses a false bill of goods as an industry. We’ve sold them on the promise of practices and the allure of a cultural mindset shift. We’ve sold them on what’s easy. It’s easy to quantify the existence of teams performing the ceremonies of Scrum. It’s easy to quantify how many people have completed Agile Leadership Training. And while Scrum teams and training are easy to quantify, they’re not easy to justify when executives and key stakeholders aren’t getting the results they desire. The reality is that change is hard. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach. But there are a set of guiding principles that every successful Agile organization has in common: • They minimize dependencies • Their governance is focused on flow • They connect work to customer value • And their leadership is engaged in the change Join Dennis as he guides you through these principles and discover how your organization can begin applying them today to achieve long-lasting Business Agility that gets you the results that matter.

Many individuals who have worked as part of an initiative to implement off-the-shelf systems have heard that agile approaches can’t work - that agile only works when building solutions from scratch or adding functionality to these systems. We believe, and have seen, that agile approaches are actually preferable to traditional waterfall in these instances, and the differences between proprietary and customization of commercially available system development have more in common than not.

Maturity is a leading indicator for Performance which leads to Outcome delivery. We crunched the numbers and analyzed the data across 46,000 team members in our enterprise customers (4,616 Agile teams) and found some fascinating insights on what specific competencies drive high performance. Our team has always believed there’s a correlation between qualitative metrics (defined by maturity) and quantitative metrics (defined by performance or flow). A few years ago, we moved to gather both qualitative and quantitative data. Once we felt we had a sufficient amount to explore, we partnered with the University of Nebraska’s Center for Applied Psychological Services to review the data through our AgilityHealth platform. The main question we wanted to answer was: What are the top competencies driving teams to higher performance?

We analyzed both quantitative and qualitative data from teams surveyed between November 2018 and April 2021. There were 146 companies representing a total of 4,616 teams (some who took the assessment more than once) which equates to more than 46,000 individual survey responses.

The results of our analysis identified the top five input drivers for each of the performance metrics in the TeamHealth assessment, along with the corresponding “weight” of each driver. These drivers are the best predictors for the corresponding metrics. 

By focusing on increasing these top five predictors, teams should see the highest gain on their performance metrics. 

Is your team losing its way during backlog refinement? Does refinement contain “hidden” work difficult to account for? Is a Definition of Ready weakly applied? Do you even have one?

Borrowing lessons from the Kanban method, we look at how to visualize a team’s backlog refinement process using a backlog refinement board – ultimately allowing a team to make work more visible to better meet its Definition of Ready. Benefits include improved understanding of work items, an “unhiding” of work, an appreciation for “where” refinement work resides – leading to greater confidence the work item has truly met the DoR prior to sprint planning.

We’ll examine how to identify the team’s refinement steps, how to turn those steps into a visual board, discuss whether a refinement board should follow the same cadence as the sprint board, and team interaction with the board. We’ll conclude with some real-world examples.

The culture of the Agile community is based in part on an ethos of responding to change and growing to meet new challenges with innovative ideas and structures.  However, this fast paced environment can lend itself to a proliferation of jargon and buzzwords, unfamiliar and meaningless to those who aren't in the know.  In fact , it's this use of language that tends to create such strong divisions between people in corporate settings, creating stumbling blocks for those trying to move quickly.

By identifying the difference between language that doesn't drive value and the words that do, understanding that people can become divided through this type of speech, and ultimately settling on a more simple, direct, and honest conversational style, you can turn a confusing conundrum into an opportunity for cohesion and community.

We have recommended best practices for implementing agile methods in an organization.  However, some organizations are not suited for the best practices and we need to adjust our approach.

In this session I will cover some of the recommended approaches and offer some hybrid models that can be implemented as alternatives.  These approaches could be used at the team, program, and enterprise level.  While these alternative approaches can work, there are trade-offs, which we will discuss as well.  

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) always begins with a conversation. At times, a simple conversation is enough to convey the essential business need, but sometimes a little more structure is needed to really understand the problem we are trying to solve.

 

In this interactive session we introduce Features Mapping, a structured, intuitive approach for business stakeholders and team members to collaboratively discover essential product requirements.  Using concrete examples, we will illustrate the technique and how it can help teams not only build a deeper understanding of the problem they are solving, but also help define more actionable acceptance criteria, and a better set of test cases.

 

Maybe you’ll find Feature Mapping to be a more compelling alternative to the typical freeform requirements discovery sessions.

Gherkin holds the promise of being an easy to implement and easy to understand tool for getting teams to be Test Driven. And it should be. But in our experience working with and coaching many teams, we have found significant differences between theory and practice. Too often, Gherkin scenarios are difficult to understand, difficult to maintain, and not valuable.

We will go over the following anti-patterns and discuss strategies to overcome them:

-Scenarios that focus on implementation rather than expected behavior
-Scenarios that are too long and too complex
-Misuse of the Gherkin keywords
-Poorly organized feature files and scenarios

After this interactive session, you will be able to go back to your teams with some practical lessons for refactoring your Gherkin scenarios so that they are manageable, durable, and valuable.

Agile approaches, irrespective of framework, foundationally rely on collaboration and communication within and beyond our agile teams.  

Big Room Planning.  A technique where we bring key stakeholders from an organization together in a room and we collaborate together.  We can collaborate on a variety of topics: business strategy, solving a potential problem, brainstorming a new competitive solution.  The sky is the limit. 

When we try to enable Business Agility Big Room Planning is a technique that can be used to align delivery teams to business strategy. 

My talk will describe how  Big Room Planning can be used at various levels in an organization, all with the goal of alignment and transparency.