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.

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.

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.

How can we break the pattern of disconnect between product strategy and daily execution? This talk focuses on linking standard strategic practices (Vision, Mission, Goals/OKRs) with standard agile execution practices (team backlogs, grooming, etc.) via establishing a portfolio kanban with outcome-based metrics and a regular, predictable cadence of bi-directional coordination and feedback via both standard product demos and establishing a stakeholder community.  

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.