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.

Solutions, solutions, solutions! Get your solutions here! We have technical solutions, DevOps solutions, automations, and metrics! ...The Agile community is caught in the middle of the Framework Wars — SAFe vs [email protected] vs Modern Delivery vs Kanban and XP — and following the rules has become more important than solving the problems that led us to Agile in the first place!

The Design Thinking Double Diamond teaches us to research and understand problems, separately from solutions. When was the last time you stopped to really think about your problems, separately from how you are solving them?

We also need to face the hard truth that yes, our teams are working hard, but sometimes they are creating more problems than they solve.

In this session we’ll walk through one technique for shifting people’s attention back to problems. It's called the “PEP Talk”. It has been used in fortune 50 companies, government institutions, and individual Release Trains to help refocus people on the right things at the right time, promote cross-team collaboration, and inspire them to design win-win solutions that solve multiple problems at once, while also unlocking intrinsic motivation. It works great as a part of a Lean Portfolio Management approach, in an Agile VMO, with a Lean Agile Center of Excellence (LACE), or a Scrum of Scrum of Scrums because it is solution-agnostic. (Plus it helps you win at Buzzword Bingo!)

Great testing starts as soon as your client comes to you with an idea.

Good testing uses TDD, BDD, Automation, and other accelerators. Great testing starts in the way we think about the new Epic, how it breaks into MVPs, how we develop our architecture. The more we think about how to test our solution, the more resilient and robust that solution will be.  Agile tells us to “inject quality” throughout the delivery process. We use testing to demonstrate that quality. The more we craft our solution to make testing easier and more effective, the faster we can demonstrate that quality, and get to production bug-free.  

In this presentation, we’ll talk about “injecting testability” throughout the pipeline. We will explore decisions and techniques in architecture, solution design, data management, and – yes – test environments, that make testing robust, easier, and more effective.

Digital revolution, artificial intelligence, virtual work...change is accelerating. Technology is seen as the key to success. Every company is now a software company. NO! Every company is STILL a people company!

This talk is perfect for team members and leaders alike as it highlights the real differentiator in Agile ways of working, PEOPLE. Through 3 human-centered, transformational stories (Product Team Mobbing, Customer Success Leader Learning Journey, & Marketing Evolution) along with a few interactive exercises attendees will hear how Agile principles and practices are broadly applicable to everything from team building to culture change.

Agile was brought into existence by people that cared, and Agile has continued and evolved because people still care. Agile transcends industry and functional area. It could care less about title or tenure. It does not differentiate between a business that has been around for 10 decades or 10 days. Agile is about connection and community, so let's talk about people helping people.

Many agile journeys end prematurely because they exhaust the organizations 'capacity for change.' As we define and actively manage capacity setasides for architecture or technical debt, I propose that we should actively manage change capacity and explicitly design our change plans around the availability - and intermittent absence - of change capacity. 

This remarkably suggests that our agile change journey should be agile, incremental, and adaptive - and provides a framework for structuring, negotiating, and planning agile change.

I suggest an alternative SAFe implementation journey based on these principles. 

Slides from an earlier presentation on this topic are attached.

What would it look like if you ran an entire organization using Agile? Agile in the executive suites, Agile prioritization, Agile teams, Agile funding, …Agile everything. The LibraryOfAgile.org is a community-led project that has been collecting, evaluating, comparing, and testing Agile techniques. Our goal is to explore together a scientific analysis of Agile techniques to test for causation and interrelation. In plain English: Does is work? Does it work everywhere? And does it mess anything else up?

In this case study, we will talk about some of the insights we have discovered in our research and lay out one design for an “Agile Utopia”. Each of the pieces of this Agile operating model are legitimate techniques that are being used in real-world organizations, though using them all together at once is (so far) theoretical.

The current name for this theoretical model is the “Pentacameral Governance Model”.  There are no managers, no budgets, democratic decision making, and lots of science, automation, and metrics. It is filled with psychology, checks and balances, and even a blockchain and a cryptocurrency.

If you could design the future that you want to live in, what would you include?

The Manifesto for Scaling Agility has one its values Organic Growth over pre-defined structure. What does this mean in terms of scaling? How do development efforts scale organically?

This talk will begin by examining the Scaling Manifesto's values and principles and how they fit within the context of the . Using this lens, we'll look at how organizations can entrust their teams to scale appropriately and confidently to meet the needs of the business. We'll look at prerequisites for making this growth successful, various starting points, and organizational prerequisites.

The Five Love Languages proposes that there are five general ways that romantic partners express and experience love, but these desires are not unique to romantic relationships.  Scrum masters can consider these same mindsets to support their team's happiness and success.

Agile in the Metaverse!

One of the biggest trends in the tech industry right now is the rise of the metaverse. The metaverse is the digital universe we inhabit when we’re online. It’s the digital spaces we visit and build, the worlds we experience, and the people we interact with. The metaverse is where we work, learn, and play.

In this talk, we will apply how we can practice agility by upholding the principle of individuals and interactions over processes and tools in the metaverse. We will also explore how we can use the metaverse and prepare for what the future of work will look like. In addition to talking about applying agile in the metaverse, we will cover why it's important to prepare organizations for the future generational workforce and how we can prepare our organizations to be agile and innovative.

Learning objectives:

1) Understand the concept of the metaverse and why it is important to prepare organizations for the future of work and agile.

2) How we, as agile coaches, use this to enable our clients to be more agile.

3) Benefits of using the metaverse as a tool for agile coaching; we will cover a demo, and discuss how it can be used in the coaching process.

4) Share case studies from universities and how we could use that to teach, train, and coach students on the various agile principles and practices through the MetaVerse.

In Conclusion, the metaverse is a tool that can be used to enable agile coaches, organizations, and individuals to be more agile and innovative. As technology unleashes with various new ways of working, it's important for us to prepare ourselves and our clients for the future of work and agile.

With today’s teams spread across time zones and locations, tools are a necessity to support collaboration and productivity. But a common misconception is that tools come with an implicit process off the shelf that will magically make your business agile. What happens more often than not is that teams and organizations implement tools as a reflection of their people and practices. So while tools are meant to be flexible to support organizational needs, it can be difficult to understand how to implement them to get the best return on investment without looking at the bigger picture.

In this talk, I'll discuss the common pitfalls of implementing a tool without a clear understanding of your people and practices. We'll work on shifting the mindset from implementing a tool to drive processes, to implementing a tool to support business needs and goals. I'll also introduce real success stories where organizations found harmony between people, practices, and technology, using the Atlassian tools to unlock agility in product and marketing teams, clinical drug trials, and advertising.

In Agile and Lean transformation, one of the great barriers is leadership style. The typical teaching is proposing 'servant leadership' - but for many, the notion of servant leadership is hard to connect to.

An alternative is emerging, but isn't well-known yet - 'Host leadership.'

This intended as an introduction to the concept of Host Leadership, it's compliment - Guest Followership - and a discussion of the advantages it may have over Servant Leadership in many contexts. 

Mapping out all the steps a customer takes while interacting with my organization is a powerful way to improve the customer experience. Customer journey maps clarify what customers are trying to do, what barriers they face, and how they feel during each interaction with our program and service. 

Understanding customer personas,  such as how people join our learning program, complete online registration, or file a complaint, is what journey maps are known for. Many companies don’t realize that these maps can also help them identify broader business opportunities or challenges that customers face. For example, new learners do not know how to register for the education program. 

How many times have we heard "we want to deliver software fast, we want to deliver value, and we want to do it because we want to be Agile." Those extremely frustrating words mean someone wants teams to follow a predefined framework like Scrum or Kanban without assessing the current environment. These processes can easily become the enemy when it comes to getting things done. Why is it that we focus so much on someone else's rules instead of how our teams want to work? Sure, you can leverage frameworks and tips from the industry but the only way it will be valuable is if you are constantly listening to your teams wants and needs. This is not listening after the fact in the form of a retrospective. This is listening from the beginning to the end.

Come to this session to find out about how the tool of listening will help you become a successful and Agile team.