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!)

Language is powerful and can paint a picture, lift people to happiness or dive us into despair.  Transforming our language can be an amazing way to shift our own mindset and that of others. What can you do to change your own internal dialog to embrace a new mindset? Why not extend the same language to help teams and others transform?

In this talk, we’ll cover a variety of language topics that can be incorporated immediately, including:

• Language of a Fixed Mindset, Growth Mindset, and Agile Mindset to enhance Agile Transformations
• Clean Language to help teams uncover root cause issues instead of focusing on symptoms
• David Marquet’s (author of Turn the Ship Around) focus on Leadership Language to help management transform into leaders
• Power Questions to help people see the future and the advantages of Agile transformations

Organizations are increasingly relying on sophisticated use of data assets and analytics to drive better decision making and improve business performance.  To support this, many companies have established teams of data scientists and analysts whose sole focus is on deriving new and impactful insights on the various internal and external factors that are important to overall health of the business and for growth potential.

As a business function, the practice of data science tends to follow a standard pattern from problem definition, data acquisition, modeling, testing, and final analysis, which lends itself well to applying standard methodologies for structuring the work, managing scope/timing, and ensuring outcomes align with business objectives.

In particular, applying Agile principles within a data science team can provide significant benefits in terms of driving clarity of scope/effort, managing workload and outputs, maintaining alignment with business goals, and creating/leveraging reusable information assets.

We will cover specific topics to help Agile leaders effectively deploy Agile within analytics teams:

• Articulating benefits of Agile for data science efforts and analytics teams
• Applying Agile processes and techniques to analytics projects
• Establishing and managing OKR to drive better outcomes for analytics teams and projects

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 caricature of a cold-hearted businessman appreciates the value of Agile, while decrying the ridiculousness of talking about feelings and expressing that he doesn't care about people, but only about money.

Looking to rapidly build out a new portal to empower employees to own their own data and journey through employment eligibility while soliciting feedback as early as possible.  How four contracts, seven companies, and 25+ people completed an initial Discovery, internal proof of concept, and externally facing user testing in 1.5 years within a government agency.

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.