You may be experiencing first-hand that we are in an age of VUCA -- volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. If that’s not challenging enough, Harvard Business Review “ups the ante” on VUCA and tells us we are living in a time of 3-dimensional change. It’s perpetual -- occurring all the time, it never lets up. It’s pervasive -- unfolding in multiple areas of life at once, you can’t escape it. And it’s exponential -- accelerating at an increasingly rapid rate, and humans aren’t built for exponential. In other words, it is not likely that you will be getting off the change bus anytime soon, there is no brake pedal and it’s almost impossible for you to see what is coming next. Feeling any discomfort? If so, you are normal! This constant-change environment is often frighteningly uncomfortable AND it is where we Agilists thrive.

Using Agile well, we learn how to guide ourselves and others through challenging situations where there is not a clear “right” answer or “winning” strategy. With our hearts of agile and our ability to courageously inspect and adapt, we already have everything we need to thrive in constant change. This is our emerging superpower!  Yet, there are important conversations we are not having with our teams and especially with our leaders. It’s time to change that. 

In this keynote, Lyssa Adkins, Agility & Leadership Coach, guides you to a deeper understanding of the change currents running beneath the modern working world and helps you explore the change edge you may be experiencing (psst… it’s the one that holds you back from having the really important conversations). Never fear! You will leave the keynote with a clear way to prepare yourself for having that conversation. 

Lyssa will take our attention to the overarching change we are all experiencing which is the ability of our home, our one planet, to sustain us. She holds the notion that perhaps Agile is no accident and has emerged at exactly the right time to help us meet today's significant challenges and paradigm shifts. If so, what might be our part to play? How might we use our emerging superpower for good? 

Agile transformations are supposed to make organizations modern, competitive, and relevant. But in the well-intentioned effort to move into the future, change leaders find themselves frustrated by pushback, limited impact, poor practices, and unfair criticism. What is going on?

In this special hands-on workshop, we will cut through the conventional approaches to building agile organizations,  and instead explore a recurring pattern that disrupts what holds organizations back:

• The BOOST is the initial gains from logical first steps for change
• The BARRIER is the unavoidable roadblock that must come next
• The ReBOUND is the way forward to further gains by leaning against the concept of the original boost. These counter-intuitive rebounds can unblock stalled agile transformations.

No, your transformation is not a failure. It turns out the buy-in, the talent, the alignment, and the growth you need to break through are already in front of you; it’s all simply hidden under the surface. Undiscovered. Unutiliized. Untapped.

 In this session we will take a look at some practices that enable the the agile value and principles in your organization.  Additionally, we will look at the practices that are stale and need renewal.  Let's get back to basics!

The Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD). Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Maybe you’ve been told it can help you better understand the flow of work, identify bottlenecks, and get a sense how long work items take to complete. It sounds intriguing, but…how exactly do you read it? What is it trying to tell you? And… Could the CFD be more helpful than a burndown chart?

In this part lecture, part workshop presentation, we’ll take a closer look at what a CFD is, how it’s constructed, and, most importantly, how to interpret what you’re observing. Being able to identify patterns in your CFD is a valuable skill to better understand how work flows across your Scrum or Kanban board. We’ll then examine several common CFD patterns you might see with your teams. We will be addressing 3 key questions: What are you observing? Why might it be happening? and What actions might you suggest for improvement?

For many, the CFD can provide a deeper understanding of a team’s performance that goes far beyond the traditional burndown chart. Whether you are a Scrum Master, Product Owner, or team member, this session is for anyone who wishes to practice their critical thinking skills.

Let's design some outcomes!   This is a hands-on workshop where participants can dive in and learn by doing.  

The presentation on leading with outcomes emphasizes the crucial shift from focusing solely on outputs to prioritizing outcomes in order to drive real business value. The speaker introduces the concept of well-crafted objectives that are not only quantitative but also directly tied to the achievement of tangible results. This approach ensures that business efforts are aligned with measurable goals, leading to more meaningful progress. In stark contrast to outcomes, outputs are highlighted as mere artifacts generated by business or IT processes. While outputs represent the completion of tasks or the delivery of specific items, they often fall short in reflecting the true impact on the business. The presenter emphasizes the need to define outcomes that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART), allowing for clear evaluation and tracking of progress.

We will start out with some hands-on exercises to turn outputs into well-crafted outcomes.  We will review them and discuss what makes them more or less effective, and how they could help us achieve our strategic goals.

Next we will explore leading and lagging metrics.    Lagging metrics are the ones that we all care about:  revenue, delivery of government services, crime reduction, keeping our homeland safe.  The problem?  we cannot affect those directly.   By contrast, a leading metric is something we can affect directly.    While we can't cause sales to go up, maybe if we reduce out-of-stock situations that will ultimately lead to more sales.    we will discuss ways to identify leading metrics and how to know when its time to pivot and try another.  

This fun workshop is chock full of exercises and discussion, and is a great way to learn some of the new exciting tools in the business agility toolset.  

In conclusion, the presentation advocates for a shift from outputs to outcomes as a strategic approach to leadership. By crafting objectives that are SMART and tied to genuine business value, organizations can better measure progress and drive meaningful results. This transition enables businesses to move beyond the production of artifacts and instead prioritize achieving quantifiable outcomes that contribute to their overall success.

Teams are not born, but molded through shared experiences over time. A newly formed team begins as a collection of individual contributors focused on their own roles and responsibilities. With the right leadership and team practices, they evolve into a cohesive, aligned group pulling together towards collective goals. This journey transforms hesitant participants into invested members, and eventually highly motivated teammates with complete trust in one another.

In this talk, we'll explore the journey from individuals who are part of a group (and many times referred to as a team) to a "Real Team".   What are the characteristics of "teams" in each stage of the process, and what is the role of the leader/manager/Scrum Master/Coach in creating an environment in which teams can flourish.  We’ll diagnose where your team is currently at while identifying the next milestones required to reach high performance. Just as individuals progress through stages of development, so too must a team make the evolutionary leap from a group of individuals to an interconnected, aligned high-performing unit.

How many of us have found ourselves on a team of people who create healthy culture with one another, but find yourself saying things like "yeah, WE all acknowledge what WE need to change, but what about the bigger problems here?"

Toxic senior leaders, non-valuable processes, a total lack of diversity, pizza as a thank you for backbreaking work? Enough already!

Join me for a talk about how you can start to change the conversation from the inside out. As Patti Smith says, "people have the power." Let's talk about how we can bring about bigger change realistically into the larger ecosystems.

In the agile world, we tend to complain a great deal about leadership.  Get a group of agile coaches together and you'll likely hear things like, "If only our leaders weren't so focused on output and metrics," or "If only leadership understood about self-empowered teams," or even "If only leadership would let us do things the right way."

We seem to be saying that leadership is the problem.  Yet the stark reality is that they are not the source of all problems in an organization.  Everyone in an organization needs to find better ways of working.  However, leadership plays a crucial part in our ability to bring positive change and increased agility to an organization.  Complaining about what leadership does will not help us bring about change.  Conversely, finding the best way to work with organizational leadership will give us the highest chance for success in creating enduring and positive organizational change.

In this session, we'll dive into the best ways to partner with leadership to bring about organizational change.  We will find out what leadership is concerned about and how to speak in a manner that captures the attention of leadership.  We will discuss both positive patterns working with leadership to effect change and some anti-patterns to avoid.

Of course, empathy is essential to realizing the value of agility as well as in establishing psychological safety and creating a high-trust culture, but how to actually cultivate empathy? Empathy as a concept is often discussed but hard to contextualize; we recognize it when we experience it, but don’t often have the language and skills to cultivate empathy as a cognitive attribute with measurable behaviors.
In this experiential session, we will focus on the role of empathy in achieving any of these objectives. You’ll explore what it takes to build empathy, for yourself, your teams and your organization. You’ll learn pragmatic and personalized techniques you can apply immediately in your organization.

Attendees will attain a deeper understanding of

1. Why and how to build empathy within yourself, your teams and the organization sustainably
2. How empathy is an important skill for organizations' Agile practices
3. Understand when and how to apply gamification principles

Organizations, teams, and individuals frequently adopt the "default" behavior of an American corporation, but many of these behaviors are no longer appropriate for the complex and uncertain work we engage in. Gene Kim presented "the five ideals of DevOps" in his business fiction, "The Unicorn Project." These ideals are not prescriptions or sets of practices, but rather directions we can move toward and lenses we can use when considering options and ways of improving. They are surprisingly versatile, applying at various levels from the whole company, to a team, down to individual decisions about how to write a line of code.

Learn about the following ideals, how they relate to DevOps, some of the things they encompass, and examples of behavior that is closer to the ideal than what you usually find:

1. Locality and Simplicity
2. Focus, Flow, and Joy
3. Improvement of Daily Work
4. Psychological Safety
5. Customer Focus

Transformation is a journey Agilists embark on at various points in their careers. Agilists who have experienced enterprise-wide Agile transformations, and strive to leverage the foundational constructs of Business Agility, have, that exceed three years inevitably, encountered both triumphs and setbacks.

Over the past 16 years, the State of Agile report consistently highlights a handful of key factors contributing to transformation success and another set of factors leading to transformation failures. Despite the Agile Communities' wealth of knowledge, extensive experience, and accumulated wisdom, the rate of failure remains alarmingly high—more than 50% of transformation efforts to enable Business Agility falter each year.

What's driving this persistently high failure rate? During this experience report, I aim to share several examples of competencies organizations must master in order to realize true Business Agility or risk stumbling which I observed supporting several different enterprise-wide scaled agile transformations. draw from decades of experience, including 10+years of applying my insights, to achieve a success rate exceeding 80% in guiding organizations through transformation. I will like to share my lessons and discoveries with you,  including recent experiences including ones when enabling and supporting transformations affected by the COVID-19 lockdown and the impact of AI like the ChatGPT.

One of the most powerful tools in helping people understand the value of changing their ways of working is to quantify the benefit.  While math can be intimidating to many, we use calculators as a matter of course for many of the economics-based decisions in our lives: buying a car or house or sending a child to college for example. Why not create calculators for estimating the economic benefit of working in new ways? Or why don’t we quantify the effect of “a bad system” in which people work?

In this workshop, I will show an example value calculator and how the parameters were derived from thinking through the old way of working compared to the new way of working.

Next, attendees will have an exercise to modify a value calculator previously created.

In the third part, attendees will think through and identify the parameters that they would use to calculate the quantified value of a changed practice.  They can dream up one from scratch or use one of several options provided.

In today’s world, corporations either need to be innovative or should be prepared to be disrupted. To be competitive, your business is reinventing and transforming but do you feel that you are being held hostage by traditional contracts? To achieve business agility, do you feel that Traditional Contracts are holding you back? Have you been in contract disputes because of Traditional Contracts? To discover a solution to these problems, we need an Agile approach to contracts, one that benefits both parties in the near and long terms.
Agile contracts exploit variability via adaptive responses to changes as new knowledge emerges and offer the provider near-term confidence of funding and sufficient notice when funding winds down or stops. Audience will learn Managed-Investment Contracts versus Traditional Approaches to contracting, ranging from firm fixed price to time and materials, with almost every point in between where “Anything you say can and will be used against you”.

Is your organization struggling to make a difference with true innovation?  Ideas abound, but how do you know which ones will pay-off?

Or perhaps your Innovation & Planning Sprints (IP Sprints) don't really result in anything innovative; they focus on training on a known technology or doing “research” into applying a known technology in a known way.  Most likely it's catch-up work, right?  What would injecting innovation look like?

Wouldn't you like to know what ideas may pay-off BEFORE you invest a ton of time, effort, and money into them?  How about setting up some guardrails to keep ideas from becoming someone's pet project?

This workshop will introduce you to exercises, concepts, practices, and techniques you can use to get innovation flowing and ensure it is considering the needs of your customers.  It will be mixed in with our experience in helping a large organization inject innovation into its IP Sprints and the journey on which we are taking them.  It will also showcase an example of the results of an actual start-up so you get a full picture for how the approach and techniques can work.  If you are not getting the innovation you want from your IP Sprints, hackathons, innovation time/days, or other approaches, let us help you get started.

As the permanence of remote and hybrid work begins to take shape across the industry, this talk takes a look at some best practices for establishing an inclusive culture for all types of employees from the moment onboarding begins. We will consider both the needs of the remote (or hybrid) worker as well as the support employers may need as they approach the reality that remote work is here to stay. Join us as we go beyond the makeshift home offices we may have had to get us through the last few years and dive deeper into how remote and asynchronous work can really work for you, your team or your organization.

As agile adoption broadens and matures within organizations, an area that is often overlooked is evolving a holistic software testing strategy keeps pace with the rapid evolution of software and help teams fit testing into our modern continuous software development world.

In this session, we will explore the basic elements of an agile testing strategy based on a holistic testing model, what a well-rounded test portfolio should look like to be responsive, reliable and maintainable, and provide tools and ideas to help you develop/refine a strategy that’s fit for purpose within your context. We will revisit original metaphors such as the Test Pyramid, Test Quadrants, and provide a fresh perspective on how you can put these concepts to use when crafting a modern test strategy that leverages the power of cross-functional teams and left shifts testing concerns throughout the software development lifecycle.

If you code for Android, you know Jetpack Compose is a big deal. It’s a clean way to describe the user interface you want, without all the plumbing and boilerplate. And if you’ve worked in this industry for any length of time, you know we’re going to write plenty of nightmare code with Jetpack Compose, too. Cruft finds a way.

This is where Test-Driven Development comes in. Remember, TDD is not a way to test—it’s a way to develop. A way that helps you write clear code that stays clear. In this session, I’ll show you how to test-drive changes in a real app that uses Jetpack Compose. No boring toy examples here. I’ll be coding live (mistakes and all), so you can see what it’s really like to work this way. And we’ll cover important concepts like:

• Declarative vs. Imperative code
• Mocking dependencies (like API calls and storage)
• Unit-testing coroutines

A new framework is a chance at a new way to code our apps. Come learn how we can get it right this time!

I had the honor of presenting an emerging talk during Agile 2023 on Agile Coaching.  The talk was based on what transpired in three sessions prior in the Audacious Saloon. So what theme emerged in those talks?  The value of Agile Coaching (maybe Agile as an Industry itself) is diminishing. If that's the case what do we do about it?  This talk will explore how embracing concepts and knowledge in the adjacent field of Product Management can increase your own value proposition as an agilist. 

We'll explore:

• The key differences are between the values & principles of Agile vs Product Thinking
• How product-led growth strategy impacts product team culture 
• What you can do to boost your Product chops and how that can help you in your current position.

Finding opportunities for improvement can be hard for teams that have used the Scrum Framework for some time. What if there was an easy way to identify “low hanging fruit” opportunities for improvement that your fellow Developers would want to achieve?

In this talk, I’ll share with you some easy approaches to identify the low-hanging fruit in your Scrum environment. We’ll cover topics including workflow, experimentation, and evaluating whether a challenge your team faces is really “low hanging fruit” and how to address it.

Good retrospectives (you know, the ones that actually lead to real change?) rest on three pillars:

* people,
* process, and
* follow-through

What makes retrospectives so difficult is that if any of these three pillars starts to crack, it's very difficult for the retrospective to be a success.

Ultimately, getting the right people in the room, utilizing a good process to facilitate the conversation, and following-through on the learning outcomes depend on having an organizational culture that encourages learning, transparency, feedback loops, and continuous improvement.

If this sounds like your company already, then great! This talk is not for you.

For everyone else, join me to explore how effective retrospectives can break a downward cycle of disillusionment and malcontent and transform you and your team into engines of learning and growth.