All too often, companies set out with the mission to “go agile” before truly understanding what that means. Business managers are quick to jump on the agile bandwagon, believing that “going agile” will magically make projects happen faster. Teams are getting certified in Scrum as if it’s a silver bullet that will suddenly make everyone more productive. Inevitably, cracks begin to show, and expectations are missed--leaving everyone involved questioning the value of “going agile” altogether.

There is a better way! The truth is that going agile will result in more productive teams and faster delivery of projects--but only if everyone can agree on the rules of the game.

Come hear Heather Fleming and Justin Riservato from Gilt discuss why gaining consensus on the principles of Agile is more important than implementing a process, and learn how having these three conversations can save you from an agile disaster:

• “But when will you be done?”  Why getting rid of the concept of deadlines is the most important (and most difficult) conversation when going agile.
• “This is my top priority, but I can’t meet with you until next week.”  What to do when your business partner can’t (or won’t) be a full member of the team.
• “I just want to code. Why do I have to be in all these meetings?”  Why implementing Scrum is not the first step to going agile.

"As a user of your system, I want functionality so that I can achieve my goals. Unfortunately, your team's users stories are getting in the way."

Users Stories, the tool teams use to break ideas into small chunks of deliverable work, are easy to describe and challenging to write. This session is about writing great user stories and acceptance criteria by ensuring everyone on the team knows what needs to be done. We will discuss what elements should be included and which ones are optional; why the size of your user story is important and how to make them smaller; and the structure for better acceptance criteria.

Executives believe starting their project NOW means it will end sooner. Unfortunately, starting one more project costs dramatically more than waiting. Sharing limited resources causes all the projects to sub-optimize. Multitasking is costing your organization a fortune!

Are you tired of being time-sliced across too many projects? Learn how value decreases when you work on many projects at the same time and increases (!) when you focus and deliver on a single project.

Come, play a game based upon ideas from Critical Chain Project Management, Lean, and Agile. Take part and help us illustrate the power of focus on your project portfolio management.

Parlez-vous Agile?

Sprechen sie Scrum?

Agile methods originated in technical practice, and its roots are solidly planted in the fertile ground of software engineering. Certifications in Scrum all require understanding of engineering practices, and the more senior level certifications require both in-depth understanding and practical application.  The message would seem to be that Agile practitioners must be Software Engineering practitioners. However, non-technical teams are adopting agile methods as ways to better organize – or, more accurately, self-organize – in increasing numbers.

As the language and history of agile is so strongly steeped in software engineering, applying agile methods in a non-technical setting requires some translation to be applied in a non-technical team.  I'm not just talking about jargon translation here; the methods and practices themselves sometimes need a tweak to work outside software engineering. The use of agile and scrum is not a slam-dunk success in every setting - be it technical or non-technical - but in this talk, I will separate myth from reality and give some practical examples from my own experience.  I invite you to join to learn, to contribute, and to discuss the opportunities as well as the effort required to leverage Agile/Scrum for a non-technical team.  

For years, Scrum/Agile coaching has been an attractive career for many. It is frequently viewed as a continuation of a career for an experienced Scrum Master who understands the intricacies of the cultural change that makes Scrum teams successful, knows nuts and bolts of a Scrum engine, and has natural aptitude for knowledge sharing and growing others. A leader who is unselfish and acutely self-aware, who has experience, and ability to influence others.  Many Scrum practitioners saw this role as their next step in professional development. The 2010 book, Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins’ and her Agile Coaching Institute made Agile Coaching a discipline rather than a buzzword. Now, five years later, Agile Coaching is rapidly losing its attractiveness as a professional career. In her open-space style talk based on a retrospective with the session participants, Mariya Breyter will explore why this is happening and what a natural career progression for an Agile coach is. Agile Coaches and Scrum practitioners will exchange their experience and discuss their paths for professional development.

Scrum is by far the dominant Agile methodology and has been put to good use to positively change many software development groups. Some have found that even when they follow all the Scrum practices, they are still having some challenges, and they have turned to Kanban for help. Kanban is often framed as an alternative to Scrum, but it need not be so. Organizations using Scrum can augment their process with the Kanban Method to become more agile and delivery-oriented.

Jonathan Hansen will use real-world examples, both from product and consulting companies, to show you some of the ways Kanban can work together with Scrum to help you manage the work inside Sprints, manage work that doesn’t fit in Sprints well, and provide a means to continuously improve your work.

If you’re practicing scrum, you’re probably well versed in velocity, escaped defects and other common scrum metrics.  This presentation starts with a review of essential scrum metrics, how to properly use them, and how to interpret their trends.  We’ll then quickly pivot into advanced and emerging metrics that many scrum teams (and programs) have found beneficial - examples include: how to measure and quantify the cost of delay when your team is blocked, how to ensure your team is investing the right amount of time to maintain clean code and create automated test scripts, and how to assess that your team is sharing work to support the whole-team approach.  We’ll review a comprehensive taxonomy of scrum metrics and show examples of presented metrics in use.  We’ll conclude talking about opportunities to better empower scrum teams to self manage by integrating economic and budgetary data with scrum metrics - consider this example: rather than reviewing estimates & actuals for all the stories completed in a sprint, determine your team run rate and track the cycle time for each story completed, then use these two data points to compute the cost for each story completed during a sprint, finally ask yourself if your customer or sponsor would be happy with the amount they invested to complete each story - if you’ve never tried this type of economic analysis with your team, trust me, you’ll have a much different (and probably more effective) discussion.  By attending this session, participants will learn a comprehensive list of metrics and practices to gain greater insights to team / project health and reduce delivery risk - participants attending will receive a metrics worksheet that will list all metrics presented and include why and how to track each of them.

Everyone knows that scrum works best when the entire team is sitting together in the same office. But the reality of today's working world is that more and more teams are geographically distributed. In many cases, this is the result of "strategic priorities" from senior management and is entirely inflexible. As scrum practioners, we must come up with strategies for adapting scrum to a distributed world. This talk will take a hypothetical distributed scrum team from release planning all the way through to launch day. What are some of the problems that will come up? What are the best ways of overcoming these issues? How should Scrum Masters facilitate sprint planning, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospectives? 

You’ve read all the industry books, you’ve gotten your certifications and now you have a team staring at you waiting for you to take the lead. There is no hesitation about how to perform the basics -- determining roles and scheduling meetings -- but how do you take an ordinary team and kick start an effective, high performing team?

Whether you have a brand new team or you’re the new guy on an existing team, the tools and techniques you will learn in this session have proven to be effective from not-for-profits and state government to private sector insurance.

As an accredited Leadership Gift Coach Jessica focuses on vocabulary, shared responsibility, team agreements, and utilizing gamification to set the stage for a powerful and effective team no matter what methodology they use. 

As the world continues to become increasingly interconnected and interdependent, Black Swans --- large-scale unpredictable and irregular events of massive consequence --- are necessarily becoming more prominent!

While agility involves responding to change, antifragility involves gaining from disorder; and while agility emphasizes embracing change through inspecting and adapting, antifragility emphasizes embracing chaos or randomness through adapting and evolving!

While management focuses on complexity, leadership focuses on change! And while change management focuses on techniques for managing change, change leadership focuses on the capacity to lead change! With the proliferation of various models for “general leadership,” “change management,” and “change leadership” that focus on language or communication, relationships, and behaviors, no particular model has emerged as the preeminent “leadership model”!

As a result of the proliferation of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, non-predictive decision making and change leadership are quintessential --- and individuals, teams & groups, and organizations & enterprises are embracing the quest for greater antifragility and require “antifragile change leadership” to realize greater employee engagement and market innovation & disruption!

We’ll explore Antifragility and Agility, Leadership and Management, and Change while sharing an empirically-derived agility and antifragility change leadership model that you can immediately put into practice with Scrum.