The ongoing challenges of creating the magical bond between team members in small and big endeavors can be elusive. What’s more, in the last few decades, this has become increasingly challenging. This presentation provides you with the much needed practical advice on how to create an effective collaborative team environment.
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The presentation follows the Nine must haves of team of leaders as appear in Michael’s book.
The Must-Haves of a High Performance Team
Must-have #1: Develop clear goals and plans
Must-have #2: Effective communication

Must-have #3: Improve and maintain positive relationships among member
Must-have #4: Clarify roles and responsibilities
Must-have #5: Enhance mutual trust
Must-have #6: Solve problems and make effective decisions
Must-have #7: Value and promote diversity
Must-have #8: Successfully manage conflict
Must-have #9: Provide development opportunities and recognition

DevOps is certainly a very popular buzzword of recent, everyone is talking about DevOps, everyone is selling DevOps packages with promises of having your organization be ‘DevOps’ enabled. However - DevOps isn’t something you can purchase, it isn’t a specific tool that you can grab off the shelf and say that your organization now has DevOps. DevOps describes a foundational series of actions and behaviors that allow for the organization to move bigger, better, faster when delivering products, software and hardware into customer facing production environments. DevOps describes the Standard Work required in order for delivery of finished product to be packaged and delivered. Builds, Deploys, Configuration management are all items that with some minor variation can b automated away - allowing the humans to start to focus on deeper and one of problems in the environment. Performance issues, certain one time failures and other forms of variance can be dealt with when the delivery pipeline defined by DevOps is working.

DevOps aims to provide enablers for delivery of finished product to teams in your organization allowing them to self service, and deliver SAFELY!

So, lets take a look at the basics of what DevOps Foundations and Standard Work are and how they enable DevOps to become a reality for your organization. Lets get things repeatable and automated, so that humans can move on to solving hard problems - and fun stuff.

"There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else." – Sam Walton.

Empiricism is the theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience. The modern era of technology innovations have consciously embraced empirical approaches to model cutting edge products for customers across the globe. An organization’s ability to balance focus between ‘Building the product right’ and ‘Building the right product’ is often the difference between its creativity and failure. So, in today’s fiercely competitive landscape of product design, how would one choose a toolset to develop innovative products in a cost-effective manner?

Behold the ‘Zorro Circles’ of Product Prototyping as a comprehensive framework to blueprint a plan that affords you an opportunity to choose from a gamut of techniques with origins from Lean Startup and Rapid Prototyping. This approach shall showcase a holistic path to model complex products by unraveling the multi-layered circles of customer identification. Attend this session to discover several strategies and tactics to identify your customers, empathize with their pain and bridge their perception with reality in order to create products that market themselves.

After hiking towards a glacier in Denali National Park Alaska, we were making camp near a small lake. Suddenly I heard my friend saying “Michael there’s a bear here, it is on this side of the lake”. And there he was, a ‘young’ 200 Pound Grizzly no more than 10 feet away… Influencing a bear in the Alaskan outback is quite similar to handling the bears or rather stakeholders of the modern organization – both have their own agenda, and will have you for lunch if they think it serves their interests and appetites.

In this presentation we learn best practices for leading and influencing without authority, including the three essentials model: stakeholder leadership, team orientation and individual adjustment. Do you have the proper toolset to influence the bears when you lack the authority?

How many hours does your team (Scrum Master included) spends trying to keep all the data up to date? Burndown and Burnup charts, backlogs, task boards, etc. How easy is for a team member, the product owner or your IT Director to get a glimpse of how's your project going in this precise moment? How many times did the cleaning lady messed up with you stories while cleaning the board?

Enough of excel files, flip charts and post-its to describe and present your work. It's time to move forward and start using software to help you manage your project. 

In this session, I'll demonstrate how the effective use of an integrated software tool to support the SCRUM framework, can significantly improve the productivity of everyone involved in the software development effort.