Do your developers pair? If you can answer yes, then you are among the fortunate ones who have a trusting environment where people feel confident in their work.

Unfortunately there are a large number of development shops that don’t practice pairing in any form.

Pair programming was documented in Kent Beck’s book eXtreme Programming Explained and published in 1999.

So why is it that 17 years later many developers do not practice this simple yet effective programming technique?

This session will address many of the reasons that developers don’t pair. Drawing on experiences in over a handful of organizations and hundreds of teams, an examination of the factors contributing to a general lack of pairing.

Considerations include: environmental concerns, organizational barriers, personal style and experiences all contribute to whether or not people practice pair programming. You will get an opportunity to examine the many benefits of pairing and the variety of methods for pairing.

This session will include a short activity where everyone will get an opportunity to pair using Lego’s.

You would most likely agree that communication is one of the key success factors in any project, regardless of their size and complexity. This highly-interactive talk shows typical communication patterns, stress the behaviors we keep repeating without even noticing and provides eye-opening insights into the ways communication can be improved. At the end of the session you will understand the most common communication issues and will be able to break those patterns and effective communication will not be just a buzzword without real meaning to you.

Traditional Performance Management systems are antiquated and in deep crises. It is time to move to a successful iterative performance flow.

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Traditional Performance Management systems are in deep crises. Their industrial era approach is unable to meet the demands and thinking of 21st century people and organizations.

Join this interactive workshop to discuss how Lean | Agile enterprises can push the reset button and move from an administrative Performance Management process to a successful iterative performance flow.

This is a highly participative open space session and we will cover questions like:

– Why is there a need to push the reset button on Performance Management?

– How do we approach goal settings in an agile environment? What is the best balance between collective vs. individual goals? Can you align individual    goals with agile thinking?

– Why is there a trend to eliminate employee appraisals? Are 360-feedbacks the new employee appraisals? Can we still promote people without appraisals and less/no hierarchical structure?

– How valid are traditional bonus models or are there better ways for remuneration and acknowledgement?

There’s quite a bit of guidance and literature for Teams to know what to do in order to adopt and execute Scrum. Nowadays, it’s even more commonplace for Executives to be offered similar workshops, so they have an idea how to support the Teams. But what about the Managers?

From experiences in the field, Managers are often forgotten, or just lumped in with the teams. With confusing phrases such as self-organization and Servant Leadership bumping up against traditional management beliefs and demands from non-trained Executives in Scrum, it’s no wonder Managers can feel a bit like they’ve entered into the Land of the Lost.

In this interactive session, come learn an exercise you can perform back at your organization to help clarify roles and responsibilities of the management layer. Your managers will gain clarity on what they should be doing and what they should be passing on to help not only their teams perform better, but the organization as well. Equip your managers with the knowledge to help them no longer be lost.

As a bonus, the great thing about this Roles exercise, is that it can be used beyond the Managers as well. It’s been applied at both the Team and Executive layers. But, seems to resonate best with Management.

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

Leo Tolstoy’s book Anna Karenina begins: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” We can refer to it as “Anna Karenina principle” which is fully applicable to implementing Agile at scale. Imagine, you rolled out Agile in your organization successfully and your energized teams are delivering software on cadence and with high quality. What do you hear next from the management? Let’s scale. Let’s have more of those. So you coach more, establish repeatable practices, coach the teams, and all of a sudden, it all falls apart. Unmanaged dependencies, overlapping product backlogs, conflicting roadmaps bring quality issues, delays in delivery, frustrated teams, and unhappy stakeholders.

In this attempt to apply the "Anna Karenina Principle" to Agile, we will explore relationship between Scrum and DevOps, ATDD and Waterfall, value and cost, "happy" Scrum and Scrumfall. This conversation will make you think and laugh, agree and disagree, talk and listen, but most importantly, it will introduce some patterns in Agile and Scrum that will help you assess what all "happy" Agile implementations have in common from technical and non-technical perspective.

The presentation includes a group exercise to validate the principle.

Although it's not easy, as an agile community we "know" how to do agile in teams.
One of the next challenges is scaling agile to the programm- or portfolio level.
In this game you will experience all kinds of manmade scaling issues.
Do you have an idea that will make scaling easier? Try your idea in the simulation and get instant feedback.

The scaling game is based on a very popular agile game, that has been around for almost 10 years. 
This version has been presented at Agile Lille, XP-Days, and the Agile Games Lab Belgium.

During the game you will experience scaling issues that occur when multiple teams work on the same product. Multiple Teams will look for solutions to scaling issues and experiment in an iterative way with their ideas on solving them..

It was co-created by Markus Wissekal & Yves Hanoulle.

Let's put aside the "bubblegum and unicorns" of the Spotify Engineering Culture videos and talk about what doesn't quite work at Spotify and how we're trying to solve it.

This is a failure / learning report intended for change agents who need encouragement that it's always hard AND it's always possible to improve.

A hands on workshop facilitating a hands on retrospective team game that aims to help you achieve that feeling of Smooth Sailing.

Attendees will be introduced to this game, play the game, and feedback to the room, with case examples and tips for facilitating the game themselves.

Smooth Sailing is a game you can play as a development team, or, with clients and customers to help understand the product you are building better and, how the journey to its creation is fairing.

This game will give you a new and fun way to run a retrospective to help to gain your barrings, identify what's putting the wind in your sails, the anchors holding you back, and discover your buried treasure. Then you'll plot your course and map a way forward that raises those anchors and catches the tide and a fair wind.

Merchants, Pirates and Cruisers welcome, bring your captain, crew and guests! Join us for some constructive fun, and feel free to bring an idea for a topic you'd like to reflect on.

Teams attending the workshop as a group can work on their own current journeys. Individuals can join groups reflecting on a common shared topic. All puns intended, see you onboard!

People are the heart & soul of Agile. Let’s turn your Human Resources into Agile People Operations to boost your enterprise agility.

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Inspired, empowered, and engaged people are the heart and soul of Agile – and HR.

Transforming your organization into an agile enterprise is no small deed. And it does not matter where you are on your way towards embracing agility on all levels. There will be a time when you need to align your people solutions with the mindset and demands of agile people and organizations.

We will talk about how to turn your Human Resources into Agile People Operations and boost your agility.

You will be surprised to learn that Improv Teams and Software Teams have many similarities; The same techniques Improv Teams use to turn a group of random individuals into Great Team Players can be used by Software Teams to improve Collaboration, Creativity, Communication & Trust.

This unique workshop will have attendees out of their seats and on their feet actively practicing the concepts Improv Teams use to develop Great Team Players. Practicing the four essential qualities of a Great Team Player: Collaboration, Creativity, Communication and Trust, not only shows attendees how they can become a Great Team Player, but also how to train others within their organization. This hands on workshop provides actionable material for participants to use immediately upon returning to work.  A flier with the top 20 games is included for every participant.

In Hugo’s workshop, participants will create a best practice board in teams of 5-6 people. The teams go through each block of ‘The Bridge Canvas’. The goal is to share best practices, ideas and experiences. Per block, each team selects the ‘best best practice’. At the end of the workshop, each team will present the best best practices for each block.

At the start of the workshop, Hugo shares a few best practices (personal ones + from other distributed agile experts). Each person gets a handout with clear instructions. This includes some questions to stimulate thinking within the team + some best practice examples per block.

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?

Giving and receiving feedback are tough for everyone. Who wants to criticize others or be criticized? Although managers have a duty to give honest feedback to staff and peers, many people resist change or differ on how to change—leading to interpersonal conflicts and impacting deliverables. Omar Bermudez explains several techniques—Giving Positive Feedback, Acid Reflux (when you get that sick feeling), and SARA (Surprise, Anger, Rationalization, Acceptance)—that allow people to give and receive honest feedback to promote incremental improvements. Omar explains how to give accurate feedback to and receive the same from senior team members or direct superiors, a skill critical to career advancement. To increase self-esteem, happiness index, and your power to influence, Omar teaches you how to present feedback to your peers, your boss, or other colleagues in a diplomatic and efficient way. Take away key insights into how to create a healthy organizational culture with clear and constructive feedback.

Performance appraisals are one of the most frequently criticized talent management practices in agile organizations. The criticisms range from their conflict with the agile values to their having a destructive impact on the relationship between managers and their subordinates. Let's talk about how we can transform this huge "individual" process in a "ecosystem" process that respects the agile values, gets people happy & engaged, and last, but not less important, allows to improve the organization ecosystem.
I will share my experience and observations from the latest 4 years working on this matter, what went well and how I solved the major hurdles along the way.
By attending this session you will learn major resistance point in HHRR department (and why), how to help HHRR department in this journey, how management level could help HHRR department, games dynamics to get teams involved and engaged, and avoid a boring process.