"Who are you?" "What do you want?" and "What are you going to do about it?" Those are the essential questions reporters use for practically any daily news story.

Do they sound familiar? "As a [Who are you?] I want [What do you want?] so that I can [What are you going to do about it?]."

Building software may seem light years away from journalism, yet there are techniques to be shared. How does a reporter blend natural curiosity, information from multiple sources and some basic writing skills to create a meaningful, well-crafted, unbiased story - and deliver it for daily release?

In this interactive session, Sue and Andrew will examine the parallels between interviewing people for news gathering and interviewing users and customers to discover what they need and want from your products. You'll discover how to:

• Identify the best people to talk with - they may not be the usual suspects
• Explore ways make users and subject matter experts excited about talking with you
• Practise techniques for questioning that build trust and elicit information
• Navigate via curiosity - this is not the time to be an expert
• Create a story in which you make meaning from relevant voices and perspectives

You'll leave with tools reporters use to develop their products and be able to apply them to create and use effective user stories that lead to useful and usable products. 

Whether a team is brand-new or seasoned veterans at working together, explicitly defining and/or refining a team working agreement will help the team to align on how they will work together effectively to meet their common goal. In this fast-paced hands-on session, participants will go through the process of building a team working agreement using LEGO Serious Play (LSP).

Creating a team working agreement helps team members set the stage for effective communication and high performance by making assumptions about ‘what really matters to us’ and ‘how we will work together?’ explicit and negotiable.  Great working agreements address some difficult topics - what values do we share? how do we want to deal with conflict when it comes up? how will we handle problems within the team? - which are often challenging to discuss openly and honestly, especially when a team is first assembled.  This session will show you how to use LEGO Serious Play to encourage a frank and fearless discussion in order to kickstart these discussions so that a team can quickly create a powerful set of simple guiding principles for working together.  Participants will learn about the importance of team working agreements in creating team cohesion and common understanding of shared values and operational guidelines, and experience hands-on how to use the LEGO Serious Play cycle of build-share-reflect to have a participatory discussion to identify shared values and build a set of simple guiding principles.

We swim in a sea of language but seem to be drowning in misunderstanding. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the efforts we make to change ways of organizing work in organizations.

Making common meaning of the language we use when working together takes conscious effort but we typically go about it unconsciously. In this session we'll examine common patterns of unintended consequences that stem simply from the language we use to describe changes to the way we work.

You'll leave with a new model for thinking about language and using it to better effect. We'll discuss and practice the use of metaphor, mindset and specific practices to create shared understand in and between teams. 

Ever find yourself coaching a team to be more agile and catch yourself ignoring the testers? Why do you do that? Because you don't know the lingo? Unsure of what advice to offer? Don't know any good Testing or QA models or approaches that specifically speak to that development role?

You're in luck! Paul is here to give you a crash course in models, methods, jargon and techniques specific to Software Testing and QA to help you enrich your Agile Coaching practice. Come prepared to interact and learn as you build a cheat sheet that will help guide you when working with Testers who don't know where to start with the transition to Agile.

As a Coach and a Team Member, I sometimes come across teams that don't seem to be able to achieve high performance, and the reasons why aren't apparent. This can be frustrating for everyone when this happens, so I wanted to explore this deeper and understand the science of what happens inside Agile/Scrum Teams.

Some of the leading research[1] suggests that a key requirement for high performance teams is Cohesion. Cohesion is a measure of the strengths of the relationships between individual team members.

In this session we will use this research to discover:

• Simple communication patterns we can monitor to spot the health of the team.
• Simple tools we can use to measure and track those patterns.
• What effect the location of the Watercooler has? What effect Lunch Tables play?
• Can Cohesive Teams get you into trouble? .....
• The importance of Dissent and Diversity within teams.
• Bonuses - The negative effects of individual bonuses are well understood by the Agile Community. However we’re left with the question - are there good bonuses?

[1] Sandy Pentland - The New Science of Building Great Teams - http://hbr.org/2012/04/the-new-science-of-building-great-teams Ben Waber - People Analytics: http://www.amazon.ca/People-Analytics-Technology-Transform-Business/dp/0133158314

The core of the session will a be a game that we play successive round of. After each round I will reveal the factors that affected play in that round. Perhaps making easier to decide what to do in the next round.

In addition to the game the details of the research will be part of the session handout so attendees can focus on the play and not the details.

At the end of 2012 engineering at Wind River began its agile journey. We started with a consultant and 2 pilot projects. By March 2013, we began to move all of our projects to Agile. That's 100s of people and many sites around the world all trying to implement agile and scrum simultaneously! Mayhem ensued. This is a story of how engineering at Wind River survived the chaos and where we are today. Drawing from this experience, there are lessons learned and learning to share.

The first value of the Agile Manifesto addresses "Individuals and interactions." Unfortunately, the fact that we're individuals can, sometimes, make our interactions unpredictable. This lively and practical session offers insights on the different ways people process information and communicate and introduces techniques to overcome misunderstanding and get our work done well.

Everyone is different, yet we’re different in some predictable ways. This session shines a spotlight on our patterns and habits of communication and encourages a conscious and strategic approach to conversations. You'll explore the diverse ways people you interact with process and share information. You'll discover techniques to overcome those differences so you can connect and be understood.

With its foundation in sound psychological principles, it’s a light-hearted - yet useful - look at human conversation and a powerful communication tool that can improve relationships at work and in life.

In this interactive session, you'll learn to:
- Recognize individual differences in communication style
- Discover the characteristics of each of four styles, to identify the folks you interact with
- Identify your own communication style, its strengths, patterns and quirks
- Develop strategies to interact productively with people whose styles differ from your own

Let's face it, when organizations want to "go Agile", they really want help solving a problem they can't quite put their finger on. Some of the time they may buy a tool and call themselves Agile. Other times, they'll implement a few practices but not much more. There are no shortage of tools, methods and techniques for installing Agile and there are an equal number of failure stories. At the end of day, Agile is simply a trigger for an organizational change.

In this session you'll learn 3 techniques that will help you navigate through complex change by working on a real problem with your peers. After all, a consultant or coach is only going to take you so far!

How do you define “value”? What does it take for a business to shift “Value” into high gear and create experiences leaving your customer saying "Wow"? Why does the software industry struggle to even meet expectations?  If you’re struggling to create valuable experiences for your customer then this session is for you.

Every team I work with talks about delivering valuable features, and yet many of their customers are dissatisfied. When I question how they define value I might get text book answers about ROI, sales, efficiencies or other quantifiable measures. Although these are important measures, I don’t believe “value” can be defined by anything you can quantify. If that’s true then how do we get from "Valuable" to "Wow" without going broke?

We will start by examining two similar customer experiences. Both experiences are valuable, one met expectations but the other left the customer going “Wow!”. Regardless of what business your in, with some awareness it’s possible to start creating more “Wow!” moments for your customers. 

Whether it's a minor typo on a page, a major failure causing a severe outage of a system or anything in between, the software industry is fertile ground for examining problems and their causes. From the problems that plagued HealthCare.gov to defects that allowed some lucky people to purchase airline tickets for almost nothing from United airlines, we hear a constant stream of issues with software systems.

With our society becoming increasingly dependent on software, we need to "up our game" with respect to tracking down problems with they happen, ensuring that defects are caught before entering the wild, and are prevented from occurring in the first place.

Root Cause Analysis is a process that enables this form of continuous improvement and uses techniques borrowed from other engineering disciplines. The aviation industry, for example, constantly seeks to improve due to the dire consequences of any failures in that domain.

This interactive workshop will explain when and how to use Root Cause Analysis (RCA) to investigate problems and determine actions that will ensure that those problems can never happen again. Using real world examples the attendees will explore simple, lightweight RCA practices as well as a more involved example using fault tree analysis.