Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a tool for change that’s aligned with the values, beliefs and challenges we find in business today. It can engage and inspire a work team – even an entire work force. It flips our perspective from looking at problems to be solved and invites us to examine what’s working. A focus on strengths helps us do more than perform – we transform. In this lively session, we’ll head in a new direction – away from the deficit-based approach to change where we identify problems and shortfalls. Instead, we’ll approach things from the other side.

In this session, you will:

• Learn how and why AI works
• Discover the 5D model (definition, discovery, dream, design, and delivery)
• Explore some questions that make positive change possible
• Discuss ways to incorporate AI in our daily work

Appreciative Inquiry isn’t just “happy talk.” it’s grounded in science and proven effective in large organizations and small teams around the world. It’s a way to open communication, unleash potential and create a true learning organization. AI offers a positive, strengths-based approach to organizational development and change management.

Join us and learn about the subtle shift you can choose to make – and to introduce to others – for everyone’s benefit.

After working for 25 years in advertising agencies and major networks - I believe that the software industry and the Agile community ...have something to teach / share with the advertising world.

• Agile marketing promotes experimentation and continuous improvement.
• Its actions are based on trends and in reaction to surrounding changes.
• Agile campaigns allow improved collaboration between clients and agencies.
• Discover why traditional marketing is out-of-date and how Agility will help you rapidly adapt to the market.

“They are resisting the changes I am trying to implement!” It’s a common refrain when people don’t embrace a change with the speed or enthusiasm desired. Do you keep pushing, give up or call in the big guns? How you respond to resistance can doom the change to failure, or boost the chance of success.
As coaches, we introduce new ideas in many different contexts. Relying on positional authority (our role as coach), or calling on outside authority (the managers who hired us) isn't likely to get those ideas a fair hearing.
In this talk, Mike will help you see resistance from a new perspective. By understanding how much influence you have, what forces are interacting around you and seeing different ways to re-frame your issues you can still get your message across without “inflicting help” on others.

How do you effectively do Scrum when you need multiple teams to work on the same product? What kind of patterns and structures should we create to support empiricism and self-organization at scale? And how do you get started? 

This session explores these questions by uncovering the rules, principles and guidelines behind LeSS. Ram Srinivasan also discusses the two LeSS frameworks and provides guidelines on which one may be more appropriate for you.  You will learn how the role of management changes in a LeSS organization.  Ram also will share his success and failure stories and will provide guidances on what will make your LeSS adoption more successful

In many Agile environments testing is either pushed to the end of a Sprint or is handled in a separate Sprint. This “mini-waterfall” approach to testing can be the root cause for a number of problems, including stress for the testers, delays in getting to Potentially Shippable Product Increment, missed testing, and team interruptions.

During this session we will look at 8 practical techniques that teams can try to help them deliver higher quality products. We will be using Jenga blocks as a tool to explore the techniques that can be used to improve quality.

This workshop shows how Test-Driven Development (TDD) is used to enable emergent design. Using a simple but representative example in Java, the presenter will demonstrate how a low-level design naturally emerges when using the TDD cycle of test/code/refactor. The audience will be involved by suggesting the next steps and also by pairing with the presenter.

Note that the goal of the session isn't necessarily to have a complete working example at the end, but to illustrate the process of low-level design through TDD.

As a customer how do you define “value”? What does it take for a business to shift Value from "Meh" and create “Wow” experiences?

Why does the software industry struggle to deliver valuable results? Every team I work with talks about delivering valuable features. When I question how they define value I might get text book answers about ROI, sales, efficiencies or other quantifiable measures. Although they are important measures, I don’t believe “Wow” comes from anything you can quantify. If that’s true then how do we get from Value to Wow without going broke?

We will start by examining two similar customer experiences. Both experiences are valuable, but one is over the top in terms of “Wow!”. Using these as a basis we will examine the system of delivering value at the corporate, team, employee and customer levels. There’s no magic formula to creating “Wow!” moments but if can align your system you might have a chance of creating a few.

Changing an organisation for the better can be really hard!  At times, it may seem impossible!  Why?  What can you do to make it easier?

In this session Steve will share lessons learned from his experience as a change agent attempting to introduce various agile development practices to several organisations.  With outcomes ranging from "failed dismally" to "roaring success", the audience will come away with a few laughs and some practical tips to refer to when setting out on their own journey.

 It is not a question of if a team is going to have a conflict; it is a question of when. Equipping them to deal with conflict is more than creating agreements or having a good facilitator. We look at a conflict model that focuses on dynamics of conflict by understanding- 1. Cognitive skills:self-awareness about triggers, hot spots, emotions,behaviors. 2. Emotional skills:reading emotions, body language, balancing emotions, using curiosity 3. Behavioral skills:understanding others’ perspectives and needs, avoiding 8 destructive behaviors, embracing 8 constructive behavior. In an organizational setting, it is important to understand the source (culture, interdependence, incompatibility, personality, power, etc.) and types of conflict (cognitive vs. affective). Creating awareness about conflict processes, retaliatory cycles and building a conflict profile can empower teams engage in constructive disagreements. 

If we examine traditional goal setting methods, like SMART, we see that we've been encouraged for over 30 years to make sure that our goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time Based.  The theory being that if our goals meet these criteria, we will be more like to actually achieve them.  From there, we take the actions necessary, we measure, and ta-da! we achieve our goals.

Only, in a large number of cases, we don't quite get there. A few things can end up happening:  

1. We get tired of pursuing the goal and give up
2. We pursue the goal, but can't quite seem to achieve it, even though we know what we want and how to get it
3. We achieve the goal, but find that somehow, the results are not what we thought they would be

Examples abound both in our personal lives and in organizations.  We work hard to get a promotion, only to find that we aren't satisfied with the new role.  We commit to a healthy lifestyle, only to give up on it after a couple of weeks.  Organizations set goals for improvement, and don't achieve them, even though everyone did the right thing.

What if we are actually motivated by how we think achieving a goal will make us feel, rather than by the achievement itself?  So really, when we were working for that promotion, what we actually wanted was to feel powerful and capable (even if we weren't conscious of it).  We thought that the promotion would make us feel that way, but it didn't.

Human beings are uniquely motivated by feelings -- we do things that we think will make us feel good, and avoid things that we think will make us feel bad.

What does this have to do with agile development you ask?  Well, in my experience as a coach and a ScrumMaster, I've watched teams struggle to adopt agile practices (even though they seemed to really want to) and I've watched team members resist implementing practices that have obvious, undeniable benefits, and wondered what the barriers were.  The common thread in all of these teams seems to be the lack of understanding of how they want to feel on an agile team -- ultimately the "what's in it for me?" is missing for them.  It's like leaving the "so that" off of the user story.

It's not enough to just want to "be agile".  We have to know why we want to be agile, and specifically, what we as individuals will get out of an agile transition.

In this workshop, we will use user stories as a basis for setting goals, with a particular focus on using the "so that" to identify how we as team members, want to feel when work on an agile team.

To win work, consultants are asked to price their work competitively. To win repeating work, consultants must do a good job. In this session, we'll explore some of the approaches Amanda has taken as a Product Owner to create great, meaningful and lean deliverables.

Together, we'll examine how traditional UX and Change Management artefacts can be tweaked to deliver more value in less time. Some examples of these tweaks include: varying the level of fidelity, varying the direction, substituting appropriate alternatives and identifying and focusing on priorities. By using the basic lean principle of prioritizing the end product, instead of the content that is produced to create and support it, you'll learn how to make the most out of the budgets that surround the activities unrelated to writing or testing code for a product or site.

While this advice may cause your standard process to be sacrificed, the quality of the resulting product and the alignment with its user's needs will not. Resulting in more bang for your (or your client's) buck.

The White Bead Corporation is looking for Above Average Employees for expanded production.  On the job training provided.  Earn bonuses!  The White Bead Corporation is a proud producer of shiny, perfect, white beads. We work hard to meet our customer’s exacting demands and won’t settle for anything less than perfection. We need Willing Workers who are Above Average Employees to handle this rigorous task in an inspiring environment. Apply within.

Come watch, and participate, in the classic experiment made famous by Dr. Deming. Let’s explore the link between typical management techniques, human factors and overall quality.