The CIO invited me into his office and closed the door. Before he took me for a tour of his operation, he had a few stories to share. Important stories. Last year’s project was a disaster. Late, lots of quality issues, in short, a failure in every dimension. His boss, the CEO, had just presented him with a very personal ultimatum: deliver the next project by April 4th, "or else". 

"Or else what," I asked?

His team was burned out and scared. They were a hard-working and dedicated group, but fear and demoralization had set in and he didn't know what to do next. That’s why he wanted to talk to me, he had heard things about my company, things that seemed too good to be true, but he had to hear them firsthand. He wanted hope, inspiration, and a practical way to get there.

I told him about my own journey from joy to fear to disillusionment back to joy. It was simple, but, of course, simple isn’t easy. I wasn’t sure he and his organization were ready; "manufactured fear" is a powerful drug.

In this talk, I will share with you what I shared with him. I will explore what an intentionally joyful culture must choose as its focus. I will discuss what joy looks like, feels like, how it is organized. Along the way, you will be confronted by paradoxical approaches of how workplace noise increases productivity, how two people at one computer outperforms hero-based organizations 10-to-1, how rigor and discipline emanate from a shared-belief system, how transparency conquers fear, how all of the disciplines you study including agile, lean, and six sigma when done well are really about building human relationships at the intersections of business and technology, between project management and software development, between development and design and how quality can be a natural result of a team built on trust. This is not a theoretical talk, but rather a talk built from well over a decade of experience of leading a team focused on “the business value of joy”. There will be lots of room for discussion with the audience. The audience will begin to understand why thousands of people make the journey to Ann Arbor, Michigan every year to see The Menlo Software Factory firsthand, and why so many more are reading about it in Joy, Inc. – How We Built A Workplace People Love.

For decades, most technology businesses have considered standardized processes to be a key ingredient to their success. Other enterprises made a different assumption: that cultivating their staff and growing teams, who would own their processes, was a better enabler of success. Agile, which has been in substantial use for the last 15 years, is an example of such a mind-set. Truly valuing individuals and interactions over processes and tools is challenging, yet many organizations have made it work. Along the way, they’ve discovered necessary conditions for sustaining people-first environments, as well as a host of surprising benefits that carry over to all forms of knowledge work. In this talk, author and veteran coach Gil Broza will share the top 10 lessons of putting people before process, learned from real-world Agile implementations.

Take a recently acquired high-profile client with global stakeholders, insert a very aggressive timeline for a complex problem, throw a global team of researchers, designers and developers at it, and see what happens!

Wonderful things can happen when multi-disciplinary teams are engaged on intense, complex projects using Agile methods. But, tight timeframes magnify problems that otherwise would have been easily worked through, including: internal and external team dynamics; communication challenges; and time zone differences. We will share with you the good, the bad and the ugly of what happened, and what we learned from our experience.

Organizational and team culture is rooted in implicit assumptions about how individuals relate to one another in getting work done.  To foster alignment or change, it’s critical to have open and frank discussions about what we assume and what we value: this workshop will demonstrate how to have that conversation using LEGO Serious Play

“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.

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.

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.

In this workshop, Steve will introduce Kanban and explain its place in the Agile toolbox.  To do so, he'll guide participants through a hands-on session using Kanban to visualise & improve life in the kitchen!

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.

Continuous delivery is the capability to release new features or changes at any time, dictated only by the needs of the business and not restricted by technical limitations. Some companies use this to deploy dozens of times a day, others release less often.

The benefits of continuous delivery are fairly obvious today. Companies that have the ability to release on demand have a distinct advantage over their competitors who can’t.

The challenge is planning the journey. Given where we are today, what steps should we be taking? What measurements should we be tracking now to know if we’re moving in the right direction? What do we need to change in our process to make this happen?

In this workshop, we will explore several milestones and measurements for continuous delivery to allow participants to create a roadmap for their specific environments.

Mike has been helping a variety of companies move towards continuous delivery, from startups to the Fortune 500 and brings that experience to the discussion.

As a leader are you struggling to find a way for your team to improve and have that change stick? Here’s a thought: What if the point isn’t to have change stick?

Successful organizations look at change as the way we work. This is where Leading for Change comes in. Leading for Change requires all of us, regardless of our title, to take a different approach in leading ourself, the people around us and the system.

Drawing from my upcoming book of the same title, I will help you start thinking of leadership in a different light. We will start by looking at how you lead yourself, then expand into leading those around you. Finally we will examine what it means to lead a system so you, the people and the system will never stop improving.

Leading for Change is about providing the leadership in support

In this experience report, Jesus Mendez and Robert Pragai will navigate the audience through some of their inspiring experiences with teams that have had those moments that have marked their evolution towards the high-performance sustainability nirvana. By sharing their reflections about what the've called "Pivotal team "break/make" moments", Jesus and Robert will show you how to spot and process those special moments to empower and influence the team's journey to thrive.

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

Working in a Company that struggles with Agility processes and mindset for more than two years, he also manages many development teams trying to adopt the agile mindset.  Scrum Masters are key players in the adoption and evolution of Agility in an organization.  But it can also contribute the its lost.  This presentation will try to identify the pitfall and the way to try to mitigate them.

Congratulations. Last year you played the High-Performance Team Game and helped create a high-performing Team in your Organization. You were so successful that the Organization has grown around you and your peers. Unfortunately, while growing, some of the magic that you had created before as a single Team has gotten lost.

Last year’s game focused on building high-performance Teams and the tradeoffs between delivering value and improving productivity. This year’s game will focus on building high-performance Organizations. Experience and knowledge of last year’s game is not necessary. 

The game will explore options for an Organization to understand itself and the current state of the work, and then bring about real, ongoing change.

 Style: Board Game with a simple Portfolio Kanban board as our playing surface. The playing cards will be Kanban cards that represent our Product Backlog.

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.

Metrics are a difficult topic, and the topics gets more complex when coupled with practices of Agile and Scrum. In this session, I'll review how we at Wind River struggled with metrics. A look at scrum team metrics like sprint burndown and burnup charts, cumulative flow diagrams and scrum hygiene (e.g. US without estimates in a current sprint). Also a look at other metrics that may be useful at a program level like Release Burnups. A discussion of some of the bad metrics like number of User Stories or comparing velocity across teams.

In the fall of 2014, the OSS group in Bell Mobility began a transformation towards using more Agile and Lean software development practices in order to optimize the delivery of value to their business partners and better serve Bell clients.

In this presentation, Alain Fortier, the General Manager of the OSS group and Steffan Surdek, agile coach at Pyxis Technologies will talk about the first year of this journey. They will explore how putting the focus on learning by doing helped the management team as well as the development find better ways of working together.

Participants will hear many stories about the lessons we learned on this journey and how the pieces are starting to come together after a year. We will share stories around various experiments we tried and how we were able to build on these experiments to foster and enable a culture of learning by doing. 

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.