Why do so many organizations struggle to put in place mature Agile teams that can apply proper Agile principles and deliver awesome products? Some people will say, “Agile is hard” as an excuse to not do Agile or to become frAgile. Well we think we have developed the “Secret Sauce” to rebooting any Agile team that just doesn’t seem to be maturing and we want to share it with you!

If you are thinking of scaling Agile across a large organization, then this talk is a must to attend to help ensure your teams have the right foundation. Organizations wanting to scale Agile must have a solid foundation of mature Agile teams who embrace the Agile values and have the right Agile mindset.

Over the years, as we have done Agile transformations in different organizations, we have seen common patterns that keep repeating. The most common pattern we found in our experience is that teams are frAgile. Too many either pretend to be Agile or don’t even know Agile is not a methodology, so organizations question the value of using Agile. Very often the confusion and frustration that comes with thinking that a team is Agile when they are not Agile, brings people right back to their old habits of command and control. Creating successful mature Agile teams is not sorcery, you need to discover the secret sauce!

In this talk, we will reveal our secrets on how to create a successful Agile-Scrum team in 5 sprints. Attendees will learn how we applied our secret sauce as we experimented with more than 30 teams and we refined the know-how. This recipe has proven to be successful in different organizations and teams delivering different types of products. Our Creative-Destruction approach goes through a human change process we labeled The Intervention Plan. The 5 steps are:

• Step 1: Run in the rain
• Step 2: Thunderstruck
• Step 3: Cry over the M&M’s machine
• Step 4: Open-up and look at the sun
• Step 5: Removing the training wheels

And by using these 5 steps, attendees will discover the 5th Agile value!

The stereotype of technical professionals as inarticulate, socially inept geniuses inventing problems to solve is unkind and inaccurate. Yet the Dilbert image persists. So do jokes like the one about the engineer sentenced to death on the guillotine, who watches the instrument of death malfunction, then tells the operators how to fix it.

Why do people make fun of engineers and those with their mindset? Do people wired and trained to analyze and solve problems and focus on the mechanics of a situation frustrate those whose brains are wired differently? And how does the engineer’s way of dealing with individuals and interactions - that first value of the Agile Manifesto - sometimes get in the way of team collaboration and productivity?

In this interactive session, we'll show a little empathy for engineers and other analytical folk whose neurological wiring makes them seem different from the rest of humanity. We'll also explore how those with the engineering mindset can develop their own empathy and consciously adopt behaviours that amplify their value to their teams and organizations, make them more effective leaders - and make their own lives easier by positioning themselves for understanding.

Join Sue in a lively exploration of what can happen when engineers and technical professionals shift their mindset from solving problems to creating impact.
You will leave this session with an appreciation of:

• How to make your ideas meaningful to others by taking their perspective
• How shifting your language from "What?" to "So What?" helps people connect the dots
• Why giving up the need to be smart may be the smartest thing you ever do
• Techniques you can use to take someone else's perspective.

Many agile methods and strategies are geared towards small teams working in reasonably straightforward situations. That’s great work if you can get it. Most organizations that are adopting agile today have been in operations for decades and sometimes centuries. They are typically dealing with significant investments in legacy systems and processes that won’t go away any time soon. They have an existing culture that is usually not-as-agile as it could be and an organization structure that puts up many roadblocks to collaboration. Their staff members are often overly specialized and many people do not have skills in agile software development techniques, and there are many thoughts as to what needs to be done to improve things, the adoption of agile being one of many. This is certainly not the startup company environment that we keep hearing about.

In this presentation Scott Ambler reviews the challenges faced by established enterprises when transforming to agile and what enterprise agile means in practice. He then overviews the Disciplined Agile (DA) framework, a pragmatic and context-sensitive approach to enterprise agile, working through how it addresses the realities faced by modern organizations. Scott then works through advice for transforming your enterprise to become more agile, including the people-process-tools triad and the skills and experience required of enterprise agile team coaches and executive agile coaches. He ends with an overview of proven strategies for adopting agile in less-than-ideal environments

Ben Linders said: "if you want to solve the problems that you are having, and deliver more value to your customers, you have to change the way you do your work. That is why agile promotes the usage of retrospectives: To help teams to solve problems and improve themselves!" 

In this workshop I will walk you through the reasons, concepts, phases, tips and tricks of agile retrospectives and everything that happen behind the scenes. We'll share the space and learn together how to make this event a great one in a practical, engaging, fun and interactive manner.

Are you ready for the challenge?  

You can earn CDUs...

"We have reached an impasse because of our regulations and current governance and cannot accelerate our agile adoption” " Does this sound like a common issue? Government, large and product-centric enterprises in aerospace, and automotive, are striving for more agility in their solution delivery. However, those organizations are bound with heavy governance, are stuck on how to comply with their regulations and at the same time being agile. Compliance is generally perceived in the software community as a way to evaluate solution delivery process from a formal and document-based perspective and many argue that Compliance/Governance and AGILE are just not compatible. The motivation of this presentation is to dispel this myth.

Compliance is one of the scaling factor that makes agile practices more complex to adopt. However it is possible to find a balance. What is needed is a different approach, one that leverages agile and lean techniques to make Agile Requirements Definition and Management practices more scalable.

• -Should you capture requirements up front or iteratively throughout the project?
• Should you write detailed specifications as interpreted by some audit officers, light weight specifications, or something in between?
• Should you take  a use-case driven approach, a user story driven approach, or something else? 

Do agile requirements strategies really work? Do they scale?  Come listen /meet with the speaker who have a  long experiences around what really works in practice.

In this presentation, we will discuss strategies for the balancing act between governance and agile.

Have you ever felt you don't quite understand WHY you work on things that you do and HOW it actually supports your business' goals?

Most (if not all) of us might agree that creating a shared understanding of the vision and goals is critical to success of the organization. But how do we do it?

From my experience coaching numerous Product Owners and Product Managers over the years is that many of them struggle with creating or articulating the business goals and how each of their product increments support them. It turned out that some of them were just taking marching orders from the powers that be, they didn't know for themselves and their teams are in the dark as well. This challenge is amplified by lack of defining and communicating the measures of success needed to validate if the product increment is indeed contributing to your business objectives.

These factors make it hard to answer questions like "should we start working on this?" or "should we continue working on that?".

Fortunately, a technique like Impact Mapping helps overcome this challenge. Impact Mapping is a simple but powerful way of visualizing the mapping of the business goals or objectives down to the product increments that teams work on. It is a great tool that lends well to having meaningful dialogues between business, technology and other stakeholders, and most importantly useful for adaptive planning of what gets worked on or should be stopped.

In this session, I will share what Impact Mapping is and how you can go about creating one. By the end of the session, you should have picked enough knowledge  so you can try creating at your work or if anything add it to your tool kit.

Governments have typically been slow in adopting Agile principles. In 2014, the launch of the healthcare.gov product was generally considered a failure. At the same time, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published a report recommending governments to implement Digital Government Strategies to bring them closer to citizens and businesses. Since then, the flurry of activities around Digital Government has accelerated and led to some very interesting organizations and initiatives such as:

• UK's Digital Government Services
• The launch of the US Digital Services Playbook
• The creation and growth of 18F
• The creation of the Australian Digital Transformation Office
• E-Estonia's rise to the top of the Digital Government charts
• The creation of the Ontario Digital Government Action Plan and the recruitment of a Chief Digital Officer

Agile methodologies - combined with user-centred design principles - are often at the heart of these Digital Government initiatives.  The timing has never been better to help governments accelerate the implementation of Agile principles, user-centred design and outcomes management to deliver better value quicker to citizens.

Through this session, attendees will:

• Better understand governmental constraints and why governments have typically been slow adopters of Agile principles
• Learn about recent worldwide Digital Government trends and initiatives
• Review approaches as to how agile methodologies can be applied in the context of existing Government of Canada IT project management frameworks
• Discuss examples of Government Agile projects and products that have delivered better value quicker to citizens

You're a Manager or Executive not a ScrumMaster - what is the role of Leadership in an Agile Organization? You've seen the Dan Pink video on Motivation and are mystified as to how to help.

Join a panel of experienced Agile Coaches for a discussion and Q&A of their experiences as coaches. Each of the panelists has a different background, and a unique journey into their role as an Agile Coach. Along the way, they've each built up a wide and diverse set of skills, from their careers, interactions, and experiences. 

What have some successes been?
How do we even define success for ourself, as an Agile Coach?
More importantly (and hopefully more entertaining), will be some of the lessons learned... We'll explore what was tried, but had a surprising and unexpected outcome. 
And, we'll discuss some of the ways experienced coaches continue to learn, share, grow, and develop everyday!

How is "facilitation" a surprising tool in an Agile transformation?  Good facilitation wins the hearts and minds of the people.  Without the people, you have no transformation.  If you want to create a "pull", rather than a "push", then grab onto facilitation as your entry point.  Vastly different groups of people within this Fortune 10 company, all had immediate boulders blocking their view to transformation.  I decided to be a people's coach, rolling up my sleeves, working right there beside them, moving those immediate boulders.  Once they could experience a different way of thinking through good facilitation, then they were more open to thinking differently about larger transformational topics.  Forget about processes and scrum practices if their heads are full of other more immediate pain points.  Help to push those boulders out of the way and you have cleared a path to transformation.  Give energy towards facilitating fast outcomes to current gaps, and you've built a bridge.  Facilitation was a quick win and quick wins make stronger bridges.

In this workshop you will see a very brief summary of how facilitation for transformation was used in several key areas in this Fortune 10 automotive company, then we’ll move into live facilitation of my favorite exercises/techniques. This way you will experience the magic yourself and be able to go back to your company and facilitate the same exercises. You’ll also leave with my facilitation guides for reference and opportunities to talk to me more about how you could use facilitation as a transformation tool.  

Your Agile Transformation is doomed.

You might be working on all sorts of great things. You’ve got training, coaching, cross functional teams, continuous delivery, you’re scaling Agile, etc.

You’re still doomed.

Why?

 Because Agile is just one part of a much larger picture. A picture that requires people not only to change their processes and software, but how they see themselves and their place in your organization.

This change requires more than transformational thinking. It requires revolutionary thinking.

 It can be done, but it won’t happen by accident.

Come find out what you need to have a successful revolution.

One the most significant ceremony of any Agile Team is Daily Standup where the team members get together and plan for their day. But quite often the daily standup turns into a zombie status update meeting where team members come together to blurt out their updates and walk away to their desk without ever maximizing the benefit of that meet up.

In this session I will share a case study of how we created a simple experiment that turned into Standup Poker and revolutionized our Daily Standup. This technique helped us uncover true insights of teams progress and got the team talking about strategic planning and plan to remove any impediments as a "team" on daily basis to accomplish their sprint goal and commitments.

We learnt that when team members started using this technique, hidden impediments and dependencies started to emerge and team members organically started to re-plan and prioritize their work to accomplish the Sprint Goal. Product Owner also found great value in this technique as this helped them see the teams true progress and engage with the team to re-prioritize user stories and even take a story out of the sprint if required. Scrum Masters started to observe a trend in the confidence level over the span of the sprint and brought that information to Sprint Retrospective to discuss and brainstorm ways to improve and keep the confidence levels high throughout the sprint. The discussions and observations due to Standup poker resulted in teams committing better and more confidently during Sprint Planning and got into the rhythm of always accomplishing their sprint goal, but more importantly they started improving everyday and got into "continuous improvement" mode.

The content, exercise and message of this session highlight the agile principles of individuals and interactions over process and tools and fostering the mindset of continuous improvement.

In this session we will share examples, stories and experiences from trying the Standup Poker and how this simple technique converted a bunch of individuals into a TEAM !!!

3.5 years ago Seedbox Technologies decided to embrace agile methodologies as its way to develop web based products, get them out faster, survive and thrive competition.

It's all started in a traditional fashion:  external consultants were hired to teach employees the agile mindset and how to use agile methodologies like Scrum and Kanban when developing web based products. Project Managers got trained and became Product Owners, experienced Scrum Masters were hired to get development teams to their highest level of performance as fast as they could, developers got trained and developed experience around their team development processes, engineering managers supported agility across the company, and stakeholders directly involved in product development got invited to collaborate with software development teams through agile processes, once they got fully implemented.

That's right, Engineering got agile quite right but by doing so:

• What happen with the rest of the organization?
• What about peoples mindset?
• Is them vs Us or vice versa? 
• Are they able to collaborate, inspect and adapt like the engineering teams and people related to agile projects do?
• How do we get everyone in the organization to communicate when we don't share the same vocabulary?
• How do we fill the gap and avoid old management treats get in the way of the companies transition to something bigger than just the teams?
• Shall we wait until they realize that we all need to change or shall we help them get there?
• How do we use are know-how to turn this mess into a big opportunity for the organization to grow?
• Do we need help?

Well, if this experience report gets accepted, I will share what I've learned about:

• The challenges & flaws that we faced when transitioning from team based agility to organizational agility
• Some of my reflections as an inside observer
• How to use the lessons learned as a wake up call
• What can be done to help the organization to thrive

Let's walk together through a nurturing experience report that might ignite your sens and get you inspired to give the extra mille! 

Florence Nightingale is considered the founder of modern nursing.  Put in charge of nursing British and allied soldiers in Turkey during the Crimean War, Nightingale was the first person to define planned consequences from activity as the basis for action when she introduced evidence-based outcome indicators to nursing and healthcare.

Nightingale’s approach was later applied to outcomes-based education and in programme management with the introduction of ‘logic models’. Fundamentally, it is a quality management approach focused on helping us get the desired results from our interventions and activities. Nightingale was arguably the first person who figured out that you need to start with framing the result you want to achieve (the why) to determine what you should do, how you should do it, when you should it, and where you should do it - all the while using an inspect and adapt mindset to interpret actual results against expected ones to determine the next course of action to be taken, including re-framing the expected results based on what we have learned so far.

In this interactive session the two Larry's (Cooper and Sullivan) will be your guides as you learn how to identify the goals and objectives (the why) for a real world scenario, how to use a simple canvas and mapping technique to figure out what needs to be done and in what order, and how to adapt what gets done next based on what we have learned so far. The mapping technique is similar to story mapping except that it provides a deeper understanding of the true nature of most projects in enterprise settings - this technique helps us story-map our strategic intent.

It helps us to more clearly identify and solve the minimum viable problem.

For Product Owners it will help them gain better insights into how value gets defined at an enterprise level and provides a line of sight from strategic goals and objectives down to actual products too be built. For leaders it helps them understand that most projects are often really multiple ones that need to be sequenced and that it is the work that is often not identified and hence not done that sinks most large efforts.

These techniques provide clarity and allow us to deal with uncertainty when dealing with complex problems and messes while maintaining agility throughout.

Mob programming is collaboration taken to the extreme, eliciting the best from every member of the team. In this session, you will experience the dynamics of mob programming and learn how to use this technique successfully in your own environments.

After mobbing with over two dozen teams, we've seen definite patterns emerge, that we'll discuss here.

In order for teams to step into high performance. it's critical that they develop the practice of having effective conversations about what is and isn't working. Yet in practice, the retrospective meeting is often the least-valued of the agile events: team members feel that their retros are boring, repetitive, and superficial.

In this workshop, we will teach participants how to design and deliver a really useful retrospective using LEGO SERIOUS PLAY. We'll cover the basics of this powerful facilitation technique, and give advice about how to build your own SERIOUS PLAY kit using pieces easily available at the local toy store. We'll also offer practical suggestions for how to design a retro that gets everyone talking (and building), and results in the team agreeing on action.

The participants will leave with a powerful retrospective technique that they can immediately use with their teams.

Agile failure is most felt by Scrum Masters. Why do so many fail to properly support their teams? Why do so many fail to inspire meaningful change in the level of leadership? Why do so many fail to guide transformation in their organisations?

In this workshop, we will harness the knowledge and experience of the participants! 

Prepare to work together to discover the Scrum Master vital behaviours!

Many people are taking on the mantle of Scrum Masters across agile teams around the world. Unfortunately, many of them have come from more traditional work structures that don't develop effective Scrum Masters. There is a misconception about the purpose of a Scrum Master. Often the Scrum Master becomes the facilitator or the project manager. This has to stop. Effective leaders, agile coaches, and Scrum Masters take advantage of vital behaviours in supporting scrum masters or by building mastery within these behaviours.

During this workshop, participants will go through a series of exercises to identify the purpose of a Scrum Master, how we can measure success, identify potential vital behaviours, learn from others to determine the vital behaviours, and then create a sound influence strategy to enable effective Scrum Masters and the work that they do. This workshop will use concepts and the model from the book "Influencer" (by Joseph Grenny et all) which details the three (3) keys to a successful change initiative and uses the six (6)  sources of influence.

Prepare to work together to discover the Scrum Master vital behaviours!

Why is transformation such a trendy concept right now? Why is it disruptive and how to make disruption turn into your advantage?

Transformation from heavyweight, "traditional" software delivery processes, towards more collaborative or "agile" approaches has become a critical success factor. The Agile movement has taken on this challenge and has the characteristics to improve the quality of projects (better), deliver ‘must have’ functionality in a timely fashion (faster), by spending less capital (cheaper). But many teams often fail to incorporate a strategy to identify, collect and communicate the value delivered by their agile pilots. Using a change framework such as “Kotter” combined with a SAFe and a Disciplined Agile approach, will help accelerate your software delivery, make your Agile process adoption sustainable and build the foundation for an overall enterprise transformation? Based on real-world experiences, this workshop addresses how organizations can increase their probability of success in their agile transformation by making the disruption works for them instead of working against. Disruption

introduces risks!! How to mitigate risks with resilience, how to overcome organizational barriers will be explored? Assumptions that underpin process changes are discussed. Organizational barriers and other pitfalls are explored. The use of process frameworks to assess and plan is presented and techniques to "make it stick" are suggested.

Attend this session to learn the key effective habits that are used during an agile transformation. I will present a real-world project with a Telco organization, and "lessons learned" from this innovative organization that we helped to execute on their ambitious plans to "evolve into agile.