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

Scrum is everywhere, with over 90% of agile teams using it. But for many organizations wanting to scale agile, one team using Scrum is not enough. Scrum is not enough. The Nexus Framework, created by Ken Schwaber the co-creator of Scrum, provides an exoskeleton to Scrum, allowing multiple teams to work together to produce an integrated increment regularly. It addresses the key challenges of scaling agile development by adding new yet minimal events, artifacts and roles to the Scrum framework. 

In this talk, we introduce the Nexus Framework and how it, like Scrum, promotes bottom-up thinking with top down support in order to discover and emerge what works best for your organization. We will use case studies as examples to describe Nexus in detail showing how it works, how it is working, and what its strengths and weaknesses are. The audience will be taken through Nexus, its new events and the key role of the Nexus Integration Team.

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.

If you have multiple scrum teams working together to deliver business value, you'll be thinking of moving to Scaled Agile. In our company we have a number of different product lines all running with multiple scrum teams. We needed a way to roll up all of that information and track the progress of our releases. We also needed to do roadmap planning. In this presentation, I'll go over our learning curve in Scaled Agile and our experience with SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework).

A green fields development project presented a good opportunity to experiment with an agile way of work involving increased team self-organization. Initially this involved confronting a traditional command-and-control approach with something based more closely on the Scrum Guide, while surmounting a number of impediments that are common to many organizations. Over time, as the project grew, scaling problems were discovered and had to be dealt with, ranging from simple things like meetings to more complex issues like team composition.

Do women make better Scrum Masters, because they’re more nurturing?  Do women have to be aggressive in order to be effective leaders?  Why aren’t women good risk takers?  Let’s explore these topics, other stereotypes, and different myths and facts that surround the female role in agile and technology.  Patricia Kong from Scrum.org and Jill Graves from the Canadian Revenue Agency will share their experiences and facilitate this discussion to explore why women are stalled in leadership roles and in the technology industry, and if Agile can help.