Dave Dame is an experienced change agent, coach and mentor who has helped medium and large organizations transition to agile methodology. In Leading With Imperfect Feet, he explains how a simple walk down a sandy beach last February perfectly encapsulates the struggle involved in changing the behaviour of an organization. Dave has cerebral palsy, a condition that makes it difficult for him to use his arms and legs. His survival has ultimately depended on the help of the people around him. As a result, he’s had to learn how to be vulnerable, face his fear of the unknown, and trust in his “team” to lead an extraordinary life. It’s this same approach that he tries to impart to the people under his guidance as he teaches them to reach their full potential through the empathy, transparency and collaboration. Our cultural attitude toward failure has prevented too many people from taking that difficult first step. But as Dave’s story ultimately illustrates, the unknown at the other end of that journey has rewards not even he could anticipate.

Uncertainty. Try as we might, we struggle to live with it. When it comes to making decisions, it is logical that we'd rather make the right decision than defer because we are uncertain and we'd rather defer due to uncertainty than make the wrong decision. But in practice; no so. We so loathe uncertainty, we'd actually rather make a decision, any decision, even the wrong decision, than live too long uncertainty. I mean, the sooner we finish the plan, the sooner we can start ... right? Understanding complexity, optionality, and the power of uncertainty gives you and your organization a tremendous advantage.

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

“Move fast and break things.” — Mark Zuckerberg

Mobile is no longer a hobby for companies. In that world, speed is the key. My company embraced the principle of “welcoming changing requirements, even late in development.” It’s allowed us to grow, and we have accomplished some amazing things.

It’s also caused some challenges for teams. They felt the pain of this pace, and our clients were frustrated by delayed releases.

This presentation describes a 3-month case study I ran to measure things like team communication, productivity, and quality while implementing Scrum for the first time. The results were convincing, and allowed us to learn what happens when you value speed more than anything else.

I hope you’ll join me in seeing how we learned to work smarter instead of harder.

Most of us have heard the mantra, "Slice your User Stories as thin as possible!" In my travels as a coach since the early 2000's, however, I've rarely seen stories that truly are thin. What are these rare creatures? Why don't I see more of them? Having good User Stories is crucial to the success of teams using them as the means for determining what needs to be built to fulfill a customer's need. Having thinly sliced stories is even more important!

This workshop provides a level set on what stories are and explores why slicing stories very thin is important, what benefits thin slicing provides, and how to do it. Through a combination of examples and practical application in the workshop, you'll leave with slicing techniques that you can apply at your next planning session.

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.

My experience report is based on many years of collaborating with PEOPLE....and learning how to really collaborate better.

Being authentic is a place I dial into when I am true to myself. It's about the choice to show up and be real. This allows vulnerability to be present and it's a choice we can make every day.

I call it being honest - with ourselves and with others.

This experience report will step beyond traditional Agile Values ... and share what I discovered with clients, global organizations and the United Nations - the presentation/experience report has (ups and downs)  - 

Let's explore useful learnings about agile and human techniques to help participants gain insight and develop important skills with the people and the teams you encounter - let's explore wellbeing!

I was at Agile2016 in Atlanta to present this year an experience report about Agile Marketing - the most important outcome from this conference for me - was the number of people who wanted to talk to me after my presentation about:
Vulnerability, happiness, trusting ourselves, wellbeing, speed to market and how to talk to clients, clients -clients!!

This talk is centered around client servicing, client solution making, relationship development stages and collaborative drivers.

Marie-Christine’s personal hands on client experience and project management will provide participants a unique outlook on process, and discover how to bridge the gap between PEOLE (client, executives, stakeholders, teams) and the business. It’s a fundamental shift in mindset. Instead of focusing on what you can sell or deliver, the focus is shifted to what are the needs while leveraging rapid iterations for maximum output and trust.

Few of us consciously choose vulnerability.

Why? The stakes are too high.

Scrum is a team sport.  We ask people to work closely together in small teams to achieve a common goal.  A significant failing in many Scrum teams I've worked with has been the team's inability to function as team -- they tend to function as a collection of individuals, focused on their individual goals first, and the team's goals second.  

We have a tendency to put people together in teams and expect them to figure out how to work together and become effective very quickly, but we don't give them the tools to get started as a team, and move towards working together as team.  In this session, we'll explore how to use a team kickoff to accelerate the process of team formation.

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

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.

What if your team worked from a common strategy to deliver more business value?  A strategy resulting from best practices they uncovered from a simple game that can be played quickly.

Scrum teams need to agree on a sprint plan. And the Product Owner Value Game uncovers best practices that pay off in the real world. The game teaches people to think about refinement and value in a different way. In the game, teams compete to deliver the most business value from a backlog of items with associated business value and required effort to implement. An element of uncertainty is present in the game just as in the real world. 

Deliver more business value each sprint. 

Phoenix, the federal government’s pay modernization initiative, aptly illustrates the federal government’s challenges with successfully deploying shared services. Phoenix, Shared Travel Services, and the Government of Canada Marketplace demonstrate that traditional waterfall project management coupled with an excessive emphasis on specifications can exacerbate risk and produce less-than-ideal results.

On schedule and on budget, Buyandsell.gc.ca began hosting the Government Electronic Tendering Services on June 1 2013. The shared services offered on Buyandsell.gc.ca help more than 80,000 private sector suppliers and buyers representing more than 90 federal departments and agencies to focus on doing business, instead of figuring out how to do business. Buyandsell.gc.ca hosts more than 1 million page views per month.

Buyandsell.gc.ca constitutes a series of successful transformation projects. These projects are a possible template for transforming government services to citizens. However, in the Buyandsell.gc.ca case, leading stakeholders never considered transformation their goal and at no time was their work managed as a transformation project.

Buyandsell.gc.ca is the result of an iterative process of discovery. The team asked open questions and was open to all possible answers. They eschewed traditional requirements definition and delivered incremental improvements guided by a strategic intent: to improve the user experience of tender management. By allowing tender creators and consumers to validate the improvements via real systems, and by accepting a long-term process of continued short-term iteration, a transformed system was made operational. That system is built upon loosely coupled foundation (platform) components that can be added to in order to deliver additional services without impacting Buyandsell.gc.ca itself.

While this approach remains unfamiliar to many in the federal government, it is based upon Agile methodologies widely used in the private sector. These techniques present a lower risk than the waterfall project management approach (the National Project Management System) traditionally use for federal government projects.

This presentation summarizes key Lessons Learned in the conception, design, implementation, and delivery of Buyandsell.gc.ca. It references best Agile practices in relation to its achievements.

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.

What stops you from doing the things you’ve always wanted to do? What stops teams from being truly great? What hinders most Agile transformations?

Fear.

That feeling in your gut when deep down you know what you need to do, but you're not sure if you can do it.

Check out any of the “x things most successful people do” posts online. Every single one of them will mention fear. Why? Because fear can either energize you to success or paralyze you into inaction.

I’ll show you how to move from paralysis to action and how you can apply these techniques to yourself and to your Agile teams. How you, as a coach, can create safe environments so that your teams can be fearless.

In addition, we'll work hands on with the Fear Follower Canvas to help you move those things you want to do from the someday pile to done!

As coaches, managers, or team members - we've all encountered situations in the workplace where a conversation moves from "constructive conflict" to "stressful conflict". In this workshop, we'll begin by exploring what the differences are between constructive and stressful conflict and establish the different behaviours that can bring forth these stressful interactions. We'll then quickly move into a series of practice exercises and facilitation techniques to help participants support a more healthy interaction both one-on-one and on the team.

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!