Description:

I see that a lot of organizations use metrics in inappropriate ways to measure teams. At the heart of these metrics, nine times out of ten, are velocity and story points. These metrics lead to a lot of mistrust, fear, and bad technical practices. This talk will focus on shifting the focus to diagnostic metrics.

Before shifting focus to diagnostic metrics, we need to understand what inappropriate metrics are. When questioning teams about why their velocity was lower from one sprint to another, teams are more likely to inflate their estimates to avoid questions in the future. This is one of my scenarios. We will explore this case and my other top-ten based on the 165 teams I have interacted with. Focusing on one metric does not provide a balanced view of the team.

For balance, I promote five metrics. The combination of metrics balances each other. These five metrics are lead time, quality, happiness, agile maturity, and business value. Focusing on these five metric areas can be used as a diagnostic tool to help teams grow and support coaching. During the session, we will use my Excel-based tool and visual model to simulate this balance.

When you push shorter lead times (how fast) on a team with a lower agile maturity, the first thing to change is quality, followed by happiness and then the delivery of value. Conversely, if a team focuses on TDD, the first thing to change is quality, followed by agile maturity, reduction in lead time, and increased delivery of value.

Teaching teams to harness data in a positive way will help them to flourish.

Have you found new team members take months getting up to speed with the rest of the team? Do you wonder about their engagement and happiness in a new place of work?

Many agile organizations struggle with these questions. Perhaps we’re still getting people off on the wrong foot with some details of our hiring and onboarding practices. These often overlooked, easily forgotten practices have a big impact on engagement and culture. Your hiring process can catalyze excitement for the company mission. Agile-appropriate onboarding quickly harmonizes the team and quickly returns them to productivity.

This talk for team members, managers, and change agents examines the positive impact hiring and onboarding practices can have on agile transformation. Using real world examples from successful agile companies, the session shares a mixture of new principles and practices audience members can experiment with. Additionally, the content is wrapped in systems thinking to increase knowledge for organizational change.

As a career software tester, I’ve heard rumors DevOps culture will put me out of a job, so I took a job testing for a DevOps team. I’m new to DevOps, but aren’t we all? What matters most is our teams’ intentional decisions to grow our DevOps practices along with our development community.

Join me as I share my experiences blending disciplines, companies, levels of experience, and differing expectations as a member of efficient and effective delivery teams. I’ll describe common cultural and interpersonal problems I experienced while transforming a cross-functional agile team dogfooding a DevOps implementation.

Whether you’re into development, operations, testing, customer support, or product ownership, you’ll leave with concrete strategies for improving your DevOps working relationships to keep the technology running smoothly. People factors strongly affect your DevOps technical outcomes, so optimizing your flow includes improving your people practices.

Don’t feel afraid to ask about DevOps anymore!

Change is inevitable. In this talk we will discuss the four facets of change that are constantly affecting us: changing products, changing priorities, changing people and changing process. We will look at where these changes comes from, the impacts they have on us and explore concrete tools we can use to get better at responding to them. Attendees of this session will leave with a new attitude on the churn that takes place around us everyday. They will learn to acknowledge the benefits that changes have so they can truly welcome it into their team, their practices, and their life.

How do you gather leadership support for your Agile Transformation? In this workshop we'll explore the easiest way to get leadership support for your transformation: By Building More Leaders!

In this session we will briefly describe our experience building an agile leadership program in a Fortune 25 healthcare company. Then we will spend the rest of the time going through fun activities to help leaders develop their emotional intelligence, increase their comfort with vulnerability, and walk away tools they can immediately apply to their teams.

If you want to move around, have a blast, and learn what a chihuahua and a banana can teach people about leadership then please stop by.

Do your coders shy away from testing? Are your leaders or teams struggling to embrace the concept of “T-shaped” individuals? Would you like to demonstrate the impact of collaboration with evidence, and have fun along the way?

What many teams initially think collaboration is, really amounts to cooperation. - doing a little more if there’s time left in an iteration. This hands on workshop will demonstrate the outcomes possible when teams shift fully into collaboration. Through 3 sprints of a simulated product development, participants will get a tangible feel for the differences between coordination, cooperation and deeper cross functional collaboration. They’ll see where bottlenecks really exist when team members stick to their competency AND the impact when they focus instead on the shared goal or outcome. We’ll explore what’s holding back collaboration in our own work teams, and what changes teams can make to foster greater collaboration and higher performance.

This workshop is aimed at Change Agents, Coaches, Scrum Masters and Managers who want to engage their teams to realize the benefits of true collaboration. Additionally, Product Owners and Executives will find the data generated through the exercises beneficial and compelling when faced with stakeholders or teams skeptical of or resistant to collaborate fully and embrace cross functional team work.

Want to help your organization shift from "busy bees" and into a resilient "hive mind" of shared progress and achievement? Come see first hand the impact of collaboration towards a shared goal, and get a sense of how you can Harness your Hive towards higher performance, interactivity and fun.

The Agile Manifesto tells us “Working software is the primary measure of progress”, but when pressed by management to report on our progress we often fall back on non-agile metrics and measures that hurt our team and organization.

As Deming pointed out “the most important figures that one needs for management are unknown or unknowable, but successful management must nevertheless take account of them.”

Most metrics can be gamed, focus on the wrong things, or are downright harmful. There are however Virtuous Metrics that enforce behaviors that are helpful to agility, provided they're focused on by the right people.

During this session, we’ll learn about Virtuous Metrics that will help your team self-organize and your organization become more agile through a fast-pace and hilarious game. You’ll leave this session with a framework for employing Virtuous Metrics in your organization for continuous improvement.

To help people and teams thrive, we want to be fierce: we want to “show heartfelt and powerful intensity” (as the conference organizers remind us). Doing that requires that we create a strong container around that fierceness to use its energies productively. And that requires empathy.

This talk will explore how empathy – the ability to understand others' needs and ensure that they know that you understand them – is what Charles Duhigg calls a "keystone habit", a behavior change that unlocks other cascading behavior changes. Building the habit of empathy will help you to build trust, influence others, give effective feedback, and enable collaboration. Along the way, we will look at seven tools to enhance your practice of empathy and help you to be fierce.

Let’s face it, there are WAY too many agile scaling frameworks today. And the list seems to be growing. Another reality is none of them really work so well “out of the box” and each has some distinct challenges.

Join Bob Galen in this interactive workshop where they will share with you scaling patterns from each of the leading frameworks that they’ve personally used and that have worked well for them. No fluff, just working patterns for the real world.

But the workshop gets even better. Then they’ll help you analyze your scaling context and select the patterns that might work best for you. For example, if you’ve got an entrenched project-focused culture, we’ll explore product organizational patterns. Or a pattern for effectively handling UX and architecture across multiple teams.

You’ll leave this session with your own list of practical scaling patterns that are customized for your organization. And ideas of what “not to do” in your future scaling efforts.

Retrospectives are regarded as the most important event in Scrum. Yet, how often do they reach their potential of generating real and significant improvement? We will cover what it really takes to facilitate a retrospective. We will focus on the key elements of successful retrospectives: Set the stage, gathering data, generating insights, deciding what to do, and closing. I will share the tricks I’ve learned that allows teams to remember all of the improvements they’ve enjoyed.

Telling a story of how a new technology platform will transform a business to leaders is not easy. We are often not speaking the same language, especially at the portfolio level when there are business and technical people. I developed the Digital Transformation Strategy (DTS) canvas to help bridge the conversation with a visual aid. If you are having discussions with the technical leaders in your organization or consultants, this tool is just what you need to help you understand the technology value proposition to business operations and people. The DTS is a tool to help Product Owners and Architects work collaboratively to frame a business need and an associated technology solution. The attendees will be able to run a short experiment during the presentation to use the DTS Canvas to simulate conversations and decisions for digitizing a business function. A few simple options will be provided and the attendees will have the option to use their own.

Nearly everyone nowadays in the agile community says that they are an “agile coach”. But there’s so much more than simple certifications and a declarative statement. The first step is the self-awareness to acknowledge what you don’t know first. Then developing a plan to develop your coaching skills.

In this workshop, we’ll explore the on-the-job skills, training classes, and mentoring that can make you a great agile coach. First, we’ll talk about the agile coaching competency framework and how to leverage it as a backdrop for your development planning and strategy.

Next, we’ll do a personal assessment of your strengths and gaps according to the framework. And we’ll explore some simple strategies (books, tools, techniques, classes, activities, etc.) that will help you fill in those gaps to become a much more well-rounded coach.

And finally, we’ll break into groups of two so that you can peer review your strategies and make adjustments. You’ll leave this session with a well-balanced game plan for becoming a better (possibly a great) agile coach.

Everyone seems to be going agile nowadays. Terms like adoption, migration, business agility and transformation are used to represent the move to agility. And they also imply that the going is easy. Well, that’s not Bob Galen’s experience. In fact, it’s the opposite. Agile transformation, deep and successful organization-wide transformation, is incredibly hard to achieve. One of the greatest challenges is knowing what the path “looks like”.

In this talk, Bob will be sharing patterns they’ve observed from successful agile transformations. We’ll start by examining the journey of agile leadership. What are the central patterns that leaders need to adopt. For example, trust, empowerment, and employee engagement will be explored. Next, we’ll look at organizational factors and tactics for increasing safety and innovation. We’ll also look at transformations at Enterprise-scale and distributed teams to see how to transform those contexts.

This workshop is not for the faint of heart, as transformation is hard. But if you want successfully create a transition to business agility, you’ll leave with tools and a new mindset.