It's inevitable, and almost unavoidable, that Professionals of all skill-sets and experience will encounter "coaching up" situations. In this session, I will review three coaching techniques that can be used in Sr Leader and "coaching up" scenarios. These techniques will provide participants with new/alternative ways to prepare for, engage, follow up, and reflect with Sr Leaders. These techniques are heavily based in the core values of openness, courage, and respect and rooted in the fundamentals of cultural and human interaction.

We prize our ability to multitask yet we rarely acknowledge the impact this has on our ability to get work done. As a team we look to process to create efficiencies but ignore one simple tool that has the ability to transform the amount, the speed, and the quality of their work: Limiting the amount of Work In Progress. In this talk I will share my stories and experiences of the power that limiting WIP has to bring a team focus, flexibility and follow through. Learn where to start, what to look for over time and how to optimize the amount of things you are working on so that you can get more done!

If you live in Colorado you have heard the term “14er” or have even hiked Bierstadt or Quandary, maybe climbed the tallest mountain in Colorado, Mt. Elbert and have probably heard of my unfortunate mishaps on Capitol Peak. That being said, how can you compare story sizing to Colorado 14ers? Just like stories, no two mountains are created equal. A lot goes into considering hiking a Colorado 14er, class rating, which includes exposure, distance, elevation game, skills or equipment needed and even drive time from the Front Range!

Similar to a 14er, a story point is an abstract measure of effort. In simple terms, it is a number that tells an agile team about the difficulty level of a story. Difficulty could be related to complexities, risks and efforts involved. As mentioned above, Colorado 14ers have the same difficulties related to complexities (skill needed), risks/uncertainty (exposure/class of mountain) and time/effort involved (elevation gain or distance).

Let’s bring story sizing and mountains together in a fun workshop session!

Agile is all about change. Not only during the initial transformation, but continually as products evolve and approaches are improved. Therefore, it is important as Agile practitioners that we can lead our teams through the emotional and behavioral adjustments that are required to ensure these changes are a success.

Much like the seasons of the year, we as humans have a cycle that is experienced each time change is encountered. And as leaders, each of us has a particular style that may be more suited towards certain phases of change, and less suited for others.

Does your leadership style address all seasons? Whether you are seeding new ideas in Spring, planning in the Summer, experimenting throughout the Fall, or embedding in the Winter; it is important to understand your leadership style and how it aligns with the perspectives of the team.

Attendees of this session will be provided with a simple but powerful tool to assess their individual leadership style, how it aligns with the current 'season' of change, and what they can do to help others adapt and thrive. Through a combination of real-world experiences, illustrative analogies, and the latest findings in neuroscience; this session takes an engaging and interactive approach on how to tackle a complicated and vital subject...addressing all human needs when implementing change.

Our understanding of how humans learn has grown tremendously in the last 20 years. Providing an environment in which people have room to think, and the safety to experiment and adapt is key. We will review fundamental concepts of neuroscience and how they intersect with organizational behavior. We will also review how the agile mindset takes advantage of these concepts. From there, we can begin to envision the conditions that will provide the greatest opportunity for learning and continuous improvement. Together, we will share ideas on how we can start to transform our environments into safe spaces where teams can grow and thrive.

THE CHALLENGE: Every year we may attend numerous presentations and meetings - filled with the typical dense and disorganized Power Point decks. We may leave that session thinking: "there's an hour of my life I’ll never get back."

For years I've worked with IT and HR leaders and project managers to improve their presentations. A key part of their job is to influence key decision makers - but more often than not we just don't know how to design a compelling presentation. We overwhelm our audience with too much information and we ignore what brain science teaches us. The result: too much random information delivered in a confusing way. So, our presentations fail to influence our audience and get us the results we want.

THE SOLUTION: Then, when we least expect it, we hear a presentation that rises above the noise. One that persuades us to take action. What makes that one so compelling?

Science shows that our brains work beautifully when we can focus on a few key ideas. So, what do good presenters do? We powerfully land a small number of BIG ideas. I will teach participants how to follow this simple and powerful method using the PRESENTATION PYRAMID.

Implementing a product roadmap in an Agile way can be tough. Roadmaps are often written as a document that isn’t easily accessible. This leads to a variety of issues. A good agile roadmap should allow for agile practices such as daily standups and planning. They should create high visibility and transparency, operate with low overhead, and provide the right information to the right people at the right time.

In this talk, Chris will share how he’s implemented a Roadmap Wall. He’ll show how to incorporate the roadmap components into a highly visible and actionable format. The roadmap wall has multiple benefits and will:

• give leadership and executives visibility into how their business objectives influence features, story backlogs, and priorities
• leverage delivery teams to understand technical feasibility tradeoffs
• show the options available to satisfy competing customer needs
• demonstrate a clear picture of how business objectives link to customer needs
• provide near real-time information for decision making

To realize these benefits, we’ll leverage a variety of familiar tools. Chris will show you how to use a kanban system to manage business objectives and OKRs. You’ll learn how using an opportunity solution tree clarifies the customer’s need when roadmapping. He’ll show you a new way to use story maps when detailing features, improving communication and planning.

In the end, you’ll walk away with a new method for visualizing your product roadmap, giving your team better decision-making information.

We all know that features in a backlog should be prioritized, as should projects in a portfolio, but how can we optimize the ordering to get the best outcome? In this session you’ll learn about and compare seven different techniques, from basic to advanced, for setting priorities: multi-voting, risk analysis, business value game, ROI, Buy a Feature, Cost of Delay profiles, and Weighted Shortest Job First. Participants will work in small groups to practice a few of the techniques on a hypothetical application.

What is the IT guy doing in the Marketing Department and what does Agile have to do with marketing strategy? Originally proposed as a simple Kanban roll out, the effort to bring Agility into a Marketing Strategy team became the start of transformational effort to define value streams, push through organizational boundaries, implemented CI/CD pipelines for Marketing Products, and bring an Agile Mindset to a team at the nexus of multiple value streams and central to the transformation of a revolutionary view of client experience.

This talk focuses on the application of Agile/Lean foundations in a Marketing Organization to unlock hidden potential, detailing how the foundations of an Agile transformation in technical delivery teams -- team Agility, CI/CD pipelines, and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) -- are integral to Marketing Products in a digital media age. Critical to success is the definition of value streams in order to re-align teams from functional organizations to the flow of continuous customer value.

Beyond Marketing, Agile professionals can apply the lessons learned from this coaching engagement to any enterprise services team concurrently supporting multiple lines of business through multiple business channels: HR, Legal, Finance, etc.

Agile transformations have been key for speeding up software development via agile "projects". With projects, development is still often segregated from the business and work is often prioritized based on making the project successful and not what can bring the most value to the business and end users. A new approach is needed. During this session, Wendy Flowers will discuss why the gap between modern technical practices and the business is causing organizations to fail and how managing work via product and not projects will optimize value creation across the entire organization.

Your Organization is Agile…YAY! You are working in a prescribed framework (Scrum, Kanban, etc.)…YAY! You are a part of a Dynamic team…YAY! You are all set and running as a defined High Performing team…NO! So, what is in the way? I can help answer that, it isn't just a team problem.

Through my experience in Agile environments, organizations check all the boxes for implementing agile, but forget the most important which are the behaviors. Over the years, I have started to focus on the behaviors needed in an agile environment. In this session you will look at what gets you excited? What makes you frustrated? What motivates you? How are you showing up? Are you owning your day or renting it? And why reflecting on these matters!

I will provide tools that we will use to identify personal behaviors and statements that you will be able to use not only within your profession, your team, your organization, but also in your daily life outside of the office.

Are you ready to show up to be your best?

Psychological safety. Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson first coined the term in her research on the effectiveness of teams. And from Google’s re:Work research into what makes their supercharged teams truly stand apart, it turns out on that “Who is on a team matters less than how team members interact and structure their work.” Creating highly effective teams is a hallmark of agile teams, and we’re hearing more and more about how teams that truly trust each other and feel safe to take risks together go on to become high performers we all want to work with.

But creating safe teams takes more than just being able to tell people about psychological safety. What are the next steps? What can you actually DO to create team safety?

This talk will introduce the topic of psychological safety and walk through three exercises that anyone can take away to build team cohesion and trust. We’ll also cover one bonus tracking technique for monitoring team health over time. Attendees will walk away with actionable tips and techniques they can use with any team, whether agile or not.

Agile expects strong facilitation skills particularly from certain roles, but training on Agile basics, roles, and responsibilities often skims over facilitation skills. Facilitating remote meetings is even more overlooked. Yet, most modern companies operate at least in some way with remote or dispersed team members or meetings. While all facilitation is difficult, facilitating remotely amplifies the challenges and can really feel like herding cats who are hiding behind the phone or computer. Learn how to wrangle those felines!

This session will give an overview of the different challenges and needs for facilitation in remote settings, foundational principals of remote facilitation, and specific techniques and activities to use when facilitating remote meetings.

Is your Agile team struggling to vanquish the nemeses that are holding them back? Come take a page out of some of your favorite DC and Marvel super hero movies for tips on how to move your team forward.

In this session, we’ll examine a range of beginner topics applicable to Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Coaches, management, or anyone who interacts with a team. Among other topics, we’ll examine how various comic book heroes have dealt with difficult prioritization choices that villains have presented them with, and give models that your team can use for effective prioritization. We’ll talk about The Fool’s Choice and how a hero was able to improve his communication skills. We’ll watch a scene from the new Wonder Woman movie and learn important lessons for Agile teams as we witness her dealing with a German invasion. And most importantly, we’ll examine when we shouldn’t try to emulate our favorite comic book heroes.

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.

Coaching stances are a self-charter, a guide for agile coaches and practitioners as they work with individuals and teams. They serve as a way for agile coaches to keep themselves on course and to navigate the choppy waters they undoubtedly encounter. So, how do you go about building that charter, that stance, so that you can show up authentically and as your best self? And, how do you best convey your stance to your team and in your organization?

In this workshop, Kari and Erin will lead activities designed to help you identify the values and behaviors that define your coaching stance. Through facilitated peak experience and mundane experience exercises, you will uncover and explore your values in ways that are personal and meaningful. In small groups, you will share what is important about these values in the work they do as agile coaches and how you can demonstrate these values in their work within the organization, whether that’s with teams, management, senior leadership, or other agile coaches. You will also choose an image that resonates with the way you would like to illustrate your coaching stance--or design one of your own. Erin and Kari will leave you with inquiries to further develop your charter once you return home from the conference.

With the tools and exploration in this workshop, you can return to your teams and organizations, better prepared to serve as agile champions and thoughtful agile-coaching practitioners. It is our hope that you will be inspired to help other agilists in your organizations to create their own values-driven coaching stances.

You know agile, have been on teams as a scrum master or product manager/owner or even a program manager, but now you are an agile coach and need help “jumping in feet first.” While there’s a lot involved in “coaching,” like emotional intelligence, experience, background, emotional intelligence, communication skills, confidence etc. but sometimes you need a little “mentorship” and how/where to get started in a coaching role.

This is a beginner to level session for new coaches in an agile transformation role.

This session will help you get started on an agile transformation assignment with a coaching backlog and will inform new coaches on “where to start” as an Agile Coach.

The session will begin agile transformation challenges followed by common agile impediments, conditions for success, an agile readiness checklist and a coaching backlog including Epics, Features and “where to start.”

Everything is NOT a “Priority”: A fun and engaging prioritization technique with HGTV's House Hunters activity

Prioritization continues to be one of the biggest challenges in Agile Transformations. Choosing the right set of features often marks the difference between short-term failure or long-term success. So how do you make sure your stakeholders are making the right choices? If you answer yes to any of the questions below, then this workshop is for you!

1. Do you have multiple stakeholders with competing priorities?
2. Do your stakeholders constantly change priorities without explanation?
3. Do your stakeholders tell you that everything is a “Must Have”?
4. Do your stakeholders think that that their work is far more important than the other groups you work with?
5. Does your stakeholder prioritize their work in a vacuum?
6. Do their priorities align back to the overall vision?

Adrienne Rinaldi will share her experience, insight, and actionable techniques and tips that you can apply to any stakeholder prioritization session. She will walk through the preparation and execution of the “Buy a Feature” prioritization exercise, which will enable you to see how this can be leveraged and applied in any organization with multiple stakeholders with competing priorities.

Peer coaching can make a huge difference in reaching your work and personal goals, but how do you get started and and make it stick? We’d love to share our informal peer coaching method that combines personal responsibility, agile, and goal setting in a way that is guaranteed to be successful. We call it “Thing Three.” In this interactive session, we will teach you the basic format we follow, along with the research to back up why it works. We will also demonstrate how it has helped even the busiest colleagues stay accountable consistently, over years, and continue to reach every goal they set. You’ll get to exercise these skills too and immediately see the value of peer coaching!