Along with shared goals, tools, and boundaries, psychological safety is a pre-requisite for a truly self-organizing team. Research shows that if you can create psychological safety for your teams, they will be more creative, willing to take risks, and speak their mind — just the types of behavior that lead to market breakthroughs and reduce project risk.

But how do you cultivate psychological safety on a team? Is conflict ever ok? This workshop will give participants the chance to practice exercises for building safety in a fun setting. We'll focus on what safety is and isn’t, how agile leaders can support it using a learning mindset, and learn several team exercises for cultivating safety. We’ll also introduce one method for measuring psychological safety over time.

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!

Imagine you are a Mad Agile Scientist and have a diabolical experiment to conduct - what would happen if you exchanged the brains of a Product Owner and Scrum Master? Mwuhahahaha!!! How would the body of a Product Owner with the brain of a Scrum Master act? And vice versa?

Perhaps the Scrum Master would now treat the team like a backlog? This Scrum Master would be focused on value and maintaining a coaching backlog of team and person improvements. This Scrum Master is refining the team, crafting a group that delivers value.

And perhaps the Product Owner might treat the backlog like a team? Rather than backlog refining, they coach the backlog. They would be focused on nurturing, protecting, and empowering the backlog. The backlog might transform from an irritation into a labor of love.

Although this experiment sounds terrible, this change of perspective might be what you need to reanimate your dead team or backlog.

Join the fun and come learn what horrifying results await!

This session focuses on the five development practices that are often overlooked but are essential to iterative software development. These five practices include automating the build for continuously integrating software as it is written, collaborating with team members through pair programming, practicing agile design skills that enable testability, using test-first development to drive design, and refactoring code to reduce technical debt. Together, these five technical areas are proving to be essential for sustained success with Scrum development. But many teams have not been exposed to the benefits of these practices or how to use them effectively.

In this session, we explore why these engineering practices are essential for Scrum software development and how to use them to reduce risk and build in quality at every level of the development process. We make the business case for these technical practices by showing how they address the inherent risks and challenges in building software. We then look at how these practices help mitigate the core issues of software development and help us drop the cost of maintaining and extending software in the future.

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.

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.

Facilitating distributed team meetings can feel like having one arm tied behind your back and one eye covered, but you can free yourself of these virtual constraints using other agile practices. We struggle with meeting tools and keeping people engaged online, but what if we collaborate with our teams to get the most value out of their meetings? If we leverage pairing, mobbing and other practices, we can co-facilitate successful outcomes with our teams.

You recently completed a two-day training, and you are now a Certified ScrumMaster. There's only one problem: what do you actually do next? Or maybe you feel like your team's adoption of Scrum is sluggish and somewhat ineffective. How do you breathe new life into your practices?

Part of the genius of the Agile Manifesto is that it doesn't tell you exactly what to do. It gives you a resilient foundation of values and principles that is grounded in discovered truths, and then lets you figure out how to apply it. Scrum describes process a bit more, but still leaves a lot of open questions. Again, this room to adapt is incredibly powerful. However, at the outset it can be quite daunting. Even after going through Certified ScrumMaster training, new practitioners may be a little lost as to what exactly to do next.

Over the years, I've built up a set of simple, concrete practices that I use both to get teams started and to help existing teams that are having trouble. Recently, I helped three teams get up to speed in quick succession. I wrote down these practices as a playbook. While I look forward to the day when these teams grow beyond my playbook and throw it in the trash, I have seen great results from starting with a small set of concrete practices. Come to this session and walk out with simple, specific things you can do to get your team flying.

Over the years, we've talked quite a bit about how to become a craftsman, exploring deeply how to progress from Apprentice to Master. What is often missing is any detail beyond the general thoughts that this is a Good Idea. Steve will share an approach, based on his experience of many years and many development organizations, to learning and career development for your team. This approach goes beyond the general ideas around Craftsmanship, but provides actual concrete areas of development. Unlike a formalized "skills checklist" we will apply a pattern language to help identify a continuum of growth for anyone's long term development.

We will discuss building understanding and building skills in the following areas:

Codecraft
Professional Skills
Process and Technical Ecosystems
Workflows
Tools

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!

When not uncovered and resolved, impediments can do harm to an otherwise well run project in ways that are often subtle and easy to miss. If impediments undermine the success of our teams, then we as project managers, leaders, and stakeholders should all be very passionate about removing impediments. In order to accomplish this we need to do three things: we need to give impediments the proper attention, we need to become experts at uncovering them, and we need to integrate them into the process of continuous improvement within the team.

In this session Tom makes a passionate appeal for the importance of the lowly impediment - often ignored, but never missed.

You’ve worked with the meeting leader, designed a great purpose and agenda, and invited all the right people. Then the meeting goes sideways. Someone comes in angry and drops a bombshell that has everyone fighting. A team clearly has a second agenda but won’t be honest about what they want and need. A leader came in angry and threatening and now nobody will say what needs to be said. You’re trying to help the group make a decision, but they are off on tangents and going down ratholes with no end in sight.

When meetings get challenging, standard facilitation techniques won’t cut it. It’s time to pull out the stops and apply some advanced techniques to create a safe, action-oriented space to help get your meeting attendees where they need to be.

One of the foundational principles of the Agile Manifesto is that the best solutions “emerge from self-organizing teams,” yet most of us are still locked in hierarchical organizational structures better suited for the factory floors where they originated. What should become of the role of people manager in the age of digital transformation?

In this session, we'll explore different ways that managers can become the catalysts that their teams need, as well as some things Agile practitioners can do to cultivate these important behaviors in the teams they work with. Come ready to learn practical tips for how to navigate the tricky space between ensuring that business needs are met and that the individuals on your team reach their full potential.

Every team’s goal is to deliver business value faster, the question is how do you do that? Using continuous integration (CI) and deployment techniques a team can increase velocity, improve transparency, and reduce risks. During this session, you will also learn the differences between CI/CD for applications development and data focused teams. Working with databases and especially data warehouses can be challenging, but there are simple techniques to help alleviate the pain.

Let’s be honest. Distributed Agile teams are here to stay, but not without considerable stumbling blocks. It’s easy to lose focus or feel disconnected, misunderstood or disengaged due to language barriers, limited time overlap and communication mishaps. For new teams, it’s even more challenging establishing relationships, since we lack face to face interaction.

This talk focuses on shifting a distributed team from stunted to high performing despite language / cultural / time zone differences, misunderstanding of Scrum, and the "us" vs. "them” mentality (all bothersome moles we will whack).

Using a true case study, we’ll journey through the challenges of relationship building, the anti-agile mindset, lack of focus, and lifeless ceremonies. You will walk away from this presentation with a toolbox full of proven, creative, and innovative ideas for successfully overcoming these obstacles.

This session is not only for current and aspiring Scrum Masters but also for People Managers, Development Team Members, Product Owners, Project Managers, and Leaders.

The Scrum Guide defines what is expected of a Scrum Master. When you read it, I bet you react like "that's a piece of cake!" But when you actually do it, many of us come to a realization that it's really, really hard. (That's what happened to me!) The Scrum Master job is hard because much of it has to do with humans, one of the most complex beings in the universe. Humans are intelligent; humans have emotions; and humans are unpredictable. Just going through the motions does not cut it. Even if you approach with the best of your intention, matters could backfire on you anytime. Borrowing "You might be a redneck if..." from a comedian, Jeff Foxworthy, Tomo will present behaviors of a great Scrum Master and those of a "not so good" Scrum Master. Then, he will take you through why the great Scrum Master's behaviors make her great and how they contribute to building a high performing team and helping the organization be more effective and productive. Finally, he will share tips and tricks that help Scrum Masters grow into greatness (for example, powerful questions, 3 levels of listening, facilitation tools & techniques, etc.)!

This session will give current and aspiring Scrum Masters what to focus on for career development and people in other roles a concrete idea on what qualities to look for in a Scrum Master.

There will be a handout for participants to take home with.

There are many leadership frameworks that one might use to help with growth in leadership skills, approaches, and methods. As you begin to review various frameworks, there emerge similarities that when exposed can provide further insight into your own learning. This session explores several of these frameworks, 'mashing them up' into a cohesive bigger picture. Explore MindSET to MindSIGHT to MindFULNESS!

Getting leaders to adopt an Agile Mindset doesn’t happen by sending them to training. It won't happen simply because they approved the funding to do a transformation. Many leaders need your experience and appreciation for how Agile works differently than what they may have seen in the past. Helping them build, own and progress through a backlog of system wide challenges is key to their success and the success of the teams. We will walk through some examples, create backlog items of your own and create an actionable plan to take back to our office during this workshop style session.