Many of you are familiar with a Kanban board, but it is merely a tool that's part of a method. Join Colleen as she explains how the Kanban method of work management can help you delivery software consistently.

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!

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.

Getting started can seem overwhelming, but there is hope! Join us as we explore how teams have made the shift within their organization to prioritize inclusion and diversity from the ground up. Human Inclusive’s Lia James and Christopher Guest will moderate an interactive discussion with Mo Abdullah, Founder of Culture Energized, Natalie Bonifede D&I at Pivotal, Lauren Burgess, Founder and CEO of Garden, Inc and Dirt Coffee Bar. We will learn how they have shifted team culture to implement inclusive, belonging, and diversity initiatives. We will explore how they’ve made changes, what they've learned, and how others can make a similar impact on their own teams. Together we will learn:

• How they got started and keep their teams accountable
• What were their biggest challenges and hard-to-learn lessons
• How to approach team dynamics differently to empower diversity to thrive
• Best practices for getting everyone on board and start the process

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?

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.”

Effective facilitation is the WD-40 of the agile practitioner’s toolbox. Without effective facilitation, meetings squeak along, skip a gear, or worst of all, grind to a complete halt. But with good facilitation, teams find deep democracy, working collaboratively towards team-defined goals.

In this talk, Erin, Yogita, and Trey will discuss and model effective facilitation techniques that facilitators can use to ensure that all voices are heard. We will lead everyone through a point-by-point understanding of what a good facilitator is, the role the facilitator plays within a group, and why teams need to hear all voices. We talk about building and supporting psychological safety, facilitation methods to acknowledge dominant participants while encouraging quieter voices, and how to deliver impact feedback in a way that supports deep democracy. Lastly, we talk about what to do with teams that have achieved a deeper democracy and how to follow up with participants once they have left the room. This is a learning session, but we also leave room to practice new skills so that everyone leaves with something new for their toolbox.

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!

When we are on the floor & wearing the coaching hat - we are dealing with 3 things -

1. Ourself (Coach himself)
2. Person (Coachee)
3. Problem

According to Chad W. Hall, there are also three levels of coaching which he describes in Coach The Person Not The Problem.

1. Beginner: Coach the Problem
2. Better: Coach the Problem through the Person
3. Transformational: Coach the Person for Internal Change

It is very important to understand the 3 levels of coaching. Many of us we operate at level 1.

We will share some recent practical & experential examples/learnings which emphasizes more on coaching at level 2 & 3.

Note - Inspired from the book "Coach the Person Not the Problem: A Simple Guide to Coaching for Transformation - By Chad Hall"

Portfolio Management is quickly evolving away from annual planning, traditional project intake and subsequent status reporting to rapid ideation and innovation with better decision making. The highest performing organizations are focused on hypothesis driven development with a focus on low-cost, incremental learnings to deliver against better business outcomes. Join Tina as she shares how organizations have successfully made the shift to Lean Portfolio Management while driving transparency and visibility at scale. Learn how the principles of Value Engineering will increase alignment across IT, Engineering and the overall Enterprise.

Agile is a set of values and a mindset. As such, it can be hard to answer questions that leadership often asks. These questions include: How agile are we? Are we getting more agile? What are the growth opportunities for our team?

Many organizations use assessments to determine their level of agility. This session will introduce several assessment approaches and tools. Like medicine, when used incorrectly, the results can be toxic. We will explore the merits, potential uses, and possible downsides of each approach.

You will leave this session understanding more about your options, as well as insights for framing an assessment that fit your needs best when trying to measure your organization's culture and teams.

Look up the definition of Scrum Master and you may read the Scrum Master role is responsible for “process authority.” But what exactly does this mean? Now imagine working with a team new to Scrum and immediately sensing unease and even a touch of hostility as team members begin to ask: “Does this mean the Scrum Master is my boss,” or “Do we have to listen to her?” The word authority may not be the best choice of words out there. Nonetheless, it’s not difficult to come across, and can often create a lot of angst and confusion.

I worked on a new Scrum project where the project teams were confused (and some concerned) about the “process authority” definition and the overall responsibility of the Scrum Master. As a result, they were slightly hostile to the Scrum Master role, and untrusting of the Scrum Master’s responsibility. The Scrum Master needed to gain the team’s trust, but how could this be done in such an environment? I was the project’s agile coach and needed to diffuse the confusion and better the working environment as quickly as possible. My journey started with this interactive presentation and discussion that many found helpful.

This presentation explores topics to help ease the tension and confusion surrounding the Scrum Master role that teams unfamiliar with Scrum may have. These topics include…

• What it means (and does not mean) when Scrum Master’s have “process authority”
• Responsibilities and expectations of the Scrum Master compared to the expectations of other roles on the team
• How different leadership styles play a role into servant leadership
• The importance of trust in a Scrum Master/team relationship

The presentation uses real-time audience feedback to further explore these topics. Audience members will provide answers to questions provided throughout the presentation, so we can explore members’ thoughts, opinions, and experiences they have had with Scrum Masters.