Conference Time
Local Time

Day One

Wed, May 29
Timezone: America/Denver (MDT)
06:00
07:45
09:00
09:15
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    Charles Vogl

    Charles Vogl - Creating a Culture of Belonging: Principles for Every Leader

    schedule  09:15 - 10:15 AM MDT place Centennial Ballroom people 314 Interested star_halfRate

    Strong cultures help people support one another, share their passions, and achieve big goals. And such communities aren’t just happy accidents - they can be purposefully cultivated, whether they’re in a company, a faith institution, or among friends and enthusiasts.

    But what makes a belonging culture? How is community changing in America? Author and executive consultant Charles Vogl discusses these questions and introduces fundamental ideas from his book, “The Art of Community”. With wisdom distilled from 3,000 years of spiritual tradition, Vogl will help leaders build loyalty, strengthen identity, and create meaning within their culture.

    We will discuss

    • 7 elements to create belonging
    • How to make culture meaningful
    • How to attract the right members
10:15
10:30
11:30
12:45
13:45
14:00
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    Thomas Perry

    Thomas Perry - Agile Management: Dealing with Impediments

    schedule  02:00 - 03:00 PM MDT place Centennial A people 66 Interested star_halfRate

    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.

  • schedule  02:00 - 03:00 PM MDT place Centennial B people 134 Interested star_halfRate

    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.

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    Adam Anderson

    Adam Anderson - Delivering Business Value Faster for Data Focused Teams

    schedule  02:00 - 03:00 PM MDT place Centennial C people 27 Interested star_halfRate

    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.

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    Charles Vogl

    Charles Vogl - Creating a Culture of Belonging: Workshop

    schedule  02:00 - 05:00 PM MDT place Mineral ABC people 79 Interested star_halfRate

    Do you want to attract and retain the best talent – something that even the most prestigious organizations struggle with? Millennials, employees of color and women too often feel disconnected, unwelcome and even lonely inside the most high profile companies. Culture problems grow expensive and painful.

    Research shows that the most productive teams share one trait – emotional safety. And yet, most managers have no idea how to create this.

    In this workshop participants will learn tools to build cultures of connection, trust and safety. Each principle is distilled from 3,000 years of spiritual tradition and can be applied to secular organizations or profit-driven companies.

    This workshop introduces principles distilled from 3,000 years of spiritual tradition to help leaders build loyalty, strengthen identity, and create meaning within their culture.

    The workshop is broken into two 90 minute sections separated by a minimum 15 minute break. In each session participants will break into small groups to explore how belonging remains relevant to their own life and success.

    The first session introduces fundamental ideas from Charles Vogl's book. This includes defining “community” and understanding how belonging culture is changing in America.

    In the second session participants will discuss with one another about how to apply the fundamental principles to their specific cultures. Vogl will guide the group experience according to topics relevant to the day’s participants. This can include conversations about envisioning their community’s aspirations, noticing the current inspiration and commitment, and naming principles that can be used to strengthen their real world cultures.

    Participants will clarify what missing principles could take their community to the next level of belonging. Leadership will leave with concrete next steps to create stronger belonging for themselves and others whom they want to bring together for enrichment.

  • schedule  02:00 - 03:00 PM MDT place Mineral DE + Corridor people 92 Interested star_halfRate

    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.

  • schedule  02:00 - 05:00 PM MDT place Mineral FG people 66 Interested star_halfRate
    With Business Agility, we talk about innovation and failure. What we don’t talk about are the head games that keep us from innovating. We don't talk about the internal dialogues that hold us back from taking risks. Imposter Syndrome is stealing too many of our innovative ideas.
    What if the key to fierce business agility is embracing the concept that people are more innovative when operating in their authentic voice? If that's the case, then we should strive to create a psychologically safe space for them to uncover their authentic voice. This will naturally unleash the innovative ideas already within them.
    Let’s break open the conversation around Imposter Syndrome and Business Agility. It could be the key to unlocking innovation.
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    Sandi Ruther

    Sandi Ruther - How to Present Like a Pro - Even Though Your Knees Are Shaking!

    schedule  02:00 - 03:00 PM MDT place Granite ABC people 60 Interested star_halfRate

    Do you love speaking? If so, this session is probably not for you! If the thought of speaking or presenting makes you feel uncomfortable (or maybe even a little sick ...), then this session is for you! You will learn somatic techniques for managing fear and anxiety. You will also learn some simple strategies for organizing your content so it is easier to present.

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    Mark Grove

    Mark Grove / Trent Hone - Kanban in Action: Thoughtfully Observing, Creating, and Discussing Flow

    schedule  02:00 - 05:00 PM MDT place Capitol 4 + Corridor people 103 Interested star_halfRate

    You have been hired to help lead a team just starting out with Kanban. They have been struggling with their implementation and are looking forward to your expert guidance, advice, and leadership. It’s your first day and you just walked into the team room to look at their board. You want to make smart observations and have meaningful conversations so you can trigger improvements. The team starts assembling for their daily standup meeting and you want to provoke a thoughtful conversation once it ends.

    What comments would you make? What questions would you ask?

    This two-part interactive workshop begins with a detailed look at how to interpret Kanban boards and ask thoughtful questions so that you can improve the work of your teams. We will provide an overview of the Kanban Method and then proceed through a series of eight short exercises that will give you an opportunity to review and interpret various Kanban board configurations with other attendees at your table. After a short break, part two of the session now puts the attendees in the driver’s seat to create their own board configurations. We provide eight business scenario exercises and ask the attendees how they would go about configuring their Kanban board given the unique system constraints for each scenario.

    Both exercises will increase your understanding of Kanban systems, give you practice interpreting and creating board configurations, and provide you with approaches for meaningful engagement. They are great for aspiring coaches, managers, and leaders who want to have more valuable conversations with their teams and improve Kanban implementations.

    Please Note: we can tailor this workshop to be either 180 or 120 minutes.

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    Lieschen Gargano Quilling

    Lieschen Gargano Quilling / William Kammersell - The Art of Agile Conflict

    schedule  02:00 - 05:00 PM MDT place Capital 5-7 people 118 Interested star_halfRate
    Communication is the difference in valuing individuals over process. Communication is fluid and happens when a need arises. If we’re not ready to accept the conflict that often comes with it, we may fall back on process, ultimately leading to the dark side of the waterfall. Mastering the art of Agile conflict elevates our team’s innovation, delivery, satisfaction, and ultimately results.
    In this interactive workshop, you’ll learn to:
    -Identify your personal conflict style
    -Understand the styles of others
    -Assess the root causes of conflict
    -Determine why persistent conflict reemerges
    -Be courageous and welcome the conflict that will strengthen your Agile teams
15:00
15:30
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    Andrew Elliott

    Andrew Elliott - This is How Your Product Dies (and how to save it)

    schedule  03:30 - 04:30 PM MDT place Centennial A people 63 Interested star_halfRate

    Product development is very much dominated by the idea of thinking forward. What are we doing next? What does next year's product roadmap look like? How many features are we launching in Q4? All good, valid questions for any software company.

    However, this idea of always looking towards the "next thing" leaves little time for reflection during the product planning and development process and can often lead to products failing to reach their full potential.

    By design, the 3 Panel Feature Evaluation is a super simple framework designed to help provide teams the ability to look at the feature area in question in three ways: before improvement, during improvement and post improvement. This 3 panel flow is designed to make sure that the user remains front and center during the planning and development process with an eye towards the pre and post experience that so often gets lost during development.

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    Peter McGraw

    Peter McGraw - Shtick to Business: How the masters of comedy can help you succeed in a serious world

    schedule  03:30 - 04:30 PM MDT place Centennial B people 121 Interested star_halfRate

    What can you learn about professional success from Chris Rock, Joan Rivers, and Charlie Chaplin? Just ask a behavioral scientist who teaches MBAs by day and decodes comedy by night.

    Dr. Peter McGraw—a business school professor, co-author of The Humor Code, and founder of the Humor Research Lab (aka HuRL)—translates the perspectives and practices of the world’s funniest people into powerful prescriptions for professional success.

    Drawing on real-world case studies from his global travels to crack the humor code, cutting-edge behavioral economics research, and his own comedy successes (and failures), McGraw reveals how the perspectives and practices of stand-ups, improvisers, writers, directors, clowns, and other comedy misfits can help you live a more successful professional life.

    And you will never have to tell a joke.

    McGraw pulls back the curtain on the craft of comedy to give you a glimpse into a mysterious world that will surprise you. Lessons include:

    • How a simple “101” comedy trick can help you overcome biases, improve your brand, and identify new business opportunities.
    • Why Nike and other innovative brands are behaving like Sarah Silverman, Andy Kaufman, and Joan Rivers in order to stand apart from the competition.
    • How the habits of Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, and other great comedy writers can be used to improve productivity—and well-being.
    • What Bill Murray’s 1-800 number illustrates about how saying “no” can be more important than saying “yes.”
    • And why $50 is not too much to pay for a notebook…if you actually write in it.
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    Zach Bonaker

    Zach Bonaker - Making a Positive First Impression with Agile Hiring and On-Boarding

    schedule  03:30 - 04:30 PM MDT place Centennial C people 50 Interested star_halfRate

    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.

  • schedule  03:30 - 04:30 PM MDT place Mineral DE + Corridor people 69 Interested star_halfRate

    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!

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    Adrienne Rinaldi

    Adrienne Rinaldi - Colorado 14ers & Story Sizing Workshop

    schedule  03:30 - 04:30 PM MDT place Granite ABC people 69 Interested star_halfRate

    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!

16:30
17:00
Thu, Jan 1
Timezone: ()

Day Two

Thu, May 30
08:00
08:45
09:00
  • schedule  09:00 - 10:00 AM MDT place Centennial B people 90 Interested star_halfRate

    Too much design up front and you are bumping into the design all of the time (and losing time). Not enough design and your system can crumble in reality. How do you blend architecture so you have the right decisions at the right time, and give them enough due dilligence? How do you embrace cloud and microservices and not risk getting into different failure scenarios or overly complicated maintenance and ripple effects?

    In this session we will walk through visualizations that help teams blend product thinking with architecture. Along the way, we will look at microservices and domain modeling as well as chaos engineering and fault tolerance - blending all of these into a context that is consumable by all and gives the right emphasis at the right time.

    Leave this session with simple visualizations and approaches that you can apply immediately to start blending product with architecture, especially if you are looking to run in a cloud world.

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    Christen McLemore

    Christen McLemore - Building a Leadership Backlog

    schedule  09:00 - 10:00 AM MDT place Mineral DE + Corridor people 123 Interested star_halfRate

    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.

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    Erika Lenz

    Erika Lenz - Building safety as a servant leader: navigating conflict in a way that improves your team

    schedule  09:00 - 10:00 AM MDT place Granite ABC people 93 Interested star_halfRate

    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.

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    Shannon Mason

    Shannon Mason / Val Zolyak - Fostering the Beginner's Mind in Legacyland

    schedule  09:00 - 10:00 AM MDT place Capitol 2 & 3 people 40 Interested star_halfRate

    Often the landscape of exploration and freedom is reserved for "greenfield". So much so, that we refer to established markets as "brownfield". What happened? When did the grass die out? At what point did the fruited plains become a wasteland of Mad Max resource clawing? Probably when your organization stopped engaging in novel ways to explore continuous product improvement- or worse!- segmented out an entire division that gets to go do "cool things".

    If constraints create creative solutions and your product is already a necessity, our challenge is to forget everything we know about how the products we build got to their current state but instead continuously reevaluate their fit. This action is harder done than said. Where do you start?

    Changing legacy products is hard, transforming them is even harder. Over the last two years, we set out to do just this and we would love to share what we learned about this process, the skills you will need, and the challenge of repetition, failure, and human dynamics in uprooting.

    Learn how a tenacious group of humans attempted to let go of everything that had gotten them to success until that point and rather than bury their heads in the sand- wrapped their arms around reality.

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    James Gifford

    James Gifford - 5 Metrics to Create Safety and High Performing Teams

    schedule  09:00 - 10:00 AM MDT place Capitol 5-7 people 151 Interested star_halfRate

    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.

09:20
10:00
10:20
  • schedule  10:20 - 11:20 AM MDT place Centennial B people 113 Interested star_halfRate

    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.

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    Matthieu Cornillon

    Matthieu Cornillon - Matthieu's Playbook: Tried and True Patterns for Kickstarting Scrum Teams New and Old

    schedule  10:20 - 11:20 AM MDT place Mineral DE + Corridor people 80 Interested star_halfRate

    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.

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    Scott Showalter

    Scott Showalter - F.A.I.L.— Fearless Adventures In Learning: 6 Games to Explore the Value Behind Failure

    schedule  10:20 - 11:20 AM MDT place Granite ABC people 76 Interested star_halfRate

    This fast-paced and energizing post-lunch session looks at six team-based improv & collaboration games that help teams embrace "failing successfully." Rather than glorify failure, we should understand that its power is not in failing alone, but rather the learning that emerges from it and the power that such learning has to unlock otherwise unforeseen opportunities. Our goal is to relinquish our fears of failure, break us out of our comfort zone and accept the prospect of failure with the ultimate goal of using it to better understand what success looks like, and how the struggle and pain of failure, and the learning that accompanies it, opens our mind to new possibilities we wouldn't have otherwise seen. These games create comfort with failure and build up our actionable learning muscle (insight synthesis, etc) that should accompany every unsuccessful attempt at success. Failure and learning for the win!

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    Marianne Graham

    Marianne Graham / Lieschen Gargano Quilling - Quarterly Planning for Product People

    schedule  10:20 - 11:20 AM MDT place Capitol 2 & 3 people 119 Interested star_halfRate

    Quarterly Planning is an important ceremony for many agile groups since it helps creates alignment within a team and organization by creating short term targets for everyone to rally around. This ceremony can be especially important when you have many teams working towards the same objectives since it requires coordinating schedules and creating goals within each team that drive toward the same mission. As product owners and managers, it is our responsibility to bring the customers’ perspective into planning events to ensure that the right work is being prioritized. But gaining alignment and helping our teams develop and execute these plans can be challenging, which means we have a lot of work to do in pre-planning and during planning events to help make things successful. In this talk, we will be covering the key activities around PI Planning plus some of the best lessons we’ve learned from coordinating actions around risks and dependencies to facilitating prioritization conversations to communicating how team goals contribute to business objectives.

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    Richard Dolman

    Richard Dolman - Key strategies for influencing leadership to let go of the traditional "waterfall" approach

    schedule  10:20 - 11:20 AM MDT place Capitol 5-7 people 113 Interested star_halfRate

    A common question - "How do we even begin to change our traditional waterfall approach to Agile?" – may invoke responses such as, "we just need training", "create self-organizing teams", "setup a transition team", “SAFe”, etc. But those don’t get to the heart of the question. We need to get leaders to understand the “Why” and the "How" in order to help insure a successful transition and provide the proper support for their teams.

    This session directly answers both the “Why?” and "How?" questions, by focusing on 2 key concepts and concrete practices, that leaders/managers need to learn and apply.

    To do this, we start by helping them understand the context for agility and equipping them with new "agile glasses" that change the way they see and think about Agile. We equip them with 2 new "lenses" through which they can:

    1. Visualize the problem domain(s) that exist in their environment and understand the relative level of complexity and uncertainty represented in their projects or product delivery efforts, using the Cynefin framework and VUCA modeling. Understanding these can help to provide better context for decision-making and mitigate the risk of taking a "one size fits all" approach to product or project delivery.
    2. Visualize a multi-dimensional planning model, often referred to as the "5 Levels of Planning", that breaks the pattern of big up-front planning and wasteful change control processes, common to waterfall, by reinforcing the practice of continuous planning. This centers on getting them comfortable with key techniques associated with an adaptive approach, rather than a predictive approach to planning.

    Many leaders view Agile as simply something that their teams need to learn and/or something that training alone will solve. The reality is that most agile initiatives fail due to a lack of leadership engagement (connection) because leaders aren't given the knowledge or tools to help them adapt.

    If this describes you or your managers/leaders, then this session will help answer the question of “how do we get started…?”

11:20
12:40
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    Colleen Johnson

    Colleen Johnson - Intro to Kanban: More than a Board

    schedule  12:40 - 01:40 PM MDT place Centennial B people 130 Interested star_halfRate

    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.

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    Chris Shinkle

    Chris Shinkle - Introducing the Roadmap Wall: Building Alignment and Buy-In at All Levels of Your Organization

    schedule  12:40 - 01:40 PM MDT place Mineral DE + Corridor people 207 Interested star_halfRate


    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.

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    Josh Maletz

    Josh Maletz / James Brayton - Accelerated Learning with Rapid Prototypes and DSLs

    schedule  12:40 - 01:40 PM MDT place Capitol 2 & 3 people 51 Interested star_halfRate

    You have created a story map with your business partners and defined an MVP. Your development team has started discussing architecture and how the system might evolve. You define spikes to answer some questions and validate your assumptions. How long does it take to build the walking skeleton and validate your spikes? Is your system designed to be able to give you the answers you need to see if the desired outcome has been attained? Are the models used to build the solution space useful? Is the resulting architecture effective? Does it bend?

    This talk, targeted at all development team members, will provide methods for creating rapid prototypes of even complex systems to explore how useful the models are and how effective your architecture is. We will show how to use Domain Specific Languages (DSLs), templates, and code generation to rapidly create prototypes and test systems to enable accelerated learning.

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    Yvonne Chen

    Yvonne Chen - Psychological Safety: What is it, and How to Actually Create It

    schedule  12:40 - 01:40 PM MDT place Capitol 5-7 people 143 Interested star_halfRate

    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.

13:00
13:40
14:00
15:00
15:20
  • Added to My Schedule
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    Em Campbell-Pretty

    Em Campbell-Pretty - What do you do when you have everything to lose? Be Fierce!

    schedule  03:20 - 04:20 PM MDT place Centennial Ballroom people 282 Interested star_halfRate

    We all go to conferences, attend meetups, read books, and subscribe to blogs. Everyday we hear new ideas but how many do we actually act on?

    When you are thrown in the deep end of the pool and you don’t know how to swim – it can be a scary time. As a leader, it can be easy to try a radical new idea especially when you feel you have nothing to lose. But what if you have everything to lose? Fear can be paralyzing. It is the Fierce leader that ‘steps into the arena and dares to be different’.

    Attend this keynote to explore how Fierce leaders can survive and thrive by letting go of everything they think they have to lose and taking a radical leap into the unknown – with or without a net!

16:30
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