What is a Community of Practice (CoP) and how can it benefit you?

A community of practice is a group of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do, and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. Engaging this way with your peers stimulates a growth mindset among the participants. This session will introduce the practice of building community around an agile role, as well as answer the following questions:

- How does a CoP provide value to the participants (Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches. Product Owners, Agile Developers, etc.) and to their organizations?

- What are some different approaches to creating a CoP?

- How does one get started?

Lynn Winterboer will tell us about different types of Communities of Practice and share her experiences with several CoPs she’s been involved with over the years. She will engage session attendees in discussion about their own experiences with communities of practice, as well as provide guidelines you can use to start your own community.

Lynn Winterboer is an agile educator, coach and mentor. She teaches and coaches data-focused teams on how to effectively apply agile principles and practices to their work. Lynn has been working on agile teams since the mid-1990’s when she was a software developer in the telecom industry. Since then, Lynn has worked as product owner, scrum master, business analyst, and tester as well. She co-chaired Mile High Agile in 2016 and 2017, and remains an active member of the Agile Denver community.

How do you grow a continuously learning organization? If certifications and wikis were enough, organizations would be crushing it. In this session we look at how we learn in complex domains - focusing on tacit vs explicit knowledge; context learning; and growing coaches and teachers.

This session is an evolution of our talks around growing Dojos (though awareness of dojos is not necessary for this talk).

In this session we will look at the challenges facing organizations and people today trying to learn new skills (committment, context, multitude of needs).

From there we will look at how we learn exploring explicit vs tacit knowledge.

We will wrap up with tangible ways you can start growing an organization that continuous learns - looking at addressing the whole value stream to provide context and growing an organization that has internal coaches and teachers (along with models for that).

Am I doing anything right? It’s a question, most professionals – especially leaders – have asked themselves at least once in their career (for some of us on a regular basis). Obviously, the answer is yes but that doesn’t mean the weight and pressures don’t occasionally start to tip the scale in the wrong direction mentally. As leaders, we spend most of our time focused on the challenges of others, of teams, and of the organization. Yet, when do we take care of ourselves as leaders and the problems we directly face? In this session, expect raw honesty of acknowledging the common patterns of challenges leaders face such as 'but I am the expert', 'am I adding value", etc. For each common challenge, you'll walk away with numerous tools and concepts to help you be the best leader you can be.

How can an Agile Coach figure out when an Agile “Transformation” is going wrong? Are there signs that they might see, heed, and take action upon? Of course, there are!

Hindsight is 20/20, but in the moment, these warning signs can be hard to see. Let’s explore some of the more common, and frightening, warning signs that your Agile “Transformation” might be exhibiting. We will discuss transformation provider types, frameworks, keywords, and other anti-patterns that might be signs that THE END IS NIGH.

This session will review common themes and help familiarize you with the warning signs. Armed with this new knowledge, you will be able to plan as appropriate, to help navigate your organization through potential impending doom.

How can you overcome the resistance and roadblocks to Agility deployed by your organization’s cultural ‘anti-bodies’? How can you move past Scrum-erfall, Wagile, Fragile, Scrum-But, or Dark Scrum? Learn how to assess your organization’s culture using the Competing Values Framework, and how to avoid much of the resistance to Agile by aligning your strategy with the organization’s established cultural values. In order to achieve sustainable Agility, though, you may need some shifts in culture. We will learn a framework for gently nudging your culture: the V2MOM (Vision, Values, Measures, Obstacles, & Methods). V2MOM is a practical technique that can be used by anyone at any level within an organization.

Have you ever seen an agile team that is "just going through the motions" and wondered how many more of those teams are out there in the world? There have been numerous articles in the past year about how agile doesn't work. The examples those articles give are all teams looking like they are doing various agile practices, mostly Scrum, yet for some reason no one is happy, productivity is down and agile gets flushed down the toilet. Agile is NOT easy, but it is also not just a set of practices to be executed. Agile was created to make the lives of software developers and their customers better. There is clearly something missing when that isn't happening.

So what is the answer? A lot of expensive research studies have been done, and the answer is the same regardless of industry or methodology. Employee engagement is ALWAYS the number one reason for success or failure. According to Gartner, only 32% of the workforce in the United States is considered "engaged" at work. Worse yet, 17% are actively disengaged! Think about that for a moment. 1 of every 6 people in the average company are actively disengaged from their work. The average Scrum Team has 6 people plus a ScrumMaster and a Product Owner. This means the average team has at least one member that is actively disengaged. Oh, and to make this worse, one disengaged person will dramatically reduce the effectiveness of an entire team!

This interactive presentation is all about exploring the mysterious topic of engagement. We'll explore primarily in 3 areas:

1. What is meant by employee engagement?
2. How does engagement magnify the results achieved with agility?
3. What can we do to increase engagement on our agile teams?

You will learn through interacting with others in exercises designed to help us all see the nuances of engagement in practice. You will be challenged to explore your own mindset about work and both how that is holding you back and how it is enabling your success. Finally, you will take home valuable insights about how the interaction between play, purpose, potential, small wins and connection increase engagement, while emotional pressure, economic pressure and inertia kill engagement. Those insights will also include specific actionable things you can do to help increase positive engagement factors and reduce negative engagement factors.

Agility by itself is insufficient. Let's explore how to combine agility with engagement and really change the world!

So you’ve optimized Kanban at the team level but true to the Theory of Constraints its uncovered new challenges. Cross team dependencies block progress for one team at the expense of another. Individual backlogs create competing priorities for critical resources. Roadmaps for what to work on next are out of date before you can hit print.

Sounds like you need to expand your Kanban. While this may seem like the solution to all the same problems you had at the team level, lets dig into what patterns are different at the portfolio level. Soloed team expertise, fear and hidden work, lack of visibility across projects, and optimization for one problem without regard for another. But as the system matures you will see status meetings disappear, impromptu gatherings around the board, organizing around the highest priority work and more informed decision making.

A midwestern startup incubator was developing and launching multiple products and companies with a single development team. But how to do this AND maintain business agility? This session demonstrates how a disciplined software design/architecture methodology, integrated with modern lean development principles, enabled this team to maintain the quality and velocity of feature development.

This session will be a case study on our experience trying to integrate tools and techniques from both lean practices and software engineering to improve our ability to effectively manage complexity and achieve more predictable outcomes and quality.

If your development teams have struggled with successfully balancing agile methods with software architecture and engineering best practices, then this session will provide an example that you can use as a guide in your own journey.

Unhealthy workplace drama lowers trust and creates a culture of learned helplessness, doing the bare minimum, meetings-for-the-sake-of-meetings, misalignment, etc. The Drama Triangle is an evidence-based model that describes the root causes of such dysfunction. Luckily, there are things you can learn to break the pattern, with spectacular results for yourself, your team, and your entire organization. The "Breaking Out of the Drama Triangle" workshop introduces you to these basic concepts with some practical takeaways you can apply immediately.

We have all heard of Tech Debt, and we're probably terrified of building so much debt that our team stops being able to deliver. However, a less commonly discussed, but just as powerful issue also exists - Feature Debt. Feature Debt is simply the accrued cost of constantly adding new functionality into your product or system instead of building better, more complete solutions. At best you have more expensive product delivery and, at worst, you run the risk of losing your customers and your team because of Feature Debt. The number of features that can ultimately cause Feature Debt will differ for each organization given different resources, velocity, architecture, etc., but none are immune to building too much. For the purposes of this discussion, I will use the term "feature" to be functionality, both big and small, that is a new and/or separate capability.

We go to school to increase our learning and solve problems. We enter the workforce with the expectation of increasing our skills to be the “go to” problem solver. Over time, we have received a very clear message: become a problem-solving expert to be promoted and valuable in organizations. This expert mindset often crashes into the concept of self-organizing teams. Can the expert on a team succeed? Can the expert lead a team? The challenge is that while agile organizations want high-performance teams, we have encountered team after team struggling because of perceived conflicting perspectives: be the expert – but be cross functional, be the expert – but share ownership, be the expert – but be collaborative, be the expert – but your team is accountable. In this session, expect challenge the reasons, personal value, and consequences of the expert role within a team. You’ll walk away with a technique that increases your understanding and appreciation for the value of not quickly fixing it yourself.

Based on the work of best-selling leadership author, Steve Farber, this powerful and transformational experience explores the key tenets of the Extreme Leadership Framework—LEAP: Cultivating Love, Generating Energy, Inspiring Audacity, and Providing Proof—and guides you in applying them to your personal and professional leadership challenges.

What is constraining your organizational or team performance? Is it poor deployment practices, bad product ownership, inattention to outcomes, silo’d team structure, geographical distribution or something else? We will talk about a tool—interaction maps—that will help you answer this crucial question as well as provide some strategies to addressing the problem. As a result of the presentation you will learn how to:

• Identify crucial interactions that govern your group performance
• Discover disconnects that impede performance
• Address underlying causes of disconnects

The audience for this talk includes for leaders, facilitators (SMs, RTEs), customer proxies (POs, PMs) and coaches.

So, you’ve been certified as a ScrumMaster or have accepted the role.
For some time, you’ve been in the rhythm of facilitating events, ensuring artifacts are in a good state and actively supporting the team.

You’re considered a mentor, a coach, a facilitator and a servant-leader. Yet, you’re now wondering “how do I take it to the next level?”

Beyond the day-to-day Scrum activities, a Scrum Master’s toolkit will contain various facilitation tools, teaching techniques, systemic understanding, exercises and practicing certain qualities. Over time, this toolkit will continue evolve and grow. That’s continuous improvement after all!

In this hands-on circuit training style workshop, come explore various techniques, qualities and tools that a ScrumMaster has in their toolkit to engage their teams in fun and interactive ways.
You’ll learn and practice key elements of each technique to help cultivate camaraderie, provide clarity and increase the collaboration of your teams.

You’ll not only enhance your learning, but also find ways to motivate your teams to improve interactions that lead to self-organization and the enthusiasm to take themselves to the next level.

How you do anything is how you do everything, including how you get to Carnegie Hall?

Practice, Practice, Practice is an interactive conversation for Agile coaches and leaders who want to set themselves apart.

As the number of Agile coaches grows, the bubble of average agile performers is increasing rapidly. However, only a small percentage of Agilist are moving to the upper end of the performance scale.

This session aims to help shift the balance by providing a simple strategy to help Agile coaches rise to their potential. We will do this by discussing the benefits of regular practice and exploring three specific practice strategies; Micro, Deliberate, and Guided.

Participants will gain a working understanding of these three models and will be able to incorporate them into their Agile journey.

Because how you show up impacts your performance and the success of your teams. How you practice determines how you show up.

Culture is listed in many surveys as one of the biggest barriers organizations have in adopting Agile frameworks. While it is true that a culture can be a blocker for change, culture can also be used to help accelerate adoption and transformation. Being able to identify and understand how culture is used at your organization is an important first step in your Agile framework adoption.

Learn some background in various types of culture, including how culture impacts an organization’s performance. As it turns out, there may even be multiple cultures existing at the same time in your organization. Additionally, culture may come in various forms at different levels in the organization, which can further challenge your implementation approach. Through a blend of discussion and interactive work with your fellow session attendees, see how you can determine which culture(s) are present at your company and what you might be able to do harness it to make shift happen.

In this session, you’ll learn about one team’s struggle to improve collaboration and how they sought to shorten cycle time by carefully crafting an experiment with an Andon Cord. The Andon Cord is a Toyota innovation designed to empower front-line employees to recognize issues, initiate a stoppage of work, and work together as a team to quickly identify a path forward. The emergency cable strung above assembly lines became a symbol of the Toyota Way, and has widely been copied throughout the auto industry and beyond.

You’ll be introduced to metrics that show a surprising correlation between collaboration through Andon Cord pulls and Cycle Time!

Some of the same mindset and techniques we use for effective strategy and purpose deployment in our organizations can be used to change our own behavior, change the culture and beliefs we create for ourselves. (After all, we often define organizational culture as how we behave when no one else is watching, or the sum of all our collective behaviors...) Come to this short workshop for tools and examples in using agile planning for effective personal behavioral change, and change the system... by changing yourself.

Agile transformations are all too frequently let by those who impose change on others. That style of transformation is a weak transformation: the change doesn't stick once the instigator is gone. In order for an organization to achieve meaningful change, those leading the transformation need to be transformed themselves first. Real, persistent change begins with personal transformation. The time has come for us as transformation agents to help each other become the change that we want to see in others.

In this talk we explore techniques for assessing areas for personal change that are congruent with larger change we are leading. We review techniques for building measurable ways of assessing the progress of our personal change, and how that helps us understand opportunities and weaknesses in our larger organizational context. Finally we review mechanisms for sharing our own journey through storytelling and other means.

Please join me as we seek to demonstrate the change that we want in others - in ourselves.