How micro-moments, small tweaks and even a single word shape culture towards (or away from) agile ways of working.

For most organizations, embarking on an agile transformation is a daunting prospect fraught with resistance, conflict, risk and likely failure. Pete shares his experiences and stories from the roads less traveled by leaders and organizations who are shifting their cultures through these simple, yet impactful, culture hacks.

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.

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 Roadmaps for what to work on next are out of date before you can hit print.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.

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.

Team Working Agreements vs. Coaching Agreements.

Are you working with teams; be it a dev team, a leadership team, a product team, etc.? Are you aware of the impact of creating a strong team alliance? Are your team’s working agreements bulleted lists of nice thoughts, or is it an effective living structure that is honored by and challenges the team to come together at a higher level of being?

This session is for Agile coaches and leaders who want to inspire high performing teams through accountability and agreement.

In this interactive discussion we will explore alignment, agreement, and accountability in the context of a team. We will also differentiate the team’s expectations of the team coach in contrast to coaching agreements and contracts.

Together we will co-create with responsibility. This session will provide scaffolding to build a structure for creating working agreements enabling high performing teams. The components of this structure include: building a foundation platform centered around team alignment, getting clarity on who we are as individuals and how we are as a team, creating the team agreements through inquiry, and weaving the thread of team accountability throughout the process. We will also model the role of the coach as facilitator and design the team coaching contract.

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.

Lean/Agile approaches stress the importance of limiting Work-in-Progress, or WIP, to manage the flow of work. Any multi-step process, from machines on an assembly line to shoppers in a grocery store, can benefit from stopping new work when a WIP limit is reached. These work stoppages are often misunderstood as merely a necessary evil, but for us humans, they're the point! Downtime - engaging the brain's "default mode network" - is crucial for mental health, and may even be the very source of creativity. Drawing from complexity theory, neuroscience, history and experience, this talk will cover the science of the brain at rest, and explore ways to make the most of it on an Agile team.

Organizations of many sizes today use PI Planning, or some equivalent of it, to plan and align teams on a regular cadence. Could these events be running at a more optimal level for your organization? Could you use some tips to have them run more smoothly and therefore deliver more value for the time spent in these events? If you answered yes to both of these questions then this is the talk for you.

I will review some tips that have helped PI Planning events that my peers and I have done run more smoothly and with better outcomes. We will also work together as a group to come up with more great ideas that I'm sure I never even considered myself.

Broken Scrum practices limit your organization’s ability to take full advantage of the agility Scrum should bring: The development team isn’t cross-functional or self-organizing, the product owner doesn’t get value for their investment, and stakeholders and customers are left wondering when something—anything—will get delivered.

Learn how experienced Scrum masters balance the demands of these three levels of servant leadership, while removing organizational impediments and helping Scrum teams deliver real-world value.

Discover how to visualize your work, resolve impediments, and empower your teams to self-organize and deliver using advanced coaching and facilitation techniques that honor and support the Scrum values and agile principles.

Based on the book Fixing Your Scrum by Ryan Ripley and Todd Miller, these ideas and more will bring empiricim and delivery back to your Scrum practices.

Scaled Agile (SAFe) is one framework for using Agile and Lean practices in a large organization. There's a lot of moving parts to it -- by the 2020 conference, SAFe will be on version 5.0. It can be easy to allow legacy methods and minds to screw up a transformation.

We'll explore some common ways to screw it up -- and some useful ways to succeed, instead.

How many of you heard of the many Agile concepts that are out there like the Build Measure Learn methodology by Eric Ries or Start With Why by Simon Sinek and you felt that it would be beneficial if your company put it into practice? How many of you despite knowing the benefits of implementing these concepts find it difficult when trying to put it into practice? In my talk, I will share how at iPrice we take these well known concepts and turn them into practices and how these concepts have helped us transform the company to achieve triple the success in a year.

In this session I will explore questions that can be asked and answered in a team setting that will provide insights into how the team operates, how much team is in the team, and identify potential cultural/ systemic counter incentives that are preventing the team form forming.

Part 1 - Turn the Dysfunctions into critical functions - just like in the book.

There are five layers that build upon each other:

Top: A focus on collective results

Active and Transparent Accountability

Commitment to team goals

Healthy Conflict

Vulnerability Based Trust

Part II: Discussion and case studies in which each of these team competencies is discussed to the 5-3-5 of scrum

How do they show up in the 3 roles/What anti-patterns do we see/ what are the outside forces driving this behavior

How do they show up in the 5 ceremonies/ What anti-patterns do we see/ what are the outside forces driving this behavior

How so do they show up in the 3 artifacts/ What anti-patterns do we see/ what are the outside forces driving this behavior

Part III and Closing: We will provide a free set of survey questions that can be used to measure team dynamics in a scrum team delivering software.

One of the simplest, yet all-too-often challenging, factors to help unleash high-performing teams is clarity of priorities. Alignment on the factors that drive value for the organization is a necessary first step. Utilizing a straightforward prioritization approach that enables comparison of varying types of initiatives removes impediments so teams can focus on a clear set of goals without the distractions of 'shoulder tap' requests and ongoing battles over 'what is the highest value thing we should be working on?'.

Agile Maturity is both an idea and a metric. It’s an idea that should be top of mind with all Agile leaders across an enterprise. The idea is thinking about how to move individuals, teams, and organizations up the maturity scale in order to achieve higher levels of quality, consistency, and predictability with team performance and product delivery.

It’s also a metric, meaning you can measure maturity. The first step is to establish a baseline, and then track it periodically in order to assess what has changed, which then dictates needed coaching and opportunities to improve.

This presentation on Achieving Agile Actualization is an exploration of how to move your teams up the maturity matrix to higher levels of performance. It is modeled after Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but applied to Agile. Maslow’s original model included 5 phases or states, from the lowest basic physiological need, maturing through psychological needs and then to self-actualization as the pinnacle of personal development and enlightenment.

Applying this same 5-level scale to Agile maturity creates a model for companies to reference in order to measure their own maturity of different parts of their Agile platform and employee engagement, as a way to then identify both strengths and weaknesses they can address. Starting with a baseline maturity level creates a starting point for targeted energy to increase maturity and by extension, many other company metrics important to both internal and external stakeholders.