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.

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.

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!

Many people believe that practicing agile approaches on a distributed team is not possible, but with three mindset shifts you can achieve the benefits of agile. The first shift is managing for change through experimentation. If the team has freedom and guidance to experiment with everything they do, they can adapt their way of working. The second mindset shifts us toward communication and collaboration as emphasized by agile approaches and away from micro-silos so common with distributed teams. The third shift emphasizes a mindset focused on agile principles over practices. Most agile practices were designed with colocation in mind. Distributed teams need to consider their effective hours of overlap and adapt or create new practices based on agile and lean principles. These mindset shifts enable distributed teams to find their most successful way of delivering value.

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!

Just what exactly does an Agile Coach do? Coaches may vary in their response to this question. I would like to think that most Agile Coaches, with some variation, would be fairly consistent in how we perceive our role. However, some companies or orgs or people probably interpret the role of the Agile Coach in ways that coaches never intended.

Let’s explore some of the things that Agile Coaches have been asked to do! Are these antipatterns? Doing what needs to be done? This session will delve into the topic of the role of the Agile Coach and highlight potential challenges and possible solutions.

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.

Product development is hard. Agile certainly helps. But solving complex, meaningful problems in collaboration with other humans is tricky.

The Leadership Circle is a model for understanding how you react under stress (and why) and how you can (and do) contribute more effectively and creatively in a group. Learn how you can use this model to become more self-aware and, ultimately, less reactive and more creative.

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.

We often talk about loving our cars, our family and the latest new gadget. When was the last time you could say you loved your job or your co-workers? We have a desire to be appreciated, to be effective and even loved for what we do and more importantly for who we are. Join this talk to learn how to lead the way to show love and how to build a culture of belonging in the workplace.

Do you have a team that is struggling to complete sprints? Are you having trouble achieving multi-sprint goals? Or do you have a group of teams that aren't all pulling in the same direction? In this talk, I’ll share variations on a technique I have developed to help address each and every one of these problems.

Though the specifics vary by application, the core technique has two steps: ask individuals how confident they are that their larger team/group will hit its overall target, then use that gut confidence assessment to drive meaningful conversation. Because it is so lightweight and takes in so many perspectives, it surfaces problems earlier and over a wider range than any other technique I’ve encountered. In addition, by putting focus on what the group is trying to achieve together, it often drives an increase in true teamwork. Through presentation and interactive demonstrations, I’ll show how to use these confidence assessments to help Scrum teams hit their sprint goals; to help individuals or teams hit longer-term objectives; and to help groups of teams work more cohesively in achieving shared targets.

Join Melissa Pope, long time veteran of the traditional PMO and Colleen Johnson, industry agile expert for this practical talk on the ways to transition how you plan, budget, staff, track, and measure success. Melissa will present the traditional approach to each of these elements and Colleen will present the agile approach. Together they will share the steps to create a seamless and gradual transition to an Agile PMO.