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).

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.

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 struggled to gain buy-in from your boss, a stakeholder or an executive for a key direction or product decision? Do you have good ideas, but find that no one is listening? In this 90-minute workshop, you'll learn how to meet executives on their level, build rapport by using their language, and create an elevator pitch to gain buy-in for your ideas. You'll leave this workshop with a strategy to analyze stakeholder needs, a formula that lays out information in a way that grabs and keeps executive attention, an elevator pitch you can use in your work and an action plan for delivering your pitch successfully.

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.

Saturday Night Live is one of the longest running Agile institutions in the world. For 44 years, they have developed and delivered small batches of comedy in weekly intervals. Talk about sustainable development. But how do they do it? Turns out, the practices and principles they employ are quite agile. From welcoming changing requirements to maintaining technical excellence, there's a lot we can learn from how they deliver. Join us for a back stage and on stage view into the process SNL has developed over decades to get from concept to cash in one week. Along the way we'll gain a new understanding of empirical process control, continuous delivery, the care and feeding of high performing teams, dependency and deadline management, what it means to deliver value continuously, and how to understand customers. We'll see how their use of Scrum ensures that they deliver on time, and how their use of Kanban keeps work visible for the entire organization. And we’ll probably laugh a lot too.

An Agile Practice is an empowered center of expertise focused on executing an organization’s transformation strategy. An effective Agile Practice quickly removes organizational blockers, enabling multiple teams to deliver more smoothly.

With many Agile transformation efforts traditionally focused on only teams, it is not uncommon to forget the rest of the organization when creating, delivering, and supporting products. When there are dependencies between teams or departments, teams must be able to collaborate and coordinate for maximum organizational effectiveness, not just focusing on individual team efficiencies.

This session provides several case studies of Agile Practices at organizations attempting to scale. Learn several patterns of both successful and unsuccessful Agile Practices, so that you can scale Agile more effectively across your organization.

Metrics are the bane of many organizations, getting fascinated on measurements that don’t matter or can drive improper behaviours. In this session, we walk through a simple grouping for metrics where the groupings not only call out the metrics, but their limits, and help guide to better metrics.

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.

The Product Mindset is the link between the products we build and the culture of the organization that is building them. It's the foundation for operating in a digital economy and creating new insights for success. So what is it, and why should we care?

There is a shift happening. One that puts the user closer to the center of our work than ever before. We are moving away from the question "Are we building it right?" to asking "Are we building the right thing?" This approach isn't new - it's growing in response to the increasing speed and complexity of competing in today's marketplace. It's founded in human behavior and decision sciences. No matter what you are creating for your customer, there is one thing that unites us: Our customers want products that are simple to use and solve their problem.

The best tool we have to grow our Product Mindset is a set of principles and techniques known as Design Thinking. This isn't trivial, it's big business. The Design Management Institute's study in 2016 says Design companies outperform others by 211% percent! You know the names; you use the products - companies like Apple, Starwood, Nike, Walt Disney to name a few.

In this session, we will explore what the Product Mindset is and how to grow it within ourselves and in our organization. We'll identify the questions we can ask to go further than we have before to define value. We'll discuss how to develop products that resonate with our user's emotional needs. And we'll finish with a simple, interactive exercise that applies design thinking to product discovery that you can take back to use on Monday morning. No experience necessary.

Join us. If we can change the way we think, we can change the way we work.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Defining a delivery strategy is difficult. We tend to underestimate the risks, aren’t explicit about our assumptions, and don’t involve the delivery team early enough in the process. I recently introduced the idea of delivering in bets to several clients. The idea that each delivery is a series of bets with different odds and risks. Each bet or investment could be matched with our corresponding confidence levels. For those bets deemed risky, we improved our odds by placing smaller bets. Delivering in bets helped us remain outcome focused, view our decisions as a portfolio, and express the expected timeframe of payouts. In each case, mindsets shifted and delivery performance improved.

In this talk, Chris will demonstrate how using bets can reshape your delivery approach. He’ll show how using some familiar tools such as Opportunity Canvas, Dual Track Agile, Story Mapping, and Monte Carlo Forecasting can improve results. He’ll discuss different methods for defining and sizing releases. Participants will leave with a new approach for identifying and forecasting a delivery.

One of the biggest challenges in software development is getting business and technology partners to clearly understand one another and speak the same language. In this session we will learn about EventStorming. A technique to explore a business problem space, EventStorming helps us develop shared understanding and create ubiquitous language so business and technology partners can communicate and work together more easily. We will look at how EventStorming can help us understand the (non-technical) big picture and how we can use it to inform system design.