Many of us dream of creating Agile Organizations. Where Agile practices and Agile mindset are reflected in the results across the whole organization. Yet the approaches that are currently used are not yielding the results we hope for. Instead there are culture challenges, resistance, leadership misalignment and mixed levels of engagement. A new approach is needed.

Learn a proven path to high-performance organizations that places culture and leadership at the centre stage. You will see how to look beyond process and scaling to understand a reliable way to introduce the Agile Mindset. Discover the common traps and blocks that prevent success and how to avoid them. Learn the “Consciously Approaching Agile” approach so that you are equipped to get deep and lasting results with Agile. Discover the new behaviours that you can demonstrate to foster organizational coherence and engagement that result in high performance.

Co-creating drawings helps teams enhance their systems thinking abilities by really seeing the big picture. A group of people talking around a whiteboard is an effective way to share ideas across a team. Imagine how much richer the conversation is when everyone on the team has a marker in their hand and is actively contributing! Graphic visualization is an important tool for talking about new ideas, generating insights and developing shared understanding. In a team context, drawing is a thinking tool rather than an artistic endeavour. When everyone participates in creating drawings, all team members can see how things fit together and what mental models are at play in defining the situation. And, by drawing together, the team is collaboratively creating meaningful records that are being validated and updated.

Come along on a visual adventure into how teams can collaboratively visualize ideas and make sure that everyone at the table has a voice. In this workshop, we will warm up with some basic doodling skills practice. No drawing experience is required to take part in this session: if you can hold a marker, we can teach you the skills needed to put your ideas on paper. Together we'll consider the ways that collaborative drawing can be used to enhance group work, and we will share practical activities that you can take back to use with your team for setting the stage, gathering information, and sharing stories.

“Are we Agile yet?”, “Of course we are agile, we stand up every day”, “We have a hybrid Waterfall/Agile technique”. Do any of these sound familiar to you?

After several years at multiple organizations it is interesting to find the same mistakes being made over and over again. This talk will discuss the various ways that your company can fail at agile and what you can do about it.

Gam'Inception is a game made of games to learn how to create games... Sounds funnier than dreams in dreams in dreams, don't you think Mr. Nolan?

By playing three serious games, attendees will learn why serious games are a very efficient way to discover new concepts, mechanisms or tools and that everyone is able to build her/his own ones:

• Attendees will have to face me in a drawing duel. Be prepared, I'm almost as good with pens than with ASCII art:
  _██_
  ( • ̮ •)
  ( . • . )
  (... • .. )
• Then, they will travel in time, to Venice, the city of Doges, for a mix of Game of the Goose, a game book and an escape game
• Finally, they will participate to Top Chef (at least my version of the show...) and will find their own recipes to cook their own games

The workshop is almost entirely interactive and requires no prior knowledge about serious games (you don't even need to know what a serious game is). At the end of the session, attendees will have learned:

• how a serious game is structured
• which steps are essential to building a serious game
• which steps are 'nice to have' when they build a serious game
• that they are way more qualified to build their own serious games than they thought
• how efficient a serious game is to learn new things
• how highly corruptible I am

Note that I always try to co-present with Leonardo DiCaprio but, sometimes, he is too busy to come ;-)
I hosted it successfully several times in Europe (Agile France, Agile Tour Paris, Xebicon and smaller events) last year so the structure is solid.

Slides, in French, are available here. The workshop (and its slides) will, of course, be in English with the possibility for attendees to ask me anything in French if they are more comfortable with this language

“When will it be done?” is a question asked in just about every business I’ve encountered, Agile or otherwise. In this metrics-focused session we will explore why that question is so hard to answer and whether it is even the right question to ask.

We will explore current thinking about measurement in knowledge work fields. How every business needs to identify their own appropriate metrics to measure for their own business challenges and goals. While metrics are always unique for each individual business context, we will identify 4 metric categories identified from the Fit for Purpose framework.

To connect these concepts to your Agile organization we explore going past looking at measurement as a team phenomena and connect this to the level of services or value streams.

Digging further we continue to examine questions around measuring and predicting delivery times. We contrast prediction approaches using deterministic methods vs probabilistic methods. And consider multiple sources of variability that make predictions challenging and often impossible.

We conclude by considering more appropriate questions to replace “When will it be done?” Rather asking “When do we need it” followed by “and so, when should start?”

Unlike a factory, where we can see work literally moving around, piling up waiting, being worked on, or even deteriorating with time, knowledge workers have to deal with abstract constructs that are largely invisible. Suddenly, answering questions like "what are we working on?" or "how does work get done here" can become tricky.

The basic premise that the first step towards effectively managing knowledge work is to make it visible will not come as a surprise for anyone with some familiarity with Agile. That said, there's more to effective work visualization than a 3-column board showing "To Do | In Progress | Done" columns, and visualizing work items is only the first step.

This session will explore approaches for visualizing otherwise invisible aspects of work, such as commitments, process, rules and, of course, work items, and using them to enable more effective management and collaboration.

We like to say that agile teams own their own process by choosing their way of working, their “WoW.” This of course is easier said than done because there are several aspects to WoW. First, our team needs to know how to choose the appropriate lifecycle for the situation that we face. Should we take a Scrum-based approach, a lean/Kanban-based approach, a continuous delivery approach, or an exploratory/lean startup approach? Second, what practices should the team adopt? How do they fit together? When should we apply them? Third, what artifacts should the team create? When should they be created? To what level of detail? Finally, how do we evolve our WoW as we experiment and learn?

There are several strategies that we could choose to follow when we tailor and evolve our WoW. One approach is to bootstrap our WoW, to figure it out on our own. This works, but it is a very slow and expensive strategy in practice. Another approach is to hire an agile coach, but sadly in practice the majority of coaches seem to be like professors who are only a chapter or two ahead of their students. Or we could take a more disciplined, streamlined approach and leverage the experiences of the thousands of teams who have already struggled through the very issues that our team currently faces. In this talk you’ll discover how to develop your WoW without starting from scratch and without having to rely on the limited experience and knowledge of “agile coaches.”

Shared understanding is a pre-requisite to success for any agile teams. Many Agile teams rely on User Stories to help them get consensus on what to deliver, and what done looks like. Stories are a great practice for agile teams, but as the complexity of the problem or solution they are building increases, they often need more. Agile teams can face serious churn in the story writing process as complexity increase. Different team members can have completely different understandings of the meaning of key business and solution concepts. Often the same concepts end up being discussed over and over again, significantly slowing down story exploration. Even worse, different stakeholders end up having ambiguous and even conflicting understanding of the solution.

During this session, we will discuss how we have integrated story exploration practices such as Story Mapping, Story Grooming, and Spec by Example, with the Domain Driven Design method, with the goal to promote the creation of a ubiquitous language and share understanding of both the solution and business domain. We will show how various teams have leveraged light weight, informal tools to enable both technical and non technical stakeholders to execute in a highly aligned way, and dramatically decrease churn and rework as a result.

A key part of this session will be taking the audience through an integrated example that show cases how one can elaborate on an idea through progressive refinement of Stories and CRC Card based domain driven models in parallel. We will showcase how Story Maps can be refined through creation of an initial Domain Driven Model expressed through Class Responsibility Cards. We will illustrate how to connect story grooming and refinement of domain models in order to create a precise business and solution language. We will illustrate how domain model walkthroughs can be used to battle test your stories against your domain model, validating key assumptions before coding starts. We will also showcase how both story grooming and domain driven design can be done directly in code, and how this approach dovetails perfectly into test driven development.

Want to experience a health check that you can use with your teams the day after this session? Join in this workshop where you will get hands on experience with Spotify's Health Check model and hear an experience report of applying it to 10+ teams.

Evaluate what aspects of this model are relevant to your context and goals. Hear about what factors contributed to our success and what potential pitfalls to watch out for.

Take the guessing out of what to improve on teams and how to measure it.

Collaboration is generally considered a net positive, and everyone knows it’s a key principle of Agile. Yet most Agile teams -- even those that seem to work well together -- don’t collaborate nearly enough, and thus don’t reach their full potential. It takes attention and work to make collaboration possible, let alone appealing and practical! In this interactive talk, the author of “The Human Side of Agile” explains the not-so-short list of not-so-simple factors that get in the way of real collaboration, and provides a process for determining actions that will make collaboration possible.

"Customers don’t buy products, they hire products to do a job” – Clayton Christensen

• Are your customers ready to buy your product even before you release it?
• Are your customers inspired by your product?
• Is your product vision aligned with your customers’ needs?
• Does your product vision motivate your team?

Join us to experience a new way of creating an empathy-driven product vision, a powerful tool to start your journey of creating the right products or services. Experience the power of Emotions inspired by Human-Centered Design concepts, iterative feedback loops, and Visual creativity.

With this approach, customers and team are involved and convinced with your product or service right from the start.

A few benefits of empathy-driven product vision are:

1) Seeing Is Believing: visualization has a better impact on the mind

2) Easy to understand and getting feedback from the customers

3) Helpful for marketing and sales to think of their product strategy

4) Empower team to be focused for the product goal in their whole development cycle

5) Helpful for start-ups to pitch a new product idea or invention to a potential investor

6) The team understands better, the vision of the new product initiatives by the company

In today's agile, scaling of any framework comes with its own ... framework! Not so with Real Kanban as the scaling approach is to simply do more of it.

The Real Kanban approach from Steve Tendon supports all flows - Operational, Financial, Informational & Psychological - by proposing the exact same models at the team, project, portfolio and enterprise level. Talk about robustness !

Operational Flow (How well are we delivering?) deals with reducing cycle time so that work in progress does not stall in the system accumulating costs. By reducing cycle time - the time an item spends in the system - Operational expenses are trimmed leading the way to more productivity.

Financial Flow (How much wealth are we creating?) recognizes throughput - the number of unit coming out of the system per unit of time - as the ultimate economic indicator for sales. Having a healthy beat is key to financial health.

Informational Flow (How well are we communicating?) uses visualization and metrics from the Theory of Constraints and Throughput Accounting to ensures system thinking behavior and alignment.

Psychological Flow (How happy are out people?) - The Real Kanban approach also allows employees to increase their skills and capabilities with WIP control, so that they can tame by themselves the boundaries of boredom and anxiety to always find a way to better themselves at their pace with the ever present slack existing in a Kanban system. The benefits - psychological flow - resulting from this system thinking's approach is to leverage the consciousness level and lead to continuous improvement by supplying metrics that guide each decision.

Teachings from Queuing Theory, Tameflow, Real Options and other fascinating Kanban and Lean tools will be presented.

A walkthrough of my experience as a portfolio coach leading teams of agile coaches supporting large (60million+, 120person+) regulatory programs in the financial services industry.

Comparing the similarities during my time leading a team of transformation coaches and scrummasters delivering customer-facing new technology at Bell, in the regulated telecom space.

Your team’s been trained to deliver new features in a short time frame. You’re estimating work using abstractions like “story points”. The predictability and quality of delivery has improved. However, every December you’re still asked to estimate large initiatives for annual budgeting. Something doesn’t make sense and you’re having a hard time explaining it to senior leadership.

Those funding projects are trying to invest wisely and mitigate risk. They need to understand what to fund and what to avoid while looking at scary numbers. However, they’re still using conventional methods of mitigating risk with big plans and committed dates.

How agile can your organization be when budgets are designed for large fixed cost, scope, and time projects? In this session we’ll talk about how to mitigate financial risk and improve return on investment by working in smaller batches. Join us and learn how you can start forecasting!

Agile is a set of values and a mindset. As such, it can be hard to answer questions that leadership often asks. These questions include: How agile are we? Are we getting more agile? What are the growth opportunities for our team? To address this customer desire, there are now many assessment frameworks available in the Agile space.

Many organizations use assessments to determine their level of agility. This session will introduce several assessment approaches and tools. Like medicine, when used incorrectly, the results can be toxic. We will explore the merits, potential uses, and possible downsides of each approach.

You will leave this session understanding more about your options, as well as insights for framing an assessment that fit your needs best when trying to measure your organization's culture and teams.

You've found yourself at the beginning of a journey where all roads lead to Agile coaching. You might be asking yourself, “What do I need for my coaching journey? Am I ready for this? Who can I ask for help? What is being an Agile coach really about, anyway?”

In this session, aspiring coaches will hear about an atypical journey to becoming an Agile coach, learn three key lessons, and remember why living Agile values is the key to, well, everything.

You’ll leave the session with the desire to live fully Agile, have a better understanding of where to start your own Agile journey, and discover how to learn more about yourself along the way.

This talk was previously presented at Manulife’s Agile Day 2018, organized by Jeff Kosciejew, and received an NPS score of 78.

How can we deliver value continuously when building modern JavaScript web applications? In the past 5-6 years, the popularity of JavaScript has exploded. There’s a good chance that you’re working at an organization where you’re using JavaScript.

Learn about component-based architecture and approaches to state management that help us respond to changing requirements or even pivot in a new direction as a product evolves.

What architecture choices and patterns enable meaningful independence and which ones hinder them?

For all you non-developers out there, this is a fabulous opportunity to deepen your understanding of what choices your software development team may be making. Developers, here’s your chance to learn more about what Agile-friendly modern JavaScript development can look like.

While some concepts are indeed language agnostic, this session will focus on the JavaScript ecosystem. We will cover the tools and techniques specific to component-based frameworks such as React, Vue, and Angular.

Agile has now gone mainstream. Starting new and more Agile teams is relatively easy, but organizations then run into the challenge to orchestrate the work of multiple agile teams. Some have even observed that even though they manage to obtain better results from individual teams, if they step back and look at the larger picture, work still takes a long time to be delivered, quality expectations are not met, and teams experience considerable "friction" when they interact with their environment.

This session is directed to those managers that operate above the team (middle-management, director level, etc.) and explores the concerns that need to be considered to create a context in which those Agile teams can thrive and realize the promise of high-performance.