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.

For anyone willing to take some risk and create a success on your own terms.

-This Agile Business presentation best represents: Experience, Exploration and Adaptation.

"This talk is centered Agile being all about People and Business - on what’s in it for you and what’s in it for your clients.

I initiated the McCafé concept at McDonald's and will share both the development stages and collaborative drivers. It’s about understanding where the real levers of power lie – with YOU.

I will step beyond Agile for IT – and show how Agile Values bring the Business and People together – I open the Kimono with the client, build the relationship and I will share with the audience:

How and What real life experiences were discovered with the McCafé launch. The presentation has useful lessons about Agile Business techniques to help participants gain insight and develop important skills with Executives and Clients. It’s a fundamental shift in mindset.

Instead of focusing on what you can sell, the focus is shifted to what your unique talents are. Discover more fulfillment in the process of uniting and practicing with your client.

Can't wait to share!!

Pressured by results, overwhelmed by schedules to meet and expectations to live up to we so often lack to recognize the power of meaningful human connections around us. Still, when we recall some of the leaders that created the most lasting change in our professional and personal lives, there are a few common traits that seem to be part of their behavior.

I have lived and practiced various roles in my life and career, and derived a simple way of reminding myself on how to create more meaningful connections for more powerful impact on the human level. In this talk I will present for the first time what has driven my teaching, coaching and leading along these years.

CARE stands for curiosity, authenticity, respect and empathy. And it represents care, genuine and uninterested, for people around us- colleagues, relatives, managers and reports. In an illustrated way I will tell stories about how this simple framework can change the impact of your leadership and foster a stronger engagement for anything you stand for.

“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.

A supported Product Owner has the power to prioritize. An empowered Product Owner has the power to say 'No'!

The Product Owner is the most underutilized and unsupported role in large organizations that are trying to increase their speed to market. Product Owners are only business people playing a 'weekend dad' to the team or they are merely only writing requirements for the team.

Companies that are successful in delivering products to market empower the Product Owner. The Product Owner has one leg in Product Management and the other leg with the Scrum Team. The empowered Product Owner engages the business, customers, engineering, design, sales groups as stakeholders. They are empowered to optimize value by creating vision and context to enable teams to deliver products people want to buy and are technically sound to maintain and scale.

In this workshop, we will help you unleash this opportunity and guide you in understanding the role of an empowered Product Owner.

CFOs in today's digital economy are looking to invest significant capital on data driven initiatives to deliver strategic analysis to business partners. However this is often reprioritized due to regulatory requirements.

This session is about how a large European Bank successfully delivered a large regulatory transformation program in 2017 using an agile approach. Driven by Finance & Risk groups and enabled by technology, incremental business value was delivered to Finance and Risk stakeholders.

The key challenges faced required an approach to handle evolving regulatory requirements, lack of trust and collaboration between Business and Technology, lack of knowledge and experience in the solution domain, integration of new technology assets to automate business requirements and an aggressive timeline enforced by the regulator.

As an Agile Coach on the project, my role was to help the Finance & Risk groups with the value stream mapping, formation of cross functional teams, developing an agile delivery approach, and provide training and coaching for the teams and leadership on adoption of agile principles and practices.

The successful delivery was largely due to business foresight to maneuver around typical IT challenges and instead adopt an approach using agile principles that put delivering business value over fixed scope. Through this approach, the clients were able to deliver the solution that addressed the immediate needs but this also position them to leverage for future regulations.

This talk will elucidate the backdrop, challenges that posed the business, the agile approach, culture and mindset that was adopted, and the resulting outcomes.

If you have thought of or thinking of adopting Agile mindset in a non-IT environment, this is the session for you. In this session we will share some techniques we developed and hiccups that we managed along the way.

By the end of this session, you will likely have gained some valuable insights that you can take back to your Organization and adopt agile principles and practices in areas outside of IT.

1. Have an already successful company
2. Read “Agile At Scale” article in latest HBR
3. "Go Agile" (Pay large sums of $ to a large consultancy)
4. ????
5. Profit

Self Organizing teams are the heart of agile software development. The Agile Manifesto practically reads as if it was written by a Team who were sick of being told how to do their job… “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it…”

As in “We will figure this out, if you’d just LET US!”

But for all the leadership training and blogs about how important an ‘agile mindset’ is, most teams are simply never allowed to sufficiently self organize.

In this brief interactive session, we’ll uncover what it means to be part of a self-organized team, the boundaries of self-organization, and how Managers and Scrum Masters can exercise servant leadership by enabling teams to self-organize.

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.

'Talk to our Scrum Master if you want to discuss something with me', 'Sorry, the team has already started their Sprint, you will need to wait for another couple of weeks', 'If only these middle managers understood what Scrum is all about!', 'Lets place this impediment in the 'blocked' column and assign it to the Scrum Master'....

I could continue citing these quotes for quite a while. Do they sound familiar ?

If so no worries, that's how the Scrum Master role is being understood after assisting to a 1, 2 or 3-days Scrum class (followed by a certification, or not). While sometimes some of these may be options that bring the most value to the team and to the organization as a whole - on a short term, far too often it becomes a 'recipe' on how to act as a 'good Scrum Master'.

Digging into my own 10 years of experience (mistakes, failures, and, some successes here and there), complemented with powerful insights from experienced practitioners, this talk aims to help the profession of Scrum Masters (and Agile Coaches of course) in stepping up their game and contribute to sustainable, long term organizational benefits while still continuing their service to the team.

Myth: "Agile teams don't document."
Truth: Some of the best documentation we've ever seen comes from Agile teams.

Agile Engineering practices have revolutionized the ways in which documentation is treated and produced. In high-stakes environments with heavy compliance and audit requirements, a tendency toward exhaustive documentation is dangerously common. This workshop provides direct guidance and simple tools to help a document-heavy workplace think differently about documentation.

I have developed this workshop to help an organization reframe their understanding of documentation with respect to knowledge work in complex environments so that they may eliminate unnecessary artifacts and simplify/automate others.

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.

Without good communication, a team is just a collection of individuals. With great communication, all team members get a better overall picture of the project, keep each other up-to-date on unexpected changes, and are proactive at moving the project forward. The key person risk is reduced, the amount of work in progress can be lowered, and the cycle time goes down.

In this talk, I'll go over specific communication habits observed in well-performing teams, and the steps we can take to get there.

Are your agile teams struggling with committing to sprint objectives? Are they struggling with conflict? Are they struggling aligning with each other? Is the stress rising when you get close to that deadline? Do they feel they are not at a sustainable pace?

Research has shown that leaders who’s brainwaves are in coherent states not only demonstrate higher productivity, but those with the strongest coherence also entrain the brainwaves of colleagues the same levels.

Laughter is one of the quickest way for individuals, and team to reach coherence. Learn how to harness laughter and play to positively disrupt habitual behavior, boost levels of innovation, engagement, and creative problem-solving, and forge team coherence in the face of high stress.

No experience necessary, just a willingness to step out of the box. Are you ready? Come PLAY!!!!!

Join Joanne and Barton as they provide a slice of their one-day workshop: Laugh to F'in' Freedom to learn how we can utilize laughter to help create high performing teams.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/emotional-intelligence-power-access-our-agile-mindset-agile-amy/

Agile is about keeping pace with change. Inclusion ensures we bring everyone along with us.

Agile initially brought a bunch of individuals cross-functional specialists together to work as a team. This cross-functional team was able to deliver complex products more quickly. The concept of diverse teammates looking at a problem and sharing their perspective from their skill background proved to be the ideal way in creating solutions that meet the needs of domestic customers.

As companies execute on their digital strategy, products are now global. Having cross-functional teams are no longer sufficient. Agile teams need to be cross-functional AND diverse to meet the needs of global customers.

In our talk, Dave and Dave will discuss the importance and competitive need to make your teams diverse. They will also share their experiences of integrating diverse members into the team.

We’ve all heard that old adage about assumptions and how they make you, and me look. Yet how often do we still take for granted the underlaying perspectives with which we approach our world and our work? In today’s workplace, so much can be left unsaid. And, over time, these unspoken realities we keep inside can lead to breakdowns in team communication and performance.

Uncovering and transmuting assumptions can serve as a powerful doorway into team transparency, trust, and cohesion. Discover tools to how to create spaces for open and vulnerable conversations, a necessary prerequisite for any assumptions work. Then build on that foundation to disrupt insidious assumptions that arise within the team dynamic and transform them to create conscious alignment that bolsters innovation, engagement, and creative problem-solving, particularly in high stress environments.

You’ll gain powerful new tools to bypass reactive and destructive behaviors, engage in new levels of relationship with colleagues, and find new resourcefulness to amplify your productivity and fulfilment.

Join Joanne and Barton as they uncover the cracks that undermine team cohesion, and leverage these assumptions to turn unconsciousness on its head and create powerful alignment at all levels of the workplace.

Too often, enterprises approach Agile Transformation as a series of tactical measures rather than focusing on the necessary mindset shift.

During WWII, Pacific islanders welcomed the Allies who bestowed precious cargo on them when they set up bases on their remote islands. When the war ended and the bases were left behind, the islanders established "Cargo Cults" in an effort to lure the cargo back by building imitation planes on the abandoned airstrips.

Decision-makers who believe that hiring a few Scrum Masters and implementing a Scrum cadence without tackling the underlying organizational debt can lead tham to the Agile promised land have fallen prey to a similar delusion.

This talk aims to articulate some of the pitfalls, and to identify some of the strategic changes that are necessary ingredients in a successful Agile transformation.