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?”

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.

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.

Transformation in a large, traditional organization is a journey. A journey of epic proportions. Success, failure and adversity are faced continuously. We will be bringing you an enlightening and raw account about how we applied DevOps practices, built a delivery rocketship and what worked well and not-so-well for us at TD Bank! Come and listen to how TD is transforming the way it works and becoming world-class in delivery.

Wave 2 of Agile is a way to understand the high-performance results that come from Being Agile. We know many in our industry have fallen into the trap or “Doing Agile” – where people lose sight of the objectives and lasting results.

Wave 2 is about Living Agile. It is how we show up. It is how we work with people and organizations to shape the Culture. It is living Mahatma Gandhi's truth:

“Be the change that you want to see in the world”.

When we focus on our own behaviour, we model Being Agile. This is the only way to invite the Agile Mindset. This is Wave 2 Agile. We stop creating conflict and resistance. We become the effective leaders and influencers of lasting change in our organizations.

“To be or not to be? That is the question.”

"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.

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.

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.

Many of us have felt the benefits of Agile. Working in cross-functional teams, learning from others in your team, the freedom of self-directedness and self-organization, the decrease in email madness and the value of quick bursts of communication through stand-ups and other cadences, have all enhanced the way that we work.

But I’m sure we’ve also experienced Agile growing pains. One common pain is developing a solution that ends up falling short of Business expectations and need. This adverse outcome leads to Agile teams potentially feeling disengaged and undervalued; it can cause a strain in the Business/Agile relationship; and it can result in painful and seemingly endless feedback loops to attain a satisfying result.

During this session I will share a few tips that have worked well for us in bridging the gap in understanding that result in less-than-satisfactory Business results. They include:

• Introducing the concept of Human Centered Design (HCD) to the Business
• Providing the Business with a basic Agile understanding to enable effective communicate with their Agile partners
• Training both teams on light weight, informal tools to enable stakeholders to communicate and execute in a highly aligned way

By taking these steps we have witnessed a more symbiotic relationship immerge between technical and non-technical teams. We have created ways to help visualize where we have inserted HCD and Agile to help foster this enriched relationship, and we will share these images in our presentation.

Cognitive biases often results to poor decisions that could affect your teams. This talk provides an introduction to cognitive biases and how they impact team performance and effectivity.

I'll cover 3 aspects of teams that could be impacted by these cognitive biases - team dynamics, communication and productivity.

I'll discuss the symptoms of these biases and show you how to proactively control and reduce its effects for more effective teams.

Many agile teams become quite efficient at planning and delivering the next set of user stories committed for each sprint. However, more often than not, they find themselves creating patch after patch of countless iterations to "fix" their solution based on "feedback", because they didn't have a clear understanding of what the real pain points and/or user needs were. In some cases, some teams never get to interact with actual users and rely on stakeholders to validate any assumption.

In this talk, we will explore how we helped a group of agile teams in an enterprise environment leverage the use of:
- Design Thinking to empathize with actual users in order to identify their pain points and needs.
- Lean Startup to use a hypothesis-driven approach to derive MVPs that create enterprise value.
- User Centric Design to prototype and validate solutions with real users via user testing.
- Agile and Kanban practices to deliver user stories.

We managed the process through a Kanban system representing the full flow of a feature from an initial idea to delivery. We will deep-dive into the each one of its states and policies.

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.