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.

Clean language is an easy to use technique for getting deeper and more effective conversations. It leverages our understanding of how the brain actually stores and accesses information to get past superficial conversations quickly so that we can get into the core of the problem faster.

In this workshop, you will learn some theory and then will get hands-on practice with the techniques that you can immediately take away and start using.

Useful for anyone facilitating retrospectives or understanding product needs or collecting feedback from others, all things that agile leaders have to do.

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.

Developers are always wanting extra time to refactor their code. But we have deadlines and commitments to make - and really, what is refactoring anyway?This session aims to help non-technical team members to understand refactoring, why it's important, and why you don't have enough time not to refactor. Using Lean 5S, we're going to go through a non-technical example of what refactoring is and the types of things your teams may be doing during refactoring and the language they use.

We've all heard how we need to collaborate better, but what does this really mean? What results can I expect to see with better collaboration?

This workshop will demonstrate how productivity increases with greater collaboration and how to create better a more collaborative environment. We'll use a simple simulation and ratchet up the level of collaboration each Sprint. In the session you will not only have an opportunity to experience this relationship with a relatively simple learning game, but we'll look behind the curtain at the science and how some various behavioral models explain why this relationship exists. We'll then explore some tactics you can use to help teams collaborate better and close with an exploration of what either helps or hinders collaboration and how you can use this information as well as the game with your teams.

If you have an interest in improving productivity of your team or the teams you serve, then this is the session for you.

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.

Have you ever been asked, “Are we agile yet?”

That’s a daunting question to answer as there is no single best way to measure adoption. Chris and Lee, experienced Agile veterans, believe that measuring adoption is not one-size-fits-all, but rather requires strategic planning tailored to the needs of that team.

Over their careers, Chris and Lee have worked with upwards of 70 agile teams. After learning and improving over several years, they have successfully developed a simple yet collaborative approach to measuring agile adoption - all while maneuvering the minefield of executives looking for performance metrics.

Join Chris and Lee as they let you in on their approach to developing an agile adoption strategy, starting with a simple survey. The pair will also share some of the challenges they encountered and how they were able to mitigate them to improve team performance.

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.

It’s hard to coach those who are highly stressed or anxious and it’s even harder to help others when you are personally stressed or anxious. In this session, we’ll be learning about some of the neuroscience behind these and will learn a variety of practical techniques that we can do to drop that sense of anxiety in less than a minute.

Anxiety and stress is prevalent within our field and affects everything we do. If you experience this or you would like to help other people who do, then this session is for you.

Bonus: The techniques we’ll be discussing are also applicable with Impostor Syndrome.

You’re a project manager and you’ve just been given an Agile project to look after. You ask for reports and you get burndown charts, velocity graphs, and cumulative flow diagrams. What in the world are these, and why do you suddenly have a migraine headache?

Metrics are different in Agile, but the questions remain the same. Come and see what your brain needs to understand the tracking of products built in an Agile way. We’ll build an Agile dashboard that you can take into your next meeting.

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.