“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?”

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.

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.

When coaches encounter resistance to agile transformations, we often treat it as a phenomenon to be overcome, confronted, or combated. But resistance is a natural reaction to change, and that reaction can't be alleviated by violent opposition. Rather than meeting resistance head on, the clever coach will work around it by helping people recognize and resolve the negative emotions that drive it. Once those negative emotions are resolved, people are more likely to let down their guard and embrace change.

In this interactive workshop, participants will learn how to identify common "faces" of resistance--behaviors that might indicate that a person is experiencing an emotional reaction to change. Participants will then work in table groups to identify strategies for helping clients recognize the emotional underpinning of their resistance. Finally, a role-playing experience will give participants the chance to practice coaching resisters to resolve their reluctance to embrace agile transformation.

Many companies attempting Agile are not getting the benefits they hope for. I believe most of these companies are more focused on blindly following practices than living the agile principles. Many of these companies have not fully embraced the principles and some do not even know the principles! For an organization to reap the benefits that agile offers, it must live the principles. In this workshop, I'll teach you exercises and techniques to reset the people in your organization around the 12 Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto and the 4 Modern Agile Principles.