The goal of Enterprise Agility is to have a nimble, flexible organization. To reach this end we need to have a clear decision-making process that supports autonomy and learning while achieving effective outcomes.

The Advice Process is easy to understand. Anyone in the organization can make a decision provided they get advice from everyone who will be meaningfully affected and people with expertise in the matter. The Advice Process helps organizations develop trust, ownership and learning to create a nimble organization. The Advice Process originates from corporate innovation as documented in “Joy at Work” and “Reinventing Organizations”

In this hands-on session you will learn how to use “Advice Poker” cards as a sense-making and education tool to explore how decisions are made and can be made. The Advice Process will be contrasted with other approaches such as consensus and traditional hierarchical decision-making. You will walk away with a powerful tool to invite greater levels of trust and ownership to allow Agile to scale.

The stereotype of technical professionals as inarticulate, socially inept geniuses inventing problems to solve is unkind and inaccurate. Yet the Dilbert image persists. So do jokes like the one about the engineer sentenced to death on the guillotine, who watches the instrument of death malfunction, then tells the operators how to fix it.

Why do people make fun of engineers? Do people wired and trained to analyze and solve problems and focus on the mechanics of a situation frustrate those whose brains are wired differently? And how does the engineer’s way of dealing with individuals and interactions - that first value of the Agile Manifesto - sometimes get in the way of team collaboration and productivity?

In this interactive session, we'll show a little empathy for engineers and other analytical folk whose neurological wiring makes them seem different from the rest of humanity. We'll also explore how those with the engineering mindset can develop their own empathy and consciously adopt behaviours that amplify their value to their teams and organizations, make them more effective leaders - and make their own lives easier by positioning themselves for understanding.
Join Sue in a lively exploration of what can happen when engineers and technical professionals shift their mindset from solving problems to creating impact.

You will leave this session with an appreciation of

• How to make your ideas meaningful to others by taking their perspective
• How shifting your language from "What?" to "So What?" helps people connect the dots
• Why giving up the need to be smart may be the smartest thing you ever do
• Techniques you can use to take someone else's perspective.

When it comes to scaling Agile, there is no one size fits all solution. Frameworks like Scrum and XP prescribe roles, events, artifacts, and rules that make it very clear how interaction should take place within a team. When we begin to add more teams to the mix, communication between teams becomes more complex. This complexity threatens to reduce our transparency and damage our culture. How can we share information, build our culture and work together, all while keeping with Agile values?

During this session Sam Lightowler and Jade Stephen will take an in depth look at the successes and failures of CBC Digital Operations when it comes to cross-team collaboration and information sharing. We will discuss what meetings and techniques have helped us build a one-team-one-product mindset, a sense of community, and a culture of Collaboration, Learning and Improvement. We will also discuss what we have tried in the past and how learning from those experiments helped us evolve into the agile-friendly and unified team that we are today.

"Agile has too many meetings." "Our meetings are a waste of time." "It's always the same two people talking while everyone else is on their phones or laptops." Indeed, meetings are often pretty bad… but they are also necessary. Agile teams can't fully implement the 3 C’s (communication, collaboration, and consensus) only by inhabiting an open space or using a messaging tool. However, it doesn't take much to make a meeting effective, collaborative, and a welcome experience for its participants. Come to this experiential session to learn 10 simple changes you can make -- without having to become a professional facilitator -- to make your meetings matter.

Approached from an agile perspective, delivering value looks very different than when thinking from a traditional mindset. During this interactive workshop, participants will gain hands on experience on applying critical concepts to estimating value in a way that also drives adoption of an agile mindset. This session is based on material that I have used on numerous occasions to help enterprise business leaders reshape the way they think about value. Participants will use the following practices when estimating the value of future work:

1. Deliberate estimation of lead time ( your most precious resource) and delay time (your most toxic obstacle).
2. How to move forward with imperfect information through the use of explicit assumptions required to approximate value.
3. Using Cost Of Delay to put a price tag on time, creating an economic incentive to increase agility at the business level

I will start the session by providing an overview of the power of focusing on lead time and delay time over efficiency and throughput. I'll show participants how to use concepts such as explicit commitment points and delivery points to measure business agility, and discuss sources of delay, and means to eliminate sources of delay.

I will then discuss ways to quickly assess the value type and urgency profile of work, providing a means to quickly catalog the type of assumptions that require research and validation in order to conduct high quality conversation around the estimation of value.

Session attendees will be given the chance to estimate the value of work through exploration of a business value assumption model. Ill go through some of the key factors to consider when estimating value, and how to quickly compare value across epics and features using the assumption model approach.

The psychological factors that prevent people from estimating value will be discussed and participants will be coached through effective methods to overcome these factors including relative ranking, accuracy over precision, and explicit tracking and sharing of key assumptions.

After this I will give an overview of how to frame value in terms of Cost Of Delay. Ill present the audience with a way to put a price on the countless queues our work tends to go through. I will then guide attendees to to quantify their value assumption model according to the amount of value lost over time. Participants will use techniques to estimate units of value according to the opportunity cost incurred when work is blocked or left waiting on a queue. I will also show the relationship between different urgency profiles and the severity of Cost Of Delay.  

For the final part of the session, participants will rank a backlog of their own work through CD3.  Cost of Delay Divided by Duration takes COD and divides it delivery lead time to create a ranking mechanism that focuses teams on delivering the highest value in a given time period of time. I'll walk through how CD3 provides insight necessary to minimizing the impact of COD for a set of options, encouraging the breakdown of work into smaller batches, and prioritizing work essential to eliminating delay.

This session will highly interactive, and give participants practical, hands on tools that can help the business think in terms of getting to value with agility, acting as a gateway practice for deeper adoption in the future.

One the most significant ceremony of any Agile Team is Daily Standup where the team members get together and plan for their day. But quite often the daily standup turns into a zombie status update meeting where team members come together to blurt out their updates and walk away to their desk without ever maximizing the benefit of that meet up.

In this session I will share a case study of how we created a simple experiment that turned into Standup Poker and revolutionized our Daily Standup. This technique helped us uncover true insights of teams progress and got the team talking about strategic planning and plan to remove any impediments as a "team" on daily basis to accomplish their sprint goal and commitments.

We learnt that when team members started using this technique, hidden impediments and dependencies started to emerge and team members organically started to re-plan and prioritize their work to accomplish the Sprint Goal. Product Owner also found great value in this technique as this helped them see the teams true progress and engage with the team to re-prioritize user stories and even take a story out of the sprint if required. Scrum Masters started to observe a trend in the confidence level over the span of the sprint and brought that information to Sprint Retrospective to discuss and brainstorm ways to improve and keep the confidence levels high throughout the sprint. The discussions and observations due to Standup poker resulted in teams committing better and more confidently during Sprint Planning and got into the rhythm of always accomplishing their sprint goal, but more importantly they started improving everyday and got into "continuous improvement" mode.

The content, exercise and message of this session highlight the agile principles of individuals and interactions over process and tools and fostering the mindset of continuous improvement.

In this session we will share examples, stories and experiences from trying the Standup Poker and how this simple technique converted a bunch of individuals into a TEAM !!!

Are you as powerful as you need to be? Do you over power the room and rub people the wrong way?

Why is that? What if there was something you could do about it?

In improvisation, in order to create realistic and compelling characters we study status. That is, how does how we carry ourselves impact our relationship status with other people and how does it change in relation to others?

In this session, we'll explore status, and play with making ourselves more or less powerful. We'll then examine how this plays out in our work environments and how we need to adjust our status depending on which groups or individuals we're interacting with.

You'll also learn the one status trick that will dramatically increase your chances of getting hired in your next interview.

Any organization’s ability to focus on what matters most to their customers is directly related to their ability to get valuable feedback from them. While more and more organizations embrace agile practices during the development of their services, they often lack in how they collect feedback and therefor don’t get the benefits they are after. After all, what is the upside to investing in being able to pivot, if there is no information available to guide the direction of that pivot?

The fact that many roadmaps leave little room for flexibility significantly contributes to this and building powerful roadmaps is a really hard task. How does one get feedback about a house without building it completely? How does one give feedback about a car without being able to drive it around the city for a couple of hours? 

This session will provide you with practical techniques on how to build a powerful roadmap for your product or service, one that allows any organization to get valuable feedback from their customers. This workshop is based on ideas from the upcoming book ‘Thinking in Agile’.

In today's digital landscape, the quest to find talent is moving at a faster rate in this new agile movement. Which creates an interesting playing field for stakeholders such as technical recruiters, scrum masters, agile coaches, software DevOps and other cross-functional team members. Incumbents face critical decisions when it comes to addressing recruitment, the process, the pitfalls and end result.

Do you struggle to find a job in the agile world? Are you having a hard time recruiting people for your agile role? Are you confused on this new agile movement and how it affects your job seeking or recruitment efforts? Is recruitment ready for the agile movement? Are agile cross functional folks ready for recruitment and its challenges?

We will take you through our experiences to help make sense of the agile world and how it affects you. Through our experience we will:

• Discuss our learning of working with organizations looking to hire good people
• Share insights into how recruiting is changing with the agile movement
• Present our experience of job seeking for an agile role

This session is based on plenty of experience of finding agile roles and helping others find agile roles. Paul Heidema is an experienced agile coach and transformation guide that has helped small to large organizations shift towards agile. Mahima Kumar is an experienced recruiter that specializes in finding scrum masters and agile coaches. Zack Muqtadir is an experienced startup leader that recently jumped into the agile world.

What are the 5 Obsessions of an Extraordinary Product Owner?

You will hear learnings generated from coaching 80+ Product Owners at a professional services organization where Product Owners are recruited from the client to work with Agile delivery teams.

What are the common characteristics of good Product Owners; what did we keep tripping up on; and what did we discover that wasn’t in any book?

You will learn why some product owner are better than others.

You will also have the opportunity to perform a self-assessment to better understand your maturity as a Product Owners and what dimensions you might improve on.

3.5 years ago Seedbox Technologies decided to embrace agile methodologies as its way to develop web based products, get them out faster, survive and thrive competition.

It's all started in a traditional fashion:  external consultants were hired to teach employees the agile mindset and how to use agile methodologies like Scrum and Kanban when developing web based products. Project Managers got trained and became Product Owners, experienced Scrum Masters were hired to get development teams to their highest level of performance as fast as they could, developers got trained and developed experience around their team development processes, engineering managers supported agility across the company, and stakeholders directly involved in product development got invited to collaborate with software development teams through agile processes, once they got fully implemented.

That's right, Engineering got agile quite right but by doing so:

• What happen with the rest of the organization?
• What about peoples mindset?
• Is them vs Us or vice versa? 
• Are they able to collaborate, inspect and adapt like the engineering teams and people related to agile projects do?
• How do we get everyone in the organization to communicate when we don't share the same vocabulary?
• How do we fill the gap and avoid old management treats get in the way of the companies transition to something bigger than just the teams?
• Shall we wait until they realize that we all need to change or shall we help them get there?
• How do we use are know-how to turn this mess into a big opportunity for the organization to grow?
• Do we need help?

Well, if this experience report gets accepted, I will share what I've learned about:

• The challenges & flaws that we faced when transitioning from team based agility to organizational agility
• Some of my reflections as an inside observer
• How to use the lessons learned as a wake up call
• What can be done to help the organization to thrive

Let's walk together through a nurturing experience report that might ignite your sens and get you inspired to give the extra mille! 

It is common to work on projects that have a hard deadline. These deadlines are not always fictional and time really matters. Frequently, there is a big discussion if Agile is the right approach for these cases. Can we deliver what is requested without a detailed planing, task breakdown, milestones on a Gantt chart?

In this talk, I will bring examples from my experience volunteering at GiveCamp for several years. Over one weekend volunteers create digital solutions for non-for-profit organizations using 2 hour sprints, MVP deliverables, prioritization, collaboration and an environment in which you feel proud of what you do. If you think this can't happen in your organization, come to this session and challenge me!

Mob programming is collaboration taken to the extreme, eliciting the best from every member of the team. In this session, you will experience the dynamics of mob programming and learn how to use this technique successfully in your own environments.

After mobbing with over two dozen teams, we've seen definite patterns emerge, that we'll discuss here.

In order for teams to step into high performance. it's critical that they develop the practice of having effective conversations about what is and isn't working. Yet in practice, the retrospective meeting is often the least-valued of the agile events: team members feel that their retros are boring, repetitive, and superficial.

In this workshop, we will teach participants how to design and deliver a really useful retrospective using LEGO SERIOUS PLAY. We'll cover the basics of this powerful facilitation technique, and give advice about how to build your own SERIOUS PLAY kit using pieces easily available at the local toy store. We'll also offer practical suggestions for how to design a retro that gets everyone talking (and building), and results in the team agreeing on action.

The participants will leave with a powerful retrospective technique that they can immediately use with their teams.

Does your team ever write scenarios that seem implementation heavy? How about scenarios that feel too vague? This session will take attendees through the art of decomposing user stories into well formed automatable acceptance criteria, from the point of view of a developer and a product owner. Together we will explore the gherkin syntax (given/ when/ then), the trades offs that exists when we change the words we use, and how this can affect the software you build. Attendees will walk away from this session armed with information to help them write better gherkin and make better informed decisions around the words they use.

Why do so many organizations get stuck in fixing local problems without solving organizational ones? How does a leader or team member see and understand the big picture? Do you struggle with helping your company or clients to understand the entire workflow to be able to make better decisions that can make huge improvements? Would you like a powerful visual tool to express the entire workstream to a large audience so that it is clear what areas need improvement?

If so, then this is the workshop for you.

Each participant will actively participate in learning about, designing your own, and consulting with others to learn the skill of creating effective and meaningful Value Stream Maps. This technique, which comes from Lean manufacturing and is closely connected to Agile, aids leaders and teams in seeing the big picture make meaningful and impactful changes that are both quantitative and qualitative. Let's learn a new skill within 60 minutes.

Paul Heidema and Junbin Huang have worked in the Agile space for more than 10 years (combined) with a focus on helping teams and organizations to support and lead impactful change at the level of the organization and system.

We employ powerful agile techniques to inspect the value stream as we build it. Then we improve and adjust to make it more clear. This will enable short cycles of execution and reflection to quickly improve the quality of the value stream map.

Are you frustrated by the many trivial examples that show up when you google "refactor legacy code"? How do you translate these examples to your real-world code base? Sometimes it's just easier to give up on the refactoring and increased test coverage, reserving these techniques for the ever elusive greenfield project. To help you with this dilemma, Nayan will walk through a real legacy Java code base, and perform some safe refactorings required to bring the code under test. All of this will be done under the guidance of the Four Rules of Simple Design (Pass the tests, DRY, Reveal intent, Minimize moving parts).

Agile failure is most felt by Scrum Masters. Why do so many fail to properly support their teams? Why do so many fail to inspire meaningful change in the level of leadership? Why do so many fail to guide transformation in their organisations?

In this workshop, we will harness the knowledge and experience of the participants! 

Prepare to work together to co-discover the Scrum Master vital behaviours!

Many people are taking on the mantle of Scrum Masters across agile teams around the world. Unfortunately, many of them have come from more traditional work structures that don't develop effective Scrum Masters. There is a misconception about the purpose of a Scrum Master. Often the Scrum Master becomes the facilitator or the project manager. This has to stop. Effective leaders, agile coaches, and Scrum Masters take advantage of vital behaviours in supporting scrum masters or by building mastery within these behaviours.

During this workshop, participants will go through a series of exercises to identify the purpose of a Scrum Master, how we can measure success, identify potential vital behaviours, learn from others to determine the vital behaviours, and then create a sound influence strategy to enable effective Scrum Masters and the work that they do. This workshop will use concepts and the model from the book "Influencer" (by Joseph Grenny et all) which details the three (3) keys to a successful change initiative and uses the six (6)  sources of influence.

Prepare to work together to co-discover the Scrum Master vital behaviours!