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.

Everyone agrees that technical debt is a burden on software innovation that we would rather avoid, and certainly clean up whenever possible. However, in most organizations, people don't prevent technical debt nearly as much as they should, and they don't ever get the time to clean it up. Why, then, if there are clear incentives to deal with technical debt, is it a rampant problem?

In this session, we will focus on how to deal with technical debt on several levels, including the individual developer, the team, the software value stream, and the larger organization. While technical debt may manifest itself in a developer's IDE, the problem starts long before the developer decides to copy and paste some code, or creates an overly-complex and under-documented class. The pressures on teams and individuals to take on more debt than they should come from many sources. Therefore, the solutions to the technical debt problem must extend beyond the team.

Many agile methods and strategies are geared towards small teams working in reasonably straightforward situations. That’s great work if you can get it. Most organizations that are adopting agile today have been in operations for decades and sometimes centuries. They are typically dealing with significant investments in legacy systems and processes that won’t go away any time soon. They have an existing culture that is usually not-as-agile as it could be and an organization structure that puts up many roadblocks to collaboration. Their staff members are often overly specialized and many people do not have skills in agile software development techniques, and there are many thoughts as to what needs to be done to improve things, the adoption of agile being one of many. This is certainly not the startup company environment that we keep hearing about.

In this presentation Scott Ambler reviews the challenges faced by established enterprises when transforming to agile and what enterprise agile means in practice. He then overviews the Disciplined Agile (DA) framework, a pragmatic and context-sensitive approach to enterprise agile, working through how it addresses the realities faced by modern organizations. Scott then works through advice for transforming your enterprise to become more agile, including the people-process-tools triad and the skills and experience required of enterprise agile team coaches and executive agile coaches. He ends with an overview of proven strategies for adopting agile in less-than-ideal environments

Movie making is a costly affair involves risks and uncertainties. An Agile approach of incremental moviemaking makes it more predictable and risk resilience.
Up to 20% of the overall Budget of the movie can be saved by effective use of Agile & Lean techniques.
Using Agile Practices in Movie making can take you to your destination in a systematic way.
Experimenting, Prototyping, Shared Learning & Using Effective Tools makes Movie making process fast, more predictable and cost effective. Prioritize scenes using “MoSCoW” technique to arrive at “Which scene to shoot Where & When”.

If you’d like an alternative to typical, quarter-by-quarter, schedule oriented road mapping (and all the associated waste) then this session is for you. Matt Barcomb will introduce a Cadenced Flow approach to flow-based road mapping.

He will first cover how to layout and execute a road map based on models that better fit software planning as well as how to transform your existing plans. Next, using options thinking to frame work will be explored and how to use starting and stopping triggers for options, reducing the need of blind budgeting or project practices. Finally, Matt will wrap up by touching on a few key metrics that will let you monitor and evaluate your new road map.

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.

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.

We’ve been fortunate enough to help organizations in their Agile transformation that impacted 500 to 15,000+ practitioners.

They all seem to have similar challenges but at different degrees. In this talk we’re going to share and explore some of our observations leading small and large scale transformations, the challenges that nearly sunk a dream and how we tackled them.

The focus will be on challenges facing transformations at scale, setting up a transformation for success, how to manage change, and the role of leadership and what’s impeding them to be effective.

You have a brand new team.  You inherit a pre-existing team, but one person seems a little unproductive.  Your team is in shambles.   You're a newly-hired manager and walk in on day one and want to impress your new underlings.  You're a Product Owner and just came back from a great session with the customer, ready to tell the team.

What do all of the above scenarios have in common?  You are looking for ways to inspire and motivate your team members into action.  You want to drive them towards a vision you have.  Or you need to find a way to "deal with" that one "bad apple" in the team, so the whole team can be that much more productive and effective. 

But how do you do this??   Come and listen, and experience first hand, some simple experiments that will help you figure out how to inspire and motivate your team members.

The White Bead Corporation is looking for Above Average Employees for expanded production.  On the job training provided.  Earn bonuses!  The White Bead Corporation is a proud producer of shiny, perfect, white beads. We work hard to meet our customer’s exacting demands and won’t settle for anything less than perfection. We need Willing Workers who are Above Average Employees to handle this rigorous task in an inspiring environment. Apply within.

Come watch, and participate, in the classic experiment made famous by Dr. Deming. Let’s explore the link between typical management techniques, human factors and overall quality.

One week sprints delivering working software every week. This is our holy grail but so many agile teams aren't able to achieve this milestone. Even harder, how can we do this when you are providing project teams to clients? When the Product Owner may not know much about story writing at the start? When projects might be 6 weeks or 6 months or longer?

This session will be an highly interactive discussion and overview of a way to structure and organize highly agile teams, delivering value immediately and continuously delivering working code in one week sprints. There will be no or minimal slides, facilitator will lead conversation with group in a coaching manner.

Covers process, quality and technology.

Audience:
Beginner to intermediate SM's or Product Owner's

"We seek and Agile Coach/Project Manager to enforce our Agile best practices. The ideal candidate must have the ability to walk on water, magically change all organizational processes, convince executives to just be Agile, and install JIRA. The ideal candidate must be PMP, BsC in Engineering, CSM, CSP, CSPO, PSM I, II and III, SAFe 4.0, MBA of All The Things and other relevant certifications as dictated by our HR department."  Did your Agile Coach end up being a dud? While Agile has largely crossed the chasm, the art of Agile Coaching is one of the most mis-understood roles in the industry today which is why we end up with job postings that cram so much detail into their description . If the coach is helping the team improve, what do the managers do? How do you measure the effectiveness of your coaches? Should Agile Coaching be a permanent structure in your organization, or a temporary one? In this session we'll dymystify Agile Coaching and give you practical tools to figure out the best way to interview, and hire, coaches for your organization.

We've all been there.  We have to deal with them in all aspects of our lives. We've all had them on our teams. They have a name: Jerk.

There are some things agile can fix and some things people that can't be fixed. With agile we can improve the work life for almost everyone, by increasing communication, increasing collaboration and minimizing the Jerks. It won't help with the chronic non-flusher, but for your teams it will help.

This session will explore Jerks and what can be done about them.

Project Management practices teach PMs to be leaders, to drive results and to complete the project on time, on budget and on scope.  In Agile, we are expecting our leaders to stand in front of the team to take the criticisms but to be behind them and let them do their job.  

Too often managers/leaders fall back into the directing mode, telling the teams what to do and how.  There needs to be a better understanding of what servant leadership means, how to achieve it and why it is important.

This session will explore the different styles of leadership and why, for Agile, servant leadership is important.

What's the best way to structure an organization? What's the best way to build and align teams?

Join a panel, which includes Chris Chapman, Mike Kaufman, Peter LePiane, and Geoff Beers, for a discussion and Q&A of what these experienced coaches have seen work, and not work, in various sized organizations. We'll look at organizational design, department design, and team design. We'll dive into the the benefits and pitfalls which come with the coordination and collaboration impacts of these design choices, and frameworks that have been used in various designs.

And we'll explore starting points to consider for getting started, since we'll find there are no silver bullets for success!

Just do a quick search on the Internet, and you'll find plenty of opinions and approaches to Agile. Talk to a few Agile Thought-Leaders, and you'll find even more opinions. Then, talk to a few current practitioners, and you'll find even more opinions and perspectives. Each one of those sources likely has a legitimate perspective.

While all of the expert opinions are based in similar values and principles, how those values and principles are implemented can (and does) vary immensely. This discussion explores some of the challenges and options.

Is one right? Are some wrong?
Are they all right? How might that even be possible?
And if you're new to Agile, how on earth do you know which to listen to, and which to ignore?
Heck, even if you're not new to Agile, there's a lot of differing opinions from which to chose! 

Join Shawn Button & Jeff Kosciejew, two experienced Agile Coaches with very different journeys into Agile Coaching, explore a few of the common frameworks and approaches they've seen, and experienced. This discussion explores some of the challenges and options in what some have to offer, and possible starting points in this journey, while providing context for experienced agilists in how we could be perceived.

Five years after the initial adoption of Agile, PointClickCare had grown from 10 development teams to 40, from a single market focus to serving multiple markets each with their own distinct needs, and from a general software platform to a core solution with multiple, market-specific modular variations and add-on modules.  Through rapid growth, teams had been stretched, juggled and supplemented to support the continued need for new products, and the process that worked for 10 teams was showing signs of strain.  To reinvigorate their Agile methodology implementation, and to set the stage for future success, PointClickCare set off to rejuvenate their Agile approach.  

Over the course of two years, PointClickCare gathered input and feedback from teams, management and software industry experts, and worked through various experiments and pilots to rework their development process.  PointClickCare began implementing new and improved practices to promote a process and culture that would carry through further growth. 

This case study will show you where PointClickCare started, the indicators that showed where improvements were needed, the steps taken to research, plan and execute organizational change, and the lessons learned from the experience.