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.

Agile transitions fail to provide adequate guidance on how a manager at any level fits into an Agile organization. What do you do now? What do managers do when teams are supposed to be empowered, self-managing, and self-organizing? Is there a place for managers in an Agile organization?

YES! There is a lot for managers to do, though they might be different than what you did before. Agile is a whole new way of work for most managers, as it requires a particular style of leadership. Your role and responsibilities need to evolve to support the growth and success of the team. You must learn to coach, remove obstacles and model new styles of communication. 

In this interactive session, Selena guides you on how you can thrive as an agile manager as you nurture and support your teams in transformational success. You leave with insights, techniques, and approaches you can readily apply when you return to work. Ready?! Come learn how to inspire, influence, and have an expansive impact in your organization .

Participants learn the “Skills Matrix” technique for getting a new Agile team started and for getting established teams to leap to the next level of capability. This technique has been used for decades at Toyota to create a team development plan in a collaborative, visual way.

For large enterprises starting their Agile journey, the first step towards Agility is Transparency.

Yet, in a lot of large, traditional organizations, the public display of information, uniformly accessible to all, is unsettling.

Through a “scary” analysis of the impact of the lack of transparency, we aim to build a really strong case for why Transparency is the new Green!

To make the leap into Transparency easy, we will also share some tools which have come in handy and worked beautifully for us.

Our pursuit of transparency is dotted with failed attempts – we would love to share those so that others can make fresh mistakes and not repeat our mistakes.

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”.

Most adults have achieved a level of personal development that allows them to function effectively in their families, society and their jobs.  Leaders need to handle more complexity and need to advance to a higher level of personal development to become effective in advancing an Agile transformation.  "Reactive" adults are functional, but unable to manage the complexity of an Agile transformation.  "Creative" (and higher levels of development are needed.  This presentation examines a model of understanding leaders called the "Leadership Circle" and correlates key capabilities in the model to effectiveness in leading an Agile transformation.

A rant, with evidence, on why electronic tools in general, and JIRA in particular, are anti-Agile.  Participants will use the Agile Manifesto to evaluate the electronic tools they are currently familiar with.   JIRA is used as a case study.

What if your team could share new ideas and make unanimous decisions in minutes?

Agile teams need to create and agree on many things such as a definition of done, a sprint plan, and what changes they’ll try in the next sprint based on the most recent retrospective.

How often have you participated in a meetings where few decisions were made? Or where the the loudest person in the room made most of the suggestions and dominated your team’s decision making?

In this interactive workshop, we will practice coming up with new ideas using everybody’s suggestions and making decisions that the whole team agrees on.

Learn and practice techniques such as Fist-of-Five, Decider Protocol and Resolution Protocol and Shared Visioning with Lego.

Make group decisions faster, more aligned with the whole team, and more likely to result in follow-through.

We all learn from the past, but how many times does history repeat itself? Why do we forget to appreciate the important people in our lives and take the things they do for us for granted? Why can’t we improve our relationships in a safe environment free from judgement?

We set out on a journey to discover how a retrospective can be used in personal lives in an attempt to understand their impact outside of scrum teams. We recruited participants who were willing to try retrospectives with their partners, roommates, family and friends and share the results with us. The findings were slightly unexpected and quite inspiring.

In this session, we will share these findings, and take the attendees through some interactive activities to try retrospectives in their personal lives.

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.

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 !!!

As practitioners, coaches, and leaders, we talk about how you don't "do agile," but rather you "be agile."  Agile is a mindset that is supported by values, principles, and science.  A mindset is not something to be switched on and off.  If we want to be agile leaders and fully experience the benefits of agility, the best way to practice is to integrate agile and leadership into all aspects of our lives.

In this workshop, Stephanie explores what she has learned incorporating agile values,  principles, and practices into her life.  She will share a framework to help you create your best integrated life: a life with joy, alignment, and fulfillment.  This framework comes from what she has learned exploring and experimenting over the past decade, including a two-year travel sabbatical in Latin America, creating a more sustainable lifestyle, and a career evolution to agile coach and professional trainer.

In this talk, we will explore:

• What does it mean to have an integrated life and what does agile have to do with it

•  How to identify what is important to you and align to your values and priorities

• The importance of leadership skills and emotional intelligence

• Techniques for maintaining focus, continuous improvement, and adapting to change

This workshop will incorporate activities for participants to get started defining their own integrated life.  

Participants will walk away with a framework that can be applied to move towards an integrated life, resources to explore concepts further, and inspiration to live a remarkable life in our conventional world.

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.

Two years ago I presented the story of a client in the US who underwent a very fast and aggressive transformation. Although it was ultimately successful, along the way, we nearly destroyed it all. The saving grace was a small group of courageous leaders who made some tough decisions to get things back on track, and continued to drive the progress needed to succeed. The success story was presented at TAC in 2014 and the near colossal failure story was presented at Agile 2015. We bring this amazing story together into a single talk with many important lessons.

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’.

The voice is an instrument of expression, and can be a powerful tool in any life endeavour. But many people do not know how to use their voice effectively. I will take people through a series of physical, vocal and speech exercises that help them free their voice from constraints, and use it with agility and confidence. The session will be highly participatory, physical and agiliciously fun!