Does prioritizing your development portfolio seem unclear or mired in politics? Ever feel like the decisions for what gets worked on when are somewhere between arbitrary and emotional? Ever get tired of providing cost estimates for work of uncertain value?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, this session is for you! Matt Barcomb will open with introductory concepts about shifting from a cost focus to a value focus for development work. Next, providing business value for user stories will be debunked. Then, a collaborative framework for prioritization, Benefit Mapping, will be discussed. Finally, Matt will end with ways to simplify the cost evaluation of work and risk.

We are about launch our latest feature to the eager public, when suddenly we get the call all developers dread: The Site is down! Our business is pressuring us to quickly fix the site, but we can’t even find the problem! We pick up the red phone and call Karen, the fixer. She calmly spends five minutes typing, and announces that she found the problem, and everything is back to normal. Where would we be without Karen? How can we get these skills on the rest of the team, so anyone can work the magic she does?
It turns out that troubleshooting is a learnable skill. Join Shawn as he explores the Science of Troubleshooting. This workshop will examine what is happening during effective problem solving. It will examine types of scientific reasoning, and explore how we are using them to solve problems, sometimes without even realizing what we are doing! Participants will see how, by using scientific reasoning and experiments to build and test hypotheses about the problems, they can greatly increase the effectiveness of their troubleshooting and debugging. By making the process explicit even consummate problem solvers can improve how they approach and solve problems. Using the awareness gained attendees can guide others to improve their problem-solving skills.

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.

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.

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.

In this interactive session, we’ll explore how each of us views the world differently and how our perception is shaped by everything we've previously experienced. Through magic, illusions, and an interactive exercise, Jeff reveals the ways our perceptions and biases influence our reality and how our individual realities are unique.

Discovering your distinct personal perspective by understanding how biases impact how we make sense of the world around us, we can learn to better understand others. We can gain insights which inform our interactions with customers, colleagues, and competitors.

You'll leave this session with an appreciation for working with others, and approaches to team problem solving in our complex world. No magic spells required.