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.

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.

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 !!!

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.

"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.

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.

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.