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.

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.

The Agile community has long proclaimed that “prioritizing by value” in combination with early learning not only results in a front-loaded value curve, but in overall higher project value compared to a traditional plan-driven approach. In addition, a relatively small number of features usually delivers the bulk of a product or application’s ROI, whereas other features fail to address real customer needs and thus don’t deliver much value at all. The crucial difficulty, though, is to identify those rock star ROI features among the vast range of possible things a team could build.

In this session, we will discuss approaches such as feature buckets, impact maps, and testable hypotheses to categorize and validate features so we better understand how they support different stakeholder goals and what “good enough” looks like. While “the more, the better” applies for some features, it is wasteful if applied across the board, so we will also conduct a short activity using the Kano model to explore the impact of customer expectations on the ROI profile of different features.

"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.

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!

Why do so many agile implementations fail? What can be done to improve our success?

Agile has become a powerful phrase and cultural movement that is often misunderstood and poorly executed. Why, because Agile is seen as another project management tool. Nope. Agile is much more than a set of frameworks, practices, and tools. To get truly long-lasting results that affect the deep culture of an organization, leaders and coaches need to employ both the "Being and Doing" of agile for the greatest chance of success.

The participants will go through a powerful exercise to see how willing and open they are to the Being of Agile which includes the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto.

Paul Heidema and Wessam Nasser will take the group through a simple and powerful exercise to identify how receptive and willing an organization is towards agile. With more than 10 combined years of helping teams, leaders, and organizations, Paul and Wessam can aid each participant to improve their chances of becoming truly agile.

Both Paul and Wessam have facilitated this workshop at organizations and public events with positive feedback and energy.

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.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to combine design thinking, visual facilitation, cause-and-effect analysis, quantified business goals, surfacing of value assumptions and direct traceability from goals to features in a single approach?

There is! Gojko Adzic’s Impact Maps are both a tool and a method that helps multiple stakeholders gain consensus on which features or actions will most likely help us achieve an organizational goal. In the process, we can decide which user groups or personas to target first, derive epics/user stories, identify the underlying assumptions that need to be validated using testable hypotheses, and determine leading indicators to get early feedback whether we are moving in the right direction.

In this workshop, we will look at how to build an Impact Map with a group of stakeholders and how to get the most value out of it. Best of all, you will go create your own sample map so you will walk away with hands-on experience!

This interactive workshop will delve into the core aspects of High Performing Teams working in an Agile environment. We will explore current research into what makes a team high performing and popular models that exist for assessing a team’s performance. We will also discuss how creating a High Performing Team model that is custom to your organization can add value by serving as a focusing tool for teams and a north star for leaders and coaches. We will then guide participants through an exercise to create their own customized High Performing Team model.

The High Performing Team model workshop will give participants a deeper understanding of what high performance truly means and how to create a model that is in line with the values and goals of their organization.

A controversial topic in the community is the value of used to be called a "sprint zero" or initial discovery week. With Professional Services project, it can be argued that taking a week to discover the problem space and build context and relationships between the vendor and client can be crucial.

This interactive session will take the group through a series of exercises that show how a framework for the first iteration can be created that allows the client and vendor team to discovery and learn about the project in a structured, valuable way. Discovery not only includes building understanding of the business outcomes to start preparing for the first sessions reviewing user stories but also involves quality, design (UI/UX), and technical strategy.

There will be two facilitators for this session.