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.

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.

Ben Linders said: "if you want to solve the problems that you are having, and deliver more value to your customers, you have to change the way you do your work. That is why agile promotes the usage of retrospectives: To help teams to solve problems and improve themselves!" 

In this workshop, I will walk you through the reasons, concepts, phases, tips and tricks of behind the scenes of retrospectives, in a practical, engaging, fun and interactive manner.

Are you ready for the challenge?  

Approached from an agile perspective, delivering value looks very different than when thinking from a traditional mindset. During this interactive workshop, participants will gain hands on experience on applying critical concepts to estimating value in a way that also drives adoption of an agile mindset. This session is based on material that I have used on numerous occasions to help enterprise business leaders reshape the way they think about value. Participants will use the following practices when estimating the value of future work:

1. Deliberate estimation of lead time ( your most precious resource) and delay time (your most toxic obstacle).
2. How to move forward with imperfect information through the use of explicit assumptions required to approximate value.
3. Using Cost Of Delay to put a price tag on time, creating an economic incentive to increase agility at the business level

I will start the session by providing an overview of the power of focusing on lead time and delay time over efficiency and throughput. I'll show participants how to use concepts such as explicit commitment points and delivery points to measure business agility, and discuss sources of delay, and means to eliminate sources of delay.

I will then discuss ways to quickly assess the value type and urgency profile of work, providing a means to quickly catalog the type of assumptions that require research and validation in order to conduct high quality conversation around the estimation of value.

Session attendees will be given the chance to estimate the value of work through exploration of a business value assumption model. Ill go through some of the key factors to consider when estimating value, and how to quickly compare value across epics and features using the assumption model approach.

The psychological factors that prevent people from estimating value will be discussed and participants will be coached through effective methods to overcome these factors including relative ranking, accuracy over precision, and explicit tracking and sharing of key assumptions.

After this I will give an overview of how to frame value in terms of Cost Of Delay. Ill present the audience with a way to put a price on the countless queues our work tends to go through. I will then guide attendees to to quantify their value assumption model according to the amount of value lost over time. Participants will use techniques to estimate units of value according to the opportunity cost incurred when work is blocked or left waiting on a queue. I will also show the relationship between different urgency profiles and the severity of Cost Of Delay.  

For the final part of the session, participants will rank a backlog of their own work through CD3.  Cost of Delay Divided by Duration takes COD and divides it delivery lead time to create a ranking mechanism that focuses teams on delivering the highest value in a given time period of time. I'll walk through how CD3 provides insight necessary to minimizing the impact of COD for a set of options, encouraging the breakdown of work into smaller batches, and prioritizing work essential to eliminating delay.

This session will highly interactive, and give participants practical, hands on tools that can help the business think in terms of getting to value with agility, acting as a gateway practice for deeper adoption in the future.

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 !!!

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.

What are the 5 Obsessions of an Extraordinary Product Owner?

You will hear learnings generated from coaching 80+ Product Owners at a professional services organization where Product Owners are recruited from the client to work with Agile delivery teams.

What are the common characteristics of good Product Owners; what did we keep tripping up on; and what did we discover that wasn’t in any book?

You will learn why some product owner are better than others.

You will also have the opportunity to perform a self-assessment to better understand your maturity as a Product Owners and what dimensions you might improve on.

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.

Why do so many organizations get stuck in fixing local problems without solving organizational ones? How does a leader or team member see and understand the big picture? Do you struggle with helping your company or clients to understand the entire workflow to be able to make better decisions that can make huge improvements? Would you like a powerful visual tool to express the entire workstream to a large audience so that it is clear what areas need improvement?

If so, then this is the workshop for you.

Each participant will actively participate in learning about, designing your own, and consulting with others to learn the skill of creating effective and meaningful Value Stream Maps. This technique, which comes from Lean manufacturing and is closely connected to Agile, aids leaders and teams in seeing the big picture make meaningful and impactful changes that are both quantitative and qualitative. Let's learn a new skill within 60 minutes.

Paul Heidema and Junbin Huang have worked in the Agile space for more than 10 years (combined) with a focus on helping teams and organizations to support and lead impactful change at the level of the organization and system.

We employ powerful agile techniques to inspect the value stream as we build it. Then we improve and adjust to make it more clear. This will enable short cycles of execution and reflection to quickly improve the quality of the value stream map.

People in organizations that are learning Kanban quickly understand the relationship of WIP, Cycle Time and Throughput. However, when teams start doing things like Pair Programming, they tend to hold fast to the idea that “you’d get more done if you worked separately!”

High performing software teams use a variety of modern technical practices including Test Driven Development, Pair/Mob Programming, Refactoring, Evolutionary Design, and Continuous Integration & Delivery.

How do these practices fit into the Kanban context? Whether through improving collaboratively, evolving experimentally, or implementing feedback loops, learn how these technical practices are supported by Kanban's four Foundational Principles and six Core Practices, which in turn make Kanban more powerful.

Are you frustrated by the many trivial examples that show up when you google "refactor legacy code"? How do you translate these examples to your real-world code base? Sometimes it's just easier to give up on the refactoring and increased test coverage, reserving these techniques for the ever elusive greenfield project. To help you with this dilemma, Nayan will walk through a real legacy Java code base, and perform some safe refactorings required to bring the code under test. All of this will be done under the guidance of the Four Rules of Simple Design (Pass the tests, DRY, Reveal intent, Minimize moving parts).

Do you ever think you have your career figured out, you're on the right career path, and suddenly along comes something like Agile and nothing seems right anymore? Yup, we went through that too! We were both excelling as Project/Program Managers, trying to help our companies do things better than ever. That's when we came across Agile, and our journeys have been forever altered. Join us to hear how our quest for helping the organisations we work for took us from a traditional PM role, to change agent, to Agile Coach and way beyond. Your journey can be a conscious choice rather than the series of accidents ours has been, even if your goal is not to become an Agile Coach, there is so many options available to you in your future which can help organizations thrive into a bright future. Hurry ... the world needs you!

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.

Agile failure is most felt by Scrum Masters. Why do so many fail to properly support their teams? Why do so many fail to inspire meaningful change in the level of leadership? Why do so many fail to guide transformation in their organisations?

In this workshop, we will harness the knowledge and experience of the participants! 

Prepare to work together to co-discover the Scrum Master vital behaviours!

Many people are taking on the mantle of Scrum Masters across agile teams around the world. Unfortunately, many of them have come from more traditional work structures that don't develop effective Scrum Masters. There is a misconception about the purpose of a Scrum Master. Often the Scrum Master becomes the facilitator or the project manager. This has to stop. Effective leaders, agile coaches, and Scrum Masters take advantage of vital behaviours in supporting scrum masters or by building mastery within these behaviours.

During this workshop, participants will go through a series of exercises to identify the purpose of a Scrum Master, how we can measure success, identify potential vital behaviours, learn from others to determine the vital behaviours, and then create a sound influence strategy to enable effective Scrum Masters and the work that they do. This workshop will use concepts and the model from the book "Influencer" (by Joseph Grenny et all) which details the three (3) keys to a successful change initiative and uses the six (6)  sources of influence.

Prepare to work together to co-discover the Scrum Master vital behaviours!