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.

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.

"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.

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.

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’.

This forum aims to explore how a developer's communication with certain roles on the scrum team can positively and negativity impact the product, along with some ways to improve communication through various technologies and techniques.

The Relationships
Developer + Team Developers
Developer + Team Product Owner
Developer + Team Designers
Developer + Team Scrum Master
Developer + Team QAs

The Questions for Each Relationship to Discuss
1. Why is communication important within the relationship?
2. What happens when communication in this relationship is bad? (signs and metrics)
3. What different ways can you communicate effectively in this relationship (technologies and techniques)

It is common to work on projects that have a hard deadline. These deadlines are not always fictional and time really matters. Frequently, there is a big discussion if Agile is the right approach for these cases. Can we deliver what is requested without a detailed planing, task breakdown, milestones on a Gantt chart?

In this talk, I will bring examples from my experience volunteering at GiveCamp for several years. Over one weekend volunteers create digital solutions for non-for-profit organizations using 2 hour sprints, MVP deliverables, prioritization, collaboration and an environment in which you feel proud of what you do. If you think this can't happen in your organization, come to this session and challenge me!

The 5 levels of Planning ( Vision, Roadmap, Release Plan, Sprint/Iteration Plan, Daily Commitment) is a useful way to summarise key planning activities for different horizons in an Agile context.  This will be an overview of the 5 levels of planning, including examples of how we've been trying this out at Spotify.

"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.

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!

The Agile Community has experienced tremendous growth since the birth of the Agile Manifesto – The Commandments of Agile Disciples – less than two decades ago. The buzzwords we have grown so familiar with today, such as Scrum, Kanban, user stories, epics, MVPs, etc would have drawn blank stares from many current agile experts just a few years ago. Today, many organizations, including those with large, complex environments and systems are increasingly embracing values and principles espoused in agile methodologies, and with ever increasing appetite thanks to the agile evangelists (coaches, consultants, etc) and believers who continue to spread the agile gospel according to the Utah 17 .

With this tremendous growth has come different interpretations and applications of agile, what I like to call the agile denominations. Every so often, new agile frameworks and methodologies are born, with agile disciples spreading different flavors of agility to new converts and unbelievers alike. This has created a paradox with new knowledge and boundaries achieved on the one hand, while sometimes compounding an already scary path into a treacherous journey of confusion and complications on the other hand. We become more focused on frameworks and models, rather than the simplicity inherent in the agile values and principles and many organizations are struggling to properly adopt the right behaviors and mindset; which all culminates unfortunately in one thought – Agile will not work for us.

In this talk, a number of parallels will be drawn between agile and religion; shared from the lens of my experiences working with and coaching agile teams; as well as helping organizations go through their agile transformation journey. This is a call to agile disciples to go back to the basics and truly embrace the agile mindset and to protect the core values and principles that we’ve come to cherish.