The goal of Enterprise Agility is to have a nimble, flexible organization. To reach this end we need to have a clear decision-making process that supports autonomy and learning while achieving effective outcomes.

The Advice Process is easy to understand. Anyone in the organization can make a decision provided they get advice from everyone who will be meaningfully affected and people with expertise in the matter. The Advice Process helps organizations develop trust, ownership and learning to create a nimble organization. The Advice Process originates from corporate innovation as documented in “Joy at Work” and “Reinventing Organizations”

In this hands-on session you will learn how to use “Advice Poker” cards as a sense-making and education tool to explore how decisions are made and can be made. The Advice Process will be contrasted with other approaches such as consensus and traditional hierarchical decision-making. You will walk away with a powerful tool to invite greater levels of trust and ownership to allow Agile to scale.

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.

For large enterprises starting their Agile journey, the first step towards Agility is Transparency.

Yet, in a lot of large, traditional organizations, the public display of information, uniformly accessible to all, is unsettling.

Through a “scary” analysis of the impact of the lack of transparency, we aim to build a really strong case for why Transparency is the new Green!

To make the leap into Transparency easy, we will also share some tools which have come in handy and worked beautifully for us.

Our pursuit of transparency is dotted with failed attempts – we would love to share those so that others can make fresh mistakes and not repeat our mistakes.

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.

Many agile methods and strategies are geared towards small teams working in reasonably straightforward situations. That’s great work if you can get it. Most organizations that are adopting agile today have been in operations for decades and sometimes centuries. They are typically dealing with significant investments in legacy systems and processes that won’t go away any time soon. They have an existing culture that is usually not-as-agile as it could be and an organization structure that puts up many roadblocks to collaboration. Their staff members are often overly specialized and many people do not have skills in agile software development techniques, and there are many thoughts as to what needs to be done to improve things, the adoption of agile being one of many. This is certainly not the startup company environment that we keep hearing about.

In this presentation Scott Ambler reviews the challenges faced by established enterprises when transforming to agile and what enterprise agile means in practice. He then overviews the Disciplined Agile (DA) framework, a pragmatic and context-sensitive approach to enterprise agile, working through how it addresses the realities faced by modern organizations. Scott then works through advice for transforming your enterprise to become more agile, including the people-process-tools triad and the skills and experience required of enterprise agile team coaches and executive agile coaches. He ends with an overview of proven strategies for adopting agile in less-than-ideal environments

Everyone agrees that technical debt is a burden on software innovation that we would rather avoid, and certainly clean up whenever possible. However, in most organizations, people don't prevent technical debt nearly as much as they should, and they don't ever get the time to clean it up. Why, then, if there are clear incentives to deal with technical debt, is it a rampant problem?

In this session, we will focus on how to deal with technical debt on several levels, including the individual developer, the team, the software value stream, and the larger organization. While technical debt may manifest itself in a developer's IDE, the problem starts long before the developer decides to copy and paste some code, or creates an overly-complex and under-documented class. The pressures on teams and individuals to take on more debt than they should come from many sources. Therefore, the solutions to the technical debt problem must extend beyond the team.

Agile transitions fail to provide adequate guidance on how a manager at any level fits into an Agile organization. What do you do now? What do managers do when teams are supposed to be empowered, self-managing, and self-organizing? Is there a place for managers in an Agile organization?

YES! There is a lot for managers to do, though they might be different than what you did before. Agile is a whole new way of work for most managers, as it requires a particular style of leadership. Your role and responsibilities need to evolve to support the growth and success of the team. You must learn to coach, remove obstacles and model new styles of communication. 

In this interactive session, Selena guides you on how you can thrive as an agile manager as you nurture and support your teams in transformational success. You leave with insights, techniques, and approaches you can readily apply when you return to work. Ready?! Come learn how to inspire, influence, and have an expansive impact in your organization .

Movie making is a costly affair involves risks and uncertainties. An Agile approach of incremental moviemaking makes it more predictable and risk resilience.
Up to 20% of the overall Budget of the movie can be saved by effective use of Agile & Lean techniques.
Using Agile Practices in Movie making can take you to your destination in a systematic way.
Experimenting, Prototyping, Shared Learning & Using Effective Tools makes Movie making process fast, more predictable and cost effective. Prioritize scenes using “MoSCoW” technique to arrive at “Which scene to shoot Where & When”.

As organizations start their Agile journey, very soon the question of “What’s to become of the Managers?” comes up.

Yesterday’s heroes and firefighters find themselves without a clear space or role.

But surely there is a better way of handling these managers and the expertise and experience that they bring with them.

Our managers can be re-imagined and flourish as mentors, as experts, as change agents.

We would like to share some of the new roles and responsibilities that our erstwhile managers can adopt in the new world.

Also a few tips and tricks to make managers our allies in the quest for Agility.

As a business leader you may be the missing ingredient to an organization effectively transitioning to Agile. Agile requires a culture shift in governance from a chess master (command and control) to a gardener (cultivates the organizations).

“With the right Agile Top-Down approach, the ride to success is always better!”

As PwC’s national agile leaders, we have extensive first-hand experience providing assurance to Canadian Financial Institutions, Media Organizations, and Insurance Companies on the maturity and health of their agile teams, projects and culture. The number one reason we see Agile projects fail in the Canadian market is due to Agile being looked at like an IT technical change as opposed to an organizational change – and business leaders are often not leading that change.

We have identified 5 areas in transitioning to Agile that play a significant role in effectively meeting customer demands and business needs. We will discuss each of these areas and provide pragmatic approaches that we have advised and seen businesses implement successfully.

1. Vision
2. Culture
3. Changing Roles
4. Flexibility
5. Continuous Improvement

Who should attend:

As a manager or executive, if you have experienced pain points in transitioning to agile or are not seeing the benefits expected, then this interactive discussion will provide value. It is designed for business leaders to be enablers of agile while also providing assurance. If you answer yes to any of the following questions, you will likely enjoy this session!

• Do you have a software team following Agile but nothing has changed in the business (governance, compliance, controls)?
• Is your organization transitioning from Traditional to Agile roles and you are afraid that your position will no longer be relevant?
• As an Executive, Manager, or a member of the 2^nd and 3^rd lines of defense, how can you become a better enabler of Agile to help achieve business objectives while providing effective assurance?

“Move fast and break things.” — Mark Zuckerberg

Mobile is no longer a hobby for companies. In that world, speed is the key. My company embraced the principle of “welcoming changing requirements, even late in development.” It’s allowed us to grow, and we have accomplished some amazing things.

It’s also caused some challenges for teams. They felt the pain of this pace, and our clients were frustrated by delayed releases.

This presentation describes a 3-month case study I ran to measure things like team communication, productivity, and quality while implementing Scrum for the first time. The results were convincing, and allowed us to learn what happens when you value speed more than anything else.

I hope you’ll join me in seeing how we learned to work smarter instead of harder.

Many team challenges can be tracked back to cognitive biases: our judgement gets anchored, we think we're better than we are, and we are our own favorite reference point. And even though we're encouraged to "think outside the box," there are conditions where we have a bias against creativity. If that's not a recipe for a tough team environment, I don't know what is.

Improve your game by learning about bias! You'll leave this session with strategies for identifying and mitigating bias on your team.

The talk covers three start up players who scaled quickly within the Indian food tech industry in the year 2015. It draws out a common factor between the marketing strategies of the three enterprises. This common factor is then fine tuned into a KPI as it is used to analyze and measure the strategies based on data. The entire process draws it’s inspiration from Agile methodologies and the respective ceremonies held as part of Agile. These include ceremonies like retrospects and just in time reviews. The talk focuses on how a product owner/manager can contribute to the marketing/sales department of a huge enterprise/product.

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.

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.

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.

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.