A face-to-face conversation is the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team. So states the sixth principle of the Agile Manifesto.

Reality comes with a big "however." Work-at-home, outsourcing and inter-company partnerships mean that, more and more, we find ourselves n meetings where other participants are not in the same room. They may be around the corner or around the world. Some organizations invest in powerful tools to make this arrangement work well - or, sometimes, not so well. Others make do with audio only. Are we fooling ourselves when we call these events "meetings?" Maybe. Yet they're part of our world, so why not make the most of them?

In this lively session, you'll examine a proven pattern for facilitation, discover ways to overcome the challenges of virtual meetings and learn techniques that encourage meaningful participation. Most of these require more focus and ingenuity than expense.

Sue will share some of the techniques she learned as a teleworking pioneer in the '90s and a trainer of coaches, via distance, since 2003. Join us to explore ways you can bring your meetings with remote participants to life and respect everyone's time - including your own.

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.

NOTE: Scrum asks us to have courage. The Agile Manifesto asks us to value individuals and interactions over processes and tools. I hope the organizing committee will consider this proposal despite the risk that it might offend some tool vendors. If we can't speak freely about our experiences with tools, we will fail as a community.

We all know how people use design thinking to create better products and deliver delightful experiences to our users. However, design thinking can be an excellent tool to use for organizational change. In the case of organizational change, our product is the change that we are trying to drive, and our customers are those people who are impacted (internally and externally) and have to live with that change. In the same way that design thinking puts the user front-and-centre for products, it can be used to put people in the organization front-and-centre. In this talk we will discuss how design thinking works and, as a case study, how we have applied it at Scotiabank to help drive adoption of the Bank’s NPS customer insights into building solutions that serve our customers. In that program, previous internal processes were ineffective in pushing relevant data to delivery teams at the right time. Using a Lean or Agile approach would have provided some benefit, but taking a design thinking approach uncovered an array of useful insights to make the whole process more purposeful. Learn from this example to explore how you might incorporate design thinking to drive greater effectiveness and relevance for your team’s body of work.

More asking, less telling. As an agile leader, adopt the approach of humble enquiry to build relationships, increase trust and collaboration, and deal with the challenges of organizational transformations.

"Humble enquiry is the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person." - Edgar H. Schein

Working in an agile way asks us to rethink how we relate to each other as we tackle complex problems and challenge the traditional structures of our organizations. Humble enquiry - the art of asking instead of telling - is a critical skill for agilists who seek to improve collaboration and address difficult problems head on. Inspired by Edgar H. Schein's book 'Humble Enquiry, this workshop will teach you the fundamentals of how to do more asking and less telling. Through mini-lectures and interactive exercises, we'll discuss the different types of questioning, consider the forces around and within us that inhibit our ability to ask instead of tell, and examine how this powerful technique can improve collaboration within agile teams as well as help to address some of the challenges of agile transformations.

From actual field experience helping organizations with adopting Lean-Agile at scale, I have observed some patterns of success and anti-patterns that I would like to share. These patterns have to do with how Leadership and the Lean-Agile Center of excellence contribute successfully or unsuccessfully for success at scaling. We discuss how they both need to exhibit some fundamental areas of leadership that are referenced directly from the book The Leadership Challenge, by Kouzes and Posner. In the session, we will discuss the areas of leadership referenced in the book and how they come to life successfully and sometimes unsuccessfully in the organization. The examples that are given the session in tandem with the book can be used as a clear guide on scaling success in the large enterprise.

The number of agile teams that I support went from 20 (too many) to more than 70 (absurd) in a few months. What could I do? How could I help them?

From this need came the Agile Coach Program that Paul created and facilitated at ADP with a small group of individuals - one was Iaroslav Torbin. These participants already support (or wanted to support) teams (be they using Scrum or Kanban) and the individuals around them. This is the story of that journey and the results.

Feedback from the program:

• "The agile coach program has been a valuable experience both personally and professionally. It was a fun, interactive and engaging."
• "I really enjoyed being a part of this program. With its interactive and constructive parts."

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!

Ever been in a situation when the Product Manager comes and asks for “a couple of small changes that are high priority” and the team says “They’re kind of big. Which one do you want first? Really, really!”.  “I want them all! As soon as possible.”.

There are many directions one can go from here. One can work harder or work smarter. While you probably know ways to work harder, but let’s explore ways to work smarter.

In this talk Ardita will share techniques that she has used which produce good results. She will talk about Product management, technical backbone, collaboration and how all to get Product managers and teams “singing” together in harmony and with focus.

How do you coach leaders in an agile transformation? How does coaching this group differ from coaching on an agile team? How do you coach Leadership as their peer? Agile is always thought of as being ‘down in the delivery layer’ of organizations. But, for us to be truly successful in embracing agility, we need to be more inclusive of all decision makers in the organization. That starts at the top. There are lot of cultural elements and tools that need to be changed across the organization. This requires dedicated change agents to be positioned within the environment of senior leaders to help them embrace agility in their everyday and strategic decision making. Most people want to do the right thing – it’s all about coaching so that, in the moments where our intentions and our decisions are tested by the status quo, we can help our leaders evaluate their choices. This means being a constant influencer, mirror and educator. And, it means sometimes you have to let things go. Successfully coaching leaders through agile transformation requires very purposeful influencing. In this session, we will discuss how to help bring senior leaders along an agile change journey as well as the primary challenges you are likely to encounter along the way and proven mechanisms to help you push through.

The White Bead Corporation is looking for Above Average Employees for expanded production. On the job training provided. Earn bonuses! The White Bead Corporation is a proud producer of shiny, perfect, white beads. We work hard to meet our customer’s exacting demands and won’t settle for anything less than perfection. We need Willing Workers who are Above Average Employees to handle this rigorous task in an inspiring environment. Apply within.

Come watch, and participate, in the classic experiment made famous by Dr. Deming. Let’s explore the link between typical management techniques, human factors and overall quality.

Agile teams today are made up of design, science, engineering, and product specialists who work together to understand customer needs and build products. When teams focus exclusively on building shippable code, discovery of customer needs tends to get overlooked. Losing sight of customer needs results in less desirable products and mediocre experiences.

How can teams continue to discover customer needs without sacrificing the quality of the software they ship? This is where Dual Track Agile (DTA) comes in.

In this talk we will share practical advice on how to accommodate discovery and learning with the help of DTA. We will explain how to set up DTA on a cross-functional team, feed discovery learnings into the development process, and end up with a better product that your customers will love!

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development was written by a group of people who came together to think together and record their thinking in a document to share with the world. There is no doubt that the Agile Manifesto has had a profound impact on the way many people think about work and life. It has shaped the world of work in countless ways.

As people come to identify themselves both individually and collectively by the doctrines of a manifesto, elevating it to the status of immutable sacred text is both tempting and comforting. Indeed, there are many examples of how highly-cohesive, cultish and fragile social groups vociferously defend the immutability of their founding ideas, manifestos and mission statements. The upholding of the transcendent status of their charismatic tribal leaders who provide rallying cries from the pulpit is vigorously pursued.

Unsustainable as a movement, within one to two generations disintegrative patterns begin to emerge. Out of a desire to protect its aims and interests, the community becomes inward looking and insular. Insularity creates unnatural stressors that degrade integrity. Jockeying, antipathy, animosity and infighting among tribal leaders (especially if the movement is closely tied to their individual material gain) gradually escalate to the point of schism, fragmentation and multiplication of competing variations of ideology. Estrangement and apathy retard progress and stagnate intellectual activity. Some of the most influential, wide-spread and world-shaping movements have succumbed to this kind of collapse.

We need not regard such susceptibility to inward collapse--such fragility--as an abomination, something to mock or scorn--something that only happens to other movements, other people with different beliefs and superstitions from our own. Identity is such a powerful human need that human beings will go to any length to preserve it, even to the point of self-ruin. It is social. It seeks belonging.

Social cohesion galvanizes the identity of the individual. Much of this occurs at the level of the sub-conscious. In its noblest forms of expression, it has lead to the highest achievements of humanity. However, identity can be blind, and in most cases has its blind spots. It can lead us down a dark and perilous path. For identity to remain grounded in reality and illumined by truth, the thinking behind identity needs to be explored and understood more deeply.

In this 90-minute session, participants will have the opportunity to think together--as the authors of the Manifesto did--in a safe and collaborative environment. Content gleaned from contributors to the discourse such as Senge, Schon, Kahneman, Bohm, Deming, Immelman and Taleb will help to guide and anchor the conversation.

The goal of the seminar is not to rewrite the Agile Manifesto. Rather, it is an opportunity to better understand, together, what it means to be "Agile", an "Agilist", to potentially discover some new thoughts and ways of thinking about agility and to offer a humble contribution to the broader discourse for the betterment of all and towards the greater resilience of the community as a whole.

“Are we agile yet?”, “Can you get me some metrics on our agile adoption?”, “I want to measure the effectiveness of our agile teams, get me some metrics to do that.”!!!

These are scary questions that can get asked of you from your executives. We’ve all been there. What are you supposed to do? How do you (politely) tell them no, yet still provide your teams with information that will help them? Most importantly, how can we actually help a large set of teams understand their own journey towards adopting agile practices?

Chris and Lee have worked with over 70 agile teams and created an approach that allowed the individual teams to understand where they were on their agile journey while maneuvering through the minefield of executives that wanted performance metrics to hold teams accountable.

This session will be a review of what the challenges were during this process, how they were accepted and mitigated and how the teams were able to get good insight into their agile adoption and performance.

Join a panel of Agile Coaches for a discussion as to what we've seen, both the good and bad, in organizations they've been coaching. And, what you can do about it, no matter where you are in your organization. Plus, bring your own questions to ask this panel, and take from the experiences of coaches including Mike Edwards, Chris Chapman, Shawn Button, Tom Sommerville, Dave Dame, and Sue Johnston.