As many organizations have adopted agile development and are starting to undertake a DevOps transformation to complete the lifecycle, it is not always easy to keep traditionally alienated back office practitioners engaged. In fact, many organizations go about engaging developers, testers, operators, ... in a way that does not align with the spirit of DevOps. Many enterprise DevOps transformations fail because of this very reason, this session will inform the audience of what it takes to create a strong and sustainable movement within an IT organization in today's world where people who perform different functions that are seemingly at odds can come together in the spirit of improving how work is done and delivered.

The speaker will approach the topic from an anti-patterns perspective, highlighting the symptoms of transformation failure from structural, procedural, and strategic angles and discussing alternative approaches to enable DevOps transformation success.

Last year, I was at an Agility Day in New Jersey for my company (ADP). During this day of fun, we uncovered and created new ways of improving retrospectives and new retrospective activities.

You don't have to always do "Start, Stop, Continue" or "Pluses and Deltas". There are plenty of activities that are more creative and more joyful for teams and groups!

In this workshop, we will follow a powerful technique to brainstorm ideas, filter down to the best ones, and then try them out on each other to uncover new and more effective retrospective activities. Come prepared to contribute to a new group of retrospectives!

We will go through a divergent process, and emergent process, and a convergent process in creating our new retrospective techniques. These and other powerful techniques will be utilized from the book Gamestorming to harness the power of the participants to create powerful and useful retrospective activities.

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."

I get frustrated with code that is sprinkled with poorly named classes, methods, and variables.

Whenever I work on a team or coach a team, I put a lot of energy into choosing good names and sensitizing my teammates to the power of naming.

I've noticed that developers spend most of their days reading code rather than writing code. I suspect you've noticed too. Creating understandable code is a high leverage activity for any team. And naming is where I start.

The core of the session is an example that illustrates the process and power of choosing good names. The example comes from a recent project. There will be code.

I will connect the example to specific techniques and patterns for choosing good names and share resources that you can use right away.

My goal for this session is to sensitize you to the power of naming.

Have you ever been in a position in which you were actively engaged in a massive organizational transformation or personal one? Have you struggled with it? Have you tried different leadership styles or approaches but you were still discontent with the results?

Perhaps the greatest challenge facing leaders in organizations is to create the kind of atmosphere in which people feel treated fairly, promote autonomy and creativity, foster certainty whenever possible, draw people together to solve problems and find ways to raise the perceived status of everyone.

If you are a leader, every action you take and every decision you make either support or undermines your objective. Every word or glance is loaded with social meaning. Your gestures and sentences are noticed, interpreted and magnified for meanings you may never have intended.

This is why leading is so difficult!

Humans cannot think creatively, work well with others or make informed decisions when their threat responses are on high alert. Leaders who understand this and act accordingly could make a very positive impact in their organizations.

David Rock,CEO of Results Coaching Intl and co-founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute developed a model known as the SCARF model (Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness) to describe the social concerns that drive human behaviour and which leaders could benefit from to smooth organizational transformation.

The SCARF model provides a means of bringing conscious awareness to people’s core concerns and shows how to attune your actions to better effect.

This session will address the foundations of the SCARF model, the five domains of human social experience: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness as well as the broader application of this model.

In today’s fast paced world, we in the Agile community have gotten better at organizing and prioritizing work. We have learned how to focus on high value and eliminate waste in our processes. And yet so much of Agile these days is focused on how we move work from an idea to production while ignoring or undervaluing how to build high quality working software. Our focus is on how to hold retrospectives, collaborate with product owners, and hold daily standups but very little attention has been paid to how we write and test code. This puts your business at risk.

Join Cheezy as he talks about how we often miss the target in our “Agile Implementations”. Instead, he will challenge us to focus on technical excellence as the true Path to Agility. His lightweight approach for teams to deliver software with Zero Defects strips most methodologies down to their bare essence. This allows teams to focus on what is really important - rapidly delivering working software to customers. If you’re ready to take the next step in your agile journey then you won’t want to miss this talk.

Agile teams are always working to discover how they can work best together. By exploring Dr. Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligence, we can discover new ways of understanding our teams. With this understanding, we can better adjust how we work to improve teams.

Many organizations flatten management structure when they transform to agile. It soon becomes obvious that important activities done by managers are still needed.  A community can fill these gaps. They can provide morale, governance, learning, and mentorship, recruiting and hiring, mutual support, coordination, sharing, innovation and more!

Unfortunately few companies manage to create a strong community. Even fewer empower that community to fill these gaps. This means they are missing the ultimate benefit of community: a strong, empowered community can transform the organization itself!

Join Shahin and Shawn in this interactive session to explore communities in organizations. Examine the benefits of building great communities. Learn how to spark the community, and how to support it as it evolves. Hear stories of communities empowered to improve the organization. Learn how to make a community into a driver of positive change.

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.

Join Jon & Matt on a journey of enlightenment and witness their transformation from "Command and Control" to "Servant Leadership". Through their journey, discover the tips and tricks that helped two budding tech workers discover, embrace and live the Agile values. Discover common pitfalls and the resources that are available to help you overcome them.

As many in our industry are learning, becoming and living as a Scrum Master is no easy task. Scrum Masters come from many different disciplines - sometimes from outside of the technology space all together! Becoming a Scrum Master requires self-guided learning, coaching, experience, and, (most importantly) failure.

Jon & Matt will walk through their own journeys and make stops along the way to discuss the failures they experienced as well as the resources and materials they used to continue on their journey. They will also touch on what's next: Potential career paths for scrum masters, and how existing Scrum Masters can continue their own agile journeys

This session is focused around leading your teammates toward success over managing them off a cliff.

Most of us who have had the pleasure of coaching a scrum team have adopted the mindset of servant leadership. But what about directors and middle management?!

Do you have teammates reporting to you who work on Scrum teams that you’re not part of?

Do you report to a manager that might as well be on another planet?

If you answered YES to either of these questions, this session is for you. We’ll talk through the shift of leading over managing and how we can use the framework of the retrospective as a tool to bridge gaps, manage performance and promote transparency. Whether you’re in a position of leadership or individual contribution, the values and mechanisms we review can be brought back to your organization.

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.

The Titanic was going 42 km/hr when an iceberg was spotted dead ahead. I imagine there was a wild scramble to do something to save the ship. I often wonder if they had rearranged the deckchairs, as I’m sure the outcome would have been different. As crazy as this sounds, there are many organizations who rearrange the deck chairs and can’t figure out why their transformation continues to fail. Adding more process, firing leadership and coaches, planning for efficiency, throwing more money at the problem and so much more. None of which helps the situation, and if anything speeds up the inevitable.

In times of change, your response to the problems you will encounter can make the difference between success and failure. During this session, you will learn The Responsibility Process^TM, and you will start to understand and know how your response to problems is creating your reality. You will also start to understand how by creating an environment of shared responsibility, it is possible to avoid the icebergs (or at least survive the collision).

I hear it all the time in my work: “That’s nice in theory, but it’s not possible to do that here because .” Or perhaps it’s “There’s no way I could do .” Whatever the story, whether in a personal or corporate context, people tell me all the time how a change is not possible. Here’s the secret though: when we approach a problem from a place of being impossible it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Leadership is one of the most complex and potentially rewarding things you can do in life. Leading for Change starts with seeing your own fears and stories, and choosing to move past them. In this session, we will be working together to confront a fear almost every one of us has. What you will come to learn is that it’s possible to write your story your way, and not be controlled by them. When leaders learn to confront their fears, their impact goes far beyond what they and those they lead thought of as possible.