Effective interactions, between product owners and designers and team members who develop and make those products real, are key to team, product and organizational success. It's reflected in the first value of the Agile Manifesto.

Still, one of the chief complaints, from both the product side and the dev side, is poor communication. The list of irritants includes: lack of clarity, lack of understanding, lack of time, lack of access, too many meetings, too much jargon, too many badly written user stories and too many people involved.

Communication isn''t the only obstacle, but it’s a big one - and it can be overcome with no cost or organizational disruption.

Regardless of the role we play on the team, part of everyone’s job is to create shared understanding. In this session, Marilyn, an experienced product owner and product manager, and Sue, a communication specialist and coach, will share their research about communication gaps in the product-development relationship and approaches that can close the gap.
Join them to explore tips and ideas to improve communication flow and help teams move from concept to cash.

NOTE TO TAC TEAM
Because we are doing some original research on this topic, I would like to include a co-presenter, Marilyn Powers, PEng, who, at the time of posting, is not yet on confengine. Info about her is available at https://www.linkedin.com/in/marilynpowers

Here is more biographical info about Marilyn:
Marilyn has more than 10 years experience bringing products and services to market as a Product Manager. As a licensed professional engineer, she has experience working in a variety of fields, from manufacturing to operations to simulation to SAAS software. Currently, Marilyn is a Product Manager at D2L, a leading Ed-tech company, where she works closely with Product Owners, Dev teams, Designers, Senior Leaders and many other stakeholders to deliver quality software tools to educational institutions and corporations who value learning and development. Her expertise is creating shared understanding between diverse groups, be it external customer advisory groups or internal stakeholders.

Previous presentations or workshops
Marilyn has presented at a variety of conferences over the past 20 years, the career highlight of which was a live demo on the main stage keynote at the D2L Fusion 2016 conference. Other conference presentations included Online Learning Conference ( New Orleans, LA 2017), Fusion (2015, 2016), Learning Impact Leadership Institute (San Antonio, TX 2016), Industrial Engineering Student Conference (Kitchener, 2016), ModSim World Canada (Montreal, 2010), Montreal Neurological Institute Day (Montreal, 2009), McGill University invited speaker on Haptics (Montreal, 2006). Prior to these presentations, Marilyn was an Instructor of Engineering at Mount Royal University in Calgary, AB.

Does your business struggle to catch up and understand the technical deliverables from your Sprint Reviews? Is there unnecessary re-work and scope creep because requirements are not properly described by the business? ADP has sought to address these issues by incorporating business Agile practices to keep up with technology. The result? Clearer requirements, strong engagement during Sprint Reviews and a collaborative solution with business readiness aligning with technical deliverables. Join our session to find out more!!

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.

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.

Lean-Agile is easily & often associated with customer centric products and solution. The “customer facing” nature of the product allows for thin slicing, feedback and iteration which in turn leads to greater business agility and customer satisfaction. While there have been many exceptional case studies that demonstrate this, applying lean-agile to non-customer facing solutions has often been dismissed. Why is this? The risk is too high to thin slice? There’s no way to get customer feedback? There’s no way to deliver using iterative approaches?

Over the last 16 months a group within a leading financial services client was brought to a cross roads. Their traditionally stable market was on the verge of being disrupted due to emerging innovation and competition from smaller, more nimble competitors. They knew to operate the same way would result in significant losses in market share over the next decade. To survive, they had to lead the innovation. Change was becoming the norm, and their focus shifted from being solely focused on final solutions, to also re-thinking how they got to these solutions.

Enter lean & agile principles and practices. Initially dismissed because this client’s business model operated as the backbone of the institution. Much of the work they did was in facilitating payment origination and transaction settlement systems. Applying lean & agile required some significant tailoring.

In this talk we will discuss this client’s journey, how they changed the entire culture within the organization to focus on survival through agility. We’ll discuss how common lean-agile principles and practices can be applied and tailored to support transforming legacy eco-systems with back-end facing solutions where the concept of a real life "customer" is quite foreign. We'll visit our experiences in encouraging the transparency that is synonymous with an agile approach and how that fostered better partnerships and trust across many groups. We’ll explore how a culture of learning has established early wins for the client and set them on a path towards leading innovation, agility and empowered being first to market.

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."

Conway’s Law tells us that the products an organization produces will mirror the communication structures within themselves. Many organizations struggle to organize in a way that facilitates both agility and bringing quality products to market. However, this is a problem that exists, not just within IT, but across the entire enterprise. Imagine you’re the (somewhat mythical/revered) business. How do you organize yourselves in this brave new world? Many of the common patterns (systems, application/application layer) that we commonly apply in technology aren’t good fits.

In this session, you will learn how to use a structured method to organize your most important resource (your people) around your most important goals. Additionally, you will learn about team types outside of your typical cross-functional team! We will use an actual industry case study to help illustrate usage, as well as give inspiration to how you might do the same in your organization

Description/Summary
Development Operations is a team that has requests from many sources, many of which have conflicting priorities. How do we move from being reactive, switching priorities, getting buried with stress of delivering on time with high quality to being proactive, innovative highly productive.

In this session I will walk through the journey my team took to move from reactively treading water to becoming an extremely innovative highly efficient development operations team.

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!

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 well over thirty teams, we've seen definite patterns emerge, that we'll discuss here.

Cultural change in any organization or team is admittedly one of the most challenging processes. However, any team or group of people can be empowered to find insights and a way to address cultural issues with the techniques of "Popular Theatre" - described as theatre for the people, by the people, with the people. Participants will be taken through the simple steps of identifying challenges/problems, role-playing and creating scenes that provide a window into the issue, where everyone looks at it together and suggests steps and solutions. These scenes become a rehearsal for reality.

Agile is not about doing scrum, kanban, lean or any other flavour of the process. An organization cannot be “doing” agile, they must “be” agile. They must believe in and understand the agile principles. After going through a successful agile transformation and running scrum for 3 years we realized that it’s just not working for us anymore. The team was suffering from scrum fatigue. It felt like there was a sprint planning, stand up or retrospective meeting happening all the time. We decided to take a hard look at how we were working and turn it on its head. We looked at all the different agile options such as scrum, kanban, lean, xp, etc and decided to take the best part from all of these instead of sticking with one approach. This session will take you through our journey and share what worked for us that could also work in your organization.

People are generally not great at understanding abstractions or novel ideas when we’re first exposed to them, but we’re pretty good at deriving abstractions or concepts given enough concrete examples. Including examples in requirements (whether that is by user stories, specifications or something else), will help teams understand the purpose of a requirement and lead to creative solutions.

Join Chris and Shawn in this interactive session, as they demonstrate why including examples is useful and what makes an example effective. Learn how adding a few examples can help illuminate the purpose of a requirement and how it helps start conversations into unexplored areas. Learn about the various tools and frameworks that support automating examples. See how team members and stakeholders can work together to develop examples that can lead to unexpected solutions.

You bring a team together, give them some work, and yet they don't meet the organization's or manager's expectations. They fail to deliver, fail to jell, and fail to perform. Why? Before a team can be high-performing, they must first come together as a team. Come get real world, specific ideas on how to properly kick off a team, setting them up for success for themselves, and the business.

A Techie's Guide to Improving Operations: Inspirations from Public Transit

There are lots of common challenges between technical operations and public transit operations. Public transit is a staple system in any city's infrastructure that helps to flourish the economy of the city. They have tried-and-tested runbook-type systems in place to deal with standard operations, and how to deal in times of incidents. Sounds pretty much like what technical operations teams have to deal with on a regular basis, right?

In this talk, we present some parallels between operating & running a public transit system that can be implemented at operations teams at software organizations. We will look at technical as well as simple organizational-behvaviour aspects that can be rolled out to increase operational efficiency at organizations, ultimately benefiting for global optimizations - such as minimize downtime, improve systems architecture & infrastructure.

Why is improving Ops important and often left out of agile enablement?

The world of infrastructure & operations is usually not looked at when enabling agile teams from a product management perspective. Most agile enablement process don't look at Ops early. All too often, we see the "throw over the wall, run it & figure it out" behaviour in organizations. The good news is... this behaviour is changing, slowly, but steadily, thanks to the DevOps movement.

There are lots of good literature out there on increasing operational excellence in technical organizations, however, in such a fast world, are leaders getting time to actually learn & reflect on tactics to enable themselves? Can there be easy takeaways that teams can implement starting tomorrow?

Yes they can!

By carefully seeing how a public transit system, such as the TTC, operates, there are lots of areas we can incrementally improve in Ops at our organizations.

Co-ordinating and managing dependencies is a challenge that impacts every team at some point. Most struggle when encountering this situation, especially in scenarios when making the dependent skillsets part of the team is impractical, such as large variability in demand. Additionally, such skillsets are frequently scarce and difficult to teach others.

In this session, you will learn how we were able to successfully link together 5+ teams (with direct upstream-downstream relationships) in a marketing/creative context, including both behavioural and visual management components. Additionally, we will review several other potential linking mechanisms and how you might apply them in your organization

Volumes have been written about what an agile organization looks like, but less has been said about what managers do to build and sustain an organization transitioning to agile. This talk will explain what the CBC’s management team is discovering during our agile transformation, the many forks in the road that we had to navigate (e.g.: organizational structure, cultural change and building trust with our stakeholders), and how the job of a manager evolved as the organization we lead changed. You’ll hear about the CBC’s ongoing four year journey and how we continue to collaborate, learn and improve.

About CBC/Radio-Canada

CBC/Radio-Canada is Canada's national public broadcaster and one of its largest cultural institutions. CBC Digital is the country’s biggest digital startup, taking on the challenges of innovating how media is made, sent and received. We are trying new things. We are growing. As an entity of our own. As a voice for our country. As a team.

Agile organizations require effective structures to create, grow and sustain the agile mindset and associated good practices. In combination with the activities involved in transforming the organization at the team and departmental levels, we need to sustain and support behaviours like interaction, collaboration, customer focus, and continued improvement for the long haul, through good times and bad, and at all levels of the organization.

The continued adoption and usage of agile ways of thinking and behaviours requires a considered approach to how we can build support capabilities that will change fundamental aspects of the organization in a way that

• pays down organizational and technical debt,
• listens to our people, and
• allows for a (fairly) smooth transition to the new way of working while keeping the lights on and fulfilling our commitments to our customers, stakeholders, and each other.

Crucially, we need to take an agile approach to how our support structures function, so that they don’t become calcified over time, and continue to be responsive to emergent conditions and our peoples’ needs. An agile organization is one that not only practices agile ways of working, the organization itself needs to be agile – resilient, adaptive, and able to continually find new and better ways of working.

This talk describes the approach taken in one of Canada's largest enterprises (Scotiabank) in order to develop a durable ‘meta-super-support-structure’ that enables teams and organizations within the enterprise to increase their agility, and helps the enterprise itself to become more agile.

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

What if your entire QA department stopped testing? How would you ensure the quality of your product without dedicated QA people?

This is a story from the trenches of a company doing just that - keeping the bar high, without QA.

As a former QA Director, the notion of developing software without dedicated QA team members sounded, well, crazy. Who's going to write the test cases? Who will maintain the automation suite? Who will save the team from themselves? In time, I came to discover the answers to those questions.

In this session, we will learn about the practices, culture and organizational design that allows EventMobi to build, ship and improve products that are used by millions of delighted users - without dedicated QA.

We will also explore a possible sequel to this story: The Rise of the Quality Coach!

Note: This talk is loosely based on a blog post which can be found here: Quality without QA — How EventMobi keeps the bar high