What stops you from doing the things you’ve always wanted to do? What stops teams from being truly great? What hinders most Agile transformations?

Fear.

That feeling in your gut when deep down you know what you need to do, but you're not sure if you can do it.

We'll examine how Improvisers and artists handle fear and how you can apply these techniques to yourself and to your Agile teams. How you, as a coach, can create safe environments so that your teams can be fearless.

In addition, we'll work hands on with the Fear Follower Canvas to help you move those things you've always wanted to do from the someday pile to done.

Although self-organizing teams are crucial to carrying out a successful Agile transformation, organizations that implement Agile at scale invariably realize that the introduction of such teams forces the organization to re-engineer numerous aspects of its operating philosophy. In particular, various management layers are often removed. The individuals in these layers are routinely re-purposed or laid off.

This talk highlights the approaches I used as an Agilist in various organizations to help people in different roles on their journey of transitioning into the world of Agile. Specifically, the talk will focus on 5 key roles: Project Managers, Product Managers, BA Managers, Development Managers, and QA Managers. It will provide insight into how managers can effectively transition to some of the new Agile roles, or redefine their existing role to effectively fit in an Agile world.

The emphasis in this talk is on pragmatic strategies for managers that are struggling to find their place in this new Agile world. Armed with these strategies, participants will be able to effectively adapt to the Agile transformation, as well as discover potential new career paths for themselves and for the individuals reporting to them.

Agility is a mindset. It is not a set of practices that can be installed. But how do you get out of the practices trap, especially when you have to mobilize not just software development and IT teams but the entire organization towards business agility where value is created through meaningful work? How do you engage business teams, users and customers? How do you enable higher levels of collaboration, not just within teams but also across teams? In other words, how do you get individuals, teams and even the entire organization into a flow state where everybody is doing the right thing at the right time by having the right conversations? Rational explanations and models of agility will only go so far. To be truly effective, the agile mindset needs to be experienced, which is exactly the purpose of the new and thought provoking Okaloa Flowlab simulation by Patrick Steyaert, one of agile's better scientific mind.

Through simulating a conventional work environment that reflects a mechanistic mindset characterized by a focus on resource efficiency, command and control and specialist workers, participants experience which roadblocks need to be overcome. As the team is taking its first baby steps into agile, they will experiment (in 2 or 3 rounds) with policies and practices (e.g. pull of work, cadences, limiting WIP) that enable collaboration, get the team into flow, and allow an agile mindset to emerge. Weaved into the simulations they will discover the fundamental difference between resource efficiency and flow efficiency.

Participants will step into the simulator after a brief explanation of the rules.

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!!

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.

Increasingly Agile adoption has focused on how to operate larger enterprises with agility, and run larger and larger initiatives, at scale.

In many cases, organizations have turned to explicit agile scaling frameworks to address their needs to coordinate increasingly larger efforts to deliver value in a way of that does not sacrifice feedback and self organization . Often these frameworks attempt to address the complexity that comes with large scale by adding extra process and procedure. Prescriptive advice is prescribed in the form of additional roles, stages, gates, and methods. This approach to scaling bears more than a little similarity to the heavy weight methods of the past, but in this case merging agile terminology with much of the same framework bloat and bureaucracy we have seen in the past.

As a a result adoptees struggle to understand how to fit these frameworks to their context, and seasoned coaches struggle to wrestle out the good bits.

During this session I will discuss a different approach to scaling agile, one that places an emphasis on both mindset and practice. I'll pay particular attention to the topic of leadership, organizational design, and the role management has to play in designing a system of work that allows larger efforts to work with an agile mindset without being forced into a one size fits all process framework.

A key part of the discussion will be to showcase how core agile methods and techniques can be extended and expanded to successfully manage coordinated agile deployments that range from hundreds to thousands of FTEs. I'll present these techniques by using real examples of agile deployments I have been a part of during my work with ScotiaBank's agile journey.

Key Scaling Practices covered will include:
- The design components required to structure your organization based on demand
- How to continuously de-scale your organization
- "Get Out Of the Boardroom" style governance and leadership
- Operational cadences and Impediment Escalation Flow
- Managing the flow of value at the Business Technology Asset level
- Moving the conversation from stories to domains
- Streamlining finance and budgeting to align to the agile mindset

I hope to illustrate ways that both management and knowledge workers can select techniques that allow them to scale agile as needed to support ever larger initiatives without succumbing to a one size fits all framework that does not adapt constant change.

The first interaction with a prospective customer often makes or breaks the sale. In today’s age of instantly obtaining products and application at the touch of a button (e.g. mobile apps), the last thing that customers expect is a long, complicated process. Truly delighting the customer requires moving towards instant gratification. How do you re-organize traditionally separate business and technology groups so that the focus is on delighting the customer?

A group within a leading financial institution identified this as a goal and looked at lean-agile principles and practices to rapidly iterate on delighting the customer and bringing business & technology processes seamlessly together. While delivery was set up using what we’ve come to as good lean-agile principles and practices, how the product backlog was managed provided the rapid feedback, innovation and pivot/pursuits required to truly delight the customers.

In building the product backlog a number of practices were introduced to make it dynamic and ever evolving.

• Kanban connected the customer to the product backlog which connected to the delivery engine
• Product metrics and cost of delay were used to create hypotheses to prioritize MVPs
• Rapid feedback through various customer and proxy customer interactions were leveraged to feed the customer backlog
• Monthly releases ensured a constant flow of new features to enhance the customer’s experience
• Story decomposition ensured the customers feedback was being directly communicated with the delivery team

The result? While the client is still on its journey the results have been overwhelmingly positive. Key metrics indicate greater customer satisfactions, increased speed to completion and simplified internal processes.

In this talk we’ll discuss how we’ve taken various product management related practices and stitched them together to connect the customer to the delivery engine. We’ll provide practical examples that we’ve seen work in our experience and engage in a discussion with the group to connect their questions to our examples.

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."

When Agile first came on the scene it was premised around putting the customer first. But, over the years its focus has evolved and the general perception of Agile today is that it’s mostly a tool for delivering software. Agile’s original focus was mainly on developers and testers, but it never really contemplated design thinking as a discipline. Design thinking, which has been around for decades but is only recently having its ‘moment in the sun’, compliments agile beautifully in that it focuses on trying to solve the right problems for the right people. Design thinking allows us to iterate and test assumptions before too much coding and production-readiness is done, which helps ensure the team is investing in the right things at every stage. It really provides a focus on innovating rather than simply burning down a backlog. In this talk we will discuss different ways to incorporate design thinking into the agile process. You will learn how to yield benefits from bringing these two practices together – most importantly how to best serve the users of the product or service you are delivering. At Scotiabank, we’ve been using these fantastic tools in combination for over a year. It is a journey, and although we haven’t completely solved everything yet, there are a lot of lessons we have learned that can be applied elsewhere.

We are about launch our latest feature to the eager public, when suddenly we get the call all developers dread: The Site is down! Our business is pressuring us to quickly come back up, but we can’t even find the problem! We pick up the red phone and call Karen, "The Site Whisperer." She calmly spends five minutes typing, and announces that she found the problem, and everything is back to normal. Where would we be without Karen? How can we get these skills on the rest of the team, so anyone can work the magic she does?

It turns out that troubleshooting is a learnable skill. Join Shawn as he explores the Science of Troubleshooting. This workshop will examine what is happening during effective problem solving. It will examine types of scientific reasoning, and explore how we are using them to solve problems, sometimes without even realizing what we are doing! Participants will see how, by using scientific reasoning and experiments to build and test hypotheses, they can greatly increase the effectiveness of their troubleshooting and debugging. By making the process explicit even consummate problem solvers can improve how they approach and solve problems. Using the awareness gained attendees can guide others to improve their problem-solving skills.

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

Products are not Projects — simple.

A project is:

"a set of interrelated tasks to be executed over a fixed period and within certain cost and other limitations."
"What is a project? definition and meaning". BusinessDictionary.com. Retrieved 2016-04-19.

Product development cannot be constrained to "certain cost" and products do not have a prescribed end date...so no "fixed period". So long as the organization finds innovative ways to meet market demands, the products they develop will evolve.

So, why all the projects?

I teach Scrum — it's a process framework that has been used to manage complex product development. Yet:

• ~55% of the people in my classes are "Project Managers"
• ~90% work daily in "project teams" (sic)
• and ~0% are ready to let go of Project Charters!?

Project charters in a complex problem domain create an illusion of safety, certainty, and confidence, but are wholly inappropriate in most organizations represented at this conference for one simple reason: the nature of our work is complex and therefore it is not possible to predict a "set of interrelated tasks to be executed over a fixed period and within certain cost and other limitations".

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!

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.

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.

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.

Most important factors in any Agile transformation is the ability to react and change quickly, which are most often associated with startups than large enterprises. To really win and transform an organization there are core elements that need to be mastered and executed at the culture level. We will cover these elements and provide you real use cases where transformations both succeeded and failed to meet their potential to prove the relationship