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.

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.

The popularity of Functional Programming is booming! Are you still wondering what all of the fuss is about? Come to this session and find out! This is an introduction to the power of functional programming. It covers functional programming's basic concepts, and shows you how functional programming will make software simple, elegant, easy to test, and lead to cleaner code. I will share my experiences learning, so you can avoid some of the pitfalls. So if you enjoy coding, love clean code, then you should start learning Functional Programming right now.

Data, the way that we process it and store it, is one of many important aspects of IT. Data is the lifeblood of our organizations, supporting real-time business processes and decision-making. For our DevOps strategy to be truly effective we must be able to safely and quickly evolve production databases, just as we safely and quickly evolve production code. Yet for many organizations their data sources prove to be less than trustworthy and their data-oriented development efforts little more than productivity sinkholes. We can, and must, do better.  

If database evolution isn’t an explicit part of your DevOps strategy then you’re not really doing DevOps yet, are you?

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

These days, almost every organization is showing interest in Agile. We seem to have all the ingredients for effective transformations: well-known practices, detailed processes, ever-improving tools, extensive literature, myriad certifications, and many consultants. How is it, then, that so few organizations are truly agile?

Gil Broza, author of “The Agile Mindset” and “The Human Side of Agile”, thinks that one particular ingredient has been overlooked in the mad rush to adopt Agile. In this session, he leads us on an exploration of that ingredient and its place in an Agile transformation.

Even as Scrum is increasingly adopted in a widening range of contexts, many business and technical leaders question the value of a Scrum Master. We believe that part of the reason for this is because this role has been often misunderstood by those who function in it. Sometime in the recent years, the focus of the Scrum Master role has changed from that of a leader (albeit a "servant leader") to a detached focus on story points and team dynamics, with little attention to the business outcomes that the team's work is meant to bring about.

As the role has been relegated to that of a “ship’s counselor” for the team, many business leaders are questioning the budget allocation toward the role as it has become less obvious how Scrum Masters contribute to achieving business objectives. Many organizations, therefore, attempt to do Scrum with either just a pro forma Scrum Master (e.g., the former team lead) or skip on this role altogether. Needless to say, both of the approaches prove problematic.

The goal of this session is to explore the current state of the Scrum Master in the enterprise and propose a refined definition of the role, detailing the competence areas key to the effectiveness of the role and describe precisely how Scrum Masters directly impact achieving business outcomes as an expert role that no team, and no business, can do without.

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.

Have you ever felt you don't quite understand WHY you work on things that you do and HOW it actually supports your business' goals?

Most (if not all) of us might agree that creating a shared understanding of the vision and goals is critical to the success of the organization. But how do we do it?

From our experience coaching Product Owners and Product Managers over the years, many of them struggle with creating or articulating the business goals and how each of their product increments support them. It turned out that some of them were just taking marching orders from the powers that be, they didn't know (the goals) for themselves and their teams are left in the dark. This challenge is amplified by lack of definition and communication of measures of success to validate that the product increment is indeed contributing to the business objectives.

These factors make it hard to answer questions like "Should we start working on this?" or "Should we continue working on that?".

Fortunately, a technique like Impact Mapping helps overcome this challenge. Impact Mapping is a simple but powerful way of visualizing the mapping of the business goals or objectives down to the product increments that teams work on. It is a great tool that lends well to having meaningful dialogues between business, technology and other stakeholders, and most importantly useful for adaptive planning of what gets worked on or what should be stopped.

In this session, we will share what Impact Mapping is and how to create one. By the end of the session, you will pick up enough knowledge through the process of creating an impact map to try it at work.

This session is suitable for anyone that is interested in learning a technique to create connections between business goals and deliverables.

Have you been to an open space? Did you remember how the facilitator’s held that space? Truth is, open space facilitators are very similar to servant leaders. Each create a space that promotes safety, collaboration, empowerment with little direction and very simple laws. We invite you to explore how to apply the open space concepts to Servant Leadership and our Agile Teams.

In Agile you should start with the simplest thing that will give you value, and iteratively build on top of that. But how does that work with a Legacy Enterprise Application that everyone is terrified to touch? Or what if we need to build an application that handles millions of transactions a day? How can we make sure that our architecture will meet our needs two years from now, when we don’t know what the application will look like? And how does the process of architecture work in an Agile environment?

Join Chris and Shawn in this interactive session, as they explore these topics. Learn architectural patterns that allow you to evolve your architecture. Examine techniques to help you work with legacy apps and dependencies. Learn how good architecture allows us to manage technical risk. See how business and technical people can work together to build an incremental plan for your product.

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.

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!

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.