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.

If your organization is interesting in Agile transformation for technology, then you should also be looking into Agile Marketing.

Think of your organization like a car. Two wheels which represent Technology, and the other two wheels represent Marketing. Even if you get the Technology wheels spinning faster, unless the Marketing wheels can spin just as fast, your car will be going in circles. Product and marketing go hand in hand when it comes to deriving value from your respective markets.

As we all know, one of the major keys in Agile is the tightening of the feedback loop. This is why we want shorter sprint cycles, smaller batch sizes, and strive to continuously learn. When it comes to building products, it's the marketing team's job to test the market, size the market, segment the customers in the market, and just generally derive value from the market. But the problem is, most modern organizations are using waterfall-like operating models to run their marketing teams which hand-cuff talented marketers from surfacing new insights.

Marketing departments are still using waterfall processes because only up until a few years ago, digital marketing was a brand new concept. Large organizations used Print, TV and Radio advertising in their marketing campaigns, which by nature were not trackable. Campaigns were planned well in advance, usually at the start of a new financial year, and themes, content and messaging was approved then too. Because of the lack of trackability, marketing was always considered a cost-centre. Today that has changed.

Marketing is now quickly being understood as a revenue-driver. New tools are allowing us to track digital campaigns like never before imagined, everything and anything can be attributed to even the most minute detail. Because of this marketing focused companies are able to confidently say that for $(x) of marketing budget input, they are getting $(y) of revenue from customers. This is catapulting Marketing teams to the top of the business group food chain.

In this session we will discuss the need for Agile Marketing and why marketing should be the focal point for your organization's business agility transformation (hint: it's because marketer's own the customer journey). More importantly, this session will actually dive into the details of how a marketing team would implement Agile using the four stages of the Growth Marketing Lifecycle (GMLC).

Marketing needs lean and agile processes for many reasons, but here is a summary of the top four points we will cover in detail during the session:

1. Transparency: CMOs are feeling the pressure to prove their budgets.

2. Recyclability: How marketing backlogs are actually recyclable, giving you more bang for your transformation buck.

3. People Investment: Mimicking the skills of the "unicorn" growth hacker through a cross-functional team gives you Voltron.

4. Continuous Learning: Because today's digital marketing campaigns are so deeply trackable, the learning we can gather from these campaigns is unprecedented.

How does a marketing group get started with agile?

There is a four step marketing lifecycle that the audience will walk through with the presenter. It's called the Growth Marketing Lifecycle (GMLC) and it follows four steps:

1. Goal Orientation: This is where we visualize the marketing team's Funnel Map (similar to a Story Map used by IT teams).

2. Ideation: This is where we develop the backlog of "growth stories".

3. Execution & Deployment: Using the scrum methodology to sprint on work items.

4. Optimize: We look at growth stories that show signs of life, and double-triple down on them in future sprints.

This session was developed and will be delivered by Ahmad Iqbal, an Agile practitioner and coach. Ahmad has lead the development and marketing of over 4 technology products, and trained over 500 practitioners in Agile Software development and Agile Marketing. Ahmad has implemented this framework successfully at two major Canadian organizations, one major insurance company and one crown corporation.

NOTE: This presentation will have an interactive app provided to all participants which will allow them to follow the content on their mobile devices.

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.

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.

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.

Does your company do performance review?

Since the goal of all for-profit companies is to make profit, how effect is performance review in actually contributing to your business goal?

In this session, we will go through some activities to explore the hidden side of performance appraisal process, along with some story-telling and discussions on our perspectives.

Last but not least, there will be some suggestions on things that we can do in place of the traditional performance review.

If you want to unmask the mystery behind performance review
If the current performance appraisal process is one of your pain points, or
If you have experience and stories to share with us regarding performance evaluation, then come to this session and let's have a conversation

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

Agile can be the coming of Age of an entire industry, but to most, it remains a deeply misunderstood collage of tools and practices that continuously fail to fulfill their promise of 'cheaper and faster' something.

This session explores the etymology of the crisis of 'doing agile', and the dangers of willfully ignoring the principles that guide it. We will delve into the convergence of historical causality within the gnarled roots of Taylorism, with the future being crafted by Millennials at the crest of the conscious capitalism wave.

Failure to recognize this opportunity will sweep aside the remaining giants that still feed on the apples of the fake economy; profit and shareholder value. Others will join the pews and lend their voice to the choir of the Information Age.

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".

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.

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.