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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

Learn how the gingerbread men are taking over the daily Stand Up and forever changing the mornings of teams everywhere.

Have your Daily Stand-Ups become stale? We’ll talk through the evolution of an idea that ended up demolishing monotony, obliterating anti-patterns and spawning smiles… and to think, it all started when my daughter and I were playing Candy Land!

We’ll talk through the implementation of a game board during one team’s stand up through the infectious adoption and evolution of its existence. You’ll hear how teams tackled some of their greatest impediments and helped build a zone of psychological safety all while having fun.

By the end of this session, you’ll be prepared to bring this back to your team and create your own success stories.

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.

We answer the question “What does the manager do?” We focus on enabling flow and value delivery, using visible progress to guide behaviour, holding teams accountable with iterative and incremental delivery and increasing throughput with catalytic leadership.

We focus on how traditional management responsibilities move from tactical to strategic.

• Line management - push responsibilities into the team, with managers keeping an eye on decisions and looking for outliers

• Functional management - facilitate functional leaderships through an advocacy role within communities of practice (instead of waiting and hoping good practices will emerge)

• Project management - the product owner/scrum master handles much of the overall problem solving/identification, responsibility for progress, and team management

• Catalytic Leadership - enable continual flow through the team for fastest possible delivery to the customer. Get things done without being the choke point

There are many dependencies across the organization to understand and smooth-out. Catalytic leadership guides your teams to high-performance through the right guidelines, constraints, and safe-to-learn environment.

You may have seen that beautiful image of a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly on the cover of some consulting firm's 'Guide to Agile Transformation' whitepaper. Looks great, doesn't it? Unfortunately, that image doesn't show the ugly truth of transformation. A caterpillar stops eating, digests itself and dissolves all of its own tissue during the transformation process.

Many organizations say they are transforming to Agile, but instead get stuck in a circle of either optimizing processes or buying an off-the-shelf method from a vendor. Then a bunch of people are forced into agile training bootcamps, a few agile projects are executed, and waves of consultants come and go, but over time, nothing is fundamentally different.

If you're willing to be courageous enough to obliterate the status quo in your organization and put meaning back into your transformation, you'll love this session.