You come into the office and before you’ve had your morning coffee, someone’s at your desk looking for help with an issue. You spend the day trying to focus on that new feature you’re building for customers, it’s going to make their lives so much easier, but you find that you’re answering questions and firefighting all day. The day ends and you wonder “what did I even do today?”. In our roles on technical teams, we live an interrupt driven life, but how do we make progress on that new feature or author that new tool or investigate that new OSS project? It’s not hopeless!

This session will introduce the concept of Deep Work and a new way to structure your team to optimize for Deep Work, while at the same time meeting your customers’ needs. The examples will focus on DevOps teams but the lessons are applicable to any team experiencing high levels of interruption. At the end of the talk you will have learnt from our experience implementing the new team structure on DevOps teams in two different organizations, ways to promote the concept, how to visualize people’s availability, and how to find success in an interrupt driven world.

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.

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.

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.

According to the 11^th annual State of Agile report by VersionOne, one of the top five reasons for adopting Agile is to “enhance software quality”. In spite of this aspiration, a common pattern in Agile rollouts is the failure to set quality goal improvements from the outset. It is often assumed that if you implement Agile/Scrum then quality will just take care of itself. As many organizations quickly discover, you cannot just “deploy Agile” and expect it to be the silver bullet for a software organizations’ quality issues. Why is this happening so frequently? Is it due to methodical deficiencies, unrealistic expectations, fundamental misunderstanding of Agile, lack of executive support, too much existing technical debt or all of the above?

If you are questioning whether your Agile rollout is really helping you deliver higher quality software, faster, then this talk is a must to attend. I will discuss the approach I have successfully used in a number of organizations which involves; identifying the necessary building blocks to establish a quality mindset in an organization, moving the organization to a test first mindset, helping the Product Management organization become more Agile, and finally setting the right level of test automation so that you can deliver quality software faster.

If you are serious about doing Agility at scale, you cannot realistically achieve that goal without ensuring that each team individually delivers quality, and in-turn whole projects/programs that incorporate outputs from the individual teams are delivering quality software. To successfully scale quality, you will need to follow the ‘blueprint’ provided in this presentation.

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.

You often hear technical debt described as a personal failing. Why didn't you code with greater rigor? By creating technical debt, how could you have made life harder on people working in the code? More often than not, technical debt is the result of bigger, systemic problems.
Chances are, you're not a bad person. You didn't want this to happen. It's the system, not you, that's chiefly responsible.
In this talk, we will present some of the conclusions from the Agile Alliance's technical debt working group, which has looked into the systemic causes and consequences of technical debt. While marginal amounts of technical debt will always accrue, that does not explain why substantial technical debt is a widespread phenomenon. The organization in which software development teams work is the much bigger culprit. Many systemic causes, such as deadline pressures, under-investment in skills, and even the unwillingness to measure technical debt, conspire to create a growing burden on software professionals, who would otherwise choose not to create this problem if given the opportunity.
Just as technical debt has systemic causes, the real cost of technical debt lies at the system level. The increasing drag on software innovation has effects not just on individual and team productivity, but on the software value stream, the portfolio, and the organization as a whole. Sometimes, the cost is obvious, such as the valuation of a start-up company's code; other times, the consequences are far more subtle and insidious.
During this session, we will use the language and methods of systems theory to better come to grips with the causes and consequences of technical debt. Don't worry if systems thinking is unfamiliar — we will cover the basics during the talk. We will also do an exercise in which you will create a simple systems model of your own challenges with technical debt, and discuss how this model should help you shape a plan of action for dealing with technical debt.
Ultimately, the goal of this session is to give you the tools to better deal with technical debt. Rather than blaming individual developers, you will be able to show the systemic sources of technical debt, and assess the relative value of addressing each of them. Rather than depending on technical measures to convey the costs of technical debt, we will help you to put the costs of technical debt in stark business terms.

Agile helps you to deliver what’s valuable to the customer faster. You can capture, prioritize, communicate, and deliver that value with good user stories. In our experience, a major impediment to writing good user stories in the real word is a lack of example stories. We have created a set of games that incorporate 80 examples of good and bad user stories. The games are easy to learn, play, and teach so that you can experience good user stories in just a few minutes. Come play the games and then share them with your friends and co-workers!

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.

An agile enterprise increases value through effective execution and delivery in a timely and reactive manner. Such organizations do this by streamlining the flow of information, ideas, decision making, and work throughout the overall business process all the while improving the quality of the process and business outcomes.   This talk describes, step-by-step, how to evolve from today’s vision of agile software development to a truly disciplined agile enterprise. It briefly examines the state of mainstream agile software development and argues for the need for a more disciplined approach to agile delivery that provides a solid foundation from which to scale. We then explore what it means to scale disciplined agile strategies tactically at the project/product level. We then work through what it means to strategically scale across your IT organization as a whole and discover what a Disciplined DevOps strategy looks like in practice. Your Disciplined Agile IT strategy, along with a lean business strategy, are key enablers of a full-fledged disciplined agile enterprise. The talk ends with advice for how to make this challenging organizational transition.

Brainstorming has long been held as the best way to get ideas from teams for decades, but what if we are wrong? Can we take the successful aspects of collaboration and create a better environment for quality concepts? Come learn about brainwriting and get more from your team today!

If you work in an office, you have probably participated in a brainstorming session or two (or 12). Invented in the 1940s by an advertising executive, the purpose was to solicit many ideas in a short period of time. By putting a collective of creative people in the same room, better concepts should come. Sounds very agile. 

However, science has shown several times that brainstorming not the best way to generate ideas. It’s cumbersome due to all of the interdependent activities happening at once. When spending time generating ideas as a group, you often spend more time thinking of others ideas than your own. 

Fortunately, a relatively unknown technique is starting to gain popularity called brainwriting. Incorporating it into your team events can produce more diverse ideas and provide a friendlier environment for collaboration. In this session, we will workshop them and leave the audience with all of the tools to bring the technique back to their offices.

What Makes It Compelling:

I was skeptical when I first read an article on the technique, mainly because I had always believed brainstorming produced quality ideas. As a “stickies and sharpies” type of coach, I’d seen so many teams collectively throw out ideas during planning and retrospective sessions. But in the ensuing weeks, I started seeing where the article was on point in terms of producing quality ideas.

After contrasting the ideas generated after using brainwriting for a few weeks, my mind was changed forever. Even better was the events themselves didn’t seem that different to teams. 

Speed.

It's been a driver in our industry before it was even an industry. The more Agile becomes more mainstream, the more we think it's part of the package. Books are out promising that certain frameworks can deliver twice as much in half the time. And yet, teams still struggle delivering what's expected of them.

Once I started asking people of all levels of leadership what they thought speed would give them, it allowed me to develop some experiments around those expectations.

Please join me for a case study where we discuss the need for speed, the origins of that desire, and the ways it manifests itself into deliverables. My desire is for the audience to take away some powerful learning into their places of work. Only by understanding the expectations around speed can we reset them into an environment built around trust and support for motivated individuals.

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.

The modern organization is at war with complexity. The code for a typical webpage is the size of a typical video game from the 1990s. "Standards are great, there's so many to choose from." Projects have multiple stakeholders and ever-changing, conflicting Priority One features. Despite gains from Agile methods, the multi-person development arena is typified by volatility, uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity — what the U.S. military calls "the fog of war."

Derek W. Wade’s background in Cognitive Science has shown him that humans have innate skills at managing this complexity. But too often, he sees leaders waste precious human capital because they don’t understand how these skills work. Over the last 6 years, Derek has explored Team Science — which evolved from studying aviation, clinical, and military teams — for practical insights into how people work best together.

If you want to help your teams cut through the “fog” and have fun doing it, Derek will use mini-games and stories to introduce you to these insights and how to apply them. Leave armed with knowledge of mental models, cognitive load, situational awareness, and boundary objects so your teams can use complexity to their advantage, solve the right problems, support each other, and finally use those whiteboards, stickies, and online tools properly.

The Lean Marketing is a workshop inspired by the discovery of the principles of Lean Startup, Effectuation, Agile Project Management and user centered value driven philosophy, to learn the fundamentals of digital marketing through experimentation and collaborative work.

In this playful experience, participants switch between planning and executing specific actions for the resolution of a real case where they must test their assumptions. The Lean Digital Marketing game is an innovative and interactive experience that gives you the tools to better adapt to today's marketing changes.

The Lean Digital Marketing Game participated in WAQ17, the largest French-language digital event in North America and at HEC innovation workshops.

Teams are becoming more and more complex in today’s product development world. This is due to a lot of influences like distributed teams, different capability levels, past work experiences of the team members, leaders who provide direction to the teams, complex client requirements that change very often and many more

Hence it becomes very important to understand what type of teams we are working with so that we can provide the right leadership for the teams to work at their optimum levels and at the same time enjoy their work.

The Cynefin framework provides a new dimension to the current contexts that helps in explaining what type of team we are working with and / or solutions that we can apply to help the teams to build better products. It draws on research into complex adaptive systems theory, cognitive science, anthropology, and narrative patterns, as well as evolutionary psychology, to describe problems, situations, and systems. It not only explores the relationship between people, experience, and context but also proposes new approaches to communication, decision-making, policy-making, and knowledge management in complex social environments.

In today’s markets, companies are seeking solutions to quickly adjust to market disruptions while trying to deliver more value to their customers with greater speed, predictability, quality and accuracy in decision-making, without compromising the company’s stability. As many companies have become digital, i.e. their primary means of communication with markets, customers and business is exclusively done through the Web, this is especially challenging. Some organizations have turned to Scrum and Agile processes for help with solving this problem.

Yet, the many senior leaders that have embraced Agile and Scrum have the feeling that something is not working as expected. Alternatively, many feel the desired benefits from adopting Scrum and Agile have not been fully achieved. While we have experienced the exponential grow of supercomputing power, we are still using old structures, paradigms and beliefs to structure our organizations.

Enterprise Social Systems will give you a fresh insight into how a hyperproductive organization works and accelerate your business transformation 2x o more.

This workshop is for Agile consultants, Leaders, Scrum Masters or everyone thinking of running an Agile transformation in their company.

Be aware that this is a very dynamic session, you should be ready to talk, move and experience new ideas. You will learn how to solve your current problems using Enterprise Social Systems and get many new ideas to experiment with.

Session is for Lean Agile Leaders which will help them manage portfolio Agile way.

Lean Agile principles when applied to portfolio management, will help you keep pace with fast changing business by giving you a disciplined approach to implementing you strategic vision as realistic work plan.

Keeping up with the new pace of change requires light weight processes and an adaptive mindset.

It will cover the following main pillars of Agile Portfolio Management

- Work Management

- Capacity Management

- Financial Management

- Value Management

- Continuous planning

- Continuous Visibility

APM session will help you look at the portfolio in different way; and help you outpace changing business.

It seems like "Agile" goes with everything these days; government projects, not-for-profit initiatives, scaled agile, startups, etc., etc.. This session will explore agility, management, and product lessons using excerpts from the hit Netflix series Orange is the New Black to illustrate these concepts. This light-hearted, yet valuable, session will take you inside the confines of Litchfield Penitentiary and expose you to the lives of the women who are incarcerated there. We'll use a series of vignettes from the show to highlight lessons in agility. No prior knowledge of the series Orange is the New Black is required for you to enjoy and benefit from this session.

Participants will leave with a handout that contains reminders and tips based on the scenarios we cover in the session.

Agile has gone mainstream and individuals everywhere are adopting Agile techniques and practices. In the process, they are interpreting what Agile means individually and what Agile means at an organizational level. 

People are interpreting Agile techniques and practices in ways that at times create organizational chaos, conflict and lead to dramatic failure.

Using humor, visual aids and a highly active approach, this session explores some real world case studies of how some organizations have interpreted and adopted agile. It explores pitfalls to avoid and best practices.

The session provides a blueprint for success with Agile transformation.