How can you make time for real innovation and improvement? How do you know what to automate or invest in? How do you escape process prison? How can you get everyone aligned to make a difference? How can you start to drive revenue from tech?

This talk introduces the one technique I’ve always returned to when I need to answer those questions and drastically improve teams I’ve joined and led. You can use it right away to understand, communicate and improve your work, team or organization - whether you’re a leader or new recruit.

Lean Value Stream Mapping (LVSM) is a software and tech focused version of a classic technique you can use right now, with materials you already have to discover opportunities, build and share your vision and save hours of toil every week so you can invest in what’s next.

Sprinkle it on your:
- Delivery/Data/Testing/Analytics/Logging Pipeline
- Developer/Customer Onboarding
- Environment Provisioning
- Failure Recovery/Incident Management/Support Triage
- SDLC
- Toil/Process of choice, you get it :)
…and start spending more time on what’s next

I’ve come to love and use Value Stream Maps after years of struggling to find time for innovation, rally buy-in and communicate ideas, issues and risks. They’ve helped me many times go from tearing my hair out (and I have the baldness to prove it!) to knowing exactly how to level up.

Good retrospectives (you know, the ones that actually lead to real change?) rest on three pillars:

* people,
* process, and
* follow-through

What makes retrospectives so difficult is that if any of these three pillars starts to crack, it's very difficult for the retrospective to be a success.

Ultimately, getting the right people in the room, utilizing a good process to facilitate the conversation, and following-through on the learning outcomes depend on having an organizational culture that encourages learning, transparency, feedback loops, and continuous improvement.

If this sounds like your company already, then great! This talk is not for you.

For everyone else, join me to explore how effective retrospectives can break a downward cycle of disillusionment and malcontent and transform you and your team into engines of learning and growth.

"Early and continuous delivery of value" is one of the promises of a shift towards Agile, and one of the manifestations of that principle is the ability to keep work in a state of "flow": always smoothly moving and reaching its Customers. Flow can be observed (and managed) at multiple levels, but the flow that really matters is that which is perceived by the Customer.

This talk will explore the meaning of "flow" at various levels (teams, systems of teams, and end-to-end Customer workflows), and the practical techniques organizations can apply to move from one level to the next, and as they do so, streamline and smooth out delivery of value to their Customers.

We enjoy having conversations. Who doesn't? We are social animals after all. We like to know more about each other's stories. It is a feature built-in by default. As coaches, it is vital to use this basic instinct to our advantage. The easiest way to influence people is to have a conversation with them. You can use it coaching, mentoring, transformation, or just building a relationship with them. Can you imagine any of the above not to start with a conversation? I can't!

Conversations are two-way streets. The easiest way to have a two-way communication is to ask questions. Questions can be dumb, unrelated, out of ordinary, crazy, or even beautiful. Can they be efficacious too? They can! An excellent communicator knows how and when to use Powerful Questions to make any conversation a mighty one.

Powerful Questions generate curiosity in the listener and stimulate thoughtful conversation. They are usually thought-provoking and challenges the underlying assumptions. Powerful Questions, if asked in the right tone and body language, generates creativity and new possibilities.

Is it hard to ask Powerful questions? It might be. It is not that easy, and indeed not natural for everyone. The good news is that it is something that can be learned, and relatively very easily.

I invite you to join me for a workshop on Powerful Questions. In this workshop, I am going to help you build your muscle to ask more Powerful Questions. I will give you an easy tool to make your questions more powerful, and conversations more enriched. Asking powerful questions will help you build bridges with people, you would become more empathetic with them, and do not be surprised you are going to listen more. Some of the characteristics of a great coach, one might say! Don't you agree?

There seems to be some confusion (not to mention strong opinions!) about when to use Scrum vs. when to use Kanban. At times purists on either side have drawn the lines and set up camp in an almost warlike approach, making it difficult to wade across the middle battlefield of information without stepping on metaphorical land mines or getting peppered with judgmental opinions, rhetorical quips or social media blasts.

In this session we will explore a case study of a department within a financial institution that is currently experiencing a transformation to Agility using both Scrum and Kanban. By the end of the session I will provide evidence of meaningful actions the department has taken and outcomes they have achieved to help move their team and organization ahead on a path to greater Agility.

Today, product teams are under pressure to be more creative, innovative and delight customers sooner, but lack the knowledge and skills to know where to start. Agile product teams have frameworks and methods for rapid feedback, but generally lack real data from real users to make good business decisions. As product release cycles run long, team members lose enthusiasm and their focus on the customer.

As a tool, design sprints offer Agile teams an effective and transformative formula for testing ideas with real people, whether you're on a small team at a startup, or inside a large portfolio of projects at an enterprise organization. Within five days, teams move from idea to prototyping to better business decisions, ultimately saving time, effort, and energy over the long-run. Join Carlos Oliveira as he introduces design sprints for product teams, a process for rapid experimentation and learning that helps teams solve big problems and test new ideas in less than five days.

Originally created by three partners at Google Ventures, the process has been proven at hundreds of companies. Carlos has run dozens of design sprints for the Fortune 500 and firmly believes that product teams can benefit and harness the power of design sprints to focus their efforts and deliver more appropriate solutions to market sooner.

Building the right thing and building it quickly! How about building it the right way?

"Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday’s code.” – Dan Salomon

Is your delivery team delivering Spaghetti code, all complex and tangled up? Want them out of bed on a Monday and working on Lasagna code, all structured, well defined and layered?

Starting out introducing Agile engineering practices is difficult. What is it? Where do you go? How do you start?

In this session Agile Engineering practices, concepts and philosophies will be introduced. Through structured exercises, attendees will demonstrate the following agile engineering practices:

• Test Driven Development (TDD)
• Pair Programming
• Continuous Integration
• Refactoring

Through this highly interactive hand on workshop, you will learn the concepts and develop an understanding of Agile engineering practices in a playful way without touching a single piece of code.

Target Audience: Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Executives, Managers, Agile Leaders and Scrum Teams.

Do you want people to feel part of a group/team or part of an activity? Then ensure that they are included and engaged. Do you find facilitating a large group of people unmanageable, people disengage? Try Liberating Structures with your teams and organization.

Liberating Structures, created by Keith McCandless and Henri Lipmanowicz, covers a set of easy to learn, yet powerful ways to collaborate as a team. It makes it possible to build the kind of meeting that everybody looks forward to attending and participating. Liberating Structures encompass microstructures that promotes collaboration and trust. It is known to foster lively participation in groups of any size, making it possible to truly include and unleash everyone.

Participants learn how to use these microstructures to simplify scrum meeting outcomes, help teams collaborate and become more productive.

The traditional approach to organizational design is a barrier if you want to grow an organization where smart people make amazing decisions that delight customers and enrich their careers.

This session aims to provides leaders at all levels of the organization with an introduction to a set of design tools that can help them create organizational structures that promote agility rather than interfere with it.

Using a game I call Full Stack Poker, I’ll facilitate a highly interactive dialogue where attendees will play the role of various organizational stake holders tasked with getting the right skills into teams responsible for delivering value.

Loosely based on the planning poker game, attendees will collaboratively select from a number of Team Engagement Patterns, collectively agreeing on an engagement model that lays out how teams can engage with support functions and other teams. Participants will also be able to estimate the amount of organizational complexity their teams will incur based on the Team Engagement Patterns chosen.

The session is aimed at teaching attendees basic concepts behind defining agile organizational structure through a highly engaging / hands on session.

Challenge: how can we transform the economy of Alberta as an organization of just over 5,500 team members and 770,000 customers?

Join Todd Hirsch, Vice President and Chief Economist of ATB Financial as we explore the ATB Story and how we believe 94 words are about more than Agile transformation. We believe we can and are changing the traditional assumption that Alberta’s economy is all about oil and gas.

Myth: "Agile teams don't document."
Truth: Some of the best documentation we've ever seen comes from Agile teams.

Agile Engineering practices have revolutionized the ways in which documentation is treated and produced. In high-stakes environments with heavy compliance and audit requirements, a dangerous tendency toward exhaustive documentation is common. This workshop provides direct guidance and simple tools to help a document-heavy workplace think differently about documentation.

I have developed this workshop to help an organization reframe their understanding of documentation with respect to knowledge work in complex environments so that they may eliminate unnecessary artifacts and simplify/automate others.

A dōjō (道場) is a hall or space for immersive learning or meditation. This is traditionally in the field of martial arts, but has been seen increasingly in other fields, such as meditation and software development (and now also Agile Coaching!).

It will be a space for the immersive practice of coaching. Imagine a place where you can come and try out new coaching techniques, get feedback, give feedback and learn from your successes and failures? This is what coaching dōjō is about!

Coaching is one of the four main skills of every Agile Coach (along mentoring, teaching and facilitating) and for many of us coaching is the hardest skill to master. Way too often we go back to the mentoring mode, giving pieces of advice and sharing our points of view. Guess what, asking questions and giving space to reflect and come up with actions is hard, it's extremely hard! That's why we want to create a space for deliberate practice of coaching.

The coaching dōjō will be very to the Code Katas exercises knows from the software development world. We will come together, work in groups of 3s, one person will be a coach, one will be a coachee and one will be an observer. We will run 3 rounds of 10-15 minutes coaching so everyone will get a chance to be a coach. At the end of the round, the coach will hear feedback from the coachee and from the observer. In every session (this will be the 1st one) we will work with different challenges and/or different coaching techniques.

Every organization is struggling with the issue of how to reconcile project management and agility. This is a serious challenge for the project management community who often doesn't understand what agility is, particularly within the context of an established organization. This can also be a serious challenge for agile practitioners who may not appreciate the potential value of management. We need to work together.

Project managers have a lot of important skills and knowledge to bring to an agile team if we help them to do so. At the same time they also have some mindset and cultural issues to overcome, something that they may also need help with. In this workshop we will identify the real value that an existing PM can bring to an agile team and explore how they can move into new agile roles to do so.

Forming, or Launching, a new Agile Team is a critical step that is very often skipped due to lack of knowledge, time pressure or just eagerness to get on with work as soon as possible. This workshop discusses and demonstrates the importance of taking the time to launch teams and provides hand-on knowledge on how to Form a Team. This technique has been used by several organizations in the US and Australia. The last being the 2nd largest bank in Australia launching teams in an organization of 4500 people.

In today’s challenging workplaces, organizations need to continuously focus on delivering value to the customers. Challenged by competition from all over the world, changing technology, increased diversity of the workplace and customers, organizations need to adapt their practices and behaviours. In this session, we will focus on Product Owners and the ownership impact on the business. Also, we will discuss the shift to a product oriented organization and the specifics this approach introduces.This will be done using real life examples and applied, simple yet captivating exercises to find the owner inside you.

One of the first actions organizations follow after deciding to jump into an agile transformation is assembling an agile team. To come with the "team" a hiring process begins. The hiring managers rush to pick the people following a generic profile of the ideal members.

After some time the selected candidate decides to leave you earlier than expected, generating high levels of stress across the project to was he/she was allocated. In other cases the organization is “forced” to keep the person as part of the team even though the performance of the employee is not the desired because of the person’s replacement process can be very complex.

In this workshop, we will share some tips to find the “perfect fit” for your organization. Furthermore, we will learn the power of asking the right questions at the right time so that your organization can get the right fit for your team.

Join us and learn how to improve your hiring process and start enjoying the benefits of finding the right people in your organization.

Your mind is like this water my friend, when it is agitated it becomes difficult to see. But if you allow it to settle, the answer becomes clear.

Master Oogway (Kung-Fu Panda)

When should you coach? When should you teach? And when should you mentor? It’s not always easy to recognize that you probably play different roles with your teams, let alone knowing when and how to switch between them purposefully.

In this session, we will help you consciously recognize the various coaching stances and which stance is appropriate for a given situation. You will practice stepping into the stances and moving between them using coaching katas that model situations you probably see all the time in your companies.

Attendees will leave this session with greater self-awareness of their coaching style, practice working within the various stances, and techniques they can practice to further enhance the agility of their coaching. This focus on understanding our internal thinking leads perfectly into the next session that focuses further outwards on making observations, separating out what we see versus how we interpret what we see.

How much of what we do requires courage to ask for what we need? How many times are you asked to make a team agile and the team or leadership is not ready? What stops teams from speaking up about what is upsetting them? Who has the courage in the room to speak up what needs to be said and to do what needs to be done?

Having the courage can be made easier once you have tools and are willing to be vulnerable to take that first step. Teams that can step into this courage are more successful and more productive.

In this talk, Joanne will explore what is needed in our teams and ourselves to bring the elephant onto the table and into the light for all to see. Once we make the elephant visible it can be addressed.

Using a variety of techniques such as team happiness, team agreement, safety checks, assumptions, clean language, retrospectives and self awareness (conscious leadership) you are able to take that step more courageously.

Courage will start with you and can make a difference to our lives and our teams. Do you want to explore more? Join Joanne.

Most of us have heard the mantra, "Slice your User Stories as thin as possible!" In my travels as a coach since the early 2000's, however, I've rarely seen stories that truly are thin. What are these rare creatures? Why don't I see more of them? Having good User Stories is crucial to the success of teams using them as the means for determining what needs to be built to fulfill a customer's need. Having thinly sliced stories is even more important!

This workshop provides a level set on what stories are and explores why slicing stories very thin is important, what benefits thin slicing provides, and how to do it. Through a combination of examples and practical application in the workshop, you'll leave with slicing techniques that you can apply at your next planning session.

Together we'll explore systems thinking theory and the concept of resiliency, and we'll use these concepts to dissect how Control and Culture are limiting you, your team and your organization. We'll wrap up with some Crowbars: approaches you can use to change the system to produce better outcomes, build stronger teams and deliver more excellent products

For agile aspirers and aficionados alike. Come prepared to contribute, learn and experiment.