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.

Interest in Functional Programming has exploded in recent years. If you are an experienced OO developer, your design techniques and coding practices can easily get in the way of FP success. It certainly did for us! Fortunately, there are ways to leverage what you already know, to allow you to take advantage of the powerful tools FP can provide.

Join Declan and Shawn in this interactive session. Experience how FP can improve your existing code and simplify your design. Explore the joys and challenges of improving your Object Oriented skills with Functional Programming.

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.

Mental Health is a rising concern across our society, one which workplaces are now starting to grapple with the impact of. How does our work affect us, and how can building strong teams support our mental health?

Participants learn the “Skills Matrix” technique for getting a new Agile team started and for getting established teams to leap to the next level of capability. This technique has been used for decades at Toyota to create a team development plan in a collaborative, visual way.

ELEVATOR SPEECH:
“We can’t make decisions or agree on priorities. So, we have the same meeting over and over. Literally, the same meeting.” If that could be said about your workplace, this interactive session is for you. Learn simple strategies and ideas for meetings that matter - those you run or those you attend.

SUMMARY:
Too many bad meetings. That's one of the most common sources of workplace whining. Today, especially in software development and delivery, our work is too complex for one person to make all the decisions or know all the answers. Everyone's contribution is needed. So, we have meetings. And some are a painful mix of frustration and boredom. When we can’t make decisions or agree on priorities, we have the same meeting over and over.

When we're the one hosting the meeting, there are lots of facilitation techniques we can employ to keep the discussion on track, on topic and on time so we can reach good decisions and plan effectively. But what if it's not our meeting? What can we do when we're not in charge?

Join Sue in exploring some simple techniques you can use at your next meeting to make the experience better for you - and for others who attend.

INFO FOR REVIEWERS:
This new talk is inspired by several years of leading the workshop, Facilitation for the Agile Workplace, accredited by ICAgile. Learners often wonder, "What about the meetings where I don't have control?" It draws on communication and facilitation techniques I've used in a long career in business and tech. Sources will include "Mining Group Gold," "Facilitating with Ease," "Liberating Structures," and "Leading Geeks."

It's an interactive session with an element of play - a simple board game with dice and cards.

By the time of TAC, I will have presented this session at PRDC Deliver and will have had an opportunity to tweak it, based on that experience.

Have you ever struggled to gain buy-in from your boss, a stakeholder or an executive for a key direction or product decision? Do you have good ideas, but find that no one is listening? In this 90-minute workshop, you'll learn how to meet executives on their level, build rapport by using their language, and create an elevator pitch to gain buy-in for your ideas. You'll leave this workshop with a strategy to analyze stakeholder needs, a formula that lays out information in a way that grabs and keeps executive attention, an elevator pitch you can use in your work and an action plan for delivering your pitch successfully.

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.

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.

Playing games is one of the most effective tools for teaching. It is hand on, active participation, engaging and fun for the audience to name some characteristics. However, it could go wrong very easily. Let's explore it together as a game!

What are the factors you need to consider when running a game? How about even before that and when picking a game to run? What elements do you need to consider running a game? How would you make it about teaching and not getting lost only playing? How would you capture the ROI for the game? How would you sell the idea of playing games to leadership?

If those are what boggles your mind, please join me for a session on Game. I will be sharing my experiences, successes, and failures on what to do with games. I will share with you tips on what to look for when picking, running and finishing up a game. How to embed a game within your training, and which part of it to use. I will share some examples that I used (and others created) on how to use already designed games for your goal. If you can’t find any, I can share some tips on how to design a game. This talk is focused to deliver value for the coaches, team leads, enterprise leaders and whomever that want to teach others from a very simple message to a very complex concept.

Are you noticing any resistance to Agile within your organization? Adopting Agile, or Scrum, or SAFe has become the new goal - so why aren't we experiencing all the outcomes that Agile has promised? This session will help you to communicate, clarify your reasons for, and set a laser-focus on the specific outcomes you want to achieve. Once your teams is motivated by outcomes instead of goals, they'll astound you with their creativity and problem solving skills.

With accountability comes transparency and visualisation of work items. When you manage the work items instead of the individuals, you are encouraging and empowering your team to take ownership of their work.

Featureban is a simple, fun, and highly customisable kanban simulation game. Created by Mike Burrows in 2014, Featureban teaches the participants the Kanban practices and principles. You will try out some basic visual management (visualisation + feedback loops), and then experience the dramatic effect of adding work-in-progress limits to create working kanban systems.

Whether you are a novice seeking to learn Kanban in a memorable way or a seasoned practitioner looking for a great simulation to teach Kanban to others, this is the session for you. This session will be hands-on with a short introduction to the concepts - we will learn as we do!

Ride along with Express Scripts Canada on their agile transformation journey. This discussion will highlight the transformation with a focus on strategy, key learnings and successes. Maximizing business outcomes, working on the right things and delivering quickly, requires your entire organization to change. We will share our experience and leave you with some ideas to take back to your organization.

Over the last 3 months I have been exploring how to solve a significant barrier I've seen with improving an organizations way of working. The problem is related to a lack of clear improvement need or appetite, even when coaches are hired and money is being spent.

The symptoms: Teams and leaders that struggle to find time to take improvement action but when they do, they find it helpful. When you're gone improvement progress comes to a full halt, and even sometimes slips backwards.

I believe the root of this problem is actually in our approach as coaches and we are focused on solving the wrong things. We are actually making this much harder on ourselves than it needs to be. In this talk we will explore what drives improvement appetite in corporations and the psychology behind the human desire for improvement. I will explore some practical steps we can take to enhance improvement appetite that will allow change effectiveness to take hold even faster.

I view this as the key to unlocking the potential of organizations that we know is possible. The path to sustainable work-life, and thriving businesses.

One common mistake by new Agilists is to think that the product backlog is a linear list with the highest priority item on the top. As it's often the case, the reality is different. Prioritization is neither binary nor linear. Your team will be asked to work on several competing priorities, like meeting the new regulation while working on the next product milestone (the product is the company lifeline) - and your product owner will insist these are both top priority!!

In this workshop we are going to explore different tools, to ensure that our teams are working on the highest value backlog items: from Eisenhower Method to Cost of Delay, CD3 and modified Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF).