Agile mixed with Waterfall exists in every product development organization globally, yet current thinking teaches us to crusade for one approach at the expense of the other - an approach that creates unnecessary resistance and alienates people with different perspectives. The question is: How can we manage the reality of a mixed-methods environment while still receiving the intended benefits of both approaches? In this talk, Brock Argue and Erkan Kadir will introduce Integrated Agile, a groundbreaking and practical approach that leverages Polarity Thinking to manage the predictable dynamics between Agile and Waterfall while maximizing the upsides of both approaches.

This workshop encourages the participants to take the role of a stakeholder in small group priority discussions. We will sample three online games to prioritize items and compare and contrast them.

At Agile 2019 Jeff Sutherland introduced a metric to measure efficiency for agile stories.  A cross-team comparable metric connected to efficiency would be an amazing achievement.  But is this wonderful concept a myth or reality?  Join Neil as we look at the results of tracking this metric for some agile teams over a year.  Come with an open mind and let's review this experience!

With so many changes coming to organizations - agile, devops, products, etc - how do you learn these new practices and apply them in your context with your constraint? Enter the dojo - an immersive, team based learning environment where teams come together to learn and apply new skills to their work.

The CFD is growing in popularity in the agile community and has been called a successor to the Scrum burn-down chart. It’s a  very effective tool as it  provides a better visualization and typical information for critical decision making.  Furthermore, CFD can help you improve your process by providing insights into issues and by identifying potential bottlenecks.

In this session, we’ll look at the different patterns, behaviors and examples of CFD, reviewing what each represents, and how can they be used in both a Kanban and Scrum context.

The Agile Manifesto came out in 2001. It’s all about teams. And yet, HR processes still focus on individuals. A few years ago, companies in Europe started to ask questions on how Agile affects HR, specifically in performance management and reward & recognition. In the US, this exercise only started recently, even though there were a few voices raising and answering these questions early on. In this interactive talk, we dare you to open the HR pandora’s box and go on a tour with us as we share with you how we navigate the HR waters to increase your business agility. We hope you would be courageous enough to join us in driving this transition in your organisations.

Silo, as they say, must be eliminated. But how long does it take, What is the talk? What is the walk? All approaches fail. The remedy is at the system's logical level. Science is involved.

At the logical level, there is only one solution: TameFlow with Throughput Accounting.

Why ? It needs to go straight to the CxO level. 

Culture is a reflection of a company's system, which are a reflection of top management's mental models. Accounting is the most pervasive system of any company. If a culture change is contemplated, the prevailing cost accounting systems have to go.

Psychological safety has been identified by many researchers as one of the main ingredients of a high performing team. As leaders, we play an important role in nurturing and growing psychological safety within our teams, but with virtual teaming, the stakes are higher and it is harder to achieve. 

Why do retreats work? And.. how do you do retreats in these confinement times??

These are challenging times, but they also present opportunities to revisit our practices and rediscover the values and principles behind them. Indeed, doing so makes it pretty clear that they are heuristics- practices that have worked for us many times in several different contexts. In this sense, they have been faithful friends in our agile journeys. But they have started breaking and failing us in these highly disturbing times.

Retreats work because they force us to take a fresh perspective on our challenges. They get us out of our comfort zones and enable us to look at our blind spots. From this new viewpoint we are able to find creative solutions to recurring issues and get us unstuck.

A “SL!K” workshop (“is there a Snow Leopard !n your Kitchen”) achieves the same outcomes using metaphors for agility. My personal experience and thorough research in agile and lean principles and applications has allowed me to identify two particularly simple yet extremely rich metaphors. The workshop invites participants to identify common characteristics of agility through them, then invites them to bring these newly rediscovered principles and apply them to their context.

Such a workshop works because it brings participants to another location, a safe place, where they explore and test ideas with strangers or colleagues outside the context of their workplaces. Creativity emerges and so do new ideas for agile practices. Finally, it works, because they can leave rigid frameworks and copy-paste agility behind, and create practices that they will be motivated to try, and empowered to adapt.

This talk summarizes a journey over decades of mental exploration and research, trial and errors, through the complex intertwined mazes of large organizations and agile training, certifications and coaching industries.

Too many agile teams get stuck in their journey or even revert back to pre-agile ways of working. This has become even worse with covid, as old habits of requesting detailed plans and requirement documents have filled the sudden physical and emotional voids.

Could these new times create an opportunity to not only stop but reverse the trend back to waterfall and handoffs? You might just need to find the right workshop!

The innovative "Is there a Snow Leopard !n your Kitchen" (SL!K) workshop leverages powerful metaphors and invite participants to combine them to make them see their way of working with a brand new perspective and immediately come up with new agile practices to try.

While this workshop appears almost silly, it is grounded in sound psychology, advanced lean and agile principles, and years of experience coaching struggling teams and helping them find their agile breakthrough.

Come with your peers and re-ignite agility for your team or organisation!

As an external agile coach consultant, for many years I was able to maintain a solid stance of neutrality and objectivity toward client challenges. Now, as an embedded, full-time agile coach, I play by a different set of rules.  I strive to be a catalyst for change and challenge the status quo, but I still need to be mindful of internal politics in the interest of self-preservation. Having experienced agile coaching engagements as both an external consultant and an internal employee, I will share some of my insights. I will also explain how an internal coaching capability is vital to achieving enterprise agility. 

Most conflict models deal with resolution strategies - how to exit a broken relationship with minimal loss. Instead, we will examine causes that lead to conflicts. We will be building on the premise that people are "designed" for fruitful mutual collaboration and cooperation. Thus, conflict is not the norm, but the embodiment of a social illness, a consequence of mistakes made in building partnerships. We will examine these mistakes, their causes and ways to correct and avoid them in the future.

Whilst the shift from project to product intrigues many agile practitioners and leaders, broader acceptance of this concept into practice is challenged with various constraints. The higher adoption barrier to this shift is due to the complexity and magnitude of changes required to the organizational dynamics. Let us explore together a structured framework that can help accelerate your project to product journey. 

In 2019, Corus embarked on a transformational project to modernize their enterprise broadcast system in a unique partnership with the software vendor. Join us as we share our agile journey where geographically distributed client and vendor agile teams collaborate on building modernized operational broadcast software. 

With the impact of Covid-19 upon us the Gig economy is accelerating – don’t
be left behind!
In this talk you get to practice and develop critical skills to thrive in the Gig economy!

What do an Uber driver, a scrum master, a freelance writer and a contract
project manager / product owner have in common? The answer is that they are
potentially a part of the gig economy.

One of the fastest growing trends in employment is a move away from
full-time contracts. Instead, both employers and workers are pursuing
alternative arrangements, including temporary or project-based contracts.

It wasn’t that long ago that people graduating from college or university
would go searching for a permanent position with regular pay periods,
consistent hours and employee benefits. However, the proportion of such jobs
is shrinking.

The emergence of new digital technologies has meant a shift in companies
employment strategies. They are looking to reduce their costs by hiring less
full-time staff in favor of short-term support based on immediate needs.

On the flip side, peoples’ preferences regarding job structures are also
changing. Workers have realized that contracting out their services to a mix
of companies allows them flexibility in determining the amount of time they
spend working and the types of work they do.

Where the two sides meet is where we find the gig economy.

Those participating in the gig economy call themselves freelancers,
independent professionals, contract workers and independent contractors.
It’s easy to think of this group as a bunch of millennials looking to escape
the traditional 9 to 5, but among those participating in the gig economy are
experienced nurses, project managers, scrum masters, agile coaches, engineers and marketing consultants.

Talk learning objectives – be BOLDER – based on Michael : Success in the Gig Economy - https://amzn.to/35llIHW  Available now for Pre-Order

*       What are the fundamental pre-requisites for branding yourself for gig economy employment?
*       What does it take to thrive in the gig economy?
*       How can you prepare for gig economy employment?

Check out Michael’s YouTube: How to Survive Your First Day of Remote Work WITHOUT Going Insane https://youtu.be/eWCmnfW0tBo

Bolder Technique:

• Believe – fast failure wins, change the narrative
• Open your eyes – core competencies, NLP, SI
• Let’s move ahead – plan and budget
• Dance to the music – use Agile Kanban to flow
• Retrospect – cadence is king

You’ve been working with a team for a while now and you’ve noticed that planning meetings always go overtime, we can never seem to agree on an estimate, design discussions always go down a technical rabbit hole, and the requirements are always too sparse.

On the other hand, the end of the sprint feels like a giant rush, there’s always unfinished work that bumps to the next sprint, and the customer is still complaining about not having their product yet.  What is going on?  Where are all these issues coming from?

It could be that your team has trouble starting, and trouble stopping.  Join this session to learn about what happens in our minds as we think about our work and how to get started, and stopped - with some fun along the way.

How do your features land in the Product Backlog? Perhaps your team uses "design sprints", "design thinking" workshops, a "UX research" phase, ongoing "grooming" sessions., or a combination of all that. When all that is happening, how do you narrow down your options to select the best ideas amongst all the good ones that come out of brainstorming sessions? Perhaps through long "prioritization" sessions, where it's difficult to come up with an objective criteria. And then, how does commitment and scheduling happen? How is it decided that an idea will be worked on now, later or perhaps never? 

All teams have processes in place to do all these things, but most have trouble describing how it actually happens, and therefore reasoning about its effectiveness and ways to improve it to remove any frustration that they may be causing. Upstream Kanban is an answer to these challenges.

This talk will explore the use of Upstream Kanban to visualize, model, and manage the "fuzzy front-end" activities that are often used to drive discovery and innovation. We will describe what to look for in a "healthy" upstream workflow, the role of experimentation, and the use of "custom risk assessment frameworks" to drive selection and commitment.