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.

Learning Organizations is a way to boost business outcomes. People learn new skills and contribute to products that are competitive and attract users.

To provide continuous learning, organizations try to improve employees' performance and contribute to the upskilling. That's not enough. It's like treating the symptom, not the root cause. 

Can you do learning if you are in stress, frustrated with the work environment or not having a good sleep? Are you trying to force yourself to remain motivated to grow in your career further? Now is the time to understand and learn human behaviour as defined by neuroscientists and help yourself and your colleagues.

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!

Are your retros running a bit flat? Need something to spice them up and make them more effective and also more interesting for your team? Join us as we walk through a collection of techniques from psychology and applied neuroscience to give your retros that edge you need. 

You’ll walk away from this session with immediately applicable techniques that you can use right away.

Do you dread going to work? Are interruptions from outside making progress difficult? Is improvement almost nil? Sprint Retrospectives are the tool to help with all of these issues, but what if they elicit frustrated groans and reluctance or, worse, resentment within your team? Mark will share tips on how to change all that. Sadly, the retrospective is often the most misunderstood and abused element of Scrum even though it's the perfect opportunity to get the results you want by improving team communication, collaboration, and morale, which eventually leads to building better products that, in turn, make customers happier.  Attendees will leave with a better understanding of the power (and fun!) of retrospectives, with activities and practical ideas of how to get out a boring rut and use them effectively.

Do you have Scrum/Kanban teams frequently releasing high-value, quality product updates? Unfortunately, such agility usually doesn’t last, with features starting to take longer to build, changes becoming riskier to make, and quality getting more difficult to maintain. This common situation – high cost of change, low safety – is often the result of low Technical Agility. The common solution? Lean on the developers to upgrade their “technical practices.” However, this solution rarely makes a lasting, noticeable difference, because what matters is how developers approach work, and that depends heavily on how product and management engage with them. In this session we’ll explore Technical Agility from a mindset standpoint, identify its influence on product management’s choices, and determine how all parties should engage with each other to achieve a level of Technical Agility that enables actual product and business Agility.

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.

Inspired from the leading book Tame Your Work Flow that I co wrote with Steve Tendon, let's twist! Twist our brains that is. On the new counter intuitive models we need to build to understand the Five Focusing Steps of the Theory of Constraints and the Cost Accounting mirages we need to destroy with the understanding if Throughput Accounting. 

The book has received the most cherished praised from the top experts in the world in Kanban, Theory of Constraints, Throughput Accounting, FLEX, DA, Lean etc. They are right here for you to grasp: 

https://tameflow.com/tame-your-work-flow-testimonials/

TameFlow is based on destroying old mental models - cognitive biases- that prevent us from reaching our goals: making money now and in the future so that we can finance our corporate aspirations. 

Scrum Masters rely on observational skills, but does that mean we only use vision?  What happens when we are all remote?  Can we leverage other senses to “observe” how teams are surviving (or thriving)?  We may not be able to sit together with our team for a long time and it may never be the same due to the long-term effects of the coronavirus.  What skills might we adapt or create for virtual teams? And, how can we still reflect back on the observations so the team can decide how to improve?

First, listening becomes a primary observation skill with online teams.  Understanding the words used, tone of voice, and what may not be spoken can tell the skillful Scrum Master other ways to assist their team. Reflective coaching questions help to mirror back the observation. For eg: 

• At what point did you notice…..??
• Describe what happened when….??
• Tell me more about...

Second, we may need to make observations about the context surrounding a change to determine how team members are processing the change.  Do they have a good balance when they live at work and work at home?  Are they in a place to accept help when a change has been forced upon them (e.g., coronavirus forced many out of the office with little warning.)  This is where a tool like the Satir Change Model is helpful to explain to the team and then ask each team member to anonymously indicate where they are on the change curve.  Rarely will everyone be at the same point on the curve during the change process? It becomes important for the team to be aware of where individuals are with the last change when proposing other changes.

Third, when people learn to reflect back, they may use this new tool too often. Scrum Masters should learn when and how they can create the space for self-learning for the team. Sometimes a Scrum Master consciously taking a step back helps the team to take their own actions in the improvement journey. An observation log becomes another tool for the Scrum Master to notice observations about the team and share it with the team at an appropriate time.

Amplifying our listening, using frameworks like the Satir Change Model, and capturing and sharing observations in a log help remote Scrum Master use the superpower of observation in building high performing team.

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.

Yup, you read that correctly - colonoscopies. A hallmark study by experts in the fields of psychology and economics has strangely strong links to the themes that underpin the Agile Manifesto. In this short talk, I present how basic human psychology - the tendency to obfuscate the initial and distill the terminal - aligns perfectly with a world of work that is based on iteration.

The Agile Mindset is elusive - and gets a bad reputation for being so. Through evidence based research this talk will allow participants to grasp onto the concept of iteration in an innately 'human' way.

As a Scrum Master,  Coach or Leader have you found yourself overwhelmed by how to secure a nice start and continuity of your engagements?

And talking about engagements... What about situations where you get involved in critical and sometimes awkward conversations? You wondered what you thought or understood was required from an engagement apparently was not the same as people were expecting from you.

In this session, learn from two experienced coaches how they used the power of Coaching Agreement with their clients, and how this living artifact can help you set the expectations upfront. Furthermore, you will discover that an up to date Coaching Agreement, can become your best friend by helping you to reduce the chance to be exposed to misunderstandings while going through the coaching process.

This session will not be just theory, you will learn through a live demo and also get a chance to practice! Join us !!

Exponential growth in the coronavirus has led to exponential change across multiple dimensions of how we work. It exposed some of the deep-rooted problems of our obsession with growth and capitalism. The changes introduced by this crisis are extraordinary and fundamentally reshaping our beliefs and behaviors. The need for agility has never been greater. With the current state of 'everything' agile, we need a shift towards a more sustainable and inclusive growth model that covers all parts of the ecosystem i.e. customers, employees, stakeholders, society, and nature. That's the promise of the Manifesto for Sustainable Agile - championing the new normal for everyone.

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. 

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.

We are living in an unprecedented time. Volatality in the stock market, record-high unemployment, unimaginable impact on small & large businesses, a complete shift to remote teams… the list is endless.

Leaders might feel helpless and without tools to deal with these seismic shifts. In this talk, I present a practical point of view that asks the leaders to be bold. It is not just about surviving the crisis but thriving. 

In 2009, after the 2008 financial crisis, EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) of resilient companies had risen by 10% while industry peers lost 15%.

• Do you want your organization to be one of those resilient companies?
• What are some of the concrete steps that you as a leader can take today to emerge stronger and better from the current COVID-19 crisis?
• How can you adapt to these seismic shifts happening in the market?
• How can your organization emerge stronger and better from this unprecedented situation?

The answer lies in creating an agile organization that can adapt seamlessly to the current as well as any future crises that may arise. Though agile principles have always been valuable they are even more pertinent in challenging times such as these.

In this talk, I discuss the principles and a practical approach that leaders can use to create a thriving organization.

Many organizations we admire around us today have embarked on a journey to productize their org structure - by assembling people around a common mission, getting them to own their "product", and setting realistic objectives / outcomes to work towards. But what about when your customer is a miner, who is risking their life every single day, in the middle of a global pandemic, to drive value for their organization? How do you productize that?

This story is about how one of the world's largest Mining and Metals organizations, sparked a shift to a product oriented way of working to:

• Move from agile projects to products
• Deepen customer centricity and user insights
• Boost end-to-end ownership over problems & solutions
• Enhance speed to market and quality of delivery
• Integrate Business and Technology stakeholders

Working alongside our client team, we were tasked with transforming two strategic investment areas for their organization:

1. Digital Geotechnical Program – “Leveraging technology to improve the safety and efficiency of our key assets”
2. Railroad Production Management – “Building the railroad of the future to deliver goods and services to the world”

For the two areas outlined above, this task became immensely challenging, as we aimed to take a fairly technology-focused concept (i.e. product-based teams) and take it out of the office and into the real world. Within each program we sought to validate a key hypothesis for each of the areas we explored:

1. Within the Digital Geotechnical Program, we sought to understand "how do we build a product team that can effectively inspect/measure/analyze the health of our assets, to improve safety?"
2. Within the Railroad Production Management Program, we looked to understand "how do we build a product team who can manage one of the most complex industrial railroads in the world, to boost efficiency and safety?"

As we embarked on this journey, we were faced with a number of key challenges, including:

• How do you productize an offering that delivers value to both business and technical users?
• How do you strategically rollout such a wide impacting change to the org in a middle of a pandemic, across languages, time zones and differing levels of maturity?
• How do we influence the business to see the value in shifting to this new way of working?
• How do you shift to this new way of working in a heavily vendor supplied environment?

If any of the above challenges resonate with you or your organization, join us for an engaging talk on some on our lessons learned from our adventure in embarking on a journey to productize the world of mining!

Games and simulations are a good way to let teams learn in a safe environment.  We'll play a number of popular online agile games and add them to your virtual toolkit.  Games include coin game, core scrum, virtual Lego (sprinting).  After playing we'll talk about the learning objectives that can be obtained from each game.  Or, just come have a break and meet some agile 'gamers'!