Stop driving on the sidewalk!

In software development and delivery, it sometimes feels like we're perpetually stuck behind a slow-moving vehicle. Sometimes we can easily go around, and sometimes we can't see what's really holding us up. In our experience, many teams are barely peeking over the steering wheel! Our workshop is aimed at sharing a technique that will help you arrive at faster, safer, and happier - whether you're stuck in a ditch or cruising the highway.

This workshop will introduce a simple method you can use to discover, define and communicate risks and opportunities affecting your teams. Even better, you can use it regardless of what team, department or silo you find yourself in. We'll examine visual representations of valuable data you can use to have productive conversations, make confident decisions, and align towards making real progress.

Takeaways:
- How to create a collaborative Value Stream Map  
- How to use Value Stream Maps to find and diagnose workflow bottlenecks  
- How to build actionable, data-driven maps that make the path clear to everyone  
- How to use maps to target your improvement and automation efforts where you need them most  

Tackle complexity, friction and waste in a few hours with a versatile and actionable mapping technique.

Not only will you see dramatically improved alignment and collaboration, but you can do it all remotely with free tools.

We'll show you how with the right map, you can be 20% better tomorrow.

If we were to ask most any person what they desire, I’m quite certain that community and connection would be among the most-answered responses. (That and winning the lottery.) But how do we get to genuine connection? One answer? Better questions.

As a coach, powerful questions are a foundational skill, one that I use every day, in service of every relationship. If we consider what questions are, the flippant, easy answer is that questions are how we seek information, seek knowledge. Yes, questions are those things, but in truth, they are so much more than that. A good question shows that someone is paying attention, they’re thinking about you, that they’re honoring your space in their circle. A good question shows care, interest, our dedication to maintaining that relationship. Good questions are the care and feeding of human connection.

This interactive talk (meaning that yes, you're going to practice what we talk about in this session) will help you to understand what a good question is, how they connect us to others, and how to use them. You'll leave knowing how to be a better servant-leader in your own relationships.

The ability to ask questions and to listen for the response is to be in service of a relationship. I created this talk to share this skill, to help you create the kind of community and connections that you desire in life.

TACO is an acronym I use with clients to help them map controls from their software delivery pipelines to the organizational controls.

TACO stands for Traceability, Access, Compliance, and Operations.

The approach consists of a base list of 25 automatable controls that are documented and the control activity, artifacts and SOR identified. After mapping how these controls are handed we map them to the organizational controls and identify any gaps.

This model allows for the creation of opinionated pipelines and helps create a common understanding across teams as to what is required in order to be secure.

Taking a TACO approach can be considered a part of implementing a DevSecOps program and I’ve used this approach at multiple banks. I’ve given the base talk at three conferences and multiple times to internal teams. It helps build organizational confidence in the automation of software delivery.

During the talk, I’ll run through the different categories of controls, how they are implemented, what the purpose of them is, how to create robust feedback loops for controls such as SAST and how to handle long-running processes such as DAST.

Content is fairly high level but I can dig into specifics of each given area as questions arise.

The talk is about designing, setting up and implementing center of excellence  to build and mature DevOps and SRE engineering practices and foster its culture at large enterprise

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.

Have you ever been on a team, continually writing code and releasing features but feel lost? Or that you and your team don't know why you are doing what you're doing? Or how your contributions impact your company strategy? 

Have you ever experienced coming up with a beautiful feature that separates you from your competitors and implemented it, and then find out later your customers haven't been using it at all? 

Have your senior executives and company spoken about a new vision and initiatives, only to have it languish for months in never-ending discussions?

Most people start their Agile transformations to deliver very fast. However, a lot of transformations seem to get stuck on the outputs. Organizations typically celebrate success when their teams continually release by target dates. However, continually releasing to your customers by a date doesn't guarantee you're getting the right business outcomes for success. So how do you go from outputs to outcomes? Well, let us introduce you to Mobius Loop.

What is Mobius Loop? It's a radically simple way to get to the outcomes that matter. It acts as a navigator, creating a continuous flow of innovation from discovery to design, to delivery, using whatever Agile process or scaling method you happen to use.

In this interactive workshop, you'll be playing the Infinite Loop game. You will learn how to use Mobius to customize your own innovation and outcome delivery process. We will introduce to the Mobius Loop Navigator's key concepts through gameplay with one team winning a prize at the end. But more importantly, everyone will leave with a navigation tool that can enable teams and organizations to catapult themselves from peripheral outputs to successful customer outcomes and business impact.

What should we work on now, later and never? When will it be ready? What is the status of our current commitments? Do our teams even have the capability and capacity to deliver on our promises to our customers? These are the challenges and risks that product managers need to manage on a daily basis. In this interactive session, we'll explore ways that Kanban can help you improve decision making, manage risk, improve transparency, and make promises you can keep.

In a complex, interdependent eco-system, where each service is evolving rapidly, we typically end up with an Integration Hell .i.e. the myriad problems that occur when API integrations break down

• Provider and consumer integrations break when their understanding of the API endpoints are out of sync
• Working integrations break when the API developer makes a change without informing the consumer
• Development and testing slow down when the consumer depends on the provider API running in a staging environment:
  • The network may be down
  • The environment hosting the API may be down
  • The staging API may crash, or may not even be started
  • Development can be delayed if the staging API is not kept up-to-date
  • API changes can come in at the last minute, resulting in breakage on the consumer side
  • The provider API may break backward compatibility, resulting in breakage on the consumer

Instead, what if we could make the dependencies between the provider and consumers explicit in the form of executable contracts. These executable contracts provide a common, clear definition of their API endpoints. They give instantaneous feedback about accidental breakage to the teams so that they can work independently. These executable contracts are:

1. Kept up-to-date and acts as a single source of truth
2. Used for service virtualisation, keeping consumers in sync with the contract
3. Run as tests against the provider API to validate it's request and response type definitions
4. Tightly integrated with CI
5. Capable of pinpointing any backwards-incompatible changes to the contract

This is Contract Driven Development, and it heralds the Death of Integration Hell.

Here's a sample contract:

This session will demonstrate all the key points of Contract Driven Development as implemented by the teams using an open-source tool called Specmatic.

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.

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!

"How well is your delivery team doing?" That seems like a straightforward question, but it is more complicated that it might sound at first. Do we know what it means to "do well" or is it one of those things that is different to everyone?

In this session we will discuss how we can meaningfully measure a teams output and what we can learn from the measurements. We will also touch on common pitfalls and provide insight in how to avoid them.

You will walk away with information on how to design metrics for your own purposes, and get started with some concrete examples to measure productivity of a delivery team. In short, you will have all the information to answer "how well your team is doing" meaningfully.

The move away from traditional ways of working and thinking to digitalization leads to change in the way we work, learn and measure. It is important to understand how the digital economy has shifted our ways of working in a digital organization from strategy to execution.

Join us in game play where we will explore Digital Product Management and the Critical Success Factors, Events and Skills needed to create value flow to customers. The original Plan to Win! game was a physical board game. We have now converted it to an electronic game that can be played by any number of people at once all over the world. We would like to beta test this during a session at this conference.  

Next time you are in a conversation with your peers, you could ask them, what is the role of the manager in an Agile environment?  They may say, the role of manager should transition into that of a servant leader.  You may end up being none the wiser with that reply.

One of the best responses to that question we recall is, the role of the manager in an Agile environment is similar to that of a captain of an aircraft or ship, they support the performance of their crew and deal with emergencies if they arise.

Successful Agile needs an accumulation of many things.  One building block is the establishment of leadership at multiple levels, managers are an essential part of this.  In order to achieve this, the Agile manager must be aware of the various stances they could assume at the appropriate time, to provide the best support for their teams.  This session introduces several stances and principle's aligned to each stance to help get you started in an interactive way and hands on approach.

After over a decade of agile transformations, many organizations have several years experience of agile and are naturally looking for signs that the change is complete. Attention turns to the level of skill or maturity an organization needs in order to declare the transformation a success. As a result, models of agile maturity have emerged that promise to somehow measure how agile you are.

The good news is that agile, by definition, should be iteratively delivering value from the moment a transformation starts. Looking back, your ability to deliver has already changed immeasurably. You are already faster, more focussed, and delivering a product with higher quality. The bad news is that you have only just started your journey. Change itself has changed, as Gary Hamel said. What looks mature today will be table stakes tomorrow.

We will talk about what agile maturity looks like today, and where agile maturity will go in the future. We will learn how iterative value delivery is the price to pay to move along the experience curve. The more frequently you deliver value, the faster you move along the experience curve. By introducing a Wardley Maps in the context of business agility, you will be able to map out the path of your transformation, filling in any gaps that you may have, and beginning to understand what direction your transformation may take you in the future. Specifically, you can identify the drivers needed to reap the benefits along the way, rather than at some mythical end point. Business agility is not a destination but a continually evolving journey. Learn how to enjoy the journey rather than long for the destination.

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.

While retrospectives are amazing, imagine if you could make continuous improvement happen every single day. Imagine being able to drive meaningful improvements in your organization that not only improve performance, but also transforms your culture.

In this workshop, you'll learn techniques for running continuous improvement micro-experiments. These are short, fast test and learn loops that give you feedback in hours or days. You can use these techniques for personal improvement, and you can use them at the team and organizational level. These techniques are universally applicable. We've been using them with executives at Fortune 100 companies, in the public sector as well as with teams and individuals at every level in those organizations. We've also been using them also with public sector organizations with the same positive impact.

This is not your average retrospective. It's akin to compound interest. A little improvement every day that at first feels invisible, but over weeks and months, the improvements you implement begin to multiply into visible, tangible outcomes that help you propel yourself and your team into a state of high performance.

Every truly agile team performs a dance as they explore the problem space. Through this dance we discover how to connect with each other and converge on solutions while navigating the puzzle of understanding the problem. As we do this we discover ...

• How to traverse our differences without becoming divisive?
• How to work within scrum, kanban, or other method of choice?
• How to tap into our innate human skills to connect and align?
• How we sometimes fail ... then pick ourselves up again.

The art of coming together as a team is a dance of connection, inclusion, and understanding. This is the heart of agility.

Join us to experientially explore answers to these questions:

1. How do we connect, so we really click? How can we do it faster?
2. When we haven't yet connected, what prevents us from feeling included?
3. How can our inclusiveness accelerate our connection and amplify our agility?
4. What can I do today to take responsibility for creating more inclusion, especially in our current virtual environments?

Note: You’re going to get 10x more out of this if you’re fluent with the responsibility process or at least go see the preparatory video that will be posted a couple weeks in advance.

Small, cross-functional teams are the "bread & butter" of Agile environments. Amongst many advantages, they help remove delays introduced by dependencies between groups. Unfortunately, many organizations find it difficult to reorganize their teams to be cross-functional, and even when they do, it's practically impossible to remove all dependencies, leaving many teams in the need to find ways to orchestrate work across various groups that work using different processes.