Company culture – it’s rooted in the foundations of a company, inherited by its values, activities, and processes throughout a company’s evolution – and ultimately culture evolves gracefully, or it dies at the table. When it comes to agile initiatives and making them thrive, a strategic cultural transformation is a MUST.

How can an organization hack the enterprise culture and adapt to agile principles or fall into their old ways and die? Organizations need to change and/or supplement existing organizational practices (i.e., people, processes and tools) to create an environment where agile initiatives can be implemented and succeed. An organization must have a culture change before an agile transformation can truly take place. How does an organization (of any size, 50 or 50,000) change their culture to be more agile? How do they adapt to agile principles and succeed? Or must they fall into their old ways and die? Let’s discuss what organizational culture is, what organizational behaviors are and how an organization can hack the enterprise to fit culture into an agile maturity model.

Let’s admit it, most of us have seen HGTV’s Fixer Upper (everyone has seen at least one episode of Chip and Joanna demoing and remodeling spaces!) and wish we can update our homes as beautifully. How can you compare story sizing home improvements? Just like stories, no two home updates are created equal. A lot goes into considering home updates like risk/uncertainty/complexity and duration/impact of the job.

Similar to home improvements, a story point is an abstract measure of effort. In simple terms, it is a number that tells an agile team about the difficulty level of a story. In terms of uncertainty/complexity, will you find mold tearing down a wall to open up the kitchen or termites when popping the roof?

There’s a potential for some unknown. With time/effort, a stamped concrete patio will take a weekend vs several weeks to build a wood deck. Shall you get a new vanity for the bathroom or just paint the old?

Let’s bring story sizing and Fixer Upper’s together in a fun story sizing workshop session that can be used on your teams tomorrow!

Agile expects strong facilitation skills particularly from certain roles, but training on Agile basics, roles, and responsibilities often skims over facilitation skills. Facilitating remote meetings is even more overlooked. Yet, most modern companies operate at least in some way with remote or dispersed team members or meetings. While all facilitation is difficult, facilitating remotely amplifies the challenges and can really feel like herding cats who are hiding behind the phone or computer. Learn how to wrangle those felines!

This session will give an overview of the different challenges and needs for facilitation in remote settings, foundational principals of remote facilitation, and specific techniques and activities to use when facilitating remote meetings.

You know agile, have been on teams as a scrum master or product manager/owner or even a program manager, but now you are an agile coach and need help “jumping in feet first.” While there’s a lot involved in “coaching,” like emotional intelligence, experience, background, emotional intelligence, communication skills, confidence etc. but sometimes you need a little “mentorship” and how/where to get started in a coaching role.

This is a beginner to level session for new coaches in an agile transformation role.

This session will help you get started on an agile transformation assignment with a coaching backlog and will inform new coaches on “where to start” as an Agile Coach.

The session will begin agile transformation challenges followed by common agile impediments, conditions for success, an agile readiness checklist and a coaching backlog including Epics, Features and “where to start.”

Everything is NOT a “Priority”: A fun and engaging prioritization technique with HGTV's House Hunters activity

Prioritization continues to be one of the biggest challenges in Agile Transformations. Choosing the right set of features often marks the difference between short-term failure or long-term success. So how do you make sure your stakeholders are making the right choices? If you answer yes to any of the questions below, then this workshop is for you!

1. Do you have multiple stakeholders with competing priorities?
2. Do your stakeholders constantly change priorities without explanation?
3. Do your stakeholders tell you that everything is a “Must Have”?
4. Do your stakeholders think that that their work is far more important than the other groups you work with?
5. Does your stakeholder prioritize their work in a vacuum?
6. Do their priorities align back to the overall vision?

Adrienne Rinaldi will share her experience, insight, and actionable techniques and tips that you can apply to any stakeholder prioritization session. She will walk through the preparation and execution of the “Buy a Feature” prioritization exercise, which will enable you to see how this can be leveraged and applied in any organization with multiple stakeholders with competing priorities.

If you live in Colorado you have heard the term “14er” or have even hiked Bierstadt or Quandary, maybe climbed the tallest mountain in Colorado, Mt. Elbert and have probably heard of my unfortunate mishaps on Capitol Peak. That being said, how can you compare story sizing to Colorado 14ers? Just like stories, no two mountains are created equal. A lot goes into considering hiking a Colorado 14er, class rating, which includes exposure, distance, elevation game, skills or equipment needed and even drive time from the Front Range!

Similar to a 14er, a story point is an abstract measure of effort. In simple terms, it is a number that tells an agile team about the difficulty level of a story. Difficulty could be related to complexities, risks and efforts involved. As mentioned above, Colorado 14ers have the same difficulties related to complexities (skill needed), risks/uncertainty (exposure/class of mountain) and time/effort involved (elevation gain or distance).

Let’s bring story sizing and mountains together in a fun workshop session!

You’re a new coach. Now what? This session will help you get started on an agile transformation assignment with a coaching backlog. This session will inform new coaches on “where to start” as an Agile Coach. The session will begin agile transformation challenges followed by common agile impediments, conditions for success, an agile readiness checklist and a coaching backlog including Epics, Features and Stories.

Colors Personalities: Lead with Your Strengths | Communication, Interaction and Collaboration

In the workplace there are so many different personalities. By understanding your color personality signature you will get to know your strengths, pre-conceived “weaknesses,” and how understanding your personality may impact you as a team member and as a leader. By knowing these personality types you can identify other personalities within your organization and then more effectively communicate or interact with others as a team member or as a leader.

This session will be interactive. It will begin with a Color Personality assessment to learn your Color Personality Signature. It will go through each colors’ strengths, how others view your personality as potential weaknesses (and how they are not), how your personality makes you a good team member or a good leader. Finally, by learning about these four personalities and their traits, can you identify how to interact and communicate differently with team members? Your boss? Your direct reports?