When you dissect most Agile practices (e.g. Iteration Planning, Retrospectives, Group Estimation Sessions, Backlog grooming sessions, etc.) you will notice that they are basically collaborative meetings/work sessions where a group of people need to creatively produce an outcome that they agree upon and can all commit to. One of the main duties of ScrumMasters and Team Facilitators is to design these agile practices and run them. Professional Facilitation tools are extremely valuable tools to help ScrumMasters, Product Owners, and Team Facilitators engage all the participants in the meeting, probe into their creativity and help bring them to consensus. Unfortunately many ScrumMasters, Product Owners and Team Facilitators are not aware yet of some of these facilitation tools and skills they need to design Agile practices to truly serve their teams. In this 2 day highly interactive workshop Ahmed will briefly introduce some of the basics of facilitation and some key facilitation tools and techniques such as Home and Away, Brain-writing, Nominal Group Technique, etc. During the workshop Ahmed will engage the audience in the "art" of facilitation and designing new innovative agile practices that can serve the team in the most effective way possible. All the tools introduced in this session will be applied to real agile practices and examples from real-life sessions will be incorporated to show the audience the practicality of the tools and that it is not just theoretical. For example he will show the participants how to use small groups and large groups facilitation tools to engage 50 people in a group estimation session for 300 stories where everyone participated and we finished in 90 mins.

When people learn about agile they usually learn about Scrum (since it is the most popular flavor of agile). While Scrum is beneficial, it does not have answers to all the challenges of software development. One of the common challenges teams face is that of having an effective Product Owner. From experience, it is not about who is fulfilling the role of the Product owner in your organization but about the definition of the role itself. We have played with many different variations of the PO role, till we ended up with the concept and structure of the Value Team. To keep it simple, the Value Team is responsible for making sure the product is (1) Feasible, (2) Valuable, (3) Useable.  After using Value Teams in many corporations (the session will have many real-life examples of this) they seems to be a practical solution to many problems about how agile can work in complex environments where there is no ONE product owner, but rather multiple organizations and people that have a say in what needs to get build and how. This session will present the idea of Value teams and answer questions on how to create them, how they operate, who is in charge, and why they are so critical to the success of the agile delivery team.

Education is a critical component in a sustainable agile transformation. Sustainable agile is realized when people have truly change the way they think – that needs education. If we truly understand that we need to change the mindset of everyone in the organization, including its leaders, then we need a combination of education, coaching and mentoring to successfully equip people with the knowledge and skills they need to develop and execute agile habits. If we think of agile as a process, not a mindset, then we default to training instead of education.

While we acknowledge our bias towards the learning roadmap published by the International Consortium of Agile (ICAgile.com), we truly believe that it is the most comprehensive roadmap in the agile community that focuses on a common education roadmap for agile and agility and not training on a particular agile methodology. ICAgile has gathered experts from around the world and they have collaborated to define an education roadmap for every discipline needed to change how the organization as a whole works, and provides education as a foundation for sustainable organizational agility. (Focus on people not process, education not training)

Certifications are a way to give people confidence in the learning and competency of others. Agile certifications should be no different. ICAgile has developed a set of competency based certifications to ensure we keep the focus on Education. 

Education is a critical component in a sustainable agile transformation. Sustainable agile is realized when people have truly change the way they think – that needs education. If we truly understand that we need to change the mindset of everyone in the organization, including its leaders, then we need a combination of education and coaching and mentoring to successfully equip people with the knowledge and skills they need to develop and execute the agile habits we talked about earlier. If we think of agile as a process, not a mindset, then we default to training instead of education.

While we acknowledge our bias towards the learning roadmap published by the International Consortium of Agile (ICAgile.com), we truly believe that it is the most comprehensive roadmap in the agile community that focuses on a common education roadmap for agile and agility and not training on a particular agile methodology. ICAgile has gathered experts from around the world and they have collaborated to define an education roadmap for every discipline needed to change how the organization as a whole works, and provides education as a foundation for sustainable organizational agility. (Focus on people not process, education not training)

Certifications are a way to give people confidence in the learning and competency of others. Agile certifications should be no different.

X

As many organizations are adopting more and more agile, a key question is emerging … how sustainable is agile in our organization? When the embedded agile coaches or consultants leave, will things go back to the way they were? How long will it take before agile becomes just empty rituals and checklists, like the other processes did? Will things go back to the way they were after our sponsor moves on? It is our experience that the sustainability of agile is deeply linked to how the organization “transforms” to agile. We know that transforming an organization to become more agile requires more than just process change. Rather, it requires a complete culture shift. Sustainable, effective agile transformations affect all the elements of culture such as, leadership style, leadership values, work structures, reward systems, processes, and of course the work habits of people. How to affect that culture shift is the key question we will discuss in the session. We will present two different common transformation approaches (organizational-led and process-led) and then describe a hybrid version called culture-led transformation that is designed to change critical organizational and personal habits to improve and sustain organizational agility.

X