Come learn from Coach and Agile Coach Matt Kirilov with his coaching clinic to follow the success of the clinics he ran or co-ran at the Scrum Alliance Agile Coaching Retreat North America 2019 and NYC Agile Camp 2019.

It has been 10 years since Lyssa Adkins recognized professional coaching as one of the core Agile Coaching competencies. This clinic is an opportunities for those who have not experienced a coach deliberately create coaching space and holding that space. Others who will find value include those who have witnessed professional coaching, but want to try it in a safe setting. Yet a third group of attendees may have something that is bothering them and come to the clinic to get their ball of thoughts untangled.

In this session you will play a game that you can use to teach Agile, Scrum, and Kanban. You will team up to play a game in parties of 2-5 adventurers to seek your fortune and battle monsters for gold! The game is fast paced, with no turns. Anyone can do anything at any time. Explore the randomly generated map, move your adventurer, or team up to battle Skeletons, Orcs, Giants, Dragons, and even the mighty Behemoth . Play is in 5 minute time-boxed rounds. In each round you attempt to do better as a team than before. To defeat a monster, you'll need to use a variety of skills including wordplay, math, drawing, and paper folding. The game illustrates most of the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto and the mechanics of Scrum. A freely downloadable version of the game is available for printing and use with your teams.

What can we do as Coaches to resist the temptation to step in and offer advice? Coaching Triggers offer a new framework to help you stay in the coaching mode, work from the coachee’s agenda, and remain neutral. This framework was developed from years of coaching clients and training coaches.

As an Agile Coach we have four interaction modes: pure coaching (aka professional coaching), mentoring, teaching, and facilitating. When we are purely in the Coaching mindset, we are working to help the coachee come up with their own solutions. All of your mental energy should be focused on looking for opportunities to assist the coachee in moving forward in their own problem solving process.

Coaching Triggers are pairs of circumstances and corresponding techniques that help to identify how we can best help the coachee move forward. For instance, if the coachee is potentially off-rack from their stated purpose for the coaching session, that’s a trigger that indicates using the technique of orienting. Each of these triggers utilizes “powerful questions” that are open-ended, non-leading, and specific to the trigger being used.

Coaching is a useful skill that anyone can learn and apply, whether you are an Agile Coach or not. Explore the coaching mode of Agile Coaching with six fun games. In “Flash Card Coaching,” you will witness the power of powerful questions and the value of coaching by using only preset questions to do a full coaching session.

There are three categorization games where you will work together in small groups to learn about powerful questions, giving advice as a Coach, and the differences between the 4 modes of an Agile Coach.

Finally, there are two “Choose Your Own Coaching Adventure” games. These are just like the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” games. Your choices lead down a path that either leads to a successful coaching outcome or an unhappy coachee. Each unhappy ending comes with an explanation and you can always back up and try again.

All of the games will be provided as free downloads for participant use.

Regardless of the number of teams working on a product, or the size of a product, working software and its value starts with and continues to grow one story at a time. Having exquisitely written, small user stories maximizes the speed of that growth and the coordination of work between teams, especially when there are many teams cooperating together. In our experience, a major impediment to writing good user stories in the real word is a lack of example stories. Learn how to write exquisite user stories across a wide variety of domain types using games! This session will introduce advanced user story writing and splitting through a combination of a short presentation and ten unique games which each provide a different insight into user story writing. Some are geared to the who/what/why of stories, others to the different aspects of INVEST, and still others to creating vertical slices and story splitting. There are more than 100 examples of “good” and “bad” tasks, stories, epics, products, and projects. The games are easy to learn, play, and teach so that you can experience good user stories in just a few minutes. Come play the games and then download them and share them with your friends and co-workers!

Agile helps you to deliver what’s valuable to the customer faster. You can capture, prioritize, communicate, and deliver that value with good user stories. In our experience, a major impediment to writing good user stories in the real word is a lack of example stories. We have created a set of games that incorporate 80 examples of good and bad user stories. The games are easy to learn, play, and teach so that you can experience good user stories in just a few minutes. Come play the games and then share them with your friends and co-workers!

If you are one of the people in your organization that is helping to increase the Agility of people, teams, or the organization overall, then you are a cultural change agent. According to Merriam-Webster’s, culture is “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization” and “a way of thinking behaving, or working that exists in a place or organization.” Agile brings a new set of attitudes, values, goals, beliefs, and practices; and a new way of thinking, behaving, and working.

In this highly interactive session, we will examine the kinds of cultural and behavioral changes that Agile can bring, the benefits of those changes, and the practices and techniques that can ease the inevitable culture clash. Participants will split up into small cross-functional groups which will go through a series of exercises to discover their current level of "Agile culture", the many sub-cultures in an organization and their unique challenges, behavioral changes that lead to cultural change, and the opportunities that we all have to personally affect our organization's culture.

One of the highlights of the workshop is a thought experiment called "the locked room" which gives participants an opportunity to see their organization's culture in a new light, imagine a more Agile culture, and consider the changes required to move to that more Agile culture.

Putting User Stories into business value order is a key tenet of Agile, but that's just the first step. There's much more value to be extracted from your user stories by making them small and valuable. Not only will you create more value by splitting stories, you will also reduce their cost!

One of the hardest parts about writing small and valuable stories is overcoming problems like having stories that cross teams or architectural layers. Many organizations say “we can’t show value until the end.” Very often, the “stories” being implemented in these situations are really just tasks masquerading as user stories. This session will show you how to overcome these impediments and create stories that are small and valuable no matter what.

The key to creating small and valuable stories is story splitting. Techniques covered will include: split by "create/read/update/delete", split by acceptance test, cake slicing, split by generated list, split by keyword, split by user, follow the test scenario, and “hard coding.”