Agile isn't just for software, it's for your thing, whatever that is. In my keynote talk, Agile for Everything, I introduced six fundamental patterns that comprise Agility. They apply not just to software, but to virtually any situation where rapid adaptation can improve success.

In this workshop, I'll teach and coach you to apply those six principles to your thing. "Your thing" might be marketing, UX design, software, finance, hardware, business development, product management, your company, your family, your career, a classroom, your education, your kids' education, an art project, or building a house. Or it might be something else.

You gain two ways attending this workshop: First, you will get coaching help in achieving "your thing," whatever that is. Second, you will gain an intuitive, visceral understanding of agility—its strengths and limitations, its nuances and quirks. That understanding will help you rapidly assess agile opportunities and dangers, and will help you teach and coach in more fruitful ways.

With a broader view of agility, agile methods can help you successfully tackle any tough challenge. That includes advancing your own career, promoting a healthy family, as well as marketing, HR, finance, recruiting, and, of course, software. This workshop-based class will teach you the most critical patterns of agile, and help you apply them to any challenging problem you face. It turns out when people around you are agile, it boosts your ability to be agile as well. You'll get to exercise a few coaching skills that can help you teach others to use these techniques.

When you coach agile in large companies, like I do, you can start with software. But if you don't leave the software cocoon, your agile efforts will stall and might even die. Maladaptive managers dominate most organizations. They don’t know how or why they should adapt, much less teach rapid adaptation to their employees. Many agile scaling frameworks, like SAFE and LeSS, focus solely on software. They don’t do much for the overall agility of a company, because marketing, legal, HR, sales, business development, finance, operations, manufacturing, etc. limit the real agility of most software departments.

I have been a serial entrepreneur, with some success. In 2008 I became Director of Agile Coaching in Citrix. As a former CEO, I knew our agile group had to leave the cocoon of software, because I could see marketing, legal and finance slowing software development down. But once I started working outside software, the Agile Manifesto, with its emphasis on software, hindered more than helped. I stopped using it. At Citrix, I taught marketing, operations, designers, finance, HR personnel, and managers to learn and adapt more rapidly. I started teaching and coaching other companies. I watched them gain market share and reduce costs. Their employees became happier and felt more fulfilled.

A few years ago, I started a project to find and promote a universal definition of agility. I used affinity analysis to combine elements of Agile Manifesto, Scrum, Lean Startup, Lean Manufacturing, XP, Theory of Constraints, and even Getting Things Done. The agile community has been borrowing concepts from these other fields since the beginning, and I thought they must share some common principles. It turns out they do. I didn’t stop with that, but studied management, psychology, sociology, and chaos theory to explain why those principles drove success.

The result is six powerful fundamental patterns I call “Agile for Everything.” You can apply them to software, of course. Scrum and Lean Startup emerge as obvious frameworks for software development and market development, respectively. We also gain insight into things we should add to Scrum and Lean Startup.

Because they are so fundamental, you can talk about the Agile for Everything patterns with executives, and they can quickly understand how they apply to whole departments and organizations, and can implement the patterns immediately. You can also apply them to your personal life, building your career, more opportunities for your kids, and more happiness overall.

ScrumMaster who take their role seriously are beset with difficulties. As a process Owner and problem solver, the issues are many and systemic fixes needed. So what can/should they do? As with many other competencies, problem solving needs practice. Here we confront a fictitious case-study (based on two real projects) with help from India's first Scrum coach. As he takes you through the thicket of a complex situation (aren't all real situations complex, and not just "complicated"?) you will get a series of in-depth example SM situations. Further a moderated discussion on how to handle them. Some will be your own. This will be different from a Certified Advanced ScrumMaster class, this doesn't have much coaching content, but a strong problem solving slant.

NOTE: Case study here is of a "cummulative" type, which allows drawing wider lessons based on familiar common experience. The situation is meant to illustrate common (and one or two not so common) problems and their treatment.

We need good agile managers, if we hope to sustain rapid adaptation and innovation. Agile managers deliver coherent chunks of value, rapidly adapt to changing circumstances, and experiment with new approaches. Because they depend on their teams to support their own agile needs, they demand agility from their teams.

Management talent is rare, and agile management talent even rarer. Gallup has surveyed thousands of managers, finding that low-talent managers, unfortunately a majority, create dysfunctional teams, build unsupported products and produce little sustained value. So developing high-talent agile managers matters.

Agile managers adopt five agile base patterns for themselves: they measure economic progress, proactively experiment to improve, limit work-in-process by time and cost, radiate collective responsibility, and collaboratively solve systemic problems. It turns out these patterns have analogues in high-talent (non-agile) manager talents. That’s a relief, because we can focus agile manager development on extending the talents good managers already have.

In this workshop, we'll explore agile manager characteristics, and management dysfunctions. We'll create approaches to move good general managers to good agile managers. We'll explore strategies for dealing with mediocre managers, whether they are peers or superiors. And we'll learning how to improve our own management agility.

This talk comes from well-documented experience. I have held management roles from Team Lead through VP Engineering and CEO. At Citrix, Skype, Amway and other large companies, I used agile to help manage a 24-member user-experience department, three different agile coach teams and a 50-member data science department. Much of this work has been described in conference papers and detailed blog posts.