Government Agile transformations can feel like overwhelming efforts – but do not abandon hope! This interactive, audience-driven presentation reviews how government and large organizations ESCAPE common Agile adoption challenges.
You - the audience - will prioritize your pain points; we’ll focus on the five Agile hells most highly prioritized. We will discuss real examples of “escaping” out of each Agile hell, with pro tips and success patterns you can apply.
The Agile hells we've escaped include:

• No Transformation hell - A federal program or department wants to change but can’t start or can’t finish
• Too Fast hell - Newly Agile federal programs sometimes respond TOO rapidly, too often changing priorities.
• Technical hell - Programs can become bogged down in technical debt and manual processes.
• No Trust hell - Government delivery can be slowed by lack of trust between contractors and feds, between business and IT, or between compliance and delivery groups.
• Product Owners hell - Government Product Owners can be unavailable, think they are managers, aren’t empowered to provide vision, or struggle with prioritization
• Too Big hell- A frequent pattern in federal Agile! Large batches produce slow progress, low visibility and high complexity, seen in big programs, big deployments, and big contracts.
• Collaboration hell - Government teams can struggle with collaboration within the same organization across roles and across the fed-contractor divide.
• Stove-piped hell - Government organizations can struggle to collaborate across contractual or organizational boundaries within the same enterprise
• Leadership hell - An organization can only be as agile as its leadership. In the government, how can you work with leaders who aren't ready to be agile?

For each Agile hell, we focus on successful techniques to escape from these common dynamics. Unlike other presentations, we won't be doing a deep dive, but we will cover the most important challenges our audience face.

Retrospectives are sometimes viewed as stressful and about complaining. Retrospectives should be rewarding and fun! We'll introduce four "games" in a somewhat narrative romantic story (break up, self worth, honeymoon planning, fixing a home). These four games cover internal and external concerns as well as individual and collective (it, I, we, its). We will explain the value of picking a retrospective that fits a team's need. Finally - we will have a funeral for the old ways of doing retrospectives.

Specific organizational patterns are the villains of agile adoption, setting unreasonable expectations and sabotaging progress. We’ll explore these villains, and give real examples how federal organizations overcame them.

Participants will see the power of metaphor first embraced by Extreme Programming: a system metaphor or (for transformations) a cultural metaphor to name and avoid common anti-patterns in Agile adoptions.

Leaders in government programs or large organizations will recognize common challenges patterns: setting schedules by fiat, limiting the availability of product owners, balancing responding to emergencies with focusing on consistent prioritizes, just to name a few. Coaches and champions supporting Agile adoptions will be equipped with counter-examples to avoid these challenges.

TSA Agile Services (TAS) began on January 4th, 2017 after extensive collaboration with contracting officials, various bids, and the Agile community. Come hear the aspects that have enabled successful delivery within a government agency. TAS encompasses over 65 applications supported by a team of 80+ people. Also - because transparency is a large key to our success - we will cover the failures we have experienced and the struggles we are still working on. Lastly - it is important for contractors and government to work closely together - this presentation will be co-presented by two Agile Coaches: one is a federal employee and the other a contractor.

Yoda said: “Ready are you? What know you of ready?”

Yoda also said: “You must unlearn what you have learned. “

Product Owners want everything – NOW! As process ninjas, coaches, and general Agilists, we help product owners appreciate the value of prioritizing. With Agile, the PO will iteratively and incrementally get a great product. Sometimes, we Agilists want our teams to have ALL the best practices – NOW! Maybe we could work iteratively and incrementally get a great team – but how to prioritize?

In this talk we will discuss (A) the problem in terms of the Satir Change Process Model; (B) the Shu Ha Ri method of prioritizing change; (C) Mike Cottemeyer’s “Three Things” to prioritize change; and (D) a mini-workshop in which we take a look at several teams and what might be the “process” for them to achieve good process! Also, we may have accidental fun.