We are facing an engagement crisis. There is a strong correlation between agile practices and employee engagement, and it's clear that one cannot work without the other. Employee voice is one of the key enablers for engagement. However, it is one of the least understood – and perhaps less practiced – aspects of engagement. Employees see problems. They have ideas, potential solutions, and experiments they'd like to run. But they feel powerless to effect the change they know is necessary. Over time, the cycle of active disengagement continues.

But it doesn't have to be this way! In fact, agile organizations already have the foundation in place to help individuals raise their voice and be heard - agile retrospectives. Unfortunately, most retrospectives currently do not have the positive ROI we would hope for or expect. Action items, learnings, hypotheses, goals, and other artifacts that come out of retrospectives are not shared with the rest of the organization in a systematic and impactful way.

This session is about the surprising connection between employee engagement, employee voice, and agile retrospectives. By providing teams with the solutions and support needed to run effective retrospectives, and by following through on the actions that come out of the discussion, you can empower individuals to become more engaged, productive and effective.

Turns out that effective retrospectives are more critical to business agility then you might have ever imagined.

Good retrospectives (you know, the ones that actually lead to real change?) rest on three pillars:

1. people,
2. process, and
3. follow-through

What makes retrospectives so difficult is that if any of these three pillars starts to crack, it's next to impossible to succeed. Ultimately, getting the right people in the room, utilizing a good process to facilitate the conversation, and following-through on the learning outcomes depend on having an organizational culture that encourages learning, transparency, feedback loops, and continuous improvement.

If this sounds like your company already, then great! This talk is not for you. For everyone else, join us to explore the current trends of employee engagement, how they overlap with agile retrospectives, and the true opportunity each team member has to improve the quality, speed, and outcome of their work. 

Retrospectives are the core of agility. And yet they are the scrum ceremony that is most frequently skipped. Many teams like the idea of the retrospective but find them boring, or worse ineffective.

This talk aims to re-energize retrospective facilitators and participants. Starting with the basics: "what's a retrospective and how do you run one?", this talk reveals 7 secrets that lead to more engaging, more effective retrospectives.

You'll learn:

* The best way to ensure your retrospectives lead to real change

* The "pledge" everyone on your team should take before participating

* How to know who to include in each retrospective

* The single most important thing you can do to keep your team engaged during the retro

* And much, much more!

Agile works best when the entire team is sitting together in the same office. Or does it?

The reality of today's working world is that more and more teams have people working remotely. As agile practitioners, we must "inspect and adapt" to this new world. What strategies should we use to make agile work better in a distributed world? How important is picking the right tools vs. setting a positive culture? What practices should team leaders and Scrum Masters of distributed teams implement to make distributed life easier and more effective?

presented by David Horowitz

David is a co-founder and CEO of Retrium. Retrium makes distributed retrospectives easy and effective through the use of a real-time facilitated web app that enables private ideation, dot voting, prioritized discussion, and the creation of action plans. In a prior life, David was a software developer for The World Bank for 9 years.

Everyone knows that scrum works best when the entire team is sitting together in the same office. But the reality of today's working world is that more and more teams are geographically distributed. In many cases, this is the result of "strategic priorities" from senior management and is entirely inflexible. As scrum practioners, we must come up with strategies for adapting scrum to a distributed world. This talk will take a hypothetical distributed scrum team from release planning all the way through to launch day. What are some of the problems that will come up? What are the best ways of overcoming these issues? How should Scrum Masters facilitate sprint planning, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospectives?