Dance with Diana Larsen along the path to Agile Fluency for your team. In 2012, Diana Larsen and James Shore refiined the Agile Fluency Modeland Martin Fowler published it, "Your Path Through Agile Fluency." (http://agilefluency.com) The model describes how teams grow in their understanding and skillful ease with Agile over time. The model reflects what Diana and Jim, and many others, have seen in real teams in the real world, and it inspires organizations to learn how to invest in teams. In this keynote, Diana will share stories of real teams as they dance along the path and energize you to find your teams' best dance.

Over the past ten years, software development teams using Agile approaches to work have adopted retrospective meetings as a critical practice for learning and continuous improvement. To the extent that practitioners say, “If you’re not holding iteration retrospectives, you’re not doing Agile.”

 Agile retrospectives at the end of each iteration or work increment set aside time for the team to examine feedback from current conditions and develop targeted tactics to keep the project on track. Many practitioners experience retrospectives as great means for detecting good, poor, and missing practices; as a handle to make tacit knowledge about effective practices explicit; and to define improvement actions in order to deal with ineffective or inefficient technical, process, and teamwork practices.

However, too many teams and practitioners don’t reap the benefits that effective retrospective meetings can provide. Too many retrospective meetings receive cursory or inadequate facilitation. Too many retrospective meetings are held to  “check the box” on the project management template, rather than to focus on real improvements. For too many teams, the action plans coming out of retrospectives are never implemented or revisited. Too many teams seek to shift blame and responsibility for action through the retrospective.

In too many organizations, retrospective meetings don’t deliver the promised return on time invested (ROTI).

In this session, you’ll learn how to get the most from your retrospective practices. Diana Larsen, co-author of Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great, will introduce you to a simple framework for getting better outcomes from retrospective meetings, suggest ways to maintain the relevance of improvement to the work of your team, and provide tips and pointers to get great returns from the time your teams devote to every meeting. 

Agile has a problem. When we started out with Agile, people used it because it made their lives and products better. Now people complain that Agile is about meetings, top-down mandates, and wasting time. We can do better. It’s time for a change.

In response, Diana Larsen and James Shore developed The Agile Fluency™ Model and Martin Fowler published it, “Your Path Through Agile Fluency” (http://agilefluency.com). The model describes how teams grow in their understanding of Agile over time. It's a descriptive model, because it reflects what happens in the real world, and in it's an aspirational model, because you can use it to understand how to invest in improving your teams.

We've found the model very useful for helping teams, managers, and executives understand what they can get from Agile and what they need to invest in order to get those results. The model's emphasis on concrete outcomes means executives are open—even eager—to devote the effort needed. Leaders appreciate being able to see the tradeoffs and make a strategic decision, and teams thrive when given meaningful goals and the time and resources needed to achieve them.    

In this workshop, led by Diana Larsen, together we’ll dig deeper into the model, including:

-       Agile Fluency Model Overview

-       Bringing Agile Fluency into your organization

-       Examples of Agile Fluency in real-world teams

-       Examples of organizational investments

-       Supplemental materials for metrics and assessments

-       Agile principles and practices in the model

-       New directions and support for the Agile Fluency Model