“Are we Agile yet?”, “Of course we are agile, we stand up every day”, “We have a hybrid Waterfall/Agile technique”. Do any of these sound familiar to you?

After several years at multiple organizations it is interesting to find the same mistakes being made over and over again. This talk will discuss the various ways that your company can fail at agile and what you can do about it.

“Are we agile yet?”, “Can you get me some metrics on our agile adoption?”, “I want to measure the effectiveness of our agile teams, get me some metrics to do that.”!!!

These are scary questions that can get asked of you from your executives. We’ve all been there. What are you supposed to do? How do you (politely) tell them no, yet still provide your teams with information that will help them? Most importantly, how can we actually help a large set of teams understand their own journey towards adopting agile practices?

Chris and Lee have worked with over 70 agile teams and created an approach that allowed the individual teams to understand where they were on their agile journey while maneuvering through the minefield of executives that wanted performance metrics to hold teams accountable.

This session will be a review of what the challenges were during this process, how they were accepted and mitigated and how the teams were able to get good insight into their agile adoption and performance.

Some projects are doomed to be waterfall. Doomed to incremental delivery, struggling under the mass of requirements documents, reporting and vendors.

Or maybe not. Maybe, just maybe, with a nuanced approach you can defeat the Project Management Ogre Office and their unreasonable demands, deflect the persistent challenges from executives and succeed in using Agile in a non-agile environment or project.

Big data is in high demand. More and more companies are recognizing that they have a vast wealth of information locked away in disparate databases and proprietary systems. How can an agile delivery model help when the constraints are all waterfall, and not terribly interested in helping?

This session will explore a couple of case studies from health care and banking to showcase the techniques that can be utilized to succeed in a waterfall environment.

“Are we agile yet?”, “Can you get me some metrics on our agile adoption?”, “I want to measure the effectiveness of our agile teams, get me some metrics to do that.”!!!

These are scary questions that can get asked of you from your executives. We’ve all been there. What are you supposed to do? How do you (politely) tell them no, yet still provide your teams with information that will help them? Most importantly, how can we actually help a large set of teams understand their own journey towards adopting agile practices?

Chris and Lee have worked with over 70 agile teams and created an approach that allowed the individual teams to understand where they were on their agile journey while maneuvering through the minefield of executives that wanted performance metrics to hold teams accountable.

This session will be a review of what the challenges were during this process, how they were accepted and mitigated and how the teams were able to get good insight into their agile adoption and performance.

The practice of Agile is all about speed. Quick to deliver, fast to market, sprinting... While speed is important we need time to reflect as well.

Mindfulness is the practice of focusing your attention on the present moment, where you are and what you are doing. It is a chance to look at the people, the scenery, the world around you. When you are with friends, be with them. Not paying attention to the world around you has consequences not only for you but for your company and colleagues as well.

This session will highlight some mindfulness techniques you can use during your day to improve work for everyone.

The practice of Agile is all about speed. Quick to deliver, fast to market, sprinting... While speed is important we need time to reflect as well.

Mindfulness is the practice of focusing your attention on the present moment, where you are and what you are doing. It is a chance to look at the people, the scenery, the world around you. When you are with friends, be with them. Not paying attention to the world around you has consequences not only for you but for your company and colleagues as well.

This session will highlight some mindfulness techniques you can use during your day to improve work for everyone.

We've all been there.  We have to deal with them in all aspects of our lives. We've all had them on our teams. They have a name: Jerk.

There are some things agile can fix and some things people that can't be fixed. With agile we can improve the work life for almost everyone, by increasing communication, increasing collaboration and minimizing the Jerks. It won't help with the chronic non-flusher, but for your teams it will help.

This session will explore Jerks and what can be done about them.

Project Management practices teach PMs to be leaders, to drive results and to complete the project on time, on budget and on scope.  In Agile, we are expecting our leaders to stand in front of the team to take the criticisms but to be behind them and let them do their job.  

Too often managers/leaders fall back into the directing mode, telling the teams what to do and how.  There needs to be a better understanding of what servant leadership means, how to achieve it and why it is important.

This session will explore the different styles of leadership and why, for Agile, servant leadership is important.