Using the game "Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes", we'll explore and highlight teamwork, communication, developing shared language, creating a shared understanding, and so much more. This session will be an interactive session for a small group, with other observing; with multiple rounds, pretty much anyone and everyone who wants to participate will be able to, but no one will be forced to participate! This is a very practical team activity, which easily scales beyond the team, and works well in-person, but even better with distributed teams as we explore the ways we need to interact when not co-located.

Have you ever been asked, “Are we agile yet?”

That’s a daunting question to answer as there is no single best way to measure adoption. Chris and Lee, experienced Agile veterans, believe that measuring adoption is not one-size-fits-all, but rather requires strategic planning tailored to the needs of that team.

Over their careers, Chris and Lee have worked with upwards of 70 agile teams. After learning and improving over several years, they have successfully developed a simple yet collaborative approach to measuring agile adoption - all while maneuvering the minefield of executives looking for performance metrics.

Join Chris and Lee as they let you in on their approach to developing an agile adoption strategy, starting with a simple survey. The pair will also share some of the challenges they encountered and how they were able to mitigate them to improve team performance.

“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.

Join a panel of experienced Agile Coaches for a discussion and Q&A of their experiences as coaches. Each of the panelists has a different background, and a unique journey into their role as an Agile Coach. Along the way, they've each built up a wide and diverse set of skills, from their careers, interactions, and experiences. 

What have some successes been?
How do we even define success for ourself, as an Agile Coach?
More importantly (and hopefully more entertaining), will be some of the lessons learned... We'll explore what was tried, but had a surprising and unexpected outcome. 
And, we'll discuss some of the ways experienced coaches continue to learn, share, grow, and develop everyday!

Why?

That's the most important question to answer. And, did you notice? I specifically didn't do it.
As a GOAT Conference participant, I need to write better User Stories.

What's missing is the "why". That's so important, because writing better User Stories could mean so many things to different people. And if you're going to attend this session, you really ought to know what you're going to get out of it. That's the 'why'.

It's more of an art, than a science. Writing great User Stories, that is.
Why have I been told to use a the funny "As A / I Want / So That" format?
How big is too big, and why should I spend time splitting stories?
Isn't a user story the same as a WBS item?
Good questions, indeed. You likely have more. Excellent.

In this interactive session, we'll explore the fundamentals of writing good user stories. And we'll try to make those good user stories, better. We'll also look at alternatives to user stories, and find ways to represent ideas as product backlog items in other ways. We'll explore why the Card, Conversation, and Confirmation, are so important, and why it's worth the time to INVEST in meaningful stories.

In this interactive session, we’ll explore how each of us views the world differently and how our perception is shaped by everything we've previously experienced. Through magic, illusions, and an interactive exercise, Jeff reveals the ways our perceptions and biases influence our reality and how our individual realities are unique.

Discovering your distinct personal perspective by understanding how biases impact how we make sense of the world around us, we can learn to better understand others. We can gain insights which inform our interactions with customers, colleagues, and competitors.

You'll leave this session with an appreciation for working with others, and approaches to team problem solving in our complex world. No magic spells required.

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.

In this interactive session, we’ll explore how each of us views the world differently and how our perception is shaped by everything we've previously experienced. Through magic, illusions, and an interactive exercise, Jeff reveals the ways our perceptions and biases influence our reality and how our individual realities are unique.

Discovering your distinct personal perspective by understanding how biases impact how we make sense of the world around us, we can learn to better understand others. We can gain insights which inform our interactions with customers, colleagues, and competitors.

You'll leave this session with an appreciation for working with others, and approaches to team problem solving in our complex world. No magic spells required.