What should we work on now, later and never? When will it be ready? What is the status of our current commitments? Do our teams even have the capability and capacity to deliver on our promises to our customers? These are the challenges and risks that product managers need to manage on a daily basis. In this interactive session, we'll explore ways that Kanban can help you improve decision making, manage risk, improve transparency, and make promises you can keep.

Many teams and businesses kickoff change initiatives focusing on the changes they wish to introduce - this is looking at the change from "left to right". The AgendaShift approach to change, developed by Mike Burrows, shifts this focus from "right to left"; first with the overall goals in mind and then developing an understanding of the obstacles in the way of achieving the goal.

This workshop is intended to give participants a broad set of tools for kicking off and seeing through a change initiative in their organization that aligns changes to clear business outcomes. In the workshop, participants will experience a set of change activities using AgendaShift that includes the use of techniques based off of: Clean Language, Improvement Kata, Story Mapping, Kanban, Cynefin, A3 Experiment Design and Systems Thinking.

In our current business climate, organizations increasingly need to deal with a volatile and changing market. Changing needs, require rapidly shifting skills needs - in short high skill liquidity. Various techniques have been used to address skill liquidity challenges including specialization, multi-skilled individuals and cross-functional teams. This session will classify and introduce new approaches to deal with skill liquidity. It will also suggest which approaches are most appropriate to your organization, based on your organization's culture and process maturity. This model is called the Skill Liquidity Maturity Model or SLiMM.

“When will it be done?” is a question asked in just about every business I’ve encountered, Agile or otherwise. In this metrics-focused session we will explore why that question is so hard to answer and whether it is even the right question to ask.

We will explore current thinking about measurement in knowledge work fields. How every business needs to identify their own appropriate metrics to measure for their own business challenges and goals. While metrics are always unique for each individual business context, we will identify 4 metric categories identified from the Fit for Purpose framework.

To connect these concepts to your Agile organization we explore going past looking at measurement as a team phenomena and connect this to the level of services or value streams.

Digging further we continue to examine questions around measuring and predicting delivery times. We contrast prediction approaches using deterministic methods vs probabilistic methods. And consider multiple sources of variability that make predictions challenging and often impossible.

We conclude by considering more appropriate questions to replace “When will it be done?” Rather asking “When do we need it” followed by “and so, when should start?”

Scrum has proven to be a successful framework for many companies in complex delivery domains to transition to Agility from more traditional delivery methods.

At some point during these transitions many companies have experienced a stall to what have previously been ongoing and exponential improvements. Complexity brings with it challenges in the "white spaces" that exist between teams where local improvements become disconnected from the delivery of customer value.

In this workshop, we introduce a simulation of "The Company" where the white space challenges are experienced.

Through the use of the simulation we introduce Lean & Systems Thinking concepts to improve the system as a whole and bring the company back to a place of continuous improvement that is connected to customer value.

^{Note for conference selection committee: Additional option: the content can be presented in a 40 -60 minute talk format if workshop space is limited.}