Tired of Agile As A Lip-service?

Feel like Lean is getting lost?

Being asked to improve everything without changing anything?

Do you want to know what you can do about it?

If so, this talk is for you! Join Trent and Matt as they use Institutional Theory to examine the current state of Agile adoption, what it means for our work today, and what it suggests for the future.

They’ll explain the increasing emphasis on frameworks, the move away from lightweight methods, and the paradoxes we’ve all observed in Agile adoptions. These developments follow clear and established patterns; they’re not unexpected. Come explore why we are where we are, and what we can do to move beyond Agile Despondency.

You work in an organization that struggles to prioritize work.

There are too many handoffs to get things done.

Issues snowball downhill, impacting what teams deliver.

You feel blocked by issues above your paygrade.

Sound familiar?

Come join Matt Barcomb as he introduces Strategy Deployment, Portfolio Planning, and Organization Design. He will explore how these topics are interrelated, as well as their typical organizational impacts.

Attendees will leave equipped with practices to sense these impacts and build the business cases needed to influence senior leadership—no matter where you may fall in the soul-crushing hierarchy of your organization.

If you’d like an alternative to typical, quarter-by-quarter, schedule oriented road mapping (and all the associated waste) then this session is for you. Matt Barcomb will introduce a Cadenced Flow approach to flow-based road mapping.

He will first cover how to layout and execute a road map based on models that better fit software planning as well as how to transform your existing plans. Next, using options thinking to frame work will be explored and how to use starting and stopping triggers for options, reducing the need of blind budgeting or project practices. Finally, Matt will wrap up by touching on a few key metrics that will let you monitor and evaluate your new road map.

Does prioritizing your development portfolio seem unclear or mired in politics? Ever feel like the decisions for what gets worked on when are somewhere between arbitrary and emotional? Ever get tired of providing cost estimates for work of uncertain value?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, this session is for you! Matt Barcomb will open with introductory concepts about shifting from a cost focus to a value focus for development work. Next, providing business value for user stories will be debunked. Then, a collaborative framework for prioritization, Benefit Mapping, will be discussed. Finally, Matt will end with ways to simplify the cost evaluation of work and risk.

Does prioritizing your development portfolio seem unclear or mired in politics? Ever feel like the decisions for what gets worked on when are somewhere between arbitrary and emotional? Ever get tired of providing cost estimates for work of uncertain value?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, this session is for you! Matt Barcomb will open with introductory concepts about shifting from a cost focus to a value focus for development work. Next, providing business value for user stories will be debunked. Then, a collaborative framework for prioritization, Benefit Mapping, will be discussed. Finally, Matt will end with ways to simplify the cost evaluation of work and risk.

If you’d like an alternative to typical, quarter-by-quarter, schedule oriented road mapping (and all the associated waste) then this session is for you. Matt Barcomb will introduce a Cadenced Flow approach to flow-based road mapping.

He will first cover how to layout and execute a road map based on models that better fit software planning as well as how to transform your existing plans. Next, using options thinking to frame work will be explored and how to use starting and stopping triggers for options, reducing the need of blind budgeting or project practices. Finally, Matt will wrap up by touching on a few key metrics that will let you monitor and evaluate your new road map.

Most organizations approach planning for development work all wrong. They try to impose models that rely on more certainty than is possible or practical. After all, development work is work that, by its very definition, has to be begun to be knowable. 

However, proven models exists for planning in less knowable situations. This session will cover practices such as benefit mapping and product-driven road maps as well as explain how to apply concepts such as options and triggers to create a more resilient and realistic product plan.

Most agree that creating a quality product is the responsibility of a whole team. But how does this actually work for the critical development functions of design, analysis, coding, test and ops?

Using a real-world example, this session covers concepts and practices that integrate those functions collaboratively, avoiding micro-silos and “smallerfall”. First, changes to how and when those functions work will be discussed. Next, the “test volcano” model will be applied to the workflow. Then, swarming and studio practices will be covered. Finally, the new testing and development concepts will be applied to deployment strategies.

Attendees will leave with a snout-to-tail process and set of practices that can be used to evolve their current teams toward a true collaboration that enables the flow of quality products.

Many organizational change initiatives fail due to lackluster leadership support. This should not surprise us as we often find that just below the surface nothing has changed. We should not expect organizations to transform if we don't design an ecosystem that allows emergence and growth to thrive.

The future of leadership lies in the ability to cultivate this ecosystem. Modern leaders need to facilitate continuous change by seeing their organization as a system while simultaneously embracing uncertainty.

Attendees will leave this session with the ability to facilitate pragmatic practices they can use immediately to apply fundamental concepts about systems and uncertainty.

Your company’s lean/agile transformation needs to include a major overhaul of your talent development practices. The landscape of finding, growing and retaining talented people has changed drastically over the last 10 years and lean practices and an agile mindset only accelerates that change so you need to be prepared?

During this session, Rachel Howard and Matt Barcomb will guide you through new ways of finding good people that are better matches for your organization, professionally and culturally as well as more effective ways to grow talent in-house and creative retention methods that better match the needs of the new generation of technologists.

Anyone who has traditional “HR responsibility” or is involved with traditional recruiting, hiring, compensating or training will leave this session with fresh ideas and pragmatic practices they can put to use quickly.