Although self-organizing teams are crucial to carrying out a successful Agile transformation, organizations that implement Agile at scale invariably realize that the introduction of such teams forces the organization to re-engineer numerous aspects of its operating philosophy. In particular, various management layers are often removed. The individuals in these layers are routinely re-purposed or laid off.

This talk highlights the approaches I used as an Agilist in various organizations to help people in different roles on their journey of transitioning into the world of Agile. Specifically, the talk will focus on 5 key roles: Project Managers, Product Managers, BA Managers, Development Managers, and QA Managers. It will provide insight into how managers can effectively transition to some of the new Agile roles, or redefine their existing role to effectively fit in an Agile world.

The emphasis in this talk is on pragmatic strategies for managers that are struggling to find their place in this new Agile world. Armed with these strategies, participants will be able to effectively adapt to the Agile transformation, as well as discover potential new career paths for themselves and for the individuals reporting to them.

Although self-organizing teams are crucial to carrying out a successful Agile transformation, organizations that implement Agile at scale invariably realize that the introduction of such teams forces the organization to re-engineer numerous aspects of its operating philosophy. In particular, various management layers are often removed. The individuals in these layers are routinely re-purposed or laid off.

This talk highlights the approaches I used as an Agilist in various organizations to help people in different roles on their journey of transitioning into the world of Agile. Specifically, the talk will focus on 5 key roles: Project Managers, Product Managers, BA Managers, Development Managers, and QA Managers. It will provide insight into how managers can effectively transition to some of the new Agile roles, or redefine their existing role to effectively fit in an Agile world.

The emphasis in this talk is on pragmatic strategies for managers that are struggling to find their place in this new Agile world. Armed with these strategies, participants will be able to effectively adapt to the Agile transformation, as well as discover potential new career paths for themselves and for the individuals reporting to them.

According to the 11^th annual State of Agile report by VersionOne, one of the top five reasons for adopting Agile is to “enhance software quality”. In spite of this aspiration, a common pattern in Agile rollouts is the failure to set quality goal improvements from the outset. It is often assumed that if you implement Agile/Scrum then quality will just take care of itself. As many organizations quickly discover, you cannot just “deploy Agile” and expect it to be the silver bullet for a software organizations’ quality issues. Why is this happening so frequently? Is it due to methodical deficiencies, unrealistic expectations, fundamental misunderstanding of Agile, lack of executive support, too much existing technical debt or all of the above?

If you are questioning whether your Agile rollout is really helping you deliver higher quality software, faster, then this talk is a must to attend. I will discuss the approach I have successfully used in a number of organizations which involves; identifying the necessary building blocks to establish a quality mindset in an organization, moving the organization to a test first mindset, helping the Product Management organization become more Agile, and finally setting the right level of test automation so that you can deliver quality software faster.

If you are serious about doing Agility at scale, you cannot realistically achieve that goal without ensuring that each team individually delivers quality, and in-turn whole projects/programs that incorporate outputs from the individual teams are delivering quality software. To successfully scale quality, you will need to follow the ‘blueprint’ provided in this presentation.

According to the 11^th annual State of Agile report by VersionOne, one of the top five reasons for adopting Agile is to “enhance software quality”. In spite of this aspiration, a common pattern in Agile rollouts is the failure to set quality goal improvements from the outset. It is often assumed that if you implement Agile/Scrum then quality will just take care of itself. As many organizations quickly discover, you cannot just “deploy Agile” and expect it to be the silver bullet for a software organizations’ quality issues. Why is this happening so frequently? Is it due to methodical deficiencies, unrealistic expectations, fundamental misunderstanding of Agile, lack of executive support, too much existing technical debt or all of the above?

If you are questioning whether your Agile rollout is really helping you deliver higher quality software, faster, then this talk is a must to attend. I will discuss the approach I have successfully used in a number of organizations which involves; identifying the necessary building blocks to establish a quality mindset in an organization, moving the organization to a test first mindset, helping the Product Management organization become more Agile, and finally setting the right level of test automation so that you can deliver quality software faster.

If you are serious about doing Agility at scale, you cannot realistically achieve that goal without ensuring that each team individually delivers quality, and in-turn whole projects/programs that incorporate outputs from the individual teams are delivering quality software. To successfully scale quality, you will need to follow the ‘blueprint’ provided in this presentation.

Why do so many organizations struggle to put in place mature Agile teams that can apply proper Agile principles and deliver awesome products? Some people will say, “Agile is hard” as an excuse to not do Agile or to become frAgile. Well we think we have developed the “Secret Sauce” to rebooting any Agile team that just doesn’t seem to be maturing and we want to share it with you!

If you are thinking of scaling Agile across a large organization, then this talk is a must to attend to help ensure your teams have the right foundation. Organizations wanting to scale Agile must have a solid foundation of mature Agile teams who embrace the Agile values and have the right Agile mindset.

Over the years, as we have done Agile transformations in different organizations, we have seen common patterns that keep repeating. The most common pattern we found in our experience is that teams are frAgile. Too many either pretend to be Agile or don’t even know Agile is not a methodology, so organizations question the value of using Agile.  Very often the confusion and frustration that comes with thinking that a team is Agile when they are not Agile, brings people right back to their old habits of command and control. Creating successful mature Agile teams is not sorcery, you need to discover the secret sauce!

In this talk, we will reveal our secrets on how to create a successful Agile-Scrum team in 5 sprints. Attendees will learn how we applied our secret sauce as we experimented with more than 30 teams and we refined the know-how. This recipe has proven to be successful in different organizations and teams delivering different types of products. Our Creative-Destruction approach goes through a human change process we labeled The Intervention Plan. The 5 steps are:

• Step 1: Run in the rain
• Step 2: Thunderstruck
• Step 3: Cry over the M&M’s machine
• Step 4: Open-up and look at the sun
• Step 5: Removing the training wheels

And by using these 5 steps, attendees will discover the 5th Agile value!