So your organization is going “Agile” now and you are overwhelmed with all this terminology like backlog, user stories, sprint, daily stand ups, etc.

Where do you start?
What does it take to kick off your first Agile project?
How do you setup your team for success?

In this talk, we will explore the essential elements for kicking off your first Agile team and possible options to setup your team and project for success.

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” ~Proverb

You might have heard of IDEO. IDEO is known as a pioneer of human-centered design or putting people at the center of their work. This approach has come to be known as Design Thinking. Design Thinking in a nutshell is about empathy, experimentation and learning fast.

When we think of an agile transformation, we don’t necessarily think of human-centered design. Most agile transformation I have seen begins with an enthusiastic leader (most likely in Technology) who is trying to change the culture and shift the mindset to improve product delivery and time to market. In the quest to do this, the leader might mandate certain practices for the organization to start doing. This can cause a lot of pain and heartache in the process and usually lead to mere results and disengagement.

What if there was a way to unlock creativity and critical thinking across the organization? This is where design thinking can help in accelerating an agile transformation.

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” ~Proverb

You might have heard of IDEO. IDEO is known as a pioneer of human-centered design or putting people at the center of their work. This approach has come to be known as Design Thinking. Design Thinking in a nutshell is about empathy, experimentation and learning fast.

When we think of an agile transformation, we don’t necessarily think of human-centered design. Most agile transformation I have seen begins with an enthusiastic leader (most likely in Technology) who is trying to change the culture and shift the mindset to improve product delivery and time to market. In the quest to do this, the leader might mandate certain practices for the organization to start doing. This can cause a lot of pain and heartache in the process and usually lead to mere results and disengagement.

What if there was a way to unlock creativity and critical thinking across the organization? This is where design thinking can help in accelerating an agile transformation.

Our delivery team may be focused on continuously tuning their CI/CD pipeline but who is focusing on the business pipeline?

If your delivery team is not always producing new functionality at the rate you want, the bottleneck might not be in the way they’re working. Imagine a software development factory that can’t get the raw materials it needs in time to keep production humming.

The Theory of Constraints (ToC) adopts the idiom of “a chain is no stronger than its weakest link”. Delivery teams need the right requirements (chunks of work) at the right time.

“What?” you say. “I’m already working as hard as I can to provide them with complete requirements specifications.” I believe you.  Participants will be introduced to some issues that might have escaped your attention and will address those issues in ways that may save them some work.

Questions that may be helpful to consider are:

• What makes it so challenging to provide the information the delivery team needs at the time they need it?
• What causes our business pipeline to be broken? In manufacturing, identifying bottlenecks may be obvious but what about knowledge work?!
• What’s hidden that could cause delays and create a state of learned helplessness?

This presentation will explore the challenges that stems from the discovery and explore ideas to consider for building a healthy business pipeline. At the end of this session, you will be able to identify the bottlenecks using the drum buffer rope and learn about the 3 amigos and clarification through examples (acceptance scenarios) and techniques to alleviate the bottlenecks.

Most agile teams focus on following a delivery process and overlook finding ways to improve the process. The essence of agile is focused around the idea of continuous improvement via inspect and adapt. In this session, we will be providing insights around evolving your measurements using data in order to embrace a different mindset. A mindset that encourages more facts and less judgment. A mindset that encourages organizations to move from “performance” to decisions, behaviors, outcomes, external evaluation to “Let’s figure this out together”, proof to evidence, answers to questions, precision to speed and from objective to subjective (but with lots of facts!)