Many organizations flatten management structure when they transform to agile. It soon becomes obvious that important activities done by managers are still needed.  A community can fill these gaps. They can provide morale, governance, learning, and mentorship, recruiting and hiring, mutual support, coordination, sharing, innovation and more!

Unfortunately few companies manage to create a strong community. Even fewer empower that community to fill these gaps. This means they are missing the ultimate benefit of community: a strong, empowered community can transform the organization itself!

Join Shahin and Shawn in this interactive session to explore communities in organizations. Examine the benefits of building great communities. Learn how to spark the community, and how to support it as it evolves. Hear stories of communities empowered to improve the organization. Learn how to make a community into a driver of positive change.

Many organizations flatten management structure when they transform to agile. It soon becomes obvious that important activities done by managers are still needed.  A community can fill these gaps. They can provide morale, governance, learning, and mentorship, recruiting and hiring, mutual support, coordination, sharing, innovation and more!

Unfortunately few companies manage to create a strong community. Even fewer empower that community to fill these gaps. This means they are missing the ultimate benefit of community: a strong, empowered community can transform the organization itself!

Join Shahin and Shawn in this interactive session to explore communities in organizations. Examine the benefits of building great communities. Learn how to spark the community, and how to support it as it evolves. Hear stories of communities empowered to improve the organization. Learn how to make a community into a driver of positive change.

Join a panel of Agile Coaches for a discussion as to what we've seen, both the good and bad, in organizations they've been coaching. And, what you can do about it, no matter where you are in your organization. Plus, bring your own questions to ask this panel, and take from the experiences of coaches including Mike Edwards, Chris Chapman, Shawn Button, Tom Sommerville, Dave Dame, and Sue Johnston.

We are about launch our latest feature to the eager public, when suddenly we get the call all developers dread: The Site is down! Our business is pressuring us to quickly fix the site, but we can’t even find the problem! We pick up the red phone and call Karen, the fixer. She calmly spends five minutes typing, and announces that she found the problem, and everything is back to normal. Where would we be without Karen? How can we get these skills on the rest of the team, so anyone can work the magic she does?
It turns out that troubleshooting is a learnable skill. Join Shawn as he explores the Science of Troubleshooting. This workshop will examine what is happening during effective problem solving. It will examine types of scientific reasoning, and explore how we are using them to solve problems, sometimes without even realizing what we are doing! Participants will see how, by using scientific reasoning and experiments to build and test hypotheses about the problems, they can greatly increase the effectiveness of their troubleshooting and debugging. By making the process explicit even consummate problem solvers can improve how they approach and solve problems. Using the awareness gained attendees can guide others to improve their problem-solving skills.

Just do a quick search on the Internet, and you'll find plenty of opinions and approaches to Agile. Talk to a few Agile Thought-Leaders, and you'll find even more opinions. Then, talk to a few current practitioners, and you'll find even more opinions and perspectives. Each one of those sources likely has a legitimate perspective.

While all of the expert opinions are based in similar values and principles, how those values and principles are implemented can (and does) vary immensely. This discussion explores some of the challenges and options.

Is one right? Are some wrong?
Are they all right? How might that even be possible?
And if you're new to Agile, how on earth do you know which to listen to, and which to ignore?
Heck, even if you're not new to Agile, there's a lot of differing opinions from which to chose! 

Join Shawn Button & Jeff Kosciejew, two experienced Agile Coaches with very different journeys into Agile Coaching, explore a few of the common frameworks and approaches they've seen, and experienced. This discussion explores some of the challenges and options in what some have to offer, and possible starting points in this journey, while providing context for experienced agilists in how we could be perceived.