As the adage goes, "many a true word is spoken in jest". In this session we will take a humourous look at common distortions and misunderstandings of Agile principles, processes, behaviours and roles. You will learn precise, clear (re)definitions for Exactimation, ScrumLord, Rundown chart, Fauxgile Methods and many more! Using levity as the entry point, for each definition we will examine how the original idea or concept is commonly misunderstood or misapplied and discuss corrective measures.

A practical guide to setting up a new agile project team. Based on years of agile delivery and coaching experience for projects in a number of distributed and offshore models, for teams sized from 10 to 200 people, and spread across 4 continents, and 8+ locations. Some areas that will be touched on:

• People - how to organize distributed teams, cultural factors to consider, ways to build trust, and how to avoid timezone burnout.
• Process - how to communicate effectively, plan collaboratively, setup distributed practices (standups, retros, pairing, etc), effectively divide work on a common codebase, maintain visibility, and track progress.
• Tools - (tips provided as a handout) which hardware and software tools should you absolutely invest in to help overcome communication,  visibility and collaboration challenges

Inspired by 'The Devil's Dictionary' by Ambrose Bierce, this is a satirical look at common misinterpretations and misunderstandings of Agile principles, processes, behaviours and roles. Precise, clear (re)definitions for Exactimation, Scrumudgeon, Abuser stories, Kanband-aid, Fragile methods, ScrumLord, Rundown chart, and many more!

A project can face varied challenges through its life, foreseen and otherwise - runaway scope, high defect volumes, depressed velocity, and many more. Addressing many of these first requires recognition of the problem and then action from one or more sets of project stakeholders. Telling the story with simple visuals can be a very powerful way to articulate a challenge (the what), the potential root causes (the why) and the options available to fix it (the now-what). Teams typically already track a lot of data related to throughput, quality, scope and cost. Creative use of this data combined with simple, hand-crafted visuals can be much more effective than hundreds of bullet points. In this hands-on workshop, you get to exercise your visual thinking and visual communication skills. We introduce some simple visual thinking techniques like Look-See-Imagine-Show, and then let you apply them in a project simulation, so that you can practice hand-rolling simple visuals that speak volumes (no fancy tools needed!).