The traditional approach to organizational design is a barrier if you want to grow an organization where smart people make amazing decisions that delight customers and enrich their careers.

This session aims to provides leaders at all levels of the organization with an introduction to a set of design tools that can help them create organizational structures that promote agility rather than interfere with it.

Using a game I call Full Stack Poker, I’ll facilitate a highly interactive dialogue where attendees will play the role of various organizational stake holders tasked with getting the right skills into teams responsible for delivering value.

Loosely based on the planning poker game, attendees will collaboratively select from a number of Team Engagement Patterns, collectively agreeing on an engagement model that lays out how teams can engage with support functions and other teams. Participants will also be able to estimate the amount of organizational complexity their teams will incur based on the Team Engagement Patterns chosen.

The session is aimed at teaching attendees basic concepts behind defining agile organizational structure through a highly engaging / hands on session.

Shared understanding is a pre-requisite to success for any agile teams. Many Agile teams rely on User Stories to help them get consensus on what to deliver, and what done looks like. Stories are a great practice for agile teams, but as the complexity of the problem or solution they are building increases, they often need more. Agile teams can face serious churn in the story writing process as complexity increase. Different team members can have completely different understandings of the meaning of key business and solution concepts. Often the same concepts end up being discussed over and over again, significantly slowing down story exploration. Even worse, different stakeholders end up having ambiguous and even conflicting understanding of the solution.

During this session, we will discuss how we have integrated story exploration practices such as Story Mapping, Story Grooming, and Spec by Example, with the Domain Driven Design method, with the goal to promote the creation of a ubiquitous language and share understanding of both the solution and business domain. We will show how various teams have leveraged light weight, informal tools to enable both technical and non technical stakeholders to execute in a highly aligned way, and dramatically decrease churn and rework as a result.

A key part of this session will be taking the audience through an integrated example that show cases how one can elaborate on an idea through progressive refinement of Stories and CRC Card based domain driven models in parallel. We will showcase how Story Maps can be refined through creation of an initial Domain Driven Model expressed through Class Responsibility Cards. We will illustrate how to connect story grooming and refinement of domain models in order to create a precise business and solution language. We will illustrate how domain model walkthroughs can be used to battle test your stories against your domain model, validating key assumptions before coding starts. We will also showcase how both story grooming and domain driven design can be done directly in code, and how this approach dovetails perfectly into test driven development.

Increasingly Agile adoption has focused on how to operate larger enterprises with agility, and run larger and larger initiatives, at scale.

In many cases, organizations have turned to explicit agile scaling frameworks to address their needs to coordinate increasingly larger efforts to deliver value in a way of that does not sacrifice feedback and self organization . Often these frameworks attempt to address the complexity that comes with large scale by adding extra process and procedure. Prescriptive advice is prescribed in the form of additional roles, stages, gates, and methods. This approach to scaling bears more than a little similarity to the heavy weight methods of the past, but in this case merging agile terminology with much of the same framework bloat and bureaucracy we have seen in the past.

As a a result adoptees struggle to understand how to fit these frameworks to their context, and seasoned coaches struggle to wrestle out the good bits.

During this session I will discuss a different approach to scaling agile, one that places an emphasis on both mindset and practice. I'll pay particular attention to the topic of leadership, organizational design, and the role management has to play in designing a system of work that allows larger efforts to work with an agile mindset without being forced into a one size fits all process framework.

A key part of the discussion will be to showcase how core agile methods and techniques can be extended and expanded to successfully manage coordinated agile deployments that range from hundreds to thousands of FTEs. I'll present these techniques by using real examples of agile deployments I have been a part of during my work with ScotiaBank's agile journey.

Key Scaling Practices covered will include:
- The design components required to structure your organization based on demand
- How to continuously de-scale your organization
- "Get Out Of the Boardroom" style governance and leadership
- Operational cadences and Impediment Escalation Flow
- Managing the flow of value at the Business Technology Asset level
- Moving the conversation from stories to domains
- Streamlining finance and budgeting to align to the agile mindset

I hope to illustrate ways that both management and knowledge workers can select techniques that allow them to scale agile as needed to support ever larger initiatives without succumbing to a one size fits all framework that does not adapt constant change.

Approached from an agile perspective, delivering value looks very different than when thinking from a traditional mindset. During this interactive workshop, participants will gain hands on experience on applying critical concepts to estimating value in a way that also drives adoption of an agile mindset. This session is based on material that I have used on numerous occasions to help enterprise business leaders reshape the way they think about value. Participants will use the following practices when estimating the value of future work:

1. Deliberate estimation of lead time ( your most precious resource) and delay time (your most toxic obstacle).
2. How to move forward with imperfect information through the use of explicit assumptions required to approximate value.
3. Using Cost Of Delay to put a price tag on time, creating an economic incentive to increase agility at the business level

I will start the session by providing an overview of the power of focusing on lead time and delay time over efficiency and throughput. I'll show participants how to use concepts such as explicit commitment points and delivery points to measure business agility, and discuss sources of delay, and means to eliminate sources of delay.

I will then discuss ways to quickly assess the value type and urgency profile of work, providing a means to quickly catalog the type of assumptions that require research and validation in order to conduct high quality conversation around the estimation of value.

Session attendees will be given the chance to estimate the value of work through exploration of a business value assumption model. Ill go through some of the key factors to consider when estimating value, and how to quickly compare value across epics and features using the assumption model approach.

The psychological factors that prevent people from estimating value will be discussed and participants will be coached through effective methods to overcome these factors including relative ranking, accuracy over precision, and explicit tracking and sharing of key assumptions.

After this I will give an overview of how to frame value in terms of Cost Of Delay. Ill present the audience with a way to put a price on the countless queues our work tends to go through. I will then guide attendees to to quantify their value assumption model according to the amount of value lost over time. Participants will use techniques to estimate units of value according to the opportunity cost incurred when work is blocked or left waiting on a queue. I will also show the relationship between different urgency profiles and the severity of Cost Of Delay.  

For the final part of the session, participants will rank a backlog of their own work through CD3.  Cost of Delay Divided by Duration takes COD and divides it delivery lead time to create a ranking mechanism that focuses teams on delivering the highest value in a given time period of time. I'll walk through how CD3 provides insight necessary to minimizing the impact of COD for a set of options, encouraging the breakdown of work into smaller batches, and prioritizing work essential to eliminating delay.

This session will highly interactive, and give participants practical, hands on tools that can help the business think in terms of getting to value with agility, acting as a gateway practice for deeper adoption in the future.