Adopting Agile Practices

Al Shalloway introduces Leanban, the next major agile approach following Scrum, XP, and Kanban—and the first explicitly based on lean software development principles. While each of these earlier approaches is a manifestation of selected Lean principles, none of them were fully Lean. The result is that each approach, while valuable, is incomplete and useful in only certain situations. Al explains how Leanban is an explicit manifestation of Lean principles while incorporating what we’ve learned from previous agile methods. It encompasses culture, Lean flow, how people learn, the importance of systems thinking, technical practices, and management, providing a consistent set of principles and core set of practices. Al presents Leanban's well-defined starting points and then discusses Leanban's well-defined migration path from one practice to another as teams learn or their situation changes. Al concludes by discussing how teams currently doing XP, Scrum or Kanban can extend their current practices with Leanban.

Garren DiPasquale says that holistic design strategy in an iterative agile environment is difficult. So how does design thinking deliver awesome applications and features for your customers? Why should your agile team care? How do you develop a macro understanding while developing micro solutions? Can you get designers and developers on the same page? As the market continues to move forward, our customers are expecting polished, delightful, and easy-to-use software. To deliver software that matches these expectations, we must adjust our product design practices to move as fast as our development counterparts. Garren introduces a model for getting designers and developers to work together―breaking problems down, and aligning both design and agile methodologies to form one cohesive team. Discover the objections designers have to agile, eliminate handoff problems, and deliver better software with a practical design framework that can be implemented on agile teams large and small.

It is challenging—if not impossible—to find local experts in low-level Linux or specific open-source software projects. However, this isn’t a challenge with a fully-distributed organization which has this talent worldwide. So the challenge becomes how to effectively manage, motivate, and retain this talent. At Linaro, Alan Bennett is responsible for producing many of their open source products. Having successfully worked with Kanban and Scrum in the past, Alan was surprised how difficult implementing agile practices was when the workdays of most team members overlapped only an hour or less. Realizing that their sprint planning and retrospectives were not going to be sustainable, the team knew they would have to make some changes. Alan shows you how his teams effectively manage their workload, combine agile with open source software processes, and create a system that survives and thrives even with the extreme communication latencies of a fully-distributed team.

Do you find your work exciting and fulfilling? Is your agile team rewarded for finding better ways to work and innovating? Even though many organizations have adopted agile approaches at a project level, few have effectively aligned their HR processes with agile values or made finding better ways of working a truly rewarding and exciting proposition. With a new generation of employees who are as interested in purpose as in profit, it is imperative that we revisit schemes like the annual review and recognize its limitations, and the damage it causes to individual morale and team productivity. Join Sanjiv Augustine to explore the subject of creating a holistic performance management system that not only adheres to agile principles but also actively promotes individual drive and team innovation. Learn how de-link merit pay from feedback, the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and how to create a “flow state” on your agile teams to enhance performance and spark innovation.

Transforming an organization to become more agile requires leadership. But what kind of leadership? Who does the leading? When? How? Chris Sims guides you through the process of mapping the styles of leadership needed at various points in your company’s agile transformation. Chris explores the six leadership styles Daniel Goleman described in his Harvard Business Review Study Leadership That Gets Results and learn when each style is effective. He mixes in the Satir Change Model that describes how people and organizations process their way through change. Work in small groups to synthesize these two models, creating a map for applying different leadership styles at points along the change curve of an agile adoption. There is no one correct answer. Each group creates a map based on their experiences and their organizations. Chris facilitates a final review of the maps created to share insights and create deeper understanding.