Adopting Agile Practices

We know that teams and individuals who take ownership of their work outperform—often by 50 percent—those who don’t. And in agile, team ownership is a key principle. However, leaders often struggle with letting their teams own their work. Leaders are afraid that if they trust, their teams will fail. So leaders must create a culture of trust and help their teams take ownership. But what if the team builds the wrong product? Teams must align with the strategy and purpose of the business as well as with value to the customer. Finally, the organization must deal honestly with ambiguity.

Free? Is anything free these days? Based on her experience working with organizational leaders and her research into what drives organizational performance, Pollyanna Pixton shares six ideas—and the keys to their effective implementation—to help assure the success of your agile teams. As a bonus, her suggestions won’t cost you a thing. Pollyanna’s first free idea is how to create a culture of trust—the keystone of open collaboration—within your team and organization. The second free idea is about ownership—how to give it and not take it back.

For a project manager, successfully transitioning from traditional project management to a more agile approach can be difficult due to the staggering learning curve. Using a combination of case studies, exercises, and best practices identified in the PMBOK® Guide, Ken Whitaker gets you up to speed on the essential fundamentals you need to effectively facilitate and lead Scrum-based agile projects.

Lean software development has often been described as “better, faster, cheaper” and focusing on “eliminating waste,” but those are misnomers. Going after speed improvement and waste elimination can actually reduce the benefits you could otherwise get from lean. Al Shalloway describes what lean software development really is and why you should be incorporating it into your development efforts—whether you use Scrum, kanban, or SAFe. Al explains the mindset, principles, and practices of lean.

Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, and training―revolves around the agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized, or, in the worst cases, vilified. Bob Galen contends that there is a central and important role for managers and effective leadership within agile environments. In this workshop, we’ll explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders—those who understand servant leadership and how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the teams’ performance, accountability, and engagement.

Engaged and passionate product owners balance strategic and tactical activities to ensure that the right product is built—and built right. Yet how do these product owners guide planning toward longer-term goals while also ensuring that requirements are sufficiently understood for development and delivery? Join Paul Reed as he shares techniques for setting context and collaboratively establishing a shared understanding of requirements. Discover methods to envision the product and identify the stakeholders and their value considerations.