Personal Improvement

Tutorials

James Whittaker, Microsoft

Mon, 06/08/2015 - 8:30am

Line up all the successful people in the world. Take away the pedigreed and the prodigies—you know the people who are going to succeed no matter what. Remove the brown-nosers and right-time-right-place lottery winners. And who do you have left? People who succeeded on purpose. Study these folks carefully, and you’ll find their paths to the top have common themes. James Whittaker exposes the career strategies of the ultra-successful and analyzes them in detail. Learn about personal strategies for identifying high-payoff activities and gain insight into being more effective as an individual contributor, manager, and leader. Discover how to identify and interact with the right set of career mentors and role models. Being successful doesn’t have to be an accident. Join James and learn how to succeed—on purpose.

MK Six Free Ideas to Improve Agile Success

Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova

Mon, 06/08/2015 - 1:00pm

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. Third is empowering teams to make decisions by helping them understand and internalize the project and product’s purpose and value. The number four idea is that you can only fix processes, not people, so invest your energy toward the correct target. Idea five is to match people’s roles to their passion. Her final free idea is that integrity does matter—and matters most. Explore with Pollyanna why each of these ideas is important and how you can adopt them on your agile team.

MN It’s All About Me™: Owning Your Behavior, Improving Your Team NEW

Doc List, Doc List Enterprises

Mon, 06/08/2015 - 1:00pm

Successful high-performing teams have many common attributes. One is their ability to function together collaboratively. In order to collaborate well, they must communicate effectively and get beyond the members' personal biases and quirks. In this interactive workshop, Doc List shares common problems with behavior, motivation, emotions, and interpretation that frequently get in the way. Participate in exercises that lead you to understand―and sometimes expose―your own blind spots and limitations. Challenge your own assumptions, learn about taking ownership of your own feelings and behavior, and articulate the difference between behavior and interpretation. Along the way, gain a new understanding of intuition and how you're using it in your interpersonal situations. Leave this workshop with a new and clearer understanding of how you've been interpreting others' behavior and acting on those interpretations.

TD Giving Great Presentations: The Art of Stage Presence SOLD OUT

James Whittaker, Microsoft

Tue, 06/09/2015 - 8:30am

Every hour of every day in every country where business is conducted, the same scene plays out―dozens of well-paid people sitting in a conference room being bored senseless. Death by a thousand slides. This mind numbing, soul crushing, grotesquely expensive experience ends here and now! James Whittaker reveals the secrets to conceiving, building, and delivering a great presentation. Whatever your level of presentation skills, this tutorial will hone them. Learn how to build a compelling story from the ground up. Receive advice on how to remember and recall that story as you deliver it. Learn how to use oratory and literary instruments to make the story come alive for your audience. Do your part to put an end to bad presentations―attend this tutorial.

TM Innovation Thinking: Evolve and Expand Your Capabilities SOLD OUT

Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.

Tue, 06/09/2015 - 1:00pm

Innovation is a word frequently tossed around in organizations today. The standard cliché is “Do more with less.” People and teams want to be innovative but often struggle with how to define, prioritize, implement, and track their innovation efforts. Jennifer Bonine shares the Innovation Types model to give you new tools to evolve and expand your innovation capabilities. Find out if your innovation ideas and efforts match your team and company goals. Learn how to classify your innovation and improvement efforts as core (to the business) or context (essential but non-revenue generating). With this data, you can better decide how much of your effort should be spent on core versus context activities. Take away new tools for classifying innovation and mapping your activities and your team’s priorities to their importance and value. With Jennifer’s guidance you’ll evolve and expand your innovation capabilities on the spot.

Keynotes

K2 Better Thinking for Better Software: Thinking Critically about Software Development

Laurent Bossavit, Institut Agile

Wed, 06/10/2015 - 10:00am

To paraphrase a famous Albert Einstein quote—We cannot solve our problems by applying the same level of thinking that we used when we created them. Although Einstein was originally talking about war, this also is applicable to software development, where one level of thinking—known as software engineering—has prevailed for the past four decades. Laurent Bossavit explores why several of the key assumptions are no longer—or never were—credible. These include the cost of defects curve, the notion of 10x engineers, and the origin of software bugs. Not stopping at debunking suspect claims and sharing techniques to expose them, Laurent goes on to explain the driving motivation which helped the claims become widespread―a misguided search for universal laws of software development―and suggests an alternative approach at a different level, hinted at by lean and agile practices. In this alternative approach each of us, backed by hard data and critical thinking, puts on the scientist's lab coat in search of local truths within our development organizations.

Concurrent Sessions

BW3 This Is Not Your Father’s Career: Advice for the Modern Information Worker

James Whittaker, Microsoft

Wed, 06/10/2015 - 11:30am

In an era where college drop-outs run successful companies and creative entrepreneurs out-earn corporate vice presidents, working smart is clearly the new working hard. James Whittaker turns on their head the career rules that guided past generations and provides a new career manual for working smarter that speaks to the need for creativity, innovation, and insight. James teaches a set of skills designed for the modern era of working for companies—big or small. Learn how to avoid a one-sided relationship with your employer and ensure your passion is working for—and not against—you. Discover how to manage your technical skills and professional relationships for maximum effect. James introduces common career hazards and how to identify and avoid them. Think more creatively and examine how to adopt specific career management strategies designed to supercharge your success. The modern age requires more modern ways to succeed. James has them for you.

BW11 Conflict: To Know It Is to Love It

Doc List, Doc List Enterprises

Wed, 06/10/2015 - 2:45pm

We all talk about conflict. We all experience it. But do we really understand what causes it and how we deal with it? Do we have any idea what to do about it? Much research and study has been done, but that doesn't help when you're in the middle of conflict. You don't have time to pull out the reference book or go to a website. You need simple, clear understanding. Learn the categories of conflict and how to recognize them, which means having an understanding of what generates them. Learn the different strategies of dealing with conflict, recognize your own preferred strategies, and understand where you may choose to change your strategy. Discover specific tools you can use in any situation to comfortably and confidently deal with conflict. Doc List introduces some ideas to enhance your learning after you leave the session, so you can continue to expand your love affair with conflict.

BW13 Get the Most from Your Cross Functional Team: The Project Manager’s View

Julie Gardiner, Hitachi Consulting

Wed, 06/10/2015 - 4:15pm

Jerry Weinberg once said, “No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem.” In the past, the challenges for any team leader, regardless of specialty, were the same when it came down to people issues. Now, with the popularity of agile and its cross-functional teams, we have another factor to consider in addition to the people―their different specialties. How can our leadership help us achieve great results and a happy agile team? Join Julie Gardiner as she presents a communication-style model that can be used to help motivate every member of the team and minimize personality/specialty clashes. Julie shows you how to apply this model to other assessments—such as Myers-Briggs, Belbin, and DISC—and shares experiences using the model. If you're a newly appointed team lead, ScrumMaster, or you just want to get the most out of your team (cross-functional or dedicated specialists), then this session is for you.

BT1 Creating a Culture of Trust

Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova

Thu, 06/11/2015 - 10:00am

In our personal and business lives, many of us know leaders who foster environments of incredible creativity, innovation, and ideas—while other leaders fail. So, how do the top leaders get it right? Going beyond the basics, Pollyanna Pixton explores with you the ways that the best leaders create “safety nets” that allow people to discover and try new possibilities, help people fail early, and correct faster. Removing fear and engendering trust make the team and organization more creative and productive as they spend less energy protecting themselves and the status quo. Pollyanna shares the tools you, as a leader, need to develop open environments based on trust—the first step in collaboration across the enterprise. Learn to step forward and do the right thing without breaking trust. Find out what to do to foster trust through team measurements, protect team boundaries, build team confidence without taking away their ownership, create transparency, and what to do when there is broken trust in the team.

BT4 Improv(e) Your Testing: Tips and Tricks from Jester to Tester

Damian Synadinos, Independent Consultant

Thu, 06/11/2015 - 10:00am

Improvisational comedy—sometimes called improv—is a form of theater in which the performance is created in the moment. Successful improv involves learning and using a variety of skills and techniques which allow performers to quickly adapt to a constantly changing environment and new information. Now reread the previous sentence, but replace the word improv with testing. In many ways, improv is a great analogy for testing. As both an experienced improviser and tester, Damian Synadinos presents some of the many similarities between improv and testing. Each improv tip and trick is thoroughly explained and demonstrated with help from the audience. Damian then shows how the very same idea can be applied in a testing context. Using creative metaphors and critical analysis, old ideas about testing are reframed in novel and notable ways. Whether novice or experienced, you are sure to laugh, learn, and leave with ways to help improv(e) your testing.

BT5 The Art of People: Facilitation, Leadership, and Team Dynamics

Robert Woods, MATRIX Resources

Thu, 06/11/2015 - 11:30am

Some of the greatest products come from great teams with exceptional leaders who know how to servant-lead, create influence (rather than exacting authority), and precisely when to get out of the way. Teams are asked to be self-empowered, change on the fly, and think for themselves. And then they’re inevitably told exactly how they have to do all of those things—or else. Poor leadership can make or break not only a great team but a great product and a great organization. As part of this highly interactive session, Robert Woods highlights leadership and facilitation skills such as focused observation, communication styles, conflict avoidance (as opposed to conflict resolution), influence over authority, and active listening. Robert explains that the impact we make on individuals is often much more about what we don't do rather than what we do. It’s called The Art of People―and it’s one we can all master.

BT13 Decision Making under Extreme Pressure: Project Management Lessons Learned from Pilots in Crisis

Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering

Thu, 06/11/2015 - 3:00pm

Controlled Flight into Terrain is a marvelous book containing case studies of poor decisions made by pilots under extreme pressure. A CFIT is an accident in which an otherwise serviceable aircraft, under the control of the crew, is flown—unintentionally— into terrain, obstacles, or water with no prior awareness on the part of the crew of the impending collision. Using three CFIT case studies, Lee Copeland examines what mistakes the crew made, why their decisions seemed appropriate at the time, and the forces operating on the decision-making process. Then Lee takes those discoveries and applies them to our world of software development. Some learnings include consider entering a holding pattern, have a Plan B ready, beware of the loss of situational awareness, trust your co-workers but not too much, be aware of time dilation, and other key ideas.