Agile Dev East 2016 - Leadership
Monday, November 14
Principles and Practices of Lean Software Development
Lean software engineering emphasizes continuous delivery of high quality applications. Ken Pugh explains the principles and practices that form the basis of lean software development—concentrating on developing a continuous flow by eliminating delays and loopbacks; delivering quickly by developing in small batches; emphasizing high quality which decreases delays due to defect repair; making policies, process and progress transparent; optimizing the whole rather than individual steps; and becoming more efficient by decreasing waste. Ken describes lean’s emphasis on...
Tuesday, November 15
Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Leaders
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 tutorial, 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,...
How to Make Better Choices for You, Your Team, and Your Projects
As leaders of teams and projects, we regularly face choices and decisions that have downstream consequences. Do you want to be able to make better decisions in your personal or professional life? Do you want to help your team members make better choices when it comes to decisions on their projects? Or are you simply curious about how and why people make certain choices? In this highly interactive tutorial, Andy Kaufman shares why the familiar pros-and-cons approach seems to make sense—but is profoundly flawed. He discusses how our biases influence the options we...
Thinking Inside the Box – Root Cause Analysis with The Six Boxes
Do you want to improve business and user value delivery, quality, efficiency, and productivity of your software engineering team? OK, that’s a stupid question because who doesn’t? Poor productivity problems, quality issues, failing to meet commitments, and general team inefficiencies are, unfortunately, still commonplace. And what is at the root of most problems? James Waletzky says the answer is those highly imperfect creatures—humans. So how do we go about fixing the problems? First, we must discover the root causes, not just the symptoms, and those are not...
Lean/Agile Metrics for the Rest of Us
For many agile practitioners, software metrics beyond a burndown chart are little understood or, perhaps, very scary because poor metrics can be worse than no metrics. In this enlightening session, Larry Maccherone explores how you and your organization can use metrics to bring management and lean/agile teams closer rather than becoming a wedge that drives them into conflict. Larry covers the entire lifecycle of the metrics process—from metric selection to reporting data—in compelling ways. You’ll gain an understanding of a wide range of concepts including common...
Wednesday, November 16
Lead Teams that Deliver the Goods
In software development—and in many life activities—success often depends on how well we collaborate with our team and our stakeholders. Yet getting a group of people to truly work in partnership—let alone self-organize—is a daunting challenge. And we’re often left with lingering tensions, anxieties, and sub-par performance because teams are made up of people with varying degrees of knowledge, skill, and commitment. Although we need our team focused on delivering a great outcome, sometimes egos, personalities, and agendas get in the way. Andy Kaufman asks you to...
Building Product Development Communities: From Startups to the Enterprise
When we want to produce more product with the same number of staff, we normally think about adding more process. David Hussman believes we don’t necessarily need to do that. Instead of talking about scaling agile, David focuses on scaling product learning—while avoiding process inflation along the way. Topics he addresses are: moving from Scrum teams to product team to focus on product success, mapping teams to product(s), interconnecting product discovery and product delivery techniques, and the challenges associated with cross team dependencies and constraints...
Enable Your Workers … You’ll Be Amazed What They Can Do
It’s as true today as it was in 1986 when W. Edwards Deming published Out of the Crisis and wrote, “Remove barriers that rob people … of their right to pride of workmanship.” Companies everywhere implement processes, hire staff, and install tools to help them meet their business objectives. Many organizations strive to have engaged workers, efficient processes, and effective tools. However, Bob Jarvis says that, rather than doing the real work they were hired to perform, workers often end up spending too much time each day fighting obstacles related to...
Evangelize for Your Project, Team, or Cause—No Matter What Role You Play
Whether you’re a developer, tester, ScrumMaster, CTO, or CEO, you know you have to listen to the needs of your customers and team; accept the fact that they are going to change their minds; and respond, adapt, tap dance, iterate, raise your voice, stand up, and delight your audience in order to ship out the best software of your entire life. Can I get a witness?! Jonathan Silva shares evangelizing strategies that can help you inspire at any level—whether a Fortune 500 company or a startup software company. These approaches include developing your point of view,...
Step-by-Step Guide to Leading a Large-Scale Agile Transformation
A few years ago everyone wanted to know how to convince their executives to go agile. Today, executives are asking their teams how they'll make the transformation. We have made significant progress changing the hearts and minds of senior leadership, but executives now demand a greater level of assurance that the plan is actually going to work. Executives are tired of being told to trust the team and that everything will be okay. Executives want to know how agile is going to help make things better. Mike Cottmeyer begins by discussing the elements of an agile...
Your Agile Team Needs a Therapist
Imagine you’re on an agile development team—and something feels weird. People disagree constantly, and when they finally do agree, no one commits to deliver the solution. Vocal team members dominate the conversation. You don’t trust your teammates. They don’t trust you. This isn’t a team. It’s just a group of people. Does this sound familiar? Because people are people—not interchangeable robots—building high-performing, self-organizing teams takes specific skills and a lot of work. In his experience working with agile teams, Robb Pieper has often taken on the...
Build Adaptable Teams: The Marine Corps Way
Shrinking budgets, increased workloads, and ever-changing demands challenge today’s product teams to adapt and learn to do more with less. Since its birth in 1775, the United States Marine Corps has faced similar trials. The key to the Corps’ survival—not unlike that of a product team—has been its ability to adapt to change. Anne Steiner uses the Corps’ leadership philosophy and its training techniques and her experience as a Marine Corps non-commissioned officer as a framework for understanding how Marines adapt, decentralize decision making, and build leaders...
Thursday, November 17
Managing Agile Software Projects under Uncertainty
In chasing velocity, we often ignore or don’t understand the uncertainties and associated risks in our processes and their results. Agile is designed to handle uncertainty in requirements as new features are requested and priorities shift. But shouldn’t we also be thinking about and mitigating the uncertainties that are unique or even introduced by using agile? Phil Lew suggests that our problem is that we sometimes carry assumptions which either cause us to spend too much effort on things we can’t control or give us unfounded comfort and reassurance. If we can’t...
Stop Saying No … Start Saying Throwdown
Have you ever been on a team and said, “We should try [insert crazy idea here]” only to immediately hear “No!” from a team member, manager, or coach? Talk about stifling innovation. To prevent this, Anthony Crain says that their teams are adopting a new philosophy. Stop saying No … start saying Throwdown! Using this idea, they can distinguish between a favorite way and a better way. “My story writing technique is better than yours.” Oh yeah? Prove it! “My estimation technique is better than yours.” Oh yeah? Prove it! “SAFe is better than traditional...
Teamwork Tools: Movement Games for Collaboration and Creativity
Are you looking for new ways to invigorate your teams? Do retrospectives seem stale? Do story breakdown meetings feel flat? On the other hand, maybe your teams are humming and you’re looking for additional variety. The research is clear—movement matters, and play stimulates creativity. Join Andrew Smith as he takes you through a series of movement games that are lively and fun, while exploring how these practices can be applied to promote collaboration and creativity within teams. Discover how to use play to shift perspectives and enable new insights within your...
Don't Ask "Can You Hear Me Now?" Start Listening Instead
Most of us believe we are good listeners. However, we often overestimate this skill and are hard-wired to short change it by making assumptions, providing answers, and jumping in when we think we know what people are trying to say. In doing so, we rob ourselves of the chance to encourage growth, build trust and respect, and promote ownership. Listening is about more than hearing the words; it is about tone, body language, and so much more. But wait … listening well can be learned, so join Judith Mills to understand and practice this underutilized skill....
Agile Metrics: Make Better Decisions with Data
Some consider measurement in agile development destructive—or at the very least useless. Larry Maccherone disagrees and offers insight into how you can use metrics in an agile environment to make life better. How do you know when you are ready to introduce metrics into the environment? What are the sources for these metrics? What tools and techniques are necessary to make decisions probabilistically? What are the mindset shifts necessary for metrics to help you making better decisions? How do teams and organizations avoid the anti-patterns that so often derail a...
Friday, November 18
On Leading Leaders: A Transition Journey
Coaching individuals is one of the greatest challenges—and rewards—we leaders face. When even a single person is guided to reach new skill levels, agile teams can experience powerful beneficial change. For instance, helping a developer gain better understanding of testing practices can improve downstream quality and flow of work. Likewise, leaders need to practice continuous improvement as much as they encourage it within teams. What if you as a leader can improve your skills by coaching leadership itself? With leadership styles as varied as the people leading,...
Games for Learning about Conflict Resolution
Scaling agile across the enterprise can create challenging organizational conflicts as groups accustomed to working in their own silos struggle to collaborate effectively and identify their shared interests. Join Ellen Grove to learn useful models for considering conflict supported by games teams can use to develop and practice conflict resolution skills. The models address underlying drivers of conflict, modes for responding to conflict, ways to assess conflict severity to determine appropriate interventions, and patterns of principled negotiation. The games...
Leaders at All Levels
Traditional definitions of leadership emphasize position, formal authority and power, vision, and heroics. These definitions might have been sufficient in another time. However, organizations that need to respond to a fast-changing environment and desire continuous improvement require a different kind of leadership and a different kind of leader. Join Esther Derby to explore a new definition of leadership—the ability to enhance the environment, so that everyone is empowered to contribute creatively to solving the problems.