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Agile Leadership Summit

Agile Leadership Summit—Leading Agile Culture Change

Thursday, June 11 • 5:30pm–7:30pm and Friday, June 12 • 8:30am–3:30pm

David Hussman,
DevJam
Summit Chair

Leaders need to foster continuous learning and improvement or sustained agility. The trick is introducing change in a way that is effective—not invasive—and lasting. If this were easy, it would not be called leading. So, where do you start? What do you do?

Participants of the Agile Leadership Summit learn from and work with experienced agile leaders who have led lasting change and produced a thriving agile culture. You’ll learn ways to foster an environment of innovation that results in great products and systems from a variety of leadership perspectives: user-centered thinking, product-centric process, reviews and evaluations, and more.

David Hussman, who works with leadership groups to foster innovation, is the program chair and your facilitator for the Agile Leadership Summit. David guides participants, working in small groups, to gain insight into their biggest challenges. Share your experiences with peers, use the power of the brain trust in the room, and build a fresh perspective. Leave with the tactical steps you can use to bring about the change, results, and the competitive business advantage you desire.

Rhea Stadick, a leader who pioneered the adoption of agile practices across Intel, will talk about her experiences during that adoption. See how they learned to sustain agility, not by following a recipe but by becoming creative chefs. Rhea discusses how your response to change can help you thrive in an uncertain future.

As the manager of agile development at CareerBuilder, Andy Krupit uses what he learned from applying lean principles to software development in the early 2000s and from piloting Scrum in 2007 to help evolve his approach to value-driven software development. Andy discusses how to create an environment of true product flow and achieve speed of delivery with end-to-end value.

Tricia Broderick and Jeremy Kriegel share what they know works from years of deep practice: how high-performance agile development teams advance, how to fully engage your customers in agile process, how to get the answers you need to be successful, and how to breed an agile mindset in your teams, customers, and organization.

Bring your challenges, experiences, curiosity, and an open mind. Leave with a short list of things you can work on immediately and other breakthrough ideas for the long term.

5:30pm–7:30pm • Summit Kick-Off Reception

 We are going to start the summit with a conversation. A group of long time agile practitioners and learners will discuss what they see promoting real and lasting agility within, across and outside teams – the theme of the conference. The questions will come from you. We would like to hear your questions before the start of the conference, but we will also take questions during summit. During the summit, the attendees will control the flow of the discussion. Topics will get five minutes of discussion and then you will vote as to whether the discussion is worthy of more time.  Any questions not discussed during the day will be fed into the open space as candidates for future discussion.
 

Working with companies of all sizes worldwide, David Hussman teaches and coaches the adoption of agile methods as powerful delivery tools. Sometimes he pairs with developers and testers; other times he helps plan and create product roadmaps. David often works with leadership groups to pragmatically use agile methods to foster innovation and a competitive business advantage. Prior to working as a full-time coach, he spent years building software in the audio, biometrics, medical, financial, retail, and education sectors. David now leads DevJam, a company composed of agile collaborators. As mentors and practitioners, DevJam focuses on agility as a tool to help people and companies improve their software production skills.

7:30am–8:30am • Registration and Breakfast

8:30am–8:45am • Welcome

8:45am–9:45amBecoming Chefs: Responding to Change in an Uncertain Future

 Rhea Stadick, Intel

Agile adoption is often part of a larger effort to create a thriving work culture―one that supports the reality of changing customer needs while prospering in a dynamic environment. Knowing that we can’t predict the future, Rhea Stadick says the next best thing we can do is to prepare ourselves to quickly and meaningfully handle shifting contexts. Unfortunately, we often see our agile adoptions focused on the latest and greatest recipe (a.k.a. tool or method). If we approach our work more like a chef approaches cooking, we will focus more on learning the basics, experimenting, and continually evolving our craft. To be successful, we must stop mastering only one way of doing things—following a recipe—and put in the effort and courage to become more like chefs. As talented and inventive chefs, we can position our companies and ourselves to create new and novel ways of working that will place us ahead of our competition.

 

For the past nine years, Rhea Stadick has worked in software quality and developing engineering teams at Intel Corporation. Rhea has been a strong advocate for the adoption of agile principles and practices across the company and in the wider industry. Along with a small group of crazy change agents, she started the first Intel Agile Conference that spurred the strong grassroots adoption of agile ways that now extends across more than 20,000 people. Rhea’s current focus is on helping organizations across Intel develop cultures and competencies to create thriving work environments that support excellence in people and product development.

Working Sessions: Tools for Leadership

 After each keynote, there will be time for participants to work in groups and interact with the speaker. At the end of each working session, you will have some valuable takeaways and next steps, so you can be ready to implement these new ideas.

10:15am–11:15am • Create Product Flow: Understanding Value and Value Lifetime

 Andy Krupit, CareerBuilder

In the agile community, value is an often-used term but many people struggle to achieve it—and most do not know how to measure it. Teams seek to deliver value via their agile process by taking a disciplined approach with planning in iterations. Analyzing velocity trends and establishing a consistent pattern with estimating are just plain difficult. So, how does a team use their process to continuously learn and set expectations? How do they know if they are working on the right things? Andy Krupit shares his experiences evolving objective measures that matter at CareerBuilder. Andy discusses how he's helping create an environment of true product flow by shifting focus from the efficiency of the parts of the process to the speed of the end-to-end delivery of value—and understanding how that value decays over time. To help you facilitate better decision-making and prioritization, Andy explores implementing Reinertsen's framework for thinking about value.

 

Agile evangelist Andy Krupit is the manager of agile development at CareerBuilder in Norcross, GA. Andy coaches and mentors teams in the adoption and improvement of agile methodologies and lean practices across the organization. Andy first started applying lean in the early 2000s as a software engineer in an environment of continuous integration, where deployments to production happened anywhere from a few times a week to daily. In 2007 he piloted the first Scrum team with tremendous success. Now, Andy coaches all teams, leaders, and others outside on applying lean and agile practices.

11:30am–12:30pm • Lunch

12:30pm–1:30pm • Uncover the Secrets Your Customers Want You to Know

 Jeremy Kriegel, Method sans Madness

What don't we know? What do we assume to be true? What happens if we're wrong? These powerful questions have the ability to change the course of any project. Finding the answers can be scary, but you don't need to be a Sherlock, Mulder, House, or UX research expert to get out of your bubble and find the answers. Relying only on internal input can be limiting, and getting out there can be intimidating. However, your customers want to tell you everything you need to know to be successful. Jeremy Kriegel explains how to identify your biggest risks and formulate a plan to address them. Learn the basics of different UX techniques, when to apply them, and even a few expert tips. Even if you don't have the benefit of expert researchers, you can learn how to effectively engage your customers to learn the secrets they desperately want you to know.

 

Jeremy Kriegel has been designing great user experiences for eighteen years. From start-ups to Fortune 100 companies, as a consultant or on an internal team, Jeremy has seen many different scenarios that each required its own approach. He brings this diversity of experience to bear in adapting UX to an agile world and finding the balance appropriate for each project. As principal consultant at Method sans Madness, Jeremy now specializes in helping startups and teams take an idea from concept to user-centered experience. His previous companies and clients include Drizly, Gemvara, Dunwello, Everest Poker, Endeca, and Sapient.

1:45pm–2:45pm • Fostering Sustained Agility: What Is Needed outside the Teams?

 

Tricia Broderick, Pearson

Do you feel like your teams are practicing agile, yet high performance is missing?  Most organizations start off strong in their transformation toward an agile mindset.  They successfully implement various team practices, such as sprints and stand-ups. However after the initial wave of benefits, a plateau or even a slip back all too often occurs. This is because many leaders do not focus on fostering sustained agility―that is, creating an overall environment that influences individuals and teams to be learning focused. Tricia Broderick explores topics including the missed opportunities to inspire people to go outside their comfort zones, the mixed messages we send with performance reviews, and overlooked chances to develop change agents. Join Tricia to learn several key initiatives outside the teams that nurture learning, quality, innovation, and job satisfaction.

 

Passionately focused on the facilitation of high-performance software development teams, Tricia Broderick brings seventeen years of experience including the past seven years with an agile mindset focus. Tricia leverages and openly shares work experience stories and examples to inspire people, especially managers and leaders—both as individuals and as members of innovative teams—to reach new heights through continuous reflection. She is a highly experienced leader, coach, mentor, presenter, trainer, and speaker. Recently, Tricia returned to leading to the edge at Pearson as manager of project management. Contact Tricia at leadtotheedge.com or @t_broderick.

3:15pm–3:30pm • Wrap Up and Ongoing Informal Discussion with Speakers and Attendees

 You are invited to stick around, hang out and chat with speakers after the wrap up as time permits.