Agile Dev West 2016 - Leadership
Monday, June 6
Principles and Practices of Lean Software Development
Lean software development has often been described as “better, faster, cheaper” and focused on “eliminating waste,” but those are misnomers. Going after speed improvement and waste elimination can actually reduce the benefits you might otherwise get from lean. Ken Pugh 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. Ken explains the mindset, principles, and practices of lean. Its foundations are systems thinking, a relentless focus on time, and an understanding that complex...
Tuesday, June 7
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, and engagement. Investigate...
Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas
We attend conferences, read books and articles, and discover new ideas we want to bring into our organizations—but we often struggle when trying to implement those changes. Unfortunately, those introducing change are not always welcomed with open arms. Linda Rising offers proven change management strategies to help you become a more successful agent of change in your organization. Learn how to plant effective seeds of change, and what forces in your organization drive or block change. These approaches, strategies, and patterns are useful in many different settings—not only to change your...
Wednesday, June 8
The Lean Executive Agility Framework
In today’s business environment, organizations cannot afford to resist change and move slowly. They have to move quickly, adapt frequently, and turn on a dime when conditions demand it. This is not always easy to do. Organizations of all shapes and sizes can become rooted in habits and processes that get in the way of efficiency and productivity. Adopting lean and agile practices is a great way to break free from those impediments. However, if leaders want their teams to be transparent and agile, the leaders must first embrace those practices themselves and lead by example. Based on his...
Leading with Purpose
Today, knowledge workers are seeking to find meaning in their lives and purpose in their work. With this new generation of employees who are as interested in purpose as in profit, it is imperative that we revisit management schemes—top-down work assignment, the annual review, strict clock-punching work hours, and inflexible vacation policies—and recognize their negative effects on individual morale and team productivity. As leaders, it is time we recognize and own our responsibility in these counterproductive techniques and boldly move into the future with radical alternatives. With...
Improvisation for Agile Skill Development
In today's economy, the Creative Economy, businesses face a disrupted, highly competitive, and constantly changing landscape. Robie and Jody Wood say that to thrive in the Creative Economy, team members, managers, and executives need to become and remain agile. Improvisational theater provides a proven model for developing agility skills since the characteristics of “being agile”—engaging people, learning, making decisions in the midst of uncertainty and ambiguity, and adapting—are the very skills that improv artists work to develop with every exercise they perform. This session is about “...
Team Leadership Is Like Big Band Drumming
Sometimes we get a little stuck. It does happen. Work is at the same place, with the same people, and the same problems. The fresh perspective we seek is overcome by everyday demands and eludes us once again. John Ryskowski says that one path to a fresh perspective is to experience something that is totally unrelated, but at the same time reveals parallels to your situation. Do you know the drummer of a big band can actually guide the band, instill a sense of confidence, and inspire musicians to play as never before while adhering to the written music? Through subtle and timely cues, the...
The Issues Agile Exposes and What To Do about Them
Before the short iterations in agile, projects were segmented into large blocks of work taking many weeks or months. If problems emerged, it was relatively easy to hide them. Now, with agile, many of these problems and issues can’t be hidden for long. Lee Copeland exposes these issues—trust, organization, work, measurement, and change—and explores solutions. Leaders often distrust their teams; teams often distrust their leaders. Learn the symptoms and solutions to these trust issues. A key organizational issue is that organizations cannot give up their previous team structures. Explore...
Apply Phil Jackson’s Coaching Principles to Build Better Agile Teams
Often referred to as the “Zen Master” for his unorthodox coaching style, professional basketball coach Phil Jackson won more professional sports championships than any other coach in history. Jackson led the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers to a total of eleven NBA championships, but rather than studying and following the strategies of other coaches, Jackson developed a set of coaching principles aligned with his personal beliefs. Dion Stewart believes that agile coaches can learn a lot from Jackson’s focus on selfless teamwork, mindfulness, compassion, and ritual rather than simply...
Thursday, June 9
How to Do Kick-Ass Software Development
Software development is hard― keeping developers, testers, designers, product managers and other stakeholders in sync and working on the right things at the right time. Building the systems that customers care about and delivering high-quality code fast are challenges every development team faces. Just being agile isn’t enough; we need to actively think about how we can improve software development processes and techniques. Sven details Atlassian’s coding practices and team dynamics, which include: collaborating fast to develop ideas, helping QA with testing, avoiding meetings to get...
Experiments: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful
Through the years, Linda Rising has given presentations about the use of stories instead of science in the industry, so in this session she has decided to be more helpful and talk about experiments. There's an increasing emphasis on experiments as a part of being more innovative but sometimes Linda says we need a nudge and some examples to help us get going. No, this is not too rigorous! Rather than talking about statistics, she is going to explore cheap, easy experiments—what to do, what to be aware of, and our own cognitive biases, including the confirmation bias that does its best to...
Disrupting Ourselves: Moving to a “Teal Organization” Model
In his book Reinventing Organizations, Frederic Laloux describes the “Teal Organization” model. Teal organizations have an evolutionary purpose, self-managing teams with little or no organizational hierarchy, and individuals who bring their whole person to work rather than putting on a work face when leaving the house. Zappos is the most talked about organization attempting a transition to Teal. Bob Payne describes how his organization is becoming a Teal Organization. Since the concept of Teal is not a specific recipe, they are basing their transition on practices gleaned from...
Managing a Software Engineering Team
You’re a senior engineer who decides to switch to management for experience in leading a team. How is your work going to change? What challenges are you going to face? How are you going to keep up with new technologies? Are people reporting to you going to see you as a leader and follow you? Sebastiano Armeli asked himself all these questions when he became a manager. See what he found it and learn how you can bring this information into your work. While management varies greatly by organization, Sebastiano explores leadership and management behaviors you can apply at your company. At...
Facilitation Techniques for Agile Meetings and Ceremonies
Facilitation is the art of leading people through processes toward agreed-upon outcomes in a manner that encourages participation, ownership, and creativity from all involved. So how do you take this definition and turn it into facilitating powerful meetings? Most agile practitioners can read about facilitation and the “right” way to do it. However, it can be challenging to take that book knowledge and feel comfortable facilitating agile meetings and ceremonies. Whether you are looking to coach a single team/product or scale agile to the program/enterprise, Darrin London says that...
Recruit, Hire, and Retain Top Software Talent
You are understaffed, overworked, and behind on your commitments. Your go-to person just quit, leaving an unbelievable void of knowledge. If the old-school ways of attracting talent—advertising on job boards, filtering résumés, interviewing candidates are not working, then this session is for you. Catherine Louis says the tables have turned. The balance of power has shifted from the employer doing the hiring to candidates operating more as free agents and selecting the job. Leaders must learn how to build teams that engage employees as sensitive, passionate, creative contributors. A shift...
A Simple Tool for Speaking Honestly and Constructively
Are you on a team where people avoid conflict or shy away from saying anything that might sound critical? Reluctance to speak up can block important challenges from being identified, and deny your team and organization the opportunity to learn and improve. According to Lorraine Aguilar, this avoidance is most evident in peer-to-peer communications. Lorraine designed a tool for agile coaches, facilitators, and team leaders who want to make it easy and safe for people to speak authentically during retrospectives and other opportunities for performance feedback and continuous improvement....
Create Brainstorming Commandos for Creative Problem Solving
Agile teams are solving real-world complex problems every day. These problems require creative problem solving by team members. In its truest sense, brainstorming is intended to be a practical approach to this task. Brainstorming entails “using the brain to storm a creative problem and to do so in commando fashion, with each 'stormer' audaciously attacking the same objective.” In this highly practical workshop, Pradeepa Narayanaswamy introduces you to a variety of brainstorming games that get the creative juices flowing to yield better collaboration and ideas among team members. Delegates...