Agile Dev West 2016 - Leadership Summit Sessions
Friday, June 10
Agile Leadership Is Essential to Agile Transformation
Many so-called “agile transformations” are really just business as usual with some new words and a few process changes at the team level. In contrast, the enterprise business systems group at Whole Foods Market has experienced a real and deep transformation in the past few years. Roles are different. Teams self-organize in new ways. Budgeting, forecasting, and reporting now support complexity and learning. Business stakeholders and teams collaborate to find high-value, minimal solutions neither could come up with alone. Part of that transformation is due to new practices and skills at the...
Agile Anti-Patterns: The Leader’s Guide to Agile Traps, Tripwires, and Treachery
Knowing the basics of being agile is essential for any agile leader, but out in the trenches, a good agilist must be ready to identify and deal with agile anti-patterns to help their team and organization move forward. What's an agile anti-pattern? Something that at first blush may seem benign or even useful—but in practice is usually dangerous to an agile initiative. These are often first expressed as harmless-sounding quotes from your team such as “I was pulled off this sprint and put onto an emergency project. Again.” Although often slippery to catch, it's important to identify these...
Agile Leadership Team Roles: Balancing Autonomy and Alignment
Have you experienced a situation where the project owner is a product expert but lacks leadership skills to align the team or manage stakeholders properly? Or, perhaps, a situation where the otherwise excellent ScrumMaster is not experienced enough to guide the team to own timely delivery, yet is expected to do so by the stakeholders? In many cases, we expect an individual to fit into a predefined role, failing to acknowledge their particular strengths and weaknesses and leaving gaps in covering team responsibilities. By making the implicit explicit, the goal is to allow teams to fully...
Decision-Making Tools for Leaders and Teams
Decisions involve risk. As the leader, you’re ultimately accountable for the hundreds of decisions made by your teams every day. Even if it were possible for you to be involved in every decision, it wouldn’t be the best use of your time or your team’s capability. As experienced leaders, it is tempting to serve as the arbiter on critical and complex matters; yet a wise leader knows this is not only demotivating for the team but leads to poorer results. In a complex domain, the more varied the perspectives, the better the quality of our decisions. So how do we, as leaders, help ensure our...