Agile + DevOps East 2018 - Scaled Agile Development
Tuesday, November 6
Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions
Agile initiatives always begin with high expectations—accelerate delivery, meet customer needs, and improve software quality. The truth is that many agile projects do not deliver on some or all of these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or to get an agile project back on track, this tutorial is for you. Jeffery Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues or mitigate their damaging effects. Poor project management, ineffective requirements development, failed communications, software development...
Strategic Foundations for Scaling Agile
New Sold Out!Are you a leader tasked with leading a digital transformation, or are you part of a guiding team that is preparing your organization for big change? Scaled agile, lean, agile, DevOps... No matter what methodology your organization intends to use, taking a proactive, strategic approach up front will provide a strong foundation for the journey ahead. Join Claudia Marquette and Francie Van Wirkus to learn why and how to use a proven inquiry strategy, designed to help you and your stakeholders assess the landscape of your organization, have productive discussions about your work, its current...
Wednesday, November 7
Enterprise DevOps Is Not an Oxymoron
Driving enterprise DevOps transformations is a challenging but massively rewarding job. Larger organizations often struggle to justify the costs of new tooling and training. In fact, larger organizations often fail even to understand what DevOps is and what it means for their business. Putting DevOps into practice also tends to hit serious roadblocks in areas of information security. How can you get buy-in for such a difficult and widespread organizational change? And once you've got it, how do you drive change in a way that stakeholders will stay supportive of it? Join Lee Eason as he...
Thursday, November 8
Self-Selection Gamified: Leave Your Fears Behind
PreviewSelf-selection is a facilitated process that allows people to exercise autonomy by choosing their preferred initiatives and joining new teams. As exciting as it may sound to some, the idea of self-selection may cause others to experience all sorts of fear: fear of missing out, fear of not being selected, or fear of picking a wrong team. Let Dana Pylayeva alleviate those fears by taking you through effective preparation steps and a round of self-selection simulation. Hands-on activities such as drawing, making participants cards in a Team Ingredients Assessment, and playing the...
Holistic Agile: Treat the Whole Company, Not Just IT
As agile methods find more global applicability, we are finding groups outside of IT that have nothing to do with technology or software development demonstrating success with agile methods. But the approach to the solutions they deliver are often catered to their own unique circumstances. The original Agile Manifesto, principles, and supporting frameworks were formed with software development in mind, but from a holistic perspective, a different approach is needed for enterprise solutions outside of IT. Robert Woods will show you how to translate the success seen in agile software...
Scaling Agile in a Large Matrixed Organization
Two engineering teams with vastly different work styles—one waterfall and one Scrum—merged into one matrixed organization to work on a critical strategic effort. During this transition the teams experienced many problems, including growing from a small team into a large one overnight, with half of the organization now knowing nothing about agile. They had issues with how to handle communication, the right level of process consistency across the twenty-plus distributed agile teams, working through technical dependencies, a lack of subject matter expertise, and no single point of control of...
Agile Distributed Teams: Oxymoron or Viable Option?
Many surveys indicate that more teams work in distributed environments. But agile approaches work best when people collocate, huddle around a problem, and closely collaborate on the best solutions that will deliver value. Is collocation the only option these days? Does distributed always imply “dysfunctional”? Does technology help or hinder? Maybe the problem is how we think about the working environment. Mark Kilby will share key principles of successful distributed agile teams that help define better working environments. Understand how the principles apply to different types of...
A Personal History of Collaboration: Soloing, Pairing, Mobbing, Cube Farms, and Pipe Fires
Pair programming is the practice you love to hate! It's been nearly twenty years since Extreme Programming promoted pair programming as a collaborative practice, and it's still here. And if you thought that was bad, now there's mobbing, where the entire team works together on one thing at a time. Does that seem nuts? Yet we often hear teams say, "We go faster because we are mobbing." In this anecdote-heavy session, you'll hear Jeff Langr's history of working through various models for collaboration (or not) across the past several decades, including pairing, solo programming, and mobbing....
I Got a Fever, and the Only Prescription Is More Feedback
The Second City, an improvisational comedy club that launched the careers of comedians such as Chris Farley, Tina Fey, and Steve Carell, has delivered a successful product to audiences nightly for almost sixty years. How do they do it? By recognizing the power of feedback. Brian Eno, a pioneer in the music industry who produced albums for U2 and Coldplay, relies on a feedback generation system to ensure the best performances of the bands he works with. Likewise, the lean startup movement has uncovered a similar pattern of organizations that thrive on experimentation and learning. John...
Create the Self-Directed Team of Your Dreams
You've read dozens of books on agile and hundreds of articles, but no one actually told you how to build the team of your dreams. Josh Anderson brings the real-world experience of growing a team from zero engineers to thirty while shipping five products—and he did it is less than a year. Learn how to build a team from scratch or transform your existing team into a mystical self-directed team, and understand how leadership operates in a world of self-directed teams. You'll be able to take these lessons home and hire, grow, and support self-directed teams, then start changing the world.
Agile Leadership Conversations in the Fishbowl
It can be lonely at the top. Trying to find other leaders who are having the same problem and issues you have and are willing to take a few minutes and help solve problems is really hard. One solution that Bob Galen has found works well is the "fishbowl" conversation. The fishbowl activity is also great for keeping a focused conversation while in a large group of people. At any time, only a few people have a conversation—the fish in the fishbowl. The remaining people are listeners—the ones watching the fishbowl. The caveat is that the listeners can join the discussion at any moment. In...
Commonalities of Agile and DevOps Transformations for Large Organizations
As the adoption of agile and DevOps have been steadily growing over the years, many organizations have been taking a proactive approach to prepare for the changes needed for success. This means giving people the skills and resources they need to be successful, working with customers and users for improved collaboration and transparency, and providing teams with the tools and infrastructure to enable continuous flow of value. Are there commonalities across organizations that others can learn from to support their journeys? Join Robin Yeman and Suzette Johnson as they provide an interactive...
What’s Really Going On with Your Team? An Observational Skills Workshop
When it comes to our day-to-day work interactions, there are many factors that pass us by simply because we’re not used to paying attention to them. The best way to become more observant is through deliberate practice, so join Julie Wyman for a brief introduction to themes and different aspects of interactions to start observing, followed by small group exercises to practice observing and to help understand what it feels like to be observed. The exercises will be followed by a debrief and full group discussion about how to observe thoughtfully and share feedback in a neutral, nonjudgmental...
How Design Thinking and Agile Can Be Friends
Agile methodologies do not traditionally allot space, time, or processes for user experience design. Some teams try to accommodate design via separate design sprints that are somewhat coupled to the team's backlog, but these are typically performed two or three sprints ahead. Increasingly, designers are demanding that teams do big, upfront design phases outside of a team's backlog, followed by agile development sprints to implement the design. As markets mature and competition increases, more and more companies must become design-focused or even design-led. Ian and Mary will show you why...
Scaling the Product in an Agile World
In agile, most companies and teams associate “product” with the product owner role. While the product owner role is very important, how does this scale? How do you coordinate priorities across product owners, groups, and product lines? The product owner responsibilities are well-defined for how they interact with their team, but what about other product-related activities? Todd Olson will explore scaling the notion of product in agile organizations. He’ll look at the role beyond the product owner with a renewed focus on the profession of product management, which is often de-emphasized or...