Agile + DevOps East 2018 - Teams & Leadership

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 allowing metrics to become a wedge that drives them into conflict. Larry covers the entire lifecycle of the metrics process—from metric selection to reporting data. Join Larry to gain an understanding of a wide range of concepts including common (101-level) metrics...

Many teams have a relatively easy time adopting the tactical aspects of agile methodologies. Usually a few classes, some tools’ introduction, and a bit of practice lead teams toward fairly efficient execution. However, these teams are quite often simply going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could. Borrowing from their experience and lean software development methods, Bob Galen and Mary Thorn explore high-performance team patterns, which are the thinking models of mature agile teams, including large-scale emergent...

The very title of this workshop is meant to challenge you. Many don’t like to use the term transformation, instead, preferring adoption, migration, transition, business agility shift or some other phrase. However, successful implementations of agile require a transformation to occur at multiple levels (teams, leaders, managers, culture, and organization), and goes beyond mere implementation of time-boxed sprints, daily standups, and the use of a product backlog. This workshop was created because so many organizations struggle with how to move towards more agile approaches to product...

Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, training, and even the empathy—revolves around the agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized at best, and in the worst cases even vilified. But Bob Galen and Mary Thorn contend that there is a central and important role for managers and leaders within agile environments. Join Bob and Mary as they explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders. Examine why those who understand servant leadership know how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the team's...

An organizational change could cause confusion, bring havoc and face strong resistance. Learn how you can help your teams and management, experience the value of a DevOps culture by participating in this workshop! The workshop simulates the pre-DevOps life of a large enterprise whose teams (development, operations and business) have very different goals. Workshop participants will use role cards, Legos, and chocolate to experience the goals misalignment, simulate a product development flow, and make bottlenecks visible. Through debriefing and group discussions participants will...

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...

Organizations often declare they are "going agile." This goal is misplaced, misguided, and just plain wrong. In fact, the agile community has become a cult of practice: Teams are too focused on the way to do things and making sure they are doing those methods correctly. We even turned agile into a proper noun so that we could more easily sell it. But what about the outcomes? This workshop will use the Modern Agile principles proposed by Joshua Kerievsky to walk some of those ideas back. The four principles—Make People Awesome, Deliver Value Continuously, Experiment & Learn Rapidly, and...

Operating on the philosophy that one must thoroughly know the rules before one can break them, a global company developed its own delivery model that is still as true to the agile mindset as is possible. Join Arjay Hinek in this lively session as he deconstructs his company's experiment in melding agile with construction project management to create a hybrid delivery model. At first, the teams were struggling with clear ownership, timely communication, and clear follow-through on work in progress. From modifying the user story mapping model in order to improve project initiation to...

Your team's been trained to deliver new features in a short time frame. You're estimating your work using abstractions like story points, and the predictability and quality of delivery have clearly improved. However, you still get asked every December to estimate year-long initiatives for annual budgeting. How agile can an organization be when the finance department is still thinking about large-batch projects with fixed cost, scope, and time? Robert Pieper will talk about how to mitigate financial risk and improve return on investment by working in smaller batches. Using financial...

When will you deliver that feature? How much will this project cost? Which features can I have in four weeks? These are all reasonable questions that both management and customers need answered, and traditionally, we’ve used estimates to provide such answers. But estimates can turn into commitments, dollars get spent based on misinformation, features end up misaligned with business needs, and all parties involved end up feeling misled and frustrated. The key question is, can we still make decisions without traditional estimates? Join us as our panel of experts discuss this question and...

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...

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...

Open work areas, a focus on collaboration and conversations, and group events that seem to require verbal fluency ... It may feel like the agile ecosystem is designed with extroverts in mind. But science tells us that introverts make up almost half of the workforce, and they may struggle to be productive in an agile environments. In fact, introverts might even shy away from agile opportunities because of the radical collaboration it requires. In this interactive session, Julee Everett will teach you to recognize the traits of an extrovert and an introvert through self-identification....

Are parts of your organization embracing agile while others become more resistant, disconnected, or frustrated by the idea? Or maybe your team wants to be more agile but it isn’t sure how to get started because it’s not a typical development team. Agile has been moving out of software and being embraced by nondevelopment teams for years, but it’s not always a great experience. How can we make the best parts of agility relevant to any team? This hands-on session will show you how to start teams down the path to “being agile” by taking a teamwork-centered approach. With examples from a...

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.

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...

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...

Every one of us has the potential to be limitless in our careers, personal life, and everything in between! Yet most of us—yes, including you—are only achieving a fraction of what you are capable of. We all want more, but we aren’t sure how to go get it. This session will be an interactive and practical guide to breaking through all the things that limit you and will kickstart your journey to a limitless life. Jessica Soroky will introduce activities from the personal development program Limitless by Choice and address the potential all teams have to be high-performing when they start...