Agile + DevOps East 2018 - Consultant
Customize your Agile + DevOps East 2018 experience with sessions for consultants.
Monday, November 5
Introducing Docker and Kubernetes to your DevOps Toolchain
As organizations look to improve the speed with which they deliver software, they increasingly turn to microservices and infrastructure-as-code for software architecture and delivery techniques to help leverage value from their DevOps adoptions. Docker, an industry standard containerization tool, facilitates moving processes into isolated environments that can be frozen into images, with an ecosystem that helps developers across organizations build and share these containers. Kubernetes builds on these capabilities and allows a software team to break down their application into small,...
Lean/Agile Data-Driven Decisions Demystified
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...
Rethinking Your Retrospectives
The retrospective is the most important ceremony that an agile team performs. Continuous improvement ideas, team health concerns, organizational impediments, and shared wins are brought to light and explored during a retrospective. This is the heart of agile. Ryan Ripley says that if you aren’t doing retrospectives, you’re missing an incredible opportunity to collaborate and improve as a team. Learn how to get started with retrospectives and take away solid action items to get this important tool implemented on your team. For those already using retrospectives—but still unsure how to get...
Coaching Workshop: Taking Your Scrum to the Next Level
Are you struggling to achieve results from your agile and Scrum teams? Are you having trouble with user story writing or with effective estimation and forecasting? Are your sprint reviews and retrospectives low focus and low energy? What about gaining traction on the organization-side of things? Do your leaders actually understand the underlying principles? Are they measuring things properly? And what about Scrum at Scale—how’s that going? If you have questions, any questions, about how to improve specific practices or generally how to improve your agile journey, then this tutorial is for...
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...
Innovation Garage: Supercharge your Product Engine
NewJourney from “Are we doing things right” to “Are we doing the right thing?” This workshop is designed for those who are passionate about creating products that people love but are struggling to keep up with the needs of their clients while continuously trying to bring products and ideas to market. This new, global, cognitive era requires innovative thinking and proactive design of human-centric products and services that customize a customers’ experience – and provide scalable returns in an uncertain market. Join Julee Everett in this hands-on, interactive workshop to learn to apply...
Wednesday, November 7
Coaching Around Resistance by Using Humble Inquiry
When coaches encounter resistance to agile transformations, we often treat it as a phenomenon to be overcome, confronted, or combated. But resistance is a natural reaction to change, and that reaction can't be alleviated by violent opposition. Rather than meeting resistance head-on, the clever coach will work around it by helping people recognize and resolve the negative emotions that drive it. Once those negative emotions are resolved, people are more likely to let down their guard and embrace change. In this interactive session, you will learn to use a method known as humble inquiry to...
No One Cares About Your Practices: A Modern Agile Approach
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...
Tear It Down to Build It Up: Using Agile in Construction Project Management
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...
Transformational Leadership for Business Agility
Despite thinking that organizations are slow to innovate, innovation actually abounds at many companies. Kodak, DEC, and Xerox did not fail due to lack of new, cutting-edge innovation; they failed because their organizations were tuned to their traditional markets, and a failure to change their business models and organizations led to their eventual disruption. The key to achieving business agility lies in leadership that transforms organizations. Transformational leaders succeed by changing the system, leading with purpose, and steering from the edges. They own their responsibility and...
Financing Agile Delivery with Forecasts
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...
Pushing Pennies: Playing with the Principles of Product Development Flow
Lean and agile concepts can sometimes be counterintuitive, but the right game or exercise can effectively demonstrate those concepts, providing a practical basis for conversation and learning. Being able to talk beyond anecdote and theory and actually demonstrate why something works is a powerful statement. In this workshop, Bill DeVoe will execute some games you can take back to your organizations to help them understand some basic lean and agile concepts regarding optimization of flow and throughput. Through these activities, we’ll demonstrate the value of a prioritized backlog,...
DevSecOps - Security at the Speed of DevOps
Security specialists, especially at large organizations, believe that better security comes from robust independent gating. On the other hand, DevOps has proven that you can safely deploy orders of magnitude faster than human gating can achieve. What's needed to add security to DevOps are tools that work well with rapid-cycle CI/CD pipelines and an approach that reinforces the DevOps culture and process changes. This requires that security specialists become self-service toolsmiths and advisors and stop thinking of themselves as gatekeepers. Larry guides you through the characteristics of...
You Can't Improve What You Can't See
From value stream mapping to burndown charts, making things visible is a core component of the continuous improvement process. But even with all this visibility, much of the data surrounding how your teams work is either not captured or not understandable. This data represents a great opportunity for insights and improvement. Think about it: Your management team tells you that your velocity is too low. What do you do? First, you need more information. What does “too low” mean? Why was the velocity low? Did the team deliver value? Brandon Carlson will share one team’s surprising insights...
How to Innovate Inexpensively
When many think of modernizing or altering their firm with the goal of staying competitive in the market, thoughts of expensive, cutting-edge concepts that are difficult to implement usually come to mind. But innovation doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. The fact is that pure modernism is focusing on the benefit of the customer, the team, and the business. It does not always have to be overly technical or costly. As with speed, the most economical method to determine if a company is pursuing innovation is to look internally and discover how the workforce is being utilized. Giancarlo Di...
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...
The Introvert's Survival Guide to Agile
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....
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...
Make Agile Work for Any Team
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...
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...
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...
How Agile Killed Managers
Agile adoption has changed the corporate landscape in many different ways. And while the change has been mostly positive for the teams, some can see agile and Scrum ideas as a revolt against traditional management practices. If the team is self-organized, then what's the manager's role? Have no fear—managers are not obsolete; their job just looks a little different. Katy Sherman will discuss how agile has reshaped the manager's role. You will see examples of what not to do, such as when managers become a real obstacle during agile adoption, as well as learn how individuals, teams, and...
Limitless by Choice: Discover Your Team's High-Performing Potential
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...
User Stories Are like Onions: Let's Peel Away the Layers
In the world of agile product development, user stories are like onions ... and no, that doesn’t mean they stink or they make you cry (although they have been known to do both). Writing user stories is still one of the hardest crafts in agile product development today. We all know that a good user story can be the difference between a low-performing Scrum team and a high-performing one. Katrina Thacker will introduce the "onion pattern" as a paradigm for creating great user stories, and she will lead you through a series of hands-on exercises to practice applying the pattern. In this...
Shu-Ha-Ri Applied to Agile Leadership
Far too many agile instances either fail or underperform because the leadership team members don’t sufficiently understand agility and their role within it. They don’t understand the fundamentals or how to map them to effective execution. But the larger problem is that they (and the organization) are unaware of the gaps. In this session, we’ll explore a basic assessment model for determining agile leadership maturity as a means of gauging and improving leadership's understanding and your overall effectiveness in applying agile. You'll break into small groups and assess the leadership...