Agile + DevOps East 2018 - General Management

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...

Are important words often left unsaid at your place of work? Do you feel like you're navigating a complex maze in conversations? Does your message tend to miss the mark with co-workers, who increasingly seem to be impediments to your reaching your goals? Trust and communication issues within the workplace can hollow out an organization. When organizations suffering from a lack of trust, it costs them speed, productivity, and collaboration. Join Allison Pollard and Marcus King as they share models to evaluate your own behaviors and facilitate activities to help you find your voice for...

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...

Have you ever needed a way to measure your testing leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that. This toolkit includes a personal assessment of your leadership competencies and the evolution of testing and testing leadership. Join Jennifer as she explores a set of eight dimensions of successful leaders, provides suggestions on how you can...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

IT organizations that don’t know their risk factors and exposure are likely to make investments in DevOps that don’t matter. After working with several teams that lost their DevOps funding after making automation investments in areas that were not business constraints, Anne Hungate's “Know Your Numbers” model emerged. Join Anne to learn how to prioritize your DevOps improvements and demonstrate the impact and value you are delivering. After all, DevOps gets traction and funding when teams can show the business impact of doing it, so if you want your DevOps initiative to take off, be...

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...

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...

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...

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...