Agile + DevOps East 2019 - Career/ Personal Development
Monday, November 4
Learning How to Lead High-Performing Agile Teams
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...
Unleash Your Organizational Superpowers With Liberating Structures
NewUnleash innovation with the simple rules of Liberating Structures. Using a subset of these 33 micro-structures, you'll learn how to enable groups of any size to work at the top of their intelligence. Liberating Structures offer a revolutionary solution to collaboration in groups by using a handful of simple rules to unleash and involve everyone. Learning to use Liberating Structures is like learning a new language. We will start with the basics - "1-2-4-all". Then we'll put them together into simple structures using "Appreciative Interviews". Finally, we'll move to advanced structures like...
What's Your Leadership IQ?
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 and Jeremias Rößler as they share 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. They will explore a set of eight dimensions of successful leaders, provides suggestions on how...
Tuesday, November 5
Introduction to DevOps with Chocolate and LEGOs
PreviewOrganizations today can no longer afford to deliver new features to their respective markets once a year or even once a quarter. In the attempt to catch up with the competition, they jump onto DevOps journey starting with the "How" and losing the sight of "Why" and "What". Join this gamified simulation tutorial to gain a solid understanding of foundational principles of the DevOps culture. Experience the benefits of DevOps transformation even before initiating one in your enterprise! This tutorial is ideally designed for organizations that are evaluating their approach to DevOps...
Wednesday, November 6
Fixing Your Scrum - Practical Solutions to Common Scrum Problems
Broken Scrum practices limit your organization’s ability to take full advantage of the agility Scrum should bring: the development team isn’t cross-functional or self-organizing, the product owner doesn’t get value for their investment, and stakeholders and customers are left wondering when something—anything—will get delivered. Learn how experienced Scrum masters balance the demands of these three levels of servant leadership, while removing organizational impediments and helping Scrum teams deliver real-world value. Discover how to visualize your work, resolve impediments, and empower...
Journey without Fear: Leading Your Teams to High Performance
Psychological safety has been identified by Google’s Project Aristotle as a top condition for creating high-performing teams. Yet many organizations are affected by fear in the workplace. It manifests itself in employee disengagement, lack of innovation, a toxic working environment with gossip and rumors, and the best people resigning. How can we start taking the first steps away from the culture of fear and toward a culture of psychological safety? Join this interactive session to experiment with a Fear in the Workplace game and start these difficult conversations in a fun way. Experience...
Open Mic: Coaching Up in Your Organization
The term “coaching up” traditionally refers to communication with a supervisor or person above you in the organizational chart. Coaching up strategies can be effective for all levels: Have you ever had a conversation with a boss, product owner, ScrumMaster, or leader that did not go well? Is one of your teammates dropping the ball? Often our instincts tell us to go on the defensive, which may result in the blame game. Instead, when difficult situations happen—or, better yet, when you anticipate them—let superiors know in a polite and helpful manner. They will appreciate your initiative....
An Agile Fireside Chat with Linda Rising
Come get your questions answered by an agile expert! We won't have an actual fireside, but Linda Rising will be on hand to answer your questions and discuss the topics that are most important to you. Linda is an internationally known presenter on topics related to agile development, patterns, retrospectives, the change process, and the connection between the latest neuroscience and software development. And she wants to discuss whatever interests you. Bring your questions and be ready for a lively, interactive discussion.
The Transformation Mindset: A Leader's Guide to Embracing Agile
Many leaders want to transform their organization to become more agile, adaptive, and responsive to the market. However, most do not deeply understand how to lead their organization through such a massive change. They install prescriptive scaling frameworks and send employees to training, but discard the elements of true transformation that are difficult. When the inevitable failure ensues, they switch frameworks, fire people, and revert back to what worked for them in the past. What these leaders fail to recognize is that the mindset they used to build their organization conflicts with...
Enter the Agile Dojo
The dojo is an experiment-rich environment for the team that encourages adding pieces and tools as needed, pushing experimentation, and learning first. What makes this dojo special is how adaptive it can be, considering teams no longer are all collocated. By using simple tools like a good camera, open call, and a free tool to display work, teams can collaborate across the world. The goal of the dojo is fourfold: Improve individuals and interactions, deliver working software, collaborate with customers, and respond to changes quickly. We'll talk about how agility can be applied to various...
Engaging Leadership: The Missing Piece for Enhancing Agile Adaptation
As W. Edwards Deming wrote, "It is not enough that top management commit themselves for life to quality and productivity. They must know what it is that they are committed to—that is, what they must do. These obligations cannot be delegated." To build and lead an agile organization, it’s crucial that senior leaders develop a new mindset and capabilities to transform themselves, their teams, and the organization. Join Reha Malik Gill as she discusses how to introduce the practices of design thinking, decentralization, and empowerment to assist you with transforming an agile organization. It...
Thursday, November 7
A Festivus for Leadership Alignment
One of the biggest problems facing organizations that are moving to an agile mindset is leadership alignment across the concepts, principles, and tactics. On the face of things, every leader says they understand agile and that they’re aligned. But saying it is one thing and being it is quite another. On top of that, it seems like feedback between the leaders has become nonexistent. Mary Thorn faces organizational misalignment nearly every day in agile coaching journeys. She has come up with an approach to detect, discuss, and realign organizations cross-functionally around their agile...
The Evolving Role of Manager in an Agile Environment
As teams become agile, are managers still relevant? Companies adopting agile are faced with many challenges, not the least of which is redefining some of the traditional roles. Bharat Nagpal will share his views on how the role of people manager needs to evolve as teams move toward agile. The concepts he presents will equally benefit new as well as seasoned agilists and managers. The session will start off by defining the role of people manager, then we'll discuss new practices that a people manager needs to learn as their teams adopt agile, as well as provide real-world examples of how...
Transforming a Team of Agile Skeptics into Agilists
Teams can hesitate to adopt agile practices, even when there’s a clear desire for transformation at the executive level. But there are strategies for coaching agile-skeptical teams into an agile mindset. Scott Weiner will detail an approach in depth, including working with leadership to create transparency and space for the team to experiment and learn, adopting a retrospective process and using it as an engine for change, educating the team on agile’s value while focusing on a small set of goals, and building trust and shared understanding by problem-solving collaboratively. We’ll discuss...
Maximizing Agile Benefits through Understanding Learning Styles
PreviewThe Agile Manifesto says we value people and interactions over processes and tools. Yet when we talk about the agile methods, we usually end up talking about processes. Agilists use timeboxing as a forcing function to draw out resolutions and decisions. What if we just needed a better way to describe our needs and issues? What if we could actually be more effective with our communication? Join Robin Foster as he explores the relationships between learning, memory, communication, teaching, and the agile framework. Discover the cognitive science behind the process of learning new...
The Inner Game of User Stories
When agile teams are working, the all-important stories stay on the wall (or, worse, in a tool). They sometimes get seen, touched, and loved only once a day. Why are the stories not the focus of the work? Why do we take our eye off the ball and allow distractions to take over? Is there something more important than value? Inspired by the book The Inner Game of Tennis and the impact it's had on athletes' mindset for more than forty years, we'll look at some ideas for getting out of your own way so you can let the best story emerge and focus on what is really important. Join Cory Bryan to...
Friday, November 8
Building Trust Between Security and Development to Accomplish Culture Change
DevSecOps empowers engineering teams to take ownership of how their product behaves in production, including security aspects. The primary goal of a DevSecOps initiative is to get development teams to shift their mindset and adopt security practices in their daily activities. However, this can only happen with healthy collaboration and mutual trust between development and security teams. Larry Maccherone can show you how. Larry will discuss how to effectively build trust between developers and security personnel to facilitate a successful DevSecOps program. He will present a proven "Trust...
Decoding Culture: How Culture Can Improve Performance and Increase Joy
We’ve all heard culture is vital to creating and sustaining a healthy organization. It was even Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year in 2014! We also know culture is notoriously hard to describe in a meaningful way. Even harder than describing culture is demonstrating its contribution to organizational performance. We know culture is important. But for all its importance, we’ve had few tools and limited research to describe or quantify culture. Join Jeff Gallimore as he explores the critical aspects of culture and discusses how a strong culture can improve corporate performance while keeping...