Agile + DevOps Virtual 2020 - Agile & Lean Practices
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Monday, November 9
Lean/Agile Metrics for the Rest of Us
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 becoming a wedge that drives them into conflict. Larry covers the entire lifecycle of the metrics process—from metric selection to reporting data—in compelling ways. You’ll gain an understanding of a wide range of concepts including common (101-level) metrics,...
An Agile Coaching Practicum in 360 degrees
Let’s face it, agile coaching isn’t for the timid or faint of heart. In most companies, it’s an incredibly challenging and nuanced role. And an important part of it is having the ability to coach in 360 degrees: downward—across your teams, outward – across managers and peers, and upward—towards those pesky leaders. Oh, and did we say that virtually EVERYONE is an agile coach? In this workshop, join Mary Thorn and Bob Galen as they share tools and experiences coaching in all directions. They will review three different coaching models from the X-Wing, to Powerful Questions, to 9-Stances, to...
Tuesday, November 10
Creating a High-Performance Agile Team
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...
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...
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...
The Transformation Mindset: A Leader's Guide to Embracing Agile
NewMany 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...
Wednesday, November 11
3 Disciplines for Leading a Distributed Agile Organization
How can you lead people you may never see in your distributed organization? Your personal operating system drives your leadership and guides your organization. While your distributed employees may rarely connect with you beyond a video screen, phone call or chat message, you can model a personal operating system that helps you and them navigate the complexities of a distributed agile organization. In this talk, we will explore three key disciplines composing your personal operating system for leadership: manage change through experimentation, amplify communication and collaboration, and...
Dev && UX: (Correctly) Integrating UX, Product Design, and Agile
Software development methodologies often lack the details of how UX fits into projects. Some suggest that a Product Manager describing features is enough for developers, UX should train others to do their specialized jobs, or excluding UX experts solves them being “too siloed” and “not collaborative.” This happens with no other role in software dev; it’s hurting culture, efficiency, and productivity, and creating poor products for customers. Your customer only sees your UX, not 1000 developers or if you were Agile or Lean. Companies are figuring out that UX specialists and the User-...
Evolving from Projects to Products: The Product Leader’s Journey
The Product Leader is the link between the products we build and the culture of the organization building them. It's the foundation for operating in a digital economy. There is a shift happening. One that puts the user closer to the center of our work than ever before. We are moving away from the question "Are we building it right?" to asking "Are we building the right thing?" This approach isn't new - it's growing in response to the increasing speed and complexity of competing in today's marketplace. The future of business agility is creating a healthy ecosystem that provides space for...
Thursday, November 12
Design Thinking for Agile Teams: Change Your Approach
Design thinking is a human-centered process for creative problem-solving that focuses on the people you're creating for, which leads to better products, services, and processes. Utilizing the design thinking approach made popular by Amazon, Apple, and other large software companies, learn how to modify your whole agile strategy and approach around a technique that can speed your time to success and failure. Learn how to get to a proof of concept and prototyping sooner, for faster feedback from customers and buyers. This workshop will explore what the design thinking approach is and walk...
Measuring Success in DevOps Transformations
At the highest level, a successful DevOps implementation is meant to reduce the time between a developer’s commit to source control and that commit being available in a production environment, while maintaining quality. DevOps is a performance enhancer for Agile. While the measure of success for an Agile team is working product, the measure of a successful DevOps implementation is speed. Including DevOps in the process allows the team to deliver working product more often and with greater confidence. A team’s DevOps implementation should improve over time. There are several components to...
Things We May Never Get Right
When there's no clear right way to solve a difficult problem, how do you avoid getting frozen in indecision? How do you know if you made the right decision? How do you know when a decision that used to be the best one isn't any more, and it's time to try something else?
We're part of a global marketplace developed and operated by multiple squads. We consider ourselves a mature DevOps organization, but there are several things we've really struggled with over the years, and we've even reversed direction at times. For example: Should designers be assigned to one squad for months...
Developers Gaming the Agile Process? Say it Ain't So!
Who doesn’t like the affirmation in hearing, “Job well done.” Most of us have experienced receiving salary increases, bonuses, and other forms of reward. These rewards are often tied to meeting or exceeding objectives set for us as individuals, teams, and businesses. Regardless of profession, most businesses recognize and reward individuals based on meeting defined goals. Over time, Ray Elenteny has observed an interesting dynamic where the spirit of Agile can take a back seat to leveraging Agile metrics to evaluate individuals and teams. Evaluation by Agile metrics seems very reasonable,...