Agile + DevOps Virtual 2020 - Agile Team Member
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...
Partnering Up – Giving Leaders the Limelight of Transformation
As agile coaches, we feel the frustrations with teams and leaders, we see the pain points in the organization, and we want to lead people to a more lean-agile future. Moreover, agile coaches may put the weight of the entire transformation on their own shoulders. At times, our own egos can get in the way of our effectiveness by limiting our ability to partner with others and share the limelight.
What would it mean to share the burden of transformation—and the limelight—with leaders?
How can an agile coach enable them to be the face of the change and motivate others to think and...
High-Performance Teams: Core Protocols for Psychological Safety and EI
Want awesome teams that build great products? Great teams don’t happen by accident. And they don’t have to take a long time to build. In this session, Richard lays out the case for Continuous Teaming. Session participants will join in a flight of fun learning activity-sets. These will give you a taste of team awesomeness and how to start when you go back to work. Richard builds on the work of Jim and Michele McCarthy, Google, Bruce Tuckman, Gamasutra, Standish Group, Peter Drucker, and Melvin Conway. His learning activity-sets are short games, using elements from improvisational theater,...
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,...