Agile + DevOps East 2021 - Project Management, Planning, Metrics
Monday, November 15
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 Bob Galen as he share tools and experiences coaching in all directions. He will review three different coaching models from the X-Wing, to Powerful Questions, to 9-Stances, to the Agile Coaching...
Tuesday, November 16
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 17
Building and Managing High-Performance Teams
The COVID-19 pandemic has possibly caused the most significant shift in work culture of our lifetime. It quickly furthered techniques such as working-from-home, digital transformation, diversity, and inclusion and made them become an immediate reality. The next few months and years contain a great deal of uncertainty about how people will work and interact in a global economy that is not yet free of the disease and its enormous impact. So how can companies, tech sector businesses, adapt to this new normal? Alberto Silveira is passionate about ready sharing his proven methodology, insights...
Distributed DevOps
Our industry has fundamentally changed over the last decade. Monolithic architectures have evolved into microservices. Applications are distributed on infrastructure across the globe. And an increasing number of companies are moving to a remote-first culture with engineers distributed as widely as applications. Our technical environment and tooling ecosystem have changed radically from the original conditions in which DevOps was created. So what's next? Learn about the next phase of DevOps: a distributed model that emphasizes swift development, observable systems, accountable engineers,...
Dev Team Metrics That Matter
The truth is, no one really likes being measured, especially devs. But business leaders like looking at numbers, so they grab what’s easily available - # of code changes, agile velocity, individual developer metrics. These types of metrics are unbalanced, exclude context, and hurt engineering culture as a whole.
Measuring should start by answering the question “What is the most valuable outcome?”
Why? Because what you measure is what your team will produce. If you start measuring the number of code changes as a key performance metric, you are going to see coding time, PR size...
Thursday, November 18
A Team Retrospective on Value Stream Management
In this session, Hope will be walking through a Value Stream Management retrospective about a team and an organization I worked with a few years ago. This team’s work had an outsize impact on the larger organization due to issues with value streams. Now, Value Streams can seem like a huge topic but they can be very straightforward. I hope today is an opportunity to reframe the concept of a value stream in a more approachable way and provide some insight on how you may be able to take action to improve yours if you find yourself in similar circumstances.
Instant and Automatic Network Configuration: As Easy as A-B-CI/CD
The network used to rely on manual configurations, siloed and separated groups, and slow provisioning processes. Thanks to technology advancements, companies can now deploy code hundreds of thousands of times per day, quickly and accurately updating their network configurations and security policies. They can even instantly provision private circuits and SD-WAN from the branch/edge to cloud - and everything in between. NetDevOps automated continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) allows the testing and validation to take place. SD-WAN is NetDevOps, agility, speed and...
It Takes a Village: How to Be a Better Transformational Leader
Jack Welch said it well: “If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.” That’s a scary thought when we consider just how quickly the world of technology is innovating and changing. All of us are striving to help our organizations embrace that change and become more innovative, but it’s easier said than done. Legacy technology, leaders with limited experience and perspective, entrenched processes, overworked teams, and rapidly changing regulatory and market conditions all contribute to making transformation incredibly difficult to adopt....
Improving Agility by Using Customers’ Definitions of “Quality” and “Done”
“Quality”… velocity, productivity, and efficiency? Improved performance? Few or no bugs? Meets stakeholder requirements? “Done”… we did what we planned? Fits business objectives? Coded, tested, documented, and deployable? Remember our customers? The people paying our salaries? Their satisfaction is supposed to be our *highest* priority. But we fall in love with assumptions about users. We burn weeks coding, testing, merging, and releasing product guesses. We move to the next project, interrupted later when we learn that customers aren’t finding much value or quality in that last release....