Agile + DevOps East 2021 - General Management
Customize your Agile + DevOps East 2021 experience with sessions covering general project management.
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
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 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...
Bringing DevOps to an Entrenched Legacy Environment with the Kanban Method
Innovative Silicon Valley companies like Etsy leverage DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices to achieve new levels of automation and agility, shrinking development lead times and deploying to production many times each day. However, many companies struggle to implement these practices for the legacy systems that run their core business. To make matters worse, the agile community offers relatively little practical guidance for implementing DevOps practices in legacy environments. Fortunately, the Kanban Method provides a practical way to gradually evolve these core systems towards...
Stepping Up - Becoming a Leader in Your Team
One of the most difficult transitions to make is from being a member of the team, to owning your former teammates performance reviews. It is awkward. It is stressful. And you can do it! How do you maintain a trusted relationship with your team mates? How do you employ empathy to help yourself understand your team? How do you gain authority and decision making where previously you had none? How do you make decisions that impact the lives of your team in very significant ways? How do you balance your corporate strategic responsibilities with your desire to advocate for your own team member's...
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
Agile Rebels
Agile frameworks such as Scrum and SAFe have gained a massive foothold, but they’re not the only games in town. Some adventurous practitioners have created their own methods to address what they feel are fundamental flaws in existing constructs. Agility is all about adaptation; how did these methodologists sidestep mainstream approaches to find creative solutions to their respective challenges? Explore how the venerable Ivar Jacobsen’s Essence framework aims to break free of all methods. See how BaseCamp’s Ryan Singer formulated ShapeUp to soothe Basecamp’s growing pains. Ron Quartel’s...
The Steam Drill Initiative: Enterprise Modernization through Lean, Agile, and DevOps
Transforming heritage enterprises can be challenging and not for the squeamish. Lean, Agile, DevOps methodologies are instrumental in the successful execution of a business transformation. A holistic strategy with clear initiatives that harness the power of these transformation drivers is critical for success. Also, connecting an organization's strategic imperatives to business outcomes increases the probability of sustaining a business transformation. In this session, Gautham tells the story of the SteamDrill Initiative - a strategic framework for enterprise transformations that focuses...
Leave the Bottleneck on The Bottle: Removing Security Friction in Your DevOps Pipeline
Enterprises embark on Agile and DevOps journeys to improve time-to-market and overall operating efficiency. However if security is not a part of your journey, no transformation is complete as it will continue to drag on productivity and create bottlenecks. Yet despite support from both Development and Security for a shared-services model for Application Security, teams have failed to effectively integrate security into today’s rapid development processes leaving organizations open not only to cyber risk, but overall business risk as they play AppSec roulette when shipping their products...
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....
Agile Transformation : Managing the Devout and the Doubters
You are leading an Agile transformation. There will be some people who resist, who doubt, and you’ll need to care for them. There will also be some people who are very supportive—perhaps too supportive. They will need some attention too, or they can actually damage efforts to mature your organization’s transformation. As part of the leadership team in an organizational transformation effort, you are a pragmatic prophet. There are truths and principles to get across to your people, but also, there is reality and pragmatic considerations to manage. While the principles should hold fast, the...
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Create an Intentional Culture Architecture to Support Your Agile Transformation
Moving towards Business Agility in large organizations is a major undertaking. Such an initiative builds on the foundational practices of Agile teams while encouraging the organization to take a deeper look into underlying principles, behaviors, and beliefs as part of its culture. While traditional management have largely focused on top-down controls we understand that organizations need to behave differently about the organizational structure and to align to deliver value to our customers. We must look at actionable steps that enable responsiveness of an end-to-end value stream. This...