Agile + DevOps East 2021 - Product Owner
Customize your Agile + DevOps East 2021 experience with sessions for product owners.
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...
Unlock the Full Potential of Your Refinement Sessions
Good refinement makes development more predictable, leads to better solutions, and enables the Product Owner to set the right priorities. Still, many teams fail to unlock the full potential of refinement. Not only is the time spent on refinement often limited, but many of the refinement meetings I join are also inefficient. I meet teams that spent half the meeting watching the Product Owner entering the new backlog items in the workflow system. Although they poker the user stories afterwards, little time is left to discuss the best solution and risks that need to be avoided. I will focus...
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,...
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...
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....
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...
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....