Agile + DevOps West 2019 - Career/ Personal Development
Monday, June 3
If Negotiating with Stakeholders is Not Working for You - Techniques and Strategies for Effective Negotiation
Preview NewDoes the idea of just thinking about negotiating with a difficult person give you anxiety? If so this tutorial is for you! This tutorial is specifically about negotiating and leadership: how to deal with difficult people and sticky problems. Join Catherine Louis as she walks you through several negotiation techniques. Armed with these new techniques, we will then “learn by doing” covering the following sticky sample negotiating exercises:
Dealing with a difficult stakeholder The customer is about to fire you, what do you do? The QA manager is not investing in her people. The...
Unleash Your Organizational Superpowers With Liberating Structures
NewUnleash innovation with the simple rules of Liberating Structures. Using a subset of these 33 micro-structures, you'll learn how to enable groups of any size to work at the top of their intelligence. Liberating Structures offer a revolutionary solution to collaboration in groups by using a handful of simple rules to unleash and involve everyone. Learning to use Liberating Structures is like learning a new language. We will start with the basics - "1-2-4-all". Then we'll put them together into simple structures using "Appreciative Interviews". Finally, we'll move to advanced structures like...
What's Your Leadership IQ?
Have you ever needed a way to measure your testing leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that. This toolkit includes a personal assessment of your leadership competencies and the evolution of testing and testing leadership. Join Jennifer as she explores a set of eight dimensions of successful leaders, provides suggestions on how you can...
Tuesday, June 4
Introduction to DevOps with Chocolate and LEGOs
Preview NewOrganizations today can no longer afford to deliver new features to their respective markets once a year or even once a quarter. In the attempt to catch up with the competition, they jump onto DevOps journey starting with the "How" and losing the sight of "Why" and "What". Join this gamified simulation tutorial to gain a solid understanding of foundational principles of the DevOps culture. Experience the benefits of DevOps transformation even before initiating one in your enterprise! This tutorial is ideally designed for organizations that are evaluating their approach to DevOps...
Learning How to Lead High-Performing Agile Teams
Sold Out!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...
Wednesday, June 5
Engaging the Other Half of the Room
Do you often attend meetings or events where participation is left to only half the room, while the others sit quietly, waiting for it to be over? Organizational habits across the globe have unintentionally implemented tactics that exclude people and are anticollaborative. Join Todd Miller to explore as a group the use of liberating structures as an answer to this problem. Learn different ways to facilitate events so that the outcome involves every mind in the room. Come prepared to participate in this interactive session to learn ways of getting everyone engaged.
Escaping the 9 Circles of Agile Hell
PreviewDoes it feel like you're toiling away in agile hell? Fear not—you don't have to be confined there for all eternity. Dave Bujard and Chris Stemen will describe the nine circles of agile hell, each an example of a problem that exists in many programs. They'll discuss the underlying issues that often are the cause and how to deal with them. Bring your smartphones—during the first five minutes, Dave and Chris will ask the audience to prioritize their pain points via an interactive app. During the presentation, they will focus on the six agile hells closest to participants' experiences...
Leadership in the Age of Agile
Do you want to grow your organization’s ability to respond to market opportunities, competitive pressures, or opportunities for innovation? Then join Ryan Ripley as he explores how leadership in an agile world has sparked a change in the way we show up as leaders and managers in our organizations. We’ll discuss how leaders enable agile to thrive and grow, while keeping a laser focus on delivering value to customers and stakeholders. Ryan will address your questions and give you practical tips and ideas that you can start using tomorrow. Join us and learn what professional agile leadership...
You Can't Have DevOps if Fear Is Running Your Workplace
PreviewA number of organizations today start their DevOps initiatives with automation. While it may help them grab the low-hanging fruit, it can only get them so far before they run into a big impediment: fear in the workplace. In these organizations, fear can undermine any further DevOps progress. Just like any other change attempted in pathological or bureaucratic cultures, DevOps can even cause more fear and face strong resistance. Join this interactive session to learn and practice recognizing typical fears and fear symptoms, all based on case studies and stories from medium to large...
Nontechnical Managers Leading Technical Teams
PreviewTechnology is complicated and changes every day. Even leaders with a technical background and deep understanding of tools and processes have trouble keeping up, and it’s virtually impossible to be an expert on every single aspect of a product. How can you help your team if you have no idea what anyone is talking about? Engineers and developers have all experienced the frustration and difficulties of being led by someone deemed “nontechnical,” from promising a customer unrealistic deadlines or solutions to a lack of trust and a complete breakdown in communication. Victoria Guido...
The Lost Art of Live Communication: Get Connected to Your Customers
Have you ever been in the same room with coworkers and sent them a Slack or text message instead of having a live conversation? As technology professionals, we often focus more on technical skills and ignore the important communication skills. Many people are starting to prefer virtual or chat messaging to face-to-face conversations, but live communication can get better results at work—and with your customers. Join Jennifer Bonine to see how to make the most of—and get the best results from—your live conversations. Jennifer will share a toolkit to help you assess your core communication...
Teaming in Agility: The Art of Excellence
Forming around an initiative to deliver productive outcomes can challenge the strongest of teams. It is even more difficult for individuals coming together during the transition. Often the responsiveness of the needs can be lost in process and system assumptions. Individuals under such a charge are left with a sense of being pawns in a chess match, making them feel less human. Teaming falters. Both the leader and the team member have responsibilities: The leader must unravel the complexity of the process, employ a human-first mindset, and foster safety and collaboration; the team member...
Thursday, June 6
Diversity without Disclosure: Rethinking Our Norms
PreviewOrganizational diversity isn't just about the attributes we can see. Every team has members with a near-infinite spectrum of needs, some of which we know about and a lot more we probably don't (and might never). How do we create a safe, accommodating space for things we aren’t aware of? It's possible. For our teams to reflect the diversity of our worlds, HR policies are necessary but not sufficient. Our teams can and should take concrete steps, large and small, to make ourselves more welcoming. You're probably doing some of them already, so let's talk about what works and how we...
Exhaustion Is Not a Status Symbol
We set out to transform the world of work with agile, yet we've heard the Scrum sprint cycle described as a “hamster wheel,” an endless conveyor belt of backlog and sprint reviews that developers cannot escape. Join Melissa Boggs in a discussion about the pitfalls of a competitive culture and how we in the Scrum community, even with the best of intentions, could be accidentally responsible for continuing to spin the hamster wheel. Hero culture has been discussed before, but have we addressed our own potential culpability in creating it? We need to make sure that the principles and...
Brainwriting: The Team Hack to Generating Better Ideas
Brainstorming has long been held as the best way to get ideas from teams. The purpose is to solicit large amounts of ideas in a short timeframe. By putting a collective of creative people in the same room, better concepts should be the outcome. Sounds very agile, right? However, science has shown several times that brainstorming is not the best way to generate ideas. It’s cumbersome due to all of the interdependent activities happening, and you often spend more time thinking about others' ideas than your own. Maybe it's time we try something new. Brainwriting is similar to brainstorming,...
Hacks to Becoming a Mindful Agile Tester
PreviewHave you ever felt like you've been working on multiple tasks all day long, but at the end of the day when you review your work, you realize you haven’t accomplished anything concrete? After years of working in the tech industry, Raj Subramanian realized he was not able to accomplish any task with complete focus and attention. So in 2017, he started a six-month journey of self-exploration and discovery. He read books; listened to podcasts on mindfulness, productivity, leadership, and self-motivation; and tried to apply various concepts learned from this journey in his daily tasks...
Leading in an Era of Constant Change
Change is a good thing. Being a leader in an era of constant change can be frustrating. Putting a company through a significant transformation is a serious process that takes a lot of people, time, and money. However, if your organization doesn't innovate and change by market-driven needs and demands, it will fail—it's just that simple. So, how do you do it? This interactive workshop will introduce five key factors to successful change management. You will experience techniques to get everybody actively involved in transformation, from top-level executives and stakeholders to the team...