Agile + DevOps Virtual 2021 - Agile Team Member

What happens when you utter the word Agile to someone in your operational organization? Do you often get a negative response or maybe even rolling of the eyes? How often do you hear “we’re not developers, we don’t need to use agile”? In the Technology Operations Center at Capital One, we faced this exact issue. Associates in the center manage high severity incidents and problem management and resisted implementing Agile. Why? Because there are a lot of Agile misconceptions out there and it makes operational teams reluctant to adopt this framework despite the many benefits of using...

While the Agile concepts may sometimes be easy, the why's and how's are a little trickier to wrap your head around. I’ve unfortunately participated in three recent rising flood water events in Houston over the last three years. Employing my agile skills has had a profound impact on the "success of the project". I will be mapping common Agile ideas to dealing with rising water encroaching on your home. I start with an interactive exercise where we talk about flooding, with the outcome being the question: “What do you do when you know that your house might flood?” The answer to this...

Everyone talks about the importance of innovation, but few understand what factors contributes to, and detracts from, true innovation.

This presentation will cover the following: Why is innovation in the workplace important? - Springboard by sharing two stories; one from a company that failed to innovate and one from a company that continually innovates - Whole group discussion on benefits of creating an innovative company culture

Innovation squelchers -What are most people doing to prevent innovative ideas and deliverables? - - What you need to STOP doing - Example/...

Whether you are in a large or small organization, we all have to convey and demonstrate our accomplishments in our software. Many of us struggle finding what to show, especially if it’s not a UI. In this presentation, we'll walk through various aspects of presenting software: presenting basics, how to prepare, how to convey your ideas, how to keep their attention, tips and tricks, remote presentations, and finally how to convey specific software topics. The entire presentation will be a culmination to that last topic: how to convey specific software topics, like spikes, backends,...

Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs are a popular concept nowadays. The reason why OKRs work is because they are about motivation (teams setting objectives that they are passionate about), collaboration (people who have similar passion collaborating to achieve results), and innovation (no one tells them how to achieve these results). OKRs are aligned across the organization so that everyone has a chance to contribute. One of the primary areas where OKRs are extremely important and not yet fully discovered is DevOps. The topic OKRs with a focus on one of the most complex and...

If you have a small team on a greenfield project DevOps is easy to get started; your code is not that complex and you environment need tend to be limited. To do it appropriately for a 1,000 or 10,000 person shop with legacy code is orders of magnitude more complex. You have to do it with slices of the organization. You need to move through various stages of DevOps maturity. In this session we will walk you the practices to implement and the appropriate order to implement them to ensure you get valuable outcomes along the way. We will start with how to approach teams that are just...

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...

When working with medical products, the verification process can be a real pain – especially when dealing with completely new QA team, complex hardware/software setup and collaboration of multiple scattered teams. My first release as a System Test Manager was a real struggle – stress, overtime, exceeding deadlines and a lot of uncertainty. But I’ve learned my lesson and focused on preparing and building the team with the right skill set and competencies. Now each team member is a leader in his own field, with set of responsibilities and me acting as a glue to hold them all together....