Agile + DevOps Virtual 2021 - Consultant
Customize your Agile + DevOps West 2021 experience with sessions for consultants.
Monday, June 7
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 Mary and Leon as they share tools and experiences coaching in all directions. They will review three different coaching models from the X-Wing, to Powerful Questions, to 9-Stances, to the Agile...
Tuesday, June 8
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, June 9
Terraform Infrastructure as Code: Best Practices and Common Mistakes
PreviewTerraform is one of the most common coding platforms for managing cloud infrastructure as code. I have been using Terraform to manage infrastructure on the cloud for several years now. Additionally, I coach DevOps teams in large enterprises that implement 100% infrastructure as code. Everything in this presentation comes from experience. I'll guide you through a series of best practices including source code management, environment management, execution through pipelines, modularizing Terraform code so it can be reused across the enterprise, and much more. Additionally, I'll review...
Tightening the Nuts and Bolts of Agile at Scale Program Management
Applying Agile ways of working to large complex programs involves more than merely teaching your teams to sprint. It requires the building blocks of strategic planning, road mapping, and backlog prioritization to properly plan the work and deliver customer-centric value. In this session we will look at these essential components of Agile at Scale Program Management to successfully deliver large, complex solutions that entail both custom development and large, off-the-shelf COTS programs. Specifically, we will discuss the following topics: 1. How to apply Agile principles to At Scale...
Thursday, June 10
What Can We Learn about our Agile Transformations from Wardley Maps?
PreviewAfter over a decade of agile transformations, many organizations are looking for signs that the change is complete. You are faster, more focussed, and delivering a product with higher quality, but when are you done? Models of Agile maturity have emerged that promise to measure “how agile you are”, with some mythical end point. By introducing a Wardley Maps in the context of business agility, you will be able to map out the path of your transformation, fill in any gaps that you may have, and begin to understand what direction your transformation may take you in the future. Business...
Leading Courageously When Vulnerability Looks & Feels So Scary
Many people believe that you either are born with courage or you're not. Thankfully, Dr. Brené Brown's research shows that you can learn to be courageous! There are four skill sets of courage, and by applying these, you can learn how to have tough conversations, hold yourself and others accountable, reset after a setback, and how to build trust. During this session, you will receive an understanding of all four skill sets, and then dive deeper into the second skill set: LIVING into Our Values. This is a mix of talk and workshop: The first 30 minutes are providing color and context, and the...
Lost in the forest: Tying transformation metrics to business outcomes
PreviewHave you ever looked at a dashboard and felt lost? Have you been asked the question “why are we doing this?” and your answer has been “everyone is doing it.” Have you struggled to explain how your actions are going to benefit your business partners? Let’s explore ways to tie our metrics, progress, and transformation activities to business outcomes that matter to our organizations. We’ll start the session discussing why it’s important to map our transformation activities and metrics to organizational goals. We’ll also review real life examples of completed visual maps. You might be...
Talking to People: Changing Patterns in a Shelter-in-Place World
Communicating honestly and effectively with team members and stakeholders is difficult enough when we are face to face. We have the tendency to not express disagreement or bad news, ultimately putting off potentially unpleasant conversations. Due to an ability to put off such discussions in a fully distributed setting, disagreements or software problems can rapidly escalate out of control in a rapid-paced development and testing team. The result can be poor code quality, missed deadlines, and team friction, imperiling the success of the project. Today’s virus pandemic makes it...
Continuous Evolution to Product Centric Operating Model: Enable Teams to Fly
Everywhere we hear and see software driven organizations have led and dominated their industry. An essential ingredient has been a shift to Lean Agile mindset and product centric operating model built on three pillars – product & portfolio management, product development & delivery and product enablement. These unicorns begin each mission with what problems we need to solve, what culture we want to build, what good looks like? Then align expectations with leaders that change is a journey and not a destination. They experiment and iterate, celebrate small wins, learn from failures...