Agile + DevOps Virtual 2021 - Product Owner
Customize your Agile + DevOps West 2021 experience with sessions for product owners.
Monday, June 7
Foundations of Tech Leadership
NewAccording to a CareerBuilder study, only 40% of new tech leaders receive formal training when they become a boss for the first time. The rest are forced to get scrappy to quickly equip themselves with new skills, techniques, and mindsets to effectively transition into their new roles. Join Kate Wardin to learn tactical techniques and resources for both new and seasoned technical leaders to feel confident in their roles. Interactive group exercises will cover topics such as 1:1s, time management, valuable team metrics, and will help you practice these new ideas and techniques in a safe and...
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
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
Business Agility in Uncertain Times
PreviewThe COVID-19 pandemic crisis has affected businesses across the world. In 2020, we worked hard to execute immediate actions like for 100% Working From Home (WFH) in many countries. Even as things have stabilized, we all know that we are a long way away from the next normal. As a brighter future emerges in 2021, three focus areas for business agility are:
1. Customer-centric Lean Mindset. Developing a customer-centric lean mindset from executives to individual contributors helps drive consistency of purpose and alignment of action end-to-end across the enterprise.
2. Lean...
Overcoming Agile Resistance in Operations
PreviewWhat 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...
Agile in 160 Billion Gallons: When Agile Principles Occur During A Disaster
PreviewWhile 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...
Adapting Agile Methodologies for Use in Regulated Industries Such as Aerospace & Life Sciences
How to adapt agile techniques for planning, development and testing so that they can be used in larger more complex situations that have a high degree of regulatory complexity, such as life sciences, aerospace, automotive and defense. In this session I would like to discuss my experiences with planning, developing and testing software applications in industries such as healthcare and finance that are heavily regulated by the Government, with strict requirements for validation, traceability and evidence. During the session, I will provide several actual examples, based on experiences and...
Innovation: How to Foster It & How to Squelch It
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/...
The Importance of a QMO in World-Class Agile Teams
In today’s competitive environment, being the first to market is critical. But what happens when there’s a heavy focus on building teams and role changes that you place quality aspects of your transformation on the back burner. Your move to agility may run into impediments if you haven’t engaged quality from the beginning, or worse, they rush unfinished or buggy products to market. In our one hour discussion, we’ll talk about how organizations use an Agile Mindset and approach to transition from traditional ways of thinking to include a QMO when delivering quality products and solutions...
Thursday, June 10
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Engage and Delight Your Stakeholders: There's ALWAYS Something to Show
PreviewWhether 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,...
Take your business to the next level with DevOps OKRs
PreviewObjectives 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...
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...
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...
Agile Metrics transformation to fix disconnect between Business and Delivery
PreviewThere is a widespread disconnect between Business and Delivery. These days many delivery teams follow agile principles. Their focus is on improving agile metrics such as sprint velocity,tracking product burnup/burndown etc. However, these metrics/measures do not say anything about the value a user or customer is getting. Business wants to gauge customer satisfaction,employee satisfaction, time to market, innovation, cost, revenue etc. There is a disconnect. Some of the common pitfalls – last-minute surprises, dissatisfied teams, and significant cost impact. Agile metrics...
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Unpredictable scenarios, guide for blind QA
PreviewAt MANGOPAY, service quality is a strategic issue and a major asset for our products. It is therefore essential to test our products before going live. However, it is still difficult to reproduce all the possible scenarios we can have in production on our test environments. Have you ever been asked to reproduce a production behaviour without having the scenario? Have you ever spent hours trying to understand what is happening in production without being able to reproduce the same thing on your test environment? In this discussion, I will share with you how we have been able to...
Friday, June 11
Opening Remarks
Welcoming remarks from Leadership Summit Moderator, Jeffery Payne to kick the Summit off and discuss the days agenda.
Managing the People Side of Change
Change in any size organization happens at the individual’s level. Compelling visions, world class strategies, and an army of consultants are powerless to transform the organization if the needs of the individuals are not incorporated into the program approach. Join Perry Riggs while he looks at the application of ideas from various organizational change management frameworks such as Prosci/Adkar, Lewin, and the Kotter change framework. We will also review ideas from recent literature like Drive by Daniel Pink, Start with Why by Simon Sinek, Dare to Lead by Brene Brown, The Fifth...
Transform Yourself Before Transforming Others
The aspiration of leadership is often rooted in character traits that make effectively leading healthy organizations difficult. Pride, ego, and ambition are powerful internal motivators, but they must be tempered in order for you to grow into the kind of leader your people need. An effective transformation of any kind must start with you to be successful. Join Lee Eason as he shares his stories of leading organizational change while highlighting the personal growth that had to occur for him to be successful. Learn how Lee lead product development turn-arounds and widespread organizational...
Think Tank Discussion Part I: Problem Definitions
Join with your peers in an engaging and highly interactive session to discuss the issues that affect you most. Using answers to the question “As a Leader, What is Keeping You Up at Night?” posed at the opening remarks, participants will form small groups to work on finding solutions to pressing test management issues. Discussions will review identified issues, barriers to change, and focus on innovative strategies and practical next steps. At the end of the think tank, all feedback will be collected and posted online to encourage further collaboration
Think Tank Discussion Part II: Leadership Solutions
Based upon the problem definitions developed during Part I of the Think Tank, small groups will brainstorm on how to best solve these challenges, leveraging the collective wisdom of peers and Summit speakers. Each group will designate a representative to present its results and practice delivery.
Think Tank Discussion Part III: Presentation of Results
Small group representatives will each be given five minutes to present their leadership solutions. Summit participants will vote on which group produced the best solutions.
Wrap-Up
Wrap-up of the Agile + DevOps Leadership Summit.