Agile + DevOps Virtual 2021 - Project Manager
Customize your Agile + DevOps West 2021 experience with sessions covering project management.
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
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
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...
Even Large Enterprises Need to be Agile
PreviewTo survive in this digital age of speed, agility, and customer-centricity, large enterprises must focus their efforts towards the delivery of the highest customer value within the shortest amount of time. Large enterprises are forced to operate like start-up companies. The only way to sustainably achieve this is through a Digital Transformation that drives Business Agility. But how can an organization embark on such a transformation? What would it take to transform the embedded practices: legacy applications, inefficient processes, traditional culture? How do we even begin? 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...
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
Remote Onboarding: How to Make the Most of It
PreviewA lot of companies struggle with onboarding remotely. It often happens because of the lack the face to face interactions, communication challenges and difficulties tracking the process and therefore, reveal the potential of the new employees. Moreover, it often leads to overall drop in team performance. Therefore, I'd like to share the recipe of how to iteratively set up the efficient remote on boarding and adaptation period for the agile teams. Among our key success factors we had: cross-teams patterns development, adaptation plan with all team members involvement, challenging...
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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,...
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...
Leadership: From Monolith to Pebbles
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....
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.