Agile + DevOps West 2023 - Consultant
Customize your Agile + DevOps West 2023 experience with sessions for consultants.
Tuesday, June 6
Creating a High-Performance Agile Team
NewMany 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...
Approaching Conflict Productively
NewWhen it comes to high-performing teams, conflict is inevitable and necessary. The very essence of gaining the best value outcomes is a result of leveraging the wisdom of various perspectives and experiences. Those variances will generate conflict. Yet, this is only a negative if we are unequipped with the knowledge and tools to embrace and approach conflict. In this tutorial, expect to unpack the differences and the relationship between conflict and drama. Discover tools for helping all voices be heard. Plus, have fun practicing skills in preparing how to react to conflicts productively...
The Craft of Highly-Effective Agile Leadership
NewBased on the learning objectives from the iCAgile, Leading with Agility workshop, this ½ day version will explore the craft of agile leadership in guiding your journey to becoming a catalyst leader. Along the way, we'll explore the why of leading with agility, how to develop and grow your personal agility, tactics for developing and deepening your organizational relationships, and approaches for leading cultural and organizational transformation. Critical topics include your responsibility in shaping a culture that is inclusive, safe, empowered, aligned, and results/impact-focused. We also...
Wednesday, June 7
Everyone...Is an Agile Coach
Some perspectives imply Agile Coaching is for a small set of specialized agilists who serve to improve everyone else. Or that it’s a unique role that others, including managers, Scrum Masters, and leaders, will find difficult to impossible to master. This session intends to debunk those notions. Bob Galen subscribes to several generic notions in agile contexts. One is that everyone has leadership potential and can rise to be a leader. And the other is that everyone is a coach, can coach, and has a foundational responsibility to coach, regardless of their role. The only questions are will,...
Avoiding the Chaos of an Agile Transformation
Agile is not a fairy tale. You have to face real life challenges and be well prepared in order to succeed. The reality is the bigger and older your organization is, the more difficult it is to pass through process level changes and that's when chaos is born. Resolving all the issues with chaos could potentially take years. In this session, Peter will share his story of one of his projects where he had to face numerous obstacles as a Test Manager in achieving proper agile implementation and to raise the quality of the products of his client. Some of the obstacles included: - Agile...
DevOps, Development Cadence, and the Product Lifecycle
In many DevOps initiatives, the DORA metrics are treated as the gold standard. When teams have good scores on deployment frequency, lead time for changes, time to recover, and change failure rate, we assume that we are on track, but this steady-state view doesn’t align with the fact that innovation and delivery are often episodic and have cadences that vary cross the product lifecycle. In this session, we’ll look at the general issue of development and delivery cadence, and explore a model based on Kent Beck’s 3X which allows us to interpret and target DORA performance in terms of the...
Reimagining Digital Cloud Transformation: Automation and DevOps Pipeline
Organizations face numerous challenges during their journey to Digital Cloud Transformation—the most pressing challenges are frequent failures and the absence of a “big-picture” mindset. Driven by KPMG’s quest to deliver a superior customer experience, their Digital Cloud Transformation framework delivers improved quality, reduced time to market, reliability, and sustainable Cloud Transformation. Moving away from the archaic approach from replicating traditional regression onto cloud integration validations, KPMG has helped customers minimize risk and increase test coverage by E2E...
Full-Stack Psychological Safety: Go Beyond the Front End
When someone says DevOps, you probably think of tools: parsers, scanners, compilers, version controllers, and more. Or you may think of a cross-disciplined team with mix of skills to take a product from idea to deployment and maintenance. While DevOps does include both, tools and skilled staff are a fraction of what is needed to be successful. In this session, we will present the main ingredient for gaining the full benefits of DevOps: Psychological Safety. Unfortunately, Psychological Safety is often overlooked or over-simplified. If spoken about, it is often addressed in binary terms –...
Thursday, June 8
360 Degree View of Agile Mindsets
Agile presentations frequently discuss the difference between doing versus being agile and the importance of shifting to an Agile Mindset. They also mention the role of an organization’s culture in making that shift. But we don’t spend much time trying to understand the underpinning values that shape those mindsets or the influence that mindsets and culture have on one another. For those of us instantiating agility in an organization, the biggest challenge is working up and down the organizational hierarchy to shift individual mindsets. To do that we have to 1) understand the internal...
Scaling Agile and DevOps Capabilities
It is important for businesses to understand scaling agile and DevOps capabilities before considering an agile transformation. In this session, Dr. Tawanna Sargent will share her experience joining a business that wanted to go through an agile transformation, but leadership didn't know how to make this happen. Dr. Sargent quickly learned about the organization and discovered that structure and alignment did not adhere. This session will dive into the key lessons learned including creating synergy and autonomy in teams, SAFe improving DevOps, identifying ineptitudes, and embracing the...
Using Neuroscience to Boost Your (Scrum) Events
Inspired by Sharon Bowmans’ Training From the Back of The Room, this session will explore how you can use brain science to keep scrum events live, active, and worthwhile. For example, research shows that our brain 'disconnects' after ten minutes when nothing changes. In a training setting, you would use this knowledge to change the setting regularly, or to make short exercises or chunks of information. In a scrum event, you could use this knowledge also. How? That's what we will explore during this session. You will learn about neuroscience and how you can use it to activate your brain and...
Regulated Industries—Is Agility Even Possible?
Agile ways of working are thought by many to be incompatible with the realities of highly regulated industries. Financial services, insurance, healthcare and governmental organizations often are those which could see the most benefits from greater efficiency, transparency, and customer-value focus. However, due to real and perceived constraints of compliance, auditing, validation and related issues, traditional waterfall approaches are the de-facto default for these industries' product development and project management, with the traditional challenges with these traditional methods. Is...