Agile + DevOps West 2023 - General Management
Customize your Agile + DevOps West 2023 experience with sessions covering general project management.
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
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...
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 –...
Are You Scaling Agile or Just Failing Agile?
One of the limitations of standard agile methodologies is that they are designed to operate primarily at the team level, with product owners, developers, testers, and other disciplines working together as a single team. So when you want to adopt agile practices on large programs or within large organizations, you will need to think about how do you scale your agile processes. However, many of the “off the shelf” agile processes are not really agile at all, resulting in organizations breaking one of the cardinal rules of the agile manifesto - individuals and interactions over processes and...
Driving Innovation in Agile Organizations
Pause to innovate, and your company will cease to exist pretty quickly thereafter. In the current business climate, “innovation” should not just be a part of your company’s vision, but it also needs to be embedded in the cultural fabric of your organization and must be practiced relentlessly. As companies brace themselves for agile transformation, one key area that needs the utmost attention is—how to build a culture of innovation that can coexist with the agile delivery framework, or SAFe as we know it. In this session, we will focus on the significance of innovation and how an agile...
Thursday, June 8
What Does a DevOps Manager Do?
As a DevOps Manager, Jessica Fritsch often finds herself educating people about what she does and why she does it whenever she joins a new team or organization. She also finds engineers have lots of questions about management and if they really want to go down that path in their career. This session will address both of these problems - educating people about what a DevOps Manager's job is like, so that current DevOps Managers and engineers looking to get into management have a answer to the question, "What does a DevOps Manager do?" Highlights from this session will include a day in the...
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...
The Power of Personal Engagement
Two steps forward in professional scrum. Come and explore the advantages of personal engagement. What makes a team thrive? How do you increase the maturity of a scrum team? What tools can you use to wake up from zombie scrum? Do you want to understand how to increase your team's engagement and help your team grow? In this session, we will help you advance forward by using scientific principles and practical tools by starting with personal engagement. We will share how to increase personal engagement, we will provide you with tools to get everyone involved, and we will help you gain insight...
The Impact of Leadership Effectiveness
Leaders often don’t realize how their style impacts the people around them or their business results. Effective leaders give their businesses strategic and competitive advantages. During times of transformation, people’s feelings are heightened, from loss of control, interruption of power, fear of failure. We fall into reactive fear-based patterns instead of coming from a place of curiosity and creativeness. Organizations that commit to growing more effective leadership find they attain and sustain high levels of business performance. We are all leaders and can involve our entire...