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Leadership

Tutorials

TE Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions SOLD OUT
Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 8:30am

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 problems, and (non)agile testing can all contribute to project failure. Jeffery shares practical tips and techniques to identify early warning signs that your agile project might be in trouble and offers suggestions for getting your project back on track. Gain the knowledge you need to guide your organization toward agile project implementations that serve both the business and the stakeholders.

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TM Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Leaders SOLD OUT
Bob Galen, Velocity Partners
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 1:00pm

Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, and training―revolves around the agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized, or, in the worst cases, vilified. Bob Galen contends that there is a central and important role for managers and effective leadership within agile environments. In this tutorial, explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders—those who understand servant leadership and how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the teams’ performance, accountability, and engagement. Investigate training and standards for agile adoption, and situations and guidelines for when to trust the team and when to step in and provide guidance and direction. Explore the leader’s role in agile at-scale and with distributed agile teams. Good leadership is central to sustaining your agile adoption; bad leadership can render it irrelevant or failed. To inspire you and your teams, join Bob to walk the path of the good and examine the patterns of the bad.

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Keynotes

K2 Continuous EVERYTHING: How Agile Is Changing Our World Forever
Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 10:00am

Everywhere we look these days we see the word continuous—continuous delivery, continuous integration, continuous deployment, continuous testing, continuous security, and continuous ______ (fill in the blank). It’s continuous everything! So, what’s happening in our industry? Will a move toward more continuous practices result in better software? Will agile have any long-lasting effect on how software is built, tested, delivered, and maintained? Join Jeffery Payne as he discusses the link between agile and continuous software engineering capabilities. Learn how operating in a continuous manner not only speeds things up but also results in better software quality and security. Discover how the continuous nature of agile is changing our world. Leave with an understanding of what this change means for us as software professionals. Take back knowledge about how we can get more involved in the continuous processes that surround our work.

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K3 Introducing the GROWS™ Method for Software Development
Andy Hunt, Pragmatic Bookshelf
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 8:30am

Agile software development is in a rut. Agile is consistently misapplied, misunderstood, misused, and then, all-too-often abandoned. Worse than that, many popular agile methods are not actually agile. They've remained largely unchanged for more than a decade. And despite preaching inspect and adapt, users adopt and forget, following practices by-the-book and suffering when a practice conflicts with their local context. Join Andy Hunt as he describes the GROWS™ Method—a new approach to software development. The GROWS™ Method is based on four key ideas—the Dreyfus Model of skill acquisition, evidence-based practice, inclusivity, and local customization. The Dreyfus Model speaks to limitations in human cognition and problem solving. Evidence-based practice is a framework for first-class experiments that encourage us to make decisions and answer questions with actual outcomes—not wishful thinking or popular folklore. Inclusivity includes more of the organization than just the developers, and local customization makes adaptation to individual environments a first-class part of the method. It’s now time to grow software development beyond the limitations of agile.

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K4 Scaling Agile: A Guide for the Perplexed
Sanjiv Augustine, LitheSpeed
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 4:15pm

Scrum, XP, and Kanban are familiar agile methods. Now in the second decade of their adoption, agile methods continue to help organizations worldwide respond to change and shorten the time to deliver value. An overwhelming 88 percent of executives cite organizational agility as key to global success. So, in recent years, many have begun scaling their early agile adoptions beyond individual teams to programs, portfolios, and the enterprise. Even though today’s scaling techniques are not yet fully understood, new scaling frameworks continue to emerge. Join Sanjiv Augustine to explore this exciting area and discover approaches to scale agile in a way that makes the best sense for your organization. Learn about scaling frameworks including the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), as well as the simple Scrum-of-Scrums meeting. Join Sanjiv to explore how you can develop a straightforward scaling strategy for your organization.

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Concurrent Sessions

BW1 Passion: What Software Teams and Executives Can Learn from Eco-Pirates
Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 11:30am

On the Animal Planet TV series Whale Wars, a fleet of boats off the coast of Japan ambush migrating dolphins at sea and drive them into a cove, where they’re captured for the theme park industry or killed for food. Their story is featured in the Oscar-winning documentary, The Cove. Having traveled with Sea Shepherd, a marine wildlife conservation organization fighting against this practice, Michael Mah says that agile teams can learn a lot from the passion and self-organizing attributes of environmental activists/eco-pirates. He explores how wildlife conservation teams channel a powerful sense of purpose, practice leadership, use social media, create transparency, build trust, and use metrics and data to command the world’s attention. Hear Michael’s take on what passionate teams muster to move the needle toward a tipping point, and lessons that your software teams can learn from activist teams in the global environmental conservation movement.

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BW4 Leadership Strategy: Influence and Transformation
George Schlitz, Objective Change
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 1:30pm

Many companies strive to transform—to be more lean, more agile, more innovative, more resilient. Introducing these changes can be radical. Success requires mastery of not just the new approaches but also problem analysis, conflict management, strategy, and influence. With myriad practices to choose from, it is vital to have a core set of practices to rely on—practices that can be used every day to lead your organization through the challenges. George Schlitz shares his leadership journey, based on numerous transformation efforts. Evaluate common scenarios that leaders encounter—dealing with conflicting goals or opinions, trying to achieve buy-in for a change, not knowing where to start a big improvement effort, and dealing with stakeholders and their varying degrees of support and resistance. For each scenario, George introduces a technique for success. Practiced regularly, these techniques help ensure that leaders can quickly defuse conflict, facilitate decisions in complexity, understand influence, and adopt strategy continuously.

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BW10 Lean Entrepreneurship for Software Professionals
Thomas Vaniotis, Liquidnet
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 4:15pm

Software teams are faced with the prospect of building a product, only to have unexpected shifts in customer demand, changes in the competitive landscape, or swings in the economic climate undermine their plans and turn their product into expensive waste. What is an entrepreneurially-minded software developer, designer, or tester to do? Thomas Vaniotis guides you toward a shift in thinking that is manifest in the Lean Startup and Lean UX movement. Learn to value information that comes from quickly exposing an idea to market pressures rather than considering the delivery of a particular feature as the goal. Identify wasteful activities in your product cycle and re-invest that energy by innovating around the build-measure-learn loop that drives value. Lean thinking and using meaningful production data to drive decisions will assist you—whether a tester, developer, product manager, or designer—in operating under the uncertain conditions of modern markets, regardless of your company’s age or size.

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BT1 Impersonal Leadership Is Dead: Be Courageous and Connect
Christopher Logan, RoZetta Technology
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 10:00am

Your people make your company worth working for and can propel it to greatness. Do you know the people you work with—their learning styles, what makes them extraordinary, their real motivation? The answers are critical to everyone’s success, making the difference between an alliance of good workers and an exceptional team of great people. Learn how to shift your leadership focus to a true personal connection and gain insight into the people with whom you work. Christopher Logan shares simple but effective methods for true connection, helping co-workers shine in mutually beneficial ways, letting them open up about what they want and encouraging them to be their best. Learn what questions to ask, how to find common ground, broach tough subjects, give room for growth, and get what you both need. Discover how your company culture can become the envy of your industry and how much you can benefit personally from having great people around you.

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BT4 The Show Must Go On: Leadership Lessons from the Theater
John Krewson, MasterCard Worldwide
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 11:30am

When creating a play or movie, what are the first three rules of directing? Casting, casting, and casting. How does Saturday Night Live produce sketch after sketch of comedy? By iterating. John Krewson finds that the principles of leadership and management in the worlds of theatre, TV, and film offer a number of lessons in the management of teams, talent, products, and change. These lessons are invaluable to those who are leading high performing software development teams or managing a software product. John takes you through the journey of creating and delivering theatrical and film productions, then shows how you can use practices like the rehearsal process and the development of a comedy revue to improve the software delivery process. He dives into specific approaches and methods used by performers and directors to harness creativity, develop shared understanding, empower and motivate teams, and manage focus. John shares multiple interactive demonstrations that further illustrate the application of these principles.

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