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Personal Improvement

Tutorials

MM Innovation Thinking: Evolve and Expand Your Capabilities
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 1:00pm

Innovation is a word frequently tossed around in organizations today. The standard cliché is “Do more with less.” People and teams want to be innovative but often struggle with how to define, prioritize, implement, and track their innovation efforts. Jennifer Bonine shares the Innovation Types model to give you new tools to evolve and expand your innovation capabilities. Find out if your innovation ideas and efforts match your team and company goals. Learn how to classify your innovation and improvement efforts as core (to the business) or context (essential but non-revenue generating). With this data, you can better decide how much of your effort should be spent on core versus context activities. Take away new tools for classifying innovation and mapping your activities and your team’s priorities to their importance and value. With Jennifer’s guidance you’ll evolve and expand your innovation capabilities on the spot.

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Keynotes

K1 The Care and Feeding of Feedback Cycles
Elisabeth Hendrickson, Pivotal
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 8:30am

Nothing interrupts the continuous flow of value like bad surprises that require immediate attention—major defects, service outages, support escalations, and even scrapping capabilities that don’t actually meet business needs. We already know that the sooner we discover a problem, the sooner and more smoothly we can remedy it. Elisabeth Hendrickson says that feedback comes in many forms, only some of which are traditionally considered testing. Continuous integration, acceptance testing, and cohort analysis to validate business hypotheses are all examples of important feedback cycles. Elisabeth examines the many forms of feedback, the questions each can answer, and the risks each can mitigate. She takes a fresh look at the churn and disruption created by having high feedback latency. Elisabeth considers how addressing bugs that are not detracting from business value can distract us from addressing real risks. Along the way, Elisabeth details fundamental principles that you can apply immediately to keep your feedback cycles healthy and happy.

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Concurrent Sessions

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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BW9 Testing Is the Profession I Chose
Jyothi Rangaiah
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 2:45pm

Never underestimate the power of sharing the testing team’s achievements, lessons learned, challenges faced, roadblocks encountered, and the enriching solutions found. Jyothi Rangaiah says as testers we must be ready to nurture the needs of testing and testers in the organizations we serve. Only people, learning every day and questioning the norm, can and will move testing forward. Getting into this learning mode requires awareness of the need to improve. Jyothi discusses the importance of sharing the testing team’s everyday challenges and achievements with all involved.

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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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BT8 Soft Skills You Need Are Not Always Taught in Class
Jon Hagar, Independent Consultant
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 1:30pm

For years in the software industry, the focus of discussion, programs, and expense has been on career skill development to enhance team performance. To support skill development, a variety of certifications and training opportunities have been created to increase technical knowledge acquisition. Gaining technical knowledge is important, but this knowledge is often secondary to having other skills that are of more value to the organization. Jon Hagar explores these so-called “soft” skills—analysis, rational thought, communication, mentoring, technical debt management, reframing problems, modeling, time management, and social aptitude—and discusses the differences between knowledge from study and practiced skills. Delegates are asked to consider the value and to discuss how to develop and improve such skills. Finally, through an entertaining analogy Jon highlights the differences between skill and knowledge.

 
 

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BT11 You Don't Have All the Answers: So Stop Giving Advice and Start Asking Questions
Judith Mills, Judith Mills LLC
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 3:00pm

Many of us are raised to recognize the value of experts. When we work in a technical arena, seeing our own value as experts is re-enforced. We often are rewarded or promoted based on our knowledge. Our tendency is to want to solve problems by giving our colleagues, teams, and mentees sound advice. Judith Mills says this approach is often counterproductive because, in doing this, we take ownership of the problem. Rather than allowing them to solve their own problems, we can thwart their growth and, in the process, become a bottleneck. Learn the benefits and techniques (and when to use them) for transferring responsibility to the person or teams with the problem. Explore how to use questions to empower others to solve their problems by helping them walk through the situation and recognize the major hurdles. Join Judith to discover when we should allow them to work it out and when we should help solve the problem directly.

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