Business User

Tutorials

ME A Product Ownership Practicum for ScrumMasters and Product Owners NEW

Bob Galen, Velocity Partners

Mon, 11/09/2015 - 8:30am

You’ve just been selected by your boss for the Product Owner role … or you’re a newly minted ScrumMaster trying to figure out how it all works … or you’re an experienced Product Owner who is struggling to find balance between your stakeholders, customers, and team … or you’ve just received your CSPO certification but have no experience being a REAL Product Owner. Fear not! Join Product Owner coach and author Bob Galen in this fast-paced, crash course in how to ROCK your new role. Explore the dynamics of user stories, product backlogs, valuation and prioritization, establishing minimal marketable deliverables, and how to deliver high-impact sprint reviews. Bob then raises the bar to talk about product ownership at scale, how to build quality into your products, and how to effectively communicate and negotiate within your organization. Leave this tutorial with the ideas, skills, and techniques to become the Product Owner your boss wants you to be.

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.

TK Mobile App Usability and UX for Developers and Testers

Philip Lew, XBOSoft

Tue, 11/10/2015 - 1:00pm

Many enterprises today are migrating to mobile while new organizations are adopting a mobile-first or mobile-only strategy. Because of the special characteristics of the mobile platform and its user base, usability and the user experience (UX) take on an increased emphasis, although there are currently no formal models describing UX. With SaaS-based business models, where users can pay by the month and switch applications in a heartbeat, UX becomes paramount. Phil Lew explains the definitions of usability and user experience, describes the connections between them, and explores evaluation methods you can use as the first step toward improving UX on the mobile platform. To build a deeper understanding of how to improve your own app’s UX, Phil gives examples to illustrate the good, the bad, and the ugly of mobile UX. Discover key principles for design and evaluation of usability. Develop a methodology for continuous improvement of your users’ experience.

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.

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.

BT7 Requirements Are Simply Requirements—or Maybe Not

Robin Goldsmith, Go Pro Management, Inc.

Thu, 11/12/2015 - 1:30pm

When talking about requirements, people use identical terms and think they have a common understanding. Yet, one says user stories are requirements; another claims user stories must be combined with requirements; and yet another has a different approach. These “experts” seem unaware of the critical inconsistencies of their positions. No wonder getting requirements right remains a major challenge on many projects. Robin Goldsmith analyzes several often conflicting and not-so-shared-as-presumed interpretations of what requirements are, reveals likely implications, and challenges not-so-wise conventional wisdom. Robin describes a more appropriate model of REAL business requirements whats that provide value when combined with product/system/software hows. He introduces the powerful Problem Pyramid™ systematic disciplined guide to help you more reliably get requirements right. With this structure you can more easily see where user stories do—or do not—fit, identify pitfalls of the “as a <role>” format, and reconcile some of the conflicts between user stories, features, use cases, and requirements.

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.