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Agile Leadership Summit

Agile Leadership Summit—Increasing Leadership Mastery
Thursday, November 12 • 5:30pm–7:30pm and Friday, November 13 • 8:30am–4:00pm

(Additional registration is required to attend)   

Tricia Broderick,
Pearson
Summit Chair

As leaders, we put our teams and organizations first. We have a responsibility to foster continuous learning and improvement. The trick is introducing change in a way that is effective, non-invasive, and lasting. If this were easy, it would not be called leading. So, where do we start? Take the time and challenge yourself to increase your leadership mastery.

Participants in the Agile Leadership Summit learn from and work with experienced agile leaders who have led lasting change and produced a thriving agile culture. Learn ways to challenge your personal leadership growth. Discover ways to lead your organization including communication interpretations, anti-fragile approaches, visual data information radiators, and more.

Tricia Broderick, the program chair and facilitator for the Agile Leadership Summit, works with leadership teams to foster high performance. Working in small groups, Tricia guides participants to gain insight into their biggest challenges. Share your experiences with your peers, use the power of the brain trust in the room, and build a fresh perspective. Leave with tactical steps you can use to bring about the change, results, and the competitive business advantage you desire.

Noopur Davis, VP of global quality at Intel ISecG, is a leader who has successfully demonstrated an agile mindset and her leadership mastery. Noopur shares her personal leadership journey and Intel’s approach for leaders to create a culture of quality.

Mike Longin and Prateek Singh, software development managers at Ultimate Software, are leaders who successfully experimented with how to lead through leveraging data. Mike and Prateek share Ultimate Software’s journey—what data worked, what data was unnecessary, and how this approach has increased their effectiveness as leaders.

Jake Calabrese and Doc List are experienced agile coaches who have helped leaders learn how to increase both their personal mastery and their team’s mastery. Jake’s and Doc’s success is based on years of deep practice on how leaders communicate, how leaders respond to conflict, and how to breed an agile mindset in your teams, customers, organization—and yourself.

Bring your challenges, experiences, curiosity, and an open mind. Leave with a short list of things you can work on immediately and other breakthrough ideas for the long term.

 

 

SMT1 Creating a Culture of Quality
Noopur Davis, Intel ISecG
9:00 AM

Culture is what people do when no one is looking. So, how do we go about creating a culture of quality when we are starting from chaos? Can this even be done? Is agile the answer? Or does culture eat process for lunch? Noopur Davis believes that it is possible to create a culture of quality and that agility provides the foundation for doing so. A quality culture has multiple dimensions—product quality, continuous improvement, product security, non-functional attributes, and a product lifecycle framework that allows multiple functions across the organization to collaborate to deliver awesome products. To an engineer focused on product development, this can feel like death from a thousand paper cuts. You must be agile and conform to our quality standards and satisfy the requirements of our systems development lifecycle. We have found that a holistic approach works best—change, driven from the top and the bottom, using agility as the vehicle to deliver quality and security via the agile Definition of Done. Join Noopur to learn more about this holistic approach and her experiences—both successes and failures—in fifteen years of working with organizations and leading Intel Security’s journey toward creating a culture of quality.

Learn more about Noopur Davis.

Successful organizations are based on relationships that work. We must be free to collaborate and interact with others on our teams and throughout our organizations. We should be moving beyond strong relationships to antifragile relationships, which actually benefit from healthy conflict. For example, we frequently hear from leaders that they have an open door policy, but when we talk to others in the organization, they say they have no way to raise issues or new ideas. This stems from not having clear agreements in place that everyone trusts. Like agile, creating antifragile relationships is a journey and mindset. To truly “be agile,” we need to continuously improve our relationships. Join Jake Calabrese to explore this concept by learning about and practicing a number of tools you can use individually and with teams—from delivery to leadership teams—to help your organization move toward a space where they can thrive. We will first focus on ourselves, looking at what we can bring to the table, and what we can do and be. Then we’ll begin to practice building an advanced team alliance, plan for potential conflicts in advance, and dive into a number of common issues contributing to toxic organizational situations.

Learn more about Jake Calabrese.
SMT3 You Said WHAT?
Doc List, Doc List Enterprises
1:00 PM

Most of us take language for granted. We use words without thinking about how they may affect others, and then we’re surprised at the reaction we get. In an interactive format, Doc List presents a challenge to identify loaded words in seemingly simple statements and questions. For instance, “Why didn’t you write the executive summary?” is quite different from “I thought you were going to write the executive summary.” One is a challenge or criticism; the other is a statement of what’s on your mind. Based on education and years of interacting with and observing people, Doc understands the importance of being more aware of the words we choose, the impact those words may have, and the importance of language in building and maintaining high-performing teams and organizations. Join Doc to gain a new understanding of the subtle—and sometimes not so subtle—differences between what we think we’re saying, what we mean to say, and what might be heard. Doc then explores some techniques to help us be clearer in what we say, how we say it—and how we can resolve the differences. Expect to engage in discussion and reflection as part of the activity, gaining greater insight into the use of language, and how language affects interactions and teams.

Learn more about Doc List.
SMT4 Leading with a Data-Driven Approach
Mike Longin, Ultimate Software
Prateek Singh, Ultimate Software
2:30 PM

All too often, we leaders are held accountable for making business critical decisions with limited options and based mostly on gut feelings rather than actual data. Over the past ten years as we moved from waterfall to Scrum to kanban (and in some cases back to Scrum again), we have uncovered a consistent thread in our decision-making—we were in that same gut-feeling boat. Recognizing that instinct simply wasn’t good enough, we decided that a data-driven approach was not only necessary but essential to creating a culture of success. Today, the teams at Ultimate have boiled down the standard visualizations and charts into simple, tile-based scorecards. Join Prateek Singh and Mike Longin to learn how these cards allow Ultimate to quickly assess at a glance the health of the team and the products they are developing. Explore the common challenges faced by an enterprise-sized adoption of agile and how Ultimate has used data to confront these challenges head-on including how our major ceremonies have been adapted to bring data into our decision-making process.

Learn more about Mike Longin and Prateek Singh.