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Leadership

Tutorials

MA Practical Agile Metrics for Release Planning, Estimation, and Retrospectives
Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.
Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

How do you compare the productivity and quality you achieve with agile practices with that of traditional waterfall projects? Join Michael Mah to learn about both agile and waterfall metrics and how these metrics behave in real projects. Learn how to use your own data to move from sketches on a whiteboard to create agile project trends on productivity, time-to-market, and defect rates. Using recent, real-world case studies, Michael offers a practical, expert view of agile measurement, showing you these metrics in action on retrospectives and release estimation and planning.

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MD Giving Great Presentations: The Art of Stage Presence NEW
James Whittaker, Microsoft
Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

Every hour of every day in every country where business is conducted, the same scene plays out―dozens of well-paid people sitting in a conference room being bored senseless. Death by a thousand slides. This mind numbing, soul crushing, grotesquely expensive experience ends here and now! James Whittaker reveals the secrets to conceiving, building, and delivering a great presentation. Whatever your level of presentation skills, this tutorial will hone them. Learn how to build a compelling story from the ground up. Receive advice on how to remember and recall that story as you deliver it.

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MG Solving Real Problems through Collaborative Innovation Games®
Michael Vizdos, Vizdos Enterprises, LLC
Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

Are you having trouble getting people in your organization to agree on a path forward? Is collaboration sometimes more like a contest to see who can yell the loudest? Is it difficult to get customers to give you the information you need to create a product charter or unambiguous requirements? Achieving meaningful collaboration with a diverse group of people can be very difficult. Michael Vizdos shares his experiences with Innovation Games®, collaboration exercises that dramatically improve the way people work together.

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TC Leadership and Career Success—On Purpose NEW
James Whittaker, Microsoft
Tue, 06/03/2014 - 8:30am

Line up all the successful people in the world. Take away the pedigreed and the prodigies—you know the people who are going to succeed no matter what. Remove the brown-nosers and right-time-right-place lottery winners. And who do you have left? People who succeeded on purpose. Study these folks carefully, and you’ll find theirs paths to the top have common themes. James Whittaker exposes the career strategies of the ultra-successful and analyzes them in detail.

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TK Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Leaders NEW
Bob Galen, Velocity Partners
Tue, 06/03/2014 - 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 workshop, we’ll 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.

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Keynotes

K2 For Maximum Awesome
Joe Justice, Scrum, Inc
Wed, 06/04/2014 - 10:15am

An agile hardware and engineering company of 500 collaborators in twenty countries, Team WIKISPEED uses test-first development practices, is run by Scrum teams, and produces road legal cars, micro-houses, and social-good projects. Joe Justice shares how their 100-MPG road car was created in just three months through object-oriented design, iterative development, and agile project management.

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K3 An Agile Throwdown: Munich Takes on the Columbus Agile Benchmark Study
Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.
Thu, 06/05/2014 - 8:30am

Agile has not only gone mainstream, it’s gone global. Data on agile team performance, time-to-market, and quality have emerged in the past decade. In 2012, a group of Columbus, Ohio, companies—business, IT, and financial services firms—participated in the first ever “Columbus Agile vs. the World” study. They collected velocity, schedule, effort, staffing, and quality data which were compared against QSM’s Software Lifecycle Management (SLIM) database. Analysis revealed delivery was 31 percent faster with 75 percent fewer defects than industry norms. Enter Munich, Germany.

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K4 Producing Product Developers
David Hussman, DevJam
Thu, 06/05/2014 - 3:45pm

Many teams and organizations have found agile methods help them produce more. Where critical thinking is alive, a more important question arises: Are we producing the right thing? Even though agile tools and processes have helped produce more, they often fail to help us produce the right product, change our focus to product over process, or improve product learning.

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