Better Software West 2018 - People and Teams
Monday, June 4
Agile Managers: Nurture Your Teams to Thrive
For most managers Agile is a totally different way of work that requires a particular style of leadership. However, agile transitions often fail to provide adequate guidance on how a manager fits into an agile organization. Your role and responsibilities need to change as the organization changes. You must learn to coach, remove obstacles, and model new styles of communication. In this interactive session, learn how you can flourish as an agile manager as you nurture your teams to thrive. Join seasoned leadership coach Selena Delesie as she discusses the differences between traditional and...
Rethinking Your Retrospectives
The retrospective is the most important ceremony that an agile team performs. Continuous improvement ideas, team health concerns, organizational impediments, and shared wins are brought to light and explored during a retrospective. This is the heart of agile. Ryan Ripley says that if you aren’t doing retrospectives, you’re missing an incredible opportunity to collaborate and improve as a team. Learn how to get started with retrospectives and take away solid action items to get this important tool implemented on your team. For those already using retrospectives—but still unsure how to get...
The Lost Art of Live Communication: Get Connected to Your Customers
Have you ever been in the same room with co-workers and sent them a Slack or text message instead of having a live conversation? Many people are starting to prefer virtual or instant chat messaging to live conversations, but live communication can get better results at work—and with your customers. As technology professionals, we often focus more on technical skills and ignore the important communication skills. Join Jennifer Bonine to see how to make the most of—and get the best results from—your live conversations. Jennifer shares a toolkit to help you assess your core communication...
Coaching Workshop: Taking Your Scrum to the Next Level
Are you struggling to achieve results from your agile and Scrum teams? Are you having trouble with user story writing or with effective estimation and forecasting? Are your sprint reviews and retrospectives low focus and low energy? What about gaining traction on the organization-side of things? Do your leaders actually understand the underlying principles? Are they measuring things properly? And what about Scrum at Scale—how’s that going? If you have questions, any questions, about how to improve specific practices or generally how to improve your agile journey, then this tutorial is for...
Tuesday, June 5
Learning How to Lead High-Performing Agile Teams
Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, training, and even the empathy—revolves around the agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized at best, and in the worst cases even vilified. But Bob Galen and Mary Thorn contend that there is a central and important role for managers and leaders within agile environments. Join Bob and Mary as they explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders. Examine why those who understand servant leadership know how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the team's...
Leaders: Getting Real without Getting Fired
Are important words often left unsaid at your place of work? Do you feel like you're navigating a complex maze in conversations? Does your message tend to miss the mark with co-workers, who increasingly seem to be impediments to your reaching your goals? Trust and communication issues within the workplace can hollow out an organization. When organizations suffering from a lack of trust, it costs them speed, productivity, and collaboration. Join Allison Pollard and Marcus King as they share models to evaluate your own behaviors and facilitate activities to help you find your voice for...
Chartering Agile Teams: Conditions for Success
Team charters are essential, but there's no specific formula for how to effectively create them or what to include. Each element of the team charter is specific to each team. There can be a framework for developing the charter, but it must be a collaborative effort of—at a minimum—the members of the team. Join Doc List as he shares his often-used framework, the key steps in crafting a charter, and the activities that are a must for the process. Explore aspects of setting specific constraints or criteria for the team, particularly Definition of Done and Definition of Ready, and see examples...
What's Your Leadership IQ?
Have you ever needed a way to measure your testing leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that. This toolkit includes a personal assessment of your leadership competencies and the evolution of testing and testing leadership. Join Jennifer as she explores a set of eight dimensions of successful leaders, provides suggestions on how you can...
Wednesday, June 6
Five (Oops! I Mean Six) Mistakes Leaders Make
PreviewThe world of work is transforming at an unrelenting pace. Product development is increasingly more complex and uncertain while the speed of decisions and delivery is escalating at an exponential pace. Many of us are unaware of how our thoughts and actions work against our own objectives and our organizations’ goals and needs. Pete Behrens illustrates how leadership agility improves self-awareness, amplifies decision-making, improves outcomes, and grows resilience and capacity in highly complex and fast-paced environments. Sharing stories from his two decades of personal experience—...
Leadership from Within an Agile Team
Teams struggle for many reasons, leaving people frustrated, complacent, and content to exist in mediocrity. There is a secret sauce that propels individuals, teams, and entire organizations to be really successful. And that secret is effective leadership! And not just the executives, managers, or those with leader titles get to lead – everyone does. The real benefits of agile emerge when each person embraces their personal leadership. By embracing our inner leader, we are able to engage our team, improve the value and quality of our deliverables, and gain the competitive edge the agile...
Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Testers
Testing in agile teams is still one of the great mysteries of the agile world. In many organizations, testers continue to be marginalized. In others, testers are active but rarely understand or reach the full potential of their role. In this session, Shaun Bradshaw, an experienced agile coach and tester, will explore the practices and mindset of fully empowered agile testers on high-performance agile teams. Throughout Shaun’s agile coaching experience, he’s seen it all—from total dysfunction to high performance and everything in between. He’ll share with you real-world tactics to help you...
A Case Study in Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement
Continuous improvement is the goal of agile teams. But what does it look like when we create a continuous improvement strategy beyond our agile teams and bring it to the company level? Working at Spotify, Kevin Goldsmith saw the benefits of its fantastic continuous improvement culture. When he joined Avvo as its new CTO, his primary goal was to help Avvo create that culture for itself. In this session, Kevin will show what Avvo has done to build a foundation for a continuous improvement culture. He’ll explore the frameworks used to create highly engaged teams and share the organizational...
Faster Food and a Better Place to Sleep: Applying Agile Outside Software
Agile methods aren’t just for software anymore—actually, they haven’t been for quite a while. Agile's collaborative, iterative, incremental approaches to work have caused it to go mainstream. But can we apply team-based agile straight out of the box in a nonsoftware context? Although most of the principles and patterns apply, sometimes the practices and frameworks need modification for a particular context. Mike Cottmeyer will explore two case studies of agile journeys: an international hotel chain going through a major rebranding initiative, and a well-known fast food restaurant looking...
Create Influence, on Demand
PreviewThe effectiveness of agile approaches are built on influence rather than authority. Practices like collocation and stand-ups actually amplify influence, leveraging behavior patterns built into humans through biology and social conditions. In this workshop, Bernie Maloney will show you how to unpack some fundamental influence patterns, gleaned from typical collaboration ceremonies, and turn them into conscious tools for leadership. Through interactive exercises, you’ll amplify and practice your ability to influence by quickly establishing and building rapport via all forms of active...
Methods for Handling Key-Person Dependencies in Agile Teams
On any team, from infrastructure engineering to development to HR, there is always a looming danger of one individual being the only person capable of performing a key task, either because of their technical skills, domain skills, or business experience. The risks of having key-person dependencies—reduced productivity, inaccurate project estimates, morale problems, delays, and business-impacting defects and downtime—are hard to identify and can be even harder to resolve. Lee Eason is a leader and coach who has experienced this problem for so long, he finally decided to do something about...
Thursday, June 7
Collaborative Curiosity
Let's try an experiment. Rather than trying to figure out what you need or want to hear from a keynote, we propose your taking over as the product owner and driving the discussion? Join Ryan Ripley and Faye Thompson as they take your most pressing, real-time questions and craft them into an inspiring keynote that is relevant to you and your needs. They will take on all agile topics: How does a team optimize their learning? How do you make it safe to explore, experiment and fail? What should you do when your teams aren’t “buying” self-direction and accountability. What do you do when those...
Conducting Agile Retrospectives That Drive Real Change
Think about your latest retrospective. Were people interested and engaged, or did they complain and accuse? Did you leave the retrospective feeling like you learned something valuable, or were you simply there to check the retrospective off your list? Retrospectives are hard work, but effective retrospectives can have a transformative effect on your team’s performance and, ultimately, your organization’s ability to achieve its goals. Join retrospective expert David Horowitz as he explores tangible steps you can take to turn your retrospectives into the catalyst of continuous improvement...
Fuel Agility with Transparent Expectations
PreviewDo you know how your work is aligned to tactical and strategic goals? Success is rooted in a productive and cohesive team-centered culture. When culture and execution are misaligned, failure is almost certain. Everyone on and around the team must understand their role in defining, delivering, and growing value. It sounds easy, but the discipline can be tough, which leads to disappointments and unwelcome surprises. Nabila Safdar focuses on curating transparent expectations by the following six core practices. First, foster candor and respect. This leads to unity. Second, have fresh...
It's All In Our Heads: Using Neuroscience to Improve Performance
Understanding how our brains take shortcuts to process all the data they take in can help us recognize when its happening, take measures to correct our course, and use that information to build stronger teams. This talk sprang from my curiosity about the intersection of neuroscience and organizational behavior. It is my hope that attendees will leave with the ability to recognize when they and their teams are using processing shortcuts, as well as some techniques for mitigating their impact. Learning Objectives: - Identify several ways in which our brains short cut processing in order to...
Impostor Syndrome: The Innovation Killer among Us
PreviewAs an agile community, we talk a lot about innovation and failure. But we often forget to talk about the head games that keep us from innovating. Billie Schuttpelz unearths those internal dialogues that prevent us from taking risks that drive innovation. Become a part of breaking open the conversation around impostor syndrome—yes, it exists, and it's stealing far too many of our authentic voices. Join Billie to get insights into how imposter syndrome is holding you back. You'll learn three ways to unleash your creative ideas, break free of the swirling thoughts and inactivity that...
Taking Your Team from Dysfunctional to Dynamic
Does it seem like your team is the antithesis of agile? Being negative or fearful, resisting change, or hoarding information are common pitfalls that impede progress and can sink an agile team. How can your team adapt to each other, avoid these patterns, and find its greatness? All teams have people with talents and untapped abilities, but it can be difficult for a team to figure out what works for them, what they have, and what they lack. If your team is struggling to unify, find its stride, or revel in the fun of working together, then this session is for you. Michelle Vician will reveal...
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Brewing Great Agile Team Dynamics: No More "Bitter Beer Face" Communications
Ever find yourself making a sour face after talking to a coworker? Wishing your team meetings felt more like an engaging social hour? There is hope. Those everyday conflicts where something seems “off” after a conversation are often related to differences in communication styles. When team members understand themselves and others, there’s less conflict, more collaboration, and better working relationships. The DiSC model can help you understand why your team behaves the way it does and how to build trust for a more agile team. In this interactive session, agile coaches Allison Pollard and...
The Impact of Agile Quantified
For years, people have made recommendations for how to develop software in an agile way based almost entirely on intuition, folklore, and anecdotes. They've never been able to quantitatively show the accuracy or applicability of these recommendations. This session quantifies those recommendations in the most precise and objective terms, including a presentation of general findings in Larry Maccherone's research correlating agile practices to performance along the dimensions of productivity, predictability, quality, and time to market. These data can be used to make general decisions about...
Three-Minute Improv Games to Improve Your Teams
The problem with many agile teams is that they simply never become a team. This often manifests itself as team members feeling unsafe or not quite trusting each other. This workshop will show you how the same techniques improv theater troupes use to improve collaboration, creativity, and communication can be used to help agile teams, too. The three-minute improv warm-up games Wayde Stallmann will lead you through in this session—including improv's famous "yes, and" technique—will help you learn to establish trust, improve collaboration, and learn how to provide a safe environment for your...