Better Software West 2018 - Project Manager
Customize your Better Software West 2018 experience with sessions covering project management.
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...
Lean Software Development: Principles and Practices
Lean software engineering emphasizes continuous delivery of high-quality applications. Ken Pugh explains the basic principles and practices of lean software development, concentrating on developing a continuous flow by eliminating delays and loopbacks; delivering quickly by developing in small batches; emphasizing high quality which decreases delays due to defect repair; making policies, process, and progress transparent; optimizing the whole rather than individual steps; and becoming more efficient by decreasing waste. Ken describes lean’s emphasis on cycle time rather than resource...
Lean/Agile Data-Driven Decisions Demystified
For many agile practitioners, software metrics beyond a burndown chart are little understood or, perhaps, very scary because poor metrics can be worse than no metrics. In this enlightening session, Larry Maccherone explores how you and your organization can use metrics to bring management and lean/agile teams closer rather than allowing metrics to become a wedge that drives them into conflict. Larry covers the entire lifecycle of the metrics process—from metric selection to reporting data. Join Larry to gain an understanding of a wide range of concepts including common (101-level) metrics...
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...
Tuesday, June 5
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...
Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions
Sold Out!Agile initiatives always begin with high expectations—accelerate delivery, meet customer needs, and improve software quality. The truth is that many agile projects do not deliver on some or all of these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or to get an agile project back on track, this tutorial is for you. Jeffery Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues or mitigate their damaging effects. Poor project management, ineffective requirements development, failed communications, software development...
What You Need to be SAFe: Implementing Enterprise Agile
PreviewMaybe you are curious about SAFe—what it’s all about and why you might adopt it. Perhaps your organization is heading toward—or in the middle of—a SAFe transformation and you have questions. If so, join Francie Van Wirkus and Claudia Marquette as they discuss SAFe. Learn to use a proven inquiry strategy, designed to help you and your stakeholders have productive discussions about your work, its current state and its ideal state, and your customers. When you better understand the flow of your work, and you understand all the customers who derive value from it, you can make smarter...
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...
When Continuous Improvement Feels Like Constantly Failing – An Introduction to Design Thinking
Do your Retrospectives feel like a repeat of the last one? Are they moan and groan sessions? Want to try something new to give your team a boost? When design principles are applied to strategy and innovation, the success rate for innovation dramatically improves. Great design has that “wow” factor that makes products more desirable and services more appealing to users. Why not try using known design principles during your retrospectives to get that "wow" factor for your teams! In this session Catherine Louis will provide a Design Thinking overview. You’ll roll up your sleeves up and try it...
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...
Measuring Flow: Metrics That Matter
Are you considering kanban but not sure how you’ll predict delivery without story points, velocity, and a burndown chart? Or are you part of a Scrum team but feeling like your team could benefit from improved flow within your sprints? In this session, join Julie Wyman and Hunter Tammaro as they explore key kanban metrics for measuring team flow and predictability. In the first half, they will introduce metrics including lead and cycle time, throughput, and the cumulative flow diagram. They’ll review what each represents, discuss easy ways to collect them, and show how they are similar and...
Thursday, June 7
Agile 3.0: The Five Secrets Advanced Agile Companies Know
Now that organizations have opted to morph agile into their own homegrown Agile Center of Excellence, many have missed out on simple advanced practices that would allow them to be even more aligned and ready to embrace a more practical agile application. Join seasoned agile coach Lee Henson as he shows you how to leverage internal and external agile service agreements to help guide your teams to a more solid agile footing. He will explore setting a clear vision and strategy by building an “agile press release” and how to embrace estimation excellence for stories, releases, and entire...
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...
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...
Let's (Re)Learn about Agile and Scrum in One Hour!
Every software conference has a number of folks who are brand-new to agile—as well as folks who think they understand it but could use a solid refresher. This interactive presentation will focus on newbies who want to understand the key concepts of both agile and Scrum. Certified Scrum trainer Steven Spearman will give an overview of the key concepts and learning approaches needed to understand agile and Scrum in one hour. While he will cover the structural basics of roles and events, he’ll focus primarily on key concepts of complexity, why traditional methods fail us so often, taking...
Lean-Agile Learning through Games
Most agile practitioners first learn agile by reading a book, attending a class, or attending local meetings. But learning lean and agile concepts works best when we're able to put some concrete examples and practice behind the concepts. By adding a set of games and exercises that teach and reinforce lean and agile concepts to our toolboxes, change agents can provide some practical basis for conversations both inside and outside their organizations. In this talk join experienced agile coach Bill DeVoe, as he shares two of his “go to” games. First, up will be The Name Game, a game that...
Things Are Broken: A Case Study In Moving Too Fast
"Move fast and break things” tells quite a story of the relationship between speed and agile. Speed has been a driver in our industry before it was even an industry. Books promise that certain frameworks can deliver twice as much in half the time, yet teams still struggle delivering what's expected of them. This session describes a six-month case study of a multi-team transformation. The orders were to make the teams deliver faster, but they were consistently missing deadlines. Frustration was on the rise. Only after taking the time to understand what they meant by "faster" could the teams...
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...
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...
Waterfall to Scrum: It Only Goes Up from Here
You’re a project manager using a waterfall methodology, but the team is not making progress on the work and deadlines are not being met. The requirements aren’t clear, scope keeps changing, deadlines won’t budge, and you can’t get more resources on the project. You were doomed from the start! A common solution to this situation is to adopt Scrum, but that can be difficult as well. Join Toiya Jones-Current as she narrates her personal journey and the baby steps she took to successfully switch from waterfall to Scrum and the transition her project team went through to deliver iteratively and...
Essential Product Ownership: It takes a Village
Scrum surfaced in 1993. So, the role of a Product Owner has existed for 20+ years. Surely the whole idea is well understood by now. Right? And the role is a simple one. There is a single product owner per product team or teams. Defining and accepting the work to meet the clients’ goals. Always mucking around the backlog. Again, simple and clear. Right? Well, in my coaching travels and observations it’s not that simple. I still see literally tens of organizations and hundreds of teams that struggle with the notion of product ownership. So, let’s go over it...
Friday, June 8
Shhh...it's not "SAFe"!
Scaling agile is tough. Convincing regulated financial institutions to change their "governance" processes to a matrixed, decentralized decision-making organization is almost impossible. But that’s just the change of direction that adopting agile approaches requires.
Come listen to the journey that Mary Thorn took with two regulated financial institutions by implementing the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) without the business-side and people actually realizing the source of the change.
You will learn why and how the principles and values of SAFe and agile can transform any...
For Lasting Change, Take an Agile Approach to Your Agile Transformation!
One of the most difficult challenges faced by an organization entering a large-scale, enterprise transformation is how to achieve lasting change. Oftentimes, leadership will charter an Agile Center of Excellence (COE) in the hopes that training, coaching and publication of best practices will bring the desired change. While these actions typically generate excitement and build early momentum, by themselves they will not change the “DNA” (aka, mindset) of the enterprise. To avoid long-term atrophy of agile benefits, it is critical to charter a COE that is deeply in-tune with the enterprise...