DevOps East 2017 General Management Sessions | TechWell

Conference archive

DevOps East 2017 - General Management

Sunday, November 5

Sanjiv Augustine
LitheSpeed

Certified Agile Leadership

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Sunday, November 5, 2017 - 8:30am to Monday, November 6, 2017 - 5:30pm

Monday, November 6

MG

Leading Successful Organizational Change Efforts

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Has this happened to you? You try to implement a change in your organization, and it doesn’t get the support you thought it would. And, to make matters worse, you can't figure out why. Or, you have a great idea but can’t get the resources required for successful implementation. Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit of techniques to help you determine which ideas will—and will not—work within your organization. This toolkit includes five rules for organizational change management, a checklist to help you determine the type of change process needed in your organization, techniques for...

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
MH

Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Teams

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Many teams have a relatively easy time adopting the tactical aspects of agile methodologies. Usually a few classes, some tools introduction, and a bit of practice lead teams toward a fairly efficient and effective agile adoption. However, these teams often get “stuck” and begin to regress or simply start going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could. Borrowing from his experience and lean software development methods, Bob Galen examines essential patterns—the thinking models of mature agile teams—so you can model...

Tuesday, November 7

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
TC

Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Leaders

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, and training—revolves around 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 tutorial, 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 team’s performance, accountability, and engagement....

James Waletzky
Crosslake
TD

Thinking Inside the Box: Root Cause Analysis with the Six Boxes

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Improving business and user value delivery, quality, efficiency, and productivity of your software engineering team is a noble undertaking. However, poor productivity, quality issues, failing to meet commitments, and general team inefficiencies are still commonplace. And at the root of most of these problems? James Waletzky says it is those highly imperfect creatures—humans. To go about fixing the problems, we must discover the root causes, not just the symptoms, and those are not always obvious. In this hands-on tutorial, James focuses on the methodology of Human Performance Improvement (...

Jeffery Payne
Coveros, Inc.
TI

Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
TJ

Rethinking Your Retrospectives

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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. 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 most out of them—we...

TN

The Lost Art of Live Communication

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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. 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 competencies and see how you...

Wednesday, November 8

Stephen Frein
Comcast
K1

Intelligent Software Development, Courtesy of Intelligent Software

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 8:30am to 9:30am

The machine learning age is well underway. Today’s software can see novel patterns that humans are unable to see and improve task performance based on experience. Learning algorithms are widely used for varied purposes, including loan approval, intrusion detection, fraud prevention, risk analysis, and online sales optimization. Yet, like the proverbial cobbler who left his children shoeless, software practitioners have been slow to apply the benefits of machine learning to their own work. Join Stephen Frein for a tour of the current machine learning landscape and its most popular...

Roland Cuellar
LitheSpeed
AW1

Creative Disruption: A Guide for the Perplexed

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Fire the project managers … do DevOps … hire plenty of agile coaches. Agile leadership books, guidance, and carnival barkers abound. However, with much hype to sort through and little guidance, how can you separate the snake oil from the real thing? How can you develop a North Star to guide you through agile, DevOps, and organizational transformation? Roland Cuellar shares lessons based on two decades of experience consulting with leading executives worldwide. Rooted in a foundational philosophy of self-management that evolved into a cutting-edge approach, Roland shares an essential...

Sean McKeever
Edgenuity
AW6

Balance Discovery and Delivery with Dual-Track Agile

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Do your product teams frequently struggle to have groomed and well-defined stories ready for the developers? Do you find yourselves frequently in “feed the beast” mode to keep your development teams busy? Do your product teams have problems gaining shared understanding across product management, interaction designers, developers, and QA? If so, your product teams manifest the symptoms of single-track agile—and this session is for you. Sean McKeever explains the key steps in establishing dual-track agile methodologies at your organization, presents his experiences, and provides...

Catherine Louis
CLL-Group.com
BW4

The Five Common Unconscious Biases Affecting Your Team

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Are you having a difficult time finding female engineers to join your teams? Are you currently working on a project which seems to be going nowhere? Have you ever engaged in what you thought was customer-driven work only to later discover it was stakeholder-driven? When it comes to designing products or software that people use, or when trying to uncover precisely what’s wrong with our workplace, studying the decisions we make is critical. Surprise! Many of our decisions are not made consciously. Examining five common unconscious biases seen in development, Catherine Louis helps us...

Rob Keefer
POMIET
AW8

Fail Smart, Not Just Fast: Use Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

You’re a professional project manager or ScrumMaster. Your software development projects never fail because you follow all the best practices. Right? We all know better. Unfortunately, many projects fail, and they fail due to issues outside the team's control. The reality is that we need to reconsider what failure looks like and plan for it when it happens. Rob Keefer introduces a tool—Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)—that has been used in engineering disciplines for many years and successfully applied to software development project management. FMEA shines a light on the...

Thursday, November 9

Ray Arell
nuAgility, LLC
K4

Change Your Focus: From Speed and Efficiency to High Customer Value

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 8:30am to 9:30am

For decades, product development has been focused largely on the speed and efficiency of delivery. So now we are stuck in the quagmire of talking about the methods and activities of delivery rather than focusing on the true goal—delivering high value to the customer. Ray Arell shares an evolutionary process to refocus both traditional and agile lifecycles. He describes a more dynamic way of defining value and addressing the needs of the customer, the business, and the developers. Ray provides practical examples of how to identify opportunities, expand concepts, and deliver high-value...

Faye Thompson
CareWorks Tech
BT2

It's All in Your Head: Use Neuroscience to Improve Performance

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

We humans process millions of bits of information each day. In order to handle that data load, our brains have developed shortcuts to take advantage of patterns, shared knowledge, and experience. Unfortunately, sometimes those shortcuts lead us astray, causing us to draw inaccurate conclusions. Faye Thompson says these shortcuts are amplified when we bring together a team of people, all trying to work together. Understanding how and why our brains take shortcuts to process all the incoming data can help us recognize when it's happening, take measures to correct our course, and even use...

Paul Wynia
Strategic Play USA
AT6

Discover Your Team’s Values with LEGO® Serious Play®

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Creating a cohesive team doesn’t require knowledge of dark arts or forbidden rituals. In fact, under the right circumstances, it can even be fun! Using exercises built around the LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP) methodologies, Paul Wynia explores techniques that ensure full team engagement and collaboration resulting in more meaningful discussions. Working as teams, discover Team Values using a series of individual and collaborative LSP builds. Once the Team Values are defined, use them to guide your team’s behaviors. These are finally turned into the Team Working Agreement, a powerful tool for...

Glen Morris
Vectren
AT8

Turn the Lights On: A Power Utility Company's Agile Transformation

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Why would a century-old utility with no direct competitors take on the challenge of transforming its entire IT application organization to an agile methodology? In an increasingly interconnected world, the expectations of customers continue to evolve. From smart meters to smart phones, IoT is creating a crisis point for industries not accustomed to rapid change. Glen Morris explains that pizzas can be tracked by the minute and packages at every stop, and customers now expect this same customer service model should exist for all industries—including power. Glen examines how to create...

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
AT9

Help! The Scrum Master *is* the Impediment

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

The change in mindset necessary to become a servant leader is incredibly hard for a scrum master who comes from a command and control background. As a newly minted Professional Scrum Master (PSM I), Ryan returned to his team excited and ready to get underway with a scrum adoption, but he had not fully grasped the concept of servant leadership. Instead of being a change agent, he was an impediment. Ryan’s cautionary tale is a common one. Attendees will learn about the difficulties of becoming a scrum master, how scrum team members need to embrace the scrum values to promote healthy team...

BT7

Cultural Intelligence: A Key Skill for Success

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Diversity is becoming the norm in everyday life. However, introducing global delivery models without a proper understanding of intercultural differences can lead to difficulty, frustration, and reduced productivity. Priyanka Sharma and Thena Barry say that in our diverse world, we need teams with people who can cross these boundaries, communicate effectively, and build the diverse networks necessary to avoid problems. We need to learn about cultural intelligence (CI) and cultural quotient (CQ). CI is the ability to relate and work effectively across cultures. CQ is the cognitive,...

Steve Martin
Pegasystems
AT11

Pin the Tail on the Metric: A Field-Tested Agile Game

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Metrics don’t have to be a necessary evil. If done right, metrics can help guide us to make better forward-looking decisions, rather than being used for simply managing or monitoring. They can help us identify trade-offs between options for what to do next versus punitive or worse, purely managerial measures. Steve Martin won’t be giving the Top Ten List of field-tested metrics you should use. Instead, in this interactive mini-workshop, he leads you through the critical thinking necessary for you to determine what is right for you to measure. First, Steve explores why you want to...

Rob Burkett
Buckle Down & Grind
BT10

The Fourth Constraint in Project Delivery—Leadership

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

All too often, the triple constraints—time, cost, and quality—are bandied about as if they are the be-all, end-all. While they are important, leadership—the fourth and larger underpinning constraint—influences the first three. Statistics on project success and failure abound, and these measurements are usually taken against the triple constraints. According to the Project Management Institute, only 53 percent of projects are completed within budget, and only 49 percent are completed on time. If so many projects overrun budget and are late, we can’t really say, “Good, fast, or cheap...