Agile and Beyond 2018

Picture the last time you were told a great story about change…how did it make you feel? Were you inspired, motivated, or moved to action? As Agile Coaches and change agents we must influence teams to look at the world through a new lens, and storytelling is one of the most powerful tools we have available to help us to do this. During this interactive session you will learn the basic framework to construct a powerful story based on the work of great storytellers including Stephen Denning, Walt Disney, Richard Branson, and Steve Jobs. You will learn about the different types of stories you can tell and which situations are best for each type. You will also have an opportunity to craft and share a story using the storytelling framework learned during the session to help inspire change around a real problem you’re experiencing today. So gather round everyone and let me tell you a story…

We all know two heads are better than one. But do we ever stop to think about why? See One, Do One, Teach One (SODOTO) is a standard method for mastering surgical procedures. Developed in 1890 by William Stewart Halsted, founder of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and first Professor of Surgery, SODOTO was established as the training method for the first surgical residency training program in the United States. Today, it is a standard practice for mastering any craft. See One - Observation allows the beginner to synthesize information from the master and understand the task ahead. The beginner moves forward with an understanding of the challenge. Do One - The beginner learns by doing and iterative application. With a framework established in the “See One” phase, and under the guide of the master, the beginner is able to practice in a safe environment. Teach One - Through teaching, there is a new level of learning and proficiency experienced. The beginner only becomes a master when they are able to effectively coach a novice. The SODOTO methods particularly support lean and agile mindsets. Paired programming and team partnering across other disciplines in an agile environment create the perfect conditions for the SODOTO cycle to flourish. Don’t believe me? I use the SODOTO method to learn a brand new skill: java programming. Under the mentorship of three separate masters, Industrial Logic Coach Wyatt Sutherland, Agile Coach Bob Allen, and software craftsman coach Fred Estabrook, I learn to program by seeing, doing, and teaching. Using written and video journal entries, I will share my experience going through the SODOTO cycle and demonstrate that partnering, observing, practicing, reflecting, and teaching is the most effective way to learn.

Agile transformation in the enterprise is often driven by loss – loss of customers to competitors due to lagging product capabilities, loss of confidence from investors due to delayed releases, loss of revenue due to poor quality or capabilities, and loss of employees to more attractive employers. Faced with these losses, businesses rush to jump on the Agile bandwagon, only to fail to achieve meaningful improvements because they are just going through the motions. Succeeding with Agile means making fundamental changes, and not just in software delivery, but across the entire organization – business, development, operations, and all of the other supporting functions. In this talk, Eric will describe how organizations can overcome these impediments by growing their Agile practices through empiricism, protecting Agile values, and changing the organization organically, team by team, product by product. Using real-world examples of businesses who have failed without and those who have succeeded with Agile, the audience will take away meaningful actions and a broader understanding of how to grow agility to build resilient Agile organizations.

Every single day you see society grabbing on to the next big thing. People spend millions and millions of dollars every day on material goods, half of which they don't even know if they need it, understand why they need it, or in some cases know what it actually does. "Agile", the material item, is no different. People pour millions into certifications they don't use or need, and organizations pour millions into transformations that they don't need or understand. This is what the "Agile" brand has become today. An output. An objective. The next hot item on the shelf. We are going to talk about what "Agile" is, why it serves no purpose and could actually be detrimental to your organization's health, and what you and your organizations should be striving for instead.

Are you tired of deadline driven development!? Are you frustrated by the silos within your organization? Stand on the backs of giants! Learn to identify key attributes of collaboration in order to inspire your team! Whether you are the newest member or the team veteran. No matter which role you play you can add tremendous value to your team by applying elements learned in this session! From mobbing to all-in-one product teams, ux/design to continuous deployments, rapid feedback to increasing visibility, you too can reap the benefits of increasing internal and external collaboration! Join Chris and Fred as they describe the experiences they have found work effectively with their teams. The practices, processes, and principles that have brought them positive results through improved interaction within the team and beyond. They will share the team prerequisites, necessary infrastructure, and appropriate mindset needed to apply these same concepts to your own teams. They will highlight the benefits: to the business, to the project, and most importantly, to the people!

Dozens of books address the mechanics and theory behind Scrum. And they’re great. But they offer little guidance to those who work on Scrum teams and are neck-deep in organizational dysfunction—and have no idea what to do next. This is when a team is most vulnerable and likely to slip back into old practices—including bad Scrum. Ryan Ripley helps break this cycle by taking you through the common anti-patterns that emerge when theoretical Scrum is implemented in complex organizations. Ryan explores why these anti-patterns emerge, and what we can do to “inspect and adapt” our way back to a healthy Scrum practice. At the center of these tips, ideas, and experiments are the lesser considered Scrum values—commitment, focus, openness, respect, and courage. Repairing bad Scrum implementations starts with embracing the values that bind the roles, events, and artifacts of Scrum together. Learn how to leverage the Scrum values to take your Scrum team to the next level.

It’s hard to run an experiment perfectly. Let’s talk about how to recover when something goes wrong.
 
Setting up an A/B test is easy, but even the most experienced teams are occasionally surprised by unexpected complications mid-experiment. Using a case study, we’ll discuss some common surprises and how to recover from, and eventually prevent, them.

Through this interactive session, we'll go through a recent experiment my team ran and you'll have a chance to set the variables up yourself. We'll learn about how complicated these experiments can get and how to discover if you've made an error in your test setup. You'll be surprised along the way by some of the very same challenges we ran into, and be asked to decide what kind of fix to do. Finally, I'll share operational processes I've put in place on my team to reduce the likelihood of these surprises in the future.

Make sure that if your hypothesis fails, it’s due to customer behavior, not a bump in the road or an error in your team's processes.

“Let’s Be Awesome – The DevOps Edition” is a technical collaboration framework where participants work together to establish a shared vision for their DevOps transformation, determine business

Many people decide what to build next using the "squeaky wheel" prioritization method, where the person screaming the loudest gets their way. But we’ve all been there, and know it doesn’t work.

This session will not tell you the one true way to prioritize what you do next. Instead, we will focus on the basic principles of prioritization: customer needs, business outcomes, and available resources. Through some interactive exercises, we'll look at a few of the most popular prioritization frameworks and examples of how they're used in companies around the globe. Combine your favorite elements from each of them to create a model that works for your team. Learn how to calm down the prioritization chaos and move to a repeatable, agile process for deciding what to build next.