Speakers

The Versatile Organization

What comes after Management 3.0, SAFe, and the Spotify Model? Well, it's not hard to see in which direction the world is moving: organizations that consist of networked individuals who work from anywhere, who form teams on the fly, who aim for objectives and achieve results, and make that a whole lotta fun for themselves. Such an organization can do anything!

About Jurgen

Jurgen was rated #40 management & leadership expert in the world, one of the Top 100 leadership speakers, and #6 most influential person in Agile; his blog was rated #3 most popular Agile blog in the world; and his books are considered best-sellers.

Of course, it's up to you if you want to believe all that…

As a serial founder, successful entrepreneur, author, and speaker, Jurgen is pioneering management to help creative organizations survive and thrive in the 21st century. He offers concrete games, tools, and practices, so you can introduce better management, with fewer managers. He also offers a platform for you to share your practices and stories with the rest of the world.

Jurgen calls himself a creative networker. But sometimes he's a writer, speaker, trainer, entrepreneur, illustrator, manager, blogger, reader, dreamer, leader, freethinker, or… Dutch guy. Inc.com has called him a Top 50 Leadership Expert and a Top 100 Leadership Speaker. Since 2008, Jurgen writes a popular blog at NOOP.NL, offering ideas on the creative economy, agile management, organizational change, and personal development. He is the author of the book Management 3.0, which describes the role of the manager in agile organizations; How to Change the World, which describes a supermodel for change management; Managing for Happiness, which offers you practical ideas to engage workers, improve work, and delight clients; and most recently, Startup, Scaleup, Screwup, which contains 50% inspiring stories and 50% practices to follow and dives into the major topics that business leaders and entrepreneurs are confronted with throughout the business lifecycle.

Jurgen can help you upgrade your enterprise with more engagement and faster results; He can show you how to become an agile business with better software; He shows you how to creatively manage your company; And he can inspire professionals with a purpose, advocating work-life integration for creative people. Jurgen is CEO of the business network Happy Melly and co-founder of the Agile Lean Europe network. He is also a speaker who is regularly invited to talk at business seminars and conferences around the world.

Comfort in the Discomfort - Using Agile & Edge Theory to Metabolize Change in Uncertain Times

We Agilists have long held that we are in an age of VUCA - volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Given what we have been through in 2020, and are still going through, even that feels a bit outdated. Harvard Business Review "ups the ante" on VUCA and tells us we are living in a time of 3-dimensional change. It's perpetual - occurring all the time, it never lets up. It's pervasive - unfolding in multiple areas of life at once, you can't escape it. And it's exponential - accelerating at an increasingly rapid rate, and humans aren't built for exponential. In other words, it is not likely that you will be getting off the change bus anytime soon and it's almost impossible for you to see what is coming next. Feeling any discomfort yet?

In such conditions, how can we best survive, and possibly even thrive? This is the territory Lyssa Adkins, Agile & Leadership Coach, will help us navigate. She will lead us through a process using the Edge Theory of Change so that each of us can consider what "edge" we are on, and how we can find comfort in the middle of discomforting change. We will also explore how we can count on Agile to create stability. This will be a hands-on keynote and you will leave with insights for yourself and ways of working with others as we make the best of our ride on the change bus.

About Lyssa

Lyssa Adkins' career is split into two eras: 14 years as a project manager and 15 years as an agilist. Even though she had all that experience prior to encountering agile, nothing prepared her for the power and simplicity of agile done well. As a PMO leader (twice!) Lyssa knows that the transition to agile can be rocky – she's been through it herself.

Lyssa is an internationally recognized agile thought leader and speaker. Her book, Coaching Agile Teams, is still a top ranked book years after publication. She co-founded Agile Coaching Institute (ACI) which has equipped over 10,000 people in the must-have skills and mindset shifts of excellent agile coaching.

Since transitioning ACI to its new home at Accenture, Lyssa has focused on coaching transformation leaders and facilitating group work sessions that unknot the gnarly, multi-department impediments that agile reveals. As a certified organization systems coach and integral facilitator, and as a deeply experienced agilist, Lyssa possesses the skills to help organizations move through the difficult problems to benefit from the full promise of agile.

ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Coaching (ICP-ACC)

This remote certification course consists of 3 full-day sessions. Participants can choose to attend all three days from Nov 8–10, or have the option to select an alternate third day, to avoid a conflict with any of the Agile Arizona Workshops on Nov 10.

The intense interactive experience in this course was hand crafted by Damon Poole and Gillian Lee, co-authors of the upcoming book "Professional Coaching for Agilists" by Pearson. In addition, this course has been designed to utilize the knowledge of the participants in order for participants and instructors to learn from each other.

To provide a similar experience to an in-person workshop there will be Q&A, open discussion on specific topics, breakout rooms, individual and group activities, sharing experiences within your breakout room and with the full class, and the use of Zoom and Mural.

Two thirds of this course is spent in fun group activities and games in zoom breakout rooms with 2-5 people depending on the activity. We encourage you to have interesting materials on hand for use in some of the activities such as colored markers, Legos, pipe-cleaners, or whatever works for you.

The focus of the course is applying the skills of Professional Coaching within an Agile environment. What you will learn is framework agnostic; applicable for coaching in any Agile-oriented environment whether people are using Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS, or any other Agile-oriented set of practices.

In this course you will learn:

• The fundamentals of Professional Coaching
• The differences between Coaching, Facilitating, Mentoring, and Teaching
• Dozens of Agile and Coaching games, activities, and techniques
• The "Coaching Triggers" framework
• New ways of providing feedback

For more information on this course, click here.

Audience

Anyone working in an Agile environment that is interested in applying Professional Coaching skills. All of the skills in the workshop are useful for anyone looking to increase their organization’s level of Agility or to become even more effective when working within an Agile environment.

Prerequisites

A working knowledge of Agile and at least one Agile methodology is required. Recent experience on an Agile team is highly recommended.

Certification

Each participant will receive the ICAgile ICP-ACC, Certified Professional: Agile Coaching.

Bonus

Participants will receive a free copy of Damon's book Professional Coaching for Agilists, which is now available on informIT and amazon.

ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Team Facilitation (ICP-ATF)

This remote certification course is an add-on bundle for the ICP-ACC course , and consists of 9 additional interactive training modules. Each hour-long module is offered on a regular basis with a variety of daytime and evening options, and can be taken in any order at the participant's convenience.

The focus of this add-on course is applying the skills of group and individual facilitation within an Agile environment. At the completion of this course you will have dozens of games, activities, and techniques for use with your teams and organization. Discover where you are in your Agile Coach journey and learn new skills and techniques to progress further and faster in that journey.

For more information on this course, click here.

Certification

Each participant will receive the ICAgile ICP-ATF, Certified Professional: Agile Team Facilitation.

About Damon

Damon has coached and trained thousands of people at companies such as EMC, Capital One, Oanda, Ford, and Fidelity. He speaks frequently at Agile Alliance, Agile New England, Agile Arizona, Kentucky Fried Agile, Agile and Beyond, Agile Toronto, and others. As a coach of coaches at Eliassen, Damon led the Agile Delivery team which grew to hundreds of Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches in the field. He created Eliassen's Agile Transformation approach and the training content across all aspects of Agile, and led the effort to provide opportunities for the coaches to advance in their coaching journey. This background gave Damon the opportunity to learn from hundreds of Agile Coaches in an enormous variety of client environments and from the wider international Agile community. Today he is an independent coach and focuses on providing Agile Coach workshops.

Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO®) Training

This remote certification course consists of 2 full-day sessions from Nov 8–9

The product owner, in scrum, is accountable for maximizing the value for that product, through the work of the scrum team. The product owner is Scrum's name for a product manager. The product owner engages with customers, other stakeholders, and the scrum team to create a product backlog and to prioritize the work in the product backlog. The scrum product owner's approach to doing this work differs in a few key ways from older, less flexible approaches.

Specifically, the product owner:

• clearly articulates and communicates the product vision or goal. The scrum team, which includes the people building the product or service, understands what they are building and why.
• prioritizes the backlog by ordering all items against each other. There is not two "#1s" or ten. The backlog items are ordered as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, … 40 … and so on. They make decisions about what is more or less important.
• creates transparency around the product backlog and the product backlog items, so that it is visible and available to everyone involved.

While these ideas are often what people aim for or espouse, the scrum product owner does them. Without transparency of work, clear decisions on priorities, and clarity of goal, we can't expect teams to be engaged and deliver. The scrum product owner understands this and is accountable to provide these to the scrum team and organization.
Throughout the course, you will have an opportunity to engage in practical, reality-based work with small groups. Explore what the product owner is accountable for in the scrum framework, learn new ways to engage customers to understand what they truly need, and create product backlog items and refine them. You will have the opportunity to dig into the tough questions about project vs product thinking and create dialogue in your organization about the problem of too much work in process.

This course is designed for anyone who

• Wants a clear, no-nonsense understanding of what the scrum product owner does and how they do it in practice.
• Is frustrated by traditional project expectations when they are supposed to be using an agile approach – they don't seem to align.
• Needs to bring new ideas, tools, and practices to their organization and scrum teams that will help everyone focus and deliver.
• Enjoys learning, challenging themselves, and has an interest in finding ways to improve.

For more information, see the CSPO training details at Helping Improve.

About Jake

Jake Calabrese is a coach, trainer, and coach-consultant working to help organizations meet the promise of agile by going beyond agile practices to address culture challenges and help teams and leaders reach and maintain high-performance. He has unique expertise as an Organization & Relationship Systems Certified Coach (ORSCC), a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC), and Professional Certified Coach (PCC), and as a trainer and coach for Agile Companies (helping non-software organizations use agile). Jake created the AgileSafari cartoon series to introduce humor into the more challenging issues we have to tackle. Jake uses ideas from various areas of thinking such as: Lean, professional coaching, neuroscience, psychology, facilitation, brain-based training, improvisation, agile, kanban, and scrum. Jake regularly speaks at local and national conferences including Mile High Agile, Scrum Gathering, and Agile Alliance Agile20xx conferences. Jake is co-founder of Helping Improve LLC.

ICAgile Certified Professional in Coaching Agile Transitions (ICP-CAT) Course

This remote certification course consists of 2 full-day sessions from Nov 8–9

To remain competitive in today's ever changing business landscape, organizations need the ability to change quickly. While many managers and leaders gravitate towards Agile and Scrum, neither tell you how to change into the highly mature organizations that are described within their details.

The Coaching Agile Transitions with Lean Change Management course is designed to help you learn about and take the best ideas from Agile, Lean Startup, Complexity Thinking, Brain Science, and Design Thinking to create an approach to change management that is friendly with Agile and Scrum.

This course will help you answer questions such as:

• How can we integrate change management with Agile ways of thinking to create less resistance to change?
• How can we apply the Agile thought process to complex organizational change initiatives?
• How can we help people become more intrinsically motivated and meet them where they are while we iterate through change?
• How can we establish a continuous change mindset within our organizational culture?

After completing this course, you will understand how to foster and guide people and organizations towards co-created, participatory change.

About Ken

Ken started his professional career as a mainframe operator, loading reel to reel tapes for data backups. He eventually became a data and analytics developer, architect, and manager over the first decade of his career. While stumbling through the traditions of ladder-climbing and top-down corporate change, he found the frustration that would ignite the passion that would fuel the next decade of his career.

While his development days are behind him, he now spends his time in the pursuit of finding better ways to invite change into teams and organizations. Ken now shares his experiences through facilitating Organizational Change and Management courses.

Certified ScrumMaster® (CSM)

This remote certification course consists of 2 full-day sessions from Nov 8–9

Taking this class (and passing the test) will provide you with the Certified ScrumMaster® (CSM) credentials. As a CSM, you'll be prepared to help Scrum Teams perform at their highest level. CSMs also protect the team from both internal and external distractions. Through the certification process, you will learn the Scrum framework and gain an understanding of team roles, events, artifacts and rules.

Course Learning Objectives:

By the end of the training, you will be able to:

• Describe the Scrum framework to others
• Explain the difference between the Scrum framework and other processes and systems
• Be a successful Scrum Master for a Scrum team
• Help a Scrum team plan successfully
• Create a personal plan for the future

For more information on this CSM course as taught by the Agile Arizona training partner Agile for All, click here.
For the CSM certification information provided by the Scrum Alliance, click here.

Note: Project Management Professionals can get 14 PDUs for this CSM course.

About Steve

Steve Spearman is a founder of Full Spectrum Agile, a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) and an Agile coach. Steve has over 30 years of experience in corporate software development as a software developer, architect, project manager, scrum master and in multiple management positions. For the last 10 years, Steve has been providing Agile-focused training and coaching to companies ranging from late-stage startups to large corporations.

Steve has a BA in Psychology and a Masters in Computer Science. His other certifications include: Certified LeSS Practitioner (CLP), PMI-ACP, PMP, Certified Scrum Product Owner, Certified ScrumMaster, Advanced CSPO, Advanced CSM, Certified Scrum Professional (CSP), Path to CSP Educator, and (former) SAFe SPC. Steve lives in the Denver, Colorado area with his wife Donna. He's an avid traveler and Scuba diver.

Advanced Certified ScrumMaster® (A-CSM) Course

This remote certification course consists of 2 full-day sessions from Nov 8–9

We often hear the question "So what does a ScrumMaster do?" when working in organizations. ScrumMasters are a crucial role in helping teams improve, yet they help in more subtle and lasting ways over telling people what to do by positional power. One of the key challenges is learning how to help bring people together to deliver value, without taking ownership. Bringing people together goes beyond getting consensus, getting to collaboration means tapping into the knowledge and wisdom of the entire team.

Advanced Certified ScrumMaster (A-CSM) picks up where Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) leaves off, helping ScrumMasters with the real day-to-day challenges of facilitating teams and organizations to grow and improve. Throughout the course, you will use hands-on, engaging exercises to learn and expand your knowledge. We will explore how to have challenging conversations, confront and resolve conflicts, deal with impediments, address real facilitation challenges, and uncover what drives you and your team for long-term wins.

What is Advanced Certified ScrumMaster (A-CSM)?
Advanced Certified ScrumMaster (A-CSM), is a certification from Scrum Alliance, that builds on the Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) knowledge. A-CSM focuses on the next level of skills and experience that agile professionals need as they dig into more challenging issues. The A-CSM certification and our course were designed to help:

• Facilitate better dialogue between the Product Owner, team members, customers, stakeholders, and executives.
• Respond confidently when encountering resistance to change, lack of engagement, low motivation, and unavailability of key people.
• Increase engagement to encourage greater accountability, commitment, and buy-in.
• Understand how to have valuable agile scaling conversations.

Read all of the A-CSM Learning Objectives.

Who Should Attend
Anyone who can benefit from the course is welcome to attend, including: ScrumMasters, agile coaches, product owners, product managers, facilitators, agile team members, leaders, and others in the organization who are looking to level up their skills.

NOTE: In order to receive the A-CSM certification, you must:

• Have an active CSM certification with the Scrum Alliance.
• Complete the A-CSM course (e.g. this class) via a Scrum Alliance approved trainer.
• Document at least 12 months of experience as a ScrumMaster on your Scrum Alliance Profile. If you do not have 12 months of experience, but want to learn and apply these concepts, you can take the class and document the experience as you get it (you will not have the A-CSM until you have all the experience documented). Read more about the A-CSM and Scrum Alliance certification process.

About Tricia

Tricia Broderick is a leadership and organizational advisor. Her transformational leadership at all levels of an organization, ignites growth of leaders and high performing teams to deliver quality outcomes. Tricia has more than twenty years of experience in the software development industry. She is a highly-rated trainer, coach, facilitator and motivational keynote speaker. Beyond her extensive knowledge and skills, her biggest offering is inspiring people to believe anything is possible. Her aim is to create connections and environments that challenge and support people in an authentic, vulnerable, engaging and fun way. In 2020, she founded Ignite Insight + Innovation.

You Inc. Building Your Personal Brand for Success

This virtual half-day workshop is scheduled for the afternoon of Nov 10

Building the right personal brand is one of the critical success factors in today's modern workplace. Organizations develop a brand and image, but not many individuals think about their personal brand and how it can affect their career. As we interact with people, we want to influence them to support our efforts-approving projects, budgets, and funding; supporting our next career move; or recommending us for that promotion or raise we want. As a professional, it is critical to understand how you are being perceived by your "target audience." During this interactive session Jennifer shares ideas on building your brand, mastering politics, reading your colleagues' and bosses' perspectives - all techniques that get the results you want. She presents a toolkit for creating your personal brand, changing perceptions in the organization to ensure successful interactions with others, and improving your ability to achieve your career goals. Any professional with career aspirations should be actively shaping her brand and career. Leave this session with a clear idea of your brand, how to continually re-invent that brand as your career and aspirations evolve, a start on your personal brand statement, and tips for networking effectively to promote your brand.

About Jennifer

Jennifer Bonine is the CEO of AI Appstore, Inc. and the RedRex platform, and was the first female Artificial Intelligence ("AI") platform tech CEO. The company is pioneering human-centered technology for schools, corporations, non-profits, and start-ups.

Respected as a gifted speaker, entrepreneur, and philanthropist, Jennifer Bonine addresses the AI industry nationally and internationally, including at the World Economic Forum in Davos and CNN Money Switzerland. She has had an exit from a startup company that provided technology in the gaming space and is currently leading a new start-up that has raised capital to revolutionize the "Future of Work, home, and Schools". She has held executive level positions leading teams for Oracle and Target and is a founding board member of the United States bid for a Minnesota World Expo 2027. Jennifer is a founding sponsor and member of IVOW AI's Women in History Data Ideation Challenge, an Executive Board Member of TeamWomen, The Digital Economist, and an executive board member of Chad Greenway's Lead the Way foundation. She is a member of Million Dollar Women, member of the Women's Leadership Council for MSPBJ, and a council member of DreamTank, an organization designed to champion young entrepreneurs. Recently named one of the Top 30 Leaders to Watch in 2020 by Silicon Review, Jennifer Bonine was featured at the UN's AI for Good summit. Jennifer is also developing a series of books to educate children about the power of AI and machine learning. She hosts a 612TALK Podcast that explores origin stories of people with Minnesota Connections along with Sony recording artist Dave McElroy.

Stakeholder Management - Negotiation Techniques for All Agilists

This virtual half-day workshop is scheduled for the afternoon of Nov 10

Are you a Scrum Master having trouble navigating conflicts? Perhaps you're a Product Owner who has to negotiate scope and timelines with stakeholders. Maybe you're an Agile Coach who needs to find ways to build empathy with your teams. If so, you're not alone! Confronting problems is inevitable and we often struggle with influence and negotiation.

To learn these valuable skills, this engaging workshop will teach you about negotiation from the best in the business: FBI hostage negotiators. Stakeholder negotiation is not the same criticality as hostage negotiation. However, people who master the art of influence and negotiation can resolve differences without escalating into damaging conflicts, collaborate better across the organization, and help their teams avoid wasted time and spin.

Negotiation techniques have evolved. Participants will learn modern negotiating techniques and apply them in a real-world Agile scenario. You will learn to prepare for and participate in a stakeholder negotiation. You will leave feeling ready and confident for their next negotiation.

Overview
The workshop covers six techniques that build an effective negotiation using a business scenario. Each technique is demonstrated through a series of recorded negotiation phone calls between an Agile Product Manager and a Stakeholder. We start with the simplest techniques and add complexity throughout the workshop.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand six techniques to influence stakeholders
• Learn how to leverage the techniques to connect with your counterpart, diffuse emotions and reveal motivations
• Apply the framework to gain stakeholder buy-in and influence outcomes

About Julee

Julee Everett is a business agility and product consultant in Tampa, Florida. She specializes in coaching change and innovation for organizations struggling to re-discover their entrepreneurial DNA, who need to re-think their strategy, or who want to evolve their culture to enable flow and empower people.

Julee's work has strong influences from design thinking, business, and product management. Her teachings are rooted in facts and theory, but her approach encourages reflection and action. She is passionate about maximizing others by making abstract concepts real and practical for those on a learning path to agility and innovation. She values authenticity, community, and kindness.

Julee is an active leader in community and peer learning spaces. She is an organizer of the Agile Alliance Product Management Initiative, the ProductCamp Gulf Coast founder, and the Tampa Bay Product Owner group founder. She is a professional trainer with Scrum.org and is a frequent publisher on Medium and LinkedIn. She was recently named one of the LIA 100, an initiative to identify women making significant contributions in Lean and Agile spaces worldwide.

About Lemont

Lemont Chambliss is a Principal Consultant for Improving. In this role, he helps clients discover better ways of working, enabling the delivery of meaningful products. Mr. Chambliss has experience with several agile frameworks and coaches at the individual, team and executive levels. Mr. Chambliss also has expertise in both manual and automated software testing, business analysis and leading software development teams.

Prior to joining Improving, Mr. Chambliss worked for a variety of major companies including IBM, AT&T, Eckerd, Catalina and AmerisourceBergen.

Influence Strategies for Practitioners

This virtual half-day workshop is scheduled for the morning of Nov 10

You've tried and tried to convince people of your position. You've laid out your logical arguments on impressive PowerPoint slides-but you are still not able to sway them. Cognitive scientists understand that the approach you are taking is rarely successful. Often you must speak to others' subconscious motivators rather than their rational, analytic side.

Linda Rising shares influence strategies that you can use to more effectively convince others to see things your way. These strategies take advantage of hardwired traits: "liking" - we like people who are like us; "reciprocity" - we repay in kind; "social proof" - we follow the lead of others similar to us; "consistency" - we align ourselves with our previous commitments; "authority" - we defer to authority figures; and "scarcity" - we want more of something when there is less to be had.

Learn how to build on these traits as a way of bringing others to your side. Use this valuable toolkit in addition to the logical left-brain techniques on which we depend.

About Linda

Linda Rising is an independent consultant who lives near Nashville, Tennessee.
Linda has a Ph.D. from Arizona State University in object-based design metrics. Her background includes university teaching as well as work in telecommunications, avionics, and tactical weapons systems. She is an internationally known presenter on topics related to agile development, patterns, retrospectives, the change process, and the connection between the latest neuroscience and software development.
Linda is the author of numerous articles and five books. She was honored by the World Agility Forum in 2020 with their Lifetime Achievement Award.
Her web site is: lindarising.org

Creative Conflict: Breaking Away from Fight or Flight

This virtual half-day workshop is scheduled for the afternoon of Nov 10

How do I react when conflict happens? When should I engage in conflict on my team? How do I resolve conflict effectively? How can I improve how I handle conflict? These are questions that every leader and every team eventually must address.

Come join this session to learn practical skills for thriving (not just surviving) when conflict knocks on your door. We'll dive into the necessity and challenges of conflicts and then help you increase your self-awareness and self-management during these potentially stressful situations. You'll learn some simple and effective tactics to keep conflicts productive and find a way to effective resolutions.

What you leave with: Through this engaging and interactive workshop, Mark will help you learn how you and your team can succeed with conflict.
You will:

• Learn to identify conflict before it gets out of control
• Explore multiple strategies for managing resistance
• Practice the steps of conflict resolution
• Understand how your body (and others) respond to conflict
• Learn to identify various distress responses

About Mark

Mark Wavle is an experienced Agile practitioner, professional coach, and Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) who is passionate about helping leaders and teams improve their work through individual professional coaching and highly engaging education. He has been a Development Team member, Scrum Master, Product Owner, Agile Coach, instructional designer, Team Lead, Practice Manager, and National Agile Lead. As a sought-out speaker and trainer, Mark has created and delivered high-impact training and presentations at over 30 conferences and hundreds of companies throughout the United States and Europe. Mark is the lead trainer and professional coach at Unstuck Careers.

The Three Jobs of Agile Management

This virtual half-day workshop is scheduled for the morning of Nov 10

From 2005 to 2015, Peter Green led the Agile transformation at Adobe. In that time he developed a good answer for almost any question someone might ask during training or coaching. Well, every question except for one: "If Agile teams are self-organizing, what do the managers do?". He searched for good answers to that question in case studies, articles, and anywhere else he could think of and didn't like what he found. Some things were over-simplified memes about the difference between leaders and managers. Some experts said we should just get rid of all the managers. Others provided well-meaning but fuzzy advice, like telling managers they just needed to learn how to be servant leaders to the teams. None of those answers were very satisfying to him, or to the very smart, well-intentioned managers he was working with. He spent over a decade searching for better answers to that question, and in this session, he'll share what he learned: that there are just three jobs we need managers to do in an Agile organization, and two ways to focus on each job.

You'll leave the session with a clear map of the agile manager's role, the most important area to focus on right away to start having a bigger impact, and techniques to decide what you can delegate to the team vs. what actions you should own as a manager. You'll also get insight into the key way that a management backlog (for an individual or a management team) differs from a traditional agile team's backlog, and what that means for your own personal refinement and iteration approach.

About Peter

Peter helps leaders discover how to create the outcomes they care about the most. He draws on a unique combination of deep empathy and keen insight developed by an almost stubborn insistence on staying actively involved in seemingly disconnected fields, including the creative arts, business, psychology, leadership, organizational design, and philosophy. Peter majored in music composition at Arizona State University. He is an in-demand trumpet player and recording engineer.

At Adobe Systems, Peter led an Agile transformation that enabled the shift to a subscription business model. Peter spent five years with Agile For All, helping to grow the business from a focus on team level agility to an expanded approach for leaders at all levels. He co-developed the Certified Agile Leadership program for the Scrum Alliance. He has trained, coached, and advised dozens of organizations to create outcomes that range from executive leadership development programs, to creating vision and strategy, to creating a culture of innovation, to clarifying and validating customer segments and needs, to reinventing business models and products, to creating high performing, Agile teams.

Peter is a Certified Scrum Trainer, a graduate of the ORSC coaching system, a certified Leadership Agility and Leadership Circle coach, a certified Innovation Games practitioner, and the co-founder of the Humanizing Work company. He is an avid reader and idea-combiner. He is a firm believer in the power of range and a growth mindset. He spends his working hours dedicated to nudging the world of work towards a more human-centric, meaningful, and prosperous future. He spends his other waking hours enjoying time with his wife and five kids, running, hiking, playing golf, and making music and visual arts. Admired at all stakeholder levels - from executives to product teams - for his hands-on Agile training, Peter works with diverse clients to help them thrive, personally and professionally, in complexity.

Building Great Teams: Culture and Core Protocols

Your team can be ten times better. The Core Protocols are one way to make your team great.

This virtual half-day workshop is scheduled for the morning of Nov 10

Your team can be ten times better.

What does that mean? That means your professional team can accomplish 10x more work, do it with 10x more quality, 10x faster, or with 10x less resources. Your family can be 10x happier. Your school can be 10x more effective at helping people learn. Your community group can be 10x better at making life better for the people it serves. Even you yourself can be 10x more effective at getting what you want.

In other words, you can be great. Your team can be great.

Greatness

Can you say these things about your teams?:

• My projects are completed effortlessly on schedule and in budget every time.
• Every team I've ever been on has shared a vision.
• In meetings, we only ever do what will get results.
• No one blames "management" or anyone else, if they don't get what they want.
• Everybody shares their best ideas right away.
• Ideas are immediately unanimously approved, improved, or rejected by the team.
• Action on approved ideas begins immediately.
• Conflict is always resolved swiftly and productively.

The Core Protocols are one way to make teams that have these characteristics.

Some of the things you'll learn:

• Results-oriented behaviors
• How to enter a state of shared vision with a team and stay there
• How to create trust on a team
• How to stay rational and healthy
• How to make team decisions effectively
• How to move quickly and with high quality towards the team's goals

About Richard

Richard Kasperowski is an author, speaker, teacher, and coach focused on high-performance teams. Richard is the author of the new book, High-Performance Teams: The Foundations, as well as The Core Protocols: A Guide to Greatness. He leads clients in building great teams that get great results using the Core Protocols, Agile, and Open Space Technology. Richard created and teaches the course Agile Software Development at Harvard University. Learn more and subscribe to Richard's newsletter at www.kasperowski.com.

Creating a Useful Strategy - for your organization, your team, or your own career

This virtual half-day workshop is scheduled for the afternoon of Nov 10

A great strategy helps guide decision-making without being overly constrained or vague, but coming up with that balance is really hard! This leaves many of us ignoring strategy altogether, either making decisions reactively or creating big grand plans that are out of date as soon as they hit the ground. Whether you're thinking about the context of your own career, a product roadmap, or for an entire organization, a good strategy removes the biggest psychological friction involved in decision-making. In this session, we'll introduce the approach we've used to create strategies that reduce that friction while balancing the need for clarity with the ability to respond to change.

You'll leave with a new way to visualize strategy and all of the forces that influence it, along with a first draft of a strategy that will help you make decisions about what to do next and, just as importantly, what to say no to.

About Richard

Richard's superpower is bringing together seemingly unrelated fields and ideas to create new possibilities. Drawing on a diverse background in software development, engineering, anthropology, design, and political science, Richard trains and coaches people to collaborate more effectively with other people to solve complex, meaningful problems.

Richard is a Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coach and Certified Scrum Trainer, as well as a certified trainer of the accelerated learning method, Training from the Back of the Room. His book, Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber, was published by Addison-Wesley in 2019 (for more information, visit bddwithcucumber.com).

When he's not working with clients, you'll often find Richard cooking, playing music, practicing Muay Thai, or flying down a mountain on his mountain bike.

Navigate the Future with the Business Agility Value Stream

No matter what kind of applications you are building, you have to be far, far better at digital development than you were with the first digital age. To compete, we must learn how to integrate Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and Cloud into our enterprise strategy and throughout our Value Streams.

About Adam

Contemplating the post-digital economy and running experiments to help advance the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe Fellow, SPCT.) 🧐

Survival Metrics - Getting Change Done In A Fast, Politically Safe, Data Informed Way

Do you know when you should pivot? What about your ideas, are they being listened to? In fact, even when you are proven right after a horrible launch, do you have that sinking feeling that everyone knew this was a bomb, but just didn’t know how to say it?

Being a change agent in an organization, especially one where a product is in flight, is hard. While teams may be happy to talk about strategy and even know what it looks like, the idea of understanding when something fails and HOW to move forward when it does escapes teams. There isn’t a shared language that helps them figure this out.

This leaves teams holding their ideas close to the chest. Their fear: an unsure political environment and unclear data will make their insight useless. This leads to “business as usual,” where everyone smiles on Zoom even while initiatives are headed to disaster.

Enter Survival Metrics, a framework that helps teams use what's important to the company (think - “values”) and operationalize them as metrics that make change much easier. In effect, teams get a dashboard-like artifact that is understandable to various teams inside of your organization. This helps clarify action steps, makes values very clear, and surface incentives that help teams pivot in a fast, politically safe, and data informed way.

About Adam

Adam Thomas has been working with product teams for the last 15 years, helping them ship products in the AI,e-commerce, and finch spaces. Right now he leads Approaching One, a consultancy that helps product leaders build orgs that matter.

Stepping into Automated QA as a Manual Tester – Lessons from a Learner’s Journey

Manual testers are struggling to keep up with the demand for more frequent product releases, and the need for automated tests is evident. The journey for a manual tester to learn automation can feel overwhelming. Training classes and books can be great for introducing new concepts. But how can learners integrate building new testing skills into their daily work?

Busy testers need a strong vision of What’s In It For Me to take the many steps to learn automated testing. Allison and Bhawna share six qualities of strong manual testers that can support them through their learning journeys. In this interactive session, attendees connect theory to practice through an exploration of adult learning principles and the steps Bhawna took to learn automated testing.

You will learn the factors that contribute to a successful learning journey and a worksheet to map your next steps. Join Allison and Bhawna to discover how to optimize your learning time!

About Allison

Allison Pollard connects people and ideas to create more engaging workplaces. As Technical Director for Improving, she is a curator of agile frameworks and coaching methods. Allison elevates organizations and communities by sharing her knowledge and experience. She is also an avid reader, a foodie, and proud glasses wearer.

Get Your Hands Off the Team's Work!

In Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) courses, Scrum myths are busted. One such myth is that the Scrum Master must be the note-taker for everyone. Nope! Coaching doesn’t mean scribing. The Scrum Guide notes that the Scrum Master is a true leader who serves the Developers, the Product Owner and the Organization. Serving doesn’t mean being a secretary.
Join this session with Angela Johnson, author of The Scrum Master Files to learn:
• How Scrum Masters disempower Developers when they scribe notes for them
• How Scrum Masters take everyone’s learning opportunity away when they become the admin
• How Accountability is greatly reduced when the Scrum Master micro manages administrative tasks
• And what to do to prevent these dysfunctions instead

About Angela

Angela is an author, Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) and Certified Less Practitioner (CLP) and Training from the BACK of the Room (TBR) Certified Trainer. Clients that Angela has transformed include: agency / services, software, hardware, marketing, learning and development and more. Angela focuses her work on the upper Midwestern areas of the United States to best serve in her most important roles: wife and mom.

Are We Getting Anywhere with this Agile Thing? How to Tell If Your Agile Transformation Is Working

If your organization is going agile, you’ve probably asked yourself these questions at some point. How do I know if we’re agile? Why should I care if it’s going well? Why aren’t we seeing the benefits we expected? How come we’re going slower? Because you’ve invested a lot of time and money into your agile transformation, it’s important to know and track how successful it is.

Our session helps you determine whether or not your organization is truly becoming agile. Ann Kahraman and Tracy Walton from Isos Technology discuss example scenarios, how to tell what’s working and what’s not working, what agile at other organizations looks like, and help you conduct an agile self-analysis through polls and breakout rooms.

You leave with an initial self assessment of the state of agile at your organization. And if you’re not where you want to be, we provide guidance for you to create a preliminary action plan to move your agile initiatives forward.

About Ann

Ann Kahraman, a Principal Agilist at Isos Technology, has a passion for helping people improve their lives and believes technology plays a big part in that. Ann has helped organizations large and small increase customer and employee satisfaction, improve operations, contain costs, and enhance their ability to deliver. She has experience in database management, large data migrations, Salesforce implementation, migration, and enhancements, business intelligence tool implementations, agile coaching, large scale agile transformations, and non-profit management. Ann also has an MBA in Management and a BFA in Photography/Media Arts, and her certifications include SAFe SPC, Certified Executive Coach, Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, SFDC Admin, and Qlik Admin. In her free time, Ann enjoys RV-ing, viticulture, DIY, entrepreneurship, painting, and career coaching.

About Tracy

Tracy Walton is an Atlassian Consultant and Agile Enthusiast at Isos Technology. She started her journey with Jira as a Product Manager looking for a more efficient way to manage her backlog and provide transparency to her team and colleagues. As a consultant, Tracy offers a unique blend of passion for leading teams, product expertise, and 10 years of hands-on experience in agile software development for a variety of products and industries including digital marketing, customer relationship management, subscription billing and compensation analysis. In her free time, she is likely gardening or swimming with her family in the beautiful beach town of Encinitas, CA.

The DNA of an Effective Product Owner

We often talk about what the Product Owner Must "DO" - they must own the Product Backlog, they must manage the product backlog and the priorities, they must refine the backlog, they must answer the team's questions.

What 6 characteristics are in a great Product Owner’s DNA? We will explore how to help a Product Owner go from good to great!
There are the 6 basic elements that make up the DNA of a great Product Owner. Innovative Product Owners are:
1. Engaged – Your best POs are engaged and ready to step to the task at hand, whether it is demonstrating value to the delivery team or to the business stakeholders.
2. Available – Being physically available is only half as valuable as being completely present in the moment and dedicated to their duties and responsibilities.
3. Decisive – There is no room for the wishy-washy in the PO role. A great PO will see an opportunity and seize it before it’s gone.
4. Empowered – Although this may seem external, an effective PO exhibits strength and confidence, which in turn helps executive stakeholders to trust them and give them the power to enact change.
5. Knowledgeable – This goes without saying—almost. Many people parading as PO are merely project managers who were assigned the role without having any clue of what it entails.
6. Foresightful – Seems like a funny word, but it’s powerful. Not all opportunities or warnings are immediately obvious. A foresightful PO takes subtle cues, regardless of where they come from, to make decisions.

Based on these DNA elements we will see how to share yourself or your Product Owners on each element. We will see where your PO’s need to focus on to become more effective.
When using these elements what would an effective PO do? What is your PO doing now? How can our PO use these elements to be more effective in creating value in the product, in engaging with customers and stakeholders and in working with the Scrum Teams.
We will wrap the talk with a conversation to address questions around the role of the PO.

About Anu

Anu Smalley Anu is the President and Founder of Capala Consulting Group, LLC where she specializes in Executive coaching and Agile Transformations. She is Scrum Alliance accredited Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC), Certified Agile Leadership-Educator (CAL-E), and Certified Path to CSP educator.
Anu has helped companies in Banking, Insurance and Reinsurance, Travel, Gaming Software, Legal, Benefits Management, Software Consulting, HealthCare. She has more than 13 years of Agile implementation, coaching, and transformation experience. As a community leader, Anu has chaired Scrum Alliance Global Scrum Gatherings for three years, speaker frequently at conferences and meetups around the world and actively contributes to Women in Agile and other volunteer initiatives within Scrum Alliance.

About Kate

Kate Megaw is the Founder and CEO of ARCLight Agile where she specializes in working with organizations on their #JourneytoAgility. She helps teams on their journey to empowerment and collaboration, to achieve faster decision making and therefore a focus on customers and their rapidly changing needs. Kate works with leaders throughout the organization, regardless of department, to create a more agile approach to leadership that encourages innovation, flexibility, and empowered teams, allowing organizations to achieve their purpose.

Kate is a dynamic Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), Project Management Professional (PMP), and Certified Team Coach (CTC), with over 20 years working in Education, Operations, Project Management, IT, and Consulting.

With her finely honed communication and presentation abilities, complemented by strong planning, organizational and people management skills, Kate is a popular speaker at events. She is a motivator and encourager and is happiest when she breaks through to a client and leads them to the ‘aha’ moment.

Before moving to the United States, Kate received her bachelor’s degree in Information Management from the Queen’s University of Belfast in Northern Ireland.

LIVE with Soul Craftswoman and Your Agile Lady

LIVE is an interactive and unscripted conversation with your hosts and panelists — exploring an array of topics around humanity and agile. The panelists will come from the audience. The topics covered will be that of the issues on the hearts and minds of the voices present. All will be invited to join in the discussion.

About April

April Jefferson is an independent coach, collaboration facilitator, experience crafter, game creator, and international speaker. She adds value to the world by guiding the journey to nourish oneself with generative engagement — enjoying harmonizing mindsets, crafting applied learning experiences, and holding space both in-person and online. April is best known for the transformation and curation of spaces that keep people at the center. These experiences include Future of Work 24 Hours, Women in Agile Open, the five-part Growing Racial Equity Series for Black Lives, and with the clients she has engaged with. April has co-founded three active communities, sits on several boards, shared over 100 talks and workshops domestically and internationally. She is a mentor and ambassador of many professionals and youth. Love — diversity, equity, and inclusion is woven organically at the essence of every space and interaction of hers. April strives to embody the moniker “Soul Craftswoman”.

Defining the Business Domain using Event Storming

Event storming is a process for modeling a business domain from the perspective of the business experts. It has been used by many with great success. Event Storming can help your team:

• Build an understanding of a domain
• Define the scopes and interactions of the components of a system
• Rapidly discover unknown-unknowns
• Expose the intricacies of the business domain
• Identify the areas of greatest risk

The artifacts produced in this process are useful to both the business experts, to help document their domain, and the engineers building systems for that domain.

In this session, we will explore the process of Event Storming. We will define the goals and expected outputs of the process, and walk through a simple example so that you are ready to bring this important process into your organization.

About Barry

Barry (he/him/his) is a .NET Software Engineer who has been creating business solutions for enterprise customers for more than 30 years. Barry is also an Election Integrity Activist, baseball and hockey fan, husband of one genius and father of another, and a 30+ year resident of Phoenix Arizona USA. When Barry is not traveling around the world to speak at Conferences, Code Camps and User Groups or to participate in GiveCamps, he spends his days as a Solution Architect for Carvana and his nights thinking about the next Arizona GiveCamp, an annual event where software developers come together to build websites and apps for some great non-profit organizations.

You can follow Barry on Twitter @bsstahl or read his blog at http://www.cognitiveinheritance.com.

ScrumBan – Effectively Combining Scrum and Kanban

Teams using Scrum sometimes struggle with operational or emergent work blowing up their sprint plans. As DevOps delivery is increasingly used by organizations the need of Scrum teams to accommodate operational work also increases. After all, it does not matter how interesting that new feature is if production is down. By combining the disciplines of Scrum and Kanban teams can find that happy balance of planned work and emergent work while still maintaining discipline and continuous improvement.

As an example, we will build up a hybrid process for a hypothetical team to discuss the reasoning behind differing combinations of practices that could be used. I will review 3 categories of a hybrid ScrumBan delivery methods that are typically seen in the industry.

About Bob

Bob Payne is an early adopter of Extreme Programming and Scrum. He has worked exclusively as an industry leading Lean+Agile Transformation leader since 1999, helping individuals and organizations achieve results with Agile methods. He has worked in small startups, fortune 100 organizations and government with teams, programs and executives. He is the SVP of Transformation ahd Coaching at LitheSpeed.
Bob was one of the earliest Certified Scrum Trainers (CSTs) receiving his CST certification directly from Ken Schwaber.
As a thought leader in Agile he is the host of the Agile Toolkit Podcast, founder of Agile Philanthropy, Chair of the Agile DC conference, organizer and speaker at national and international conferences. With nearly 20 years of practical hands-on Agile experience, Bob has served as a trusted advisor to executives, teams and management at leading firms, including United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, The IRS, Nike, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, National Geographic, Nationwide Insurance, Royal Bank of Canada, Samsung, and Walmart.

Kicking Up the Team's Conflict Competence

Conflict happens. According to research, as much as some of us may try to avoid conflict, employees spend approximately 2.8 hours each week involved in it. That’s because conflict, though it can be uncomfortable, is an essential part of progressing, bonding, and developing real trust as a team.

Instead of backing away from the potential discomfort or anger involved, what would happen if teams embraced conflict as an opportunity to learn and grow together? We introduce an intentional practice and template for establishing a conflict protocol as a key strategy for navigating workplace conflict. People create conflict protocols so that when conflict arises between them, they already have agreed upon guidelines for communication and practices for addressing the conflict.

You will collaborate in small breakout groups to explore and design the perspectives, principles, and practices your “team” will rely upon to navigate disagreements and effectively address conflict while maintaining healthy relationships. As a result of attending this workshop, you’ll gain tools and strategies to reframe conflict as an opportunity to improve and build relationships, create a safe space to handle conflict, and draft a conflict protocol.

About Bryan

Bryan Stallings is the Chief Evangelist at Lucid where he helps teams come together to see and build the future. He has been bringing people together in the workplace to solve messy, human problems for 20+ years. Prior to Lucid, Bryan was the longest tenured agile coach at SolutionsIQ, where he led for fourteen years. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), past faculty for the Agile Coaching Institute, a certified Co-Active coach and ORSC-trained coach.

About Samantha

Samantha believes that the quality of our interactions and relationships dictates the quality of our lives, and this is the foundation of her passion and life's work: helping individuals and teams improve the quality of their lives and communication, thus building more productive and connected relationships. As a professional coach, mediator, and facilitator, Samantha provides customized support and solutions to a wide range of diverse and influential individuals and organizations, to successfully navigate complex challenges and circumstances (both personal & professional), while increasing their capacity to lead with greater impact and influence. Clients count on her as a trusted resource to gain the tools and strategies needed to embrace the inevitable conflicts presented by work and life. These tools also assist in engaging in difficult conversations by resourcing individuals and groups more effectively and creating filters for making important decisions. Her expansive skillset and expertise have allowed her to work with individuals, startups, family-owned businesses, and large corporations to create positive and sustainable outcomes and develop exemplary leadership skills that ultimately accelerate their growth and success.
“You can count on me to support you and always bring a positive attitude and a fresh perspective to any situation. I believe everything is workable and with the right people by your side, you can adapt quickly, thrive in changing environments, and accelerate your capacity to lead with greater impact and influence."

Additional Information & Credentials:

Co-Active Certified Coach, CPCC

Co-Active Leadership

Justice Institute of British Columbia: Certification In Mediation

Justice Institute of British Columbia: Certification in Conflict Coaching

Scrum Alliance: Certified Scrum MasterResolved over 5,000 Disputes

Co-create your ideal Human Resources organization in a Post-pandemic world

During the height of Covid, I had an opportunity to witness an HR team operating in a manner causing extreme discomfort within the entire organization. Upon deeper examination, I am super grateful for witnessing this huge window of opportunity to overcome by tackling this question “how might we design our HR organizations to serve us in a Post-Covid world?”

Checking your own organization quickly, do you find

- your HR team has an “us” versus “them” mentality and behavior?
- yourself creating your own job descriptions without HR input, or having to create policies and procedures without HR guidance, or perhaps correcting HR errors?
- financial concerns trump actually doing the thing that needs to be done, such as rewarding a deserving employee with a promotion and raise.
- your HR team completely forgets who they serve. (The test of this is how often you hear “how can I serve you?” from your HR department.)
- you find yourself avoiding the HR department like the plague.

If these 5 points resonate with you, please attend this workshop to co-create exactly what we want from our Post-Covid HR departments.

The outcome of this workshop will be the detailed how-to for HR departments, spelled out clearly, so that they can become
- concerned with all employees’ welfare
- proactive - reach out and offer help
- actually serving their teams
- playing a key role in making your workplace the best place to be.

About Catherine

Catherine Louis is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, independent Agile coach, founder of CLL-Group.com, and co-founder of PoDojo.com. Her specialties include Agile transitions in the scope of large, multi-nodal solutions, high-reliability systems, with large teams of several hundred to several thousand R&D employees. Her focus is on building the Agile business, leadership training, enabling the transition from phased-control waterfall development to adaptive development with an Agile mindset. Catherine has over 20 years of research and development experience (software, hardware, services, operations) with extensive development experiences in technical marketplaces worldwide. She is a volunteer with over 15 years as a SAR II and K9 trainer and handler with Wake Canine Search and Rescue.

Three years of self-selection reteaming at Redgate Software

Are you attracted to the idea of allowing people to move towards the work they find most motivational, allowing them to decide for themselves what they work on and which team they are part of? Perhaps you’ve read Heidi Helfand's book - Dynamic Reteaming - and heard of organizations that have run team self-selection events, and while that’s sounded to you like the right thing to do, you’ve thought “that’ll never work here”?

The traditional wisdom of having long-lived, stable teams means that deliberate reteaming might sound unwise. You might be anxious that if you gave people agency over which team they were in, nobody would want to work on Team X. Or everyone would want to work on Team Y? Or Team Z will be left with people who did not have the skills to really succeed with Z?

Well, that’s exactly how Redgate, a software company in the UK, felt in 2018.

This is the story of why and how we took the plunge, deciding to run our own self-selection reteaming process. Chris will share what happened, what went right and what went wrong, and how that first attempt has lead us to making reteaming an annual event that’s popular with senior management and our software development teams.

Chris hopes attendees will be inspired to try a self-selection process that works for them, building on the following take-aways:
* Learn about "reteaming", the principles of self-determination and the value of providing staff with autonomy, mastery & purpose
* What holds us back from self-selection both as leaders and participants
* What happened when Redgate Software ran their self-selection process (Spoiler: Good things)
* How to plan and run a considerate self-selection process - physically and remotely
* Tools and techniques to apply to your process

About Chris

Chris is Head of Product Delivery at Redgate. His job is to lead the software development teams that work on Redgate's ingeniously simple database software, building teams with clarity of purpose, freedom to act and a drive to learn. For the last three years Chris has lead Redgate's annual reteaming process which gives people a strong influence over which team they are part of, encouraging them to move towards the work they find most engaging

Combating the “Great Resignation” - Employee-Centric Retention

Shifting your approach to Retention using an Employee-Centric Experience Process

The “great resignation” is not only impacting organizations - consider the impact that it is having on Agile teams. It takes time, energy, and money to build high-performing, self-led Agile Teams. What if leaders and managers approached employee retention in a different way?
Agile organizations are customer-centric by nature, but what is the impact when we also become employee-centric? We may be able to keep our most valuable assets by simply shifting our mindset by taking the same approach with our employees as we do with our customers.
Join Christina Maines as she shares case studies on what employee-centric organizations do to ensure that employee satisfaction is met. She will discuss the effects that the pandemic has had on organizations large and small when it comes to employee retention and what she has found to be major contributors based on her research and personal experience having changed jobs unexpectedly in early 2021.
Attendees will walk away with proven methods that will aid them in shifting their culture to an “employee-centric” culture, including:
- Using value propositions to better understand employee frustrations
- Identifying ways to alleviate employee frustrations, from the employees perspective
- Developing a plan to retain employees and keep Agile teams intact

About Christina

Christina Maines is an Agile Coach at LitheSpeed and is a Certified SAFe® Program Consultant (SPC) with over six years of experience working with/on agile teams. She is a dynamic, results-oriented, and motivated professional with a proven record of building relationships and coaching individuals, programs, and teams to success.
Throughout her career, Christina has worked with both business and technology teams in financial services, software development, and program management in both private and federal government spaces. She started her personal Agile journey while working at USAA as a liaison for executive management providing coaching and training for department leadership and eventually transitioning into ScrumMaster and Release Train Engineer roles. As a consultant contracted with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), she successfully transitioned development teams to cross-functional agile teams. Christina is adept at guiding remote/virtual facilitation of Big-Room/PI Planning sessions and provides interactive online training of SAFe® Agile courses.
She is passionate about coaching agile teams to deliver continuous value and exceed expectations through building high-performing cross-functional teams and implementing proven agile methods.

Reflective and More Effective

One of the more popular ways to reflect in the Agile world is the retrospective. Unfortunately, retrospectives can become focused on the past, become dull and repetitive, and sometimes get shortened or even cancelled. In this session, we'll explore ways to get the most out of the time the team spends together at the end of each Sprint and completely move away from the idea of looking back at what went well or what didn't go well. There will be breakouts with Mural and you'll be able to try a variety of retrospective ideas including "team coaching," "team with the best results ever," and "upgrades and advantages."

Participants will walk away with a new perspective on how regularly reflect and make real changes, a method for tracking retrospective action items, and a variety of Mural templates they can use with their own teams.

About Damon

Damon has coached at dozens of organizations and trained thousands of people across a wide variety of industries and company sizes including EMC, Capital One, Oanda, Ford, and Fidelity. He's delivered over a hundred sessions at meetups and conferences including Agile Alliance, Agile New England, Kentucky Fried Agile, Atlassian Summit, Agile and Beyond, and Agile Toronto.
As a coach of coaches at Eliassen, Damon led the Agile Delivery team which grew to hundreds of Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches in the field. He created Eliassen's Agile Transformation approach and the training content across all aspects of Agile, and led the effort to provide opportunities for the coaches to advance in their coaching journey.
This background gave Damon the opportunity to learn from hundreds of Agile Coaches in an enormous variety of client environments and from the wider international Agile community. What can you and Damon learn from each other?

Breaking Free from Blame

That dreaded "we need to figure out what happened to hold people accountable" meeting is approaching, which often means people are getting their fingers ready to point. When working with humans, blaming never leads to accountability. What blaming will lead to is a loss of focus and waste of time towards the shared goal of delivering value. In this session, Tricia Broderick examines what blame in the workplace really means, the impacts of blaming and better alternatives to accomplishing accountability.

About Diana

Diana Larsen contributes to the foundations and extensions of Agile thought. Diana served for nine years on the Agile Alliance board of directors, five in an officer role. She has co-authored several influential books. Agile Retrospectives provides a framework for team learning and improvement. Liftoff 2nd ed. gives clear instructions for chartering and setting the tone for teamwork. In Five Rules for Accelerated Learning, find guidance for supporting more effective learning. Download a free eBook The Agile Fluency Model on the agilefluency.org website. The Model assists leaders with enabling team success for business benefit.

Diana co-founded Agile Fluency® Project^* with James Shore in 2015. Through AFP's programs and services, Diana shares wisdom gained over three decades of working with leaders, teams, and organizations. She holds the intriguing title of Chief Connector. Diana continues her career as facilitator, mentor, and consulting partner.

(*) Agile Fluency is a registered trademark of Agile Fluency Project, LLC

About Tricia

Tricia Broderick is a leadership and organizational advisor. Tricia has over twenty years of experience in the software development industry. Her transformational leadership, at all levels of an organization, ignites the growth of leaders and high performing teams to deliver quality outcomes. Tricia boldly role models putting people first. Her aim is to create inclusive connections and collaborations that challenge and support people in an authentic, vulnerable, and engaging way. As a result, she is a highly-rated trainer, coach, facilitator, and motivational keynote speaker. In 2020, she founded Ignite Insight + Innovation.

Async Code Reviews Are Killing Your Company’s Throughput

"Never had a Pull Request over 300 LoC that didn't look good to me" is, sadly, a reality of so many teams in our industry.
Fortunately, some other teams recognized the value of applying the Small Batches idea from Lean to the PRs.

But, what if I told you that teams doing small PRs with async code reviews, actually have way lower throughput than teams doing big PRs?

I got this surprising systemic insight by analyzing tens of thousands of PRs across a bunch of repositories.
On the bigger PRs side of the spectrum, we tend to lose quality, while on the smaller PRs end of the spectrum we lose throughput. We're forced to make a trade-off between speed and quality.

But! There's a parallel universe of ways of working where you get to have your cake and eat it too. Where you can have both throughput and quality. Universe called co-creation patterns (Pair and Mob programming).

Join me on a journey where I'll show you the data invalidating the assumption that two or more people sitting at the same computer will hurt team's throughput and why the opposite is actually the case.

About Dragan

Dragan is based in Berlin and works as a Principal Engineer at HelloFresh (ex-GetYourGuide and Careem/Uber).

Typically on the search for better ways of working, exploring ends of the spectrums, and helping teams and organizations try out counter-intuitive ideas that initially don't make a lot of sense, but end up as completely opposite of that.

It's been a long time since he fell in love with eXtreme Programming, Domain-Driven Design and software as a craft (founder of Software Crafting Serbia community).
Last couple of years he enjoys endless discussions connecting the Theory of Constraints, XP, Systems Thinking, Lean and socio-emotio-technical topics.

Project or not?

Is it time to move away from a definition that declares a project must have an end? How do we describe developing software that is under continuous update forever? Agile methodologies can support a never-ending backlog. Are development teams ready to do the same?

We examine continuous updates vs. version releases, advantages and disadvantages of both, and industry directions. You brainstorm with peers about the utility of incorporating additional perspectives into your toolbox and learn how other organizations are accomplishing this. Working with peers and using current research, you create strategies to help your development teams embrace and succeed with this vision of software development.

You go back to your company with fresh insights and new ways to look at when "complete" is not required, and strategies to help your team incorporate this current reality when it is appropriate. You will have research-based information that supports strategic implementation of this emerging trend.

About Glenda

Glenda started project management in construction, working with a cellular telephone company building 40 new cell towers per year, back when "Project" software management tool was not a Microsoft product. She has managed software development projects for government agencies, non-profits and small businesses.
Glenda thinks that project management skills are life skills that are beneficial for everyone.

Projects and Products - Unravelling the confusion and making prioritization problems transparent

We work on products and projects, yet there is often a lot of confusion on what they are and how they relate. While the definition of the project is quite well defined, we often don't use it or contrast it with product(s). This session explores the definitions of each and how they relate to each other - and explains them in simple and easy to use ways (we address services as well). We look at the common issues and challenges that organizations create with their traditional approaches to funding and structure, which often constrain success when shifting from project to product approaches. Finally, we analyze the reality of what product people have to deal with when they have multiple stakeholders requesting more than is possible (so always). Product people have the tough job of making choices, since everything people can think of can’t be done - being able to explain it in clear terms is critical.

About Jake

Jake Calabrese is a coach, trainer, and coach-consultant working to help organizations meet the promise of agile by going beyond agile practices to address culture challenges and help teams and leaders reach and maintain high-performance. He has unique expertise as an Organization & Relationship Systems Certified Coach (ORSCC), a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC), and Professional Certified Coach (PCC), and as a trainer and coach for Agile Companies (helping non-software organizations use agile). Jake created the AgileSafari cartoon series to introduce humor into the more challenging issues we have to tackle. Jake uses ideas from various areas of thinking such as: Lean, professional coaching, neuroscience, psychology, facilitation, brain-based training, improvisation, agile, kanban, and scrum. Jake regularly speaks at local and national conferences including Mile High Agile, Scrum Gathering, and Agile Alliance Agile20xx conferences. Jake is co-founder of Helping Improve LLC.

Braving it Without Bulldozing it: Assertive communication for a win-win result

Have you ever been in a situation where your choice not to speak left you feeling like you were stuck with a decision you didn't agree with? Have you ever spoken up only to find out later someone felt pressured or railroaded by you?

Assertiveness is the art of speaking boldly and with compassion, speaking confidently and with humility, and speaking up while not speaking over those around you. We will discuss the key tools to help you work out this balance and build your emotional intelligence in conversations so that you can be confident in your communications.

Learning outcomes:
Self-assess where you fall on the spectrum from Passiveness to Assertiveness to Aggressiveness.
Understand and analyze the underlying motivators of the actions of people in these stances.
Assess a personal or professional situation in which you wish you had been more assertive.
Design how you might deal with that situation again if you could turn back time.
Create a plan for improving communications in the future.

About Jessica

Jessica Katz is a trainer, mentor and coach helping people find and nurture their authentic selves. Through Liberated Elephant, Jessica works with individuals, teams, leaders, and organizations to help them discover where they are, and with their new knowledge, help them uncover solutions that move them forward on their journey. Her methodology is informed by Agile values, principles, and practices, creating a safe space for clients to be their full selves without judgement.

Connecting Remotely Beyond Meetings

Many work teams have become closer than ever during the pandemic period, meeting regularly and providing much-needed support. But research shows that valuable connections beyond the team have faltered: people bemoan the loss of casual interactions with colleagues from other departments in corridors and cafeterias.

A key issue is that many work calendars are a monoculture: near-endless drifts of online meetings, often with the same people, discussing the same stuff. This Zoom overload leaves people exhausted, crushes their productivity, and disconnects them from their wider working network.

As “back to the office” becomes a reality, making time and space for the growth of a more varied ecosystem is essential. We need a “rewilding” of informal verges and greenways, where cross-pollination can happen - without more meetings.

In this session, you’ll learn to:
- Reduce the need to hold another meeting, whether in-the-room, remote or hybrid
- Evolve communication techniques that enable richer collaboration outside of meetings
- Create time and space for your best work to flourish.

About Judy

Named as a ‘Top 100 influencer in Remote Working’ in 2020 by Onalytica, Judy Rees helps people to connect and collaborate online.

She is a regular presenter at online events, demonstrating key principles of engagement and inclusivity in the process.

As a trainer she has introduced scores of trainers, coaches, and facilitators to the joy of live online training and events.

As an event designer and facilitator/host she has worked with a wide range of organisations including the World Bank and the RSA.

She’s also the lead designer of Rees McCann’s courses, including Engaging Online Events: The Complete Step-By-Step Guide.

She founded, and continues to host, one of the world’s first online-video unconferences, Metaphorum, which annually connects 150 people around the world in a 13-hour live-learning marathon.

As a news editor, and later as a media executive, she also managed large remote teams for many years.

She’s known as the co-author of 2009 category bestseller Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors And Opening Minds, and the creator of Collaboration Dynamics, a remote-first programme for team development. Clean Language informs and underpins her online-engagement work.

6 Negotiating Tips for Stakeholder Management

Are you a Scrum Master having trouble navigating conflicts? Perhaps you're a Product Owner who has to negotiate scope and timelines with stakeholders. Maybe you're an Agile Coach who desires to improve dependencies across teams. Confronting problems is inevitable in any Agile role. Servant leadership comes with the expectation of influencing and negotiating with others, typically without a position of authority. This can be extremely difficult, especially in emotionally charged or high-stake situations.

In this talk, we present 6 tips for negotiation from the best in the business: FBI hostage negotiators! If you can master the art of influence and negotiation, you can resolve differences without escalating into damaging conflicts, collaborate better across the organization, and help your teams avoid wasted time and spin.

About Julee

Julee Everett and Lemont Chambliss combine their decades of experience working through challenges in business agility, change management, agile transformations, and building high-performing teams to bring this interactive, pragmatic approach to negotiation.

About Lemont

Lemont is a Principal Consultant, Agile Coach with Improving.

In this role, he helps clients discover better ways of working, enabling the delivery of meaningful products. Mr. Chambliss has experience with several agile frameworks and coaches at the individual, team, and executive levels. Mr. Chambliss also has expertise in both manual and automated software testing, business analysis and leading software development teams.

Prior to joining Improving, Mr. Chambliss worked for a variety of major companies including Catalina, IBM, AT&T, Eckerd, and AmerisourceBergen.

Becoming A Change Resilient Organization

When a decision is made, it often involves subsequent changes that impact people, processes, and technology. Unfortunately, many changes forget about the impact they will have on the people within an organization. Regardless, the treadmill of change within organizations continues without relent, often creating resistance and a bottleneck of changes.

To get these changes unstuck, we need to take a different approach to change. By better understanding our change ecosystem, we can empower co-created change practices and establish a pull change system instead of pushing change on people. If we focus on making progress over planning for perfection when implementing change, we can begin our journey to becoming a change resilient organization.

Join me in this interactive session as we discuss how organizations can reverse the treadmill of change failure and instead build a resilient approach to change that unlocks change purpose and alignment through adapting to change complexity, generating meaningful dialogue, and building intrinsic motivation for change.

About Ken

Ken started his professional career as a mainframe operator, loading reel to reel tapes for data backups. He eventually became a data and analytics developer, architect, and manager over the first decade of his career. While stumbling through the traditions of ladder-climbing and top-down corporate change, he found the frustration that would ignite the passion that would fuel the next decade of his career.

While his development days are behind him, he now spends his time in the pursuit of finding better ways to invite change into teams and organizations. Ken now shares his experiences through facilitating Organizational Change and Management courses.

How to Embrace Chaos and Be Antifragile

Anti-fragility is a concept initially coined by Nassim Taleb, and its definition is deceptively simple: it means "the opposite of fragility." In other words, anti-fragile becomes more powerful when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors. You are an anti-fragile system if you become more assertive when everything around you is getting chaotic.

Kurt will share some real-world examples of how he applied these concepts and how you can apply them to your life and work as well. In this session, we will cover:

- What antifragility is and why it's important

- How to create personal resilience for both stability and growth

- How to use anti-fragile techniques in your career or business

- And much more

By adopting a "fail forward" attitude, we're able to bounce back quickly and prepare ourselves for future successes.

Becoming antifragile is all about learning to embrace volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors so that they strengthen us over the long term.

About Kurt

At the age of twenty, Kurt Schmidt was recognized as one of the top BMX freestyle bike riders in the world and launched his first company. As a professional athlete, he was renowned for his biking skills and entrepreneurial spirit.

In 2010, he was tapped by The Nerdery to join the Development Department and was quickly promoted to the Director of Project Management. Kurt established the company's first PMO and helped to lead, train, and grow The Nerdery’s project management team of over 50 Project and Program Managers.

Currently, Kurt Schmidt is the President of Foundry, a digital product, and experience agency and hosts a weekly Podcast named the "Schmidt List" where he interviews industry leaders to learn their thoughts on bridging modern management techniques, design thinking, and cutting-edge technology for our ever-increasing “agile” world.

Nice Teams Finish Last

Let’s see if this sounds familiar:
You attend a retrospective where most of what comes up is a shout-out or win. If there are any topics for improvement they are largely related to external factors and fall into a “safe” category. Additionally, it is difficult to identify meaningful action items. These toxically nice retrospectives may even be painful to attend.

Most of us prefer to be nice and generally that’s a good thing. However, when our teams shift into this “toxically nice” category everyone loses. We lose our sense of empowerment, autonomy, ability to make decisions and so much more. As agile advocates, scrum masters or leaders we are ideally positioned to change this culture.

Walk away from this interactive session with an understanding of what “toxic niceness” is and new tools to empower you to change the outlook of your team.

About Leah

Leah is a Delivery Manager at Workiva and enjoys being a servant leader for her teams. As an agile advocate, she participates in the software development process and facilitates team goal completion. Leah’s passion lies in tying the people to their process. With a people first approach, Leah generates stewards of process rather than apathetic followers.

About NiJay

NiJay Gaines is a multidisciplinary leader, who has used agile practices as a division I college athlete and coach as well as roles in sectors that include technology and software as a service. A Certified Scrum Master with a passion for delivering results to her clients the way she delivered victories for her basketball teams. NiJay is committed to building high performing teams at Workiva that drive a top tier customer experience during the delivery of their products and services.

Science or Stories?

Smart people are logical and objective, aren’t they? They (we) look at the evidence to help make the best possible decisions. We are not influenced by hype or emotion and as a result our behavior reflects the best the world has to offer, isn’t that true? Cognitive science now tells us that these beliefs about ourselves and others (especially scientists) are wrong. We tend to make decisions based on intuition or emotion and then justify those decisions later with logic, a process called rationalization. The most influential element in our environment is not scientific evidence but stories. We love stories. Research shows that we are more likely to buy a product or embrace a process because of a friend, colleague, or relative and ignore evidence that might go against that decision. Are these bad things? Is there anything we can do about it? We have a long history of being influenced by stories and it has helped us survive. Linda suggests that the real answer is we need both approaches -- stories and emotion + evidence and logic. Both approaches have flaws and benefits. Linda will share the research and tell her own stories to try to convince you and try to help us do a better job of making decisions.

About Linda

Linda Rising is an independent consultant who lives near Nashville, Tennessee. Linda has a Ph.D. from Arizona State University in object-based design metrics. Her background includes university teaching as well as work in telecommunications, avionics, and tactical weapons systems. She is an internationally known presenter on topics related to agile development, patterns, retrospectives, the change process, and the connection between the latest neuroscience and software development. Linda is the author of numerous articles and five books. Her web site is: lindarising.org

"Working software" is not enough, now we need "Working products"

Many companies struggle with their product and tech organization because they experience slow delivery and see few outcomes. We all need to understand that crafting good software is no longer enough to be competitive in the modern digital landscape. Building digital product is what we need! It is way different than building software but is much more effective, much more rewarding and much more fun! How can we do that?
The main difference is that building products means building relationships, communication channels and engage the right discussions. In this session we will discuss the difference between building digital product and writing software and how, very often, we do not achieve our goal because we approach a product development activity with a software development mindset and we fail in building the product development community.

About Lorenzo

I am passionate about product management and I love data when it comes to making decisions.
I prioritize and refine my backlog thanks to all of the stakeholders and the product development team.
More than anything I enjoy fast feedback from the market, craft beer, and retrogaming.

Agile Transformation of a School System (From Teachers to Students)

Over the last 100 years we have moved from horseback to electric vehicles, from pony express to email, and from industrial age to information age. However, in all that time education remains the same. We sort students by grade level and organize schools in assembly line fashion just like we did in 1920. It is time for education to address the current needs for our students.
By empowering teachers to focus on meaningful outcomes and iterate those solutions we can bring innovative instruction to our students. Through transparency and autonomy students will learn relevant skills and be excited about the experience.
You will be empowered with practical action steps and a listing of resources you can use to encourage agile transformation in the schools your children attend or in the community in which you volunteer. The team also explains how you can support formal agile training for educators.

About Mark

Mark French is an accomplished financial executive with extensive experience in the not-for-profit world. He has spent the last 30 years as a planner, budget manager, strategist and organizer with comprehensive financial responsibility. He brings a big picture perspective to all aspects of an organization, from marketing and academics to production and finance.

Before he was the CEO for Blueprint Education, a role he has had since 2014, Mark was Blueprint’s CFO for more than 25 years. In his role as CEO, Mark has expanded operations at Blueprint to include growing enrollment by more than 200% and dramatically increased the school’s grade given annually by the state from an “F” to an impressive “B.” Once a struggling charter school, Blueprint’s schools now have renewed charters into the year 2037.

Mark is passionate about establishing self-directed, cross-functional teams of both students and staff who are empowered to innovate through iterations. He continues to develop the successful Agile transformation he started across all areas of the organization at Blueprint Education including administration and instruction, and is proud to confirm that all areas of the business are truly Agile.

He strongly believes the best decisions are made by those closest to the action and works to ensure that exists at every level of the organization.

Over the past several years, Mark has implemented sweeping changes and improvements at Blueprint Education’s two charter schools and its innovative new program called VIP (Value-Independence-Purpose) that ensures graduating seniors have the skills necessary to thrive in a world full of challenges.

Mark is a graduate of Arizona State University (ASU) with a degree in Corporate Finance. He also attended ASU’s Post Baccalaureate Accounting program and earned additional training in financial, managerial and tax accounting.

An avid fan of auto racing, Mark also enjoys volunteering. He currently volunteers as the chairman of the deacons at his church and is chairman of the personnel committee. He also donates his time to help with audio/video production.

Mark has been married to his wife, Joy, for 32 years and lives outside Phoenix Arizona. They have three grown children who also live in Arizona and North Carolina.

Where Does Our Future Lead? Remote, Hybrid Remote or Elsewhere?

2020 introduced the largest remote work experiment ever. Vaccines to counter Covid-19 and new policies to safely work together emerged. Hybrid remote seemed the obvious solution as we moved into 2021. But was it a solution or another forced experiment? Does remote still seem like a better option or a temporary fix? We’ll explore why some organizations have chosen remote work, some of the key principles that need to be in place to make remote work successful, and when being face-to-face still provides the better option for certain types of work.

About Mark

With over two decades of experience in agile principles and practices, Mark Kilby boldly coaches where others feel it’s impossible. His years of experience leading, training, and mentoring remote, hybrid-remote and distributed agile teams is captured in his book co-authored with Johanna Rothman, From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams. Mark also co-founded a number of professional learning organizations to build sustainable, collaborative learning communities. You can learn more about Mark's remote agile coaching and his online community work at https://markkilby.com. Currently, Mark and his partner, April Jefferson, are capturing and sharing how they coach and facilitate in an upcoming book and monthly learning journeys at http://mobilitymindset.life.

Improving Outcomes with Evidence-Based Management

We strive to make good decisions as we work to deliver amid change and uncertainty. Still, it's easy to lose sight of the deeper goals - improving outcomes, reducing risks, and optimizing investments. What should we measure? Are our goals still valid? Are we still headed in the right direction? And, how can we do this at the organizational level?

Through a set of interactive exercises, you learn about the elements of Evidence-Based Management (EBM) and how they improve decision-making in complex situations. Using discussion and the online whiteboard tool Mural, Mark guides your discovery of EBM and its value to you.

In this session, you:
- Learn four Key Value Areas (KVAs) and the balance needed for sustained success
- Explore how empirical loops can be applied to strategic goals
- Re-frame measures as empirical evidence that enables deeper questions for better decisions

Come learn how to make better decisions and continuously improve toward strategic goals and objectives.

About Mark

Mark Wavle is an experienced Agile practitioner, professional coach, and Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) who is passionate about helping leaders and teams improve their work through individual professional coaching and highly engaging education. He has been a Development Team member, Scrum Master, Product Owner, Agile Coach, instructional designer, Team Lead, Practice Manager, and National Agile Lead. As a sought-out speaker and trainer, Mark has created and delivered high-impact training and presentations at over 30 conferences and hundreds of companies throughout the United States and Europe. Mark is the lead trainer and professional coach at Unstuck Careers.

Building Quality

I will present building a good software testing life cycle and achieving quality in software projects from scratch. It is a real life story. After attending start-up company, we managed to build the QA processes and faced the storming and performing stages as the team. I will share this journey.

After starting a new project, the initial planning is done and the very first development activities start. But as we all know, all products are tested, which means at some point (ideally soon after the development activities start) testing activities also start.

So, from the start of the testing till maturity, there is a long and tricky way. In this talk, I discuss what kind of challenges are experienced and how we can cope with them.

Challenges:

• Uncertainties
• Hidden information
• Missing guidance
• Complex and complicated systems under test
• A lot of deployments and limited resource
• Adaptation problems in the team

Solutions:

• Information mining: Walk through and explore the system, Customer Surveys, Requirement Analysis, Specification Benchmarks
• Define processes: Bug Life Cycle, Test Case Life Cycle, Workflows: Code Review Guideline, Acceptance/Exit Criteria
• Decide Tools: Issues, Tasks, Tests, Results, Code
• Maintain Tests: Coverage, Suite Management, Markers
• Automation: Implement the skeleton: Flexible enough for further improvements, Robust and open for RCA, Reporting
• Define Levels and Subsets: Priorities for the executions

  Proposed approaches can be applied by any organization by adapting according to the related work to achieve time and cost reduction

Proposed approaches can be applied by any organization by adapting according to the related work to achieve time and cost reduction.

About Mesut

Mesut has BSc and MSc degrees from Bogazici University Electrical & Electronics Engineering. He worked in Defense Industry for 7 years and managed the testing activities in a multinational project. He has a proficiency in CMMI and PMP with a broad range of experiences under his belt.

After that, he worked for Siemens A.G in system testing team for 4 years. He had the technical lead position in Istanbul QA office where he managed 18 people and represented the site in the global organization. He took the responsibility for V&V activities for a cloud-based open IoT platform containing lots of microservices and acted as a Product Owner.

Currently, he has been working for Rapyuta Robotics, Tokyo. In the robotics domain, his expertise is focused on test automation.

His certificates are: PMP, PSPO, PSM, ISTQB CTAL TM and he is a frequent international speaker with a wide range of various talks: https://www.mesutdurukal.com/conferences.html

Kanban - "You say it best when you say nothing at all"

Part 1: The problem - in most companies today, one of the main struggles around delivery of work, is truly not understanding the steps necessary to complete work and the lack of transparency around the current state of the work in the workflow

Part 2: Mike and Rebecca show how Kanban can be used to bring visibility and transparency through both creative and non-traditional ways to help your team focus and deliver with excellence.

Part 3: Learn the practices and principles of Kanban; the measurements that can lead to improvement; how the Kanban board can make bottlenecks visible; and provide questions to ask so you can better understand how Kanban can help. Mike and Rebecca discuss the 6 steps to Getting Started with Kanban to help everyone with their Kanban journey.

About Mike

Mike has a passion for helping teams/organizations get to a shared understanding of what it takes to deliver; level-setting expectations and responsibilities; and then leveraging the process improvement aspect of Kanban to help everyone better understand their current workflow process.

Leveraging the visualization of the Kanban board; Kanban metrics; and a shared understanding, everyone involved is better equipped to collaborate on the possible change needed to address issues as they are uncovered

Mike draws on his 35 years of overall experience, 14+ years of real-world Agile experience and 8+ year of Kanban experience as he helps all parts of the organization understand/visualize where they are “Now”, and then working with them to identify their ”Next” incremental step on their journey toward Delivery Excellence.

About Rebecca

Rebecca draws from over 20 years of working with her peers and leadership to deliver valuable customer outcomes while focusing on continuous improvement. She has been immerged in Project Management focused career path as Agile PMO Director, Program Manager, Scrum Master and Agile Coach.
In her role as Agile Coach & Scrum Master at Insight Digital Innovation, Rebecca is hands-on with scrum teams and leading Insight Associates through their Agility journeys. She specializes in focusing on Agile curious team members who seek to better understand the roles in the world of digital innovation and how to expand working in creative ways.
She has worked in information technology across the following industries; financial services, insurance, energy, higher education and hospitality.

Be Agile Remotely

Dwight Eisenhower said, "planning is everything, the plan is nothing."

One of the main things that the agile movement has taught us, is that no plan goes according to the plan. It is important that we organise, review and adapt the plan as changes occur.

With the current global health crisis many organizations have found themselves suddenly outside their plan, leading them to review their current way of working and adapt to a new way of working: remote work in agile.

Usually such large scale organizational changes are strategically planned, carefully designed and methodically implemented with help from experts. The recent transition to remote working however has happened so quickly and with so little time for deliberate planning and adjusting that the change may have created some level of added tension and chaos.

Working remotely might seem at first as simple as working from a "different" office. But soon - as you probably have experienced - people realize that they have to change the way they communicate and collaborate completely. And for many, this new way of life, the new way of work is proving to be challenging. Most people have never learned the mindset and skill set of remote communication and collaboration.

Molood has founded Remote Forever with the vision of bringing remote work to agile. In this inspirational talk, you will learn how to maintain your business agility while working remotely with the support of a growth mindset. It will challenge some of the assumptions you have about working remotely and will inspire you to upgrade your mindset and get ready to adapt to new ways of communicating with your coworkers. In the end, you will have ideas for actions you can take to be more effective at working agile remotely, as well as having a great time doing so.

About Molood

Molood Ceccarelli is a remote work strategist and agile coach. She is often referred to as the queen of remote work in agile circles. She is the founder of Remote Forever Summit, an annual online summit about distributed agile that has been around since 2016 and has attracted over 10k attendees from around the world. Her company Remote Forever helps distributed companies adopt agile ways of working and helps agile companies work remotely effectively. Her work has been published in places such as Forbes, Huffington Post and Inc.com as well as Scrum Alliance.

Building a Bridge to a Legacy Application - How Hard Can that Be?

My team loves working on legacy code projects. It’s all that we do. That’s why a friend of mine reached out to us for some help.

His startup was building out a universal API across a very fragmented industry with little to no interoperability or standards. Up until now, integrating with the systems in that industry had been pretty easy, because the companies that built them were willing to help.

But now he’d found one that wasn’t willing to help. There was no obvious API for getting data out of the legacy application so that it could be exposed via his company’s API. A big client for his company was riding on his ability to be able to pull this off. He remembered how much I loved a challenge and how much my team loved legacy code, so he figured we were his best shot.

The goal was to be able to read from the application’s database.

In this talk, I’ll cover:

- the different approaches that we took
- the one we really wanted to try because we thought it would be fun
- the approaches that we needed to try before we could attempt the fun one
- the excitement that we felt while working on it
- the grind toward completion once the big technical hurdle was crossed
- the sense of achievement when we got a read-only solution built
- the hope that we’d get the green light to start working on a read-write solution
- the disappointment when the plug got pulled and we weren’t authorized to proceed any further

It was a fun journey, and I’d love to be able to share it.

About M.

M. Scott Ford is the Co-Founder & CEO of Corgibytes, where he has quietly led a software maintenance revolution for the past decade. Where most people find nothing but frustration, shame, and bugs in legacy code, Scott has centered his work around his genuine love of software modernization and helping others use joy, empathy, and technical excellence to make their systems more stable scalable and secure. Scott’s ideas have been featured in books such as The Innovation Delusion and as a guest lecturer at Harvard University. Scott is the author of three courses on LinkedIn Learning: Dealing With Legacy Code And Technical Debt, Code Quality, and Clean Coding Practices. He is the host of the podcast Legacy Code Rocks and enjoys helping other menders find a sense of belonging in a world dominated by makers.

The Sprint Review: Source for Collaboration and Communication

Every Scrum Master knows the definition and rules of the Sprint Review from the Scrum Guide inside out. The team presents what has been achieved - the current increment - and gains valuable feedback. So everyone gets an outlook on the goals and can then adapt them together and collaboratively. But the review has potential for much more. It is also worth looking at the original intention behind the framework.

Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, the founders of SCRUM, had a pretty good idea of ​​what they wanted to achieve with the framework. Ken and Jeff were motivated by the following statement when developing SCRUM:

"Encourages developers to go into the field and listen to what customers and dealers have to say." (Takeuchi and Noaka, 1986)

But doesn't a traditional meeting prevent collaboration between developers and users? Developers and users often withdraw after the meeting and then wait for feedback until the next review. No, it doesn't have to be like that.

The review can be used for much more than just a demonstration and an outlook on the following sprints. By observing and analyzing the participants, valuable helpers for identifying requirements and supporters during a transformation can be obtained. But the absent also ran the starting point for further action. A systemic approach is used to search for reasons for absenteeism and to find solutions.

Agile projects can only really show their strengths with collaboration between developers and stakeholders. With the right stakeholders, gained from the review, the right structures can then be selected in order to achieve ideal results with optimal use of time. These include, for example, a design studio, domain storytelling or event storming.

In their lecture, Katja Hegein and Nils Hyoma will report on their experience of a project in which disruptive software was successfully introduced in an agile manner. Many critical stakeholders were involved and, through collaboration, became supporters of the new solution.

About Nils

Nils Hyoma is a business informatics post-graduate from Hamburg University, a professional agile coach, and a passionate amateur water polo player. Nils studied Japanese studies, international business studies, and business informatics in Hiroshima and Hamburg. Many years as an active developer, he learned the basics of agile software development. After working in online retail / eCommerce and in IT consulting, he is now part of the coaching team at Novatec Consulting since 2021. Nils supports and coaches both local and distributed, international teams and projects. Nils has been active in team sports since childhood. It also reflected team spirit in his professional life: As a coach, he forms well-established units out of developers and analysts, who can then independently develop products. The guiding principle is always the focus on customer satisfaction.

Standing in the Tragic Gap: how to lead change without burning out

You've seen the promise of Agile done well. Not some hyped up, fairy-tale dream of agile, but some real, meaningful improvement based on applying ideas from the Agile community. And yet, most of the time it doesn't feel like that. People seem skeptical, irrational, or just "stuck in their ways". Great teams get broken up. A key leader moves on to "another opportunity". A promising idea gets killed in the round of budget cuts. In this session we'll explore Parker Palmer's concept of the Tragic Gap, how it's different than Ineffective Idealism and Caustic Cynicism, and why any great leader needs to be willing to stand in that gap every day. Finally, we'll give you a few key tools that will help you build a routine to do this without burning yourself out in the process.

About Peter

Peter helps leaders discover how to create the outcomes they care about the most. He draws on a unique combination of deep empathy and keen insight developed by an almost stubborn insistence on staying actively involved in seemingly disconnected fields, including the creative arts, business, psychology, leadership, organizational design, and philosophy. Peter majored in music composition at Arizona State University. He is an in-demand trumpet player and recording engineer.

At Adobe Systems, Peter led an Agile transformation that enabled the shift to a subscription business model. He co-developed the Certified Agile Leadership program for the Scrum Alliance. He has trained, coached, and advised dozens of organizations to create outcomes that range from leadership development, to creating vision and strategy, to creating a culture of innovation, to clarifying and validating customer segments and needs, to reinventing business models and products, to creating high performing, Agile teams.

Peter is a Certified Scrum Trainer, a graduate of the ORSC coaching system, a certified Leadership Agility and Leadership Circle coach, a certified Innovation Games practitioner, and the co-founder of the Humanizing Work company. He is an avid reader and idea-combiner. He is a firm believer in the power of range and a growth mindset. He spends his working hours dedicated to nudging the world of work towards a more human-centric, meaningful, and prosperous future. He spends his other waking hours enjoying time with his wife and five kids, running, hiking, playing golf, and making music and visual arts.

Agile Tropes In The Wild

Has an agile phrase been used as a weapon against you? Have you noticed how Agile phrases get thrown around but fail to ignite a deeper discussion about what they really mean? Many Agile tropes have gone wild causing apathy, mistrust, and in the worst cases demoralization. Ironically, this is the very opposite of what Agilists are intending and leaves them wondering why results are not happening. In this session, expect to unpack several Agile tropes and their harmful impacts through real-world stories. We will examine how message timing and delivery can be just as important as the message itself. Walk away with a renewed excitement and the important part you play in the narrative.

About Rhonda

Rhonda Middlin is a Technical Product Manager at TechSmith. She has held several Agile product and leadership roles in her 20-year career. Her greatest passion is building and working with development teams. As a firm believer in agility in thought and delivery, she fosters learning and joy every step of the way. She understands that both learning and joy can directly correlate to healthier team cultures, thus better business outcomes.

Test-Driven Development: A Stunningly Quick Introduction For Everyone

“The job of QA is not just to do testing — it’s to build quality in.”

How often have you heard that sentence? And how often has it been followed up with solid practices for actually building quality in?

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is one of the foundational practices of high-quality product development. Popularized nearly 20 years ago, TDD is an important skill for high-quality software development. If you want it to be easier to build high-quality code, then you need to understand TDD.

In this hands-on session, we’ll learn by doing. Richard will facilitate a coding dojo, a safe place to learn and practice the skills of test-driven development. We’ll mob-program together on a coding kata — an easy programming problem — to learn TDD, refactoring, clean code, code smells, and more — all in the pursuit of technical agility, business agility, and a great product that people love. To follow along, bring your laptop and development environment. We recommend Java and IntelliJ IDEA.

You’ll leave with an introduction to solid new skills, including:
Test-driven development (TDD)
Extreme Programming (XP)
Refactoring and refactoring patterns
Code smells
Mob programming

What people are saying:
Richard gave us a great hands-on intro to mob programming which really got me thinking–great session! -Will Nicholson, Technical Architect
A fantastic and uplifting day learning TDD and mod programming. I’ll definitely be imitating this back @ work! -Ben Ansell, Software Engineer
I learned many new techniques in just one day that I can use Monday morning when I return to the office. -Pontus Strand, Consultant
An amazing opportunity to gain an understanding of Agile technical skills -Darrel Ward, Software Engineer
Highly enjoyable -Jirawat Utayaya, Software Engineer
This isn’t just for a developer. It is inclusive to the non-developers to take part in the creative side of coding. -Senior UI Engineer
Coding right is more important than writing code. -Richard Crissafulli, QA Engineer

About Richard

Richard Kasperowski is an author, teacher, speaker, and coach focused on team building and high-performance teams. Richard is the author of two books: High-Performance Teams: The Foundations and The Core Protocols: A Guide to Greatness, as well as the forthcoming book High-Performance Teams: Core Protocols for Psychological Safety and Emotional Intelligence. He leads clients in building and maintaining high-performance teams that get great results using the Core Protocols, Agile, and Open Space Technology. Richard created and teaches the course Agile Software Development at Harvard University, and he co-teaches the Spark! fellowship at Boston University. Learn more and subscribe to Richard’s newsletter at www.kasperowski.com.

What really happens when you move to light touch agile governance

Today, top performing agile teams exist in organizations worldwide. However, in many of these same organizations, those very same teams are hamstrung by legacy bureaucratic management - the remnants of a waterfall approval-based governance approach. Issues with delivery across multiple silios, non-value adding process red tape, and antiquated PMOs persist. So, we continue to struggle with reaping the full benefits of agile methods, and fall short of business agility.

True end-to-end, business agility requires a bimodal approach: continued care and feeding of agile teams done in parallel with a systematic middle-management transformation away from stifling bureaucracy. The Agile Value Management Office (VMO) is rapidly gaining traction as the preferred way to accomplish this through:

· A team of teams organizational construct and approach for light-touch governance

· Adaptive planning and experimentation with small-batch Minimal Marketable Products (MMPs) for end-to-end flow

· Up-front and continuous integration of legal, audit and other business-critical functions for true risk management

Join Sanjiv Augustine to explore how these have liberated managers, unshackled agile teams and resulted in positive customer outcomes. Through key case studies, we’ll see how these have also ensured critical management, oversight, and governance.

About Sanjiv

Sanjiv Augustine is the Founder and CEO of LitheSpeed, LLC and the Agile Leadership Academy. Sanjiv is an entrepreneur, industry-leading Agile and Lean expert, author, speaker, management consultant, and trainer. With nearly 30 years in the industry, Sanjiv has served as a trusted advisor to executives and management at leading firms, including Capital One, The Capital Group, CNBC, Comcast, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, General Dynamics, HCA Healthcare, The Motley Fool, National Geographic, Nationwide Insurance, Royal Bank of Canada, Samsung, and Walmart. Sanjiv is the author of the books, Managing Agile Projects (Prentice Hall 2005), and Scaling Agile: A Lean JumpStart, as well as several publications including, Transitioning to Agile Project Management, The Lean-Agile PMO: Using Lean Thinking to Accelerate Agile Project Delivery and Transformational Leadership for Business Agility.

Flow Engineering - Boost velocity, quality and happiness through your entire value stream

How can you make time for real innovation and improvement?
How do you know what to automate?
How do you escape process prison?
How can you get everyone aligned to make a difference?
How do you get from where you are to your next performance target?

This is an introduction to 4 valuable mapping techniques and models that build clarity, alignment, and confidence in teams using a combination of collaboration, visibility and measurement.

I'll introduce 4 powerful maps: Outcome, Value Stream, Dependency, and Capability, that you can co-create with your teams to uncover hidden insights and opportunities. I'll show you how to take those insights and create a powerful roadmap of actions and experiments to dramatically improve flow and deliver continuous value.

Flow Engineering builds on the lean practice of Value Stream design and improvement as a framework of techniques you can use right now to reveal your biggest opportunities to eliminate hours of friction every week, so you can invest in what's next.

Use it to improve your:
- Development process
- Planning and shaping
- Delivery/Data/Testing/Analytics/Logging Pipeline
- Employee/Customer Onboarding
- Support/Failure Recovery/Incident Management
- Workflow of choice
…and start spending more time on what's next

About Steve

Steve is obsessed with making tech human, and leveraging it to deliver continuous value.

He shows teams how to use simple tools and techniques to make big changes. For the past 20 years, his focus has been on sharing mapping techniques to guide ambitious and struggling teams towards their true north.

He's a former startup CTO, agency consultant, systems and release engineer, finance IT manager, tech support phone jockey, and pizza maker. All focused on the flow of value, all the time.

Learn more about his work at https://visible.is
Examples of past talks are here: https://vzbl.io/stevetalks

Practical Product Discovery

Stakeholders have made a request. Features (or components!) are defined. Stories are in the backlog. We are ready to develop our new product. Or are we?

If these are the typical steps your teams or organization takes to build a delivery pipeline then you’ve probably missed key steps enabling Product Discovery and a purpose driven understanding of what you are trying to build.

Product Discovery may appear time consuming and unnecessary, however an initial investment into some practical discovery techniques will help get you closer to building the right product and delighting your customers through a learning mindset.

Join this session to learn why Product discovery makes sense and leave with some simple techniques that can be easily facilitated to invoke thoughtful insights into the why behind your Product.

About Sweta

Sweta Mistry is an Organizational & Agile Transformation Coach and Trainer in NYC. She has 20+ years of professional experience in industries including manufacturing, retail, education, non-profit, marketing, fin-tech and media. Her journey from a developer to a coach resulted from her focused interest in human behaviors, psychology, and humanizing processes.