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Agile2019 has ended
Sunday, August 4
 

15:00 EDT

Bookstore Open
Come check out the latest literature on agile practices.
Sunday August 4, 2019 15:00 - 19:00 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Daily Activities

15:00 EDT

Registration Open
Pick-up your badge and conference materials and ask any questions you may have at Agile2019 throughout the week.

Register and attend the Early Registration Meet & Greet on Sunday from 18:00 - 19:00 to miss the crowd!
Sunday August 4, 2019 15:00 - 19:00 EDT
Maryland Foyer
  Daily Activities

15:15 EDT

First Time Attendee Orientation
New to the Agile2019? These short half-hour sessions are designed to give you a little “101 Guide” to Agile2019, including insights into ways to get the most out of your experience. There will also be a “Q & A” session at the end in case we miss anything.

There is no pre-registration required for this, or any other session.
Speakers
avatar for Christina Hartikainen

Christina Hartikainen

Sr Business Analyst

Sunday August 4, 2019 15:15 - 15:45 EDT
National Harbor 2/3
  Daily Activities

18:00 EDT

Early Registration Meet & Greet (Location Change)
Attend the Early Registration Meet & Greet on Sunday from 18:00 - 19:00 to miss the crowd!
Sunday August 4, 2019 18:00 - 19:00 EDT
Potomac Foyer
  Evening Events

18:15 EDT

First Time Attendee Orientation
New to the Agile2019? These short half-hour sessions are designed to give you a little “101 Guide” to Agile2019, including insights into ways to get the most out of your experience. There will also be a “Q & A” session at the end in case we miss anything.

There is no pre-registration required for this, or any other session.
Speakers
avatar for Christina Hartikainen

Christina Hartikainen

Sr Business Analyst

Sunday August 4, 2019 18:15 - 18:45 EDT
National Harbor 2/3
  Daily Activities
 
Monday, August 5
 

07:30 EDT

Registration Open
Pick-up your badge and conference materials and ask any questions you may have at Agile2019 throughout the week.
Monday August 5, 2019 07:30 - 17:30 EDT
Potomac Foyer
  Daily Activities

08:00 EDT

Breakfast
Monday August 5, 2019 08:00 - 09:00 EDT
Potomac Foyer
  Meals

08:00 EDT

Bookstore Open
Come check out the latest literature on agile practices.
Monday August 5, 2019 08:00 - 18:00 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Daily Activities

08:15 EDT

First Time Attendee Orientation
New to the Agile2019? These short half-hour sessions are designed to give you a little “101 Guide” to Agile2019, including insights into ways to get the most out of your experience. There will also be a “Q & A” session at the end in case we miss anything.

There is no pre-registration required for this, or any other session.
Speakers
avatar for Christina Hartikainen

Christina Hartikainen

Sr Business Analyst

Monday August 5, 2019 08:15 - 08:45 EDT
National Harbor 2/3
  Daily Activities

09:00 EDT

How to Manage Your Attention in a World of Distraction (Chris Bailey)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
The research is clear — the state of our attention determines the state of our lives. Yet our attention has never been as overwhelmed or in-demand as it is today. We’ve never been so busy while accomplishing so little, and we’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable with a lack of stimulation and distraction.
Modeled after Chris Bailey’s bestselling new book, Hyperfocus, this talk reveals how effectively managing our attention hinges on working with greater intention, taming stimulating distractions in advance, and strategically unfocusing to take better mind wandering breaks.

Learning Outcomes:
  • .

Speakers
avatar for Chris Bailey

Monday August 5, 2019 09:00 - 10:15 EDT
Potomac Ballroom
  Keynotes, Talk

09:00 EDT

Agile Alliance Initiatives
Initiatives are ideas and concepts that develop into plans for action. They are proposed by Agile Alliance members or the Agile Alliance board of directors. Initiatives help the Alliance deliver on its mission to support people who explore and apply Agile values, principles, and practices to make building software solutions more effective, humane, and sustainable.” There is an Initiative Shepherd available to assist individuals with concept development.

Stop by the Agile Alliance Lounge to see all our initiatives, get involved, or propose one of your own!
Monday August 5, 2019 09:00 - 17:00 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Agile Alliance Lounge

09:00 EDT

Agile Alliance Lounge
Take a break from Agile2019 action and relax in the Agile Alliance Lounge! As an attendee, you are a member — we invite you to check out information about Alliance initiatives and activities, meet the board members and staff, and visit the Agile Advice and Business Agility areas. While you’re there, don’t forget to enjoy a refreshing beverage, pick up some swag, and discover how you and your company can become more involved in the Agile community.

Monday August 5, 2019 09:00 - 17:00 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Agile Alliance Lounge

10:15 EDT

Morning Break
Monday August 5, 2019 10:15 - 10:30 EDT
Maryland Foyer
  Meals

10:30 EDT

Business Agility Lab and Sensemaking Opens
Limited Capacity seats available

Business Agility Lab and Sensemaking Opens: Share your Agile experience in the most extensive retrospective on Agile adoptions. Enter a narrative in our kiosk and gain the chance of winning a netbook PC in our drawing on Thursday.

As the Agile ecosystem expands to include engineering and business management, adapting the core Agile principles to work in the entire company is a huge opportunity to grow higher customer value and profits. But doing so is not without challenges. To address this, Agile Alliance will have a special area in the Agile Alliance Lounge called the Business Agility Lab.

In the Lab, you will be able to participate in several working sessions with business leaders who have a depth of experience in building Agile organizations and companies. They will offer firsthand knowledge about the challenges and success stories in broad adoptions.

This year's business leaders will be Ray Arell (Business Development Leader for Agile Alliance, former Sr. Director at Intel), Heidi Musser (Principal Consultant at LeadingAgile, former VP & CIO at USAA), Hendrik Esser (Manager of Special Projects at Ericsson), and other thought leaders in the business community. Attendees will be able to sign up for one-to-one mentoring at the Lab.

We also encourage you to participate in one of the widest retrospectives on Agile adoptions, the Narrative Project. You can add your voice by submitting a story or help design experiments to amplify Agile principles inside your company — all in the Lab.

Lastly, if you have been a part of the Agile Coaching Network (ACN) live event or podcast, you can join us for several live group sessions to ask questions or offer advice based on your own experiences with Agile adoption. We will also be running a daily afternoon Lean Coffee(TM) ACN live event. This session is open to people who have not joined the ACN before--everybody is welcome!

The following people will also be available in the Business Agility Lab:
  • Shawna Cullinan, Enterprise Agile Coach with Paciolan
  • Bonnie Aumann, Agile Coach previously with Spotify
  • Deepti Jain, Agile Transformation Strategist at AgileVirgin
  • Rhea Stadick, Enterprise Agile Transformation Expert at Nike

Monday August 5, 2019 10:30 - 17:00 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Agile Alliance Lounge

10:45 EDT

Stop Spinning your Team's Wheels, It's time to revisit your working agreements! (Alex Kanaan)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Are your Agile teams disengaged and failing to meet their commitments? Are you spending too much time in endless meetings? Has collaboration eroded between remote team members? Then STOP spinning your wheels, it’s time to revisit your working agreements! When effective, working agreements create a social contract that helps a group align on what matters most to them as a team.
As an internal Agile coach for a Financial Services company, I started to coach a globally distributed team. While they were dedicated individuals, they struggled to collaborate and failed to meet commitments. Upon attending several ceremonies, I observed only a few people speaking and many perspectives were not being heard. In particular, the offshore tech lead was speaking on behalf of that entire team! There had to be a better way to make everyone feel safe enough to engage and share their opinion. What the team needed were meaningful working agreements.
This was not as easy as you think. The struggle was creating an environment, where ALL team members would feel their opinions and contributions made a difference. Then a thought occurred to me, “One of the reasons the team has been failing was that they didn’t observe scrum values, so why not use those as the basis for rebuilding new agreements?” This aha-moment proved to be a turning point for the team to focus on addressing what matters the most to all. The exercise revealed many hidden barriers. As a result, the team established a new sense of trust that respected each other's culture, boundaries and abilities. This made them value each other’s contributions and as such their collaborated improved to the extent they were much better at delivering on their commitments.

Lessons Learned from Your Experience:
  • Working agreements can help align teams in terms of expectations
  • A team needs to derive their own “meaningful” working agreements, that everyone so can own and commit to them
  • Leverage the 5 scrum values to facilitate working agreements ideation by the team
  • A well-facilitated session helped my team come up with their meaningful agreements and uncovered hidden cultural blockers
  • Remote teams in particular benefit from working agreements
  • Working agreements may need to evolve over time

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Alex Kanaan

Alex Kanaan

Agile Coach, USAA
IT Leader, Portfolio Manager and Business Agility consultant with expertise in transforming organizations to Agile using Scrum, Kanban and SAFe. Over 15 years engaging IT and business leaders to deliver complex projects globally with fortune 100 companies including Accenture, Microsoft... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 10:45 - 11:15 EDT
Chesapeake 7/8/9
  Experience Reports, Experience Report

10:45 EDT

Business Agility Lab: Introduction to Business Agility
Introduction to Business Agility: Business Agility is the organizational heuristics and flexible mindset to detect and react quickly to opportunities or issues within a diverse set of circumstances to maintain or grow stakeholder value. This is a broader context than just using Agile to develop software. It expands the Agile mindset and tools to the entire organization. In this introduction, will give an overview of the critical heuristics and have an open discussion about the concepts. Seating is limited, so please plan appropriately.

Monday August 5, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Agile Alliance Lounge

10:45 EDT

State of Business Agility (Evan Leybourn, Sally Elatta)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
In the modern economy, companies do not have the luxury of stability. The impact of change, both technological and cultural, is greater and faster than ever before. In this environment, it is only those companies that are agile, innovative and dynamic who thrive.
This interactive presentation will show you who these companies are, how they operate and (more importantly) how you can become one.
Sally Elatta and Evan Leybourn will present the latest findings from the 2019 State of Business Agility report as well as transformational case studies from the industry and our experience. Throughout all this, we’ll make it relevant and actionable for you through a series of hands-on activities designed to show you where to focus your organizational efforts.

Learning Outcomes:
  • You will come away with a deep understanding of business agility; both its context, definition, and execution in companies around the globe. You will also;
  • Understand what Business Agility really means and why it is an organizational imperative now
  • Meet new friends and learn from others in the business agility community
  • Gain new insights from the 2019 State of Business Agility report
  • Be able to apply actionable takeaways for their transformations
  • Evangelize and champion business agility within their organization
  • Engage community around the State of Business Agility

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Evan Leybourn

Evan Leybourn

Founder, Business Agility Institute
Evan is the Founder and CEO of the Business Agility Institute; an international membership body to both champion and support the next-generation of organisations. Companies that are agile, innovative and dynamic - perfectly designed to thrive in today’s unpredictable markets. His... Read More →
SE

Monday August 5, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Maryland Ballroom C
  Agile Companies, Talk

10:45 EDT

Agile Foundations Circuit Training (Michele Sliger)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Agile Roles Circuit Training. In this session attendees will move from one learning station to another every 10 minutes, to get a brief overview of some of the different roles and responsibilities in an agile team. Each station is hosted by a “trainer" who can help you understand the basics of the position, coach you through it, and answer your questions.
There will be five stations:
The Product Owner and Customers. Susan Almon
ScrumMaster vs. Agile Coach — What’s the Difference? Brock Argue
What Happened to the Project Manager? Richard Cheng
Development Team Member. Jim Newkirk
Agile Testers. Dan Ashby and Toby Sinclair
Feel free to repeat a station, skip stations, or gather in the middle where you can get a quick rest in before rejoining the circuit.

Learning Outcomes:
  • -Introduction to the roles in Agile

Speakers
MS

Monday August 5, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
National Harbor 2/3
  Agile Foundations, Workshop

10:45 EDT

Agile adoption in Aeronautics Computing Center of Brazilian Air Force (Fernando Rodrigues de Sá, Everton Lucas)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
The adoption of Agile Methods at CCA-SJ was an initiative of our system developers. Scrum was chosen as the framework for development. Despite this, at the beginning, teams were not following the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Scrum teams were not properly formed. Scrum Guide was not even known by many developers. We also faced some problems in the interaction between individuals, since there were conflicts between military hierarchy and Agile Principles.
The Agile Transformation began with an intense work of 3 Agile Coaches. After our first results in adopting Agile Methods, we are increasingly gaining the confidence of our C-Level. In less than a year, I led this journey to success. Now we have a PMO where I lead a 9 members team. The planning of projects to be developed in 2019 was based on Scrum. That is, the new teams were formed according to the Scrum Guide.
In this talk I will present our journey in this Agile Transformation. I will also present two projects that were entirelly conducted based on Agile Methods. Our cases of success: a Low Cost Flight Simulator and a system that controls the overflight of foreign aircraft in Brazilian's airspace.The work that we are doing at CCA-SJ in the adoption of Agile Methods is pioneer in the Brazilian Air Force.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Transparency is key to gaining trust.
  • The importance of both top-down and bottom-up approaches.
  • Reinforcement of the importance of applying the principles and practices of the framework.
  • A case of success becomes an example for other teams and encourages the changes that can be made.

Attachments:
Speakers
FR
avatar for Everton Lucas

Everton Lucas

Agile Coach, Aeronautics Computing Center of Brazilian Air Force
Developer since 1999, I've worked on products that used Delphi, PHP, C #, Java, PL/SQL, Ruby on Rails and Python. Bachelor in Information Systems. I'm always looking for learning between developing software and agile methods for one reason: the themes and knowledge complement each... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
National Harbor 4/5
  Agile in Government, Talk

10:45 EDT

Agile Legislation (Troels Vincents Hjortholm, Terkel Tolstrup)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
By nature, it is contradictory to work in an agile set-up with the mindset of constant change and adaptability, while at the same time being assigned to fulfil a fixed legislation as a premise.
How can you work in an agile set-up when – from the agile perspective – you must comply with rigid rules and regulations and you discover the need to adjust or change a specific law and/or the legal interpretation of the law? Rigid in the sense that changing a law or legal interpretation takes time – more time than an agile approach normally allows for.
Nevertheless, the reality is that this is the premise of governmental organisations all around the world. However, by establishing a close collaboration between law makers and the agile delivery organisations a very fruitful collaboration can arise where both parties can benefit from better results.
In this talk, we will present three concrete examples from Denmark, including a government agency, a highly regulated public fund and a compliance program; all three examples have managed to drive value out of agile ways of working while at the same time working closely with lawmakers for mutual benefit.
Government agency case:
The government agency has implemented a full-scale SAFe program, where they manage to be in close dialogue with the law makers to adapt the laws according to the functionality available from each release in the agile program.
Public fund case:
For many years the public fund has supervised important parts of the Danish welfare system. They have successfully implemented agile ways of working, including legislation projects where all three project parameters: time, cost and scope are fixed. In this case, we will focus on how to interact with the legislators by being in continuous and close dialogue, so the legislators can help remove the impediments which are identified by the agile programs in the administrative interpretations of the laws to deliver better and simplified digital solutions.
Compliance program case:
We often think of compliance with government regulations as either compliant or non-compliant. However, in this case we will walk you through the major findings of a company’s agile compliance program where, in one year, they achieved 30 releases of new functionality supporting the compliance program. This was only made possible by including the government compliance agency in continuous dialogue and involvement.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Inspiration on agile collaboration between law makers and agile delivery organisations to achieve improved legislation and simplified digital solutions.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Troels Vincents Hjortholm

Troels Vincents Hjortholm

Senior Manager, Deloitte
Troels V. Hjortholm is the leader of Deloitte Nordics Agile Community and has +11 years of solid agile experience covering everything from team coaching to enterprise agile transformations. Troels is passionate about applying agile ways of working to create successes within the Public... Read More →
avatar for Terkel Tolstrup

Terkel Tolstrup

Partner, Deloitte
Advise enterprises in adapting an agile culture and mindset. Experience from being an early adapter of eXtreme Programming practices around 2002. Moving into agile organizational setups and transforming large scale organizations from implementations in projects to establishing and... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake 4/5/6
  Agile in Government, Talk

10:45 EDT

The Answer is the Question (Bernie Maloney)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
As a Scrum Master, Coach or Trainer, do you ever wish you could practically snap your fingers & influence your colleagues or students to facilitate their own answers?
Most questions we receive are requests for something our listener is missing. But questions themselves can be repatterned and used for so much more than a direct answer. WIth a series of exercises, this session introduces facilitation skills & techniques that enable a teacher (be they a Scrum Master, Coach or Trainer) to use questions to restructure a listener’s thinking, and therefore their experience, opening a path for a listener (be they a colleague, coachee or student) to discover an answer for themselves.
Come learn how to influence your colleagues and students to think “outside the box” powerfully leading them beyond their conscious mind to tap into their unconscious & find an answer within their question.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Practice a state for increased situational awareness, to better grasp a student or colleague’s question
  • Outline a pattern of questions that can be used to loosen up a student or colleague’s perspective on a question or problem
  • Use the pattern of questions to coach a fellow workshop participant through thinking “outside the box” and find new answers to their question or problem
  • Summarize this coaching technique and choose a situation where you’ll apply it “in real life”

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Bernie Maloney

Bernie Maloney

Agile Coach | Accelerating Genius, Persistent Systems
Bernie’s career started with a flash and a bang. Literally. His first position was designing devices that protect telephone networks from lightning strikes. A few career pivots later, he had a flash of insight: it was possible to tap into latent potential in every person, every... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Maryland Ballroom A
  Coaching & Mentoring, Workshop

10:45 EDT

One Architecture to Rule Them All: Why Hexagons are Awesome (Ted Young)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
In this session, you'll learn the details of the Hexagonal architecture (aka "Ports & Adapters") and how it helps keep your code clean and well-tested. You'll find out how can scale from small microservices to much larger applications and how it's superior to traditional tiered and horizontally layered architectures.
You'll see how the core domain is easily augmented with RESTful APIs, a Web UI, database persistence, and calling out to external APIs. You'll learn how each part fits nicely into place in the Hexagonal architecture, yet are expendable when external needs change, without causing a major overhaul.
While this talk is full of multiple examples of working Java code (Spring Boot) that implements this architecture, it is directly applicable to other languages, such as PHP and JavaScript.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Learn why separation between the core and the adapters supports testability
  • Learn how adapters are identified and the difference between "primary" and "secondary" adapters
  • Understand the problems with vertically layered architectures
  • Know how to easily enforce the architecture constraints to keep code in the right place

Attachments:
Speakers
TY

Monday August 5, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
National Harbor 6/7
  Dev Practices and Craft, Talk

10:45 EDT

DevOps > Automation, DevOps = Culture + Ownership + Empowerment (& Good Patterns) (Reneshan Moodley)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
The three spheres of a DevOps adoption being Culture, Processes and Tools are fundamental to any organisation. The focus on tools often supersedes any work being done at the process levels and almost always, the culture aspect is 'ignored'. Through my years of helping teams adopt agile and eventually pursue DevOps, I've identified certain patterns that address the varying levels of change that are needed by a team pursuing Agile Ways of Work.
In this talk, I'll highlight the most important patterns that are needed along with suggestions to help embed these patterns. I will be using the DevOps radar (from SAFe) as a guidepost for patterns to get an organisation moving towards the promised land.
Whilst there isn't an 'endpoint' for a DevOps adoption, these patterns reflect milestones on a DevOps transformation roadmap and serve as a possible ‘quick start’.
NOTE: This is not. A SAFe pitch or SAFe sales workshop. The DevOps radar can be used, regardless of the presence of SAFe.

Learning Outcomes:
  • 1. Identify the three spheres of DevOps and assess where the most difficult work is to be found.
  • 2. Understand the patterns that can help and their suggested application.
  • 3. Understand the core skills/capabilities of a DevOps team.

Attachments:
Speakers
RM

Monday August 5, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake 10/11/12
  DevOps, Talk

10:45 EDT

Risk Resistors and Opportunity Obtainers: The Power of Agile Digital Policy (Kristina Podnar)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Faced with complex multi-site, multi-language, multi-channel digital presences, many organizations struggle to provide exceptional digital customer experiences, especially those on an enterprise, distributed digital team. With the growing number of compliance requirements and international regulations, can you successfully deliver a digital strategy with repeatability and integrity?
This talk defines policies that can be leveraged throughout the enterprise for digital success—whether that is a website redesign, technology re-platform or implementation of mobile applications and social software. In a universe where digital transformational efforts are prolonged, this workshop will familiarize attendees with the agile approach to defining digital policy and simultaneously driving change adoption throughout the organization for fast impact and change.
Participants will participate in hands-on exercises and step away from the session with a clear methodology to take back to the office. Tips and case studies of successful projects (and failures!) will also be shared.

Learning Outcomes:
  • 1. Understand how digital is disrupting enterprise work habits and customer experience delivery
  • 2. Articulate the value of digital policies in creating freedom within a framework to balance digital risk and opportunity, as well as unleash team creativity
  • 3. Learn the agile methodology for defining digital policy in 5 days with participation from across the enterprise (marketing, communications, legal, IT, human resources, procurement, finance, etc.)

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Kristina Podnar

Kristina Podnar

Digital Policy Consultant, NativeTrust Consulting, LLC
Kristina Podnar is a digital policy innovator. For over two decades, she has worked with some of the most high-profile companies in the world and has helped them see policies as opportunities to free the organization from uncertainty, risk, and internal chaos. Kristina’s approach... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake A/B/C
  Enterprise Agile, Workshop

10:45 EDT

Scientific Method to Hire Great Scrum Masters (Pavel Dabrytski)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
In 2018, I was looking for a better method to interview and hire people. I had been an independent Agile consultant for over three years by then, and I had simply run out of time I could give to my clients. Every single day was booked out with classes, coaching sessions, or meetings. If I wanted to grow my business further, there was no other choice. But the thought of hiring always scared me. What if I get the wrong person on board?
The science and statistics of hiring were not on my side either. Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking Fast and Show, claims that employers make hiring decisions based on pure intuition after a few short interviews, and such procedure is almost useless for predicting the future success of recruits. Multiple social science studies claim that managers hire people who look like them, talk like them, and think like them – not the best strategy to grow a successful business. Thankfully, Kahneman's book led me to Paul Meehl. Meehl's Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction work outlined a few simple steps that help rid of cognitive biases and hire the best person for the job using statistical data. It worked well for me too and, I want to share the technique with you. This workshop will teach a better, scientific method to hire winning candidates.

Learning Outcomes:
  • * Learn about the research behind interviewing and hiring
  • * Understand more about cognitive biases
  • * Determine key traits necessary for candidates to succeed in the new position in your company
  • * Create an interview pack for your company based on the scientific method

Attachments:
Speakers
PD

Monday August 5, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
National Harbor 12/13
  Leadership, Workshop

10:45 EDT

The Emergence of Integral Leadership: Shifting the Structure of our Attention (Michele Madore, Michael Spayd)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Agile, or any kind of organizational transformation, requires a level of leadership equipped to skillfully navigate their organization through massive change, in both the external and internal dynamics that are present throughout the change. That level of leadership goes beyond just outcome-creating (Creative) leadership, and extends to the next stage, which is Integral Leadership. Integral Leadership is built on an integral mind, one that is able to hold polarities, unresolvedness, tension and contradictions. We've been using The Leadership Circle's developmental tool to talk about moving from the Reactive to the Creative. This development allows for a person to move from the Competent Manager, to the Visionary Leader, who operates from passion, rather than fear-based Reactivity. The developmental shift to Integral Leadership moves the focus on 'Results' & 'Relationships' to a focus on the 'Whole'. This developmental shift to Integral Leadership allows for Servant Leadership, with the whole system's welfare as their focus, and operates from a place of compassion. It is Integral Leadership that has the developed capacity to lead transformational change.
In this session, we will take a practical and fun approach to explore each person's own orienting quadrant and potentially inherent translations (perceptions) of other's orientations. Being able to skillfully see another person's way of seeing things requires us to first understand our own way of seeing. As transformation leaders and coaches, our ability to shift our structure of attention to focus on the whole, rather than coming from our own inherent bias', is the single most deciding factor as to how far we can take our organizations and our clients. This session will help you see why Integral Leadership is a developmental journey and an imperative for the next stage of leadership needed in our world.

Learning Outcomes:
  • - Understanding the context for Integral Leadership and Transformation
  • - Understanding the Universal Model of Leadership (The Leadership Circle), from Reactive to Creative to Integral
  • - Exploring Integral Leadership and the Integral Mindset
  • - Exploring the developmental path to Integral Leadership

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Michele Madore

Michele Madore

Co-Founder, Managing Partner, Trans4mation
My passion is just to be an instrument of real change. My company is Trans4mation, and what I know is that transformational type change lives in our hearts, minds, and habits, individually and collectively. The future of our organizations and our world is really about learning how... Read More →
avatar for Michael Spayd

Michael Spayd

Co-Founder, Managing Partner, Trans4mation, LLC
My purpose is to help individuals, teams and organizations wake up to their inherent potential and highest purpose. Over my 18 years in the Agile community, I have brought in many tools and perspectives from the worlds of professional coaching, organization development, systems coaching... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Maryland Ballroom D
  Leadership, Talk

10:45 EDT

WE make better sense than me - the art of Collective Sense Making (Antoinette Coetzee, Jason Knight)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Making sense is too important to do alone. We each see a part of the puzzle. It's only when we combine our collective sense of what's going on that we see more of the reality around us. Too often, it remains hidden. We need this collective wisdom to make sense of volatility, uncertainty, accelerated change, and ambiguity in order to respond.
Did you know there is a framework for having a Collective Sensemaking conversation? And, if done properly, it develops the thinking of everyone involved? In this session, you will observe a live demo with a detailed breakdown of the demo to illustrate the power of this approach. You will then have an opportunity to practice yourself. Come to this interactive workshop and learn how you and your organization can apply this framework to better respond to the challenges you face.

Learning Outcomes:
  • * Describe the Sense-and-Respond pattern
  • * Recognize the power of Collective Sensemaking in catalyzing deep individual growth and development
  • * Understand and demonstrate Collective Sensemaking and its value in co-creating solutions
  • * Explain the link between developing Collective Sensemaking and the impact on our leadership capabilities
  • * Understand key nuances in the practice and application of Collective Sensemaking
  • * Apply Collective Sensemaking to your own problem-solving
  • * Demonstrate the kind of interactions and attitudes needed for Collective Sensemaking
  • * Explain how the practice of Collective Sensemaking can significantly impact the quality of relationship within groups (e.g. in meetings) and teams

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Antoinette Coetzee

Antoinette Coetzee

Agile Coach and Trainer, Plain Agile
Antoinette has been in the Agile world since working with some of the original Manifesto signatories in 1996. She spent several years as Agile team member, developing software products. She has been an Agile mentor since 2005, then received coaching from Agile Coaching Institute in... Read More →
avatar for Jason Knight

Jason Knight

Organizational Effectiveness Partner, Sapphire Digital
Jason Knight is known around Tulsa, OK as the guy to talk to about Scrum and agility in general. He loves software development, the practice of agility and servant leadership. His journey has taken him from small development jobs to enterprise level coaching and teaching. Along the... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Maryland Ballroom B
  Leadership, Workshop

10:45 EDT

Continuous Learning at Work (Cara Turner)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
One of the key tenets of agility is that we are always learning. But how does that fit in if we're always working too? How do we bake in continuous learning without breaking the bank?
Too often learning is treated as a nice to have or even a luxury.
And when we do get to attend training, it usually happens in isolation, making it difficult to apply. The words 'I've learnt that you're doing it wrong' seldom go down well with our teams
Speakers
avatar for Cara Turner

Cara Turner

CEO & Agile Coach, codeX
Cara is the CEO and Agile Coach at Project codeX, an agile-first software training programme that equips aspiring coders with high quality skills and experience, while bridging the digital divide.Having spent years helping teams adopt agile practices that reduce risk and increase... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
National Harbor 11
  Learning, Workshop

10:45 EDT

The Inclusive Agile Accelerator: How to Improve Learning and Inclusion in the IT Industry (Alejandro Olchik, Rafael Prikladnicki)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
For seven years, and running fifteen editions, in Brazil, we have been evolving a not-for-profit immersive and educational program through a university-corporate partnership, that has achieved consistent impact on job opportunities for its candidates, promoting the development of 21st-century skills, gender equality, increasing social inclusion and contributing to the local community.
As for today, the program helps 24 students each semester. We receive more than 17 candidates per opening. Our recruiting process is capable of selecting teams where the number of women is greater than the number of men. We are also managing to identify and increase the number of openings reserved to young people coming from socially unfavorable contexts. Each semester, we receive around ten project proposals from real customers, most of them with a firm purpose behind. The program escapes from a lecture-based and prescriptive approach to learning. Through the development of a safe space for making mistakes, participants learn through practice, not only about agile methods, business analysis, lean startup, programming, and testing, to a level that they are ready to pursue professional opportunities in the market, but also about each other, their differences and the importance of respecting those differences.
Interactively, this talk will bring awareness about the obstacles minorities face in the technology sector, and explain the evolution, current stage, and outcomes of the Inclusive Agile Accelerator. In the end, we expect to provide some useful recommendations for aspiring educators and change agents looking for practical advice on how to grow more inclusive environments.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Carry out recruiting ideas and practices to improve gender diversity and social inclusion in general.
  • Provide practical recommendations and guidelines when implementing similar educational programs.
  • Determine the relevance of the results obtained and the feasibility of the educational approach to different contexts.
  • Summarize the main challenges and obstacles faced to advance the program further.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Alejandro Olchik

Alejandro Olchik

Agile Coach, ionatec
Agile Coach and Trainer at ionatec. Senior Mentor at the Inclusive Agile Accelerator. MBA Professor at PUCRS. Órulo CTO, a B2B marketplace for the real estate industry.Themes I'm interested: education and learning, 21st-century management practices and startups.
avatar for Rafael Prikladnicki

Rafael Prikladnicki

Director of Tecnopuc, PUCRS

Monday August 5, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake G/H/I
  Learning, Talk

10:45 EDT

Hands On: Scaling Product Backlogs using Visual Models (Candase Hokanson)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Are you a Product Owner(PO) or Scrum Master(SM) who has been given a new role as your company scales their agile approach? Like many, I started as a Team PO and was "blessed" with a promotion to Product Manager of a SAFe Agile Release Train (ART) when my client implemented SAFe. At first, I was a little flummoxed of how to manage 7 teams backlogs that were reporting to the train and handle the bigger group of business stakeholder providing input to the program vision.
Luckily, I remembered many of the tools I used as Team PO and began to tweak and rework them to handle the increased scope of my new ART world. Come and join me as we learn about two visual models that are typically used at the team level by POs and SMs but can easily be scaled to any level of the organization. First, we'll learn about the Business Objectives Model which helps us ensure we're building the highest business value items first at the team level and how that scales to programs and portfolios. THen we'll discuss how Feature Trees, used at the team level to organize scope in a one-page view, can be scaled to show similar information at any level.
At the end of this workshop, attendees will have two new tools in their toolkit to take back to their organizations regardless of the level of enterprise they are working in. I love using visual models as a PO on an individual product, but I've come to learn over the past several years, that they are incredibly useful for all levels of management (program, portfolio, and large solutions if you are doing SAFe), so come, have fun and build some new visual models in a scaled way!

Learning Outcomes:
  • -Understand why we need to scale the backlog
  • -Understand the major varieties of scaling the product backlog
  • -Ability to define and create a Business Objectives Model
  • -Ability to define and create a Feature Tree

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Candase Hokanson

Candase Hokanson

Senior Product Manager, Seilevel
Candase Hokanson is a Senior Product Manager at Seilevel and a PMI-Agile Certified Practitioner who trains and Coaches, Product Owners, Scrum Masters, and business analysts on Agile approaches as well as championing products in those roles for clients. She works with teams to unite... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake J/K/L
  Project Program & Portfolio Management, Workshop

10:45 EDT

Calm The Storm In Your MInd (Heather Dunning)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Have you ever had a moment where the thoughts in your head feel like a scene from Game of Thrones? Or the Civil War reenacted? Sometimes we can be our own worst enemy, fighting with the voices in our head between right or wrong, good or bad, worthy or unworthy. You may even be experiencing indecision, insecurity and mental exhaustion at this convention.
Could you imagine a world where all of those voices get along? Or at least they were willing to be kinder and more loving while still disagreeing? Come and spend some time inside your mind and your body. Learn how the two can walk peacefully and harmoniously hand in hand. Discover how physical pain can be created from negative thought patterns and unresourceful inner dialogue. Experience being grounded thru breathing and visualization exercises. Explore your inner workings thru an extremely simple and effective practice that assists in harmonizing opposing parts in your mind. All exercises can be done in your normal attire, no comfy clothes required. With this in mind, we will stimulate you and get your energy flowing by finishing the session with revitalizing Qi Gong movements. Allowing you to move through the rest of your conference journey in peaceful, patient and present style.
Upon exiting, you will have gained resourceful, easy to use tools and strategies honoring the wisdom of your body, calming the storm in your mind, and balancing your life from the inside out.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Thru grounding exercises the participants will be able to release the weight that the intensity of this week may put on them. It’s the first of many stepping stones to lead them on their path towards more body awareness, a connection to the earth and releasing heavy emotions, thoughts and EMF’s from their energy field. This can assist them in having more focus, energy and intention while juggling the many facets of the conference and their life. The benefits from this simple exercise is endless, everything from a great night's sleep, to better work performance, more present in relationships, and even better overall health.
  • Both the intro talk and the actual parts integration work informs each individual with a deeper knowing into their own minds and bodies. It also equips them with a life tool to assist in becoming more resourceful with self and others. Teaching how to be a better cheerleader to themselves, even in the most challenging times. This simple mental practice begins the development of self love from the inside out.
  • Qi Gong is an ancient form of movement that allows the participant to move blockages in the body and mind. It increases energy level within minutes. Increases brain focus and the ability to receive more information. The practice itself, if done daily, can improve overall health, wellness and vitality. Creating a strong foundation for a healthier mind body connection and commitment on every level.

Speakers
avatar for Heather Dunning

Monday August 5, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake 1/2/3
  Self-Care, Workshop

10:45 EDT

Testing Microservices - See It, Feel It, Touch It, Heal It, Explore It (Ken Pugh)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Microservices are becoming more prevalent. External behavior of an application depends on multiple services working together. Each service needs to be checked that it both provides the desired behavior as well as handles exceptions and error conditions, such as the inability to communicate with a dependency. Interactions between these services needs to be checked and monitored. Checking behavior does not stop at deployment but needs to continue after release.
From a testing perspective, microservices can be viewed both as mini-applications with external behavior and as internal components. For applications, the externally facing triad (tester, developer, and customer) collaborates to create tests for behavior; for internal components, a different triad (tester, consumer, producer) generates these tests. To properly test microservices, we need to see, feel, touch, heal, and explore them.
See it: Tests need to be visible so that all members of the triad share the understanding of the behavior.

Feel It: Behavior for cross-functional (non-functional) aspects of microservices can be documented in tests.

Touch It: Testing for interactions of microservices can include injection or simulation of faults.

Heal It: Check that telemetry which records microservice interactions can be used to determine failure causes.

Explore It: Testing ought to go beyond just the behaviors described.
With so many aspects, testers need to work as collaborators in specification and tests, not just the test executors. The primary audience for this interactive workshop is for testers involved in microservices. However, it is also appropriate for any role which collaborates on the construction or delivery of these microservices. The session includes both lecture and a set of exercises on specifying and testing microservices.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Collaborate on creating microservice specifications with tests
  • Create appropriate cross-functional behavior tests for microservices
  • Determine a strategy to test microservice interactions
  • Explore ways to test telemetry

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Ken Pugh

Ken Pugh

Principal Consultant, Ken Pugh, Inc.
Ken Pugh helps companies evolve into lean-agile organizations through training and coaching. His special interests are in collaborating on requirements, delivering business value, and using lean principles to deliver high quality quickly. He has written several programming books... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
National Harbor 8
  Testing & Quality, Talk

10:45 EDT

Beyond Agile: Thriving on Digitalization with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy (Jutta Eckstein, John Buck)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Digitalization calls for rapid organizational flexibility and adaptability. This has an impact on all dimensions of a company: its strategy, structure, and the processes. Thus, companies are expected to be flexible and both rapidly responsive and resilient to change, which basically asks them to be agile. Yet, doing agile (the mechanics) is different from being agile (the mindset). The mindset lets you apply flexible agile patterns not only for software development teams but for the whole company.
In this workshop, we will examine what being agile really means and how it can be implemented by combining principles from different "streams" like Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy, Agile (BOSSA nova).
Together, these concepts enable a company not only to survive but also to thrive on (digital) disruptions through entrepreneur initiatives. In this session, we will use case studies of companies that are pioneering the combination of these concepts.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Understand the organizational values that support the digital transformation
  • Learn how Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy & Agile combines supporting digitalization
  • Know how you can accelerate your digital transformation company-wide

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Jutta Eckstein

Jutta Eckstein

Independent Coach, consultant, trainer and speaker, IT Communications
Jutta Eckstein (http://jeckstein.com) is an independent coach, consultant and trainer from Braunschweig, Germany. Her know-how in agile processes is based on over twenty-five years’ experience in project and product development. Her focus is on enabling agile development on the... Read More →
avatar for John Buck

John Buck

President, GovernanceAlive LLC
John Buck is the coauthor of the very recently published book Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy, see http://www.agilebossanova.com/ and #agilebossanova. The second edition of his earlier book was also recently released We the People: Consenting to... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake D/E/F
  The Future of Agile Software Development (IEEE Software), Workshop

10:45 EDT

Warts and All: Designing in the Open for Increased Agility (Matt Dobson)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Design often happens in isolation without being shared with teammates or stakeholders until it appears refined and complete. Opening up the design process to observation and collaboration, even its earliest stages, accelerates product speed, agility, and quality. Sharing work early and often reduces surprises and builds trust and understanding. When designers become comfortable with sharing their work while it is in-progress, when it is still rough and unrefined, it can create an environment where design and discovery are ongoing and aligned with a truly agile process.
Working openly helps UX work in the spirit of the agile manifesto by reducing documentation and increasing conversation. Making the design (and research) process visible gives teams the ability to find opportunities to collaborate and self-organize in response.
My talk will outline the many benefits of designing in the open, along with tangible examples of how to begin working more openly on your teams. I will draw from my experience working as a designer at Humana’s Digital Experience Center where the team valued constant pairing and collaboration, facilitated by working in a co-located open office. And I’ll contrast that with my current role at 18F, a remote-first distributed team whose philosophy is ‘default to open.’

Learning Outcomes:
  • The benefits of designing in the open
  • Tangible examples of how to begin working more openly with your teams.
  • Practical tactics for creating a culture of collaboration on co-located and distributed teams.
  • Learning how to maximize the effectiveness of cross-functional teams by eliminating 'hand-offs' and encouraging collaboration and co-ownership.
  • Steps towards developing the confidence to share work openly and how this approach will build a collective confidence in the team.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Matt Dobson

Matt Dobson

Innovation Specialist, 18F

Monday August 5, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
National Harbor 10
  User Experience, Talk

11:30 EDT

Eureka – How agile helped me to sell crazy ideas to the business (Xavier Lucas)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Have you ever faced an issue as a customer of a company, and then got an opportunity to resolve the issue as an employee of that company?
11 years ago I was a frequent traveler with Alaska Airlines. I was happy to have earned my elite status with their loyalty program, and was looking forward to use the benefits immediately. However, I was left disappointed, as there was an issue with the Loyalty system, which meant I had to wait to use my elite member benefits. As a high value customer I was upset, and called Alaska Airlines customer care to let them know about my frustration.
Fast forward six years, I joined with Alaska Airline as an employee. Guess what? The team I joined and am currently working in is the “Loyalty team” which manages Alaska Airlines mileage plan program. And more? Things are the same, with how the loyalty system works. Could I act on the issue I faced as a customer? NO. Could I work on a crazy process improvement idea or customer experience improvement ideas I had? NO. As a member of the development team(last in the chain of command) I had no power to take my ideas or solutions forward. Work life with Alaska Airlines moved on in a normal pace, without my ability to address customer and business process issues I was passionate about.
Three years later, our eCommerce division chose Agile methodology as our software development process . To be honest, like many other people, I hated it in the beginning. People say agile is a mindset. As I was going through the agile mindset transformation I slowly realized the empowerment it brings to me and to my team. I became vocal in the agile sessions, I actually transformed from an introvert to an extrovert. Agile gave me a safe environment to share my ideas to my team and then as a team sell those ideas to business. Agile processes encouraged me to do small experiments with my ideas. It gave me and my team a seat at the table, we had a say in what we want to do and how we want to do it. With the Agile team structure and mobbing development process we adopted, suddenly the onus of success or failure fell on the entire team, this gave me enormous confidence and also a safety net. I witnessed a personal growth in me and in my teammates.
In this session I will take you into my agile journey. I will share my experience about how agile helped me to transform into a better employee, better teammate and better person.

Lessons Learned from Your Experience:
  • • Agile process actually empowers teams and gives people a seat at the table.
  • • Working as an unified Agile team provides a safety net for experiments.
  • • It is important to gain product owner/stakeholder confidence prior to making/proposing big changes.
  • • Iterative deliverables are less riskier and easier to get feedback on.
  • • Mobbing produces better and effective results.
  • • Self-organizing is the key to become a high performing Agile team.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Xavier Lucas

Xavier Lucas

Staff Software Development Engineer, Alaska Airlines
I am a strong believer in starting with “Why”. I love solving customer problems with innovative solutions. Making process improvements and designing simple systems brings me joy. Agile mindset is the key to my success.

Monday August 5, 2019 11:30 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake 7/8/9
  Experience Reports, Experience Report

12:00 EDT

Lunch
Monday August 5, 2019 12:00 - 14:00 EDT
Prince George Exhibit Hall
  Meals

12:00 EDT

Sponsor Exhibits
Sponsors are an important element of the Agile2019 Conference. Be sure to stop by and say Hi to all of our Sponsor Exhibitors in the Prince George Exhibition Hall at Agile2019.
Monday August 5, 2019 12:00 - 15:45 EDT
Prince George Exhibit Hall
  sponsors

13:00 EDT

Agile Advice
We all need advice from time to time, and having someone to bounce ideas off or share their thoughts can lead to great insights and uncover creative personalized solutions. At Agile2019, we are excited to provide Agile Advice as an offering tailored for you to bring your toughest questions, your biggest puzzles, and your worst hurdles.

Agile Advice is a 20 minute one-on-one conversation with an expert ready to offer their time and insight to those that are looking for a bit of advice. This diverse group of experts will be ready to chat about a wide range of agile topics such as culture, training, engineering, frameworks and leadership. Make sure to stop by and sign up for actionable advice on your Agile journey.
Speakers
avatar for Reese Schmit

Reese Schmit

Sr. Agile Coach, Agile Velocity
Reese Schmit is a Sr. Agile Coach at Agile Velocity. Over the past 15 years, she's done just about every job in the software industry, from User Experience Designer to Product Manager, QA Engineer to Scrum Master. This varied experience has taught her to frame problems from different... Read More →
avatar for Chris Li

Chris Li

Founder, SparkPlug Agility LLC
I am a passionate and energetic Certified Scrum Trainer and Enterprise Agile Coach who is always interested in meeting new people and picking up new skills. I enjoy talking about topics around agile training, coaching, and consulting as well as designing courses and public speak... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 13:00 - 15:00 EDT
Potomac Foyer
  Agile Alliance Lounge

14:00 EDT

Scaling agile for larger electronic health record based initiatives (Vaishnavi Kannan, DuWayne Willett)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
With rapid evolution of healthcare knowledge, best clinical practices, and care delivery methods, how can the electronic systems underpinning modern healthcare delivery keep up? Over the last decade, use of Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems became nearly universal. Large EHR vendor software systems now pervasively support multiple workflows: clinical, operational, and financial. So given the rapid pace of environmental change in healthcare, how can one best innovate and adapt on top of one of these vendor EHR platforms?
Agile methods increasingly enable rapid-cycle, responsive configuration and evolution of EHR features (such as clinical decision support tools) by individual teams. But can scaling agile EHR configuration in a healthcare organization leverage principles proven effective in scaling at other types of organizations? In this report, we describe our experience scaling up agile EHR configuration at a large academic medical center, and share lessons learned in four areas: team collaboration, governance, shared architectural modeling and design, and tooling to support our journey towards scaled agile.

Lessons Learned from Your Experience:
  • Team Collaboration: Pros and cons of shared iteration schedules, shared release schedules, or both.
  • Governance: Coordinating organizational span of a given project/initiative with the corresponding level of EHR and operational governance groups.
  • Shared Architectural Modeling and Design: Value of high-level 1-page scoping models such as Use Case Diagrams, Feature Breakdown Structures, Workflow Diagrams (with nested diagrams as needed) for effective cross-team and multi-stakeholder collaboration.
  • Tooling: Challenges and benefits of shared tooling. Providing visibility into backlog and progress relevant to specific customer subgroups in the setting of multi-stakeholder, multi-jurisdictional governance over a single EHR platform.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Vaishnavi Kannan

Vaishnavi Kannan

Data Scientist (Clinical Informatics), UT Southwestern Medical Center
I am a Data Scientist (Clinical Informatics) and lead Clinical Decision Support Specialist at UT Southwestern, developing clinical decision support features within our electronic health record. I work closely with clinicians and the Medical Informatics group on CDS design and patient... Read More →
avatar for DuWayne Willett

DuWayne Willett

Chief Medical Informatics Officer, University of Texas Southwestern Health System
DuWayne Willett is the Chief Medical Informatics Officer (CMIO) at the University of Texas Southwestern Health System in Dallas. DuWayne led the initial design and implementation of the Health System Data Warehouse at UT Southwestern, and first become a student of agile methodologies... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 14:00 - 14:30 EDT
Chesapeake 7/8/9
  Experience Reports, Experience Report

14:00 EDT

Business Agility Lab: It All Starts With a Vision
It All Starts With a Vision: Organizations try to rally at the project level and fail to bring culture and agility into their vision statement. Creating a single vision is core to having something concrete to ideate around and have fun. In this session, we will do several exercises to help you create and form a vision to help rally and motivate your organization. Seating is limited, so please plan appropriately.
Monday August 5, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Agile Alliance Lounge

14:00 EDT

Teal Enough: Tales from a small company trying to grow, retain culture and be Agile (Amanda Geary, Bob Payne)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
The Lithespeed team first read Frederic Laloux's "Reinventing Organizations” in 2015. We immediately said ‘Hell yes, we are doing this - we should never work any other way!’ Fast forward 4 years, a couple conference presentations and a lot of trial and error.
On our journey to Teal, we have undergone many transitions. We will share some of our challenges moving towards a deeper teal culture and our goal of developing tools for creating a system of organizational development and self-management. We will share our real-world experience using distributed decision making and organizational structure, self-management for the whole organization, People Operations, peer to peer feedback/engagement/performance reviews, financial transparency, open salaries, managing the business, and giving voice to the organization.
We came to Agile2018 and spoke on this topic - suggesting that instead of listening to someone who has just read the book you should come listen to our 'No BS' account. We walked away from our session with your feedback and some new ideas and spent a year doubling down on our commitment to a ‘teal’ workplace. Some might say we aren’t there yet…our response? We are ‘teal enough’!
Attendees will leave with an understanding of People Operations and Teal Organizational Models, as well as specific tactics we used and what went well.

Learning Outcomes:
  • In this session, we will relate our experiences with self management, decision making from the bottom and separating HR from company culture and day to day business (Who does the hiring and firing? Who should give/receive feedback and how often?). These are not data points from articles and other presentations. These are real world successes and struggles that we are working through RIGHT NOW.
  • Hopefully you will walk away with some insight to use within your own organization. We also hope that in the Activity and Q&A portion we will get feedback and learn about your experiences as well. We are always pivoting and would love to have suggestions to try in the future at LitheSpeed!

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Amanda Geary

Amanda Geary

Finance and People Operations, LitheSpeed
I started my career as a research analyst at 4th Wave, a technology consulting firm specializing in research on trends in the IT and communication industry. I then moved on to Freddie Mac and worked with development & testing to analyze market needs and implement product offerings... Read More →
avatar for Bob Payne

Bob Payne

SVP of Agile Transformation, LitheSpeed
An early adopter of Extreme Programming, Scrum, and SAFe, Bob Payne has worked exclusively as a Lean+Agile Transformation leader since 1999.Bob hosts the Agile Toolkit podcast and has produced over 170 podcasts, recording a variety of industry leaders and Agile practitioners. His... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
National Harbor 4/5
  Agile Companies, Talk

14:00 EDT

Introduction to Agile: Origins and Evolution (Diana Larsen)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
What is this thing everyone calls Agile? If your process for software development is working for you, you may be wondering: Why should I change? What’s so different? In this introductory talk we’ll answer your questions. We will look at a brief history of Agile ideas. We’ll examine whether Agile has anything to offer you. Shifting to Agile software development may involve changing your work culture to improve your production, and that’s uncomfortable and challenging. So, why do others embark on this journey? What do they hope to get out of it?
To provide context we’ll:
  • Look at the primordial ooze from which Agile methods and practices emerged and evolved
  • Discuss the impact of the Agile Manifesto and 12 Principles on the way we do software development today and the movement to business agility
  • Describe working “Agile” - similarities, differences, and what might need to change
  • Describe what you can do next Monday to get started

Learning Outcomes:
  • Learn common myths and misconceptions about Agile
  • Understand the “why” behind what we do
  • Understand the importance of identifying your existing culture and how it impacts adopting agile
  • List ways you can get the best start on your Agile journey

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Diana Larsen

Diana Larsen

Co-founder & Chief Connector, Agile Fluency Project, LLC
Diana Larsen is a co-founder, chief connector, and principal mentor at the Agile Fluency® Project. Diana co-authored the books Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great; Liftoff: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Teams; Five Rules for Accelerated Learning. She co-originated... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
National Harbor 2/3
  Agile Foundations, Talk

14:00 EDT

Starting with our Agile Successes (Antoinette Coetzee, Lyssa Adkins)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
This week will be filled with ideas for addressing your greatest Agile challenges, or for getting started on the right foot. There will be a lot of talk about impediments and solutions in the days ahead! There might even be some criticism of people, companies, frameworks, etc. Before all that begins, we invite you into a space of recognizing our Agile successes and appreciating the ways Agile has already created vitality, stability, possibility, etc, etc. This session is fueled by your real-life success stories. Come hear some, come tell yours, and infuse your heart and mind with positivity - an empowering place from which to receive the messages you will hear the rest of the week!

Learning Outcomes:
  • - Be inspired by individual Agile success stories told impromptu by the session participants
  • ~ Appreciate Agile for what it has already created in the world, and the effect it can have on individual's lives, teams and organizations
  • - Change the place from where you will be listening
  • ~ Make connections that set you up for success for the rest of the week

Speakers
avatar for Antoinette Coetzee

Antoinette Coetzee

Agile Coach and Trainer, Plain Agile
Antoinette has been in the Agile world since working with some of the original Manifesto signatories in 1996. She spent several years as Agile team member, developing software products. She has been an Agile mentor since 2005, then received coaching from Agile Coaching Institute in... Read More →
avatar for Lyssa Adkins

Lyssa Adkins

Agile Coach & Consultant, LyssaAdkins.com
I came to Agile as a project leader with over 15 years project management expertise. Even with all that experience, nothing prepared me for the power and simplicity of Agile done well.My Agile experience, along with my professional coaching and training abilities, gives me the perspective... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
National Harbor 8
  Audacious Salon, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Choose Your Own Coaching Adventure and Other Games (Damon Poole, Gillian Lee)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Everybody loves to play games, so we have created five games that quickly teach the basics of being an Agile Coach. In "Flash Card Coaching," you will witness the power of powerful questions and the value of coaching by using only a deck of 24 powerful questions to silently coach a fellow attendee from "what's on your mind" do "what will you do next and when will you do it?"
There are three categorization games where you will work together in small groups to sort cards into categories and then turn them over to get feedback on how you did. The first game has you sort questions into powerful or not, the second into different kinds of advice giving or advocating, and the third into coaching, mentoring, teaching, or facilitating.
Finally, there are two "Choose Your Own Coaching Adventure" games. These are just like the old "Choose Your Own Adventure" games. You are presented with a scenario and multiple choices. Each choice may either lead further down the path to a successful coaching outcome or end up with an unhappy coachee. Each unhappy ending comes with an explanation and you can always back up and try again.
All of the games are freely downloadable for your future use.

Learning Outcomes:
  • The differences between coaching, mentoring, teaching, and facilitating
  • How to provide advice as a coach without advocating a particular option
  • The difference between powerful questions and closed or leading questions
  • How to use a coaching arc

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Gillian Lee

Gillian Lee

Agile Coach, Nulogy
Gillian helps teams and organizations deliver better business results by coaching and mentoring them on Agile. She helps engage and grow the people around her through playful facilitation and intentional peer-to-peer learning. Gillian is an ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Maryland Ballroom A
  Coaching & Mentoring, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Improv Your Coaching! Using Comedy to Connect, Adapt, and Respond to Any Situation. (Mary Lemmer, Jason Hall)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
How would Steve Carell or Tina Fey handle a coaching situation?! During this session, we’ll do improv games and exercises popularized by theatres and used by popular comedians like Tina Fey, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, and Amy Poehler to boost our coaching muscle memory. This interactive session will blend the funny with the serious and empower you to handle any coaching situation.
Great coaches are great improvisers. It’s the in the moment experiences that define and separate impactful coaching from the lackluster. Amazing coaches and improvisers both need to empathize with, actively listen to, connect and collaborate with the people to be successful. Improvisers and Coaches both operate within the context of uncertainty. During this session, we’ll discuss and use improv comedy exercises to practice handling coaching situations. It will be interactive, fun, funny, and a safe and creative space to practice some of the most challenging aspects of our jobs as coaches.
Session attendees can expect to leave this session with:
-Feeling empowered to handle any coaching situation
-Ideas for how to handle different coaching situations
-Less fear
-Having discovered how to empathize with others as part of coaching
-Greater emotional intelligence
-A methodology for learning and practicing failure, in a safe and fun environment
-A way to handle changing environments and the changing learning needs of others
-A strengthened ability to think quickly
-Exercises and games they can play with their teams to share their ways of strengthening connection with and understanding of others
-A huge smile on their face!

Learning Outcomes:
  • Ability to handle and feeling empowered to handle any coaching situation
  • Align on a path before fully engaging on a problem
  • Practice reading and interpreting body language and altering your in-the-moment approach
  • Become aware of how your status affects the outcomes you’re going after and know how to modulate your status accordingly
  • Ability to empathize with others as part of coaching
  • A way to handle changing environments and the changing learning needs of others
  • A strengthened ability to think quickly
  • Exercises and games they can play with their teams to share their ways of strengthening connection with and understanding of others

Speakers
avatar for Mary Lemmer

Mary Lemmer

Founder, Improv4
Mary Lemmer is an entrepreneur, improviser, comedian,and writer. Mary is the founder of Improv4, an improv training company specializing in cultivating leadership and team building skills for companies, teams and leaders. Mary has helped dozens of companies, including Plenty, Ozlo... Read More →
avatar for Jason Hall

Jason Hall

Independent Coach, Collaborative Structures LLC
I'm a team and organizational servant with coaching strengths in creating safe spaces for teams to thrive, experiment, learn, and have fun. I've helped organizations develop a more customer-centric approach to product delivery grounded in measurable success. Always learning, always... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Chesapeake D/E/F
  Coaching & Mentoring, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Part 1 of 2: Facilitate Cleaning Your Code Without (Necessarily) Being a Techncial Coach (Arlo Belshee)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Does your team struggle with technical debt that you feel powerless to change? Messy code is organizationally complicated to fix. It requires all the developers, managers, and product owners to work together. It requires a change in habits. The new habits are not too complicated, but everyone adopting them at once is.
In this workshop you will fix the powerlessness; as soon as you get back from the conference your team can start fixing the code.
As a leader - coach, mentor, product owner, manager, or lead dev - you are good at getting people to work together towards a common goal. Yet still technical debt remains. Part of the problem is cultural; we can give some tips but that part is actually fairly easy to solve.
But a big part is that technical debt doesn't behave like a lot of other work. Code cleanup projects or stories will not help. You need to change the moment-by-moment habits of all of your developers. Technical debt is created or repaired by choices made unconsciously every 15 seconds. We need to change those choices.
Code by Refactoring helps. It exposes and changes the coding micro-habits on your team. It is a journey. And the first step is Read by Refactoring mob sessions. We have been teaching technical people to run these sessions for years. With this workshop, for the first time, we have developed a way for anyone to run Read by Refactoring sessions - even if they are not technical. Turns out you don't need to code yourself in order to teach your team a better way to code.
Join us and experience the Read by refactoring workshop, with all the materials and guidance you will need to take it home and facilitate your team.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Facilitate a Read by Refactoring workshop for your own team or within your company.
  • Understand Disciplined Refactoring and how that changes the economics of software development (for the better).

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Arlo Belshee

Arlo Belshee

Team Craftsman, Legacy Code Mender, and Rabblerouser, Tableau Software
Arlo helps you change cultures in large organizations. He transitions hundreds or thousands of people at a time to full technical and cultural prowess in a way that sticks. More importantly, Arlo gives your company the ability to change its own culture. He seeks to be the last consultant... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
National Harbor 10
  Coaching Technical Skills For Less Technical Coaches, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Seven Principles for Any Effective Agile Team, Collocated or Distributed (Mark Kilby, Johanna Rothman)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
As we wrote the distributed agile teams book, we realized that many of the agile problems we’ve seen are similar---regardless of whether the team is collocated or distributed. Even if the team “practices” a specific framework, the teams are not agile-in-culture, nor are they teams. They don’t have a project rhythm of delivery or reflection. They work as “silos of one” instead of collaborating together or being transparent in their work. Too often, the team members (and managers) share knowledge on a need to know basis and no one needs to know. People blame each other when things go wrong. Teams don’t have a culture of resilience and perseverance.
That’s a laundry list of “agile gone wrong.” Why? Too often, it’s because the teams don’t (or can’t yet) work according to seven principles that work for distributed and collocated teams. Instead of practices, people need principles that work so they can work. Here are the seven principles we describe in the book:
  • Create transparency at all levels.
  • Create a culture of continuous improvement with experiments.
  • Practice pervasive communication at all levels.
  • Create a project rhythm.
  • Assume good intention.
  • Create a culture of resilience.
  • Default to collaborative work, not solo work.
  • Establish Acceptable Hours of Overlap.
In this workshop, Mark Kilby and Johanna Rothman will walk you through seven principles that work for every agile team. You’ll see where to place your team on a continuum, and learn several approaches for managing each principle.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Learn 7 principles to help any team become more agile
  • How to think about agile principles, past the manifesto values, for your team
  • See common traps that teams and organizations fall into that stalls their agility
  • See how the recommended principles can help release the team from a trap

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Mark Kilby

Mark Kilby

Agile Coach, K5Labs LLC
Mark Kilby coaches leaders, teams and organizations on how to work more effectively, whether they are distributed or collocated.  For over two decades, his easy-going style has helped his client learn to collaborate and discover their path to success and sustainability.Sometimes... Read More →
avatar for Johanna Rothman

Johanna Rothman

President, Rothman Consulting
Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," provides frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams see problems and resolve risks and manage their product development. Johanna was the Agile 2009 conference chair. Johanna is the author of several books... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Maryland Ballroom D
  Collaboration Culture & Teams, Workshop

14:00 EDT

That’s not what I meant! - How communication can make, or break, teams (Trisha Hall)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
'Why don't you just understand???" How many times do you ask yourself this question? Your request, acceptance criteria, what you are asking for is clear in your mind, but your colleague doesn't ever seem to get it quite right. Why can't they just see things they way you do?
Maybe it's because they don't think the way you do, so it's a matter of understanding how they think and communicating in a way the receiver understands the information...
There are over 400 different combinations of thinking and behavior preferences, each one of them giving and receiving information in a different way. Learn more about how to decode your own combination, the combinations of your colleagues, and how to bridge the gap between.
This session is open for anyone that has to communicate their ideas, or for those that have to interpret someone else's ideas so they can get their work to 'Done'. We will have a conversation around techniques you can use to both enhance your own communication style as well as interpret the styles of those around you. During the incorporated table exercises you will get to share your ideas around communication and practice some of the concepts introduced in the session.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Learn techniques to understand the thinking and communication styles of both themselves and those around them.
  • Learn techniques to apply the knowledge of thinking styles to creating effective meetings
  • Gain an understanding of the Intent-Impact gap and how to mitigate its effects

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Trisha Hall

Trisha Hall

VP, Enterprise Solutions, Agile Transformaton Inc.
I grew up in the corporate world and am an Agilist at heart.  I spent the first 18 years of my career in project, process and vendor management as well as contract negotiation.  I found, and fell in love with, Agile when I was asked to learn Agile and develop an Enterprise metrics... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Chesapeake 10/11/12
  Collaboration Culture & Teams, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Don't write those User Stories! (Ardita Karaj)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
As a sales system, I need a database, so that I can store the data.
This is an example of a real story from the backlog of a team I know. Don't you think we have forced the User Story template too far? Product Owners and Managers have moved from writing big business requirement documents (BRD) to writing each of those sentences in the user story format without connecting with the real customer. Unfortunately, some trainers and coaches reinforce this behavior even more and we see teams that have been "doing agile for 4 years" and write stories without a real user and a real need.
Product people, You're liberated!
You don't have to write those user stories! You don't have to continue to fit everything you want to share with your team into this format. Agile teaches us to continuously improve and to put our interactions over tools. Agile has moved to markets and businesses that never thought would benefit from agility. The way we bring, present and work on customer's needs can't always fit in the classic format.

Product Managers/Owners, Business Analysts, UX or any agile team member can benefit from what we will discuss. On this workshop, we will look into alternative ways to connect with our teams, bring the real problems we need to solve and communicate in ways that are meaningful. User Story is not the only format for us to have meaningful conversation!

Learning Outcomes:
  • - Alternatives for Product Managers/Business Analysts to communicate work required with a purpose
  • - Make conversations with development team meaningful and value driven
  • - Supporting the growth mindset to always find better ways to communicate with teams by bringing value to your conversations

Attachments:
Speakers
AK

Monday August 5, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Chesapeake 4/5/6
  Customers & Products, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Testing 1, 2, 3, ..., ...? (Wouter Lagerweij)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
We talk about the Testing Pyramid, and it has helped move us away from the focus on end-to-end testing. But just ‘unit’, ‘component’, and ‘integration’ is not sufficient as a testing vocabulary.
In this talk I go through the different types of testing we need to apply to keep our increasingly extensive services landscape running smoothly. We’ll look at all the different parts of our code we need to test, what type of unit tests are applicable, how and where to test our APIs, and the APIs we depend upon, what exactly is an ‘acceptance test’, how to deal with multiple clients, multiple API versions and exactly when we have a need for a test environment. And how all these tests are parts of your continuous delivery pipeline.
All of this is shown as code written specifically for the purpose of the talk, so that we don’t get stuck in abstractions, but have concrete examples to show how it works.
The code will be available from github, including the pipeline and deployment setup, so you can take the learnings back to work and apply them immediately.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Realisation of how many different types and places thereare to do developer testing
  • Every Test Has A Specific Purpose
  • Test Where The Functionality Is

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Wouter Lagerweij

Wouter Lagerweij

Agile Coach
I love spending time with teams and organizations to figure out how to improve the way they make software, and make it more fun.To make that happen I use the knowledge and skills gathered in over ten years of experience applying Agile processes and practices from XP, Scrum, Kanban... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Chesapeake J/K/L
  Dev Practices and Craft, Talk

14:00 EDT

Massive Agile Cross-Coordination Simulation Game (Season Tanner)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Digital transformations create a need for large-scale Agile initiatives to find ways to manage the dependencies they have amongst themselves. In State Farm's Digital Transformation, the number one question that Executives, Directors, and Product Managers asked was: how will we manage dependencies with each other in this new operating model?
The simulation is a puzzle-based exercise that focuses on identifying the problems associated with coordination across large, cross-cutting Agile efforts—along with possible solutions to managing those dependencies. It is fondly known as "The Puzzle Game" within State Farm's walls. Not only will this game help you gain a deeper understanding of the size and complexity of the problem--you will also walk away from this workshop with ways to solve those complex problems and a set of instructions for how run this same simulation in your own organization!

Learning Outcomes:
  • Understand the size and complexity of managing dependencies across multiple Agile efforts in a large organization
  • Identify antipatterns when managing those dependencies
  • List of potential solutions in alignment with the 12 Principles of the Agile Manifesto
  • Receive facilitation instructions for how to run the simulation in your own organization

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Season Tanner

Season Tanner

Product Manager and Executive Agile Coach, State Farm
I love to discuss and share experiences with Agile, Continuous Delivery, DevOps, and Product Management. I am a practitioner who has been starting up, coaching, and working on large scale Agile efforts of many sizes and many different types of work—from State Farm’s Auto Quote... Read More →

Massive Agile Coordination Game Instructions pdf
Massive Agile Coordination Game FINAL pdf
Monday August 5, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Chesapeake A/B/C
  Enterprise Agile, Workshop

14:00 EDT

The Road to Real Business Agility (Dean Leffingwell)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Business Agility represents the ability of an organization to rapidly respond to changing market conditions by continuously delivering products and services that meet evolving customer demands. In a world being ‘eaten by software’, business agility is completely dependent on an organizations ability to create and deploy innovative digital systems. That, in turn, requires the mastery of core technical competencies — including team and technical Agility, implementation of DevOps and a continuous delivery pipeline, and lean portfolio management. And yet Business Agility demands even more. All aspects of the enterprise — leadership, sales, marketing, operations, supply, manufacturing, finance, legal, HR and more— must become more agile and adaptive, and more fluid in its organization. These teams need to be more Agile in their approach, and must also understand how to work with an Agile technology organization.
In this tutorial, Dean Leffingwell will describe the competencies needed to achieve true business agility —agility based on confidence in the ability to deploy innovative technical solutions more quickly than ever before—coupled with the business skills necessary to more rapidly adapt to evolving customer demand.

Learning Outcomes:
  • An understanding of what Business Agility really is, and a description of the technical and business competencies needed to accomplish it.
  • An initial self assessment of where an attendees enterprise is on the road to Business Agility.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Dean Leffingwell

Dean Leffingwell

Chief Methodologist, Scaled Agile, Inc.

Monday August 5, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Maryland Ballroom C
  Enterprise Agile, Talk

14:00 EDT

The Life Changing Magic of Holding Space: A stance for leaders decluttering complex space (Steve Holyer)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Does your leadership stance spark joy?
Would you like to clear clutter from the complex system where you lead?
How do you cultivate an Agile mindset for yourself and others?
Open Space Events like Agile Coach Camp, or a regional Agile Open Conference, or an internal Open Space Company event can spark joy, and help you cut through the clutter surrounding you in the systems where you lead. Can Open Space Technology be life-changing for leaders?
This session asks; "What can a leader learn from the principles and law of an Open Space Event. How can that radically enhance their practice of agile leadership and spark joy in themselves and others?
We will explore leadership in autonomous, self-organising teams as well as leadership that supports autonomous self-organising teams. We will also explore ways to improve an organisation's level of agility, and we will look at psychological safety.
If you're a leader at any level — including manager, founder, scrum master, product owner, coach, or developer—I invite you to explore the principles (and one law) of open space with other leaders who share your passion in this session. I invite you to deepen your leadership with the practice of holding space.
This is not a session about Open Space Agility (in case you were wondering). Nor is it a session for training new open space facilitators (although open space facilitators may pick-up some tips). This is is a session about how the agile adjacent practice of "holding space", which comes from Open Space Technology, can deepen leadership at all levels. This workshop will explore how this practice can be one of the allusive keys to leading with an an agile mindset.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Describe the principles of Open Space and explain how they relate to agility in an organisation and support it
  • Learn practical ways to enhance your leadership stance by enabling and following the "law of mobility"
  • Explain "holding space" and relate it to systems thinking.
  • Understand new ways to lead by "invitation"
  • Discuss practical ways to encourage autonomous self organisations and name related agile practices both well-known and emerging
  • Create a plan or stance for open space leadership when you return home

Speakers
avatar for Steve Holyer

Steve Holyer

Agile PO Coach and Trainer, engage-results.com
Steve Holyer is a product ownership coach, trainer, facilitator and consultant helping product organisations unleash value and deliver results. Principal consultant at Steve Holyer and Associates in Zurich Switzerland; he is an international speaker and trainer on Scrum and Agile... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
National Harbor 12/13
  Leadership, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Breaking Down the Curriculum - Learning Games (Nate Haut)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Why don't we set people up for learning success? From corporate seminars to elementary school classes, learning is broken into waterfall like segments which students complete without an understanding of the big picture, or why it is important. Students may be tested multiple times during a course, but their success or failure is not a closed loop system to improve the curriculum. What if a failing student was a signal that they needed to learn a different way? This session will demonstrate that everyone learns differently, and it is important to break down the curriculum and adapt to make learning easy and fun for everyone!
This session will focus on two themes: Breaking the learning curriculum down into smaller sections to solicit honest feedback, and adapting the curriculum to embrace the fact the people learn differently. We will explore why learning is difficult for some people, and what can be done to help each person learn their best. We will experiment with creating learning games and how to modify them to make learning fun and easy for all types of students. After several examples, attendees will be challenged to consider real life examples of topics they hope to teach, and practice developing learning games to help their students learn more effectively. If you would like to find better ways than lecture and textbook learning, this is the session for you!

Learning Outcomes:
  • Understand that everyone learns differently, and that is good
  • Receive an introduction to the psychology of learning and how we can tap into people's different experiences to help them learn best for them
  • Understand that enabling people to learn best for them creates a community where people can ask questions and feel safe to admit when they need help or don't understand
  • Strategies for breaking learning down into smaller sections to assure the audience is learning successfully
  • Learn how to Agile can be used in a learning environment to constantly check with the team if the learning style is working for them and adapt and improve as needed
  • Games to change the structure of rigid lecture based learning

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Nate Haut

Nate Haut

Agile Product Owner
Nate Haut is an Agile Product Owner supporting software solutions for manufacturing environments. He loves solving engineering problems and helping shape the digital work space with software tools for the modern work force. Nate enjoys outdoor adventures and rock climbing. He can... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
National Harbor 11
  Learning, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Bringing Social Emotional Learning (SEL) Techniques into Your Agile Learning Ecosystem (Popi Makris)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Social Emotional Learning (SEL) encompasses a number of techniques that help individuals understand and manage emotions, set goals, establish positive relationships and make good decisions. Over the last two decades, SEL techniques have been implemented in schools around the world to educate the 'whole child' ensuring that each child is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged. Follow up studies have demonstrated that SEL works - not only are students experiencing dramatic academic achievement but behaviors and dropout rates also continue to be favorable. What's so special about SEL techniques and is there an opportunity to introduce them to our agile teams and into our agile learning ecosystems? This is what this workshop intends to explore.
In this workshop, participants will take a journey through the limbic part of the brain, the part that processes emotion. We will then take an in-depth look into SEL competencies (Self Awareness, Self Management, Decision Making, Relationship Skills, Social Awareness) and will provide mini exercises to demonstrate the power of SEL. Participants will be provided with a number of take-away activities that they can adapt to their respective learning environments and ecosystems.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Participants will come away from this workshops having a better understanding of
  • - how the brain processes emotion
  • - what social emotional learning practices exist
  • - how to apply SEL practices to the learning ecosystem
  • - learn new hands-on SEL activities and exercises

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Popi Makris

Popi Makris

Founder, The Agile Gardener
Talk to me about leadership, connections, people, culture, training, empowerment, children - and, oh yeah, LEGOs!!!

Monday August 5, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Chesapeake 1/2/3
  Learning, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Start Less, Finish More: The real costs of organizational multitasking (Brandi Olson)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
The research is compelling—our brains work best when focused on one task at a time. Switching between tasks results in a host of negative consequences—including dramatic losses of productivity, lower quality work, and increased burnout. At the agile team level, scrum masters, product owners, and coaches teach the principles of prioritization, focus, and getting to done.
But what happens when multitasking is built into the culture of an organization? Organizational multitasking happens when the efforts of the organization are divided across multiple work streams. It shows up in the form of competing priorities, high numbers of projects in progress, spreading people too thin, and employee turnover. The cost of organizational multitasking is expensive and devastating.
You know this already? Great! This session is for you. The workshop is focused on how to shift the mindset and culture that leads to organizational multitasking. We will explore the cost of organizational multitasking through science, games, simple illustrations. Participants will walk away with tools to influence change from a portfolio management culture of getting more started to a culture of getting more of the right things done.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Translate the science to support the case for more focus, less multitasking at the highest level of the organization.
  • Practice creating simple illustrations to explain the cost of multitasking for individuals and organizations.
  • Play games! Also, develop skills to play similar games with a leadership team, managers, and team members to shift the organizational mindset that perpetuates multitasking.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Brandi Olson

Brandi Olson

CEO, The Olson Group
I wholeheartedly believe that agile has the power to change the way smart people solve complex problems and make the world a better place. I got my start in agile when I was a special education teacher, and now I coach leaders on agile delivery and organizational design. I love talking... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Chesapeake G/H/I
  Project Program & Portfolio Management, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Mindful Writing for your Self-Care Tool Kit (Toby Sinclair)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
“Write hard and clear about what hurts.” Ernest Hemingway
Our thoughts can often be all consuming. We can feel locked in by our internal dialogue, unable to escape.
Writing is a great way to process your thoughts, relax your mind and gain clarity. A 2011 study published in the journal of science found that students who wrote a journal were better able to ease their anxieties.
However as simple as it sounds, writing can be incredibly daunting. What should I write? How should I write it? And we often question, is it good enough?
In this workshop we will explore four different writing techniques you can add to your self-care toolkit. Through writing exercises you’ll have the opportunity to explore techniques such as journaling, poetry, cartoons and story writing.
You will leave this workshop to see the benefits of mindful writing such as:
  • Boosting self-esteem
  • Creating “Me” time
  • Relieves stress and anxiety
  • Increasing creativity
  • Letting go of thoughts
The practical techniques you learn in this workshop will help you get pen to paper straight away!

Learning Outcomes:
  • * Select the best writing technique for your self-care toolkit
  • * Compare different writing techniques to support your self-care
  • * Use these foundational techniques as a foundation to create your own writing exercises
  • * Build a writing schedule to Add to your daily routine

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Toby Sinclair

Toby Sinclair

Personal and Team Coach, JP MORGAN CHASE
Toby is a Personal and Team Coach based in London. He is a practitioner with over 10 years experience in the technology industry including testing, development and in recent years Professional Coaching. He works in complex organisations helping them identify improvements.Toby is a... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
National Harbor 6/7
  Self-Care, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Icebox Zero: Agile UX & The Lean Backlog (Scott Showalter, Justin Beall)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
One of the most disregarded principles of the Agile Manifesto is perhaps one of the most important: Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done. Frankly, simplicity seems simple enough, but in reality it’s as complicated as the work we are so often asked to deliver on—work that we may ultimately find was not worth doing. This session explores the complexities of this sort of counterintuitive workstream optimization, with low-effort tactical approaches to preventing such waste in software and product development. The session attempts to codify the things teams need to do to truly execute on simplicity, and as a bonus, fulfill what is likely the most important principle of the Agile Manifesto: satisfying the customer. We’ll explore how to apply the concepts of thoughtful lean metrics to improve our ability to deliver value.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Generate value by embracing Lean UX in an Agile environment—practicing the art of maximizing the amount of work not done.
  • Judge the overall systems cost of unhealthy backlogs.
  • Use experiment patterns to invalidate the wrong ideas.
  • Recognize value by measuring thoughtful lean throughput metrics.
  • Instill a true sense of purpose and passion in our team members through customer-centered empathy & team autonomy techniques.
  • When might it still make sense to maintain a minimal icebox.

Speakers
SS
avatar for Justin Beall

Justin Beall

Free Agent, Self
Software engineer (Python / Node / Java), craftsman, XP advocate, agile technical coach, product (discovery, delivery, management, owner) curious, data miner, believer in growth mindset, multiplier, servant leader, was a VP of Engineering, individual contributor, speaker, and fierce... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Maryland Ballroom B
  User Experience, Talk

14:45 EDT

Transforming Healthcare with Business Agility (Emilia Breton, Daniel Scalfaro)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
The cost of healthcare administration is crushing Americans. According to National Institute of Health, it was projected to be $315 billion in 2018. This is we (a major healthcare payer) recognized an opportunity to improve the lives of thousands of healthcare providers and people like you and me by streamlining the provider experience. We originally thought launching a single Agile Release Train would help release software faster, making it easier for doctors and administrators to work with the organization. Turns out, it would take far more than that. In this talk, Dan Scalfaro - Director of Digital IT at a national healthcare payer - and Emilia Breton – Agile coach at Accenture | SolutionsIQ - will share their experience working together over the course of 6 months to establish a powerful communication platform that would ultimately break down barriers that had existed between various business and IT organizations for decades. As a result of our partnership, the organization stands to drastically simplify antiquated processes in healthcare, which all of us benefit from in the form of happier, less stressed healthcare providers.
So often coaches are brought into a group to implement a framework and the group never realizes the results promised by agile evangelists. In order to realize the true power of agility we found that we needed to start with transforming leadership and bringing together people, from across different business and IT silos and groups. We started out looking to launch a train and discovered a diverse and powerful group with the ability to change the face of healthcare now and in the future. Over the course of 6 months we built a new group that cut across traditional functional towers, divisions and specialties to launch a new truly cross functional virtual organization with one focus, removing barriers for doctors and make their experience with the organization easy.

Lessons Learned from Your Experience:
  • Start with Why. Once you truly understand all of the driving factors from the business and IT sides the path becomes much more clear, and crossing the edge for true cultural change is a smaller leap.
  • Never underestimate the power of entrenched power structures, bringing multiple business and IT units together can be new and uncharted territory. It often threatens existing fiefdoms. Be prepared to address those who feel threatened and bring them in as allies.
  • Make sure you identify the people you need to make a lasting change happen, it takes a village, many of them may not be inside your traditional business or IT unit, don't be afraid to seek out the people with knowledge and skills you need.
  • Deep insights can be gained with a piece of string. Visualize the communication lines and relationships between groups and individuals, it will help you identify gaps and bottlenecks so that you can address them.
  • Changing the way an organization works requires far more than a single coach for a brief amount of time make sure you have the coaching support you need. If you want to create sustainable change find allies in business and IT, give them the knowledge and freedom so they are empowered to carry the change into their groups and departments, and let them do the work!

Speakers
avatar for Emilia Breton

Emilia Breton

Agile Coach, Accenture|SolutionsIQ
I am a natural-born Agile thinker who managed to swim out of the PMI waterfall almost a decade ago. As an Agile coach, I am constantly looking for new ways to build better software and make the world a better place. As a passionate gamer I believe that teams who play together can... Read More →
DS

Monday August 5, 2019 14:45 - 15:15 EDT
Chesapeake 7/8/9
  Experience Reports, Experience Report

15:15 EDT

Afternoon Break
Monday August 5, 2019 15:15 - 15:45 EDT
Maryland Foyer
  Meals

15:45 EDT

Undercover Scrum Master (Dane Weber)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
After three years as a Scrum Master and Agile coach, I hit a wall coaching a team that did not want to try popular Agile engineering techniques such as TDD and pair programming. I had become a Scrum Master after four years working on the business analysis and account ownership side of things and could not speak from personal experience about engineering practices. In order to get some first-hand experience and to gain a new perspective, I chose to spend a year or two as a software developer on a Scrum team.
The experience has been eye-opening. I experienced a tremendous cognitive load working with a wide array of technologies; this pulled my attention away from many of the collaborative and process-oriented activities I cared about as a Scrum Master. I was surprised to feel strong pressure to complete work quickly, cutting corners, even when the Product Owner and Scrum Master were not asking me to. When this pressure was explicit, it usually came from my fellow developers. On the other hand, there is real joy in writing code and seeing a system do something worthwhile that it wasn't doing before. My outlook has changed tremendously and is something I want to share with anyone who works with development teams, especially Scrum Masters and other coaches. I am still enjoying my time as a developer, but I'm looking forward to returning to coaching and incorporating this experience into my approach.

Lessons Learned from Your Experience:
  • Modern full-stack Agile software development places a heavy cognitive load on developers. This can be directly helped by scripting, automating, and building custom tools. Refactoring and improving code quality also reduces this load and should be supported. The team's norms and workflow processes may be just a bit too much for developers to memorize and embody. This can be helped by taking the burden off of team members, such as by writing up the rules for stand-up or Scrum ceremonies on posters that hang in the room where the meeting occurs. Adding checklists and templates where possible serves as a reminder and ready-reference for the Definition of Ready or Definition of Done.
  • It is easy for a team/project culture to make developers feel like they should hurry and cut corners. Discussions about velocity, cycle time, expected completion of a feature, burn-up charts, and so forth all lean toward doing more faster. It is also rarely in the product owner's wheelhouse to recommend slowing down and being more careful and thorough. It was important for the team to explicitly talk about how we wanted to do our work well, to celebrate it in each other, and to have the explicit support of our Scrum Master, product owner, and others.
  • Writing code is fun. Getting code to work is a rapid and rewarding feedback loop. No other part of the job has the same immediate payoff. While writing automated tests can be part of the fun and frequently pays off, there are many aspects of it that are frustrating and not rewarding. Explicitly adopting team-wide approaches to automated tests and celebrating accomplishments with standing up or fixing test frameworks serve as good and positive reminders to push through. Similarly, being involved in backlog refinement and other planning activities feels like a short-term sacrifice for a long-term gain. Some people are naturally more likely to volunteer for "chores," so to avoid burn-out and unfair conditions, systems that rotate through everyone spread out the responsibility.
  • Many good practices, like good habits, take real, intentional effort to form. Even if people recognize pair-programming and TDD as good practices, it takes a lot more to become comfortable and skilled such that they succeed and come naturally.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Dane Weber

Dane Weber

Lead Consultant, Excella
@daneweber on Twitter and LinkedIn. Dane Weber sees software systems as an extension of human systems and is passionate about improving both. He is a software developer, DevOps practitioner, and Agile Coach with Excella. Dane helps teams, programs, and organizations improve and adapt... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 15:45 - 16:15 EDT
Chesapeake 7/8/9
  Experience Reports, Experience Report

15:45 EDT

Business Agility Lab: Afternoon ACN Lean Coffee on Business Agility Topics
Afternoon ACN Lean Coffee on Business Agility Topics: The Agile Coaching Network (ACN) has grown to over 1,500 members! It is a monthly live event and podcast that has reached over 32,000 people. We will be holding a daily ACN Lean Coffee session to talk about whatever is top of mind about your Agile adoptions. Please join us and add your voice to the conversation. Seating is limited, so please plan appropriately.

Monday August 5, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Agile Alliance Lounge

15:45 EDT

Business Agility Mentoring and Small Group Chats
Business Agility Mentoring and Small Group Chats: Have questions about Agile working across your business? Then please stop by the lab and sign up for 1:1 or group mentoring on the subjects of your choice. We will have many business agility mentors available to provide you advice. Seating is limited, so please plan appropriately.
Monday August 5, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Agile Alliance Lounge

15:45 EDT

May I Help You Find Something? – A Journey of Enterprise Business Agility @ Target (Tom Diedrich, Chris Diller)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Are you ready for your Enterprise Agility journey? Let’s take a look! Becoming Agile and getting to Enterprise Agility is a journey of incremental progress where, as with other journeys, you’ll explore, discover, experiment, and learn - at your own pace and in a way that's right for your Enterprise. 
In this presentation, we’ll travel together through journeys taken by Target Marketing business teams that are becoming Agile. We’ll join them as they progress from Team and Product Agility into Strategic Agility and enter into Enterprise Agility as we envision it. We’ll see teams operating in various frameworks including Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban (hybrid), and experimental groups forming practice squads and guilds to deliver what’s new and next for Target Guests.
Anchoring to the Agile Values and Principles, these teams are developing empathetic, trusting, and collaborative relationships within their teams and across organizational pyramids. We'll see how delivering valuable outcomes early, often, and beyond expectations helps drive engagement with Executive Leadership. And we'll share some of the signals that indicate that your Enterprise is advancing toward Business Agility such as our Coach-in-Training experiment that enables teams to continue along their learning journey once they've skilled up in our internal immersive learning environment.
Being a leader in an industry means having trend-setting strategies, leadership and products that adapt to change, and making guest-centric decisions. Today’s industry leaders must be agile – ultimately across their Enterprise. Tom Diedrich and Chris Diller, Lead Agile Coaches at Target, will share stories of Marketing teams’ journeys and outline an ongoing approach in pursuit of Enterprise Business Agility at a large corporation.

Learning Outcomes:
  • The investments to consider making for Enterprise Agility now and in the future
  • How leveraging immersive learning increases speed of transformation and more sustainable positive outcomes
  • Parallels and distinctions of IT and business teams in an Agile environment
  • The importance of alignment on Product
  • What it means to commit to organizational change

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Tom Diedrich

Tom Diedrich

Target Corporation
avatar for Chris Diller

Chris Diller

Lead Agile Coach, Target Corp
Chris is a Certified Scrum Professional and practicing Agile Coach at Target. He's been involved in developing software since 2006 as an embedded software developer, project leader, ScrumMaster, and Agile Coach, but has found a "home" with Scrum and Agile since 2013. Chris has a passion... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
National Harbor 4/5
  Agile Companies, Talk

15:45 EDT

Organizational Transformation (Mike Cottmeyer)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Leading a large-scale agile transformation isn’t about adopting a new set of attitudes, processes, and behaviors at the team level… it’s about helping your company deliver faster to market, and developing the ability to respond to a rapidly-changing competitive landscape. First and foremost, it’s about achieving business agility. Business agility comes from people having clarity of purpose, a willingness to be held accountable, and the ability to achieve measurable outcomes. Unfortunately, almost everything in modern organizations gets in the way of teams acting with any sort of autonomy. In most companies, achieving business agility requires significant organizational change.
Agile transformation necessitates a fundamental rethinking of how your company organizes for delivery, how it delivers value to its customers, and how it plans and measures outcomes. Agile transformation is about building enabling structures, aligning the flow of work, and measuring for outcomes based progress. It's about breaking dependencies. The reality is that this kind of change can only be led from the top. This talk will explore how executives can define an idealized end-state for the transformation, build a fiscally responsible iterative and incremental plan to realize that end-state, as well as techniques for tracking progress and managing change.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Participants will leave the session with an understanding of how to build an organizational business case for agile, how to craft a transformation strategy and roadmap, how to build consensus internally for the transformation, and how to support the transformation with meaningful metrics that reinforce and support the changes.
  • Furthermore, we will go through how to structure the transformation, how to create an effective communication plan, and how to do all the necessary change management to make sure that everyone stays safe and supported through the transformation.

Speakers
avatar for Mike Cottmeyer

Mike Cottmeyer

CEO and Founder, LeadingAgile
Mike Cottmeyer, LeadingAgile founder and CEO, is passionate about solving the challenges associated with Agile in larger, more complex enterprises. To that end, his company is dedicated to providing large-scale Agile transformation services to help pragmatically, incrementally, and... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
National Harbor 2/3
  Agile Foundations, Talk

15:45 EDT

Thing Three: The Power of Peer Coaching (William Kammersell, Lieschen Gargano)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Peer coaching can make a huge difference in reaching your work and personal goals, but how do you get started and and make it stick? We’d love to share our informal peer coaching method that combines personal responsibility, agile, and goal setting in a way that is guaranteed to be successful. We call it “Thing Three.” In this interactive session, we will teach you the basic format we follow, along with the research to back up why it works. We will also demonstrate how it has helped even the busiest colleagues stay accountable consistently, over years, and continue to reach every goal they set. You’ll get to exercise these skills too and immediately see the value of peer coaching!

Learning Outcomes:
  • Thing Three is an informal process we’ve created and have been using for years to facilitate peer coaching for both work and life. Participants will learn how to leverages agile techniques, like commitment/objective setting, limiting WIP, cyclical planning & reviews, and constant collaboration for their personal goals and challenges. They will leave with the tools to succeed in today’s VUCA world by providing vision, understanding, clarity, and agility.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for William Kammersell

William Kammersell

Product Manager, Scaled Agile
William Kammersell is a Product Manager and SAFe Program Consultant (SPC) at Scaled Agile, provider of SAFe. With over a decade in agile software development, he loves researching customer problems to deliver valuable solutions. His journey as a developer, scrum master, agile coach... Read More →
avatar for Lieschen Gargano Quilling

Lieschen Gargano Quilling

Agile Coach, Scaled Agile
Lieschen Gargano Quilling is an agilest and facilitator extraordinaire. In her current role as Scrum Master for Scaled Agile Inc., she is focused on business agility and building powerful teams and leaders. She has a Master's degree in conflict resolution and a background in large-scale... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
National Harbor 12/13
  Coaching & Mentoring, Workshop

15:45 EDT

Part 2 of 2: Facilitate Cleaning Your Code Without (Necessarily) Being a Techncial Coach (Arlo Belshee)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Does your team struggle with technical debt that you feel powerless to change? Messy code is organizationally complicated to fix. It requires all the developers, managers, and product owners to work together. It requires a change in habits. The new habits are not too complicated, but everyone adopting them at once is.
In this workshop you will fix the powerlessness; as soon as you get back from the conference your team can start fixing the code.
As a leader - coach, mentor, product owner, manager, or lead dev - you are good at getting people to work together towards a common goal. Yet still technical debt remains. Part of the problem is cultural; we can give some tips but that part is actually fairly easy to solve.
But a big part is that technical debt doesn't behave like a lot of other work. Code cleanup projects or stories will not help. You need to change the moment-by-moment habits of all of your developers. Technical debt is created or repaired by choices made unconsciously every 15 seconds. We need to change those choices.
Code by Refactoring helps. It exposes and changes the coding micro-habits on your team. It is a journey. And the first step is Read by Refactoring mob sessions. We have been teaching technical people to run these sessions for years. With this workshop, for the first time, we have developed a way for anyone to run Read by Refactoring sessions - even if they are not technical. Turns out you don't need to code yourself in order to teach your team a better way to code.
Join us and experience the Read by refactoring workshop, with all the materials and guidance you will need to take it home and facilitate your team.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Facilitate a Read by Refactoring workshop for your own team or within your company.
  • Understand Disciplined Refactoring and how that changes the economics of software development (for the better).

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Arlo Belshee

Arlo Belshee

Team Craftsman, Legacy Code Mender, and Rabblerouser, Tableau Software
Arlo helps you change cultures in large organizations. He transitions hundreds or thousands of people at a time to full technical and cultural prowess in a way that sticks. More importantly, Arlo gives your company the ability to change its own culture. He seeks to be the last consultant... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
National Harbor 10
  Coaching Technical Skills For Less Technical Coaches, Workshop

15:45 EDT

People Watching: Is Your Hiring Undermining Your Agile Culture? (Robert Woods)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Wait! Stop! Don't hire that highly talented person with the great resume, numerous certifications and years of valuable experience! Believe it or not, that person could undermine your cultural agility.
One of the biggest mistakes companies make in trying to scale the mountain we call organizational cultural change is bringing in the wrong people to help support that change. Too often we remain stuck in old hiring practices based on keyword searches, years of experience or quantity of certificates. While valuable to know, this does not mean, though, that they will fit what you are trying to do within the organization. You may even be creating a cancerous situation that is causing leadership to question whether or not Agile methods were the right way to go at all!
Robert Woods, President and Lead Consultant at MindOverProcess, will be outlining the absolutely critical adjustments required to how we look for people, hire and why they are so impactful to the success of any cultural support. These adjustments impact areas ranging from Product Development to Change Management, Business and IT alignment, Team Building, Leadership and Facilitation on up to Executive buy-in. Learn how to watch, engage, hire and retain the people you need before its too late!

Learning Outcomes:
  • - Identify how a company's current hiring practices could be undermining its agile cultural changes
  • - Gain techniques a company can use to change those practices
  • - Learn how to measure the results of hiring into an agile environment

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Robert Woods

Robert Woods

Founder and Lead Consultant, MindOverProcess

Monday August 5, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Maryland Ballroom D
  Collaboration Culture & Teams, Talk

15:45 EDT

Learning From Unlikely Places: What an FBI Hostage Negotiator can Teach Us (Diane Zajac)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
What’s the secret to successful hostage negotiations? Create safety. Talk less. Smile. What else? And can the same rules apply to eliciting requirements? What about gathering feedback? How about dealing with conflict on your team?
Too often, product owners spend more time telling their stakeholders what they know instead of hearing what they don’t. Team members tackle touchy topics without really listening to each other. Talking less is not enough. We can’t just be quiet and hope folks fill the silence.
In Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss shares insights gleaned from a career as the FBI’s leading international hostage negotiator. His counterintuitive strategies offer guidance for any of us who want to hear from and understand the people around us better.
Join this interactive session to learn how to use mirrors, labels, and calibrated questions in meetings and group discussions. Discover some of your own anti-patterns, like talking too fast or saying, “I understand.” Whether you are conducting a customer interview or navigating a team retrospective, you’ll be able to practice the principles you learn on a daily basis.
Knowing that we often gain new perspectives by looking in unlikely places, come to this session to learn simple strategies to get to know what the people around you are really thinking.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Discover how we can gain new perspectives by looking in unlikely places.
  • Learn and practice the strategies of mirrors, labels and calibrated questions, along with ways to diffuse emotional situations.
  • Learn to recognize common anti-patterns that impede successful negotiations and interactions.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Diane Zajac

Diane Zajac

Co-founder and Agent of Change, OnBelay

Monday August 5, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Chesapeake 4/5/6
  Customers & Products, Workshop

15:45 EDT

Sizing the future: How to predict the size of your products collaboratively with data (Adam Yuret)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
"How to we associate T-shirt sizes of epics to get a date?"
"How many of these features can we get done in H2?"
These are common questions that cause lots of pain in product development. Commonly people turn to labor intensive approaches such as planning poker of massive epics which are no more reliable than a guess.
What if we could answer those questions reliably without having to estimate every story or even break them all down from the epics.
Come learn how to use reference class estimation to work out the overall size of large scale efforts before you do a single story breakdown.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Audience members will learn how to use historical data to accurately size large-scale product development efforts.
  • How to effectively communicate the impact on these sizes to the probability of delivery within the needed timeframe.
  • How to communicate these things effectively and visually to teams and stakeholders.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Adam Yuret

Adam Yuret

Founder/Consultant, Context Driven Agility
Adam Yuret is an experienced systems thinker who has consulted small non-profits and fortune 100 clients on adopting context-driven systems to solving difficult problems. Adam started Context Driven Agility in 2010 to share his passion for humanistic flow-based systems full time... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Maryland Ballroom C
  Customers & Products, Talk

15:45 EDT

Being Agile with Architecture Decisions: A Short Workshop on Architecture Decision Records (Ken Power)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Are you working on a system where the architecture is too large for each person on the team to hold all the details in their head for all time? Do new team members struggle to understand what they need to know about the architecture? Do current team members have challenges in knowing what architecture decisions were made, by whom, and for what reason? Some architecture decisions are more consequential and higher impact than others, and need to be preserved.
The right level of architecture documentation supports agility. Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) are a useful, lightweight approach for this. Often no more than a page in length, they capture the key decisions that we need to remember. This hands-on session shares experiences with ADRs, giving you a set of tools to be successful in your team.
Through this interactive session we will explore these questions together:
  • What are Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) and why are they useful?
  • How do ADRs promote or help agility?
  • What are the motivations that led to trying Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) for preserving decisions?
  • What are some scenarios and examples where ADRs are helpful?
  • What kinds of decisions should we record with ADRs, and why?
  • What are some of the cultural challenges associated with using ADRs, and how do we address them?
This session provides participants with hands-on practice of creating and reviewing ADRs. The session draws from experiences with multiple large-scale, global organisations and system architectures, and builds on established work with ADRs from other authors and practitioners.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Understand how Architecture Decision Records can support agility
  • Options for structuring and tailoring Architecture Decision Record templates, including some examples of how we have tailored ADRs with different teams
  • Understand the types of decisions for which ADRs are appropriate, and what decisions might be better suited to a different medium
  • Factors to consider for creating, storing, and reviewing ADRs
  • Fostering a culture of valuing ADRs
  • Factors to consider when working with distributed teams in multiple geographies
  • Pointers to other work in the area of ADRs

Speakers
avatar for Ken Power

Ken Power

Software Engineering Leader, https://kenpower.dev/
Ken Power has held multiple positions in large technology organizations. His current responsibilities include leading global, large-scale engineering organization transformations. He has been working with agile and lean methods since 1999. He holds patents in virtualization and network... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Chesapeake D/E/F
  Dev Practices and Craft, Workshop

15:45 EDT

But Why is it Shipped So Late? (Dr. Sam Swapn)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Why should I see & hear this talk:
In a lot of seemingly agile environments software still does not get shipped very often. Teams work hard and create an increment usually within two weeks, still it gets stuck and does not get shipped and deployed to production. This is a big problem in software development. Why does that happen? How do we fix this problem? Implementing DevOps can help you ship more often by closer communication and collaboration between Development Teams and Support Teams. Close coordination and experimentation between these teams helps in faster recovery and faster delivery. That is why it seems, Forrester Research states that the 2018 was the "Year of Enterprise DevOps" and now more than 50% companies globally are applying DevOps.
What to expect from this talk
DevOps can work even at Enterprise Level if practiced correctly. I will talk about this, in a highly interactive and engaging environment, on how we dealt with this situation in a Case study from Leading Insurance FORTUNE 30 company when we were stuck and not to release, by applying Devops concepts of automation, lean, communication, and exploration- CI (continuous Integration)& CD (Continuous Delivery) we were able to solve the problem. When introducing DevOps here is how you can face challenges. With one challenge being that DevOps is not only about tools such as Maven, Docker, Containers, Micro services but a lot about ‘ silo mindset’. It is about bringing culture change that can help. Applying DevOps technique will help release faster,have fewer defects and frequent releases. In this highly engaging and interactive Case Study we learn concepts of DevOps, followed by an Exercise in which we play a Game:The DevOps Game- The Phoenix Project from Sogeti- to demonstrate the success that DevOps can bring to collaborative teams, and finally a Debrief session to answer questions in a Q&A time box that audience might have- we will highlight the benefits of applying DevOps.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Participants will learn in a highly interactive and engaging environment and practice to work on 'key success factors' for faster delivery to production by applying DevOps.
  • By applying DevOps principles it will prepare Agilists to solve forward fixes problems and reduce failure rate for releases.
  • This session will also prepare participants to learn to resolve the culture related issues by applying DevOps and help create a shift in mindset required to be truly Agile teams.
  • With DevOps we collaborate and experiment between Development & Infrastructure teams and not just stop on creating the code but making sure it is delivered to production and released and business starts getting the benefits on their investments.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Dr. Sam Swapn

Dr. Sam Swapn

Agile Coach, Agile Strategic Solution
I am an Agile Coach, a mentor, a friend, a philosopher, and a guide to many leading professionals in America and globally for last more than a decade. I have trained thousands, from C level executives to Team level, in Agility. I have more than three decades of corporate experience... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
National Harbor 6/7
  DevOps, Workshop

15:45 EDT

Thrive, Survive, or Die: An Adventure into the Kanban Cadences (Joey Spooner, Trent Hone)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Welcome to Ultimate Baskets! You’ll be taken on a highly interactive journey through the evolution of our company as we progress through a challenging time. In this workshop, you'll become familiar with the learning loops of the Kanban Cadences and use them to manage projects, address risks, and foster innovation. Are you good enough to thrive or will you just survive? Hopefully, you won’t drive us to extinction.
During this interactive workshop, you’ll be exposed to a rich narrative, important metrics, and valuable data points. You will use this information make a series of decisions in Operations Reviews and the Risk Reviews, two of the most powerful Kanban Cadences. Those decisions will—hopefully—foster the growth of Ultimate Baskets over four exciting months. Make investments, initiate new projects, address critical risks, and see if you can help our company achieve a dominant "thriving" position in the marketplace.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Our workshop has a series of Learning Outcomes. You will:
  • Become familiar with how to use various Agile metrics for important business decisions.
  • Learn how to use cadenced feedback loops to promote Business Agility.
  • Gain exposure to system thinking concepts and their importance to Business Agility.
  • Learn about different levels of decision-making (the enterprise, program, and project level) and the impact decisions at different levels have on an organization.
  • Discover how the Kanban Cadences can support a modern, networked, service-based organization.

Speakers
avatar for Joey Spooner

Joey Spooner

Kanban Coach and Trainer, TriTech Enterprise Systems
Joey Spooner is an Accredited Kanban Trainer and Kanban Coaching Professional at TriTech Enterprise Systems, Inc. In a 15 year career spanning the communications, insurance, higher education, non-profit, and government sectors, Joey has been a software developer, IT director, strategic... Read More →
avatar for Trent Hone

Trent Hone

Managing Consultant, Excella
Trent Hone is a Managing Consultant with Excella Consulting and an award-winning naval historian. He works with software and IT organizations to improve their art of practice, increase effectiveness, and accelerate learning. He has helped dozens of government and commercial teams... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Chesapeake A/B/C
  Enterprise Agile, Workshop

15:45 EDT

Collaboration in Agile: Brain-based Learning (Mehmet Baha)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Achieving collaboration in/across teams is crucial in Agile. The session will be a powerful mix of cutting edge business information and music. In this unique session, you will experience a brain-based learning approach where different parts of your brain are activated. When you participate in the session through percussion, the session becomes a visual, auditory and kinesthetic experience. Providing statistics and data on collaboration and Agile engages the left side of your brain. You will experience collaboration in a very profound & unique way.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Learn the importance of collaboration in Agile
  • Take part in an experiential learning on collaboration. The experiential learning is based on music/percussion
  • Discover MIT's approach to collaboration
  • Create action items based on the MIT's approach to improve collaboration in your organisation

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Mehmet Baha

Mehmet Baha

Founder & Senior Consultant, Solution Folder
Baha is Founder of Solution Folder which provides training solutions to create collaborative work culture in companies. After obtaining a scholarship from Fulbright, he did his master’s in Washington DC, USA in the area of conflict resolution. He has more than 15 years of work experience... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
National Harbor 11
  Learning, Workshop

15:45 EDT

Learning from the books you said you read…. (Em Campbell-Pretty, Melissa Hay)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Have you ever noticed how almost every speaker at every agile conference references a ton of books? Did you ever wonder if they even read those books? And if so, how did they remember what they read? And did they take action based on what they read?
What about the last book you read? What experiments did you run whilst reading the book or after finishing it? Or can you not remember the last time you read a non-fiction book?
We all know that trust, safety, flow and product orientation are keys to success with agile teams. We are all striving for high performing teams that deliver great products. Sometimes all the blogs, books and LinkedIn posts are just too much to consume. So how can we bring these ideas into our real world?
Here’s your opportunity to see how we go about learning from books. We will share examples of books we’ve digested and experiments we have run with real teams to see them thrive. This is the insiders’ guide to making a real difference with what you learnt from all the books you said you read.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Participants in this session will be able to:
  • -Use book clubs at work to enable learning with a bias to action in the workplace.
  • -Describe how other organisations have used the learning they have gained from reading.
  • -Apply a bias to action when reading to learn.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Em Campbell-Pretty

Em Campbell-Pretty

Managing Director, Pretty Agile
avatar for Melissa Hay

Melissa Hay

Principal Consultant, Pretty Agile

Monday August 5, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Maryland Ballroom A
  Learning, Talk

15:45 EDT

Agile Reports for the PM Brain (Wayne Hetherington, David Sabine)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
You’re a project manager and you’ve just been given an Agile project to look after. You ask for reports and you get burndown charts, velocity graphs, and cumulative flow diagrams. What in the world are these, and why do you suddenly have a migraine headache?
Metrics are different in Agile, but the questions remain the same. Come and see what your brain needs to understand the tracking of products built in an Agile way. We’ll build an Agile dashboard that you can take into your next meeting.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Learn:
  • • why standard metrics are not well suited for agile products,
  • • how to pick a good metric and focus on what you need to measure
  • • what an Agile dashboard might look like for your next product.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Wayne Hetherington
avatar for David Sabine

David Sabine

Professional Scrum Trainer
David, as Professional Scrum Trainer with Scrum.org, works to improve the profession of software delivery. He helps organizations deliver products of the highest possible quality and value. His career highlights the intersection of business, technology, fine art, and education. With... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Chesapeake 1/2/3
  Project Program & Portfolio Management, Workshop

15:45 EDT

Your Magic in the Mirror: Lessons in Witchcraft and Wizardry (Olaf Lewitz)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Your self. An abundance of magical possibilities. How often do you dare let it out to enchant your world?
When your self-care is at its best, that's like... what?
and... your courage, that's like... what?
and... your confidence, that's like... what?
and... what's holding you back from unleashing your magic right now, that's like... what?
Reflection tools (aka mirrors) serve two important purposes in self-care and growth: they show us what is really holding us back, and they show us the only thing we can really change: ourselves.
In this session, we will practice simple, pragmatic tools - fit for everyday use with yourself and any human you work with - that will ground you, focus you on what you do best, and increase your courage and confidence to do it.

Learning Outcomes:
  • We practice simple, pragmatic tools for self-reflection to increase the awareness of our potential.
  • We discover and understand knacks and aptitudes we have to increase the likelihood of using them.
  • We refill our batteries with positive attention and encouragement during a busy and overwhelming conference.
  • We reflect on how attention to ourselves grows our magic and our potential.
  • We take away tools that we can use every day, with anyone, to achieve the same effects at home and at work.

Speakers
avatar for Olaf Lewitz

Olaf Lewitz

Trust Artist, TrustTemenos Academy
Olaf Lewitz loves his life and his work. He helps all with the art to love like that; an art that requires and fosters trust. He's the trust artist. Will stay when needed and leave when wanted.

Monday August 5, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Maryland Ballroom B
  Self-Care, Workshop

15:45 EDT

Zen Den - Upskill while you Chill (Audree Tara Sahota)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Zen is the new Black.
Did you know that top executives use meditation to get peak performance?
This experiential session gives you a chance to take a break from information overload and get into a more resourceful state. Along the way, you will discover three different kinds of Meditation that can help you function at your best: Centering, Emotional Clearing, and Problem-Solving.
We have cracked the code on meditation with quick ,easy techniques and found an

effective way to hack into your nervous system to slow down and destress. There is no way to “think” your way to a more resourced state of being; the only way is to connect with your mind-body and support it’s functioning. Anyone can meditate, you will experience how easy it is.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Destress from “Conferenceitis” - Get into a more resourceful state
  • Receive 3 Meditation Practices with MP3 Download
  • Understand the importance of meditation for high performance
  • Develop an easy meditation practice to get results

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Audree Tara Sahota

Audree Tara Sahota

Chief Metaphysical Officer, Agilitrix/SHIFT314
My passion is to help people on their personal growth journey- shifting your mindset is a journey of awakening, that leads to an awareness of the ego and its destructive tendencies. Deepening into the core of your being, discovering your truth, dissolving old patterns. This journey... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Chesapeake J/K/L
  Self-Care, Workshop

15:45 EDT

How agile is your testing mindset? (Karen Greaves, Kelley Cooper)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Agile testing is about more than how to squeeze enough testing into the last few days of the sprint. However, many teams have adopted agile and not yet changed the way they think about testing.
Do any of these sound familiar:
Testers are usually extremely busy at the end of a sprint.
Teams have a hardening sprint before they ship where they do manual regression testing.
There is a growing backlog of bugs found internally that never get fixed.
You really want to do test automation but you struggle to fit it into the story.
Developers are usually working on different stories to the testers because they work ahead.
Task boards have a test column after the dev or in progress column.
If so, it's time to adopt an agile testing mindset. In this session, we will introduce you to 5 simple statements to help you practice this new mindset every day. We will also cover techniques you can start using immediately to help reinforce this mindset. These will be simple things anyone can do: from a minor tweak to your taskboard, to different questions to ask in planning.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Experience how testing early and often can actually save you time.
  • List five ways agile testing is different to traditional testing.
  • Learn which questions to ask to prevent bugs before any code is written.
  • Learn some simple techniques for your task board to help focus on doing testing activities before development (even if you don’t do TDD).

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Karen Greaves

Karen Greaves

Agile Coach, Growing Agile
I love meeting new people so come introduce yourself. Check out www.growingagile.co.nz to see what I look like, or just listen for the loudest person in the room :)
avatar for Kelley Cooper

Kelley Cooper

Agile Coach
Professional herder of cats on PCP...Agile Coach and mother of 4!

Monday August 5, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
National Harbor 8
  Testing & Quality, Workshop

15:45 EDT

Pop culture as inspiration for test ideas (Nicola Sedgwick)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Do you see colleagues getting tunnel vision and fixating on resolving problems or releasing features?
Do you understand the value add to the user (or business) for every item in every release?
Do you have a great quality product but unhappy users?
"If the answer is "yes", then don't wait another minute. Pick up the phone and call..."
You're not alone
Sometimes we need a stimulus or trigger to break us out of the day-to-day and get us looking at a feature or task in a new light. This workshop will share some tools for doing exactly that. These tools are not complex or technical, but fun exercises and games to demonstrate how we can take inspiration from popular culture to breath new life into our work and our teams. For Agile 2019 the inspiration will be:
  • Ghost Busters
  • Dungeons & Dragons
  • David Bowie

Learning Outcomes:
  • Techniques for forcing yourself to look at a scenario through a different lens (David Bowie)
  • Understanding that 'tunnel vision' is a human condition and not a failing (Ghost Busters)
  • Bringing feature requirements to life by having fun with them (Dungeons & Dragons)
  • Takeaway instructions for attendees to run these games with their own teams

Speakers
avatar for Nicola Sedgwick

Nicola Sedgwick

Mindful Leader, Coach & Team Glue, Culturli
An avid enthusiast of agile ways of working, Nicola loves the way technology can enhance and transform the world around us. Nicola is often found working with a product and coaching focus to ensure agile teams collaborate between themselves, and with stakeholders, in order to eliminate... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Chesapeake G/H/I
  Testing & Quality, Workshop

15:45 EDT

Prototyping Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence using Design Sprints (Chris Butler)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
How do you build experiences that effectively combine the power of humans and machines— especially when emerging technologies like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence ("ML / AI") are involved? The design sprint methodology provides a great set of tools to understand these problems quickly. Unfortunately due to the complexity of the interactions, the process isn't straightforward. Where do we start?
This talk will introduce the basics of data science, ML / AI (so you know what you are getting into). From there we will consider how these complex and non-deterministic systems will be used in the human and organizational contexts. Exploring and understanding the expectations for humans— as well as for machines in different environments— can lead us to potential solutions.
We will take you through the Design Sprint stages (Map, Sketch, Decide, Prototype, and Test), when considering data science, ML / AI systems. As a bonus, we'll include the often-missed step: Synthesis, and what it means for non-human intelligences.
We will discuss UX topics that include prototyping and research, to understand the assumptions around abstractions, mental models, affordances, interpretability, and trust. The talk will conclude with a discussion on how these tools will change the way we do our work as practitioners— and make us more effective in our roles.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Introduction to data science, ML / AI and why it matters.
  • How to run a Design Sprint for complex systems like data science, ML / AI
  • How to build and measure trust in your ML / AI prototypes.
  • How to better understand the mental models people use when building for machines.
  • How to create the right abstractions to allow for human interpretability.
  • How to use ML / AI to help humans build the right thing, and to learn from our customers.

Speakers
avatar for Chris Butler

Chris Butler

Lead PM, Google, Core Machine Learning
Chris Butler is a Chaotic Good Product Manager and Lead Product Manager for Google's Core Machine Learning team. His role focuses on strategy and PM'ing the PM experience. Chris has worked previously as a product leader at Microsoft, Facebook Reality Labs, Cognizant, KAYAK, and W... Read More →

Monday August 5, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Chesapeake 10/11/12
  User Experience, Talk

16:30 EDT

How Do We Know if a Scrum Master is "Good Enough" for our Teams? (Sarah Baca)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
In my current role at Express Scripts, I serve as one of the people leaders for our 100 scrum masters. Since I began this role, the biggest challenge in my mind was “How do we know our scrum masters are doing a 'good job?' And what does it mean to do a 'good job' in our highly contextual roles as scrum masters?"
In this session I will share how we are trying to answer this question, and how it is evolving as we learn more.

Lessons Learned from Your Experience:
  • I've learned some ways to create feedback loops between the scrum master and the team, the team to the scrum master, the people leader to the scrum master, and the scrum master to the people leader. I've learned how important it is to make the expectations clear to scrum masters, coach them, and help them grow.
  • I've also had some experiences with things that didn't work - we originally started out with a survey that went out to the teams, asking them to assess their maturity. The problem is that the teams don't know what "good" looks like. And perhaps they were worried about what their boss would think. So they gave themselves high scores on everything. :( I

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Sarah Baca

Sarah Baca

People Leader, Scrum Masters, Express Scripts
I'm a leader and agile coach who is passionate about growing cultures where people feel like they belong and are free to focus on creating a great product for their customers.

Monday August 5, 2019 16:30 - 17:00 EDT
Chesapeake 7/8/9
  Experience Reports, Experience Report

19:00 EDT

Ice Breaker Reception: Night at the Museum
Join us for Agile2019’s opening night reception, themed after the movie Night at the Museum. The evening will be filled with food, drink, and games! Mix and mingle, chat with new Attendees, reconnect with old friends, and be sure to check out the Sponsor booths to see what’s new and exciting in the industry.
Monday August 5, 2019 19:00 - 22:00 EDT
Prince George Exhibit Hall
  Evening Events

19:00 EDT

Sponsor Exhibits
Sponsors are an important element of the Agile2019 Conference. Be sure to stop by and say Hi to all of our Sponsor Exhibitors in the Prince George Exhibition Hall at Agile2019.
Monday August 5, 2019 19:00 - 22:00 EDT
Prince George Exhibit Hall
  sponsors
 
Tuesday, August 6
 

07:30 EDT

Registration Open
Pick-up your badge and conference materials and ask any questions you may have at Agile2019 throughout the week.
Tuesday August 6, 2019 07:30 - 17:30 EDT
Potomac Foyer
  Daily Activities

08:00 EDT

Breakfast
Tuesday August 6, 2019 08:00 - 09:00 EDT
Potomac Foyer
  Meals

08:00 EDT

Bookstore Open
Come check out the latest literature on agile practices.
Tuesday August 6, 2019 08:00 - 18:00 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Daily Activities

09:00 EDT

A Practical Look Into Self-Selecting, Distributed Teams (Bevan Williams)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Your company acquires a team based in another country. A switch in company strategy requires the formation of new teams. A project is cancelled and team members suddenly need to be reassigned. These scenarios happen, so how do you handle these changes to your teams?
What about having your team members choose for themselves? What if this included your offshore teams and remote workers?
If this sounds like a crazy idea, then this talk is for you.
This engaging and light-hearted talk will be an honest reflection of the experience exploring, introducing and facilitating remote friendly Self-Selection at Travelstart - the largest Online Travel Agency in Africa. I will share the highs and lows experienced from preparation, through execution to where it is now, many months later.
By sharing practical experience and challenges I hope to encourage more companies to give their teams the freedom of self-selection - even when considering remote employees.

Lessons Learned from Your Experience:
  • Self-selection can work with remote teams and team members - While co-located teams are always the ideal, they are not always a reality. Having all team members gather for the self-selection too is also ideal, but again not always possible. For this reason, we made use of specific tools and remote facilitation techniques to run the full self-selection process. I would like to assure people that co-location is not a constraint to having self-selecting teams.
  • Management selection alone cannot cater for the traits needed to build high performing teams - Much has been said, and written about building high-performing teams. Focussing on the work of Daniel Pink's Drive, Google's Project Aristotle and J. Richard Hackman's Leading Teams, we learned that while managers have a major responsibility in driving high performing teams, it's not always possible for them to truly be aware of the inter-personal relationships that affect team performance. This event also highlighted a technical knowledge gap between what was being interviewed for versus what skillset(s) were actually missing. For these reasons, we found that what the management team assumed would be good team structure, was quite different to the reality of what was chosen.
  • Self-selection is not just an event, it will radically change your team's culture and how they engage - Since teams were first chosen as at the event, every subsequent decision or change is always discussed with self-selection in mind. This has rapidly increased the level of ownership teams felt within their roles. Teams _wanted_ to be more involved in hiring, tooling, product and business decisions, etc. This means that as a coach or sponsor, you need to be even more aware of decisions that would affect the autonomy of the team.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Bevan Williams

Bevan Williams

Agile Coach & Trainer, Think Agile
Bevan is an Agile coach based in Cape Town, South Africa. He has been an IT professional since 2009 and has previously worked as a Software Engineer, Scrum Master, Head of Mobile and Delivery Manager. He is passionate about coaching, training, enabling and leading people to do their... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 09:00 - 09:30 EDT
Chesapeake 7/8/9
  Experience Reports, Experience Report

09:00 EDT

How to Help Your Non-Software Colleagues Adopt Agile (Gil Broza)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Exciting news! Colleagues from a non-software department, interested in adopting Agile, have turned to you for advice!
While you’d like to help them, you realize that copying your Agile practices for software/IT won’t cut it. Maybe even a popular process framework (name starts with “S”) wouldn’t be right for their work. They are already starting to use Agile bits – boards, stickies, sprints, and standups – but you’d like to help them go further and enjoy a context-specific Agile implementation that will transform their world.
What you need to do is help them design their implementation based on Agile values and principles. While you don’t have to be a process expert, you do need to have the right conversations. And, you need to discuss the Agile approach in a way that empowers your colleagues to make suitable choices, without being tied to any prescription, tool, or so-called best practices. Come to this session, led by the author of “The Agile Mindset,” to learn how to facilitate a rigorous, collaborative process for successfully customizing Agile to a given context.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Outline the first conversations you must have, and how to conduct them, for an Agile implementation that works
  • Empower your colleagues to make Agile-minded choices without being tied to any prescription, tool, or so-called best practices
  • Facilitate a rigorous, collaborative process for customizing Agile to a given context

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Gil Broza

Gil Broza

Agile Mindset & Leadership Expert, 3P Vantage, Inc.
Gil Broza helps tech leaders achieve meaningful agility in product development. He also supports their non-software colleagues in creating real business agility in their teams. Gil has helped over 100 organizations make Agile work well in their unique contexts by using his Right-Fit... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 09:00 - 10:15 EDT
Maryland Ballroom D
  Agile Companies, Workshop

09:00 EDT

Product Innovation (Melissa Perri, Marissa Fong)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Product Innovation - the competitive edge that every company wants but how do you get it? And, what is it, exactly? Creating innovative products means finding a gap in the market that can be readily filled with a new or expanded product in you company. To do that well, you have to not only be very aware of your market and customers, but set up as an organization to discover and pursue these ideas.
In this session we will cover how Agile teams are ripe with opportunity to create innovative products, with plenty of examples of how other companies have succeeded in this area. We'll go over why the role of the Product Owner/ Product Manager is critical for fostering it, and the tools of the trade needed to discover those winning market gaps. Finally, we'll discuss how organizations can optimize themselves to pursue these ideas and deliver extreme customer value.

Learning Outcomes:
  • What product innovation is and why it is critical for businesses
  • How agile teams can become more innovative
  • How experimentation and risk taking lead to great ideas
  • The critical role of the Product Manager and product organizations for creating great products
  • Where the pitfalls in innovation at companies stem from and how to address them

Speakers
avatar for Melissa Perri

Melissa Perri

CEO, Product Management Leader, Executive Product Coach, Author, and Speaker, Produx Labs
Melissa Perri is the CEO of Produx Labs, a Product Management consultancy, and the author of “Escaping the Build Trap”. She believes the key to creating great products is growing great product leaders.Committed to that mission, she created the online school Product Institute... Read More →
MF

Tuesday August 6, 2019 09:00 - 10:15 EDT
National Harbor 2/3
  Agile Foundations, Talk

09:00 EDT

Experiments, Measurements, and Relationships: How Large Federal Projects Can Succeed (David Blair)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Federal agencies often have a reputation for being deeply silo-ed bureaucratic institutions that struggle with innovation. But at USCIS, evolving product management has joined forces with forward thinking IT leadership to advance technical innovation that transforms the mission. Citizenship and Immigration has embarked on a vision of moving to a paperless system for a workflow that has historically required hundreds of paper forms. Through this journey, the need for an involved, responsive, and collaborative partnership between business and technology stakeholders has become imperative. DevOps practices have allowed for a continuous flow of delivery of new valuable functionality directly to public and internal users. But this new landscape creates new challenges borne out of this technological maturity. How do we continuously release new features without disrupting the business? How do we know we’re making the right functionality? How can we anticipate the demand for specific features? And how can we measure the impact on business performance measures that have historically been illusive?
We’ll explore some experiences and lessons learned from the Electronic Immigration System (ELIS) program. David Blair, the IT Program Manager, will discuss the innovative “soft launch” approach used to release a public mission critical system for just 72 hours, how the limited availability to the public allowed for feedback, and what technology made that possible without disrupting the ongoing business processes. He’ll discuss how the partnership with mission-oriented stakeholders was one of the key drivers of the program success. And how together, consistent practice of non-disruptive, reliable deployments built confidence in both IT and the business. The daily repetition of deployment success indicated to key stakeholders that production changes could be made safely and quickly. Engaged product ownership helped verify that internal and external users’ needs were being met and feedback was being incorporated immediately. Business performance metrics became the primary measures of IT success. It is this collaborative business/IT partnership that is key to the success of a modern federal enterprise.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Attendees will learn approaches to overcoming federal challenges to continuous deployment
  • Attendees will learn methods to modernize processes through software without a big-bang approach
  • Attendees will learn how to build trust between the mission/business focused stakeholders and the IT program leadership
  • Attendees will hear an example of how these approaches were actually successful within a large federal institution
  • Attendees will learn how to identify business performance measures that can help indicate IT value delivery

Attachments:
Speakers
DB

Tuesday August 6, 2019 09:00 - 10:15 EDT
National Harbor 4/5
  Agile in Government, Talk

09:00 EDT

Part 1 of 2: The Oppression of Structure and the Tyranny of Structurelessness (Johannes Schartau)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Structure is a concept that is mostly invisible yet shapes almost everything we do. The purpose of this session is to explore and make sense of structure and its use. When is there too much structure so that things become rigid? When is there too little so that things fall apart? At what point does structure turn into oppression? At what point does the lack of structure enable tyrannies?
Please note that there is no pre-defined learning outcome of this session. There is a structure held in place by facilitation that is supposed to let the participants shape and explore the content.
This session is for you if
  • you're not even sure what the preceding paragraphs are about
  • you're a big fan of defining things and making them explicit
  • you're a big fan of anarchy
  • you would like to explore your personal approach to structure
  • you like to discuss vague, slightly abstract ideas

Learning Outcomes:
  • Collect examples of what structure is and where we find it
  • Help participants gain clarity on their own relationship to structure
  • Identify how we individually cause joy and pain through the use or lack of structure
  • Explore how we as an Agile community relate to structure
  • Provide a way for participants to re-calibrate their use of structure in their work-life

Speakers
avatar for Johannes Schartau

Tuesday August 6, 2019 09:00 - 10:15 EDT
National Harbor 8
  Audacious Salon, Workshop

09:00 EDT

Coaching with Presence using the Kominsky Method (Timothy Meyers)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
One of the foundational professional coaching skills described by ICAgile in their certification track for Agile Coaching is Presence.
Says ICAgile, "being fully present as a coach is key to successful coaching. Methods for presence include building rapport, awareness of the environment, self- management and consciously preparing for coaching."
While recently watching the Kominsky Method on Netflix, I saw Sandy Kominsky (an acting coach) describe Presence as "possibly feeling a little flakey, maybe a little uncomfortable" but "being the most important thing" he could teach. I immediately sat up in bed and said "he's right!" and my wife looked at me like a crazy person. Come join me to experience this flakey, uncomfortable, yet most important thing I can teach you: being "totally present."
In this talk hear Tim Meyers, an ICAgile certification track contributor, unpack the varying forms of Presence and offer a few ways to practice them.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Attendees will be exposed to four levels of presence (moment, self, another, environment)
  • Attendees will be given several short activities to help them practice presence

Attachments:
Speakers
TM

Tuesday August 6, 2019 09:00 - 10:15 EDT
Chesapeake 10/11/12
  Coaching & Mentoring, Workshop

09:00 EDT

Mission Not Impossible: Coaching Data Warehouse (DW)/Business Intelligence (BI) Teams (Scott Ambler)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Coaching a data warehousing (DW)/business intelligence (BI) team in agile is very hard. Very hard, but not impossible. The cultural impedance mismatch between traditional data strategies and agile strategies is huge - most data professionals still believe in detailed up-front modeling, downplay the importance of user experience (UX), and rarely have testing skills. Data professionals often believe that data is special, that agile thinking and strategies cannot apply in their context. Nothing could be further from the truth.
To successfully coach an agile team an Agile DW coach must have a deep background in enterprise agile, in data, and in DW/BI. They must have the technical skills to perform agile database techniques - including agile data modeling, database refactoring, and automated database regression testing - and be able show how those skills are better suited than traditional strategies to address the complexities faced by data teams. A formidable challenge.
In this workshop we will explore the challenges faced when coaching agile DW/BI teams, the knowledge required to do so, and strategies for successfully engaging with such teams.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Understand the challenges faced when coach DW/BI teams in agile techniques
  • Discover how to take a disciplined agile approach to DW/BI development
  • Learn about proven agile development techniques for database evolution
  • Discover how to overcome the cultural, process, and tooling challenges surrounding agile DW/BI development

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Scott Ambler

Scott Ambler

Senior Consulting Partner, Disciplined Agile, Inc.
Scott is a Senior Consulting Partner of Scott Ambler + Associates, working with organizations around the world to help them to improve their software processes. He provides training, coaching, and mentoring in disciplined agile and lean strategies at both the project and organizational... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 09:00 - 10:15 EDT
Chesapeake 1/2/3
  Coaching & Mentoring, Workshop

09:00 EDT

Part 1 of 2: How to Introduce Test-Driven Development (TDD) to Your Team (James Shore)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Test-driven development (TDD) is an essential skill for agile teams. Without it, codebases quickly lose the flexibility needed to support agile development. Software accrues technical debt and becomes difficult to change. Rather than improving the code in-place, teams advocate for expensive and risky rewrites. TDD helps avoid these problems.
But for coaches, Scrummasters, and other leaders without a programming background, how can you introduce this foundational skill? In this two-part session, veteran TDD practitioner James Shore will teach you the coaching and facilitation skills you need to help your teams get started with TDD. No programming experience is required, and you won’t be doing any programming in this session. Instead, you’ll gain the resources and knowledge needed to help your teams help themselves. You’ll learn what TDD is, how to recognize when TDD is being done well, and how to facilitate TDD learning workshops without being a TDD expert yourself.

Learning Outcomes:
  • -Understanding of, and ability to explain, the core TDD loop
  • -Understanding of each component of the TDD loop (think, red, green, refactor, repeat)
  • -Ability to recognize when TDD is being done
  • -Thinking tools for evaluating the success of TDD at the team and organization level
  • -Ability to facilitate an introductory TDD workshop

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for James Shore

James Shore

Consultant, Titanium I.T. LLC
James Shore teaches, writes, and consults on Agile development processes. He is a recipient of the Agile Alliance's Gordon Pask Award for Contributions to Agile Practice, co-author of /The Art of Agile Development/, and co-creator of the Agile Fluency™ Model. You can find his essays... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 09:00 - 10:15 EDT
National Harbor 10
  Coaching Technical Skills For Less Technical Coaches, Workshop

09:00 EDT

Corrosive expertise (Seb Rose)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
After we leave school, how do we learn? Books, blogs, videos, conferences, training courses. Who creates all this material? Experts, self-proclaimed or otherwise.
Despite occasional resistance to expertise in all its forms, the expert is still an important contributor to the growth of the team and the individual. However, expertise comes in many shapes and sizes. Some expert advice is related to context - it is relevant only in specific circumstances. Some expert advice is related to proficiency - it is relevant only once you have attained some level of skills. The expert offering advice via mass media knows neither your context nor your proficiency. How do you gain confidence that advice is appropriate for you and that you've understood it correctly?
We'll explore several classic embodiments of expert advice, to see how misunderstandings can cause problems, despite the best intentions. The examples we'll look at are:
  • an acronym: INVEST, created by Bill Wake
  • a metaphor: the Test Automation Pyramid, created by Mike Cohn
  • a template: Connextra (As-A/I-Want/So-That), created by Rachel Davies
Expert advice taken in good faith, that leads to bad outcomes, is corrosive. This sort of corrosive expertise teaches us to become distrustful. It's time to reiterate that there is no magic formula, no silver bullet. At best, expertise can lend you a framework within which to think, but it will never make thinking unnecessary. While experts have valuable things to say, we need to filter their insights through our own experience.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Explain that not all expert advice is appropriate in all contexts
  • Describe several examples of how widely accepted, well intentioned advice can lead to misunderstandings, confusion and bad outcomes
  • Demonstrate how to sift advice through the filter of your own experience

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Seb Rose

Seb Rose

BDD Advocate, SmartBear
Consultant, coach, trainer, analyst, and developer for over 30 years.Seb has been involved in the full development lifecycle with experience that ranges from Architecture to Support, from BASIC to Ruby. He’s a BDD Advocate with SmartBear, helping people integrate all three practices... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 09:00 - 10:15 EDT
Maryland Ballroom C
  Collaboration Culture & Teams, Talk

09:00 EDT

Diversity without Disclosure: Norms to Broaden Inclusion and Intersectionality (Cheryl Hammond)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Organizational diversity isn’t just about the attributes we can see. Every team is a near-infinite spectrum of its members’ needs, some of which we know about and a lot more we probably don’t (and might never). How do we create a safe, accommodating space for things we aren’t even aware of?
It’s possible. For our teams to reflect the diversity of our worlds, HR policies are necessary but not sufficient. Our teams can and should take concrete steps, large and small, to make ourselves more welcoming. You’re probably doing some of them already, so let’s talk about what works and how we can scale it out.
From stairs, ramps, and elevators to menu planning to planking and wall sits during meetings, we’ll discuss how to rethink our norms, retire our assumptions, ask the right questions without prying, and create space for our teammates to self-accommodate. You might never know the difference you’ve made, but your teams will be healthier and wiser for it.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Become constructively curious about the breadth of diversities that affect teams
  • Learn several specific techniques for creating a more accommodating team environment

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Cheryl Hammond

Cheryl Hammond

Delivery Lead, Agile Practice Leadership Enablement, Pivotal
Cheryl Hammond, a.k.a. bsktcase, has a couple decades' experience as a software developer in the private and public sectors. She led her team's successful adoption of Scrum-ban for a mission-critical regulatory compliance project under multi-agency state and federal government oversight... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 09:00 - 10:15 EDT
Chesapeake 4/5/6
  Collaboration Culture & Teams, Talk

09:00 EDT

Project or Product? Oh, my, it's both! (Bringing a product mindset to project-based teams) (Susan Almon)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Popular opinion is that teams should be product-based ("Products not Projects"). This idea makes sense if you build products but not if your business model is project-based work for clients. What if your projects create products for clients? The product and project models need to work together.
I'll review project and product models to identify the key elements of each, and show how they can be combined to best meet the needs of clients and teams in a mixed project/ product world. I'll show how to use the research done by the #noprojects folks to improve projects and figure out how to apply a product mindset to get the best of both models. I call it #whenprojects.
Join me as I share my experience of discovery, realization and leading change.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Product management concepts for project teams
  • How to introduce new ideas to a team
  • How making small changes can make a big difference
  • How to turn negative ideas into positive actionable steps (from #noprojects to #whenprojects)
  • How to identify and combine parts of two seemingly conflicting models (project and product)

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Susan Almon

Susan Almon

Senior Consultant, Deloitte
I've been a consultant for most of my career, helping clients identify and solve problems, in many roles across industries. Currently, I lead Agile teams to deliver solutions for clients. With a passion for gathering, sharing and implementing innovative ideas, I have an extensive... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 09:00 - 10:15 EDT
Chesapeake A/B/C
  Customers & Products, Talk

09:00 EDT

Considerate Pair Programming: an interactive workshop (Todd Sedano)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Pair programming is presented as a straightforward and intuitive practice but is highly relational and difficult to master. When pair programming is done right, it increases productivity, code quality, and developer happiness. But when done wrong, it leads to frustration and resentment.
In this workshop, you will learn how to leverage the strengths of your pair, recognize unhealthy pair programming dynamics, work through conflicts, have difficult conversations, and adjust for power imbalances.
We will do several interactive exercises starting with a fun pairing exercise and work towards how to handle more challenging situations.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Participants will learn practical techniques to improve the pair programming dynamic, discuss their expectations for the relationship, work through conflict, and adjust for any power imbalances.

Speakers
avatar for Todd Sedano

Todd Sedano

Engineering Manager, VMware

Tuesday August 6, 2019 09:00 - 10:15 EDT
Chesapeake J/K/L
  Dev Practices and Craft, Workshop

09:00 EDT

Continuous Build and other DevOps anti-patterns, and how to overcome them (Thomas Stiehm)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Software development is hard and poorly implemented or broken tools, techniques, and patterns just make it worse. Learn to spot DevOps anti-patterns and how to work your way back to a sane way of working.
Continuous Build is an anti-pattern that I have often seen where a team will have what they call Continuous Integration (CI) in place but it only builds the code, there are no unit tests or static analysis run. Certainly, this is better than not building but it leaves a lot of health check information on the table that is considered part of CI. Without this information, you can never really gain the confidence that your build is healthy. The whole goal of CI is to feel that your build is healthy so not tests and analysis means you aren’t doing CI.
Just like CI, other DevOps practices can be hard to understand, implement, and get right. Even with the best of intentions, we make mistakes or misinterpret the implementation of a technique. Learn how to spot common DevOps anti-patterns and how to correct them. These patterns include
1. Continuous Build - CI without tests isn’t CI
2. Turning unit tests off to build the release
3. Don’t automate that, it is my job
4. Different build process for developers and high environments
5. Different deployment process for developers, test environments and/or production
6. Not having a production-like environment to test in before production
7. Saving performance testing for the end of the release
8. Saving security testing for the end of the release
9. Never asking the users about the software
10. Only automating build and deployment, not testing
11. Not having retrospectives
12. Restricting retrospectives to only the development part of the process
13. Running analysis and never looking at or acting on the findings
14. Reduce coverage or static analysis gates to get a build to pass
We have all experienced a time where we wanted to believe we could make an anti-pattern work but it never does. It is better to learn how to spot these and how to correct them than it is to try to keep tweaking a broken process hoping this time it will be better.

Learning Outcomes:
  • How to spot common DevOps anti-patterns
  • How to correct DevOps anti-patterns when you see them
  • Learn how to figure out if what you are doing is stymied by an anti-pattern and how to rally your team around moving off that anti-pattern
  • Learn that motivation for anti-patterns and how to get people to change their minds about it

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Thomas Stiehm

Thomas Stiehm

CTO, Coveros, Inc.
Tom has been developing applications and managing software development teams for over twenty years. As CTO of Coveros, he is responsible for the oversight of all technical projects and integrating new technologies and testing practices into software development projects. Recently... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 09:00 - 10:15 EDT
National Harbor 6/7
  DevOps, Talk

09:00 EDT

Living Off an Agile Landscape: Agile Farming vs Agile Gardening (Quincy Jordan)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
We have all heard of companies that have ‘gone agile’. ” We’re iterating and doing daily standups” they say, but are they really farming Agile or just maintaining a hobby garden. To truly have successful Enterprise Agile, you must make the shift from Agile Gardening to Agile Farming and learn to live off the Agile Landscape. Living off the Agile Landscape is about evolving from one small environment (ie. Garden) to scaling and system thinking (ie. Farming). To scale Agile, The Agile Landscape must be cultivated, tilled, irrigated, and fertilized. Meaning, it takes more than collaborative workspaces and morning standup meetings for an organization to live off an Agile way of being. It takes scaling agile. Scaling through establishing a Community of Practice, building a culture of validated learning across a portfolio of products, providing an atmosphere for safety, engaging areas beyond IT and include outside influencers to development team, and figuring out how to properly cultivate an organization that incentivizes people at an enterprise level to work collaboratively.

Learning Outcomes:
  • • How to cultivate an Agile environment at an enterprise level?
  • • Incentivizing individuals to work collaboratively
  • • Fertilizing the Agile Landscape into rich soil to grow agile thinking at scale

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Quincy Jordan

Quincy Jordan

Principal Transformation Consultant, AgileThought

Tuesday August 6, 2019 09:00 - 10:15 EDT
Maryland Ballroom A
  Enterprise Agile, Talk

09:00 EDT

Lead the Play: Leadership Lessons from Space Pirates (Derek W. Wade)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
What if you could organize and motivate people to double their highest-expected productivity goals?
The future of leadership is emerging to guide 21st-century organizations beyond the small, cross-functional, green-field software development teams of the 1990s. Agile enterprises must respond to emerging markets, provide unity of purpose to workers with conflicting motivations, and foster order when change is the only constant. Agile leadership must cope with distributed teams, "gig economy," diverse skill-sets, and the impact to morale of unexpected changes. But the measure of success is still delivery to the market: volume, quality, reliability.
Early in 2017, a group of several hundred independent players of the futuristic massively-multiplayer video game Elite:Dangerous faced all the above organizational challenges yet still managed unprecedented delivery to their market. And they did it despite the "me first" culture of online games. We'll explore the structural, social, and cognitive factors which enabled this large distributed team of casual volunteers to deliver twice as much as their nearest competition. And we'll uncover how to amplify those factors in your own workplace.
You'll learn the powerful effects of making individual contributions visible, expanding the scope of your regular team synchronizations, having a loose leadership hierarchy, and encouraging diffusion of innovation. And you'll see how community engagement is an essential quality of a servant leadership culture. This is a compelling story about leadership that's relatable to anyone regardless of their interest in or experience with Agile, online gaming, or space pirates.

Learning Outcomes:
  • At the end of this session attendees should be able to summarize, and identify application opportunities in their own organization, the lessons highlighted by the case study:
  • 1. Seeing complexity in the workplace -- The leadership challenges in the modern workplace result of interactions between internal/external forces, from systems and people. Knowing what components make your workplace more complex helps you target your interventions.
  • 2. Visibility is more than cards on walls -- Expose opportunities for individuals to contribute emergent best practices to the whole organization.
  • 3. Self-organization doesn't mean chaos -- Leadership networks must be allowed to form and be visible. Hierarchy isn't all bad. It takes "just enough."
  • 4. Learning is the new productivity -- To be a fast, resilient organization, encourage experimentation over compliance.
  • 5. Servant leadership is more than removing impediments -- It's actively working to create a culture of engagement

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Derek W. Wade

Derek W. Wade

President, Kumido Adaptive Strategies
Derek W. Wade is the founder of Kumido Adaptive Strategies, an organizational performance consultancy specializing in cognitive/learning science. His human-centered approach has improved hundreds of collaborative efforts across a broad range of industries from healthcare to finance... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 09:00 - 10:15 EDT
Maryland Ballroom B
  Leadership, Talk

09:00 EDT

Some Useful Neurophysiology of Collective Learning (MARSHA SHENK)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Collective smarts may be the greatest challenge of enterprise agility. It happens in a special 'state': physiological and contextual. Learning - or considering anything new - also happens in a special state.. This talk will provide a taste of each, bits of science to understand them, plus tools to guide you in practice with others.
We will briefly explore what‘s happening in the brain when people ‘get to something’ they’ve never thought of before - collectively. Three experiential exercises, bits of PaleoAnthropology and NeuroPhysiology, plus a juicy Fortune 500 story will illuminate our narrative. New tools will 1) chart your own and others' immediate capacity for co-learning and design 2) measure and celebrate value-added: a leading indicator/early metric of learning and agility that can be tracked with lagging hard metrics.
Playfully shared by a Business Anthropologist, the session is both sobering and exhilarating. The good news is: the desired states are biological, feel good and spread organically. Our brains evolved to learn and act collectively. The bad news is: stress is also biological and spreads organically. NOT ENOUGH OF US KNOW HOW TO TAKE CARE OF THE BIOLOGICAL ASPECTS THAT ENABLE COLLABORATIVE LEARNING IN ADULTS.
More good news: it's immediately rewarding to do so (and well underway in schools and public health.) It could shortly be well underway in your workplace.

Learning Outcomes:
  • After participating you will be able to:
  • > Understand your own and others' capacity for 'new stuff', and how to optimize them.
  • > View 'resistance' and 'barriers' with new eyes and new skills.
  • > Apply two pleasurable tools that promote co-learning, including an infectious leading metric for collective value-add.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for MARSHA SHENK

MARSHA SHENK

Business Anthropologist, The BestWork People
Collective learningHow the social brain controls when/what we can learnEcosystem Intelligence

Business Agility tastes like Chocolate pdf
Leading indicators work with the brain pdf
Tuesday August 6, 2019 09:00 - 10:15 EDT
National Harbor 12/13
  Learning, Workshop

09:00 EDT

Assumptions and Ambiguity be Damned. Develop a Strategy to Embrace Change. (Dennis Stevens)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Markets are changing faster than typical strategic planning cycles can support. Additionally, digital strategies are increasing interdependencies and exacerbating the strain on execution. Strategic planning often falls short because it’s not as fluid as it needs to be.
One thing we must consider, is that there are—typically— a lot of assumptions being made about markets as well as the organization’s capacity to execute. Those assumptions often miss the mark when attempting to meet the ever-changing needs and expectations of shareholders and customers. Agile provides the opportunity to create the requisite adaptability to validate and adapt to as we understand our ability to deliver and the realizable value of our strategies.
This talk is targeted at senior managers seeking to understand how to leverage Agile to improve Strategic Execution. This talk will show how to build market sensing into strategic planning, how to design the execution model to provide valuable feedback, and how to prioritize learning to maximize return. The model has been developing over years and has successfully responded to the assumptions and ambiguity facing firms. The reality is that it’s not that simple, but we have a model that can help.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Understand how agile can enable strategy execution in rapidly evolving markets
  • Quanitify opportunities to accelerate learning to maximize business return
  • Determine when and how to prioritize for learning over earning

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Dennis Stevens

Dennis Stevens

Chief Methodologist, LeadingAgile
What does it take to create meaningful change in your organization.

Tuesday August 6, 2019 09:00 - 10:15 EDT
Chesapeake D/E/F
  Project Program & Portfolio Management, Talk

09:00 EDT

Test Everything - Quality ... It's not just for code anymore (Bob Payne)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
In this dynamic workshop we will explore the world of value delivery and quality. If done means potentially shippable, valuable, operable, usable and secure we need to do more than just test the code.
All too often I have seen systems developed with great automated testing on the widgets that make up our "Product". I use the quotes around product because I believe we need to look more holistically about how we deliver value in organizations. This is not a new idea, testers have striven to take this approach and when a holistic approach is taken to all aspects of quality our business outcomes are better.
We deliver what we thought was needed in the "Product" but...
  • It does not deliver the value we thought because we did not test the value proposition before building.
  • It is not optimally usable because we did not test the user experience.
  • It has operational issues because we did not test infrastructure, load, performance or other critical operational issues.
  • It has documentation but that documentation is not used because we did not test the, need, value, format or accuracy of it.
  • It gets delayed or is stopped from production because we did not test our assumptions about, security, governance and risk.
"Your system is perfectly designed to get the results you are getting."
-W Edwards Deming"
We must change the system of product delivery to get the results we want.
This world cafe style will start with an introduction to the topic of value, appropriate quality and testing both value and quality. I will discuss example methods for:
  • Testing Value
  • Testing Usability and User Experience
  • Testing Operations
  • Testing the Documentation
  • Testing Security, Risk, Audit and Governance
We will then break out into groups around the 5 topics and brainstorm how to ensure quality as early as possible and how we might test even before we build. Participants will rotate through the topics and add greater and greater detail to them as they drill down on the topics.
A readout will follow
For more information on the World Cafe workshop format you can check it out here (http://www.theworldcafe.com/key-concepts-resources/world-cafe-method/).

Learning Outcomes:
  • - Testing everything
  • - Testing early
  • - Testing more than just the code

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Bob Payne

Bob Payne

SVP of Agile Transformation, LitheSpeed
An early adopter of Extreme Programming, Scrum, and SAFe, Bob Payne has worked exclusively as a Lean+Agile Transformation leader since 1999.Bob hosts the Agile Toolkit podcast and has produced over 170 podcasts, recording a variety of industry leaders and Agile practitioners. His... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 09:00 - 10:15 EDT
Chesapeake G/H/I
  Testing & Quality, Workshop

09:00 EDT

Revenue Generating UX: Building a $5M Business with Robots (Tami Reiss)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Will machines replace humans?
Justworks is a young company that provides payroll and benefits to growing businesses. Incumbents like TriNet and ADP generate 100% of their revenue through human salespeople. In this case study, we'll learn how Justworks leveraged technology by creating a self-service enrollment funnel. Payroll and benefits are scary things for most entrepreneurs, so signing up without talking to a person can be a BIG LEAP. It took 3 years, but in that time they built out a sustainable on-screen enrollment and onboarding flow that builds trust and guides prospects through setting up and using the service, now generating millions of dollars in Annual Recurring Revenue.
In this talk we'll look at some of the UX tools that were used: through understanding buyer personas, a bunch of SQL, some A/B tests, multiple screen revamps, coordinated branding efforts, and A LOT of automated emails. This session will learn to discover the metrics that matter, how to identify small changes that have a big impact, and when to advocate for design overhauls.

Learning Outcomes:
  • How to iteratively build a "Self Service" enrollment funnel
  • How to use UX and UI to build trust with buyers
  • How to identify small changes that have a big impact
  • When to advocate for design overhauls
  • How to find the metrics that matter

Speakers
avatar for Tami Reiss

Tami Reiss

CPO in Residence, ProduxLabs / Insight Ventures
Product Leadership

Tuesday August 6, 2019 09:00 - 10:15 EDT
National Harbor 11
  User Experience, Talk

09:00 EDT

Agile Alliance Initiatives
Initiatives are ideas and concepts that develop into plans for action. They are proposed by Agile Alliance members or the Agile Alliance board of directors. Initiatives help the Alliance deliver on its mission to support people who explore and apply Agile values, principles, and practices to make building software solutions more effective, humane, and sustainable.” There is an Initiative Shepherd available to assist individuals with concept development.

Stop by the Agile Alliance Lounge to see all our initiatives, get involved, or propose one of your own!
Tuesday August 6, 2019 09:00 - 17:00 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Agile Alliance Lounge

09:00 EDT

Agile Alliance Lounge
Take a break from Agile2019 action and relax in the Agile Alliance Lounge! As an attendee, you are a member — we invite you to check out information about Alliance initiatives and activities, meet the board members and staff, and visit the Agile Advice and Business Agility areas. While you’re there, don’t forget to enjoy a refreshing beverage, pick up some swag, and discover how you and your company can become more involved in the Agile community.

Tuesday August 6, 2019 09:00 - 17:00 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Agile Alliance Lounge

09:45 EDT

Downfalls of Coaching in a Hierarchical Model (Allison Pollard, Skylar Watson)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Companies of size require more than one coach for support. How does an organization know if coaching is worth the investment or not? During transformations, it’s common to structure coaches to focus on different parts of the organization based on their specialties (e.g., technical, executive, business/program), resulting in a hierarchical coaching model. Having a tiered coaching structure reduces visibility between the products’ outcomes and how things are implemented on the shop floor. With specialized coaches touching various parts of the organization, localized improvements may be achieved but a holistic view is lacking. Skylar and Allison found themselves frustrated and feeling minimized as agile coaches working where specialized and hierarchical coaching was the model being pushed.
In other engagements, Skylar and Allison would take a systems view to focus on practices with maximum impact to measurably improve teams and business outcomes by targeting coaching around specific products. Early conversations with a team may center on understanding what success for their product looks like and their current delivery capabilities. An approach of teaching agile practices from an organizational checklist shifts to determining what is preventing the team from delivering more value for the product and teaching techniques that help solve that problem.
Better organizational results can be achieved when coaches focus on helping teams meet their product goals. Skylar and Allison will share their experiences working in a hierarchical coaching model versus a product-based model and what they've learned along the way.

Lessons Learned from Your Experience:
  • A tiered coaching structure can lead to higher coaching WIP and less visibility of measurable results than a product-based coaching model
  • Recognized that our coaching group was mirroring the organization it served based on how coaches were assigned
  • Recognized we needed to change our approach as we struggled to answer questions about what was most important for us to focus on
  • The way a coaching group is organized affects its ability to positively impact the organization

Speakers
avatar for Skylar Watson

Skylar Watson

Independent Consultant
Skylar Watson is a software consultant and owner of SkyNet software solutions where he implements high value software to satisfy customers needs. Skylar works with companies both domestically and internationally providing assistance on adopting agile software practices.
avatar for Allison Pollard

Allison Pollard

Leadership and Team Coach/Trainer
Allison Pollard is a coach, consultant, and trainer who brings the power of relationship systems intelligence to go beyond tasks, roles, and frameworks to create energy for change. She engages with people and teams in a down-to-earth way to build trust and listen for signals to help... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 09:45 - 10:15 EDT
Chesapeake 7/8/9
  Experience Reports, Experience Report

10:15 EDT

Morning Break
Tuesday August 6, 2019 10:15 - 10:45 EDT
Maryland Foyer
  Meals

10:30 EDT

Business Agility Lab and Sensemaking Opens
Business Agility Lab and Sensemaking Opens: Share your Agile experience in the most extensive retrospective on Agile adoptions. Enter a narrative in our kiosk and gain the chance of winning a netbook PC in our drawing on Thursday.

As the Agile ecosystem expands to include engineering and business management, adapting the core Agile principles to work in the entire company is a huge opportunity to grow higher customer value and profits. But doing so is not without challenges. To address this, Agile Alliance will have a special area in the Agile Alliance Lounge called the Business Agility Lab.

In the Lab, you will be able to participate in several working sessions with business leaders who have a depth of experience in building Agile organizations and companies. They will offer firsthand knowledge about the challenges and success stories in broad adoptions.

This year's business leaders will be Ray Arell (Business Development Leader for Agile Alliance, former Sr. Director at Intel), Heidi Musser (Principal Consultant at LeadingAgile, former VP & CIO at USAA), Hendrik Esser (Manager of Special Projects at Ericsson), and other thought leaders in the business community. Attendees will be able to sign up for one-to-one mentoring at the Lab.

We also encourage you to participate in one of the widest retrospectives on Agile adoptions, the Narrative Project. You can add your voice by submitting a story or help design experiments to amplify Agile principles inside your company — all in the Lab.

Lastly, if you have been a part of the Agile Coaching Network (ACN) live event or podcast, you can join us for several live group sessions to ask questions or offer advice based on your own experiences with Agile adoption. We will also be running a daily afternoon Lean Coffee(TM) ACN live event. This session is open to people who have not joined the ACN before--everybody is welcome!

The following people will also be available in the Business Agility Lab:
  • Shawna Cullinan, Enterprise Agile Coach with Paciolan
  • Bonnie Aumann, Agile Coach previously with Spotify
  • Deepti Jain, Agile Transformation Strategist at AgileVirgin
  • Rhea Stadick, Enterprise Agile Transformation Expert at Nike
Tuesday August 6, 2019 10:30 - 17:00 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Agile Alliance Lounge

10:45 EDT

Towards Agile Autonomous teams with Domain-Driven Design (Kenny Baas-Schwegler)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
I’ve been involved in several transformations over the years, from DevOps to Digital to Agile. These transformations typically focus on transitioning people into near-autonomous teams of no more than eight people who will work in an agile manner. Every company I’ve worked for asks the same questions at these transformations: How do we divide the current software between the teams, and how do we align these teams to our business architecture?
To address these questions, companies request my help to design microservices using a Domain-Driven Design (DDD) approach. This approach makes it easier to distribute the software between teams based on identified boundaries, called “bounded contexts.” While I believe enterprises involved in an Agile transformation need at least a Domain-Driven Design approach to create autonomous aligned teams with a loosely-coupled architecture, this process presents unique challenges. In this talk I will present my experience report, I share my experience over a period of six months using DDD to transition a financial enterprise towards Agile autonomous teams.
I mostly used what is already in my experience report and rewrote some words.

Lessons Learned from Your Experience:
  • .

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Kenny Baas-Schwegler

Kenny Baas-Schwegler

Strategic software delivery consultant, Xebia
A lot of knowledge is lost when designing and building software — lost because of hand-overs in a telephone game, confusing communication by not having a shared language, discussing complexity without visualization and by not leveraging the full potential and wisdom of the diversity... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 10:45 - 11:15 EDT
Chesapeake 7/8/9
  Experience Reports, Experience Report

10:45 EDT

Business Agility Lab: Building a Lean Enterprise
Building a Lean Enterprise: In this session, we will demonstrate the breaking down of the crucial elements of a lean enterprise. This will include how to build out Lean Value Trees and strategies around investments. Seating is limited, so please plan appropriately.
Tuesday August 6, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Agile Alliance Lounge

10:45 EDT

The Business Agility behind Riot’s K/DA; the Fictional Band that Topped Real World Charts (Ahmed Sidky, Michael Robillard)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
How did a virtual band top the Billboard chart for World Digital Songs? Was it a coincidence? Was it a one-time wonder? Hopefully not! It was an unexpected yet desired result of building the foundation of business agility, not to avoid disruption or adapt to external forces, but to operate in a universe where we place our players firmly in the center of our universe. In this session, we will discuss the Copernican Revolution that informs our mindset for business agility and how we balance the interplay between top-down strategy and bottom-up ideas to delight our players. We will also describe the implementation of key components of business agility, including Leadership, Individuals, Operations and the core Relationships that enable or hinder business agility. We will also explain why business agility is a journey that relies on what we call “the grind” and learning through experimentation rather than a framework, model, or methodology. We hope to illustrate the power of a new mindset for business agility by sharing the outputs, the outcomes, and the journey we’ve experienced at Riot Games.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Ability to identify key elements for business agility
  • Ability to inspire and engage your top talent
  • Ability to support both top-down strategy and bottom-up ideation and creativity
  • Ability for leaders to create mission-obsession and engagement
  • Ability for backoffice functions to enable, not stifle or govern, innovation and agility

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Ahmed Sidky

Ahmed Sidky

Head of Business Agility, Riot Games
Ahmed Sidky, Ph.D. known as Doctor Agile, is a well-known thought-leader in the Agile community. He is currently the Director of Development Management for Riot Games and before that he was a transformation consultant for Fortune 100 companies. He is the co-author of Becoming Agile... Read More →
MR

Tuesday August 6, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Maryland Ballroom D
  Agile Companies, Talk

10:45 EDT

Agile and Scrum in Government Agencies - How Do We Make It Work? (Richard Cheng)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
In 2019, the conversation is no longer about whether Agile is appropriate for government, but rather how do we it, how to we do it better, what do we need to change to make it work. In this foundations session, we start by exploring Agile values, principles, and the Agile mindset. We will identify how this aligns with the compliance and governance needs of our government and where this may cause issues with those needs. From there we will review the Scrum framework, in particular, the roles, meetings and artifacts. We will address how this is implemented in an environment of Federal staffers, contractors/vendor teams, and mixed teams. We conclude with aligning the culture, processes, and leadership in government to enable agility. This includes common pitfalls, obstacles and sharing of success stories. Coming out of this session, attendees will walk away with a great shared understanding of Agile and Scrum and an understanding on how to make it work in our government agencies.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Understanding of Agile values and principles
  • Understanding of Scrum framework
  • Understanding obstacles and pitfalls when trying to implement Agile in government
  • Effective practices in making Agile and Scrum work in government agencies

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Richard Cheng

Richard Cheng

Director of Training, Excella
Richard Cheng is a Principal consultant at Excella Consulting, providing consulting services to commercial and Federal clients in the Washington, DC area. Richard trains, coaches, and mentors clients in understanding and implementing Agile and Scrum. Richard also leads Excella's Training... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
National Harbor 2/3
  Agile Foundations, Talk

10:45 EDT

Government Products Deserve Love Too (Jason Gudalis)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Product management and the public sector seem to go together like oil and water. After all, when was the last time that you experienced a government product that you really enjoyed using? It might be rare, but user enthusiasm for products in the public sector isn’t fiction. Current Product Manager of FBI’s Sentinel and former Technical Director of Department of Defense product portfolios, Jason Gudalis will provide a deep dive into building products that elicit passion by:
  • Capitalizing on the strengths of the public sector to foster healthy product development
  • Mitigating the weaknesses of the public sector to protect healthy product development
From eliminating the barriers between users and product teams to managing an agile product roadmap, he’ll share the lessons and stories that fundamentally shaped his approach to agile development and product management -- and helped him create lovable product experiences in the unlikeliest of places: the federal government.

Learning Outcomes:
  • * Strengths in the public sector to capitalize on for agile development and product management
  • * Weaknesses in the public sector to mitigate for agile development and product management
  • * Effective and efficient team organization
  • * Agile and healthy execution of requirements
  • * Mechanisms to make organizations more customer focused

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Jason Gudalis

Jason Gudalis

Product Manager

Tuesday August 6, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
National Harbor 4/5
  Agile in Government, Talk

10:45 EDT

Part 2 of 2: The Oppression of Structure and the Tyranny of Structurelessness (Johannes Schartau)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
This is part 2 of a 2 part session. Participation on the first session is required to adequately engage in this session.
Structure is a concept that is mostly invisible yet shapes almost everything we do. The purpose of this session is to explore and make sense of structure and its use. When is there too much structure so that things become rigid? When is there too little so that things fall apart? At what point does structure turn into oppression? At what point does the lack of structure enable tyrannies?
Please note that there is no pre-defined learning outcome of this session. There is a structure held in place by facilitation that is supposed to let the participants shape and explore the content.
This session is for you if
you're not even sure what the preceding paragraphs are about
you're a big fan of defining things and making them explicit
you're a big fan of anarchy
you would like to explore your personal approach to structure
you like to discuss vague, slightly abstract ideas

Learning Outcomes:
  • Collect examples of what structure is and where we find it
  • Help participants gain clarity on their own relationship to structure
  • Identify how we individually cause joy and pain through the use or lack of structure
  • Explore how we as an Agile community relate to structure
  • Provide a way for participants to re-calibrate their use of structure in their work-life

Speakers
avatar for Johannes Schartau

Tuesday August 6, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
National Harbor 8
  Audacious Salon, Workshop

10:45 EDT

Cultural Values Mapping (Brandi Olson)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
We each bring a set of social and emotional skills to the ways we show up and interact with others. Our ways of feeling, ways of relating, ways of getting work done are deeply influenced by our cultural values and preferences. And yet, our personal cultural values are often unexamined, leading us to make value judgments about the “right” way or the “wrong” way to communicate, resolve conflict, make decisions, etc.
For example, what’s your value around time? Is time a scarce resource? If so, starting a meeting when the clock says it’s time is the “right” way to behave. What if you see time as an unlimited resource? This value might lead you to believe that the “right” time to start a meeting is when everyone who needs to be there has arrived. Even the Agile Manifesto and Principles are steeped in a set of cultural values + preferences that privilege some behaviors over others.
Failing to recognize the diverse values and cultural preferences of colleagues usually leads to the harmful assumption that a difference in behavior is the result of a personal flaw, instead of recognizing it as a difference in social-emotional skills or cultural values. This reality plays out frequently as we try to make sense of agile adopters and agile resistors.
This workshop is for scrum masters, coaches, and leaders who coach humans, teams, and organizations towards more agile and authentic ways of being, collaborating, and delivering. We will explore a simple, yet profound, tool called Cultural Values Mapping, designed for individual and collaborative examination of the diverse cultural values and preferences that are always influencing the social and emotional skills we bring to work. Participants will have the opportunity to map their own cultural values + preferences and will explore practical coaching strategies for using the tool with teams and their leaders to open honest conversations about how we work together.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Build awareness of how cultural values shape the social and emotional skills we bring to an agile team.
  • Map personal and organizational values across a variety of dimensions culture dimensions.
  • Explore how to use the Cultural Values Map as a coaching tool to increase understanding, deepen relationships, and improve collaboration in agile teams and organizations.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Brandi Olson

Brandi Olson

CEO, The Olson Group
I wholeheartedly believe that agile has the power to change the way smart people solve complex problems and make the world a better place. I got my start in agile when I was a special education teacher, and now I coach leaders on agile delivery and organizational design. I love talking... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake 4/5/6
  Coaching & Mentoring, Workshop

10:45 EDT

Part 2 of 2: How to Introduce Test-Driven Development (TDD) to Your Team. (James Shore)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Test-driven development (TDD) is an essential skill for agile teams. Without it, codebases quickly lose the flexibility needed to support agile development. Software accrues technical debt and becomes difficult to change. Rather than improving the code in-place, teams advocate for expensive and risky rewrites. TDD helps avoid these problems.
But for coaches, Scrummasters, and other leaders without a programming background, how can you introduce this foundational skill? In this two-part session, veteran TDD practitioner James Shore will teach you the coaching and facilitation skills you need to help your teams get started with TDD. No programming experience is required, and you won’t be doing any programming in this session. Instead, you’ll gain the resources and knowledge needed to help your teams help themselves. You’ll learn what TDD is, how to recognize when TDD is being done well, and how to facilitate TDD learning workshops without being a TDD expert yourself.

Learning Outcomes:
  • -Understanding of, and ability to explain, the core TDD loop
  • -Understanding of each component of the TDD loop (think, red, green, refactor, repeat)
  • -Ability to recognize when TDD is being done
  • -Thinking tools for evaluating the success of TDD at the team and organization level
  • -Ability to facilitate an introductory TDD workshop

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for James Shore

James Shore

Consultant, Titanium I.T. LLC
James Shore teaches, writes, and consults on Agile development processes. He is a recipient of the Agile Alliance's Gordon Pask Award for Contributions to Agile Practice, co-author of /The Art of Agile Development/, and co-creator of the Agile Fluency™ Model. You can find his essays... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
National Harbor 10
  Coaching Technical Skills For Less Technical Coaches, Workshop

10:45 EDT

Stop complaining and start learning! Retrospectives that drive real change (David Horowitz)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Good retrospectives (you know, the ones that actually lead to real change?) rest on three pillars:
people,
process, and
follow-through
What makes retrospectives so difficult is that if any of these three pillars starts to crack, it's next to impossible for the retrospective to be a success.
Ultimately, getting the right people in the room, utilizing a good process to facilitate the conversation, and following-through on the learning outcomes depend on having an organizational culture that encourages learning, transparency, feedback loops, and continuous improvement.
If this sounds like your company already, then great! This talk is not for you.
For everyone else, join me to explore how effective retrospectives can break a downward cycle of disillusionment and malcontent and transform you and your team into engines of learning and growth.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Specific questions will be answered around:
  • * How to create a safe environment for brainstorming, collaboration, and retrospectives
  • * How to balance personalities within the group
  • * When anonymous feedback is necessary… and when it’s not
  • * The role of ongoing feedback in continuous improvement
  • * How breaking the mindset around retrospectives can positively impact the ongoing employee engagement crisis
  • You will also gain an understanding of the pitfalls of traditional employee engagement tactics and how to overcome challenges associated with these efforts by deploying agile retrospectives to create a safe, honest and productive environment for teams to deliver their best work.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for David Horowitz

David Horowitz

CEO and Co-Founder, Retrium
David Horowitz is co-founder and CEO of Retrium. Retrium is the market leading platform for effective agile retrospectives. Prior to co-founding Retrium, David spent nearly a decade between The World Bank and International Finance Corporation as a software developer turned Agile coach... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Maryland Ballroom C
  Collaboration Culture & Teams, Talk

10:45 EDT

Agile under pressure: shipping a disruptive medical device in less than two years (Robert Stohr, Jana De Cock)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Barco Demetra aims to support dermatologists in detecting skin cancer sooner. It is a transformative medical device that helps them to work smarter and faster. At least, it is now. Two years ago, Demetra was still in the conceptual phase. During this fast-paced product development track, including both hardware and software development, we gathered our own learnings on the good, the bad and the ugly."
At the start of the project, there were many unknowns. Along the way, we tackled those unknowns whilst handling what seemed like conflicting priorities. Only via many interactions with dermatologists and deep insights into their workflow, we managed to design an optimal solution. The result is a tailored software app for the hardware device, that collaborates with a web frontend, orchestrating all data in the cloud."
New constraints posed new challenges but also created great opportunities: only through ruthless and decisive product discovery, hard prioritisation, early customer feedback and established development practices did we manage to timely deliver a solution that can potentially save lives. Our constant state of uncomfortable excitement confirmed we were on the right track.
We will tell this story from our product management point of view and demonstrate how we achieved the right circumstances for building customer confidence, the roadmap and the product.

Learning Outcomes:
  • “What’s the verdict, doctor?” Integrating user research and testing in agile product development
  • Creating the right circumstances for continuous product feedback, handling continuous scope changes and conflicting priorities
  • Forming and adapting the release map and product backlog accordingly
  • Different development teams, sites, time zones… Managing all cogs in the wheel.
  • Building stakeholder, delivery and early-adopter confidence: get to a state of uncomfortable excitement
  • Developing an end to end solution for medical devices

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Robert Stohr

Robert Stohr

Tribe Lead, ITP Agency NV
I've always been passionate about IT and process. Working on challenging projects and finding ways to further improve team performance and delivery quality that lead to better products and happy users are what keep me motivated every day.Complex puzzles are a second area of interest... Read More →
JD

Jana De Cock

Product Manager, Barco NV

Tuesday August 6, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake A/B/C
  Customers & Products, Talk

10:45 EDT

Growing Your Personal Design Heuristics (Rebecca Wirfs-Brock)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
How can we get better as software designers? By becoming more aware of our design heuristics and continuing to cultivate and refine them. Heuristics aid in design, guide our use of other heuristics, and even determine our attitude and behavior. For example, as agile software developers we value frequent feedback and decomposing larger design problems into smaller, more manageable chunks that we design and test as we go. We each have our own set of heuristics that we have acquired through reading, practice, and experience.
This session introduces simple ways to record design heuristics and how to share them with others. You can grow as a designer by examining and reflecting on the decisions you make and their impacts, becoming more aware of seemingly minor decisions that were more important than you thought, and putting your own spin on the advice of experts. While we may read others’ design advice—be it patterns or stack overflow replies, the heuristics we’ve personally discovered on our own design journey may be even more important.
Come to this hands-on session to try out practical techniques for distilling your design heuristics (so you can explore and explain them to others); learn ways to identify competing heuristics; evaluate shiny new heuristics you may read or hear about; and grow your ability to explain your heuristics to others.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Understand 3 different types of design heuristics: heuristics that aid in design, determine our attitude, and guide use of other heuristics
  • Learn simple techniques for recording heuristics on the fly (Question-Heuristic-Example Cards, Heuristic Gists)
  • Recognize competing heuristics and how to integrate new heuristics into your existing heuristic toolkit

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

Wirfs-Brock Associates
I'm best known as the "design geek" who invented Responsibility-Driven Design and the xDriven meme (think TDD, BDD, DDD..). I'm keen about team effectiveness, communicating complex requirements, software quality, agile QA, pragmatic TDD, and patterns and practices for architecting... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake G/H/I
  Dev Practices and Craft, Workshop

10:45 EDT

Dev???Ops: The Missing Middle of Security (Elizabeth Ayer)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
If you thought it was difficult bringing the Ops and Dev teams to the same table, let’s talk about security! Often housed in a separate team, security experts have no incentive to ship software, with a mission solely to minimise risk.
This talk is a detailed case study of bringing security into DevOps. We’ll look at the challenges and tactics, from the suboptimal starting point of a highly regulated system with a history of negative media attention. It follows an Agile-aspiring Government IT team from the time when a deployable product was "finished" to when the application was first deployed many months later.
This talk is about humans and systems - in particular how groups often need to flex beyond the bounds of what either side considers reasonable, in order to get a job done. We’ll talk about structural challenges, human challenges, and ultimately how we managed to break through them.
There are no villains - everybody in this story is a hero, working relentlessly through obstacles of structure, time, law, and history. Come hear what finally made the difference, filling in the missing middle of DevSecOps.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Understand challenges of bringing Security into DevOps in the most challenging situations
  • Experience a detailed story of a team going from "Done" to "Deployed" - in a painful 9 months!
  • Consider the structural changes which didn't work and the human hacks that did
  • Come away with lessons for starting an initiative and where *not* to compromise
  • Develop a sympathy for the conditions of US government technology

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Elizabeth Ayer

Elizabeth Ayer

Product Manager, 18F
Who are you ?I'm the product lady who had to retire her battle cry of "Shippit!" after too many people misunderstood the intent. They can't take "early and continuous delivery of valuable software" away from me, though!As a product team leader, I have tripped and recovered my way... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake 10/11/12
  DevOps, Talk

10:45 EDT

Is There a Place for Individuals and Interactions in Enterprise Agility? (Em Campbell-Pretty, Adrienne Wilson)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Is Enterprise Agility an oxymoron? We say we value Individuals and interactions over processes and tools however, the enterprise agility space is drowning in processes and tools. There are countless frameworks and innumerable tools to measure every part of a teams performance to dizzying detail. But what about individuals and interactions? Does this get overlooked because it’s “too hard”? How does an enterprise scale an agile practice beyond a team, into a team of teams, or boldly into an entire enterprise but not lose sight of this principle?
In this session, Em & Adrienne will trade war stories with you about with Agile in the Enterprise and what role valuing Individuals and Interactions plays in successful transformations.

Learning Outcomes:
  • At the end of this session participants will be able to:
  • Identify Enterprise behaviours that are incongruent with valuing Individuals and Interactions, including leadership pitfalls.
  • Explain the economic benefit of valuing individuals and interactions
  • Describe the types of behaviours displayed by Enterprises that values Individuals and Interactions
  • Apply valuing Individuals and Interactions in an Enterprise context

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Em Campbell-Pretty

Em Campbell-Pretty

Managing Director, Pretty Agile
avatar for Adrienne Wilson

Adrienne Wilson

VP Of Operations, Pretty Agile

Tuesday August 6, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Maryland Ballroom A
  Enterprise Agile, Talk

10:45 EDT

The inevitability of Enterprise Agile Transformation Fatigue & How do you Reset (Aruna Chandrasekharan)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Are you sick and tired of hearing the word "Transformation"? Do you feel that it is one of the most over-used and least understood nouns/adjectives/adverbs in the English language? Would you be okay with not talking about transformations for the next 10 years? The good news is that you are not alone. The bad news is that the process to stop feeling this way is long and slow and perhaps painful as well. But first things first, why do you feel this way and how did you get here?
Many large Enterprises are undergoing some version of an Agile Transformation and have been at it for a more than a couple of years. However, the promise of wonderful results never actually materialized. Why? Are Enterprises solving the wrong problems at the wrong time? Is it just easier to do that so that they can "get started"?
When an Enterprise doesn't solve the really hard problems, when they try to fix what's not broken, Enterprise Transformation Fatigue sets in . This Fatigue is a real thing and any Enterprise that has decided to "Do Agile" is suffering from it. They may not know it, acknowledge or agree with it, but it's real and it's here.
Are you a change champion? Are you in the midst of a transformation? Are you considering transitioning to the coaching role? Do you have basic knowledge of Agile frameworks, values and principles?
If you answered "YES", then wouldn't you like to have a set of tools in your tool belt to deal with this fatigue? Or better yet, wouldn't you like some tools to help you keep your sanity!
If you answered "YES" again, then you're just the person who needs this session!
Let's get together to give this fatigue a clear definition that resonates in simple language.
Let's learn to recognize symptoms of these different types of transformation fatigue and tips to combat them
and last but NOT least
Let's explore how we can pivot from where we are to where we want to be
Aruna Chandrasekharan is an Enterprise Change Agent@Cognizant Technology Solutions. She is interested in leadership engagement for "Sustainable Transformations" where leaders are truly "leading" the change. Over these last several years, she has arrived at this notion of Agile Transformation Fatigue across the entire organization and the unfortunate inevitability of it.

Learning Outcomes:
  • We will define Transformation Fatigue
  • We will discuss why it is inevitable and how we got here
  • We will discuss the various types of Transformation Fatigue
  • We will learn about how to recognize symptoms for each type of fatigue
  • We will learns tools and techniques to combat or work around that type of fatigue
  • We will explore how to pivot from where we are to where we want to be

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Aruna Chandrasekharan

Aruna Chandrasekharan

Transformation Strategist
Music, Books and People and TransformationsI love a mix of different styles of music but Cuban Son, Colombian Cumbia, Indian, 80s, 90s music, Brazilian Jazz and Frank Sinatra are dear to me. Atlas Shrugged, Enders Game and Chlidhood's end are key books in my life.People are endlessly... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake D/E/F
  Enterprise Agile, Talk

10:45 EDT

Make It Easy: A Very Simple Approach to Continuous Improvement (Woody Zuill)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Why does it have to be so difficult?
"So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work." ~Peter Drucker
It seems it is clear that there is often a "right way" or "best practice" for many tasks in the modern workplace - but is that clarity real, or just a trick that we play on ourselves?
Over time I've found that the biggest successes I've experienced in software development have been the result of finding ways to Make It Easy for people to excel in their work, and to connect and interact as humans. Many others have noticed this as well. For example, let's consider this wonderful quote:
Saying "Hey everyone, we need to cut costs!" doesn't work nearly as well as "Let's make our work easier!" ~Mark Graban
But why is this so elusive? Is it the system of work we follow?
"The system disables performance. For most managers this is hard to see. What they see is people 'behaving badly'." ~ John Seddon
Here is what I'd like us to consider:
• What would it look like if everyone at work was able to contribute their best, and to excel in their work and life?
• What would the result be if this could be achieved?
• Can we make our work easier?
• What would it take to make this a reality?
• Is this about systems thinking and values and principles, or strategy, or techniques, or just "hiring the right people"?
There is a lot of research and writing about system thinking, teamwork, open workspaces, flow, velocity, biases, assumptions, frameworks. How can this help us? I suspect It isn't the workers, or the managers, or the leaders - there are some folks who seem to be finding a way that works for them and their workplace - can we all find a path?
I've been using "Make it Easy" for a number of years and we're going to explore this simple idea: Every day let's find something we need to do, and find a way to make it easier or unnecessary.

Learning Outcomes:
  • You will hopefully learn about:
  • What a better workplace might be like
  • Awareness of the things that are blocking us
  • Finding a path to a better workplace
  • First steps to try
  • How can we identify something to "Make Easy"
  • How might we go about making that thing easier or unnecessary

Speakers
avatar for Woody Zuill

Woody Zuill

Independent Agile Guide, Independent Agile Guide
I've been a software developer for 36+ years, and I'm an Agile enthusiast. I work as an Independent Agile Guide. I worked with the original "Mob Programming" team at Hunter Industries, and have been instrumental highlighting "No Estimates" concepts. I've enjoy sharing my Agile experiences... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Maryland Ballroom B
  Leadership, Talk

10:45 EDT

Brain Agility: Overcoming Cognitive Bias (Lisa Cooney)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Did you know that your brain makes up stories all day long, and if they are good stories, you believe them? Come to this entertaining interactive session to experience some “cognitive illusions” for yourself, and learn what they demonstrate about how our brains’ work. During this session, open to all levels, you will watch videos to learn about specific cognitive biases, and then learn what to do about them. For example, confirmation bias leads us to perceive evidence that confirms our existing beliefs while disregarding evidence that contradicts them. Knowing this, we can begin to be more discerning when trying to answer the question, "What happened?"
Cognitive science and behavioral psychology offer important insights for agilists, insights that can help us work more effectively with our co-workers and clients. You will learn how awareness of our brains’ tendencies is a powerful tool to overcome our own innate cognitive bias, and the cognitive bias of others. This newfound awareness can open you to more varied perspectives in order to tell yourself a story that is both richer and more nuanced – and closer to being “a true story.” You will not only be more capable of sharing your perspectives, but also more open to the perspectives of others people, leading to more successful interactions and outcomes.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Describe how our brains are hardwired to “co-opt” our beliefs
  • Explain that awareness of this tendency can help us overcome our cognitive biases
  • Increase your ability to be open to all perspectives
  • Apply the agile value, “individuals and interactions over processes and tools” more deeply in your work and life

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Lisa Cooney

Lisa Cooney

Principle Agile Coach, Axios
I am an Agile coach with a master's degree in education - my passion is bringing Agile to the world. I am the editor of Michael Hammon's leadership book, Evolvagility; I help run the Women in Agile meetup in Washington, DC; I am on the program committee for the Business Agility Conference... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
National Harbor 12/13
  Learning, Talk

10:45 EDT

Lightning Talks (Peter Green)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Christopher Pola - Making your CFO the biggest proponent of Work-In-Progress (WIP) Limits - 5 minutes
Kathryn Kuhn - Agile Heresy - It's time to move on from Servant Leadership - 5 minutes
William Kammersell - Discovery on Demand: Creating a Pipeline for Weekly User Research - 7 minutes
Ben Walsh - Using retros to uncover team dynamics - 5 minutes
John Margetis - Vendor Contract mindset vs. Agile Mindset - Adversarial or Collaborative? - 3 minutes
Patt Miller - Effectively Auditing Agile Development - 5 minutes
Chris Butler - Asking for bad ideas - 5 minutes
Thomas Lukareski - The evolution towards continuous planning - 5 minutes
Yasunobu Kawaguchi - Fun! Done! Learn! - a positive retrospective born in Japan, is this work in other culture? - 5 minutes
Kyle Morton - Daily Doze? 3 ideas to help keep the Daily Scrum useful - 5 minutes
Christopher Lucian - Stop paying for your bug tracking software. A concrete path to Zerroboogs #ZeroBugs - 7 minutes

Learning Outcomes:
  • The lightning talk session consists of a series of short presentations by different speakers lasting only a few minutes each. In this session, you'll get an introduction to a number of Agile topics, and perhaps introduce the audience to one of your own! You'll surely leave this session with some ideas to explore and conversations to start.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Peter Green

Tuesday August 6, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake 1/2/3
  Lightning Talks, Talk

10:45 EDT

From Projects to Products: Aligning Strategy and Execution (Richard Knaster)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Traditional approaches to project and portfolio management inhibit the flow of value and innovation in the enterprise. They were not designed for a global economy and the impact of digital disruption. This new reality puts pressure on enterprises to work with a higher degree of uncertainty yet deliver innovative solutions much faster and with higher quality. Despite this new reality, many legacy project and portfolio practices remain.
One of the main problems with projects is that they were designed to be temporary endeavors with temporary people to achieve a project’s requirements. As a result, the primary focus of projects is on completing tasks on time and on budget rather than achieving and measuring ongoing business outcomes.
Clearly, a different approach is needed. The system must change from planning the delivery of projects to collaborating on the development of products. The portfolio goes from managing projects to a managing a set of value streams that deliver products or solutions that help the enterprise meet its business strategy, either by providing value directly to the customer or in support of internal business processes. This workshop will provide useful concepts and practical guidance on how to implement this new and proven approach that delivers extraordinary business outcomes on a predictable cadence. It will also help create an environment where people can thrive and are truly empowered.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Understand why traditional portfolio management inhibits agility
  • Learn to better organize teams for value delivery
  • Apply Lean-Agile principles to empower the portfolio
  • Establish Lean budgeting and guardrails
  • Implement portfolio flow with a Kanban system
  • Measure Lean portfolio performance
  • How to implement the new approach

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Richard Knaster

Richard Knaster

Fellow, Principal Consultant, Author, Scaled Agile
Richard Knaster has more than 30 years’ experience in software and systems development, in roles ranging from developer to executive, and has been leading large - scale Agile transformations for well over 15 years. Richard actively works on advancing SAFe’s Lean-Agile methods... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
National Harbor 11
  Project Program & Portfolio Management, Talk

10:45 EDT

Mindfulness, it's a practice... NOT perfection. LEAD Imperfectly! (Darren Hoevel)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
What does your mindfulness practice look like? Is it still a practice if you don't meditate or do yoga?
Human development is largely driven by changes that take place in the body and the brain. As we strive to create and be a part of high performing teams, having an awareness of the physiology, neuroscience, and the power of empathy will greatly increase our probably of success. Even more powerful, is having the capability of AWARENESS of ones self and our environment. How do we foster and create an environment where you and your colleagues can experience the feeling of being understood, lead with empathy, and create generative solutions through dialogue. Mindful Leadership provides clarity and enhances the journey through the important work we are doing.
Please join me on this exploration of the the physiology of the brain, patterns of the mind, how each of our individuals stories create our perspectives, and how our current agile and coaching models incorporate aspects of mindfulness.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Discover, what is mindfulness for you... it's a practice NOT perfection
  • Explore some concepts of mindfulness
  • Learn about the brain and the physical affect of your thoughts and actions
  • Are you mindful already? Bring your agile and coaching models into your practice
  • What is your Mindfulness roadmap?
  • What is your Mindful Leadership Model?

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Darren Hoevel

Darren Hoevel

President, Agilist, Pliant Solutions
Darren Hoevel is a passionate Agile realist, organizational change advocate, corporate cultural renovator, customer ambassador and founder of Pliant Solutions. He is driven by transforming organizations into self-managing, self-organizing teams with high morale. Darren prides himself... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
National Harbor 6/7
  Self-Care, Talk

10:45 EDT

Leveraging software development principles into automation framework (Aditi Mulay, Ricardo Mediavilla-Maldonado)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Automation framework development can be considered similar to application development. The framework would greatly improve if the the same design principles used to write application code are leveraged to build it. By leveraging the 4 pillars of Object Oriented Programming in writing your automation framework, we can achieve the same level of efficiency as your application. Here are some examples we will discuss during the presentation:
  • Abstraction
  • Encapsulation
  • Inheritance
  • Polymorphism
Software development is built on the foundation of reusability and reliability. By making the steps in scenarios reusable and scenarios or test cases independent, we can lower the test maintenance costs and improve stability.

Learning Outcomes:
  • We expect that attendees will have a better understanding of software development principles such as abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism and how to use these concepts in the development of automation frameworks

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Aditi Mulay

Aditi Mulay

Automation Test Lead, Karsun Solutions LLC
Aditi Mulay is currently working as Automation Lead at Karsun Solutions LLC ensuring code quality, increasing test coverage for their web based application. Aditi has worked in diverse domains like education, advertisement and the government sector. Aditi has managed and lead automation... Read More →
RM

Tuesday August 6, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake J/K/L
  Testing & Quality, Talk

11:00 EDT

Agile Advice
We all need advice from time to time, and having someone to bounce ideas off or share their thoughts can lead to great insights and uncover creative personalized solutions. At Agile2019, we are excited to provide Agile Advice as an offering tailored for you to bring your toughest questions, your biggest puzzles, and your worst hurdles.

Agile Advice is a 20 minute one-on-one conversation with an expert ready to offer their time and insight to those that are looking for a bit of advice. This diverse group of experts will be ready to chat about a wide range of agile topics such as culture, training, engineering, frameworks and leadership. Make sure to stop by and sign up for actionable advice on your Agile journey.
Speakers
avatar for Reese Schmit

Reese Schmit

Sr. Agile Coach, Agile Velocity
Reese Schmit is a Sr. Agile Coach at Agile Velocity. Over the past 15 years, she's done just about every job in the software industry, from User Experience Designer to Product Manager, QA Engineer to Scrum Master. This varied experience has taught her to frame problems from different... Read More →
avatar for Chris Li

Chris Li

Founder, SparkPlug Agility LLC
I am a passionate and energetic Certified Scrum Trainer and Enterprise Agile Coach who is always interested in meeting new people and picking up new skills. I enjoy talking about topics around agile training, coaching, and consulting as well as designing courses and public speak... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 11:00 - 15:00 EDT
Potomac Foyer
  Agile Alliance Lounge

11:30 EDT

Enterprise Service Planning at Optimizely (Keith Nottonson)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Learn how one startup moved from chaos to scrum and beyond by implementing Enterprise Service Planning (ESP) and the seven cadences and visualizing it on an evolving fifty foot wall of work, resulting in an increase in our product velocity while decreasing our time to customer value across multiple products and delivery teams.
Over the past eight years, Optimizely grew from a single product company built by a handful of engineers and designers to a multi-product company built by many teams of engineers and designers. But its development processes didn't adapt fast enough to keep up with Optimizely's growth. Engineers had too many dependencies in flight, designers were added too late in the process to be effective, and the highest value work wasn't properly prioritized. In the last couple of years, we have improved that drastically.
Agenda:
0 - 3 Welcome and introduction to presenter, company, and situation
4 - 7 How we arrived in such a state (2010-2013) and what we did (2014 - 2016)
8 - 13 Implementing ESP and the Wall of Work (2017-2018)
14 - 18 Where we are doing today (2019)
19 - 23 Insights about the seven cadences and visible portfolio management
24 - 27 Key Learnings and Challenges
28 - 30 Questions & Thank you

Lessons Learned from Your Experience:
  • * Understanding that my company was an ecosystem of interdependent services by visually mapping it out and seeing the observed capability of each service
  • * By having a central physical visual information radiator, driving conversations, alignment and insights is much easier than arguing in electronic format
  • * Mapping the seven cadences to our existing workflow and then adjusting/adding feedback loops where necessary was a cinch when I knew where and what to look for

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Keith Nottonson

Keith Nottonson

Development, Senior Director, Optimizely

Tuesday August 6, 2019 11:30 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake 7/8/9
  Experience Reports, Experience Report

12:00 EDT

Lunch
Tuesday August 6, 2019 12:00 - 14:00 EDT
Prince George Exhibit Hall
  Meals

12:00 EDT

Sponsor Exhibits
Sponsors are an important element of the Agile2019 Conference. Be sure to stop by and say Hi to all of our Sponsor Exhibitors in the Prince George Exhibition Hall at Agile2019.
Tuesday August 6, 2019 12:00 - 15:45 EDT
Prince George Exhibit Hall
  sponsors

14:00 EDT

Technological Revolutions and what they mean for the Next Decade of Software Delivery (Mik Kersten)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
For the past decade, technology platforms, development paradigms, and the vendor landscape have been shifting at a rate that very few organizations have been able to match. Over the past two centuries, a pattern has emerged. Every 50 years or so, a constellation of innovation, entrepreneurship, and new technology combine to transform the world economy. Today, we’re approaching the end of the Turning Point of the fifth technological revolution. The organizations the can’t adapt and scale their software delivery processes are unlikely survive the next decade. In this talk, Dr. Kersten will summarize the dynamics of technological revolutions, what we have learned in the first 50 years of software development, and how dramatically those lessons and the software ecosystem will change over the coming 50 years. Then present five predictions on how Agile software engineering will evolve to help today’s organizations survive the coming decade.
  • The Age of Invention will pivot to an Age of Adoption
  • Software complexity will drive specialization
  • As automation grows, so will the demand for IT professionals
  • Coding will evolve into domain expertise and data modeling
  • How AI will become its own field of practice

Learning Outcomes:
  • How organizations can survive the turning point of the fifth technological revolution with the Flow Framework™
  • Predictions on how Agile software engineering will evolve to help organizations survive the coming decade

Speakers
MK

Tuesday August 6, 2019 14:00 - 14:30 EDT
Chesapeake 7/8/9
  The Future of Agile Software Development (IEEE Software), Talk

14:00 EDT

Business Agility Lab: Fit For Purpose
Fit For Purpose: In this session, we will discuss when it is the right time to use Agile, Lean, Six Sigma, or other methods when transforming your enterprise. Seating is limited, so please plan appropriately.
Tuesday August 6, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Agile Alliance Lounge

14:00 EDT

Embracing Open Agility: Tales and Fails From Our Company-Wide Agile Journey (Jill Parsons, Jared Steinshouer)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Does VeriShip use components from:
Scrum? Yes.
Kanban? Yes
Lean Startup? Yes.
DevOps? Yes.
Mob Programming? Yes.
Stuff we’ve completely made up? Yes.
People Operations? Yes. You might say this isn’t an Agile framework, but we disagree. Without a positive work culture and a strong sense of safety, nothing else is possible.
The truth is no two teams are alike, so why try to treat them the same? We have combined components from all the above, in addition to Red Hat’s Open Organization philosophy, Kerievsky’s Modern Agile concepts, Business Agility practices, and everything in between, into a rolled-up version of what we now refer to as “Open Agility" at VeriShip. Our ENTIRE organization works every day utilizing various methodologies and approaches to promote openness, visibility, safety, and continuous improvement in the workplace.
In this session, we will present a series of real world experiments we have tried during our company-wide Agile transformation that includes every department within our organization (Accounting, Sales, Product, Marketing, Operations, Customer Success, Software Engineering, etc.). We will share the experiments we’ve tried, successes we’ve had and, most importantly, our failures and what we’ve learned along the way. We believe that in order to excel in a company-wide Agile transformation, a company needs to feel safe working in a highly adaptable and experimentive environment. In order to accomplish this, we believe there needs to be high visibility, high safety, and intentional metrics, both traditional and non-traditional, (for example: happiness metrics) embedded into the culture of the organization. We'll talk through our experiences surrounding each of these.

Learning Outcomes:
  • - Becoming familiar with real world experiments that were tried during an actual company-wide Agile transformation that includes every department in the organization (Accounting, Sales, Product, Marketing, Operations, Software Engineering, etc.)
  • - Taking ideas based upon our experiences that could be used and/or modified for other organizations.
  • - Understanding what open agility means and what it takes to move away from a one size fits all approach into a more open, experimental model.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Jill Parsons

Jill Parsons

Agile & People Operations, VeriShip
avatar for Jared Steinshouer

Jared Steinshouer

CTO / COO, VeriShip

Tuesday August 6, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
National Harbor 4/5
  Agile Companies, Talk

14:00 EDT

Collaboration & Cooperation in Agile Teams (Esther Derby)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Why is it that some teams soar, and some wallow and slog towards uncertain results? It often comes down to how well the people on the team work together. Collaboration is at the heart of teamwork. But what does that really mean? How is collaboration different from cooperation? Why do we need both? What does stellar teamwork look like?
In this session, we’ll explore these questions. I’ll share how both managers and team members can influence the conditions for collaboration and cooperation. We'll look at common barriers to collaboration and cooperation, and do a mini-assessment that will reveal actions that you might take to boost collaboration and cooperation on your team(s).

Learning Outcomes:
  • recognize barriers to collaboration and cooperation
  • understand how to create the conditions for collaboration and cooperation
  • recognize stellar team work
  • how to observe and adjust the environment to enable teamwork

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Esther Derby

Esther Derby

Founder, esther derby associates, inc.
I draw on four decades of experience leading, observing, and living through organizational change. In 1997, I founded esther derby associates, inc. and work with a broad array of clients from Fortune 500 companies to start ups. My approach blends attention to humans and deep knowledge... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
National Harbor 2/3
  Agile Foundations, Talk

14:00 EDT

Part 1 of 2: Anti-fragility, Collaboration and Agile (Caitlin Walker, Andrea Chiou)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
If you are in contempt of another human being you will be operating from an I’m OK you’re not OK position. Sometimes we do this consciously, sometimes unconsciously. Sometimes we use phrases or terms without thinking and someone else points out that this term makes them feel they’re being held in contempt. What to do when internal worlds and external behaviors collide?
Anti-fragility (Taleb 2012) would hold that from the disorder of diversity we can come to positions of strength. These differences and conflicts can become the stimulus for the group to learn, strengthen and grow BUT only if we have the skills of inquiry without turning the interaction into an act of contempt itself.
We will be uncovering anti-fragile ways of inquiring into conflict that don’t in themselves promote more conflict. We will also be uncovering more fragile ways of inquiring into conflict that put someone else down and require winners and losers.
This workshop is all about creating enough space for resilient inquiry and keeping 'What we'd like to have happen' in mind throughout our interactions.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Learning about others with divergent and even conflicting views - using unbiased 'clean' inquiry.
  • Becoming attuned to knowing the difference between what you said and the response others give.
  • Noticing the patterns of language and behavior that you and other people adopt when in conflict.
  • Developing strategies for moving from fragility to anti-fragility

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Caitlin Walker

Caitlin Walker

Director, Training Attention
I support groups to develop strategies for shifting their attention away from Conflict, Contempt and #Drama. When they're in contempt, they can detect it, acknowledge it, get curious and shift themselves and others. They can move from the addictive #Drama towards action. From a position... Read More →
avatar for Andrea Chiou

Andrea Chiou

Enterprise Agile Coach, Tenable
I work remotely as an Enterprise Agile Coach at Tenable, Inc. a cyber-exposure and vulnerability detection company located in Columbia, Maryland. I care about 'vulnerability detection' in the teams I coach too. Just like with IT systems, we'll have to develop awareness of each others... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
National Harbor 8
  Audacious Salon, Workshop

14:00 EDT

What I’d loved to have known when I started coaching teams (Olaf Lewitz, Martin Alaimo)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
As agile coaches, we work with teams and organisations. Most coaching programs focus on individual coaching. That does not enable us to effectively coach teams and organisations.
Our own learning path included many errors and pitfalls. In hindsight, learning about systems coaching only late in the journey was not helpful. In this session, we will summarize what we’d have liked to have known when we started.
Our three main pitfalls are:
  • Coaching individuals and not systems
  • Coaching without agreed and measurable outcomes
  • Suggesting and/or Controlling how the team/organization “should” work
In our session, we will explore these and learn what to do instead.

Learning Outcomes:
  • understand common coaching pitfalls specific to the coaching of organisations and teams
  • reflect my own experience of such pitfalls and take away strategies to avoid and improve
  • new ideas and approaches to help me improve my agile coaching

Speakers
avatar for Olaf Lewitz

Olaf Lewitz

Trust Artist, TrustTemenos Academy
Olaf Lewitz loves his life and his work. He helps all with the art to love like that; an art that requires and fosters trust. He's the trust artist. Will stay when needed and leave when wanted.
avatar for Martin Alaimo

Martin Alaimo

Agile Coach & Trainer, Founder, Kleer
I work as Organizational Coach and professional trainer. As a Certified Scrum Coach (CSC) and Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), my main area of intervention is team work under a collaborative and relational environment within the scope of technological products development. My main concern... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Maryland Ballroom A
  Coaching & Mentoring, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Part 1 of 2: Code Reviews - How to facilitate code reviews as a less-technical coach (Kim Castillo)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Abstract
Technical excellence is widely considered one of the ingredients of successful Agile teams and presumably, the session audience is interested in finding ways to support this quality.
In this session, we will address some of the conundrums of being a “less technical” coach to our teams and identify what strengths and tactics we can leverage to make the technical practice of code reviews a better experience.

Learning Outcomes:
  • What I hope from this session is that you walk away from here:
  • • Recognizing code reviews
  • • Find/create opportunities to facilitate high quality code reviews (and not feeling like a fraud while you’re at it)
  • • Understanding the value in engaging this practice and other areas that puts us in the “middle of all of it”

Speakers
avatar for Kim Castillo

Kim Castillo

Sr. Technical Program Manager (In reality, an embedded Agile coach and renegade), Pluto TV
I’m an Agile Coach. I’m bent on building a culture of engaged and innovative teams through thought leadership, human interactions, and coaching. Everything I do is in service to creating an environment that leads to psychological safety, experimentation, relentless learning, deep... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
National Harbor 10
  Coaching Technical Skills For Less Technical Coaches, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Human Systems Dynamics: Adaptive Action Lab (Jeremy Lightsmith, Glenda Eoyang)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
What keeps you awake at night? What are the biggest and most difficult challenges you face? Bring your most wicked problems to this session, and learn new tools to tame them.
Software development is riddled with complexity. Agile methods address some of this complexity, but they aren’t enough. Human Systems Dynamics and Adaptive Action will help you and your teams work through sticky situations with a range of models and methods that are scalable, straightforward to use, and designed to work in complex adaptive systems like software.
Bring a challenge and we will use it to learn three of HSD’s methods for getting you unstuck, along with a brief overview of what Human Systems Dynamics and Adaptive Action are all about.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Participants will walk away with:
  • - high level knowledge of what Human Systems Dynamics
  • - 3 methods they can take back with them to their teams: Adaptive Action, Power of Inquiry, Four Truths
  • - they should be able to explain these methods, use them on their own problems, and use them with others in their team

Attachments:
Speakers
JL

Jeremy Lightsmith

Agile Coach / Facilitator, Lightsmith Consulting LLC
avatar for Glenda Eoyang

Glenda Eoyang

Executive Director, Human Systems Dynamics Institute
Glenda H. Eoyang, PhD, is the founding executive director of the Human Systems Dynamics (HSD) Institute. Since 1986 she has pioneered applications of chaos and complexity to improve adaptive capacity of people as they work and play together.  She leads a network of 300 scholar practitioners... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Chesapeake A/B/C
  Collaboration Culture & Teams, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Save the World, Save Your Team - Shifting Mindsets through Cooperative Board Gaming (Chris Diller, Tom Diedrich)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
"Can you save humanity? You and your team are the only things standing in the way of deadly diseases that threaten the world. The fate of humanity is in your hands." - description of "Pandemic" from Z-Man Games
Game on! But can a game really teach me something about being Agile? How can a board game save my team?
In this interactive workshop, we'll explore how cooperative board gaming relates to the work of Agile teams. We'll dive head-first into the Agile nature of "Pandemic" through gameplay in small groups and then retrospect to identify similarities and differences between cooperative board gaming and Agile team behaviors. We'll discover how the patterns observed during gameplay can be used to help identify possible dysfunction within your team. You will leave this session with the ability to use cooperative board gaming with your own teams to inspire new ways of thinking, shift mindsets, and increase team engagement.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Explain how cooperative board gaming can be used as a retrospective technique so that I can improve my teams.
  • Describe how to relate cooperative board gaming to the cooperative nature of my team's work so that I can help them reflect on their own actions.
  • Facilitate a cooperative board gaming workshop of my own so that I can help shift the mindset of my team, company, or client.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Chris Diller

Chris Diller

Lead Agile Coach, Target Corp
Chris is a Certified Scrum Professional and practicing Agile Coach at Target. He's been involved in developing software since 2006 as an embedded software developer, project leader, ScrumMaster, and Agile Coach, but has found a "home" with Scrum and Agile since 2013. Chris has a passion... Read More →
avatar for Tom Diedrich

Tom Diedrich

Target Corporation

Tuesday August 6, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Chesapeake 4/5/6
  Collaboration Culture & Teams, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Helping IT HiPPOs dance to the Product-Focused tune (Salah Elleithy, George Dinwiddie)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
IT Organizations often build whatever the Highest Paid Person's Opinion (HiPPO) suggests. This often leads to building systems that don't satisfy the needs of others in the organization. Customer-focused techniques from product-focused organizations can be adapted for IT projects. By better meeting organizations needs, such an approach can be more cost effective and better aligned with the true goals.
Too many IT projects are driven by opinion rather than data. Whether it's the CIO calling the tune or a VP on the business side, they often are starting with a suboptimal solution rather than the problem to be solved. In this session, Salah and George will help you explore product-focused techniques to better meet those needs. You, too, can offer your HiPPOs just the right tune to dance their way to business success!

Learning Outcomes:
  • Use Impact Mapping to target identified business needs
  • Identify key roles/users capable of creating the desired impact
  • Discover needs from the point of view of key roles/users
  • Measure the impact of each delivered slice on the identified business needs and act on that information

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Salah Elleithy

Salah Elleithy

Agile Coach, SparkAgility
I am a Leadership, Co-Active, Agile Coach and Learning Facilitator on a mission to spark courageous curiosity with a twist of play. I help individuals, teams and leaders learn faster and become better one day at a time. I am also passionate about helping individuals, teams and leaders... Read More →
avatar for George Dinwiddie

George Dinwiddie

Grand Poobah and Jack of All Trades, iDIA Computing, LLC
George Dinwiddie helps organizations develop software more effectively. He brings decades of development experience from electronic hardware and embedded firmware to business information technology. He helps organizations, managers, and teams solve the problems they face by providing... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Chesapeake 1/2/3
  Customers & Products, Workshop

14:00 EDT

What “Good” Looks Like: The 4-Quadrants of Product Ownership (Bob Galen)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
The product owner role was introduced in Scrum in 1993. So, the role has been around for ~25 years. Yet, still we struggle with the nature of it. Is it simple or complex? Is it inward or outwardly facing? It is about backlogs and stories or something more? And is ‘ownership’ the whole point?
In this talk, Bob Galen will be sharing his 4-Quadrants model for what effective (good) product ownership looks like in the real-world. It will start with balance, because the role is so broad and deep in its nuance. The essence of the 4-quadrants says that there are product, project, analyst, and leadership parts to the role. We’ll explore each in turn and talk about cross-connecting each area. We’ll also explore the partnerships that are key to success.
And finally, we’ll even explore product ownership at-scale, which is its own can of worms. So, we’ll help with that too. You’ll leave this session certainly understanding what Product Owner Excellence looks like and how crucial it is for team success.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Introduce the 4-Quadrants of Agile Product Ownership as a framework for skills, responsibilities, and expectation management.
  • Deep dive into each of the quadrants and explore that aspect of the role; wrapping up with quadrant interactions.
  • Finally, explore Product Ownership at-Scale and the challenges associated with it.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Bob Galen

Bob Galen

Principal Agile Coach, Agile Moose
Bob Galen is an Agile Practitioner, Trainer & Coach based in Cary, NC. In this role he helps guide companies and teams in their pragmatic adoption and organizational shift towards agile methods of working. Bob has been doing that since the late 1990s, so he’s deeply experienced... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Maryland Ballroom D
  Customers & Products, Talk

14:00 EDT

Ground Rules for Sustainable Code Refactoring (Amr Noaman)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Teams face many challenges to keep a sustainable and constant pace of refactoring. In many cases, this is due to oversight of some very basic guidelines and ground rules to enable a "refactoring-friendly" environment.
In this session, I'll build on my 10-year journey doing successful refactoring of poor code and present necessary ground rules and practical guidelines for enabling sustainable refactoring. I've clustered these guidelines into three high level categories:
  • Team development habits in maintaining old code
  • Enabling a configuration management environment
  • Making refactoring effort visible and trackable
Whether you're a technical person working on enhancing poor code or a manager sponsoring this activity, you'll walk away with a very good background information to enable a sustainable refactoring environment and eventually a high quality product code.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Explain key challenges to refactoring poor code
  • Learn about pre-requisites teams should take into consideration to enable sustainable and continuous refactoring
  • Understand how visibility can help sustain continuous refactoring

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Amr Noaman

Amr Noaman

Co-Founder & Principal Coach, Agile Academy
* Coach, consultant, and speaker passionate to propagate lean and agile thinking in the Middle East and North Africa* One of the drivers of Egypt's GoAgile program, transforming tens of teams and organizations from a wide range of private and public organizations. * Co-founder and... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
National Harbor 6/7
  Dev Practices and Craft, Talk

14:00 EDT

Beginning with an End in Mind: The Secrets of Re-Shaping an Enterprise with OKRs (Mariya Breyter)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
"You can motivate by fear, and you can motivate by reward. But both those methods are only temporary. The only lasting thing is self-motivation." ~ Homer Rice
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) have been well known for decades now, and John Doerr's book on Measuring What Matters became a hit immediately after it was published. However, while OKRs as a concept seems logical and straightforward, many companies struggle with implementing this concept in an aligned and inspirational way. As an Agile coach implementing OKRs in multiple large organizations, I experience five major anti-patterns:
  • OKRs are implemented top-down. OKRs are not KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)** which are top-down arbitrary numbers provided by management to each employee at the beginning of a long-term period (usually a year). OKRs are set by teams, not individuals, and aligned with organizational objectives. In that, OKRs are inspirational and encourage teams to set up the objectives that motivate them and inspire self-organizing teams to make a difference.
  • OKRs are used to measure performance and define compensation . Unlike KPIs which are used to measure performance and this influences compensation and promotions, OKRs are not related to performance in any way. Numbers are easy to game, and connecting OKRs to performance would negate the purpose of those. OKRs need to be aspirational and hard to achieve, and by doing that, the teams challenge them to continuously grow and become high-performing. This is the reason OKRs are self-graded, not measured by the managers.
  • OKRs are focused on activities, not results. Frequently, OKRs are focused on activities or tasks, e.g. provide 100 training sessions, hire 300 employees, create a Playbook covering 50 topics. While sometimes there is a reason for task-based key results, in most cases, the objective is either customer-related (e.g. customer satisfaction), business objective (e.g. revenue growth), employee-related (e.g. retention data), or a related goal. In either case, it forces teams to pivot if the initial set of activities does not bring the intended result and fail forward to pursue the goal. OKR example
  • OKRs need to be measured by managers. OKRs are self-graded by the team that committed to those. Pre-grading is a helpful technique which allows setting quantifiable success criteria from 0 (not started) to 1 (challenging but possible).
  • OKRs are assessed at the end of the period for which they are set. OKRs are reviewed at frequent intervals (usually monthly for quarterly or annual OKRs), and it is important to keep in mind that the value of those sessions is not in grades but in alignment and collaboration discussions and outcomes.
During the workshop, we will be playing several OKR-setting games. The goal of these games is to experience in practice how to avoid common mistakes and set up cascading OKRs bottom-up by empowering teams, aligning divisions, and keeping the organizational objectives in focus - all of this while keeping employees motivated and inspired. Finally, we will discuss OKR implementation and review examples of how OKRs empower teams to self-organize while achieving shared goals within a scaled agile environment.

Learning Outcomes:
  • We know that mastery, autonomy, and purpose drive our professional satisfaction and create motivation. However, as human beings, we are all motivated by different objectives that may not be aligned with each other's or with organizational goals.
  • How do we create a meaningful alignment of our team's goals, individual aspirations, and company objectives? How do we establish complete transparency across the organization so that at each moment of time anyone would see the same picture and understand how their individual or their team's activities contribute to this shared goal? How do we get a say in what are the objectives and a clear understanding of why they are so important for the whole company?
  • Participants will leave the workshop with a clear understanding of the process of: (a) how to build a cascading OKR structure within a scaled Agile organization, (b) how to continuously pivot and self-assess their team's results, and (c) how to align the whole organization while allowing for team-level self-organization.
  • In sum, they will have a framework of how to implement OKRs in an aligning and empowering way while having fun and building their network playing two exciting simulation games.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Mariya Breyter

Mariya Breyter

Product Management Leader, Amazon
Mariya Breyter is an enterprise agile coach, and transformation and strategy leader with over twenty-year experience ranging from government jobs to versatile corporate experience in financial services, healthcare, media, and education. Mariya's professional passion is leading enterprise-level... Read More →

Beginning with an End in Mind Mariya Breyter 2019 pdf
Tuesday August 6, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Chesapeake D/E/F
  Enterprise Agile, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Build Your Modern Management Mindset: Adapt How You Lead for Agile Success (Johanna Rothman)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Agile approaches have downplayed the role of management. Too many people say, “We don’t need no stinkin’ managers.” On the contrary. We need managers to create and refine the agile culture and create leadership capability across the organization. Without a modern management mindset, any agile transformation dies a quick and ugly death. Instead, it’s time to invite managers to change their mindset to enhance an agile culture.
Agile managers value collaboration over resource efficiency and multitasking. They value autonomy over micromanagement. And, they value delivery over spreadsheet-based management.
These agile managers reject the contemporary myths of utilization and the indispensable employee. They reject the illusions that they can manage by spreadsheet or that time spent at work is a useful measure. They reject the traps of process standardization and that people don’t need to time to learn.
Learn to see and create management excellence for your agile culture.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Learn to see the myths, traps, and illusions that prevent management from achieving leadership excellence and agility.
  • Learn actions to bypass these myths, traps, and illusions.
  • Learn the basis of management thinking patterns that do not serve agile teams or organizations.
  • Learn ways to invite your or your manager's thinking patterns to change.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Johanna Rothman

Johanna Rothman

President, Rothman Consulting
Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," provides frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams see problems and resolve risks and manage their product development. Johanna was the Agile 2009 conference chair. Johanna is the author of several books... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
National Harbor 12/13
  Leadership, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Using Beyond Budgeting and Sociocracy for agile-friendly performance appraisals (John Buck, Jutta Eckstein)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
There are many suggestions dealing with Agile-friendly performance appraisals, which promise to rely on trust, honesty, respect, safety, and servant leadership. The Agile Manifesto does not address performance appraisal although it does generally mention regular and frequent feedback, which can also be applied to performance evaluation. Two related methods, Beyond Budgeting and Sociocracy, offer interesting approaches to agile performance review. In this session we want to present these two different performance appraisal approaches, how they're are supported by the values of BOSSA nova (short for Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy & Agile) and want to invite the participants of this workshop to discuss the synthesis of the two approaches.
This session looks at several real-world examples from actual companies including Accenture, Equinor, and Google.
The first principle of Beyond Budgeting asks to “engage and inspire people around bold and noble causes; not around short-term financial targets,” the eleventh principle advocates: “Evaluate performance holistically and with peer feedback for learning and development; not based on measurement only and not for rewards only.” Thus, the main strategy of Beyond Budgeting is to separate (financial) bonuses from performance evaluation and to use relative and not fixed targets as a foundation for the evaluation.
Sociocracy suggests holding 360 degree in-person meetings. The person being reviewed should request it when needed, not just on a rigid annual basis, and perhaps not just once in the year. In the 360 degree meeting, the organization itself can be critiqued in the review - “the way we organize is causing performance problems.” Similar to Beyond Budgeting there is a focus on the vision and mission of the specific department as well as the overall company as a source of inspiration and motivation. The output of the performance review meeting should be a development plan that the immediate group of supervision, peers, and subordinates consent to.
Based on BOSSA nova, we invite participants to dive into what Beyond Budgeting and Sociocracy combined offer for performance appraisals. Participants will take away insights that they can use in their organizations.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Get to know the performance evaluation approach of both Beyond Budgeting and Sociocracy
  • Understand the strengths and weaknesses of the Beyond Budgeting and Sociocracy performance appraisal approaches
  • Explore possible synthesis of the two approaches
  • Take-away concrete ideas on how to improve the performance evaluation in your organization

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for John Buck

John Buck

President, GovernanceAlive LLC
John Buck is the coauthor of the very recently published book Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy, see http://www.agilebossanova.com/ and #agilebossanova. The second edition of his earlier book was also recently released We the People: Consenting to... Read More →
avatar for Jutta Eckstein

Jutta Eckstein

Independent Coach, consultant, trainer and speaker, IT Communications
Jutta Eckstein (http://jeckstein.com) is an independent coach, consultant and trainer from Braunschweig, Germany. Her know-how in agile processes is based on over twenty-five years’ experience in project and product development. Her focus is on enabling agile development on the... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Maryland Ballroom C
  Leadership, Workshop

14:00 EDT

The Learner's Brain - A User Manual to the Most Complex Thing in the Universe (Joe Ziadeh, Jolene Jangles)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
How do people learn in an Agile way? In this workshop we'll give you the user manual to the most complex object in the known universe - the human brain! Our brain drives how we learn, and this workshop will show you how to tailor instruction and activities to create safe and effective learning environments.
In this workshop we will briefly cover some core neuroscience and psychology topics anyone who teaches needs to know. Come play a series of games designed with specific techniques you can immediately use to improve your teaching. We'll briefly cover:
  • Neurophysiology - How the structure of our brain impacts how we learn and process information
  • Neuroplasticity - How the brain physically changes as we learn new things
  • Cognitive bias - How a learner's perception of an idea (and our environment) can fundamentally change how the way learners hear and understand what you're teaching.
We'll cover these concepts using games and activities specifically designed to help you learn and retain the information efficiently. We'll also discuss how to build the appropriate environment to make learning safe, and lightly touch on how to build courses with all of these things in mind using Training from the BACK of the Room.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Attendees can explain how neuroscience drives students' ability to learn.
  • Attendees can describe how this session used neuroscience to their advantage to teach the concepts.
  • Attendees can facilitate 3 techniques to teach concepts, and create a safe and effective environment for learning and experimentation.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Joe Ziadeh

Joe Ziadeh

Director of Process Definition and Measurement, Express Scripts
I'm happy to talk about anything Agile. But I personally love neuroscience, Training from the Back of the Room, rap, public speaking, innovation games, change management, and team building.
avatar for Jolene Jangles

Jolene Jangles

Enterprise Coach, Balanced Agility
I strongly believe in people’s greatness and am passionate about moving people and systems forward. Some of my particular interests are transformation, coaching and the brain science. Tell me your story. Where do you want to go? How do we ignite your rebel within?

Tuesday August 6, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Maryland Ballroom B
  Learning, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Getting ahead of your Agile Delivery teams with a formalized discovery process (Stephanie Allen, Anjali Leon)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Are your delivery teams challenged with striking the right balance between creating scalable, high quality, releasable software with ensuring they are addressing the most important problems and opportunities for your customers? Does it take the full investment of building and launching a product to validate an idea? Do you have a nagging feeling that you may not be working on the right things?
At Pearson Online & Blended Learning, we met these challenges head on by creating and implementing a framework that includes early collaboration within a cross-functional team and a light-weight process. Based on Design Thinking principles and practices, the framework effectively balances discovery and delivery efforts. It ensures that, across the portfolio, our investments are focused on the right things, and the efforts of our delivery teams are aligned to solving the most important problems for our customers and addressing the most valuable opportunities for our business.
In this interactive session, we’ll reveal our discovery framework, approach to implementation, and share our triumphs and challenges. Each participant will have the opportunity to reflect on how a similar approach may help them address challenges within their own organizations. We will also collaboratively identify and troubleshoot potential problems you may encounter while implementing such a framework.

Learning Outcomes:
  • After the completion of this session, participants will be able to:
  • Relate to how our discovery framework helps solve some commonly expressed organizational challenges
  • Apply Design Thinking principles, tools and techniques to discovery efforts in an Agile environment
  • Decide when and how to engage customers in identifying and validating the right solution to their problems
  • Flex and fit the discovery framework for their individual environments

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Stephanie Allen

Stephanie Allen

Vice President, Digital Product Management, Pearson
I specialize in the design and development of educational technology products, leading the creation of innovative new programs that incorporate the latest industry advances in order to exceed expectations for learner goal achievement. Talk to me about product management and educational... Read More →
avatar for Anjali Leon

Anjali Leon

Agility Coach, Educator and Advisor, PPL Coach
Awakening new possibilities by connecting people to people, to ideas, and to purpose. Anjali shares her unique blend of emerging thought leadership and down-to-earth style to educate, inform, and inspire people to do their best work as she helps organizations navigate the powerful... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Chesapeake 10/11/12
  Project Program & Portfolio Management, Talk

14:00 EDT

Liberating Strategy - Walking the Fine Line Between Rigidity and Planlessness (Johannes Schartau)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
During Agile transformations teams are often told to become adaptive and flexible - all within a clearly defined, rigid five (or more) year strategy that severely inhibits true agility. Some companies are aware of this problem. As a solution they don’t engage in any kind of strategic planning whatsoever. Unfortunately, they often discover that without any direction every decision can be passed off as the right one and confusion reigns.
What’s usually lacking is an agile approach to strategy on an enterprise level. One that takes the reality of dynamic markets and an uncertain future into account and creates an environment for development teams to actually be agile in. At the same time it needs to provide enough guidance and clarity for everybody to make great decisions for the company as a whole.
Join this session to learn a different approach to strategy-making that is based on the use of several Liberating Structures. It’s an approach that walks the fine line between rigidity and planlessness. One that includes more people than just the top executives in the creation of strategy. One that seamlessly takes everybody from broad exploration to direct action. A Liberated Strategy.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Develop a strategic narrative along six core questions while including more people than ever before
  • Plan for uncertain futures and align your product portfolio accordingly
  • Seamlessly go from sensemaking and planning straight to action

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Johannes Schartau

Tuesday August 6, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
National Harbor 11
  Project Program & Portfolio Management, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Self-Empathy as a Path to Targeted Self-Care (Lorraine Aguilar)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
How can we best care for ourselves when faced with challenges that drain our energy or bring out the worst in us? As Agile change agents, we want to lead by example and embrace these challenges as opportunities to learn and grow - not only in wisdom, but also in the quality of our self-care.
This session is about smart self-care. You will experience a kinesthetic process that uses body awareness to access deep self-empathy and reveal opportunities for self-love that can restore your energy, outlook and effectiveness. You will walk away with an appreciative awareness of your deepest needs and more targeted self-care strategies that honor those needs - without abdicating responsibility for your role in contributing to unwanted situations.
Upon completing the session, you will be able to practice and teach this process to others. This process is based on Nonviolent Communication (NVC), a set of empathy-based principles and practices that promote collaboration, inclusion and connection.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Apply a kinesthetic process to access self-empathy through body awareness.
  • Examine the underlying human needs that drive your behavior.
  • Identify self-care strategies that target your underlying human needs.
  • Explain the relationship between self-empathy and accountability.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Lorraine Aguilar

Lorraine Aguilar

Working Harmony, Inc.
Agile communications training and leadership programs.

Tuesday August 6, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Chesapeake J/K/L
  Self-Care, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Business Agility (Shane Hastie, Evan Leybourn)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Business Agility has become a buzzword, but what does it really mean and why does it matter? Evan and Shane explore the why, what and some of the how behind the move to take the ideas from the agile manifesto and agile product development and apply them in broader organisational contexts. What does it mean to be agile in Finance or HR, for instance; what is the impact on leadership when everyone in the organisation is empowered and self-organizing (and should they be)?

Learning Outcomes:
  • What it means to be agile in Finance or HR
  • The impact on leadership

Speakers
avatar for Shane Hastie

Shane Hastie

Director of Agile Learning Programs, ICAgile
Coach, trainer, passionate agilist from New ZealandDirector of Agile Learning Programs for ICAgile Member of the Agile Alliance board 2011 - 2016.Founding Chair of Agile Alliance New Zealand.Lead Editor for Culture & Methods on InfoQ.com
avatar for Evan Leybourn

Evan Leybourn

Founder, Business Agility Institute
Evan is the Founder and CEO of the Business Agility Institute; an international membership body to both champion and support the next-generation of organisations. Companies that are agile, innovative and dynamic - perfectly designed to thrive in today’s unpredictable markets. His... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Chesapeake G/H/I
  Stalwarts, Stalwart

14:45 EDT

The Future Looks Awesome, and Moving Beyond Agile (Mike Griffiths)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Agile approaches succeeded and changed the way we work. They brought the philosophy and tools previously used by only the high performing teams to the majority of organizations. Now it is time to move beyond them and embrace a new wave of emerging ideas and approaches.
It is short-sighted and self-absorbed to imagine agile approaches represent the best way to execute all work types. As new technology, products, and services emerge, we need new ways to deliver them. Likewise, as organizational structures evolve to use this technology and integrate the aspirations of next-generation workers - who grew up in a digital world, our approaches much evolve again.
Fortunately, patterns are emerging from new organizational structures and the lessons from failed agile transformations. Agile’s “Family” mindset of empowerment and values-driven culture is being overtaken by “Organism” and “Community” mindset organizations embracing Holacracy and Teal Organization ideas. People are also realizing not everyone wants to adopt an agile mindset and we need better ways of integrating with more traditional models that remain that way for their own advantages. The future involves further expansion and integration, not more fervent conceptual conversion.
Come and examine the future beyond agile and hybrid agile. Explore the trends in corporate structures, career aspirations, engagement models, and the technology that is making it all possible. The future is exciting, dynamic, and decidedly less agile – but in a good way.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Summarize the scope of agile approaches
  • Explore how the nature of work is changing
  • Investigate the changes in the emerging workforce
  • Understand new organizational structures
  • Recognize the impacts of emerging work, worker, and workplace

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Mike Griffiths

Mike Griffiths

Leading Answers & RMCLS, Consultant
Mike is an agile author, speaker and trainer, who helped create the agile method DSDM in 1994. He served on the board of the Agile Alliance and the Steering Committee to create the PMI-ACP credential.

Tuesday August 6, 2019 14:45 - 15:15 EDT
Chesapeake 7/8/9
  The Future of Agile Software Development (IEEE Software), Talk

15:15 EDT

Afternoon Break
Tuesday August 6, 2019 15:15 - 15:45 EDT
Maryland Foyer
  Meals

15:45 EDT

Future of Agile is Diversity (Karina Kohl)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
The “algorithm” is now an entity. It is a subject that society is talking a lot lately. In 2015, a photo app automatically tagged two Afro-American friends as gorillas. In 2016, a bot called Tay learned to be racist, Holocaust denier and that feminists “should all die and burn in hell”, in 12 hours. In less than 24 hours, it was shut down. There is unpredictability of machine learning algorithms when confronted with real people. How much bias machine learning algorithms can introduce? How much came from the data used to train the algorithms and how much came from the algorithm itself? How to create products based on machine learning avoiding gender, race, age or culture bias and others and avoiding doing harm to those groups?
Yates (Communication of ACM, June 2018) said that “any remedy for bias must start with awareness that bias exists.” Page (The Difference, 2007) proposed that identity diversity (our gender, race, religion, etc.) leads to cognitive diversity (the way we think and solve problems), mainly in tasks as prediction and problem-solving. A study made by McKinsey & Company in 2014 says that diversity fosters innovation and increase financial results. So, workplace diversity can help in different ways, including to detect and reduce bias in algorithms design and execution.
How much agile teams, from the beginning of software development chain, can help to minimize bias and reduce backslash to the end user? What is the role of agile when teams are built to work in a machine learning world? Agile Manifesto values individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Agile teams are built on that. Recently, Modern Agile also set two of four values based on people: make people awesome and make safety a prerequisite. Not as a causality, but, maybe, as a correlation, agile values are good evidence that we can have development environments that better support diversity. Once we have more diverse teams, we can expect better outputs (less biased) from machine learning algorithms.

Learning Outcomes:
  • In this presentation, we intend to approach how much of the bias algorithms came from the lack of diversity of teams and how much diverse agile teams need to be to minimize that.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Karina Kohl

Karina Kohl

Head of Operations and Product Manager, Globo.com
Karina Kohl is Product Owner at Globo.com and Agile Practitioner. Working in IT and R&D business since 2002, Karina worked as Java/Web developer for many years. In 2012/2013 she transitioned to the Product Owner role.In her formal education, Karina is MSc (2005) and BSc (2003) in... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 15:45 - 16:15 EDT
Chesapeake 7/8/9
  The Future of Agile Software Development (IEEE Software), Talk

15:45 EDT

Business Agility Lab: Afternoon ACN Lean Coffee on Business Agility Topics
Afternoon ACN Lean Coffee on Business Agility Topics: The Agile Coaching Network (ACN) has grown to over 1,500 members! It is a monthly live event and podcast that has reached over 32,000 people. We will be holding a daily ACN Lean Coffee session to talk about whatever is top of mind about your Agile adoptions. Please join us and add your voice to the conversation. Seating is limited, so please plan appropriately.
Tuesday August 6, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Agile Alliance Lounge

15:45 EDT

Business Agility Mentoring and Small Group Chats
Business Agility Mentoring and Small Group Chats: Have questions about Agile working across your business? Then please stop by the lab and sign up for 1:1 or group mentoring on the subjects of your choice. We will have many business agility mentors available to provide you advice. Seating is limited, so please plan appropriately.
Tuesday August 6, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Agile Alliance Lounge

15:45 EDT

In Principle We Agree: From Development to Organizational Agility with Holacracy (Timo Punkka)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
While Agile methodologies have proven successful in product development, conventional departmental organization structures may pose challenges to scaling agility and achieving the desired efficiency at the organizational level.
Schneider Electric Fire & Security undertook a two-year experiment, inspired by Holacracy, to scale agility across the entire organization. The presentation explores the team-based organizational structure that emerged around the existing value streams, creating end to end transparency and organizational autonomy.
You will hear why the case organization wanted to go beyond development agility, and what eventually led to the chosen Holacracy inspired model. You will be introduced to the early victories en route, the organization’s current state and how to leverage dynamic governance for systematic improvement.
Are you concerned with moving agile practices to beyond development? Join us, and get inspired!

Learning Outcomes:
  • An understanding why Agile product development, while beneficial, is not the end of the story
  • A model for organization for reaching towards organization-wide Agility
  • Based on a case example, an emergent change approach for experimenting towards the future organization

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Timo Punkka

Timo Punkka

Schneider Electric

Tuesday August 6, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
National Harbor 4/5
  Agile Companies, Talk

15:45 EDT

Make It Happen: The World's First Agile Restaurant (Riccardo Mariti, Jeff Sutherland)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
THE RESTAURANT MODEL is broken. As CEO of multiple restaurants, it has really felt that way for a few years and I’ve been searching for the reason and for a solution. By ‘broken’ I mean that in the industry, morale is at a serious low. The restaurant industry is one of the most abusive industries I have ever come across. Decent people promoted to management positions become megalomaniacs as a norm, it happens every time. It’s as though they think it is expected of them to rule with an iron glove, order team members around, and stop personally dealing with customer service, spending most of their time working on admin tasks rather than on the floor with customers. It’s the strangest phenomenon.
When I read Jeff and JJ Sutherland’s book, Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, everything changed and many of my early insights were confirmed with hard facts and documented evidence, and case studies. We decided to implement Scrum@Scale where every facet of the organization is run with Scrum.
We will present an overview of creation of the world's first Agile restaurant which today runs only with Scrum teams and has no managers. The goal was to improve shrinking margins due to competitive pricing and higher salaries. When teams starting doing shift planning we found that over 20% of shifts created by managers were totally unnecessary, planning time was significantly reduced, and morale substantially improved. The radical success of this implementation has spawned two new restaurants funded by investors within a year, so we will describe three restaurants run totally with Scrum.
The restaurant is run like a lean assembly line. The process efficiency of every component is constantly measured and improved. For example, time from order to the first course arriving and served – PE Benchmark 8m – Ave 12m – Bad – 15m. We will present production data and actual financial results for the restaurant. This will enable others to plan for implementation in any environment similar to a restaurant.

Learning Outcomes:
  • 1. Learn how to apply agile practices in the restaurant business.
  • 2. Understand that lean practice is fundamental to enabling agile practice in this environment
  • 3. Show how to implement Scrum@Scale in a small business
  • 4. Demonstrate how to collect performance and financial metrics in this environment.
  • 5. Show actual performance and financial results from the world's first Agile restaurant.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Riccardo Mariti

Riccardo Mariti

CEO, Riccardo's
avatar for Jeff Sutherland

Jeff Sutherland

Founder and Chairman, Scrum, Inc.
CoCreator of Scrum

Tuesday August 6, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Maryland Ballroom C
  Agile Companies, Talk

15:45 EDT

Agile Development Practices (James Newkirk)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Successful execution on an agile project requires a focus on product ownership and associated set of engineering practices. You need these engineering practices to support the planning and to make it effective. These practices also serve to make the code ready for the next challenge. In this session I will describe a system of engineering practices that bring together lessons learned from Extreme Programming and Scrum with approaches adapted from Lean Thinking to benefit the team, customers, and users.
In order to ground the discussion, we will begin with a set of values and principles to describe the why behind the practices. We will then discuss each practice and how together they weave into a system that supports the planning process and software delivery.
The session is for all who take part in software delivery, business and technical people alike.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Understand why we use engineering practices, in terms that work not only for engineers or developers, but for anyone who might be the member of a team
  • Understand how the practices correlate to values
  • How these practices work together to define the system
  • Where to begin…

Attachments:
Speakers
JN

Tuesday August 6, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
National Harbor 2/3
  Agile Foundations, Talk

15:45 EDT

Part 2 of 2: Anti-fragility, Collaboration and Agile (Caitlin Walker, Andrea Chiou)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
This is part 2 of a 2 part session. Participation on the first session is required to adequately engage in this session.
If you are in contempt of another human being you will be operating from an I’m OK you’re not OK position. Sometimes we do this consciously, sometimes unconsciously. Sometimes we use phrases or terms without thinking and someone else points out that this term makes them feel they’re being held in contempt. What to do when internal worlds and external behaviors collide?
Anti-fragility (Taleb 2012) would hold that from the disorder of diversity we can come to positions of strength. These differences and conflicts can become the stimulus for the group to learn, strengthen and grow BUT only if we have the skills of inquiry without turning the interaction into an act of contempt itself.
We will be uncovering ways of inquiring into conflict that don’t in themselves promote more conflict. We will also be uncovering ways of inquiring into conflict that are pretenses at inquiry and are actually passive aggressive ways of putting someone else down without standing up for what you believe.
This workshop is all about creating enough space for resilient inquiry and keeping 'What we'd like to have happen' in mind throughout our interactions.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Learning about others with divergent and even conflicting views - using unbiased 'clean' inquiry.
  • Becoming attuned to knowing the difference between what you said and the response others give.
  • Noticing the patterns of language and behavior that you and other people adopt when in conflict.
  • Developing strategies for moving from fragility to anti-fragility

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Caitlin Walker

Caitlin Walker

Director, Training Attention
I support groups to develop strategies for shifting their attention away from Conflict, Contempt and #Drama. When they're in contempt, they can detect it, acknowledge it, get curious and shift themselves and others. They can move from the addictive #Drama towards action. From a position... Read More →
avatar for Andrea Chiou

Andrea Chiou

Enterprise Agile Coach, Tenable
I work remotely as an Enterprise Agile Coach at Tenable, Inc. a cyber-exposure and vulnerability detection company located in Columbia, Maryland. I care about 'vulnerability detection' in the teams I coach too. Just like with IT systems, we'll have to develop awareness of each others... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
National Harbor 8
  Audacious Salon, Workshop

15:45 EDT

Facilitating Distributed Teams (Mark Kilby)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Facilitating distributed team meetings can feel like having one arm tied behind your back and one eye covered, but you can free yourself of these virtual constraints using other agile practices. We struggle with meeting tools and keeping people engaged online, but what if we collaborate with our teams to get the most value out of their meetings? If we leverage pairing, mobbing and other practices, we can co-facilitate successful outcomes with our teams.

Learning Outcomes:
  • What are different types of distributed and dispersed teams and how you can facilitate them.
  • How a chat backchannel can help keep team members connected.
  • How you can pair or mob with your audience to facilitate.
  • See how you can use these practices to prepare for a typical distributed meeting.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Mark Kilby

Mark Kilby

Agile Coach, K5Labs LLC
Mark Kilby coaches leaders, teams and organizations on how to work more effectively, whether they are distributed or collocated.  For over two decades, his easy-going style has helped his client learn to collaborate and discover their path to success and sustainability.Sometimes... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Chesapeake 10/11/12
  Coaching & Mentoring, Talk

15:45 EDT

That's Not Coaching! - a story that started over drinks (Chris Li, Brock Argue)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Everyone is looking for a great "Agile Coach" and everyone else describes themselves as such. Often, both the client and coach have a misunderstanding of what coaching actually is. Not being on the same page about the basic concepts of coaching while mixing in other concepts around mentoring and consulting muddy the waters even further. This leads to a challenging situation of figuring out what success looks like for a coaching engagement.
Chris Li and Brock Argue were sharing a meal and some adult beverages at a conference recently, and the stories started to flow about the headaches, challenges, and misunderstandings that happen so regularly in the world of agile coaching. Seemingly every story we shared with one another ended in the declaration "...but, that's not coaching!". Join us for a fun and energetic workshop and learn what coaching really is...minus the libations! Chris and Brock will be sharing their own personal stories, practical tips and tools based on their experience that will help those who come to the party re-acclimate themselves to what a coach is and does.
This workshop invites participants to gain a clear understanding of what it means to be a 'coach' from a pair of leaders in the agile space. Hearing perspectives from different points of view will help those in attendance begin to align their own definitions of what it means to coach others at the individual, team, and organizational levels. This highly interactive session is an exciting mix of interesting one-way content, interactive exercises, and a workshop that forms the basis of creating a coaching agreement to serve as a take-away to build upon in further conversations.

Learning Outcomes:
  • The ability to determine what interactions are 'coaching' and what interactions are not
  • Clear definitions of coaching, mentoring and consulting
  • An understanding of what professional coaching is from a practitioner's point of view
  • The ability to design their own "Coaching Agreement" which can be used in their day-to-day practice

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Chris Li

Chris Li

Founder, SparkPlug Agility LLC
I am a passionate and energetic Certified Scrum Trainer and Enterprise Agile Coach who is always interested in meeting new people and picking up new skills. I enjoy talking about topics around agile training, coaching, and consulting as well as designing courses and public speak... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Maryland Ballroom A
  Coaching & Mentoring, Workshop

15:45 EDT

Part 2 of 2: How to facilitate code reviews as a less-technical coach (Kim Castillo)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Technical excellence is widely considered one of the ingredients of successful Agile teams and presumably, the session audience is interested in finding ways to support this quality.
In this session, we will address some of the conundrums of being a “less technical” coach to our teams and identify what strengths and tactics we can leverage to make the technical practice of code reviews a better experience.

Learning Outcomes:
  • What I hope from this session is that you walk away from here:
  • • Recognizing code reviews
  • • Find/create opportunities to facilitate high quality code reviews (and not feeling like a fraud while you’re at it)
  • • Understanding the value in engaging this practice and other areas that puts us in the “middle of all of it”

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Kim Castillo

Kim Castillo

Sr. Technical Program Manager (In reality, an embedded Agile coach and renegade), Pluto TV
I’m an Agile Coach. I’m bent on building a culture of engaged and innovative teams through thought leadership, human interactions, and coaching. Everything I do is in service to creating an environment that leads to psychological safety, experimentation, relentless learning, deep... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
National Harbor 10
  Coaching Technical Skills For Less Technical Coaches, Workshop

15:45 EDT

Mapping Value to Benefits Realized with Leading (not bleeding) Indicators (Christine Babowicz, Natalie Warnert)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Prioritization of work is hard across all levels of the organization. When we focus on feature value, often the first indicator of value we think of is dollars versus effort expended and ROI. But what about value that is not realized through dollars? What about the benefits that are harder to quantify? What about benefits we can see sooner?
By expanding the definition of what value can truly mean, we can normalize, rationalize, and quantify value in new and different ways that make sense to all of our customers and our leadership. With this workshop and mindset we can assess value across programs and portfolios as well as engage team members and stakeholders through interactive activities. In a way, it’s like relative sizing to drive value that appeals to many different consumers and stakeholders of your product and the associated benefits they seek.
Natalie & Christine first demonstrate traditional value estimation (dollars and lagging indicators) and the resulting feature map/prioritization. Then, we look at other types of value realization through a team or program level activity using customer common sense, leading indicators, and innovation accounting. The activity provides participants with hands-on experience estimating and mapping feature value, sans dollars, on a more level and relative playing field. This gives Product Owners, Product Managers, and teams a better baseline to align enterprise and program roadmaps with their own team or product priorities - and most importantly what the customer actually values - the benefits they (and the company) receive!

Learning Outcomes:
  • Understanding of customer value realization through more than just revenue and lagging indicators
  • Intro to leading indicators, innovation accounting, and normalization of benefits realization
  • Facilitating a successful session with a justifiable program roadmap outcome and an activity to bring home

Speakers
avatar for Christine Babowicz

Christine Babowicz

Manager, Enterprise Lean-Agile Coach, MetLife
Christine Babowicz is an Enterprise Lean-Agile Coach at MetLife based in Cary, NC and founding member of the MetLife Global Lean-Agile Center of Excellence. In her role as an Enterprise Lean-Agile Coach, Christine finds herself in the beginnings of a major, organization-wide transformation... Read More →
avatar for Natalie Warnert

Natalie Warnert

Sr Agile Consultant, Natalie Warnert LLC
Natalie Warnert is the primary founder of the Women in Agile initiative, which enables, empowers, and expands the distribution of new and diverse ideas in the agile and technology communities worldwide. She is a frequent speaker on business and agile topics including product strategy... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Chesapeake 1/2/3
  Customers & Products, Workshop

15:45 EDT

Escape Velocity (Doc Norton)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
If your team uses velocity for planning but you don't find it very useful, this session is for you.
If your manager or scrum master or other pseudo-authority figure keeps obsessing over your velocity, this session is for you.
If you want to know about better ways to forecast when a piece of work will be done or how to gather data that actually helps your team, this session is for you.
Doc Norton shares stories and science detailing why velocity isn't a very good metric, talks about some common velocity anti-patterns, and shares what metrics you could use instead. You'll be able to better forecast when work will be done and you'll be better able to diagnose issues with your process and work toward correcting them.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Why Velocity alone is a poor indicator
  • Simple ways to measure code quality
  • How to create and read a CFD
  • Forecasting probability

Speakers
avatar for Doc Norton

Doc Norton

Co-Founder; Agile Catalyst, OnBelay
Doc is passionate about working with teams to improve delivery and building great organizations. Once a dedicated code slinger, Doc has turned his energy toward helping teams, departments, and companies work better together in the pursuit of better software. Working with a wide range... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Maryland Ballroom D
  Data & Metrics, Talk

15:45 EDT

Making Better Business Decisions with Flow Metrics (Dominica DeGrandis)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
When it comes to assessing an IT transformations (such as Agile and DevOps), performance metrics have come under intense scrutiny. Traditional performance metrics, such as counting the number of lines of code or the number of software bugs should be used with caution, because there are bugs that are not worth fixing and code that is not worth maintaining. Output based performance metrics represent activities, not outcomes. To visualize and optimize the business value of your software delivery, it's helpful to measure business outcomes, versus measure how busy people are. Flow metrics help us do just that.
In this talk, Dominica DeGrandis presents five flow metrics that reveal trends on desirable business outcomes – such as faster time-to-market, responsiveness to customers, and predictable release timeframes. The goal is to inspire you to experiment with flow metrics at your organization to help you become the voice of reason in your organization.
Talk outline:
5 min: Intro
10 min: Flow Distribution: A measure to see tradeoffs
10 min: Flow Velocity: A measure of throughput/productivity
10 min: Flow Load: Amount of Work-in-Progress (WIP)
10 min: Flow Time: A measure of speed
10 min: Flow Efficiency: Work vs. wait ratio
5 min: Things to consider - Gaming metrics - What we measure matters, because people value what is measured. A balanced set of metrics.
5 min: Takeaways & benefits
10 min: Q&A
For each Flow metric, I will cover interpretation, construction and description of a real examples/stories.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Learn what Flow metrics are and how they can help your team make better business decisions.
  • Discover how to interpret and construct Flow metrics.
  • Hear a new perspective on the benefits of measures focused on product measures instead of project measures.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Dominica DeGrandis

Dominica DeGrandis

Principal Flow Advisor, Planview
Dominica DeGrandis is the author of Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow. She is a huge fan of Flow and using visual cues to inspire change. As Principal Flow Advisor at Planview, Dominica introduces flow metrics & Value Stream thinking to organization... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
National Harbor 11
  Data & Metrics, Talk

15:45 EDT

Automation as a Lofty Goal (Christopher Lucian)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
How many things in your work day can be automated that currently are not? 1%? 100%? Chances are that everything you do today can theoretically be automated. Of course this is an inflammatory argument. It is also likely that you have some low hanging fruit for automation that typically gets ignored. The funny thing about software development is that over time you automate all the stuff you did in the past. I don’t write HTML anymore, I write an HTML template, or generator. I don’t write generators anymore, I create a domain abstraction…. I don’t write domain abstractions anymore I write acceptance tests and an evolutionary algorithm writes the code for me. As I automate more and more of what I do, I get more and more time to automate more things. How do we gracefully transition into a future of automation? I believe we should be considering automation continuously, in this way we will be able to automate more and more things.
What about those of us who are content to repeat automatable tasks? It needs to be clear that the less we have to do day to day, the more effective we can be in the long run. In my career I have witnessed many developers who had thought their job was to do repetitive tasks to keep production up and running. We had automated everything they did and got back these developers.
I want to talk about today's options for automation in our craft and extrapolate to the future! Then I want to discuss automation as a lofty goal and how we can promote the need for automation of our automation on our teams with some practical technical examples.
As a developer you will learn new automation techniques as well as communication techniques for discussions around automation as a priority with management.
As a manager or director you will learn how automation as a team goal can increase your teams productivity continuously, and how to eliminate waste in your system to write software faster and with higher quality.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Practical implementations of Automation as a Habit
  • How to Implement a strict workflow that includes automation as a habit
  • How to Analyse the impact of a habit of automation on your process

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Christopher Lucian

Christopher Lucian

Director of Software Development, Hunter Industries
I'm Chris Lucian, the director of software development at hunter industries and a founder of mob programming. I am passionate about the advancement of machine learning and software craftsmanship. I seek the continuous improvement of myself, my family, my company, and my community... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Chesapeake A/B/C
  Dev Practices and Craft, Talk

15:45 EDT

BDD, ATDD, TDD, DDD, DP, OOAD, ... If You’re D’d out, Try A Holistic Approach (Ken Pugh)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Teams starting to become agile often get caught by the technical issues of software development. While stories may be completed initially, technical debt such as lack of cohesion, bad coupling, missing tests, and other issues slow things down. Test automation becomes harder and brittle for both internal units and external flows. Team members are not sure which of the techniques such as Behavior Driven Development, Acceptance Test Driven Development, Test Driven Development, Domain Driven Design, Design Patterns, Object Oriented Analysis/Design, or others will help them.
This session presents a holistic approach to discovering how these D’s relate to each other and how they can help you. We start by concentrating on the desired behavior and the context in which that behavior occurs. Next we explain how tests specify that the behavior is being implemented correctly and we recognize that all tests specify some behavior. We continue by illustrating how external behaviors that a user experiences are a combination of behaviors of the implementing components. We end up by showing how behavior of those components (microservices, classes, methods) can be specified in an implementation independent manner. Along the way, we’ll show how principles, such as separation of concerns and low coupling, apply in many aspects of development including defining behavior.
This interactive session is appropriate for anyone working on the creation of a software application – developers and testers. It’s aimed at newer agile teams, but any teams who are experiencing delivery issues may benefit.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Explain the different contexts of an application
  • Identify what are external and internal behaviors and how to specify them
  • Create a shared understanding of the behavior of business rules and domain terms
  • Minimize the amount of redundancy in tests and code

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Ken Pugh

Ken Pugh

Principal Consultant, Ken Pugh, Inc.
Ken Pugh helps companies evolve into lean-agile organizations through training and coaching. His special interests are in collaborating on requirements, delivering business value, and using lean principles to deliver high quality quickly. He has written several programming books... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Chesapeake J/K/L
  Dev Practices and Craft, Talk

15:45 EDT

Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself - Emotional Self-Management for Leaders (Lorraine Aguilar)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Have you ever regretted getting defensive or sending an email while angry? Emotional self-management is especially important for leaders because all eyes are on you - your behaviors are more visible than others employees, who expect you to be a role model.
This session is for leaders who want to manage their emotions instead of letting emotions manage them. You will develop the capacity to empathize instead of react by applying a simple kinesthetic process to translate an emotional trigger into constructive dialogue. In this lively and practical session, teams will spar by testing how quickly they can extinguish a verbal fireball with empathy instead of making a "career-limiting reaction." By playing this game, you will learn to speak free of blame and judgment and reveal the deeper human needs that drive our behavior. This technique is based on Nonviolent Communication (NVC), a set of principles and practices that promote empathy, inclusion, collaboration and innovation.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Apply a kinesthetic process to empathize instead of react.
  • Use constructive language to express yourself without judgment or blame.
  • Demonstrate self-awareness and self-empathy by identifying the deeper human needs that drive behavior.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Lorraine Aguilar

Lorraine Aguilar

Working Harmony, Inc.
Agile communications training and leadership programs.

Tuesday August 6, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Chesapeake 4/5/6
  Leadership, Workshop

15:45 EDT

Six Steps Towards Self-Learning Teams and Deliberately Developmental Organizations (Andy Cleff)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
One of the 12 principles behind the Manifesto for Agile Software Develop is: At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
This adjustment of behavior can take many forms: from stopping a practice that is not fruitful to simply doing more or less of something already in the system. And sometimes it means starting something new, an experiment to test a falsifiable hypothesis, for example: if we always had a minimum of a dozen donuts in the team room….
Regardless of what changes, it is up to a team that embraces agility to figure things out themselves. No external “boss” is barking orders. So this 12th principle leads to the idea that a self-organizing team also needs to be a self-learning team, and ask the question: "When we're learning at our best, we're like what?"
Join Andy to learn about a six-step framework that will propel your teams and organization on the path of deliberate and continual learning with joy.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Take-aways from this presentation will propel your teams and organization on a path of self-learning and growth:
  • * Leveraging the power of metaphor to lay the groundwork
  • * Visualizing the current and future states of the team skill set
  • * Prioritizing "the learning backlog" and creating conditions conducive to self-learning
  • * Measuring and making visible the outcomes of team experiments in order to amplify a culture of organizational learning
  • * Building learning communities at scale

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Andy Cleff

Andy Cleff

Sr Agile Coach, Agile Velocity
Andy Cleff is an experienced and pragmatic agile practitioner that takes teams beyond getting agile to embracing agile. His superpowers include holding multiple perspectives, enabling step changes that bridge current and future states, allowing space for both order and chaos simultaneously... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Maryland Ballroom B
  Learning, Talk

15:45 EDT

Innovation Starts with Agile Portfolio Management (Corey Post)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Large organizations with multiple product lines and divisions that compete for funding, talent and scarce dollars have a problem. While they live on past successes, their future survival is at risk. Why? Because product funding comes from portfolio managers and executives so far removed from their organization's customers and the markets they serve that they are unable to empathize with users, understand their needs and provide workable solutions that people will actually buy.
As a result, executives and managers fund products and projects that are a “solution in search of a problem”. Worse, the funding cycles are often multi-year undertakings, taking away the organization’s ability to experiment, adapt and deliver real customer value.
This leaves these “successful” companies vulnerable to the team working out of a garage, able to prototype, test, pivot when necessary, and learn.
So how can these organizations fund, and build, solutions that customers want and will pay for? How can these organizations own the future rather than fall victim to it? Through Agile portfolio management, which includes short funding cycles, rich feedback loops and an innovation investment strategy that balances near team needs with future opportunities.
If you are a portfolio manager, product manager and/or making investment decisions for your organization, then this session is for you. You will learn both the mechanics and the "why" behind Agile portfolio management as well as how it differs from traditional portfolio management. You will do a deep dive into a prototypical Agile portfolio kanban including states and exit criteria.
As a result of this session, you will:
  • Gain an understanding of the mechanics of Agile portfolio management
  • Understand how to match capacity to demand and fund small batches
  • Discover a method to run experiments and use feedback loops to create a learning organization that can identify and adapt to customer needs
  • Find out how to leverage the Three Horizons portfolio strategy to encourage innovation and plan for the future
You will also get to experience Agile portfolio management through an interactive breakout session where you will make trade-offs leveraging a framework that considers the time value of money, innovation, risk and your organization's core capabilities.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Gain an understanding of the mechanics of Agile portfolio management
  • Understand how to match capacity to demand and fund small batches
  • Discover a method to run experiments and use feedback loops to create a learning organization that can identify and adapt to customer needs
  • Leverage the Three Horizons portfolio strategy to encourage innovation and plan for the future

Speakers
avatar for Corey Post

Corey Post

Agile Transformation Coach, Accenture | SolutionsIQ
Corey Post is a Lean-Agile transformation and enterprise coach with more than 15 years of leadership experience in Agile ways of working and continuous improvement. His practice areas include guiding successful adoption of Agile principles and practices, Lean-Agile portfolio management... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Chesapeake D/E/F
  Project Program & Portfolio Management, Talk

15:45 EDT

The Curious Case of You (Samantha Laing, Tracey Moerkerk)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
For 75 minutes you will be encouraged and guided to look deep within yourself.
From a place of curiosity (as opposed to judgement) you will explore your feelings, emotions, actions. We take some time to set the scene and still your mind and inner critic. And then the work will begin.
What is inside you yearning to be heard? What is it your body wants to say to your mind? What is important to you?
This is deep YOU work - you will not be sharing with others - instead you will explore where your heart and mind needs you to go. The final part of this will be exploring joy and how that might look for you.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Understand the dream you have for your future
  • Listen to the YOU deep inside
  • Ways to add more joy to life

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Samantha Laing

Samantha Laing

Agile Coach, Nomad8
My personal motto is ‘be brave’, and I embody this by taking on challenges one small step at a time.Most of my career has been in the IT industry, specifically Software Development. Nowadays I find myself coaching others with a passion for agile and a focus on self-care.I love... Read More →
avatar for Tracey Moerkerk

Tracey Moerkerk

Agile Coach and Consultant, Miss Daisy Consulting
I've had a passion for helping teams become high performing for as long as I can remember. I support teams to transition to an agile mindset through training and coaching, helping them become empowered to make the right decisions for their customers, all within a trusting and fun... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
National Harbor 6/7
  Self-Care, Workshop

15:45 EDT

Stalwarts - Jeff Patton (Jeff Patton)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Why today’s agile mindset doesn’t match the agile manifesto. We’ve already evolved, iterated, and improved on it, even though we’ve been afraid to explicitly change it. Let's talk about the new implicit manifesto.

Learning Outcomes:
  • The implicit Agile Manifesto

Speakers
avatar for Jeff Patton

Jeff Patton

Chief Troublemaker, Jeff Patton & Associates
Jeff makes use of over 20 years of product design and development experience to help companies create great products.Jeff started in software development in the early 90s as a project leader and senior developer for a small software product company. There he learned that well written... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
Chesapeake G/H/I
  Stalwarts, Stalwart

15:45 EDT

Sketchnoting Like a Pro (Raymond Zanden)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Are you someone who frequently gives presentations, like an Agile Coach, Scrum Master, Manager or Trainer? Do you want your presentations to be remembered for a long time?
Then this is the workshop for you. In this workshop you will learn that everyone can create powerful Sketchnotes—a rapid form of visual note-taking— to boost the impact of presentations!
"A picture tells more than a thousand words"
When you need to present, you will get their attention immediately when you are using this Sketchnote technique. But this way of visualizing is also very useful in illustrating complex concepts or communicating your vision/ strategy.
In this workshop you will learn the basics of how and what to draw.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Introduction to Sketchnotes
  • Drawing basic shapes
  • Applying the basic shapes in a visual vocabulary
  • Drawing techniques for visual thinking
  • You will be able to make a presentation with markers on a flip-over

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Raymond Zanden

Raymond Zanden

Rabobank
I'm a Scrum Master at the Rabobank, this is one of the three larges banks in the Netherlands. I like to coach development teams to get them to the next level. I love to use sketchnoting as a tool to communicate, as it makes it so much easier to communicate and my colleagues like it... Read More →

Tuesday August 6, 2019 15:45 - 17:00 EDT
National Harbor 12/13
  User Experience, Workshop

16:30 EDT

A Descriptivist Scaled Agile Framework Grounded in the History of Human Self-Organization (Anastas Stoyanovksy)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
There are numerous competing frameworks that exist in the space of "scaling Agile" - SAFe, DAD, RAD, and others. A common thread to most, if not all, of these is that they tend to take a top-down perspective by identifying particular business sub-units with their assigned goals, whether those be writing software or designing a product, and then prescribe how and when these subunits should communicate or coordinate. From a bottom-up perspective, instead, XP describes role archetypes that often naturally manifest on an individual level within software engineering teams. After observing that these competing top-down approaches to scaling agile development tend to either explicitly incorporate or implicitly assume XP practices at the individual level, we suggest that there may be some degree of design contradiction in combining a descriptivist, bottom-up perspective with a prescriptivist, top-down one. Furthermore, depending on one's perspective, one may want to emphasize the Agile value of "people over processes" to a higher degree - and throughout an entire organization, as opposed to only within engineering teams.
We suggest that the challenge of scaling Agile is not significantly determined by anything in the field of software engineering and that it is instead related to the general problem of effective self-organization of any group of people that is sufficiently large to have nontrivial internal structure and that must effectively respond to external stimuli. Further, we suggest to turn to the millennia of history of self-organization in human society for a fundamental perspective on this challenge. Robert's Rules of Order, Newly Revised (RONR), which was created by studying that same history, empirically describes principles for effective self-organization of a large group of people, suggesting time-tested principles and practices for the efficient and transparent operation of formal organizations. Perhaps not surprisingly, a number of Agile ceremonies and XP practices find direct analogy with those practices and structure; we begin by building on the basis of that observation. As a starting example: effective formal organizations generally have bylaws and periodic meetings at which those bylaws can be altered by some sort of majority vote, and so one could view an engineering team's development process as its bylaws and Agile retrospectives as periodic meetings to revise those bylaws.
We define an integrated framework that reimagines and redefines existing Agile and XP principles and practices with the benefit of RONR's perspective, replacing top-down prescriptivism with bottom-up descriptivist principles of self-organization derived from the history of human society, as described in RONR. We believe that this framework is able to provide a sort of barebones structure needed for an organization to both operate and effectively grow, while also encouraging enough autonomy to allow for organic, finer-grained self-organization; taken together, one result (among others) is efficient decision making that is concomitant with reduced communication overheads. Encouraged by both objective and subjective preliminary success smoothly increasing head count by 50%, we present our current framework and our implementation of it at IBM Watson. We discuss generalizations and possible implementations of this framework for different organizational scales and with a view of facilitating smooth organizational growth.

Learning Outcomes:
  • A framework from scaling Agile development that aims to balance minimal structure with organic autonomy
  • Principles for enabling self-organization while maintaining a high signal-to-noise ratio
  • Mechanisms for accelerating onboarding into an organization
  • A historical perspective on human self-organization

Attachments:
Speakers
AS

Tuesday August 6, 2019 16:30 - 17:00 EDT
Chesapeake 7/8/9
  The Future of Agile Software Development (IEEE Software), Talk

17:30 EDT

Agile Tonight!
Ready to talk about the big issues in Agile? Each year at the Agile20XX conference, our Agile Tonight! session brings attendees together to learn about and discuss important questions, issues, and trends impacting and influencing our industry.


At Agile2019, Agile Tonight! continues the conversations about diversity and inclusion in our world, expanding on the earlier conversations we began at our previous conferences. Through data, interactive table exercises, and practitioners’ stories, we will collectively raise awareness of the issues leading to feelings of being physically, mentally, or emotionally unsafe or of being excluded — at our conferences, at our workplaces, in our industry, and in our lives. We will create an inclusive environment in the room and share approaches and stories that will give everyone more confidence to help create safer environments in their daily work and lives.

Two Pages from ncwit Women In Tech The Facts pdf
Tuesday August 6, 2019 17:30 - 19:00 EDT
Maryland Ballroom C
  Evening Events, Workshop
 
Wednesday, August 7
 

07:30 EDT

Registration Open
Pick-up your badge and conference materials and ask any questions you may have at Agile2019 throughout the week.
Wednesday August 7, 2019 07:30 - 17:30 EDT
Potomac Foyer
  Daily Activities

08:00 EDT

Breakfast
Wednesday August 7, 2019 08:00 - 09:00 EDT
Potomac Foyer
  Meals

08:00 EDT

Bookstore Open
Come check out the latest literature on agile practices.
Wednesday August 7, 2019 08:00 - 18:00 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Daily Activities

09:00 EDT

ish: The Problem with our Pursuit for Perfection and the Life-Changing Practice of (Lynne Cazaly)
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Excellence, quality and continuous improvement are important, but the pursuit of perfection …not so much. Our drive to make things look or seem perfect is dangerously on the rise and has dire consequences for how we feel about ourselves, how we live and work and how we collaborate with others. Lynne Cazaly shares the latest thinking on how being more ‘ish’ – which means somewhat, more or less, to some extent - is a more flexible, helpful and effective way to think and work. We can go for iteration over perfection more often.


Speakers
avatar for Lynne Cazaly

Lynne Cazaly

Owner, Lynne Cazaly
Lynne Cazaly helps individuals, teams and organisations transition to new ways of working. Lynne is an international keynote speaker, author and a master facilitator. She is the author of 6 books: ish: The Problem with our Pursuit for Perfection and the Life-Changing Practice of... Read More →

Wednesday August 7, 2019 09:00 - 10:15 EDT
Potomac Ballroom
  Keynotes, Talk

09:00 EDT

Agile Alliance Initiatives
Initiatives are ideas and concepts that develop into plans for action. They are proposed by Agile Alliance members or the Agile Alliance board of directors. Initiatives help the Alliance deliver on its mission to support people who explore and apply Agile values, principles, and practices to make building software solutions more effective, humane, and sustainable.” There is an Initiative Shepherd available to assist individuals with concept development.

Stop by the Agile Alliance Lounge to see all our initiatives, get involved, or propose one of your own!
Wednesday August 7, 2019 09:00 - 17:00 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Agile Alliance Lounge

09:00 EDT

Agile Alliance Lounge
Take a break from Agile2019 action and relax in the Agile Alliance Lounge! As an attendee, you are a member — we invite you to check out information about Alliance initiatives and activities, meet the board members and staff, and visit the Agile Advice and Business Agility areas. While you’re there, don’t forget to enjoy a refreshing beverage, pick up some swag, and discover how you and your company can become more involved in the Agile community.

Wednesday August 7, 2019 09:00 - 17:00 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Agile Alliance Lounge

10:15 EDT

Morning Break
Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:15 - 10:45 EDT
Maryland Foyer
  Meals

10:30 EDT

Business Agility Lab and Sensemaking Opens
As the Agile ecosystem expands to include engineering and business management, adapting the core Agile principles to work in the entire company is a huge opportunity to grow higher customer value and profits. But doing so is not without challenges. To address this, Agile Alliance will have a special area in the Agile Alliance Lounge called the Business Agility Lab.

In the Lab, you will be able to participate in several working sessions with business leaders who have a depth of experience in building Agile organizations and companies. They will offer firsthand knowledge about the challenges and success stories in broad adoptions.

This year's business leaders will be Ray Arell (Business Development Leader for Agile Alliance, former Sr. Director at Intel), Heidi Musser (Principal Consultant at LeadingAgile, former VP & CIO at USAA), Hendrik Esser (Manager of Special Projects at Ericsson), and other thought leaders in the business community. Attendees will be able to sign up for one-to-one mentoring at the Lab.

We also encourage you to participate in one of the widest retrospectives on Agile adoptions, the Narrative Project. You can add your voice by submitting a story or help design experiments to amplify Agile principles inside your company — all in the Lab.

Lastly, if you have been a part of the Agile Coaching Network (ACN) live event or podcast, you can join us for several live group sessions to ask questions or offer advice based on your own experiences with Agile adoption. We will also be running a daily afternoon Lean Coffee(TM) ACN live event. This session is open to people who have not joined the ACN before--everybody is welcome!

The following people will also be available in the Business Agility Lab:
  • Shawna Cullinan, Enterprise Agile Coach with Paciolan
  • Bonnie Aumann, Agile Coach previously with Spotify
  • Deepti Jain, Agile Transformation Strategist at AgileVirgin
  • Rhea Stadick, Enterprise Agile Transformation Expert at Nike

Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:30 - 17:00 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Agile Alliance Lounge

10:45 EDT

A Report on the State of Agile in India (Deepti Jain)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey
Abstract:
The Indian subcontinent has not seen many successful Agile Transformations. In this report we share how a group of 30 Lean Agile Practitioners and thought leaders from industry came together to better understand why Agile Transformations have not achieved or sustained the results in India that we hoped for. This special report was shepherded by Agile Alliance (under Rebecca Wirfs-Brock), with the intention of bringing out key challenges and success factors for any attempted or possible Agile Transformation in Indian IT and Software Development Centers.

At gatherings all around India, the talk is about different tools, techniques and agile experiences. But many of the experiences are either not from India or only partially achieved here. Agile experiences in India invariably fall short of full-fledged organization-scale self-sustaining irreversible transformations. Most are about rather short-term limited-scale team-level externally-supported “agile adoptions” or about lower-order internal efficiency gains such as faster builds, or higher code coverage, lower tech debt, or quicker deployments. No doubt these accomplishments are important from a product development standpoint, i.e. “building the product right”, as well as a product management standpoint, i.e., “building the right product”.

However, in most cases, any objective assessment or quantitative demonstration of improved agility in terms of market-facing metrics (such as revenue impact, percentage of market share, number of paying customers, etc.) is conspicuously absent! Roles in functions such as product management or user-experience design have only begun to spring up in last few years. So the matter of fact is not many have seen real Agile Transformation in India, and those who have seen it, recognize that scaling it across the organization and sustaining it over a reasonable period of time is a wider and chronic problem.

On paper, it all looked familiar and appeared highly successful. However, given that most organizations were either IT outsourcing operations working per or alongside a client’s given process (often in a tight contract lest there be legal disputes around delivery not matching the specs or project plans), or the so-called GICs (the Global In-house Centers, i.e. the in-house delivery arm for MNCs typically headquartered overseas) working on derivative versions (as opposed to “1.0” problems) or smaller-scale problems (compared to their headquarters) or on “lights on” work, or the Startups that were predominantly in early phases of acquiring or post-product/market fit; it often stood out that the landscape looked very different from the US / West Europe (where the work flowed from, for the most part).

So, to bring out the real state of Agile in India in the open, we (Deepti Jain and Tathagat Varma) called for a Summit—a “Change Agents Summit,” to create an authentic account of the situation.

Lessons Learned from Your Experience:
1) Agile Transformation in India is a far fetched dream
2) Headquarters of these IDCs need to truly invest (and have intentions) to bring true agility
3) There is so much power in the people if they come forward authentically, and so it's important to create a social movement that bring out a real report on Agility and Agile Transformation in India.
4) One such gathering is not enough, but a recurring approach is needed. Hence we have set an yearly gathering called Change Agents Summit, which is also India's first Flip Conference that focuses on
Speakers
avatar for Deepti Jain

Deepti Jain

Agile Transformation Strategist, AgileVirgin
Deepti is an Agile practitioner, experienced in creating, leading, and managing an Agile team in a distributed setup. She is active in Agile community building in India via her initiatives and events. For the past 6 years, her primary focus is on Agile and its Scaling with Continuous... Read More →

Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:45 - 11:15 EDT
Chesapeake 7/8/9
  Experience Reports, Experience Report

10:45 EDT

Business Agility Lab: Facilitating a Mindset Shift
Facilitating a Mindset Shift: In this session, we will give you an overview of ways to amplify a mindset shift in your organization. This topic will also address dealing with internal bureaucracies and people defending the status quo. Seating is limited, so please plan appropriately.

Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Agile Alliance Lounge

10:45 EDT

Live from DC, It's Saturday Night: the agility of SNL (John Krewson)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
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Abstract:
Saturday Night Live is one of the longest running Agile institutions in the world. For 44 years, they have developed and delivered small batches of comedy in weekly intervals. Talk about sustainable development. But how do they do it? Turns out, the practices and principles they employ are quite agile. From welcoming changing requirements to maintaining technical excellence, there's a lot we can learn from how they deliver. Join us for a back stage and on stage view into the process SNL has developed over decades to get from concept to cash in one week. Along the way we'll gain a new understanding of empirical process control, continuous delivery, the care and feeding of high performing teams, dependency and deadline management, what it means to deliver value continuously, and how to understand customers. We'll see how their use of Scrum ensures that they deliver on time, and how their use of Kanban keeps work visible for the entire organization. And we’ll probably laugh a lot too.

Learning Outcomes:
  • By the end of this session, attendees will understand:
  • - how the 4 agile values and 12 agile principles can be broadly applied to entire organizations
  • - how frameworks like Scrum and Kanban can operate within and outside of software development
  • - how empirical process control enables delivery in a complex, ambiguous environment
  • - how the relationship between failure and trust impacts the ability to deliver
  • - how more frequent interaction with users improves delivery
  • - the benefits of continuous delivery

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for John Krewson

John Krewson

President, Sketch Development
John Krewson is the founder and President of Sketch Development Services, a software development studio that provides Agile coaching, consulting and training. Sketch delivers software for its customers using Agile principles and practices, and helps other organizations with their... Read More →

Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
National Harbor 4/5
  Agile Companies, Talk

10:45 EDT

7 things we do for our agile transformation at scale (Cecile Auret)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
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Abstract:
Your IT department is so big that you don’t even know the name of all the managers after 2 years! Your government agency has a reputation of bad service and old fashioned digital services! You know the organization must change but you don’t know where to start!
If you belong to a giant organization with silos and old school management practices in place, come to hear our open and honest story of how our agile transformation and learning journey is organized.
We are transforming our work methods since 2015. Through the new practices brought or encapsulated by SAFe®, we tear down historical silos and deeply transform the communication patterns. On the way, we even on-board non-agile teams as well as teams working on desktops and infrastructure.
With an IT department of 1600 people plus as many external contractors, this transformation is no small deal. It takes a good strategy, a small team of driven individuals and a culture open to change despite the unknown. Slowly but surely, culture evolves. The journey is long and full of surprises.
By the end of this session, you will understand how a French government organization is changing to build better solutions, better respect the tax payers’ money and attract new talents.

Learning Outcomes:
  • By the end of this session, you will be able to:
  • • Understand the transformation strategy and roadmap
  • • Discover how the transformation team works
  • • How communication influences the results
  • • How the SAFe framework is assisting the change
  • • How to leverage profession based communities within the enterprise to move to agile

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Cecile Auret

Cecile Auret

Change agent, Pole-emploi
I help teams and programs move to agile with scrum, kanban and the Scaled Agile Framework®. I also construct training material and develop communities of practice. I’m happy to talk about agile methodologies, management and the ups and downs of a transformation.

Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
National Harbor 2
  Agile in Government, Talk

10:45 EDT

Ca$hing in on Tru$t & Tran$parency (Ben Kopel, David Faurio)
Limited Capacity seats available
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Abstract:
Why are many people hesitant to talk openly about how much money they make? Is it a cultural issue? A safety issue? What could happen to trust levels between individuals and within organizations if we were open and transparent about money? How could awkward and uncomfortable compensation negotiations change? How could understanding compensation decisions lead to a heightened desire to learn and stronger organizational agility? Could it help break down other taboo barriers? How does all of this tie to the agile values and principles? Let’s discuss and experience these questions and more through a simulation, and explore how vulnerability can be a game changer.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Discover new ways to unleash higher levels of collaboration, safety and trust within a performing team
  • Learn how to combat discrimination to enable an environment that fosters higher levels of interaction in the team and beyond
  • Get out of your comfort zone by experiencing new ways of discussing transparency with your teams and colleagues

Speakers
avatar for Ben Kopel

Ben Kopel

Director of Agile Coaching, Project Brilliant
Ben is a curious learner focused on building strong teams and organizations through collaboration and continuous improvement. He has been working with agile teams for over ten years in different roles at various organizations: developer, Product Owner, Scrum Master, Agile Coach, trainer... Read More →
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Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
National Harbor 8
  Audacious Salon, Workshop

10:45 EDT

What’s REALLY Going On? An Observational Skills Workshop (Julie Wyman, Mark Grove)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
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Abstract:
Imagine you are asked to sit in on a team’s Sprint Review and Retrospective. The team has been having difficulty forming and the Scrum Master has asked you to observe the team during these two sessions. Are you simply going to watch what’s going on or is there more you can do? Perhaps you are seeing interactions and team dynamics at play without truly realizing what you are observing. And when you do observe, are you injecting your own biases into those observations? Observation is a powerful tool for a coach, but one which we may not take advantage of to its true potential. After all, what exactly should we be observing, anyway?
By learning how to expand our observational skills in a non-biased and non-judgmental manner, we can gain a deeper understanding of team dynamics and interactions, allowing us to offer more meaningful and impactful support, coaching, and empathy. Because there are many observational aspects that pass us by, the best way to become more observant is through deliberate practice. So, let’s practice together through a series of group exercises in a fun and safe setting!
In this interactive workshop, we’ll first review some tools and tips to make you a better observer. Then we’ll divide into small groups of observers and builders. As the builders work to complete a fun task, observers will practice the observation techniques. When the builders’ challenge is complete, we’ll debrief and discuss, allowing plenty of time for observers to share their observations. We'll then switch roles, so each participant has the opportunity to practice observing. If you are looking for new ways to connect with your team, to build skills to enhance your agilist toolkit, or simply to participate in a fun and informative workshop, this session is for you!

Learning Outcomes:
  • Learn new tools and tips to enhance your observational skills
  • Practice observing different types of interactions
  • Build empathy for what it feels to be observed
  • Learn how to share observations in neutral, non-judgmental language

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Julie Wyman

Julie Wyman

Agile Coach, Excella
Julie Wyman is an Agile Coach with Excella. She is a Certified Scrum Professional (CSP) and IC-Agile Certified Professional in Agile Coaching (ICP-ACC) with over nine years of experience in areas including Agile software delivery, traditional project management, and client training... Read More →
avatar for Mark Grove

Mark Grove

Managing Consultant and Agile Coach, Excella Consulting
Mark Grove is an agile coach and Management Consultant with Excella Consulting and an ICAgile Authorized Trainer and Lean Kanban University Accredited Kanban Trainer (AKT). He coaches individuals and teams to continuously deliver value to the customer by embracing an Agile mindset... Read More →

Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake 4/5/6
  Coaching & Mentoring, Workshop

10:45 EDT

Dynamic Reteaming From The Trenches, Doing a 180 on fixed team dogma (Laurens Bonnema, Laïla Nouijeh)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
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Abstract:
If the solution to being bad at integrating software is continuous integration, and the way to stop sucking at delivering software is continuous delivery, isn't it only logical that the answer to taking a performance hit every time team composition changes is continuous reteaming?
In this presentation, we'll take you through our mind-shift about fixed teams, and the experiments we ran to figure out if we could become good at dynamic reteaming. After sharing what we've learned, we'll help you design your own experiments, and we'll share tips and tricks on how to get started.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Learn about Dynamic Reteaming, and design your own experiments to get started with it.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Laurens Bonnema

Laurens Bonnema

Agile Management Consultant, Xebia
Agile Management Consultant and Graphic Facilitator. Mentor to managers creating Agile organizations. I make boring business notes fun!
avatar for Laïla Nouijeh

Laïla Nouijeh

Scrum Master, PGGM
Scrum Master with PGGMMotivate people and teams to max out their awesomeNothing else. Focus is one of the scrum values ;)

Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
National Harbor 11
  Collaboration Culture & Teams, Workshop

10:45 EDT

Visual Thinking for the Visually Reticent (Michael Keeling, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
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Abstract:
The best designers make complex ideas understandable. Whether you design algorithms or user experiences, architectures or team processes, understandable ideas are easier to share with teammates and to reason about. Visual thinking is one of the most powerful tools in our silver toolbox for helping us create understandable ideas. Drawing is a natural ability we all have. As kids we had little trouble expressing our ideas visually, but we’ve noticed that lots of adults have trouble putting pen to paper (or marker to whiteboard) to draw a picture of what’s on their mind. At some point along our journeys to earn diplomas and advanced certifications, many of us lost the ability to think visually. We became masters over textual information but drawing complex ideas became difficult. Luckily, visual thinking skills can be improved with practice. In this session we will reawaken our visual minds and learn how to put those skills to work to help us design software better. By the end of this session you will be well on your way to being able to select abstractions to visualize, draw different perspectives of a system, use your sketches to tell interesting stories, and sketch your ideas more confidently. This is a learning by doing session that you won't want to miss!

Learning Outcomes:
  • Use at least two visual thinking frameworks to help decide what to draw under varying circumstances.
  • Describe the benefits of visual thinking in the context of software design.
  • Explain tips and strategies to teammates for practicing visual thinking and sketching.

Speakers
avatar for Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

Wirfs-Brock Associates
I'm best known as the "design geek" who invented Responsibility-Driven Design and the xDriven meme (think TDD, BDD, DDD..). I'm keen about team effectiveness, communicating complex requirements, software quality, agile QA, pragmatic TDD, and patterns and practices for architecting... Read More →
avatar for Michael Keeling

Michael Keeling

Staff Software Engineer, LendingHome
Michael Keeling is a software engineer at LendingHome and the author of Design It!: From Programmer to Software Architect. Prior to LendingHome, he worked at IBM on the Watson Discovery Service. Keeling has a Master of Science in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary... Read More →

Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
National Harbor 3
  Collaboration Culture & Teams, Workshop

10:45 EDT

The Power of Design Sprints for Product Teams (Carlos Oliveira)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Today, product teams are under pressure to be more creative, innovative and delight customers sooner, but lack the knowledge and skills to know where to start. Agile product teams have frameworks and methods for rapid feedback, but generally lack real data from real users to make good business decisions. As product release cycles run long, team members lose enthusiasm and their focus on the customer.
As a tool, design sprints offer Agile teams an effective and transformative formula for testing ideas with real people, whether you're on a small team at a startup, or inside a large portfolio of projects at an enterprise organization. Within five days, teams move from idea to prototyping to better business decisions, ultimately saving time, effort, and energy over the long-run. Join Carlos Oliveira as he introduces design sprints for product teams, a process for rapid experimentation and learning that helps teams solve big problems and test new ideas in less than five days.
Originally created by three partners at Google Ventures, the process has been proven at hundreds of companies. Carlos has run dozens of design sprints for the Fortune 500 and firmly believes that product teams can benefit and harness the power of design sprints to focus their efforts and deliver more appropriate solutions to market sooner.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Learn how design sprints can solve big challenges and help teams iterate on ideas
  • Understand the guiding principles behind design sprints
  • Learn ways to implement design sprints on Agile product teams
  • Understand how design sprints align teams with common goals and business objectives
  • Understand how design sprints help teams make better decisions with real data

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Carlos Oliveira

Carlos Oliveira

CEO, adaptiveX
Talk to me about human-centered design, innovation and business agility.

Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake A/B/C
  Customers & Products, Workshop

10:45 EDT

Prosperous Metrics: Solving the Scenarios we Struggle to Measure (Zach Bonaker, Jason Kerney)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
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Abstract:
Imagine yourself sitting down in a director’s office with a nervous feeling. “So, about those agile metrics I asked from you…”, she says. Your stomach churns and pulse quickens.
Whether you’ve worked as a manager, coach, or consultant, you’ve likely experienced conflict and confusion over metrics with agile. Traditional metrics which emphasize personal productivity drive negative behaviors, encouraging us to stay busy over working together to achieve goals. Meanwhile, leaders feel dissatisfied with popular “agile metrics,” such as velocity and burn-down charts, when they fail to provide the insights desired.
Are you interested in a different learning experience? You're invited to participate in a debate about metrics and explore three problem scenarios we often struggle to measure. Using a model for organizational measurement as a guide, your input will provide the fuel for an inter-facilitator debate between an Organizational Coach and a Software Coach. From this shared conversation, you will discover which outcome oriented metrics solve organizational needs for performance, quality, and change. Clarity and prosperity between agile and metrics are not out of reach. Come find out how!

Learning Outcomes:
  • Recognize mindsets and beliefs about the nature of data in organizations.
  • Explain the positive and negative effect metrics can have on people, teams, and organizations.
  • Use an effective enterprise framework for developing and applying metrics.
  • Differentiate between metrics for enterprise improvement and success.
  • Compare the use and impact of different metrics in an agile system of work.
  • Select and implement the best metrics for use in tough, real-world scenarios facing agile practitioners.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Zach Bonaker

Zach Bonaker

Benevolent Trouble-Maker, Walmart Labs
Zach Bonaker is a "benevolent trouble-maker" based in San Diego, California, USA and has more than 10 years of experience assisting software organizations with improving working conditions and results. With experience guiding Fortune 500 companies to multi-million dollar startups... Read More →
avatar for Jason Kerney

Jason Kerney

Agile Technical Coach, Some Company
I am a programmer, coach, father, husband and friend. I care deeply about the industry of software development and the communities surrounding it. I love to play with programming languages, yet consider it the greatest accomplishment when we address the humanness that software ultimately... Read More →

Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Maryland Ballroom B
  Data & Metrics, Talk

10:45 EDT

Agile Design Systems that Scale (Miriam Suzanne)
Limited Capacity seats available
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Abstract:
Design Systems, style guides, and component libraries can be essential tools for software development – documenting the relationships between code and design. But design systems take work to build, and require regular upkeep. We don’t all have dedicated teams and budgets to build and maintain a centralized system. Working with an agile team on quickly-growing products, it's important to keep the design system flexible and iterative, continuously up-to-date with the product itself. How can we use meaningful code abstractions and automation to encourage design systems from the start? We'll look at both the human and code aspects of building and maintaining agile design systems that scale.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Understanding of design system goals, deliverables, and processes
  • Understanding abstractions that encourage pattern-making and low-touch documentation
  • Building a meaningful code architecture that supports automation
  • Examples of what we’ve done, where we’ve failed, and where we’re headed

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Miriam Suzanne

Miriam Suzanne

Founder, OddBird
Miriam is a co-founder at [OddBird](https://oddbird.net), with 15 years experience as a project manager, user-experience designer, and front-end architect. She is the creator of [Susy](http://oddbird.net/susy), [True](http://oddbird.net/true), and other popular open source tools... Read More →

Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake D/E/F
  Dev Practices and Craft, Talk

10:45 EDT

A Software Engineer's Guide to DevOps (Laurie Barth)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
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Abstract:
Are you new to DevOps and trying to familiarise yourself with the terminology and concepts? Then this talk is for you. In the talk I will cover the 101 of DevOps including terms and technologies. Join me as I talk about why DevOps is necessary and the current ecosystem supporting it.

Learning Outcomes:
- What is DevOps really?
- What problems is DevOps aiming to solve?
- Current tools and technologies
- Terminology and vocabulary of DevOps
Speakers
avatar for Laurie Barth

Laurie Barth

Software Engineer, Ten Mile Square
Laurie is a software developer and consultant at Ten Mile Square Technologies. Depending on the day she can be found using any number of technologies from different languages to frameworks and other support tools. She loves meeting new people, so come up and say hi!

DevOpsAgile2019PDF pdf
Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
National Harbor 6/7
  DevOps, Talk

10:45 EDT

Leading a 1,000-person Technical Culture Transformation Without Resistance (Arlo Belshee, James Shore)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
What does a leader do to change technical culture?
Case study:
  • Technical debt is costing customers and delaying products.
  • You're a leader, not a coder.
  • The debt is systemic. It's bigger than any one team can solve.
  • You can't stop delivery. You can't break the organization.
  • You have 1,000 people, 200 experts, and factions forming around contradictory solutions.
How do you solve this kind of technical culture problem? Come find out.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Understand the role of autonomy in cultural change.
  • Execute the core technique for unlocking technical improvement.
  • Decide when to expect consistency and when to allow variance.
  • Deconstruct accountability and metrics.
  • See how to apply these ideas to other problems.
  • Provide clear direction to your management team about your organization's next steps.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Arlo Belshee

Arlo Belshee

Team Craftsman, Legacy Code Mender, and Rabblerouser, Tableau Software
Arlo helps you change cultures in large organizations. He transitions hundreds or thousands of people at a time to full technical and cultural prowess in a way that sticks. More importantly, Arlo gives your company the ability to change its own culture. He seeks to be the last consultant... Read More →
avatar for James Shore

James Shore

Consultant, Titanium I.T. LLC
James Shore teaches, writes, and consults on Agile development processes. He is a recipient of the Agile Alliance's Gordon Pask Award for Contributions to Agile Practice, co-author of /The Art of Agile Development/, and co-creator of the Agile Fluency™ Model. You can find his essays... Read More →

Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Maryland Ballroom C
  Enterprise Agile, Workshop

10:45 EDT

Crucial Leadership Conversations – A Chance to Practice What You Preach (Bob Galen)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
A recent HBR article referenced a survey where leaders were found to be uncomfortable with employee conversations. To the tune of ~ 70%. These were simple conversations and not crucial or pivotal conversations. These were even harder for leaders to engage in. A second HBR article/survey on self-awareness showed that while over 85% of leaders felt they were self-aware, only 15% actually were.
Net-net, as leaders, we generally suck at communications and we don’t even know it. But never fear.
In this session, we’ll do two things. First, we’ll share some useful tools and frameworks for your leadership conversational use. But more importantly, we’ll break up on a Dojo format and give you a chance to practice your conversations across a wide-variety of agile transformation scenarios. You can pick one of mine or come up with your own, but everyone will get the chance to refine their situational conversational skills.
Which are the very ones a successful agile adoption needs from you as you envision, engage, and guide your teams through the change.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Setting the stage with some HBR research and findings on leadership communication and self-awareness.
  • A set of communications tools to help frame and execute more effective crucial conversations.
  • Practice and practice of several conversations in a Dojo-style group, so that you take away some practical ideas and experience.
  • Each Dojo session will end with a retrospective/critique, helping to increase your self-awareness.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Bob Galen

Bob Galen

Principal Agile Coach, Agile Moose
Bob Galen is an Agile Practitioner, Trainer & Coach based in Cary, NC. In this role he helps guide companies and teams in their pragmatic adoption and organizational shift towards agile methods of working. Bob has been doing that since the late 1990s, so he’s deeply experienced... Read More →

Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake J/K/L
  Leadership, Workshop

10:45 EDT

Laughing for Leadership - Strengthening Leadership Skills with Improv Comedy (Mary Lemmer)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
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Abstract:
Like an improv show, companies are unscripted and start with nothing. Everyone is figuring out as they go.
Whether they realize it or not, business leaders are improv comedians. Great business leaders and great improvisers adapt to change, build trust among teams, communicate clearly, and make decisions with limited information.
Considering the similarities, I and others have discovered some things improv comedy can teach leaders. During this interactive session, we’ll do improv games and exercised, popularized by theatres that have trained world-famous comedians like Tina Fey and Steven Colbert, to help leaders strengthen leadership skills.
This improv session replaces podiums, tables, and desks with group activities and exercises that get people to practice new skills as opposed to just listening to someone talk about them. In addition to developing important skills, improv is so much fun!

Learning Outcomes:
  • This session is targeted at managers and leaders inside the company who want to develop their own leadership skills, as well as walk away with the tools and methodologies to develop leaders in their teams and companies.
  • Attendees will leave this session with:
  • Improved leadership skills, including, but not limited to the ability to make decisions with limited information, communication skills, emotional intelligence and empathy
  • Knowledge about how to apply improvisational principles to their leadership practice
  • Ideas for how to develop and inspire leaders, with fun and laughter
  • Confidence in their leadership abilities
  • Less fear
  • A way to handle changing environments and the changing learning needs of others
  • A strengthened ability to think quickly
  • Exercises and games they can play with their teams to share their ways of practicing leadership
  • A huge smile on their face!

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Mary Lemmer

Mary Lemmer

Founder, Improv4
Mary Lemmer is an entrepreneur, improviser, comedian,and writer. Mary is the founder of Improv4, an improv training company specializing in cultivating leadership and team building skills for companies, teams and leaders. Mary has helped dozens of companies, including Plenty, Ozlo... Read More →

Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
National Harbor 12/13
  Leadership, Workshop

10:45 EDT

Will the Real Agile Leader Please Stand Out? (Christopher Avery, Michael Sahota)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Mix it up with an outrageously distinguished panel and moderator exploring agile leadership.
  • What is it?
  • How is it different?
  • How do you become an agile leader?
  • What works?
  • What doesn’t?
Leadership -- much less agile leadership -- is a complex reality. There’s no one right way, no proven Top 5 traits, no single approved developmental path.
Instead, there are multiple valid perspectives with complimentary, interlocking, and sometimes even conflicting patterns. But patterns are sure to emerge.
Provocatively moderated by Jake Calabrese, the diverse panel includes
  • Angela Tucci, CEO, Apto
  • Tricia Broderick, Coach at Agile For All
  • Soo Kim, Executive Director, English Services Media Operations, CBC
  • Michael Sahota, Agile Culture & Leadership - Trainer & Consultant
  • Christopher Avery, The Responsibility Process Guy
Get ready for an Agile Panel: You’ll be involved the whole way by providing questions and responding to polls from start to finish.
We’ll laugh, gasp, and be amazed together. Don’t miss it.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Fill your palette by exploring leadership as a complex reality with multiple valid perspectives
  • Get inspired with your own path for growing leadership
  • Discover what leadership styles resonate with you
  • Learn the growth paths and personal transformation required to develop other leaders
  • Decide for yourself who’s a real leader and who’s not

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Christopher Avery

Christopher Avery

CEO, The Responsibility Company
UNLOCKING YOUR NATURAL ABILITY TO LIVE AND LEAD WITH POWER. Christopher Avery "The Responsibility Process guy" is a reformed management consultant. After a decade helping corporations help smart, ambitious professionals find ways to cope with lives they don't want and think they... Read More →
avatar for Michael Sahota

Michael Sahota

Culture & Leadership - Trainer & Consultant - Certified Enterprise Coach, Agilitrix (Independent Consultant)
Michael K Sahota guides and teaches leaders how to create high-performance organizations. As a Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC), Michael has created a proven system for leading organizational change through a practical playbook for high performance. His model for Consciously Approaching... Read More →

Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Maryland Ballroom D
  Leadership, Talk

10:45 EDT

Explaining Agile to your 5-year old, your grandmother or your boss (Nate Adams)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
I remember my first real foray into the Agile mindset. I was a software developer for a mid-sized company and attended a three-day Scrum bootcamp; I left completely bought in. I came back to work ready to transform how we worked. My first stop was the project management group where I proceeded to explain to them why we needed to stop with the Waterfall mindset and start thinking in iterations and increments. I sat back, ready for the accolades I was sure were coming. They kicked me out of their office. The laughter still haunts my dreams.
You know what? Teaching is hard.
Cognitive biases are the result of shortcuts our brain takes to make quick decisions. One particularly insidious bias, confirmation bias, insulates us from ideas that challenge our strongly-held beliefs or views of what is true. When presented with evidence that challenges our views or ideals, we tend to feel a strong psychological discomfort called cognitive dissonance. When not recognized and managed, cognitive dissonance can be a powerful barrier to learning and growing. Because Agile mindset and practices often challenge the status quo in organizations, they can struggle to find traction thanks to the resulting cognitive dissonance. What's a poor agile transformation agent to do when confronted with this?
Join me to experience examples of some of the games, stories, analogies and activities I use to minimize the effects of cognitive dissonance when teaching Agile concepts. I hope you'll take these and use them wherever you feel they will provide value. More importantly, though, we'll discuss successful mindsets and strategies you can use to fill a mental toolbox of your own with stories, activities and examples specifically designed to have maximum impact at your organization.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Recognize why new concepts are sometimes strongly rejected
  • Understand context, and how important shared context is to transfer of ideas
  • Highlight the importance of anecdotes, examples, activities and modern business fables
  • Explore the value of analogies and the perils of allowing them to go too far

Speakers
avatar for Nate Adams

Nate Adams

Agile Coach/Software Architect, NewBoCo

Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Maryland Ballroom A
  Learning, Talk

10:45 EDT

My LPM Toolkit: The Gambler + Sizing Chart (Christopher Pola, Laureen Knudsen)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Do you ever wonder 'Why?' Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) practices are not more prevalent? Do you think about 'Who/What?' is the laggard in your organization's lean-agile journey? Would you agree that adopting LPM can result in exponential improvements?
We know only too well, that managing agile teams in a traditional project management structure is like sticking a square beg in a round hole. If you are managing agile teams with 'traditional' management practices then you are slowing down the teams, and slowing down how the company operates. Essentially stifling the companies ability to improve on all levels. I assume that we all know this. Right? So, what is preventing greater adoption of LPM? Is it fear? Is it a lack of knowledge? A lack of experience or practical guidance?
This session is going to explore the latter. Essentially the session is a call-to-action for implementing Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) practices: it melds theory, practice and introspection to provide actionable insights. In the spirit of agile let us quickly define the problem, examine a hypothesis, and share experiments you can try/test.
As art imitates life, and music never fails to inspire us: can a song written in the summer of 1976 inspire us about the importance of Lean Portfolio Management, and help influence a call-to-action? Let's have a little fun as we explore the world and benefits of LPM.
The session explores the theory, and practices of LPM, with the main focus on LPM success patterns, know-how, tips/tricks that you are encouraged to take back to the office, and start experimenting with. The major practices/processes of a mature LPM will be covered: Ideation, Planning/Re-Planning, Prioritization, Budgeting etc. Remember, a LPM mindset can deliver the next level of (exponential) improvement for your organization.

Learning Outcomes:
  • 1). Every audience member becomes a strong advocate and influencer for implementing LPM.
  • 2). Learn small experiments, practices, tips/tricks, techniques for how to start implementing [and iterating on], the fundamentals of LPM budgeting and planning.
  • 3). How to use an agile mindset to help with the adoption of LPM: challenge the frameworks, the naysayers, and continuously improve, so agile ways of working may thrive in organizations. Reinforce the need for test and learn cycles at the Portfolio level is a key part of this message, and the examples that will be provided.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Christopher Pola

Christopher Pola

Executive Advisor, Rally Software
I like to get inspiration, and learn from many disciplines/hobbies: botany, astronomy, philosophy, the arts, and nascent technology like blockchain or mixed reality.
LK

Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
National Harbor 10
  Project Program & Portfolio Management, Talk

10:45 EDT

Stalwarts - Natalie Warnert (Natalie Warnert)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
tbd

Learning Outcomes:
  • tbd

Speakers
avatar for Natalie Warnert

Natalie Warnert

Sr Agile Consultant, Natalie Warnert LLC
Natalie Warnert is the primary founder of the Women in Agile initiative, which enables, empowers, and expands the distribution of new and diverse ideas in the agile and technology communities worldwide. She is a frequent speaker on business and agile topics including product strategy... Read More →

Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake G/H/I
  Stalwarts, Stalwart

10:45 EDT

Testers in the deployment pipeline - Blockers or assets? (Alan Parkinson)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Companies that release multiple times a day typically financially outperform companies that don’t. Moving from monthly or weekly deployments to deploying multiple times a day requires an introduction of new technical practices and the concept of the deployment pipeline. Without any changes to the testing techniques used and the stages they are applied within the pipeline, testing quickly becomes a bottleneck and a major frustration. The knee jerk reaction to this situation to remove skilled testers and just use "Automated tests".
Testers still have a place in deployment pipelines and in this interactive workshop, we will be using games to introduce the concepts of small frequent deployments, learn why tester practices may create a bottleneck in the deployment pipeline, and what changes you can make to avoid these blockages. The exercises run within the sessions are designed to be taken back to the office to help with coaching your co-workers.

Learning Outcomes:
  • How automation can give a false sense of security to teams and why you still need skilled testers
  • Exercises to help coach, teach, or influence colleagues to adopt changes to testing within the deployment pipeline
  • The impact on testing when developers adopt a trunk-based branching strategy and feature toggles
  • Where different testing practices need to be moved within the deployment pipeline

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Alan Parkinson

Alan Parkinson

CEO and Product Owner, Hindsight Software

Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake 10/11/12
  Testing & Quality, Workshop

10:45 EDT

Title: Finding Efficiencies in Agile Testing (Melissa Tondi)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Imagine if you could add a more time to your testing, where would you spend it? Although we can't add more hours to our day, we can find time by discovering inefficiencies in our current approach.
Many of us feel like we never have enough time to fully test in a given sprint, cycle or other timeframe. We plan for the best case scenario, but, undoubtedly, something happens with our best-laid plans that cause us to feel like we "just didn't test enough." In this session, we will talk about the five areas that may be causing inefficiencies in your overall approach - to include test planning and duplication of testing to the left of QE. Melissa will discuss these five areas and you'll have a chance to share yours with the outcome to be practical solutions that can be implemented quickly. Once we have the plan to reduce or eliminate the inefficiencies, we'll talk about areas you may be able to spend more time in or add to your overall testing strategy – effectively adding more time to do what you do best!

Learning Outcomes:
  • Why is there Never Enough Time?
  • What Testing Activities do we Emphasize?
  • Where do we Find Inefficiencies?
  • How do we Fix them?
  • What would you do with that Time Saved?

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Melissa Tondi

Melissa Tondi

Quality Engineering Leadership, E*TRADE
Melissa Tondi has spent most of her career working within software testing teams. She is the founder of Denver Mobile and Quality (DMAQ), past president and board member of Software Quality Association of Denver (SQuAD), and Sr. Manager of Quality Engineering at E*TRADE, where she... Read More →

Wednesday August 7, 2019 10:45 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake 1/2/3
  Testing & Quality, Talk

11:00 EDT

Agile Advice
We all need advice from time to time, and having someone to bounce ideas off or share their thoughts can lead to great insights and uncover creative personalized solutions. At Agile2019, we are excited to provide Agile Advice as an offering tailored for you to bring your toughest questions, your biggest puzzles, and your worst hurdles.

Agile Advice is a 20 minute one-on-one conversation with an expert ready to offer their time and insight to those that are looking for a bit of advice. This diverse group of experts will be ready to chat about a wide range of agile topics such as culture, training, engineering, frameworks and leadership. Make sure to stop by and sign up for actionable advice on your Agile journey.
Speakers
avatar for Reese Schmit

Reese Schmit

Sr. Agile Coach, Agile Velocity
Reese Schmit is a Sr. Agile Coach at Agile Velocity. Over the past 15 years, she's done just about every job in the software industry, from User Experience Designer to Product Manager, QA Engineer to Scrum Master. This varied experience has taught her to frame problems from different... Read More →
avatar for Chris Li

Chris Li

Founder, SparkPlug Agility LLC
I am a passionate and energetic Certified Scrum Trainer and Enterprise Agile Coach who is always interested in meeting new people and picking up new skills. I enjoy talking about topics around agile training, coaching, and consulting as well as designing courses and public speak... Read More →

Wednesday August 7, 2019 11:00 - 15:00 EDT
Potomac Foyer
  Agile Alliance Lounge

11:30 EDT

How I tried Holacracy and Lived to Tell the Tale (Sandy Mamoli)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
This is the story of introducing Holacracy at a New Zealand tech company, whose CTO gave me a one-line instruction: “I’d like you to make it happen.”
Come along and learn from our successes and failures from our quest to create a truly self-organising organisation, learn what worked for us and what didn't and find out how we resolved the question of whether we had joined a cult or actually improved our business.

Lessons Learned from Your Experience:
  • 1) Holacracy will amplify the culture that's already in place. It won’t change or improve it!
  • 2) Holacracy, Agile and common sense will make a big difference to companies in the future
  • 3) It’s not about doing Holacracy but about being holacratic!

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Sandy Mamoli

Sandy Mamoli

Me, Nomad8
I'm a former Olympian, a geek, a gadget junkie, international speaker and author of "Creating Great Teams - How Self-Selection Lets People Excel". I have a masters degree in artificial intelligence and I know quite a lot about Agile.

Wednesday August 7, 2019 11:30 - 12:00 EDT
Chesapeake 7/8/9
  Experience Reports, Experience Report

12:00 EDT

Lunch
Wednesday August 7, 2019 12:00 - 14:00 EDT
Prince George Exhibit Hall
  Meals

12:00 EDT

Sponsor Exhibits
Sponsors are an important element of the Agile2019 Conference. Be sure to stop by and say Hi to all of our Sponsor Exhibitors in the Prince George Exhibition Hall at Agile2019.
Wednesday August 7, 2019 12:00 - 15:45 EDT
Prince George Exhibit Hall
  sponsors

14:00 EDT

Harvesting Mob Programming Patterns: Observing how we work (Michael Keeling, Joe Runde)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
We were huge advocates of pair programming and have directly experienced the many benefits of pairing, but when we first heard about mob programming with thought it sounded crazy! Perhaps... so crazy it might actually work. Mob programming is a software development practice in which the whole team works on the same code at the same time. In our experience, mob programming can be significantly better than programming alone. While mobbing, we've created some of the best code our team has ever written faster than the typical code review cycle. We've explored new domains and architectures quickly. We've helped individuals feel more confident in their ability to change the system and built strong bonds within the team. In addition to these huge wins, we've also experienced a few bitter failures. Mobbing can be a tremendous waste of time in some circumstances. Not all mobs can work on all problems. Sometimes people forget how to be a good teammate.
In this report we explore a set of mob programming patterns discovered by two different teams and two different companies -- LendingHome and IBM -- after more than a year of practice. Patterns we found include emergent roles in the mob such as the recorder, researcher, and facilitator, collaboration patterns such as create a punch list and form splinter groups, and driving patterns such as think out loud and asking the mob to tell me what to write. While the patterns themselves proved interesting and useful, we were surprised at how much our mob programming improved after even modest reflection regarding our practice. In addition to the mob programming patterns, some of which corroborate experiences shared by other teams, we discuss the benefits of pattern harvesting as a mechanism for supporting reflective practice and general process improvement.

Lessons Learned from Your Experience:
  • • In the report we explore about half a dozen mob programming patterns
  • • There are many ways "right" ways for a mob to organize and work together.
  • • Patterns can be harvested through story telling and used as a strong feedback loop to improve practice.
  • • We can use concrete examples of practice, such as a patterns catalog, to make it easier for the team to want to try a potentially controversial practice such as mob programming.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Michael Keeling

Michael Keeling

Staff Software Engineer, LendingHome
Michael Keeling is a software engineer at LendingHome and the author of Design It!: From Programmer to Software Architect. Prior to LendingHome, he worked at IBM on the Watson Discovery Service. Keeling has a Master of Science in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary... Read More →
avatar for Joe Runde

Joe Runde

IBM
Joe Runde is a software engineer who recently started his career at IBM. There he works on Watson while teaching about machine learning methods and learning about software design from many smarter folks. Joe has an MS in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University and a BS in... Read More →

Wednesday August 7, 2019 14:00 - 14:30 EDT
Chesapeake 7/8/9
  Experience Reports, Experience Report

14:00 EDT

Business Agility Lab: Alignment with HR
Alignment with HR: In this session, we will discuss how to engage with your HR department in order to create a transparent organization. Seating is limited, so please plan appropriately.
Wednesday August 7, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Conference Entrance
  Agile Alliance Lounge

14:00 EDT

HR Goes Agile (Zuzana Sochova)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Agile HR is an enabler of an Agile organization. “Don’t just do Agile, grow Agile in your organization.”
As Agile application extends out of IT and is more and more common at the organizational level, the need for change in the HR is inevitable. Agile changes entire organizational culture, which is built on collaboration, servant leadership, and empowerment, that brings into the picture variety of different tools, practices, and last but not least new focus to employee experience.
Join this interactive workshop to share experiences, practices, and tools with other HR professionals and leaders on how to support the success of Agile at the organizational level. Learn from different organizations, get inspired by different approaches and case studies.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Understand the fundamental need behind the Agile HR shift
  • Be aware of how HR can help the organization to change the mindset
  • Know what practices to avoid
  • Get a number of useful practices to become your Agile HR journey

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Zuzana Sochova

Zuzana Sochova

Agile Coach & Scrum Trainer, CST, sochova.com
Zuzana “Zuzi” Šochová is an independent Agile coach and trainer and a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) with more than fifteen years of experience in the IT industry. She started with agile and Scrum back in 2005, when she was implementing agile methods in the USA. From that time... Read More →

Wednesday August 7, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Chesapeake 4/5/6
  Agile Companies, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Shorten that Feedback Cycle - Deliver Products that Customers Value (Ankur Saini)
Limited Capacity filling up
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Is there a silver bullet for implementing agile to deliver products that are fit for purpose and fit for use? Shorten your feedback loops is what experts agree on. However, feedback loops in highly structured, siloed and regulated environments, such as the Government, have built-in challenges, ranging from regulation to competing stakeholder interests, which inhibit agility if left unaddressed. This session presents a backstage pass to the journey of a mission-critical system at General Services Administration (GSA) - from a well-intended failure to a hallowed agile success story - through the eyes of the GSA Program Manager. By examining the successes and failures along this journey through an interactive conversation, we will discuss how we have conjured up an agile methodology that works within our constraints at GSA, and has allowed us to enhance user experience for over 2000 users in a short amount of time. This methodology optimizes a series of interrelated feedback loops (from product conceptualization through production deployment) to deliver customer-centric products faster. Using workplace experiences, we will interactively examine how different organizations within GSA, including but not limited to Contracting Office, Program Office and IT, have collaborated to making agile a reality at GSA despite being geographically dispersed. Further, we will share our observations and techniques we’ve employed to minimize risk from cognitive biases and likely pitfalls that one may encounter when attempting to implement agile practices.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Understanding the agile methodology as a network of interrelated feedback loops.
  • Jump-starting implementation of agile practices in their organization to deliver customer-centric products through optimizing feedback loops.
  • Detecting anti-patterns in the agile practices and in their organization and collaboratively develop solutions to course-correct.
  • Defining success metrics for their process and products, and identifying indicators that impact those success metrics.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Ankur Saini

Ankur Saini

Program Manager, U.S. General Services Administration
Ankur Saini is a solutions architect who partners with CXOs, Product Owners and Developers to deliver business value through successful technology initiatives. Certified as a PMP, CSM and ITIL Expert, he has over 15 years of experience leading multi-million dollar software development... Read More →

Wednesday August 7, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Chesapeake D/E/F
  Agile in Government, Talk

14:00 EDT

Part 1 of 2: Upward Trend (Stuart McCalla)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Imagine a chance to get to put your agile knowledge on a map, the knowledge you paid for, earned, cherish and defines you both professionally and personally. Now imagine other people around you doing the same building a map based on connections between what you know and what they know. This is the opportunity that we will have as we come together and map all the concepts, frameworks and lenses into an integral map. A map that can hold all of us with complexity and nuance.
“Most of us are only willing to call 5% of our present information into question any one point.”
― Ken Wilber
When we all get together and hold a simple enough meta-framework that can hold all of our combined knowledge and we will get to examine our ideas with the goal to create connections in the Agile community. Possibilities abound when new ideas get sparked and new endeavors get launched as this rich fertile exchange is allowed to happen.

Learning Outcomes:
  • This will evolve into a map of Agile practices that will spark discussion and allow people to see connections. It will be captured real time with either snapshots or time-lapse photography to see the wall being built.

Speakers
avatar for Stuart McCalla

Stuart McCalla

Executive and Leadership Coach, Innerstand

Wednesday August 7, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
National Harbor 8
  Audacious Salon, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Communicating Effectively: Or Teaching Your Team How Not to Suck at Giving Feedback (Sarah Urriste, Josh Mehler)
Limited Capacity full
Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Susie the developer yells “You don’t know what you’re doing!”  at Joe the Solutions Architect before storming out of the room and slamming the door. Dreaded by both ScrumMasters and Agile Managers alike, scenarios like this are one of many that you will encounter in this workshop. By arming your team with a communication feedback model, you can help them determine if and when to respond to challenging situations they may encounter in their work. 
After this presentation and workshop, you will be able to facilitate your own Communication Feedback session with your team, and help team members decide if feedback is appropriate, and help them structure their feedback in a way that will result in more positive outcomes, get to the root of the issues they are trying to solve and improve the health of the team. 

Learning Outcomes:
  • Provide Scrum Masters and other Agile Leaders with a model they can employ to help team members communicate effectively amongst themselves and resolve conflicts. We will provide a few scenarios and follow-up exercises for attendees to take with them.

Attachments:
Speakers
avatar for Sarah Urriste

Sarah Urriste

Enterprise Portfolio Manager, HealtheSystems
Once a Scrum Master, always a Scrum Master :) Even though I am working at the Portfolio level with a broader audience, the basics still hold true at every level of the organization and effective communication is always important. I am the Enterprise Portfolio Manager for HealtheSystems... Read More →
avatar for Josh Mehler

Josh Mehler

Scrum Master, Healthesystems
I'm a Scrum Master with a Ph.D. in Rhetorical Studies, Education, and Digital Media.

Agile 2019 Communicating Effectively Or Teaching Your Team How Not to Suck at Giving Feedback Urriste Mehler pdf
Wednesday August 7, 2019 14:00 - 15:15 EDT
Chesapeake 1/2/3
  Coaching & Mentoring, Workshop

14:00 EDT

Part 1 of 2: How to coach Exploratory Testing sessions (Lanette Creamer)
Limited Capacity seats available
Feedback Survey

Abstract:
Exploratory testing is one of the fastest ways to discover unknown and potentially subjective quality issues that go beyond requirements, like usability and integration issues. If you aren't a tester or a deeply technical coach, how do you organize and run effective exploratory testing? Given any group of participants willing to perform testing, you will be able to confidently prepare, coach, and present the results of exploratory testing sessions as well as handle anything unexpected that may come up with confidence. In part one of the workshop, you will learn how to prepare, write and review charters, and some techniques for isolating and reporting issues. You will see examples of ways to present the results of the exploratory testing session, from the simplest low tech methods to a more complex visual diagramming presentation depending on what is important to convey for that project.
In part 2 of the workshop, we will use all of these techniques into practice together, performing and leading exploratory testing. Participants should bring a laptop (preferably), tablet or at a minimum a smart phone.

Learning Outcomes:
  • Attendees will be able to write and review exploratory testing charters
  • Techniques to prioritize areas of focus using metrics
  • Organize environments so that testers can start immediately
  • Run successful exploratory testing sessions
  • Assist testers in isolating and reporting useful information without interrupting flow
  • Debrief and report results of the testing

Attachments:
Speakers
LC