Agile2019

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:

• state of business agility - Sally Evan2019.pdf

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:

• Agile Alliance 2019 Example.pdf

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:

• Agile2019SizingMonteCarlo.pdf

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:

• Corrosive expertise - Agile2019.pdf

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:

• Stop Complaining and start learning! Agile 2019 (8).pdf

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:

• PerformanceAppraisals.pdf

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:

• CS_Jeff revision Cutter_May_2019_RM3_1.pdf
• Riccardos_Restaurant_Scrum_Case_Study_Agile_2019_Washington_DC_6th_August_2019.pdf

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.

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:

• Leading a 1,000-Person Technical Transformation Without Resistance.pdf
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Abstract:
When the people of an organization embark on their quest for increased agility, they are essentially begin working on the opposite side of a paradox that has been ignored. Often times, though as they take their journey, they begin experiencing the downside of now ignoring the the traditional, control-based approach and there is an outcry to revert. A dilemma is created.
What are these paradoxes? Well, the first four you encounter are described in the Agile Manifesto’s values. If one could have both sides of the “over” statements easily, we’d take them. Successfully maximizing the appropriate upsides of each side of these values while minimizing the downsides becomes a swinging pendulum to manage. This becomes key to leading others in your organization. If you are a manager, team leader, or executive trying help your organization get traction, then this session will provide some new insights into how to balance change with stability.
These four values are just the start of the paradoxes that will emerge as you take your journey. This workshop will help you use a technique called Polarity Management to help manage the upsides and downsides of this balancing act so that you can lead people effectively. Once out in the open, dilemmas created with a swing one way or another become easier to handle and perhaps can even be avoided.

Learning Outcomes:

• Recognizing the paradoxes within an organization’s Agile Journey
• Applying the Polarity Management technique to understand and manage them effectively
• Understanding how to depict your paradox using a Polarity Map

Attachments:

• Agile Leadership Journey-Leading People-Managing Paradoxes.pdf

Abstract:
In Scrum, we measure performance using velocity. However, the velocity of one team cannot be compared to the velocity of another, since it is a relative measure that is only meaningful to the team using it. So can we accurately compare the performance of teams? Measuring Value Added Time as a percentage of Total Time is a metric that is used in Lean Manufacturing to help get a better understanding of production processes and optimize those processes.
Verbruggen et al (2019) introduced an adaptation of this metric to the Agile environment (see attachment). Giving teams an objective insight into their flow of work helps them optimize their efficiency and compare themselves to other teams. This adapted metric is called Process Efficiency and is comparable across teams, technologies, and domains of practice. Jakobsen and Sutherland (2009) showed that using the pattern "Good Housekeeping (scrumplop.org)" and improving flow (process-efficiency) to over 50% allowed every team to achieve 400% increase in velocity - twice the work in half the time. Sutherland coached an Indian team to put the average process efficiency of a story into their Scrum tooling. By the third day of the Sprint the team had increased their process efficiency from 10% to 80% (using the pattern "Swarming: One Piece Continuous Flow (scrumplop.org)" and on the fourth day, completed all stories planned for a two- week Sprint.
The standard definition of Lean is that process efficiency is greater than 25%. Focussing on this metric is emerging as the fastest way to improve team performance. An easy way to implement this metric using points, story start time, and story end time will show how your Scrum tooling has all the data necessary to calculate this metric and how to use it to improve team delivery capability.

Learning Outcomes:
1. Learn why process efficiency is one of the most important metrics for agile teams.
2. Understand the impact of improving process efficiency on team velocity.
3. Learn how to easily calculate process efficiency using data easily available in any Scrum tool.
4. Understand how to use this metric to achieve the fastest path to hyperproductivity.
Attachments:

• Process Efficiency - Adapting Flow to the Agile Improvement Effort revised submission 20180828.pdf

Abstract:
What can we do as Coaches to resist the temptation to step in and offer advice? Coaching Triggers offer a new framework to help you stay in the coaching mode, work from the coachee’s agenda, and remain neutral. This framework was developed from years of coaching clients and training coaches.
As an Agile Coach we have four interaction modes: pure coaching (aka professional coaching), mentoring, teaching, and facilitating. When we are purely in the Coaching mindset, we are working to help the coachee come up with their own solutions. All of your mental energy should be focused on looking for opportunities to assist the coachee in moving forward in their own problem solving process.
Coaching triggers are pairs of circumstances and corresponding techniques that help to identify how we can best help the coachee move forward. For instance, if the coachee is potentially off-track from their stated purpose for the coaching session, that’s a trigger that indicates using a technique like focusing, interrupting, or orienting. On the other hand, if they seem distracted, consider using the technique of releasing. Each of these triggers utilizes "powerful questions" that are open-ended, non leading, and specific to the trigger being used.
In this session we will introduce the following coaching triggers:

• Interrupting - skillfully pausing the coachee to check if they are exploring relevant territory
• Orienting - keeping the coachee working towards their stated goal
• Spectating - resisting the urge to interrupt for your own sake
• Releasing - detecting distractions and allowing the coachee to release them

The majority of the workshop will be practicing the coaching triggers in pairs. For each trigger we will provide the circumstances, an example of how to use the trigger, and the powerful questions that go along with the trigger.

Learning Outcomes:

• Better understanding of the differences between Agile Coach and Agile Expert
• How coaching triggers can help to stay in the coaching mindset
• Some new powerful questions
• The coaching triggers of focusing, interrupting, orienting, spectating, and releasing

Attachments:

• CoachingTriggersHandout.pdf
• CoachingGrooveSupplement.pdf
• CoachingGrooveAgile2019_final.pdf

Abstract:
Traditional approaches to portfolio prioritization based on annual planning cycles and a small number of executives making decisions behind closed doors create apathy and distrust, fail to leverage the wisdom of the organization and too often result in underfunded initiatives that fail to realize their goals. Simply put, traditional approaches to portfolio prioritization aren't very Agile.
Inspired by the Agile Manifesto value of "Customer collaboration over Contract Negotiation", this workshop presents a new approach to portfolio prioritization based on seven principles and four collaborative frameworks. The seven principles helps reframe how to engage the act of portfolio prioritization while the collaborative frameworks provide the tools for collaboration. This interactive workshop will briefly present the seven principles and then move to a thorough exploration and hands-on case study of the following frameworks:

1. 20/20 Vision: A framework to help participants prioritize strategic objectives.
2. Prune the Future: A framework to create roadmaps and longer term plans aligned to strategic objectives.
3. Participatory Budgeting: Most organizations will generate more good ideas than can be funded. Participatory Budgeting is a process through which a group of stakeholders decides on, or contributes to, decisions made on the use of shared resources, such as portfolio budgets or development team capacity, resulting in fully funded initiatives.
4. Investments by Horizon: This frameworks helps portfolio teams in making choices that balance near-term objectives with long-term innovation.

Each participant will also be given a learning log and an ebook that provides further insight into how to leverage these frameworks.

Learning Outcomes:

• Identify problems with traditional approaches to Portfolio Prioritization
• Identify the different planning processes that are required for different planning time horizons (strategic vs tactical time horizons)
• Distinguish between project prioritization and resource allocation
• Distinguish between "new business" and "run the business" and "infrastructure" investments
• Ensure that initiatives are properly funded before execution
• Gain experience with collaborative frameworks that support portfolio management

Attachments:

• 2019-Aug-09-Collaborative Frameworks for Portfolio Prioritization.pdf

Abstract:
Have you ever had clients that cannot change their habits, even if they are aware of the negative impact on their life or performance? Desire and motivation do not seem to be enough: even when it could actually mean keeping or losing their job, the ability to change remains elusive.
How can coaches support their clients to overcome their own immunity to change and succeed?
Participants in this workshop will learn a coaching framework that can support this change. It is a powerful tool that can be used with individuals, teams, organisations. Through interactive and engaging exercises, participants will amplify and practice their ability to influence change. They will learn to recognise the immune system that is holding them back from changing. They will give clients the keys to unlock their potential and finally move forward. All while having fun.
Come learn a simple, yet subtle technique to uncover and overcome immunity to change. You will boost your capability help your clients move forward.

Learning Outcomes:

• By the end of this workshops participants will learn to:
• - assess their clients' immunity to change
• - own the immunity mapping technique through practice
• - support a peer client to uncover immunity to change, identifying assumptions and limiting beliefs
• - expand their own ability to help clients move forward.

Abstract:
You will learn how to facilitate the discussions your org needs and your org will learn how to have constructive dialogs. I am going to demonstrate how to use some of these techniques in the workshop. And all the attendees are going to be fully immersed and ready to wield their new knowledge the very next day at work.
Come learn how to help your team(s), org(s), and company(ies)!!!
For more information, watch my video at http://youtu.be/UNOjqMUv8h0
A version of this workshop that was presented at Agile Tour Sydney 2016 is at http://bit.ly/2f4Bie8
A version of this workshop that was presented at AgileNZ 2017 is at http://youtu.be/i4ewZ3xvhi8

Learning Outcomes:

• Attendees will be introduced to Liberating Structures as a set of protocols for communication and collaboration. The purpose and intent of the protocols will be discussed and described. Attendees will actually participate in a variety of Liberating Structure exercises, enabling the techniques to be applied immediately. To summarize the session a set of online resources will be provided to the attendees so they can research further at their leisure.

Attachments:

• Liberating Structures.pdf