When accountability is lacking, the unfortunate repercussion is that it drags down morale and hurts productivity. This may lead to members of your team finger pointing and blaming others, instead of spending time solving problems and finding solutions which boosts productivity. That’s when it’s time to step up and find ways to improve accountability.
This session will help improve personal accountability (or help managers assist staff in doing so) to achieve the things that matter, get more done and realize the full potential of yourself or team. We will explore personal styles of communication, teamwork, accountability and responsibility in the workplace. Each participant will leave with knowledge of proven strategies that can be used immediately to begin improving accountability for better results.
Team members often come out of initial scrum training expecting to be a cohesive and productive team in their first sprint, only to find themselves struggling. It has become more and more clear over time that teams need a chance to digest the learnings from training, be purposeful about team forming, prepare their physical and technical environment, and figure out how they will work together on a daily basis. This practice has become known as Sprint-0.
Together we will collaborate on how to execute a successful Sprint-0 to prepare your next team for faster success. You will take away solid ideas and information on aspects of Sprint-0 as we discuss when and why Sprint-0 is applicable, create a backlog of Sprint-0 items, determine exit criteria, and learn how to facilitate the team efficiently through to the launch of their first sprint. Join us for a great collaborative session!
My presentation will be based on a blog post that I wrote recently, which was inspired by some of the rifts that I've been seeing in the agile community. I believe we need to focus on the values and principles of the agile manifesto and stop worry about being right. Ultimately, our collective goal should be the success of the teams and organizations we work for and with, and we should recognize that evolution and new ideas are part of achieving that success. I plan on presenting my personal perspective and what I've experienced around this issue, and then provide some thoughts on how we can get past the "My Agile is Better Than Your Agile" mentality.
You know the old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words”. And you know what it means - pictures convey so much more about people or an idea you’re trying to describe than you could ever hope to with words. So why is it in knowledge work, that some of the most important information and conversations are captured and conveyed with words alone? Whether these words are text in a document or hidden in a tool, we’re settling for less. Our work pleads for visualizations.
Chris will share how using visualization has changed his projects and his company. His experiences working with large and small teams in a variety of industries has shown that although people implement popular tools, they don’t know how to leverage them.
Chris will share how visualization methods enable better decisions and help teams develop shared understanding.
Negativity surrounds the concept of existing code. This negativity is baked into the language we use. We work on 'legacy projects', 'dirt field projects', 'rescue projects', 'antiquated projects', 'ancient projects'. I'd like to use the construction metaphor to look at these projects in a different light. I've been inspired by the TV program, 'This Old House'. I think the care and attention that's given existing structures while making them do more for their inhabitants is a great model for how we can treat our software projects. This talk isn't language specific; it's themes and guidance will apply to anyone who's worked on a project that someone else left behind or anyone who is likely to do so in the future.
Agile works… we get it. You don’t have to sell people on the underlying principles anymore. Agile has gone mainstream. That said, many large scale agile transformations efforts are struggling. Many transformations have failed. Many organizations are on their second or third attempt and can’t figure out why things aren't working. It’s easy to blame the people. It’s easy to blame the process. It’s easy to blame the culture, and it’s especially easy to blame the management.
While all these factors may certainly come into play, the underlying problem is that most large organizations just weren’t built to be agile. Our challenge then is to figure out how to safely and pragmatically begin refactoring your company into the kind of organization that can adopt agile and sustain the transformation at scale. Refactoring an enterprise takes careful planning and commitment, and must be done in a way demonstrates value early and preserves your ability to make and meet near term commitments.
This talk will begin by introducing a framework for understanding the type of company you work in; it's delivery constraints, and the business drivers that are likely working against your agile transformation. We’ll follow by exploring a strategy for establishing an end state vision and operational model to guide your transformation. Finally, we’ll define an approach for incrementally introducing change, measuring outcomes, and sustaining the change once things really get going.
Agile transformations tend to focus on the team and management level. A typical transformation is largely about creating teams, implementing team practices, and implementing management practices. We implement these practices and eliminate obsolete ones with the intent to maintain alignment with Agile values and principles, but also because we have the most access to these areas. It's easier to change something when we have the authority to change it. But what about transformation at the leadership and executive level? How do we transform leaders when our access is limited and there are few practices we can apply to guide their behavior?
An Agile transformation cannot exclude leadership. Executives and leaders need to be included as a specific element of a transformation, but they cannot be transformed simply by implementing a set of practices. Mindsets must be transformed. In this talk, John Krewson, Agile Transformation Lead at MasterCard, will identify the required skills and characteristics of a successful change agent, then outline an approach for changing mindsets at the leadership level, drawing from personal experience and several change models.
In the good old days we used to experiment and do what felt good. One Scrum team, that's a good time but we eventually need a little more excitement. We add a couple more teams and it gets interesting enough to have an occasional Scrum-of-Scrums. When a few more teams come along, well... now you've got a party (aka joint Release Planning)! Then at some point, we jumped from there to a robust framework with lots of prescribed roles and rules that is unwieldy for most organizations outside the Fortune 500. The overhead of SAFe for a typical mid-size company is too much to bear, yet teams and management are at a loss for a lighter scaling method to coordinate their handfuls of teams.
Together we will examine several alternative scaling methods and examples applicable to mid-size firms where SAFe is likely to be over burdensome. Participants will take away a set of usable methods, as well as ideas for further investigation and experimentation in scaling teams in an agile context.
It’s gonna be a party, just like the good old days... before we had to be SAFe in order to scale.
