AgileIndy 2015

Are you ready to sweat? Okay, so we won't be physically sweating, but prepare to increase your agility through interactive exercises and simulations that help explore some of the key concepts behind agile and lean. You will leave with a better understanding of why agile and lean work so well and tools that can help you share this understanding with others on your teams back at the office.

Your team practices Agile, and has had success with it. But problems with commitments in the sprint, and story estimation still rear their ugly head. To tame these problems, your team is ready for more mature user story practices. You want to integrate quality and testing into writing User Stories. Eric introduces a technique that he has used to successfully solidify stories within and after the sprint. Using collaboration between team members, Eric shows how your team can interactively clarify committed stories, using testing cadence and introduce test automation early.

Agile practitioners adopt kanban with high expectations: decreased cycle time, increased throughput and a clearer look at where projects stand. But where do all these high hopes come from? And how do you make them come true? In this talk, we’ll explore the underlying principles behind kanban—from systems thinking to lean manufacturing—and draw some fun parallels to everything from car traffic to passenger trains. Understanding these core concepts is the real key to moving faster with kanban.

This talk is for agile beginners, teams who are considering or have recently adopted kanban, and teams who want to optimize their kanban process.
They’ll learn:

• What kanban really means—a brief history and how it applies to agile software development 
• Why limiting work in progress (WIP) is essential to speeding up your development efforts + tips for setting WIP limits 
• The right way to pull cards from one state to the next (and why it’s a lot like trains) 
• How to spot bottlenecks in your process, fix them and maximize output

When you follow the Agile process, your team is likely to deliver value and produce good results. At the same time, getting great results consistently warrants deep involvement from all players – Senior Management, Teams, Product Owners and Scrum Masters.
The real breakthrough will occur when the organization becomes a true learning organization, where employees feel empowered to create shared visions and work toward that vision through personal mastery and team learning.

Over five years ago, the authors began their Agile journey by participating in a large scale transformation from waterfall to Agile. Their path has led them through the initial Agile rollout to a new plateau of sustaining Agile, where most people understand the mechanics and principles of Agile. The authors will share points to keep in mind during an Agile roll out, sustaining an Agile organization and their plans on how to evolve to a learning organization.

Take away from this session would be answers to the following questions:
• What does it mean to sustain Agile in large organization?
• How to design a culture that supports the sustainment of Agile?
• How can the organization support a move toward a learning organization?
• What is blocking the organization from moving forward?
• How do we encourage continuous improvement?
• How to support/encourage communication across teams?