Agile and Beyond 2017

In order to achieve extraordinary coordination, starlings flock in formations called murmurations. These formations behave mathematically similar to metals becoming magnetized and snow crystals before an avalanche. These are examples of systems where collective phenomena emerge from the short-range interactions of individual participants. Studies show that change in direction (orientation) of individual participants affect group behavior more than velocity. This sort of relationship is known as a scale-free correlation. In this presentation, I will discuss how the concepts associated with murmuration, along with engineering and teams practices can be applied to software teams, in order to reach a state of criticality.

This presentation will help you quantify software qualities. Quality in delivered software is intangible and very different from quality in physical goods. Some external attributes of quality software—free from defects and easy to maintain—are reflections of the code’s internal qualities. When classes and methods are cohesive, non-redundant, well-encapsulated, assertive, and explicitly coupled, they are less prone to mistakes and far easier to debug, test, and maintain. David Bernstein asserts that paying attention to code quality helps us focus on the key principles, patterns, and practices used by expert developers. If you don’t pay attention to critical code quality attributes, iterative development practices can quickly degrade code into a maintenance nightmare. Join David and take a deep dive into the code qualities that make software more maintainable and less bug friendly. Create software that not only provides value now but also is easy to change and extend so it can continue to deliver value far into the future.

Over 3 months John recorded over 60 hours of interviews and spoke to some of the most respected people in the industry to produce an audio documentary that attempts to answer the question “What is safety? And why is it important anyway?”

This highly interactive talk will present the findings and guide and challenge you through a journey to understanding safety. Including short interactive sessions and role play exercises to cover the following topics:

• What is safety and what does it look and feel like?
• Is trust essential to high performing teams?
• Is vulnerability at the core of a creative team?
• How can leaders can help foster (or hinder) safety?

This talk has grown as John created the new podcast The Agile Path. The first season on this podcast (launching early 2017) is about safety in teams. John has interviewed world renowned specialists in the field; Christopher Avery, David Marquet, Jerry Weinberg, Esther Derby, Johanna Rothman, Woody Zuill and many more in over 60 hours of audio. This has been a fascinating deep dive learning experience for John and he hopes to explore these insights with the audience.

“My Agile is better than your Agile.” It seems like every day, I witness a Twitter war between two thought leaders criticizing one another’s framework. Ironically, these frameworks are simply a set of practices that apply the same set of values and principles. Don’t get me wrong, I am not minimizing the value of a framework. Many of them have been created by some of the great thought leaders of our time. They have provided us with a wealth of tried and true practices, all of which reside in my Agile coaching toolbox.

The truth is frameworks and practices are simply a means to an end, better business outcomes. CEOs are not interested in Scrum, SAFe, or Kanban, but rather customer satisfaction, time to market, reliability, and innovation, to only name a few. As practitioners, I included, we tend to get hung up on the framework, allowing it to drive outcomes. Instead, we should be applying an experimental approach in which we enable the desired outcome to drive the practices we adopt.

Over the past few years, books like The Lean Startup (Ries), Lean Change Management (Little), and The Lean Enterprise (Owens/Fernandez), have influenced me to take this somewhat backwards view to Agile transformation and organizational change. I have had my share of successes and failures as a change agent, but I am finding more success with this approach, and it just feels right. The purpose of this presentation is to help others see change initiatives through the same lens.

As Agilists, we need to be adaptive and maintain an open mind. Organizations are complex adaptive systems, each unique with its own set of challenges, values, and objectives. There is certainly not a one size fits all approach for organization Agile adoption. To add to the complexity, every Agile team within the system is different in its own sense, each having slightly different goals.

Given the enormous complexity, where do we start? The answer is not Scrum, but rather outcomes.

Learning Objectives for Attendees:

1. Agile is a mindset, based off of 4 values, defined by 12 principles, manifested through unlimited amount of practices, that enable business outcomes
2. There are number of different frameworks offered by the Agile community, not just Scrum
3. Review the a high level business outcome(s) that each framework is tailored to such as customer satisfaction, time to market, employee satisfaction, reliability, flow, adaptability, and predictability
4. Share a “practice catalog” that I have built over the years that consists of practices across multiple frameworks and which outcomes they contribute to
5. Given the uniqueness of each organization, framework practices should be continuously experimented with within the team and the organization until the right blend is found to meet their desired outcomes.

After being educated on the high level business outcome that each framework is tailored to help achieve, the presentation will include an exercise in which the participants will be tasked with building an organization team structure given a set of unique objectives and business outcomes.

What if we took Extreme Programming and said it’s not “extreme” enough? What if we took pair programming and cranked it to 11? Mob programming is a technique with “all the brilliant people working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and on the same computer.”

I was lucky enough to be on a team for about year that worked “as a mob.” I’m also now leading a team that is mobbing full time and using mob programming for workshops and other learning experiences. Come learn what practices we found to be critical, what obstacles we encountered and what practices became irrelevant during our experience.

It’s an accepted truth in software development; when deadlines loom the team will be pressured to GO FASTER. Unable to convince management of the risks, developers resign to cutting a few corners and working longer hours. Unfortunately the net result is just as predictable, a short term spike in velocity and months of hidden costs and delays to come.

This talk will cover how to reverse the velocity death spiral by building collaborative and high trust relationships with management. We'll cover the root causes of our collective distrust like estimation, accountability, communication, and abuse of power. Further we’ll explore how to have healthy, data supported discussions to enable developers and managers to resist short sighted solutions that will plague the team for years to come.

Respect for People is one of the pillars of Lean. If you read the Lean-Agile literature or attend conferences, you will hear plenty about culture. However, these ideas usually aren’t presented as systematically and tangibly as the process tools. Most of the Lean principles that we study are focused on the other pillar, Continuous Improvement. Cultural ideas may be mixed in there but in a way that’s hard to untangle. Or, at the risk of ruffling some feathers, they may seem overly touchy-feely or theoretical brain science-y.
That’s a real shame. A business can’t just be a nice place to work, full of nice people; it must deliver a steady stream of results for customers and financial stakeholders. But the best long-term results come from providing a sustainable, healthy work environment. So investing in a strong culture is a wise decision for executives and managers.
This talk will explore some key ideas around team structure and the responsibilities of both team members and managers in a respectful Lean-Agile company. It will present a candidate set of seven principles to spell out Respect for People to match those for Continuous Improvement. And it will share some of the source material from which these ideas are derived.

This session will will explore key Continuous Delivery concepts and see how they can be implemented using a variety of open source tools via a live Demo. The demo will start from scratch and build all the necessary pieces.

Gaining agility is different than "doing agile", particularly at scale. This session will start with how agility makes a difference for the business and for the teams adopting it. We will look at the business structures that are needed for agility to thrive, how teams are organized and the new measures that will redefine success. With agility, one size does not fit all, but there are proven solutions, and this session will look at success stories as well as the dead-ends every organization wants to avoid. This session is appropriate for anyone starting an agile transformation, but we will also explore agility nuances that can make the difference between the success and failure of your agile transformation.

Any organization that has attempted to shift toward more of an agile approach knows that it isn’t easy. In this session we'll review the top characteristics of healthy agile teams and look at what they did to get there. We’ll also review some of their struggles and discuss how we might be able to avoid them in our own journey’s.

Do you avoid failure? This session is about how you can use failure to learn faster, build better systems, and enable innovative organizations. Learn about cognitive biases, like regret avoidance, that need to be overcome to move past the stigma of failing. Explore experimenting with failure to supercharge learning. Investigate the skills to reframe failure and enable a mindset and culture suitable for success in a world full of random events. Come succeed at failing!

Are you as powerful as you need to be? Do you over power the room and rub people the wrong way? Why is that? What if there was something you could do about it? In improvisation, in order to create realistic and compelling characters we study status. That is, how does how we carry ourselves impact our relationship status with other people and how does it change in relation to others? In this session, we'll explore status, and play with making ourselves more or less powerful. We'll then examine how this plays out in our work environments and how we need to adjust our status depending on which groups or individuals we're interacting with. You'll also learn the one status trick that will dramatically increase your chances of getting hired in your next interview.