The Agile Manifesto doesn't explicitly talk about what changes in management should happen and neither do the approaches. In fact, sometimes we hear the exact opposite from teams - "What do we need managers for..?" or perhaps "Can't they just get rid of all the impediments we have?"

As a former manager and now as a coach, I find the words Servant Leadership sometimes doesn't resonate. It actually only paints part of the picture anyway. What we want are ways to enrich management so that they can do more for the organization and its teams. Let's discover what some of this enrichment might be.

Do you feel like Agile Scaling has become a goal rather than the means to an end for your organization? To determine where you stand on the Scaling spectrum, ask yourself a few soul-searching questions: Why do we need to scale? Is this the right time for us to scale? If you’ve checked these boxes, you may wonder “where do I go from here?”

This talk will focus on 3 areas that emerged as common themes throughout my experience working on government Agile Scaling projects and ultimately influenced the trajectory of each agency's scaling journey:

• Communicate vision consistently
• Focus on your people genuinely
• Create your own path intentionally

I've seen successes and some struggles with Agile Scaling efforts in government agencies. Regardless of the agency acronym or the frameworks used, these key elements shaped their scaling outcomes.

We have heard several definitions of user stories. We have used the INVEST formula countless times, and most likely used 1,000+ sticky notes.

Books, essays and the Internet are good sources for the basics. After some failures and a lot of practice, we might be able to write acceptable stories and deliver decent products.

However, delivering valuable, remarkable software requires much more. To make sure the right stuff is delivered, the right conversations between development teams and business stakeholders need to take place. This is where the ability to write user stories like a pro comes into play.

In this talk, I will propose 7 ideas to improve your user stories. You will learn concepts such as “prioritize according to stages of growth,” rules like “budget instead of estimate,” and techniques such as “best by” and “narrow segments.”

If you hold any form of leadership position, whether as a manager, scrum master, or coach, you will find that you will be at times offering guidance or advice. What unfortunately happens though is that your observation of the need and conversation to help fill that need can get tangled with your biases. Want to improve your coaching conversations? Then this workshop is for you.

To help you work through the arc of your conversation and understand how these biases come into play, we're going to discuss the GROW conversation model and the Satir interaction model. This workshop will open with an anchoring activity. We'll then use an exercise and focused discussion to review each model and see how these played into the coaching received.

DevOps has become all the rage from a technical change perspective; it really has changed the game. And while it provides numerous benefits, only after you also embrace the human side of change within the organization, can you really get to full Agility.

What if we could take advantage of a continuous delivery of change just like we do in our development pipelines? As executives, managers, Scrum masters, coaches, or anyone else in a leadership role, we should desire to make each change focused, easy, and small to contain risk. Once this is done, changes can mimic a development pipeline that delivers towards a business outcome. This workshop will help you learn how to keep the number and size of changes in check and consider how to manage the risks of deploying change.

Scrum is easy to understand but hard to implement. Many team members think of Scrum as a framework with roles, meetings and artifacts. They take a training class and come back to work and take on new roles, setup Sprint planning, standups, reviews, and retrospectives. They start working in Sprints using product backlogs, user stories, task boards, and burn down charts. Things start out well, however, soon difficulties arise and anti-patterns and smells emerge as teams start moving from Scrum to ScrumBut. You’ll often hear “We do Scrum but we don’t have an engaged Product Owner” or “We do Scrum but we don’t test within the Sprint”. In this interactive session we will tie elements of the Scrum Framework to the values and principles of the Agile manifesto to better understand the purpose behind the framework and it’s roles, meetings and artifacts. Come to this session to understand the reasons things are setup in a certain way so that you can assess the implications, risks and impacts of deviating from the basic framework.

A lot of organizations today are going through an agile transformation. They’ve sent everyone to training. They’ve introduced product owners and scrum masters. They’ve created product backlogs and are working in iterations. The teams have planning meetings, standups, reviews and retros. The result? Teams are just going through the motions and organizations have yet to see the benefits. Sounds familiar? Why is that? What role does leadership have to play? How about the team? You? Come to this session to uncover some of the most common impediments that derail an agile transformation. Learn a five step approach to overcome these obstacles at both the team level as well as the leadership level. Leave with a new tool for your toolbox that you can use with your organization to get them moving faster towards greater agility and better business outcomes.