Have you spent a lot of energy and time with your teams focusing on estimation? Do you feel that everyone isn't quite on the same page? There are many challenges on teams who wish to work with an agile mindset, and negative patterns around estimation can have quite the impact on productivity and team morale.

In this workshop, participants will revisit what a Product Backlog Item represents and exactly what an estimate represents. Using this as a foundation, session participants will learn about four distinct parts of a pattern that repeats itself in organizations who may not have a strong handle on these concepts. The workshop concludes with a lightweight estimation exercise that participants can take back to their organization.

Having a better understanding of estimation is helpful, and having a simple yet powerful game to compare items relatively to one another will help break your teams of the pattern of misunderstanding the point of backlog item estimation.

Innovation Labs often don’t create the impact they’ve promised and many eventually fail. Capital One’s Innovation Lab, founded in 2011, has evolved to stay relevant throughout the years. In this session, Amber King, Senior Manager of Accelerator Operations talks about how the Labs' operating model has changed over the years, the details of how the Lab's new accelerator model works, how we incorporate Lean Start-up, Design Thinking, Google Design Sprints, Scrum, and Kanban techniques on our teams and what has triggered the need to reinvent the Labs' model in order to continue to push for disruptive innovation.

So you are considering getting a coach to help you in your transition to Agile. Or perhaps you are an Agile practitioner considering becoming an Agile coach. What do these Agile coaches do? What makes them different?

This session will enter the foyer of the house that describes what coaches do and considerations one can have when they think about coaching (including hiring one). Prepare to be challenged and to learn a bit of what it takes to be or work with a coach; it has little to do with courses or certifications, though they may help. In covering what coaches do, one can now begin to think along the lines of what the skills one may need to improve.

Going agile in the government is easy to say and hard to do. Teams and individuals prefer to stay apart and work on their own for weeks or months at a time. Documentation can quickly become more important than working software. Addressing the demands brought on by a change in administration, policy, or executive direction requires teams and individuals to start working together in order to succeed in their overall mission.

This experience report will discuss the benefits, challenges, and outcomes when implementing Kanban in a traditional waterfall and silo working environment. Techniques for creating a continuous change towards an agile way of working will be shared. Performance data from a two year Kanban initiative at the Department of Labor will be reviewed and discussed. Participants will walk away with a clear understanding of how Kanban can break down silos, improve the agility of a traditional waterfall and silo focused organization, and noticeably improve performance.

Running a small business is no small task. Financial management, sales, hiring, managing people, and supporting existing clients are just a handful of activities a small business might address in a single day. So what happens when you use the Kanban Method to manage your business?

I’ll share my experiences while training, coaching, and evolving a small business using the Kanban Method. You’ll see how the Method quickly surfaced issues, revealed hidden opportunities for innovation, and how the business is using the Method to mature the services they offer.

The Agile Manifesto has been around for over 16 years. That seems like enough time for organizations to adapt to Agile processes and get the hang of writing Agile contracts. Yet, when it comes time for US Federal Agencies to enter into a contract about Agile work processes and deliverables, we're still seeing Waterfall language persist.

If we want to see Agile software development contracts that are truly aligned for the best interests of all parties involved, there are a few steps that we need to take. Learn what these steps are in this presentation.

Does your organization or team’s Agile practice feel stale? Do you believe your team can reach a higher level of performance but not sure what the next step is?

Marie Dingess and Christina Murto will share the changes we have fostered over the past couple of years to move our Agile game to the next level at Capital One.

We will highlight the “seeds of change” we planted and cultivated in our Digital Technology space as well as patterns we saw as teams evolved their practices including:

• Lean, Systems Thinking, Kanban/Scrumban
• Continuous improvement (leveraging PDCA & Improvement Kata)

We will speak to considerations for trying these practices, tools and techniques, and showcase the results:

• Quantitative improvements: decreased cycle time and increased story throughput
• Qualitative measures: improved morale, team ownership of processes, and engaged Product Owners.

What does it take to build an award winning enterprise mobile app that serves millions of customers? How to keep scaling the platform and delivering values to customers frequently, reliably and with quality while keeping the team happy and engaged?

Beyond coding, there are important pieces of puzzle that have to come together. This presentation offers a case study of our journey from launching the flagship mobile app for one of the country’s top financial institutions to growing the platform that consistently ships and innovates. Through our experience, the audience can gain key insights into the challenges we faced and the decisions and commitments we made along the way to foster a culture that values shipping, innovation, continuous improvement, and keeps it fun in the process.

Successful Agile transformations are cultural transformations where the ‘doing agile’ comes from ‘being agile’. Transformations are qualitative experiences which are notoriously difficult to measure and track without getting into comparisons. And we all know when you compare agile teams using metrics everyone loses.

We here in Capital One Commercial Bank took a unique approach to the opportunity. We decided that we are not going to have a transformation goal but multiple self-identified transformation goals for each team and organization.

We feel we have an approach that meets each team where they are on their agile journey and lets them identify their own path forward. And as agile coaching partners, we provide guidance along the way. To this end, we guide the teams through a self-assessment that help them identify opportunities across the following five categories.

1. Sustainability – Core agile behaviors around prescribed Scrum and Kanban practices.  Maturity in scrum ceremonies, planning, and impediments
2. Value Delivery – Teams understanding of customer, product roadmap, features and priority
3. Scaled Agile –Behaviors observed around PI planning, clarity post PI planning and planning across teams
4. Culture – Behaviors teams experience from leadership around clarity of roles and agile transformation objectives
5. Technical Health – Behaviors around tech debt, architecture, test automation and CI/CD

The approach is nonjudgmental and does not focus on roles or people but focuses on the agile experience felt by each agile team member. Teams/Organizations then choose for themselves with a little guidance what are their transformation goals and as coaching partners, we help them achieve it. We assess the organization again after a fixed period of time and look for measurable improvement in experiences. Based on new and historic data we help modify or change the transformation goals and pursue it with them.

In our experience, the transformation when presented this way becomes an opportunity and not a burden. We strongly believe that the transformation is everyone's responsibility and that everyone wants to be the best.

Human Resources is critical to creating and nurturing a truly agile environment, and with positions like CHRO becoming ever more prominent, better positioned to make a real difference.  How can HR practitioners apply agile principles both to their own work, and to strengthening the overall adaptability and appeal of the organizations they support?

This session will explore topics from Arlen's forthcoming book The Leader's Guide to Agile HR & People Operations through a smidgen of talking and a bevy of entertaining and (largely) practical exercises.