Many of you are familiar with a Kanban board, but it is merely a tool that's part of a method. Join Colleen as she explains how the Kanban method of work management can help you delivery software consistently.

Join Jen Krieger (Mile High Agile 2020 Chair) and Ronica Roth (President of the Board for Agile Denver) for an interactive session in which we envision the look and feel of next year's conference. This is your chance to influence the direction and content of Mile High Agile 2020!

It's inevitable, and almost unavoidable, that Professionals of all skill-sets and experience will encounter "coaching up" situations. In this session, I will review three coaching techniques that can be used in Sr Leader and "coaching up" scenarios. These techniques will provide participants with new/alternative ways to prepare for, engage, follow up, and reflect with Sr Leaders. These techniques are heavily based in the core values of openness, courage, and respect and rooted in the fundamentals of cultural and human interaction.

We prize our ability to multitask yet we rarely acknowledge the impact this has on our ability to get work done. As a team we look to process to create efficiencies but ignore one simple tool that has the ability to transform the amount, the speed, and the quality of their work: Limiting the amount of Work In Progress. In this talk I will share my stories and experiences of the power that limiting WIP has to bring a team focus, flexibility and follow through. Learn where to start, what to look for over time and how to optimize the amount of things you are working on so that you can get more done!

If you live in Colorado you have heard the term “14er” or have even hiked Bierstadt or Quandary, maybe climbed the tallest mountain in Colorado, Mt. Elbert and have probably heard of my unfortunate mishaps on Capitol Peak. That being said, how can you compare story sizing to Colorado 14ers? Just like stories, no two mountains are created equal. A lot goes into considering hiking a Colorado 14er, class rating, which includes exposure, distance, elevation game, skills or equipment needed and even drive time from the Front Range!

Similar to a 14er, a story point is an abstract measure of effort. In simple terms, it is a number that tells an agile team about the difficulty level of a story. Difficulty could be related to complexities, risks and efforts involved. As mentioned above, Colorado 14ers have the same difficulties related to complexities (skill needed), risks/uncertainty (exposure/class of mountain) and time/effort involved (elevation gain or distance).

Let’s bring story sizing and mountains together in a fun workshop session!

Description:

I see that a lot of organizations use metrics in inappropriate ways to measure teams. At the heart of these metrics, nine times out of ten, are velocity and story points. These metrics lead to a lot of mistrust, fear, and bad technical practices. This talk will focus on shifting the focus to diagnostic metrics.

Before shifting focus to diagnostic metrics, we need to understand what inappropriate metrics are. When questioning teams about why their velocity was lower from one sprint to another, teams are more likely to inflate their estimates to avoid questions in the future. This is one of my scenarios. We will explore this case and my other top-ten based on the 165 teams I have interacted with. Focusing on one metric does not provide a balanced view of the team.

For balance, I promote five metrics. The combination of metrics balances each other. These five metrics are lead time, quality, happiness, agile maturity, and business value. Focusing on these five metric areas can be used as a diagnostic tool to help teams grow and support coaching. During the session, we will use my Excel-based tool and visual model to simulate this balance.

When you push shorter lead times (how fast) on a team with a lower agile maturity, the first thing to change is quality, followed by happiness and then the delivery of value. Conversely, if a team focuses on TDD, the first thing to change is quality, followed by agile maturity, reduction in lead time, and increased delivery of value.

Teaching teams to harness data in a positive way will help them to flourish.

Have you found new team members take months getting up to speed with the rest of the team? Do you wonder about their engagement and happiness in a new place of work?

Many agile organizations struggle with these questions. Perhaps we’re still getting people off on the wrong foot with some details of our hiring and onboarding practices. These often overlooked, easily forgotten practices have a big impact on engagement and culture. Your hiring process can catalyze excitement for the company mission. Agile-appropriate onboarding quickly harmonizes the team and quickly returns them to productivity.

This talk for team members, managers, and change agents examines the positive impact hiring and onboarding practices can have on agile transformation. Using real world examples from successful agile companies, the session shares a mixture of new principles and practices audience members can experiment with. Additionally, the content is wrapped in systems thinking to increase knowledge for organizational change.

As a career software tester, I’ve heard rumors DevOps culture will put me out of a job, so I took a job testing for a DevOps team. I’m new to DevOps, but aren’t we all? What matters most is our teams’ intentional decisions to grow our DevOps practices along with our development community.

Join me as I share my experiences blending disciplines, companies, levels of experience, and differing expectations as a member of efficient and effective delivery teams. I’ll describe common cultural and interpersonal problems I experienced while transforming a cross-functional agile team dogfooding a DevOps implementation.

Whether you’re into development, operations, testing, customer support, or product ownership, you’ll leave with concrete strategies for improving your DevOps working relationships to keep the technology running smoothly. People factors strongly affect your DevOps technical outcomes, so optimizing your flow includes improving your people practices.

Don’t feel afraid to ask about DevOps anymore!

Getting started can seem overwhelming, but there is hope! Join us as we explore how teams have made the shift within their organization to prioritize inclusion and diversity from the ground up. Human Inclusive’s Lia James and Christopher Guest will moderate an interactive discussion with Mo Abdullah, Founder of Culture Energized, Natalie Bonifede D&I at Pivotal, Lauren Burgess, Founder and CEO of Garden, Inc and Dirt Coffee Bar. We will learn how they have shifted team culture to implement inclusive, belonging, and diversity initiatives. We will explore how they’ve made changes, what they've learned, and how others can make a similar impact on their own teams. Together we will learn:

• How they got started and keep their teams accountable
• What were their biggest challenges and hard-to-learn lessons
• How to approach team dynamics differently to empower diversity to thrive
• Best practices for getting everyone on board and start the process

Psychological safety. Harvard Business School Professor Amy Edmondson first coined the term in her research on the effectiveness of teams. And from Google’s re:Work research into what makes their supercharged teams truly stand apart, it turns out on that “Who is on a team matters less than how team members interact and structure their work.” Creating highly effective teams is a hallmark of agile teams, and we’re hearing more and more about how teams that truly trust each other and feel safe to take risks together go on to become high performers we all want to work with.

But creating safe teams takes more than just being able to tell people about psychological safety. What are the next steps? What can you actually DO to create team safety?

This talk will introduce the topic of psychological safety and walk through three exercises that anyone can take away to build team cohesion and trust. We’ll also cover one bonus tracking technique for monitoring team health over time. Attendees will walk away with actionable tips and techniques they can use with any team, whether agile or not.

Agile expects strong facilitation skills particularly from certain roles, but training on Agile basics, roles, and responsibilities often skims over facilitation skills. Facilitating remote meetings is even more overlooked. Yet, most modern companies operate at least in some way with remote or dispersed team members or meetings. While all facilitation is difficult, facilitating remotely amplifies the challenges and can really feel like herding cats who are hiding behind the phone or computer. Learn how to wrangle those felines!

This session will give an overview of the different challenges and needs for facilitation in remote settings, foundational principals of remote facilitation, and specific techniques and activities to use when facilitating remote meetings.

Is your Agile team struggling to vanquish the nemeses that are holding them back? Come take a page out of some of your favorite DC and Marvel super hero movies for tips on how to move your team forward.

In this session, we’ll examine a range of beginner topics applicable to Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Coaches, management, or anyone who interacts with a team. Among other topics, we’ll examine how various comic book heroes have dealt with difficult prioritization choices that villains have presented them with, and give models that your team can use for effective prioritization. We’ll talk about The Fool’s Choice and how a hero was able to improve his communication skills. We’ll watch a scene from the new Wonder Woman movie and learn important lessons for Agile teams as we witness her dealing with a German invasion. And most importantly, we’ll examine when we shouldn’t try to emulate our favorite comic book heroes.

You know agile, have been on teams as a scrum master or product manager/owner or even a program manager, but now you are an agile coach and need help “jumping in feet first.” While there’s a lot involved in “coaching,” like emotional intelligence, experience, background, emotional intelligence, communication skills, confidence etc. but sometimes you need a little “mentorship” and how/where to get started in a coaching role.

This is a beginner to level session for new coaches in an agile transformation role.

This session will help you get started on an agile transformation assignment with a coaching backlog and will inform new coaches on “where to start” as an Agile Coach.

The session will begin agile transformation challenges followed by common agile impediments, conditions for success, an agile readiness checklist and a coaching backlog including Epics, Features and “where to start.”

How do you gather leadership support for your Agile Transformation? In this workshop we'll explore the easiest way to get leadership support for your transformation: By Building More Leaders!

In this session we will briefly describe our experience building an agile leadership program in a Fortune 25 healthcare company. Then we will spend the rest of the time going through fun activities to help leaders develop their emotional intelligence, increase their comfort with vulnerability, and walk away tools they can immediately apply to their teams.

If you want to move around, have a blast, and learn what a chihuahua and a banana can teach people about leadership then please stop by.

Do your coders shy away from testing? Are your leaders or teams struggling to embrace the concept of “T-shaped” individuals? Would you like to demonstrate the impact of collaboration with evidence, and have fun along the way?

What many teams initially think collaboration is, really amounts to cooperation. - doing a little more if there’s time left in an iteration. This hands on workshop will demonstrate the outcomes possible when teams shift fully into collaboration. Through 3 sprints of a simulated product development, participants will get a tangible feel for the differences between coordination, cooperation and deeper cross functional collaboration. They’ll see where bottlenecks really exist when team members stick to their competency AND the impact when they focus instead on the shared goal or outcome. We’ll explore what’s holding back collaboration in our own work teams, and what changes teams can make to foster greater collaboration and higher performance.

This workshop is aimed at Change Agents, Coaches, Scrum Masters and Managers who want to engage their teams to realize the benefits of true collaboration. Additionally, Product Owners and Executives will find the data generated through the exercises beneficial and compelling when faced with stakeholders or teams skeptical of or resistant to collaborate fully and embrace cross functional team work.

Want to help your organization shift from "busy bees" and into a resilient "hive mind" of shared progress and achievement? Come see first hand the impact of collaboration towards a shared goal, and get a sense of how you can Harness your Hive towards higher performance, interactivity and fun.

Everything is NOT a “Priority”: A fun and engaging prioritization technique with HGTV's House Hunters activity

Prioritization continues to be one of the biggest challenges in Agile Transformations. Choosing the right set of features often marks the difference between short-term failure or long-term success. So how do you make sure your stakeholders are making the right choices? If you answer yes to any of the questions below, then this workshop is for you!

1. Do you have multiple stakeholders with competing priorities?
2. Do your stakeholders constantly change priorities without explanation?
3. Do your stakeholders tell you that everything is a “Must Have”?
4. Do your stakeholders think that that their work is far more important than the other groups you work with?
5. Does your stakeholder prioritize their work in a vacuum?
6. Do their priorities align back to the overall vision?

Adrienne Rinaldi will share her experience, insight, and actionable techniques and tips that you can apply to any stakeholder prioritization session. She will walk through the preparation and execution of the “Buy a Feature” prioritization exercise, which will enable you to see how this can be leveraged and applied in any organization with multiple stakeholders with competing priorities.

The Agile Manifesto tells us “Working software is the primary measure of progress”, but when pressed by management to report on our progress we often fall back on non-agile metrics and measures that hurt our team and organization.

As Deming pointed out “the most important figures that one needs for management are unknown or unknowable, but successful management must nevertheless take account of them.”

Most metrics can be gamed, focus on the wrong things, or are downright harmful. There are however Virtuous Metrics that enforce behaviors that are helpful to agility, provided they're focused on by the right people.

During this session, we’ll learn about Virtuous Metrics that will help your team self-organize and your organization become more agile through a fast-pace and hilarious game. You’ll leave this session with a framework for employing Virtuous Metrics in your organization for continuous improvement.

To help people and teams thrive, we want to be fierce: we want to “show heartfelt and powerful intensity” (as the conference organizers remind us). Doing that requires that we create a strong container around that fierceness to use its energies productively. And that requires empathy.

This talk will explore how empathy – the ability to understand others' needs and ensure that they know that you understand them – is what Charles Duhigg calls a "keystone habit", a behavior change that unlocks other cascading behavior changes. Building the habit of empathy will help you to build trust, influence others, give effective feedback, and enable collaboration. Along the way, we will look at seven tools to enhance your practice of empathy and help you to be fierce.