Co-creating drawings helps teams enhance their systems thinking abilities by really seeing the big picture. A group of people talking around a whiteboard is an effective way to share ideas across a team. Imagine how much richer the conversation is when everyone on the team has a marker in their hand and is actively contributing! Graphic visualization is an important tool for talking about new ideas, generating insights and developing shared understanding. In a team context, drawing is a thinking tool rather than an artistic endeavour. When everyone participates in creating drawings, all team members can see how things fit together and what mental models are at play in defining the situation. And, by drawing together, the team is collaboratively creating meaningful records that are being validated and updated.

Come along on a visual adventure into how teams can collaboratively visualize ideas and make sure that everyone at the table has a voice. In this workshop, we will warm up with some basic doodling skills practice. No drawing experience is required to take part in this session: if you can hold a marker, we can teach you the skills needed to put your ideas on paper. Together we'll consider the ways that collaborative drawing can be used to enhance group work, and we will share practical activities that you can take back to use with your team for setting the stage, gathering information, and sharing stories.

“Are we Agile yet?”, “Of course we are agile, we stand up every day”, “We have a hybrid Waterfall/Agile technique”. Do any of these sound familiar to you?

After several years at multiple organizations it is interesting to find the same mistakes being made over and over again. This talk will discuss the various ways that your company can fail at agile and what you can do about it.

Gam'Inception is a game made of games to learn how to create games... Sounds funnier than dreams in dreams in dreams, don't you think Mr. Nolan?

By playing three serious games, attendees will learn why serious games are a very efficient way to discover new concepts, mechanisms or tools and that everyone is able to build her/his own ones:

• Attendees will have to face me in a drawing duel. Be prepared, I'm almost as good with pens than with ASCII art:
  _██_
  ( • ̮ •)
  ( . • . )
  (... • .. )
• Then, they will travel in time, to Venice, the city of Doges, for a mix of Game of the Goose, a game book and an escape game
• Finally, they will participate to Top Chef (at least my version of the show...) and will find their own recipes to cook their own games

The workshop is almost entirely interactive and requires no prior knowledge about serious games (you don't even need to know what a serious game is). At the end of the session, attendees will have learned:

• how a serious game is structured
• which steps are essential to building a serious game
• which steps are 'nice to have' when they build a serious game
• that they are way more qualified to build their own serious games than they thought
• how efficient a serious game is to learn new things
• how highly corruptible I am

Note that I always try to co-present with Leonardo DiCaprio but, sometimes, he is too busy to come ;-)
I hosted it successfully several times in Europe (Agile France, Agile Tour Paris, Xebicon and smaller events) last year so the structure is solid.

Slides, in French, are available here. The workshop (and its slides) will, of course, be in English with the possibility for attendees to ask me anything in French if they are more comfortable with this language

“When will it be done?” is a question asked in just about every business I’ve encountered, Agile or otherwise. In this metrics-focused session we will explore why that question is so hard to answer and whether it is even the right question to ask.

We will explore current thinking about measurement in knowledge work fields. How every business needs to identify their own appropriate metrics to measure for their own business challenges and goals. While metrics are always unique for each individual business context, we will identify 4 metric categories identified from the Fit for Purpose framework.

To connect these concepts to your Agile organization we explore going past looking at measurement as a team phenomena and connect this to the level of services or value streams.

Digging further we continue to examine questions around measuring and predicting delivery times. We contrast prediction approaches using deterministic methods vs probabilistic methods. And consider multiple sources of variability that make predictions challenging and often impossible.

We conclude by considering more appropriate questions to replace “When will it be done?” Rather asking “When do we need it” followed by “and so, when should start?”

To increase the speed of delivery, your team needs test automation! Eric walks through scenarios to help increase your test automation. Scenarion 1 - Helping your team jump start unit testing a legacy application, Eric shows how to start introducing test automation into your release pipeline. Scenario 2 – We hate TDD - Eric walks through a strategy to help a team resistant to Test Drive Development/Design that helps introduce this practice. Eric then takes questions on increasing test automation to improve pipeline quality

Wave 2 of Agile is a way to understand the high-performance results that come from Being Agile. We know many in our industry have fallen into the trap or “Doing Agile” – where people lose sight of the objectives and lasting results.

Wave 2 is about Living Agile. It is how we show up. It is how we work with people and organizations to shape the Culture. It is living Mahatma Gandhi's truth:

“Be the change that you want to see in the world”.

When we focus on our own behaviour, we model Being Agile. This is the only way to invite the Agile Mindset. This is Wave 2 Agile. We stop creating conflict and resistance. We become the effective leaders and influencers of lasting change in our organizations.

“To be or not to be? That is the question.”

"Customers don’t buy products, they hire products to do a job” – Clayton Christensen

• Are your customers ready to buy your product even before you release it?
• Are your customers inspired by your product?
• Is your product vision aligned with your customers’ needs?
• Does your product vision motivate your team?

Join us to experience a new way of creating an empathy-driven product vision, a powerful tool to start your journey of creating the right products or services. Experience the power of Emotions inspired by Human-Centered Design concepts, iterative feedback loops, and Visual creativity.

With this approach, customers and team are involved and convinced with your product or service right from the start.

A few benefits of empathy-driven product vision are:

1) Seeing Is Believing: visualization has a better impact on the mind

2) Easy to understand and getting feedback from the customers

3) Helpful for marketing and sales to think of their product strategy

4) Empower team to be focused for the product goal in their whole development cycle

5) Helpful for start-ups to pitch a new product idea or invention to a potential investor

6) The team understands better, the vision of the new product initiatives by the company

In today's agile, scaling of any framework comes with its own ... framework! Not so with Real Kanban as the scaling approach is to simply do more of it.

The Real Kanban approach from Steve Tendon supports all flows - Operational, Financial, Informational & Psychological - by proposing the exact same models at the team, project, portfolio and enterprise level. Talk about robustness !

Operational Flow (How well are we delivering?) deals with reducing cycle time so that work in progress does not stall in the system accumulating costs. By reducing cycle time - the time an item spends in the system - Operational expenses are trimmed leading the way to more productivity.

Financial Flow (How much wealth are we creating?) recognizes throughput - the number of unit coming out of the system per unit of time - as the ultimate economic indicator for sales. Having a healthy beat is key to financial health.

Informational Flow (How well are we communicating?) uses visualization and metrics from the Theory of Constraints and Throughput Accounting to ensures system thinking behavior and alignment.

Psychological Flow (How happy are out people?) - The Real Kanban approach also allows employees to increase their skills and capabilities with WIP control, so that they can tame by themselves the boundaries of boredom and anxiety to always find a way to better themselves at their pace with the ever present slack existing in a Kanban system. The benefits - psychological flow - resulting from this system thinking's approach is to leverage the consciousness level and lead to continuous improvement by supplying metrics that guide each decision.

Teachings from Queuing Theory, Tameflow, Real Options and other fascinating Kanban and Lean tools will be presented.

A walkthrough of my experience as a portfolio coach leading teams of agile coaches supporting large (60million+, 120person+) regulatory programs in the financial services industry.

Comparing the similarities during my time leading a team of transformation coaches and scrummasters delivering customer-facing new technology at Bell, in the regulated telecom space.

Your team’s been trained to deliver new features in a short time frame. You’re estimating work using abstractions like “story points”. The predictability and quality of delivery has improved. However, every December you’re still asked to estimate large initiatives for annual budgeting. Something doesn’t make sense and you’re having a hard time explaining it to senior leadership.

Those funding projects are trying to invest wisely and mitigate risk. They need to understand what to fund and what to avoid while looking at scary numbers. However, they’re still using conventional methods of mitigating risk with big plans and committed dates.

How agile can your organization be when budgets are designed for large fixed cost, scope, and time projects? In this session we’ll talk about how to mitigate financial risk and improve return on investment by working in smaller batches. Join us and learn how you can start forecasting!

When coaches encounter resistance to agile transformations, we often treat it as a phenomenon to be overcome, confronted, or combated. But resistance is a natural reaction to change, and that reaction can't be alleviated by violent opposition. Rather than meeting resistance head on, the clever coach will work around it by helping people recognize and resolve the negative emotions that drive it. Once those negative emotions are resolved, people are more likely to let down their guard and embrace change.

In this interactive workshop, participants will learn how to identify common "faces" of resistance--behaviors that might indicate that a person is experiencing an emotional reaction to change. Participants will then work in table groups to identify strategies for helping clients recognize the emotional underpinning of their resistance. Finally, a role-playing experience will give participants the chance to practice coaching resisters to resolve their reluctance to embrace agile transformation.

Many companies attempting Agile are not getting the benefits they hope for. I believe most of these companies are more focused on blindly following practices than living the agile principles. Many of these companies have not fully embraced the principles and some do not even know the principles! For an organization to reap the benefits that agile offers, it must live the principles. In this workshop, I'll teach you exercises and techniques to reset the people in your organization around the 12 Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto and the 4 Modern Agile Principles.