Government Agile transformations can feel like overwhelming efforts – but do not abandon hope! This interactive, audience-driven presentation reviews how government and large organizations ESCAPE common Agile adoption challenges.
You - the audience - will prioritize your pain points; we’ll focus on the five Agile hells most highly prioritized. We will discuss real examples of “escaping” out of each Agile hell, with pro tips and success patterns you can apply.
The Agile hells we've escaped include:

• No Transformation hell - A federal program or department wants to change but can’t start or can’t finish
• Too Fast hell - Newly Agile federal programs sometimes respond TOO rapidly, too often changing priorities.
• Technical hell - Programs can become bogged down in technical debt and manual processes.
• No Trust hell - Government delivery can be slowed by lack of trust between contractors and feds, between business and IT, or between compliance and delivery groups.
• Product Owners hell - Government Product Owners can be unavailable, think they are managers, aren’t empowered to provide vision, or struggle with prioritization
• Too Big hell- A frequent pattern in federal Agile! Large batches produce slow progress, low visibility and high complexity, seen in big programs, big deployments, and big contracts.
• Collaboration hell - Government teams can struggle with collaboration within the same organization across roles and across the fed-contractor divide.
• Stove-piped hell - Government organizations can struggle to collaborate across contractual or organizational boundaries within the same enterprise
• Leadership hell - An organization can only be as agile as its leadership. In the government, how can you work with leaders who aren't ready to be agile?

For each Agile hell, we focus on successful techniques to escape from these common dynamics. Unlike other presentations, we won't be doing a deep dive, but we will cover the most important challenges our audience face.

Retrospectives are sometimes viewed as stressful and about complaining. Retrospectives should be rewarding and fun! We'll introduce four "games" in a somewhat narrative romantic story (break up, self worth, honeymoon planning, fixing a home). These four games cover internal and external concerns as well as individual and collective (it, I, we, its). We will explain the value of picking a retrospective that fits a team's need. Finally - we will have a funeral for the old ways of doing retrospectives.

Have you or your team gotten stuck working in silos? Collaborative programming (pairing,mobbing, and swarming) offers a solution, but how do you share practical skills and benefits of good collaboration in a short time frame? Look no further. We'll overcome dependencies and barriers to communication with a team-based, time boxed, collaborative tabletop game- Magic Maze.

This session presents a fun way to learn or teach the key skills for successful collaboration without diving into a real technical story. Play the game and take home a facilitation guide to use the game for your own teams.

Agile adoptions hit a speed bump when big, complicated organizations expect User Acceptance Testing, and don't see an Agile equivalent. We'll demystify UAT, and show the multiple places in where it can be found in Agile delivery.

Big and complicated organizations -- particularly government! -- conflate two different ideas in UAT: final sign-off of satisfactory delivery, and (badly delayed) user feedback.We'll explain how getting that user feedback early and often dramatically reduces delivery risk and increases user satisfaction. We'll review tips and ideas to change the approach and walk from the term "UAT" safely.

The resistance is real in federal programs. We often hold back the power of DevOps by blocking access to production. We’ll see how DevOps leaders bridge the gap in federal delivery, with leadership lessons from lightning.

Lightning overcomes air’s enormous resistance in short bursts. Government DevOps proceeds in the same way, with significant cultural and policy barriers forming resistance – but also with local champions and moments of alignment that allow DevOps programs to begin to cross that resistance in abrupt, sometimes jagged progression. We'll discuss what helps reduce that local resistance to rapid deployment in federal programs:

• Breaking governance silos
• Changing the culture of “No”
• Decoupling release authorization from deployment authorization
• Team managed deployments
• Ongoing security authorization

Communication chaos under looming deadlines - sound familiar? We'll level up our teamwork, practice rapid learning, and identify ways to calm the chaos and focus on getting to done, all using Spaceteam, a chaotic and collaborative card game.

You'll work with your teammates to repair a failing spaceship before it falls into a black hole. in order to escape, you'll communicate problems, request help, assist colleagues and respond to constant change -- all in five minutes!

You'll learn from your failures, improve as a team, and gain insights into what helps organizations and teams collaborate effectively and achieve flow.

Our Agile transformations can feel like Sisyphean efforts – but do not abandon hope! In this talk we will discuss nine circles of Agile Hell. Each hell is an example of a common problem programs encounter.

We'll ask the audience to prioritize their pain points, and focus on the six Agile hells closest to their experience. We will discuss real examples for “escaping” out of each Agile Hell - from Agile Coaches that the Dave(s) know.

By attending this event, Agilists will expand their toolbox of techniques to help their organizations.

Specific organizational patterns are the villains of agile adoption, setting unreasonable expectations and sabotaging progress. We’ll explore these villains, and give real examples how federal organizations overcame them.

Participants will see the power of metaphor first embraced by Extreme Programming: a system metaphor or (for transformations) a cultural metaphor to name and avoid common anti-patterns in Agile adoptions.

Leaders in government programs or large organizations will recognize common challenges patterns: setting schedules by fiat, limiting the availability of product owners, balancing responding to emergencies with focusing on consistent prioritizes, just to name a few. Coaches and champions supporting Agile adoptions will be equipped with counter-examples to avoid these challenges.

Everyone wants to know which Agile metrics really count, and why. But a lot comes down to context: who's asking, what decisions are on the horizon, how you communicate, and so forth. Add scale, and you've got a major challenge.

David Bujard, Dante Vilardi and Nate Conroy have spent the last few years trying to figure how to make agility measurement effective at a big federal program. In this talk they will discuss lessons learned from numerous experiments -- those that produced results, and those that didn't.

David and Dante are Agile coaches who support a transformation program at USCIS.