There are now so many well-marketed Agile Scaling Frameworks (S@S, LeSS, SAFe, DAD, Nexus) that’s it’s difficult for organizations to differentiate their value propositions, tenets, assumptions,… But luckily there’s one, well established approach that blows all of these methods completely out of the water. Come learn about DONt: The best way to scale.

Product Roadmapping, Release Planning, and Release Management are often difficult skills to learn for the Product Owners and Product Managers that support Agile Teams. If the estimates are fuzzy, and don't translate exactly to a linear measure like time, "How do we know when anything will be done?"

Participants in this workshop will get hands-on experience planning and managing a product Release, and deal with the same dynamics that real Product Owners experience collaborating with Agile Development Teams. Working in Teams, participants will play The Release Planning Game, a tabletop board game created by the facilitator for use in Certified Scrum Product Owner classes.

Behind the creation of every Agile Framework was the intention to improve the Return on Investment for creative work, primarily through faster and richer feedback. But as team-level frameworks like Scrum are internalized by large organizations, that message gets mistranslated. Instead of, “Get better outcomes, sooner,” the drive instead becomes, “Just do more, faster.”

A common expression of this problem is the confusion of Velocity for Value, where teams are directly managed based on their Output, but the connection between Output and Outcome is lost or ignored. This plays out in all kinds of ways that distract from achieving tangible results, and often incentivizes internal competition over collaboration. This problem can be especially tenacious in organizations with significant institutional ‘status-ing’ behaviors, where leadership struggles to translate common Agile methods like Relative Estimating into existing artifacts like Executive Dashboards or Earned-Value Management.

In this tutorial, participants will explore the 'Velocity Trap', and will be shown how to setup a results-driven framework that prioritizes 'Maximizing Outcomes while Minimizing Output.'

There are now so many well-marketed Agile Scaling Frameworks (S@S, LeSS, SAFe, DAD, Nexus) that’s it’s difficult for organizations to differentiate their value propositions, tenets, assumptions,… But luckily there’s one, well established approach that blows all of these methods completely out of the water. Come learn about DONt: The best way to scale.

Over the last 5 years, Agile approaches have seen widespread adoption across the US Federal Government. Where real commitment is given to proven Agile frameworks and techniques, programs do see significant improvement in value delivery and speed. But unfortunately often, ‘Agile’ nomenclature is used while perpetuating behaviors that make real improvement impossible, and may actually make the lived experience worse for participants or stakeholders. And where Agile approaches fail, they add to a narrative that real methods won’t work in this environment. Many of the anti-patterns I’ve seen working as a Coach in the Public Sector are rooted in decision-makers clinging to 5 myths about Agile in Government. This talk will explore these 5 myths, where they come from, and some ways out of them.

Small compromises in Agile practices can ultimately lead to major impacts on team health and their ability to deliver valuable solutions to users. Unfortunately, between getting lost down in the weeds of technology creation and the natural human tendency to postpone or avoid uncomfortable discussions, it’s easy to lose sight of how a shortcut today may kill a team (or even an entire company) down the road.

Working in teams, participants will explore the links between Agile and Scrum principles, and tangible results that come from sacrifing aspects of those approaches, using the approach of beloved American TV detective, “Columbo:” Ask a simple question, and then tease apart all the justifications and excuses when the answer is less than ideal. The author will first lead the entire room through a discussion of one seven basic questions about Scrum performance, with the goal of identifying healthy and unhealthy responses, and identifying what behaviors and dynamics would support each state. Working in groups, participants will tackle another question in the same manner on their own. The session will conclude with time-boxed presentation and discussion of each group’s findings.