How do your features land in the Product Backlog? Perhaps your team uses "design sprints", "design thinking" workshops, a "UX research" phase, ongoing "grooming" sessions., or a combination of all that. When all that is happening, how do you narrow down your options to select the best ideas amongst all the good ones that come out of brainstorming sessions? Perhaps through long "prioritization" sessions, where it's difficult to come up with an objective criteria. And then, how does commitment and scheduling happen? How is it decided that an idea will be worked on now, later or perhaps never? 

All teams have processes in place to do all these things, but most have trouble describing how it actually happens, and therefore reasoning about its effectiveness and ways to improve it to remove any frustration that they may be causing. Upstream Kanban is an answer to these challenges.

This talk will explore the use of Upstream Kanban to visualize, model, and manage the "fuzzy front-end" activities that are often used to drive discovery and innovation. We will describe what to look for in a "healthy" upstream workflow, the role of experimentation, and the use of "custom risk assessment frameworks" to drive selection and commitment.

Small, cross-functional teams are the "bread & butter" of Agile environments. Amongst many advantages, they help remove delays introduced by dependencies between groups. Unfortunately, many organizations find it difficult to reorganize their teams to be cross-functional, and even when they do, it's practically impossible to remove all dependencies, leaving many teams in the need to find ways to orchestrate work across various groups that work using different processes.

Kanban is often described as something you layer "on top" of your existing process in order to stimulate improvement. So, what would that look like if your existing process is Scrum?

The term "Scrumban" has been used to describe this kind of combination, but it's much more than simply "Scrum with WIP limits". It's not about picking and choosing "the best of both", but the full application of the Kanban Method to a challenged Scrum implementation, to help it move beyond what's currently causing it to stall.

Kanban is "a way of seeing"; in this session we will "see" Scrum through the lens of Kanban, and explore how those insights can be used to re-ignite the inspect-&-adapt cycle to create a highly customized process that is better suited for your particular context.

Small, cross-functional teams have become a staple in Agile environments. However, for a variety of reasons, those teams usually find themselves needing to interact with other teams in the organization, which creates the problem of "dependency management". Suddenly, making individual teams "agile" is not enough: the whole web of dependencies needs to increase its agility.

This talk will explore the problem of intra-team dependencies, its impact in Customer flow, and practical strategies team-level leaders (as well as system-level leaders) can apply to help make the whole system more responsive, fit-for-purpose, and agile.

"Early and continuous delivery of value" is one of the promises of a shift towards Agile, and one of the manifestations of that principle is the ability to keep work in a state of "flow": always smoothly moving and reaching its Customers. Flow can be observed (and managed) at multiple levels, but the flow that really matters is that which is perceived by the Customer.

This talk will explore the meaning of "flow" at various levels (teams, systems of teams, and end-to-end Customer workflows), and the practical techniques organizations can apply to move from one level to the next, and as they do so, streamline and smooth out delivery of value to their Customers.

Agile has now gone mainstream. Starting new and more Agile teams is relatively easy, but organizations then run into the challenge to orchestrate the work of multiple agile teams. Some have even observed that even though they manage to obtain better results from individual teams, if they step back and look at the larger picture, work still takes a long time to be delivered, quality expectations are not met, and teams experience considerable "friction" when they interact with their environment.

This session is directed to those managers that operate above the team (middle-management, director level, etc.) and explores the concerns that need to be considered to create a context in which those Agile teams can thrive and realize the promise of high-performance.

Unlike a factory, where we can see work literally moving around, piling up waiting, being worked on, or even deteriorating with time, knowledge workers have to deal with abstract constructs that are largely invisible. Suddenly, answering questions like "what are we working on?" or "how does work get done here" can become tricky.

The basic premise that the first step towards effectively managing knowledge work is to make it visible will not come as a surprise for anyone with some familiarity with Agile. That said, there's more to effective work visualization than a 3-column board showing "To Do | In Progress | Done" columns, and visualizing work items is only the first step.

This session will explore approaches for visualizing otherwise invisible aspects of work, such as commitments, process, rules and, of course, work items, and using them to enable more effective management and collaboration.

Scrum has proven to be a successful framework for many companies in complex delivery domains to transition to Agility from more traditional delivery methods.

At some point during these transitions many companies have experienced a stall to what have previously been ongoing and exponential improvements. Complexity brings with it challenges in the "white spaces" that exist between teams where local improvements become disconnected from the delivery of customer value.

In this workshop, we introduce a simulation of "The Company" where the white space challenges are experienced.

Through the use of the simulation we introduce Lean & Systems Thinking concepts to improve the system as a whole and bring the company back to a place of continuous improvement that is connected to customer value.

^{Note for conference selection committee: Additional option: the content can be presented in a 40 -60 minute talk format if workshop space is limited.}