Do you have Scrum/Kanban teams frequently releasing high-value, quality product updates? Unfortunately, such agility usually doesn’t last, with features starting to take longer to build, changes becoming riskier to make, and quality getting more difficult to maintain. This common situation – high cost of change, low safety – is often the result of low Technical Agility. The common solution? Lean on the developers to upgrade their “technical practices.” However, this solution rarely makes a lasting, noticeable difference, because what matters is how developers approach work, and that depends heavily on how product and management engage with them. In this session we’ll explore Technical Agility from a mindset standpoint, identify its influence on product management’s choices, and determine how all parties should engage with each other to achieve a level of Technical Agility that enables actual product and business Agility.

Exciting news! Colleagues from a non-software department, function, or business unit are interested in adopting Agile, and they have turned to you for advice!

While you’d like to help them, you realize that copying your Agile practices for software/IT won’t cut it. Maybe even a popular process framework (name starts with “S”) wouldn’t be right for their work. They are already starting to use Agile bits – boards, stickies, sprints, and standups – but you’d like to help them go further and enjoy a context-specific Agile implementation that will transform their world.

What you need to do is help them design their implementation based on Agile values and principles. While you don’t have to be a process expert, you do need to have the right conversations. And, you need to discuss the Agile approach in a way that empowers your colleagues to make suitable choices, without being tied to any prescription, tool, or so-called best practices. Come to this session, led by the author of “The Agile Mind-Set” and the forthcoming “Agile for Non-Software Teams,” to learn how to facilitate a rigorous, collaborative, empowering set of activities for successfully customizing Agile to their context.

Collaboration is generally considered a net positive, and everyone knows it’s a key principle of Agile. Yet most Agile teams -- even those that seem to work well together -- don’t collaborate nearly enough, and thus don’t reach their full potential. It takes attention and work to make collaboration possible, let alone appealing and practical! In this interactive talk, the author of “The Human Side of Agile” explains the not-so-short list of not-so-simple factors that get in the way of real collaboration, and provides a process for determining actions that will make collaboration possible.

These days, almost every organization is showing interest in Agile. We seem to have all the ingredients for effective transformations: well-known practices, detailed processes, ever-improving tools, extensive literature, myriad certifications, and many consultants. How is it, then, that so few organizations are truly agile?

Gil Broza, author of “The Agile Mindset” and “The Human Side of Agile”, thinks that one particular ingredient has been overlooked in the mad rush to adopt Agile. In this session, he leads us on an exploration of that ingredient and its place in an Agile transformation.

"Agile has too many meetings." "Our meetings are a waste of time." "It's always the same two people talking while everyone else is on their phones or laptops." Indeed, meetings are often pretty bad… but they are also necessary. Agile teams can't fully implement the 3 C’s (communication, collaboration, and consensus) only by inhabiting an open space or using a messaging tool. However, it doesn't take much to make a meeting effective, collaborative, and a welcome experience for its participants. Come to this experiential session to learn 10 simple changes you can make -- without having to become a professional facilitator -- to make your meetings matter.