You’ve likely heard of the Tuckman stages of group development: forming - storming - norming - performing. Our goal is always to reach performing, but what do you do if your team gets stuck in the storming phase?

In this session, I will share recent experiences of helping a team get unstuck and back on track to norming, with high performing in their sights. I’ll set the stage by describing the real challenges the team faced in trying to reconcile multiple, different team cultures and approaches to accomplishing work. Next, I'll share specific techniques the team used to start moving forward, such as a visioning exercise to align on team values and a team radar to assess current state, journey line and marketplace of skills activities to celebrate individual strengths and interests, establishing a feedback habit to create space for healthy disagreement, and picking up a gratitude practice.

So if you have a feeling your team’s norms could use some refreshing or if you’re currently stuck in the storming phase, join me for this session and leave with ideas you can use right away to help your team become more aligned and get back on the road to high performing!

Imagine you are asked to sit in on a team’s sprint review and retrospective. The team has been having difficulty forming and the Scrum Master has asked you to observe the team dynamics during these two sessions. Are you simply going to watch what’s going on or is there more you can do? Perhaps you are seeing interactions and team dynamics at play without truly realizing what you are observing. And when you do observe, are you injecting your own biases into those observations? Observation is a powerful tool, but one which we may not take advantage of to its true potential. After all, what exactly should we be observing, anyway?

By learning how to expand our observational skills in a non-biased and non-judgmental manner, we can gain a deeper understanding of team dynamics and interactions allowing us to offer more meaningful and impactful support, coaching, and empathy. Because there are many observational aspects that pass us by, the best way to become more observant is through deliberate practice. So, let’s practice together with a group exercise in a fun and safe setting!

In this highly interactive workshop, we’ll start by sharing tools and tips to make you a better observer. Then we’ll ask for a small group of volunteers (“builders”) to be observed performing a brief task. The remaining attendees will practice applying the observation techniques, and, after the builders finish, will share their observations in small groups. We’ll conclude with a full-group debrief and discussion of the key takeaways and opportunities to improve our effectiveness and observations.

If you’re looking for new ways to connect with your team, to enhance your agilist toolkit, or simply participate in an informative and interactive workshop, this session is for you!

Have you tidied up your personal life with Marie Kondo and are now wondering how to achieve the same effect in your work life? Do you have the feeling that the most valuable product backlog items (PBIs) are getting lost under a mountain of old stories, bugs, and tasks? Maybe you know a change is needed, but feel completely overwhelmed about where to start? If so, join us to learn how to make your product better through the life changing magic of tidying up your backlog.

We’ll start by exploring the costs of a large, cluttered product backlog and share a short quiz you can use to gauge the current state of your own backlog. Next, we’ll cover how we’ve adapted the KonMari method and introduce five easy steps you can take to get started in your tidying process. We'll share real-life examples along the way, calling out potential pitfalls to avoid (don’t become a storage expert!), and illustrating how story mapping may be the magical backlog equivalent to Kondo’s “vertical folding” technique. By the end of the session, you’ll know the specific next steps to take so that you too can realize the many benefits of a tidied-up product backlog: improved visibility, increased self-organization, and easier decision-making.

Almost everyone says that they REALLY REALLY want to receive feedback…so why does it feel like we hardly ever get meaningful, constructive feedback at the point in time when it would actually make a difference? Why do we come up with a list of reasons why we should just let something go, so that we can avoid having to deliver feedback ourselves? For many of us, both the giving and receiving of feedback can often feel like an awkward and uncomfortable task. And it’s because we avoid it whenever possible that we don’t improve these skills and we miss out on opportunities to help ourselves and our teammates grow.

In this this highly interactive workshop, we hope to reduce anxiety around delivering and receiving feedback. First, we’ll discuss what makes giving feedback such a challenge and then introduce several different frameworks and approaches that you can use to prepare and organize your feedback and your response. Then, since the best way to improve our skills is through deliberate practice, we’ll break into small groups to practice together through a series exercises in a fun and safe setting. We’ll be swapping roles as we go along, so that everyone has equal opportunity to practice giving and receiving feedback.

If you are looking to improve your personal feedback skills, searching for ways to help your team become more open and willing to share feedback with each other, or interested in how simple practice and exercises can improve learning and build up skills, then this session is for you!

Multitasking can often be considered a must-have skill when, in fact, it can actually make us less productive and more prone to error. But even with plenty of research supporting the perils of multitasking, it can be hard to convince managers and stakeholders. After all, being 100% utilized is the way to go, right? Maybe it’s time to re-think what really matters. A focus on the flow of work and value delivery should take precedence over ensuring everyone is simply busy.

In this highly interactive session, we'll run through three simulations (Multitasking is Evil, Name Game, & Featureban) to make the case that reducing our work in progress so that we can focus on the flow of work is the way to go! Each interactive session is a fun and easy way to learn and think about what it means to begin and finish work. Each activity becomes a little more complex, allowing us to consider additional details and interactions that simulate our day-to-day decision making at work. After running through each activity, we will debrief and discuss what we learned so you can take these ideas back with you to work!

When working with project teams, how many times do we see interactions and team dynamics at play without truly realizing what we are observing? And when we do observe, do we tend to inject our own biases into those observations? Observation is a powerful tool, but one which we may not take advantage to its true potential. After all, what exactly should we be observing, anyway?

There are many observational aspects such as body language and tone of voice that we may pick up on intuitively. But there are probably even more that pass us by because we’re simply not used to looking for or paying attention to them. By learning how to “up” our observational skills in a non-biased and judgmental manner, we can gain a deeper understanding of team dynamics and interactions allowing us to offer more meaningful and impactful support, coaching and empathy. The best way to become more observant is through deliberate practice, so let’s practice together through a series of group exercises in a fun and safe setting!

In this highly interactive workshop session, we’ll first review some tools and tips for you to consider to make you a better observer. Then we break the room into multiple groups of observers and builders. Builders will be assigned a challenging but fun task as the observers practice the new tools and ideas discussed earlier. When the task is complete, we allow plenty of time for debrief and discussion as the observers share their observations. We then switch roles (observers to become builders and vice-versa) as the builders attempt a new task for the new observers to witness.

If you are looking for new ways to connect with your project team, build new skills to enhance your agilist toolkit, or simply participate in an informative and interactive workshop, this session is for you!

Leading an organization's Agile transformation comes with challenges for all parties. Management needs to learn what changes are necessary and how best to implement them. Teams may struggle to make the case for change and to adopt changes while still meeting their other obligations. And coaches can face the challenge of leading a change as outsiders, neither part of the team nor invested with any formal power. Using the true story of a project at a non-profit client, this talk will illustrate how Kanban encourages leadership in all three roles, empowering the whole team to play a part in designing organizational change. Kanban helps coaches and consultants act as partners, creating a lasting solution tailored to the organization's context.

Limiting work-in-progress, or WIP, is a core principle of Kanban, and is a common recommendation to teams using Scrum or other frameworks as well. Yet the idea that working on less can lead you to get more done seems to defy common sense. Even those who understand the reasons for limiting WIP can struggle with resistance from team members or leaders when putting the theory to practice. This talk will review the concept of WIP and explore in depth the reasons for limiting WIP: enhancing focus, reducing cycle time, optimizing flow and making bottlenecks visible. We will give strategies for starting out with WIP limits and suggestions for what to do when a limit is reached. Attendees will also participate in a short simulation that will illustrate the concepts in practice, and that attendees can use on their own projects to help overcome skepticism of WIP limits in their organizations.

I spent January in Antarctica hanging out with penguins, whales, and seals. It was about as different from my day-to-day work as can be. And yet, on my long flight home, I couldn’t help but reflect on how well my trip aligned with one specific value of the Agile Manifesto: “Responding to change over following a plan.”

Antarctica is a place that truly drives home why we need both planning AND, even more importantly, the ability to respond to change. This trip helped me fully appreciate how true this value is - and not just in software development. And after being stuck in Antarctica six days longer than planned, it also built up my empathy for team members struggling with dynamic situations!

Does your Scrum team start all its stories on Day 1 of the Sprint? Do stories sometime carry over into the next Sprint? Or perhaps testing always gets crammed in on the last day of the Sprint? If any of these sound familiar, your team may benefit from improving its flow.

Flow metrics are common with Kanban, but can provide tremendous value to any team, including those using Scrum. In this session, we’ll start by exploring the value of achieving a smooth flow of work (versus simply achieving maximum utilization) and give simple ways for your team to measure its flow. We’ll look at examples of metrics including lead and cycle time, throughput, and the cumulative flow diagram (CFD), reviewing what each represents, easy ways to collect them, and how they can be used in both a Kanban and Scrum context. You’ll leave the session knowing how to interpret and capture all these valuable metrics, so your agile team can measure and improve its flow.

For a long time multitasking has been considered a must-have skill when, in fact, it makes us less productive and more prone to error. But even with plenty of studies and papers supporting that idea, it can be hard to convince managers and stakeholders that we should be taking on less at a time. In this lightning talk, we'll run through one very quick, lightweight simulation (Multitasking is Evil) you can use to help make that case and show that lowering work in progress is the way to go!

“Going Agile” is a big cultural change for most organizations and it’s significance, impact, and the effort required for successful implementation can often be underestimated. There are many benefits to be gained by adopting a more Agile approach, including quicker feedback loops, more focus on value, and higher levels of collaboration. However, for Agile to succeed in the long-term it’s essential to set expectations up front and to balance the amount of change with the amount of disruption it will cause. In this session, we will look at how David Anderson intentionally built change management principles into his Kanban Methodology and explore other change management techniques the Agile community can leverage when helping organizations transition to Agile.

Are your solutions to recurring issues having only minor improvements? Are some of these solutions actually making things worse in the long run? When answering yes to these, typically, we are trying to solve the issues with too narrow a view. Oddly we think we are addressing it at sufficient level but usually not. In order to see the entire picture we need a common language that will enable us to understand an entire complex adaptive system (e.g. organizations, teams, individuals). Join us as we learn a language called System Modeling (aka. Causal Loop Diagrams).

With this language we will be able to have rich dialogue to gain a full understanding of the entire complex adaptive system so that we can create solutions at the fundamental level and not the symptomatic level. Addressing system issues at the fundamental level will significantly improve the system. Symptomatic solutions may give the appearance of improvement in the short term but typically make things worse in the long run. Unfortunately we usually pick the symptomatic solutions because they seem obvious and we don't realize the long term impacts because of feedback delays that could take weeks, months or even years to realize.

Are you struggling with delivering a potentially releasable working product every iteration? Ever wonder what one of biggest reasons we have difficulty getting things done at the individual, team and organizational level are? Do you keep doing something even though you know it reduces your productivity and lowers quality? We are going to run an exercise that highlights one of the major culprits that you have all experienced and probably continue to experience. The exercise will likely ignite a little (or big) fire in your belly that will help you become more productive and improve the quality of your work. From this, we will discuss ways to improve this at the individual, team and organization levels.