Do you feel like Agile Scaling has become a goal rather than the means to an end for your organization? To determine where you stand on the Scaling spectrum, ask yourself a few soul-searching questions: Why do we need to scale? Is this the right time for us to scale? If you’ve checked these boxes, you may wonder “where do I go from here?”

This talk will focus on 3 areas that emerged as common themes throughout my experience working on government Agile Scaling projects and ultimately influenced the trajectory of each agency's scaling journey:

• Communicate vision consistently
• Focus on your people genuinely
• Create your own path intentionally

I've seen successes and some struggles with Agile Scaling efforts in government agencies. Regardless of the agency acronym or the frameworks used, these key elements shaped their scaling outcomes.

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!

Picture it: you've been dropped like a paratrooper in the middle of a project jungle where the scrum teams are already full speed ahead in working their sprints, but it's more like the sprints are working them... to a slow death march. The never-ending barrage of user story questions is like a thick brush blocking the teams from reaching their goals. Plus, you've been given a "helpful" tip from an insider that some teams are "in need of discipline". How do you dig in and evaluate what's going on without creating more chaos?

In this session, we will discuss who and what to evaluate when making assessments of an Agile team's maturity.

Operations and Maintenance work is often seen as an unsexy, thankless job - but it has to be done. Since it's not hot, new development work, it ends up being placed on the back burner or thrown into a dark cave and not always considered as an area of work to apply agility. Sooner or later though, once the new software development work is done, everyone has to face these questions:

1) How do you manage the grunt work of keeping these systems operational and subsequent enhancements

2) How do you deal with system owners who all think their requests are the most important and

3) Is there a better way to handle all of this dirty work?

This session will show you how you can prioritize your O&M work – without the turf battles - when supporting multiple systems.

Psychological safety is one of the newest buzz terms in team dynamics but what does it really mean for an Agile team? No need to reinvent the wheel here - whether you’re using Scum or Kanban, they both have safety built in. You can find it hiding in plain sight - in Scrum values & Kanban principles.

Let’s learn how to use these concepts to develop trust in our teams and where to start.

Picture it: you've been dropped like a paratrooper in the middle of a project jungle where the scrum teams are already full speed ahead in working their sprints, but it's more like the sprints are working them... to a slow death march. The never-ending barrage of user story questions is like a thick brush blocking the teams from reaching their goals. Plus, you've been given a "helpful" tip from an insider that some teams are "in need of discipline". How do you dig in and evaluate what's going on without creating more chaos?

In this session, we will discuss who and what to evaluate when making assessments of Agile maturity.

Have you ever tried hopping onto a moving train? That is what it feels like for those of us who join dysfunctional Agile projects already in motion. Everything is moving really quickly,  but you don’t know exactly where you’re going. For that reason, you attempt to figure out a few things:

• What are the project/team issues - does the team even know what Scrum is?
• What is expected of you - do they know what a Scrum Master does?
• What all are the government quirks - do your government partners think we can just "go Agile"?

A situation like this would call for a Agile mindset. But what does it really mean to have an Agile mindset and what does it look like?

This talk will outline some techniques for employing  an Agile mindset when considering the people, process and tools of an inflight project from several different angles. I will also discuss some lessons learned from working with government partners in a not-so Agile environment.