Let’s travel to the Forbidden Island to learn how teams work together. On this island, a team of 3-4 people will be working together to collect valuable artifacts and then try to escape while the island sinks beneath them. Egad!

Successful cross-functional teams will learn to work together. Less successful ones will sink beneath the waves. Success is harder than you think as a bit of time pressure gets mixed in. What will you demystify as you execute and debrief this mission?

As Alistair Cockburn has said, software development is a cooperative game. By using a simple game simulation with cross-functional roles, we can see how various team dynamics play out. After running through this simulation, we’ll discuss what went well and didn’t and ways to set teams up for more success. The Forbidden Island serves as a perfect petri dish to see what team dynamics grow.

Whether you are a team member or manager, you will get valuable insights from this session.

When the people of an organization embark on their quest for increased agility, they are essentially begin working on the opposite side of a paradox that has been ignored. Often times, though as they take their journey, they begin experiencing the downside of now ignoring the the traditional, control-based approach and there is an outcry to revert. A dilemma is created.

What are these paradoxes? Well, the first four you encounter are described in the Agile Manifesto’s values. If one could have both sides of the “over” statements easily, we’d take them. Successfully maximizing the appropriate upsides of each side of these values while minimizing the downsides becomes a swinging pendulum to manage. This becomes key to leading others in your organization. If you are a manager, team leader, or executive trying help your organization get traction, then this session will provide some new insights into how to balance change with stability.

These four values are just the start of the paradoxes that will emerge as you take your journey. This workshop will help you use a technique called Polarity Management to help manage the upsides and downsides of this balancing act so that you can lead people effectively. Once out in the open, dilemmas created with a swing one way or another become easier to handle and perhaps can even be avoided.

If you hold any form of leadership position, whether as a manager, scrum master, or coach, you will find that you will be at times offering guidance or advice. What unfortunately happens though is that your observation of the need and conversation to help fill that need can get tangled with your biases. Want to improve your coaching conversations? Then this workshop is for you.

To help you work through the arc of your conversation and understand how these biases come into play, we're going to discuss the GROW conversation model and the Satir interaction model. This workshop will open with an anchoring activity. We'll then use an exercise and focused discussion to review each model and see how these played into the coaching received.

If you hold any form of leadership position, whether as a manager, scrum master, or coach, you will find that you will be at times offering guidance or advice. What unfortunately happens though is that your observation of the need and conversation to help fill that need can get tangled with your biases. Want to improve your coaching conversations? Then this workshop is for you.

To help you work through the arc of your conversation and understand how these biases come into play, we're going to discuss the GROW conversation model and the Satir interaction model. This workshop will open with an anchoring activity. We'll then use an exercise and focused discussion to review each model and see how these played into the coaching received.

The Agile Manifesto doesn't explicitly talk about what changes in management should happen and neither do the approaches. In fact, sometimes we hear the exact opposite from teams - "What do we need managers for..?" or perhaps "Can't they just get rid of all the impediments we have?"

As a former manager and now as a coach, I find the words Servant Leadership sometimes doesn't resonate. It actually only paints part of the picture anyway. What we want are ways to enrich management so that they can do more for the organization and its teams. Let's discover what some of this enrichment might be.

DevOps has become all the rage from a technical change perspective; it really has changed the game. And while it provides numerous benefits, only after you also embrace the human side of change within the organization, can you really get to full Agility.

What if we could take advantage of a continuous delivery of change just like we do in our development pipelines? As executives, managers, Scrum masters, coaches, or anyone else in a leadership role, we should desire to make each change focused, easy, and small to contain risk. Once this is done, changes can mimic a development pipeline that delivers towards a business outcome. This workshop will help you learn how to keep the number and size of changes in check and consider how to manage the risks of deploying change.

We've all heard how we need to collaborate better, but what does this really mean? What results can I expect to see with better collaboration?

This workshop will demonstrate how productivity increases with greater collaboration and how to create better a more collaborative environment. We'll use a simple simulation and ratchet up the level of collaboration each Sprint. In the session you will not only have an opportunity to experience this relationship with a relatively simple learning game, but we'll look behind the curtain at the science and how some various behavioral models explain why this relationship exists. We'll then explore some tactics you can use to help teams collaborate better and close with an exploration of what either helps or hinders collaboration and how you can use this information as well as the game with your teams.

If you have an interest in improving productivity of your team or the teams you serve, then this is the session for you.

So you are considering getting a coach to help you in your transition to Agile. Or perhaps you are an Agile practitioner considering becoming an Agile coach. What do these Agile coaches do? What makes them different?

This session will enter the foyer of the house that describes what coaches do and considerations one can have when they think about coaching (including hiring one). Prepare to be challenged and to learn a bit of what it takes to be or work with a coach; it has little to do with courses or certifications, though they may help. In covering what coaches do, one can now begin to think along the lines of what the skills one may need to improve.

Your in a predicament. The system needs re-architecture. There are a lot of bugs to stamp out. You need to turn it off, but you can't - it's mission critical to your business.

When most of us learn about Agile, the examples and stories we are told are from a Greenfield perspective; Greenfield meaning new development. Most organizations that aren't start-ups have many applications already in use; this pristine start just doesn't exist. Existing software needs to be maintained and continuity of operations is the highest priority; these are the circumstances of Brownfield development. This is essentially any application past its first release. Making this more difficult is that teams need to maintain legacy code and update antiquated architectures.

This session will cover techniques you can use at the team level to help this maintenance activity. We’ll specifically look at the use of the Mikado Method, Kanban, and some indicators you may want to use to analyze your application portfolio from a maintenance perspective.

Losing good people during your transformation? Getting more resistance than you expected? You may be producing unwanted reactions in the way you are leading your people through change.

If you want your Agile transformation firing on all cylinders without the harmful side-effects, managers at all levels should focus on becoming Catalysts. Much like a chemical catalyst, your job is to help boost organizational performance by creating a healthy environment and providing the needed support.

In this interactive presentation-tutorial, we’ll explore how you can do that through some simple techniques that anyone can do; extracted from Fearless Change and Liberating Structures. We'll relate these techniques to how trust works and give you some powerful ways to improve your organizational trust.

Ever struggled to define what is minimally necessary? Whether it is defining a Minimally Viable Product or what is minimally necessary for a project or team, you need a way to not only brainstorm ideas, but also a way to cut the unnecessary waste out.

Pass to Perfection is a game for getting a solution, product, or project started with what is minimally necessary; in development terms, this is your Minimal Viable Product (MVP). It mashes up ‘Yes and’ thinking for co-creation, and the essence of The Perfection Game (from the Core Protocols) for negotiation and prioritization in a collaborative round-robin game format. Create ideas until you can’t think of anything else and you pass, remove ideas until you have what is essential and you pass. This workshop will have you try out the game and learn how easy it is to get people started.

Do you find you need to explain you business quickly? Or that you need to understand various internal choices or external environment impacts on what you do or how you may need to adjust?

A business canvas can be really useful for answering these questions. In this talk, I'll describe how I used a business canvas to represent the business model for the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Pesticide Programs. By doing some logical analysis on current industry trends, I'll discuss how a colleague and I were able to develop a likely forecast of events (that proved true) that decreased the amount of registration fees we would collect. This change had a direct impact on the organization in terms of funds needed for people, systems, and analytical research.

Learn how a business canvas can help you!

Have you wondered what helps make contracts deliver better results? It's not specifying Agile approaches, but thinking of the development life-cycle, its impacts, and asking for demonstrable understanding of Agile approaches.

This short talk will discuss how a contract vehicle was established at the Environmental Protection Agency to improve contractor accountability and more importantly improve system reliability. It will include a short discussion of what next steps for following contracts should be included.

So you are considering getting a coach to help you in your transition to Agile. Or perhaps you are an Agile practitioner considering becoming an Agile coach. What do these Agile coaches do? What makes them different?

This session will enter the foyer of the house that describes what coaches do and considerations one can have when they think about coaching (including hiring one). Prepare to be challenged and to learn a bit of what it takes to be or work with a coach; it has little to do with courses or certifications, though they may help. In covering what coaches do, one can now begin to think along the lines of what the skills one may need to improve.

Losing good people during your transformation? Getting more resistance than you expected? You may be producing unwanted reactions in the way you are leading your people through change. If you want your Agile transformation firing on all cylinders without the harmful side-effects, people at all levels need to become Catalysts.

Catalytic leaders help lead continual improvement - change. How can we do that? How can anyone be a leader? This workshop will mix presentation with exercises to help you understand practical things you can do to lead change effectively.

As we have seen from recent reports in the news and elsewhere, cyberattacks come many sources. How can we use Agile practices to improve organization's information security posture?

In this session, Dan and Paul will discuss techniques that can help make information security an important part of software development and speed your response to threats. The use of hardening pipelines, dark stories, and user stories/acceptance criteria that map to policy guidance based on NIST 800-53 controls will be discussed and how each approaches improving your security posture from a different angle.

Having trouble with your Agile ceremonies?  Could it be because you are treating them like any other meeting? Or maybe you need to up your game as a facilitator?

This interactive session will lay some groundwork to start that improvement. You will learn what the job of a facilitator is and how it helps teams accomplish more. We'll discuss a process for running an effective session and techniques that can help you through that process for various Agile ceremonies such as Iteration Planning, Retrospectives, Stand-ups, etc.

Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools is one of four Agile values in the Manifesto. Also, the preamble starts off "We are uncovering better ways of developing software...." Thus an emphasis on learning as well. So as a manager, how do we learn how our people are doing? Certainly listening to them and attending to their needs is one way, but how do they recognize the impacts of the organizational work system at large? This session will focus on techniques for observing human systems at work; how do we notice when organizational processes are getting in the way and need to change? How can we think about changing systemic impediments?

So why does pair programming (or any form of pairing really) work? Well rather than tell you why, let's experience it! 

This is a simple 3 round exercise that you can do with your teams and managers to demonstrate the benefits of pairing. It will show the linkage between having a shared mental model through collaboration and ease of integrating the resulting work.

We've all heard it; the only constant is change. When an organization begins a journey for Agile Transformation, the changes piles up... Unfortunately most change management approaches focus on creating a project-oriented plan for this. Other approaches like Lean Change are more emergent, but aren't specifically designed to help people to cope with change itself, only to help make the steps smaller. Let's explore some complementary people-centric approaches:

• Transition Management to help people make the journey through the wilderness
• Appreciative Inquiry to build on the current strengths, and
• The Power of Habit, to help people unlearn what is unwittingly holding them back

As we talk through each of these, we'll focus on the role of leadership and how these techniques can help people become willing, as opposed to being coerced, partners. We'll close with a brief discussion on how to engage people creatively with storytelling and such approaches as Open Space, World Café, and other workshops. In thinking on techniques that complement change management approaches, we can improve the effectiveness and willingness of the people in the organization to join in.