Agile2017

Abstract:
One of the biggest challenges for Enterprises today is dealing with constant and rapid change happening all around them. The change is so disruptive that no Enterprise, regardless of age and size, can take their survival for granted. However, nature and humans have dealt with change very effectively since time immemorial. Systems like Weather, Economies and even the Human Body are highly adaptable to a rapidly changing environments. These systems, known as Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), have grown resilient by thriving on change.
So when we have systems all around us which are effectively dealing with Change, can Enterprises learn from CAS about dealing with change. The answer is a resounding 'Yes'! While adopting Agile Values and Principles are helping organizations not only cope with change but also leverage it, the understanding of CAS and how they deal with change will certainly help Enterprises enhance Agility.

Learning Outcomes:

• 1. Understand the model of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), and how they deal with change effectively
• 2. Learn the similarities between 21st Century Enterprises and CAS
• 3. Gain insights about the characteristics of CAS
• 4. Learn the difference between 'Complicated' and Complex', and how the 'Complicated' model is an impediment to Enterprise Agility
• 5. Understand how Enterprises can deal with the challenges arising from Change and enhance Enterprise Agility, by adopting the CAS model

Attachments:

• Organizations as CAS_Agile Alliance_Aug 4_Upload.pdf

Abstract:
We'd like to deliver functionality on a regular cadence, but sometimes poor design and technical debt trips us up. Ongoing, sustainable development and delivery of system functionality benefits from explicit attention to architecture. Yet we don't want to slip into old habits, overspecifying things we'll never implement or doing too much design upfront. We need to strike a balance. While being agile, we also want to pay attention to the desired and emergent architecture qualities of our systems. Performance, scalabability, maintainability, or flexibility don't happen by magic.
This session introduces you to several architecture practices that can be picked up individually and adapted to your specific business context. You'll learn about practices for managing architecture work, making it visible, and for incrementally delivering architecture. For example, you might want to want to define a landing zone for key system qualities, giving room to make architectural tradeoffs. Or, you may need to raise awareness of existing architecture debt so that you can plan accordingly. Or you may need to fit in cycles of architecture investigation or innovation in with ongoing delivery of functionality. Or probe your existing system's capabilities through defining quality scenarios for normal and failure/recovery modes.
One set of architecture practices doesn't fit all situations. Come learn some powerful architecture practices that can be independently adopted to address your challenges with architectural complexity, uncertainty, emergent system behavior, and incremental delivery of features and capabilities.

Learning Outcomes:

• Appreciate explicit attention to architecture and the utility of independent architecture practices
• Ways to manage and mitigate architecture risk: landing zones, risk reduction backlogs, architecture roadmaps
• Managing architecture investigation: architecture spikes, innovation spikes, bounded reasearch
• Making architecture work and progress visible: coloring the backlog, system quality dashboards, system quality scenarios
• A decision-making framework for "dialing in" explicit architecture practices

Attachments:

• Intentional Architecture-Practices for Sustainable Development and Delivery.pdf

Abstract:
Understanding the enterprise is essential to the success of any enterprise transformation initiative. All too often, consultants are rushed in to implement agile methods without any meaningful understanding of the existing people, processes or culture. Engaging without understanding these important contextual elements is a recipe for failure. There is an alternative that can help lead to more successful outcomes: Organizational Discovery.
Organizational Discovery is a structured process for uncovering the critical elements of the people, process and culture. It goes far beyond the current rather superficial models of "agile assessment" to dig into uncovering meaningful functions and dysfunctions within the enterprise. In this talk we describe the discovery process with different investigation approaches and the pros and cons of each.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the enterprise discovery process
• Learn different investigation approaches and how and when to use them
• Discover the kinds of artifacts needed to uncover to maximize engagement success

Attachments:

• Enterprise Discovery-From Clouseau to Columbo, Understanding Large Organizations.pdf

Abstract:
Data science improves effectiveness of many industries by looking at what has occurred in the past and using that analysis to help make decisions about the future. This talk shows practical techniques to solve questions about Agile processes and software development using even small amounts of historical data.
This session introduces the concepts behind data science and offers numerous easy wins with practical applications to any software development process. It will demonstrate how even a little data can be used to inform more likely future outcomes and how to get started immediately in your company.
Some of the practical techniques explained and demonstrated are –

• How to estimate the likely lead time for future items based on (similar) past items using completed item cycle-time data trends
• How to forecast how many items are likely to be delivered over some period of time using system throughput (just needing historical start and completion date data)
• How to estimate the likely number of remaining defects in a product using sampling and defect report and fix rate data
• How to look for clusters of similar impediments and failures in completed items using blocker clustering and frequency data
• How to identify and quantify declining predictability in a process earlier by observing changing process trends

By the end of this session you will know how and why simple techniques applied to historical data are reliable and outperform intuition alone, and have immediately actionable techniques that you will understand. Everything shown is easily implemented using post-it notes and spreadsheets (yours or mine, freely available on Google sheets or Excel).
Learning outcomes include -

• Learn what “data science” means and how it is used with simple examples
• Learn how to immediately start doing simple analysis of historical data
• Learn how to assess the expected reliability of analysis applied to historical data
• Learn five immediate ways to perform quality data science in an Agile context

Data science isn’t as complicated as it sounds with the core concepts easily understood in a few minutes. Even if you hated mathematics in school, this session will make you love again.

Learning Outcomes:

• What “data science” means and how it is used with simple examples
• How to immediately start doing simple analysis of historical data
• How to assess the expected reliability of analysis applied to historical data
• Five immediate ways to perform quality data science in an Agile context

Attachments:

• Latent_Defect_Estimation_Worksheet.pdf
• I Love the smell of data in the morning (Getting started with data science) - Troy Magennis.pdf

Abstract:
Processes and, generally, way of working approaches are usually optimized for one particular context. Having one company-wide way of working might help to keep a company aligned, but often causes severe local sub-optimization and frustration. So: should every sub-organization have their own processes, practices and ways of working?
At Ericsson, one of the world’s largest SW companies, operating in a rapidly changing highly complex environment, we must swiftly provide high quality solutions responding to our customer’s needs. This requires a good balance between a company-wide alignment and local optimization.
Then how can we practically achieve just-enough (global) alignment to enable (local) autonomy and optimization?
In this talk you will learn about the Ericsson Business Unit IT and Cloud’s journey from fixed static processes to – as we call it – our “SW Development System”.
You will learn about that SW Development System, which is based on insights from Agile, Lean, VUCA, Human System Dynamics and Applied Systems thinking: it is a human-centered, “just-enough” framework for working in an aligned way across a large organization where different parts contribute to a large product portfolio. It avoids the trap of forcing “mechanics” into the organization and yet allows us to work in an aligned and locally optimized way, helping us to collaborate and evolve across our large enterprise.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understanding of how to achieve a good balance between company-global alignment and local autonomy.
• Learn about a Development System, that is based on the human interactions instead of process mechanics.

Abstract:
As more large enterprises are adopting agile practices organization-wide, they face unique challenges when compared to smaller organizations or individual projects. While most agile approaches work well at the team level and even for small groups of teams, many of those same preferred practices just don’t work when scaled scaled to an entire organization. For example, with just one or a few agile teams, self- directing teams can organize how they want to solve problems, but when scaled to an entire organization, some level of consistency between teams is needed to manage the dependencies between them. Because of this, the teams can't be fully self-directed. Additionally, distributed teams are a reality in global enterprises, but most agile approaches prefer co-location for face to face conversations. Business stakeholders aren’t usually part of the decision to adopt agile, and as such, are resistant to participate, or are not trained on how to work with teams operating in an agile environment. Executives sometimes mandate the organization-wide move to agile, leaving managers to implement a methodology they might not believe in or aren’t trained to support. PMOs love gated approval processes and are hesitant to give them up, but they are still needed as key stakeholders on projects. Also, in most global organizations, funding isn’t allocated to projects in an agile manner, which means executives are asking for guarantees on the dollar that agile just doesn’t support. These are all challenges we've seen at our customers when scaling agile practices and while we don't have all the answers to these challenges, we do have suggestions for how we handled these situations at various times.
In this talk, we’ll (1) start by understanding the primary motivations for large global organizations to adopt agile practices followed by (2) an overview of different scaled approaches and their limitations when scaling and conclude with (3) the most common challenges our customers’ teams are up against, and suggestions to overcome those challenges.

Learning Outcomes:

• 1) Understand why large enterprises want to adopt agile processes.
• 2) Understand limitations of scaled approaches to operating in an agile environment.
• 3) Discuss common challenges of agile in large enterprises, and how to overcome them.

Attachments:

• Agile Large Enterprise.pdf

Abstract:
This talk is based on story-telling, where Bas will share the creation of LeSS and within that side-track on explaining better how LeSS works. Expect most of the session to be in story format and not in typical introduction to X format.
LeSS is a lightweight (agile) framework for scaling Scrum to more than one team. It was extracted out of the experiences of Bas Vodde and Craig Larman while Scaling Agile development in many different types of companies, products and industries over the last ten years. There are several case studies available and an book describing LeSS in detail.
LeSS consists of the LeSS Principles, the Framework, the Guides and a set of experiments. The LeSS framework is divided into two frameworks: basic LeSS for 2-8 teams and LeSS Huge for 8+ teams. All of these are also available on the less.works website.
LeSS is different with other scaling frameworks in the sense that it provides a very minimalistic framework that enables empiricism on a large-scale which enables the teams and organization to inspect-adapt their implementation based on their experiences and context. LeSS is based on the idea that providing too much rules, roles, artifacts and asking the organization to tailor it down is a fundamentally flawed approach and instead scaling frameworks should be minimalistic and allowing organizations to fill them in.

Learning Outcomes:

• See why experimenting is a key to improvement
• Learning the difference between component and feature teams.
• Understanding the difficult problem of owning vs renting processes
• Understand the LeSS Frameworks and the LeSS 'complete' picture
• Seeing why organizational complexity - added roles, processes and artifact - is harmful for agility.

Abstract:
Let's put aside the "bubblegum and unicorns" of the Spotify Engineering Culture videos and talk about what doesn't quite work at Spotify and how we're trying to solve it. This is a failure / learning report intended for coaches and other change agents who need encouragement that it's always hard AND it's always possible to improve.
The talk will feature the different perspectives of two coaches: one of the first coaches at Spotify who grew up with "the Spotify model" and one of our more recent coaches coming from a company trying to implement it.

Learning Outcomes:

• * Spotify is used as a framework/model copied by others, but Spotify's model isn't without challenges even for Spotify
• * Encouragement that it's always hard AND it's always possible to improve
• * It's great to be inspired by others but at the end of the day you need to face your difficulties and solve your problems yourself
• *You can succeed with autonomy by never giving up; it comes with challenges and benefits

Attachments:

• You can do BETTER than the Spotify Model Agile 2017.pdf

Abstract:
It has become all the rage to utilize scaling frameworks to introduce agile in a synchronized and replicable fashion in the enterprise. Having been an enterprise coach for years, I understand the need for such a systemic approach. Oftentimes, what gets lost in these transformations is the humanistic perspective. We get so focused on the framework, that we forget the people.
Join me and fellow participants in a discussion of five key actions that help to humanize transformations: defining the mission together; identifying the value stream; team self-selection; team bootstrap; and keeping the spirit alive post-transformation. This is not another framework, these are deceptively simple steps anyone can take to put people first in their transformation.
Who will benefit from the session?
-Those considering using a scaling framework and lack direct experience
-Those in the middle of a transformation but feel stifled by the structure and lack of innovation
-Those who are nearing the end of their transformation and wonder how to sustain the new culture

Learning Outcomes:

• Five practical steps for organic scaling that harnesses individuals motivations into meaningful impact:
• Step 1. Collaborative mission-building: an approach for identifying and articulating the desired business outcome as an invested team
• Step 2. Value-stream mapping: using a well-known model that identifies the work needed to deliver a product or service
• Step 3. Team self-selection: a method that empowers teams to self-select their teams based on the value stream identified
• Step 4. Team bootstrap: a checklist of actions critical to starting a team on the right foot
• Step 5. Keeping the spirit alive: a discussion about what to expect 3, 6 and 18 months after the initial transformation

Abstract:
Since Agile 2013, the "Agileness" of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) has divided the agile community. Four years on SAFe still has its critics, however according to the 11th Version One State of Agile survey, SAFe is the most widely used of the formal agile scaling methods. So regardless of whether SAFe is Agile, it is being implemented widely, so perhaps it is time for a conversation about the practicalities of succeeding with SAFe. How does one succeed with SAFe? What are the common mistakes that can lead to train wrecks?
Em Campbell-Pretty is one of the world's most experienced SAFe practitioners, having been applying SAFe in the field since before it was called SAFe! In this session she will share war stories and lessons learned from 6 years working with SAFe at some of Australia's largest enterprises.

Learning Outcomes:

• 9+ tips to avoid a train wreck when implementing SAFe

Attachments:

• Agile2017-OnTrackTheARTofAvoidingaTrainWreck-No Video.pdf

Abstract:
Agile transformations are usually focused on our IT organizations. As change agents, we've become adept at changing our software teams but we often experience resistance when talking with groups outside of IT - in particular HR and Finance. If your people systems use carrots and sticks and your company funds projects, not teams, your transformation won't see it's maximum benefit and may flounder. In this talk, I'll discuss how I've engaged HR and Finance teams to bring them along the agile path. We'll cover common challenges and missteps and how to address them. And I'll provide you with talking points and practical actions you can take immediately to start making changes to your whole company and effect transformations beyond your teams.

Learning Outcomes:

• Participants will understand the roots of resistance to agile from HR and Finance teams. They'll leave with talking points to bring to their departments and action plans on what they can do to start working with those departments to transform them to support an agile framework.

Attachments:

• Agile Transformations Beyond the Team - Agile 2017.pdf

Abstract:
Where has the customer gone in large scale enterprise agile frameworks? Customer Collaboration is one of the main tenants of the Agile Manifesto, but it seems that have we lost touch with this concept as we have scaled agile into large organizations. If we look at the SAFe Big Picture, the customer is represented, but only at the end of the process consuming the solution. This talk explores how and why it is important to pull the customer to the beginning and middle of the process and not just the end. This isn't to pick on SAFe -- the customer doesn't appear at all on the graphics for Disciplined Agile, LeSS, and Nexus at all! The concepts and principles explored in this presentation are universal in any large enterprise and can, and should, be applied to to any framework.
Each of the main enterprise agile frameworks today (Disciplined Agile, SAFe, LeSS, Nexus, etc) have a graphic representation of their model, which present an inside-out view of how an enterprise is organized to delivery in an agile fashion. But what do our agile enterprises look like from the outside, from our customers' view point? As agile becomes widely adopted as the way of developing products, there is a growing gap with where new product development ideas are generated and how customer input is integrated into the agile process. Increasingly we are seeing organizations struggling because of a lack of an effective and experienced product management group and even experienced agile coaches not knowing how to effectively engage customers in their process.

Learning Outcomes:

• - Understanding the role of the customer, the voice of the customer, and market validation of new product ideas
• - How to define who your "customer" is
• - How to identify opportunities for involving customer input into your enterprise agile process, taking into account different kinds of product development and a framework for identifying the right way to engage customers in your process
• - Understanding how design thinking, lean start-up, and usability testing are powerful tools when combined with agile for engaging the customers

Attachments:

• Putting the customer first Ruch.pdf

Abstract:
Individual goals. Annual reviews. Ratings. Bell curves. Ugh.
Are these rituals considered an impediment in your Enterprise Agile journey? If so, then the time has come to revolutionize your organization's Human Resources (HR) performance management system.
In this presentation, we will examine the philosophy behind traditional HR performance management and the negative impact it is having in Agile organizations. To address this complex challenge, we will explore the emergent field of Agile performance management and share practical, real-world experiences that can be used to champion this change in partnership with your HR organization.

Learning Outcomes:

• Obtain basic understanding of why performance management systems exist
• Absorb historical context behind the management of "performance" vs. "growth"
• Increase ability to recognize the unintended consequences of an Agile-incompatible performance management approach
• Acquire tools and evidence for advancing an Enterprise Agile journey stalled by performance management

Attachments:

• HR Performance Management - Agile 2017 - Poll Results Aug 10.pdf
• HR Performance Management - Agile 2017.pdf

Abstract:
What if your Agile Transformation continued to keep pace with rapidly evolving tools and processes but one of the key roles for driving agile continuous improvement did not? That’s the situation we found ourselves in at Capital One as we shifted to an engineering mindset and innovation culture that demanded more than basic scrum facilitation out of our Agile practitioners.
This talk will identify key symptoms to look for in determining when this role needs a reboot and additional support in their growth. We will share our approach to rethinking the role beyond the Scrum Guide. Once we had a new vision for the role, we focused on understanding what our Scrum Masters would need to achieve it. We will share lessons learned of how we rallied leaders across a diverse enterprise to provide clarity in role growth, training, recruiting, and communities to strengthen our Scrum Masters and improve our organizational agility.

Learning Outcomes:

• Attendees will learn the complexities of raising expectations for Scrum Masters in a way that:
• encourages growth in a positive manner
• allows department lines some level of autonomy
• strengthens the Scrum Master community
• involves everyone (Leadership, People Managers, Scrum Masters, Engineers)

Attachments:

• Elevating the Scrum Master role at Capital One - Agile2017.pdf

Abstract:
Chances are your company will not make real money in 2017 on the Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine Learning. However, come 2020 your software development process is unlikely to be of much value to the business unless you develop deep expertise in these two areas, both personally and institutionally. Nascent that these two areas are, the time to start investing in them is now.
This presentation will explore the what’s, why’s and how’s of the forthcoming transformation. It will show how the Internet of Things, with more than 20B devices connected to it, will obsolete the way business insights, models and paradigm are derived nowadays. Instead of human brainpower amplified by the wisdom of crowds, machine learning will become the primary way to discover hidden patterns, and, up to a point, to devise and implement strategies to exploit them.
Whether you are a stakeholder, program manager, architect, product owner, business analyst, designer, developer or tester, you will need to significantly amplify your skills in order to engage and generate value in this kind of Zettabyte-scale environment. The evolving blueprint for so doing, including illustrations from various pioneers that are starting to move ahead along these lines, will be presented with special emphasis on how automated insight generation begets innovation.

Learning Outcomes:

• Grasp the emergent realities of Zettabyte-scale Big Data that will inevitably come with the Internet of Things
• Understand why our ability to analyze such amounts of data and and act on them lags behind our ability to collect, curate and manage the data
• Understand the fundamental difference between human insights and automated insight generation
• Learn how to use automated insight generation to capture value up-front in Lean-Agile processes
• Find out which new skills you will need to develop in order to successfully engage in collaborative problem solving in 2020, and beyond

Attachments:

• Agile_2017_Prezo_V4.pdf

Abstract:
Achieving Regulatory and Industry Standards Compliance with the Lean-Agile at Scale
Many systems in aerospace, defense, automotive, medical, banking, and other industries have an unacceptable social or economic cost of failure. These systems are also subject to extensive regulatory oversight and rigorous compliance standards. Historically, organizations building these systems have relied on comprehensive quality management systems and stage-gate based waterfall life-cycle models to reduce risk and ensure compliance. These same organizations are now adopting lean-agile methods, and are struggling to understand how their existing stage-gate compliance activities participate in a lean-agile flow of value.
In this presentation, Dr. Harry Koehnemann with 321Gang and Dr. Steve Mayner from Scaled Agile, Inc. will show how to align the goals and practices of those who build high-assurance systems with those who must assure those systems. They will demonstrate how several lean-agile principles produce better compliance outcomes by:

• Taking an incremental approach to creating and assessing compliance information
• Including compliance teams and their concerns in the product development ecosystem to collaborate on planning, executing, assessing, and adapting.
• Incorporate compliance in agile quality practices – automating, adapting, continuously improving, etc.
• Integrating V&V and compliance activities into iterative development flow

Learning Outcomes:

• Explain how compliance objectives in high assurance environments are aligned with Lean-Agile principles and practices
• Know the distinctions between PRODUCT and PROCESS compliance requirements
• Improve compliance, verification, and validation outcomes through iterative and incremental implementation
• Understand organizational alignment and collaboration strategies for early and continuous feedback on compliance
• Apply specific technical practices that increase quality and compliance through automation

Attachments:

• When Worlds Collide - Regulatory Compliance with SAFe.pdf