9/15/16 Agile Day
Women in Agile
Conference Chair: Sweta Mistry
Selena Delesie
Keynote: Evoke the Soul of Agile
Selena Delesie is an international speaker, coach and trainer who inspires people to get lit up from within, radiate positive energy and empower everyone around them to step into their greatness. As a successful corporate manager, consultant and coach, she brings years of experience across the technology, financial, Agile, software development and testing sectors. She bridges this with training in outside-the-box modalities to support people through lasting personal transformation. Selena’s clients rave about her ability to help leaders break free from traditional business practices to engage the strengths and passions of their team and produce a highly creative, productive and vibrant workforce. Connect wth Selena on Twitter, LinkedIn or her website.
Remember the Agile Manifesto? Do you see that working in your company – particularly the part about valuing the items on the left more than the ones on the right? Many companies are balanced away from the left-side, the items that shape the foundation for companies to be thriving, innovative, and impactful. These companies don’t build the foundational and powerful aspects of connecting with people, collaborating, moving through change, and creating awesome working products that solve important problems.
Why is this happening?
We spend too much time focused on doing better. “Go faster”, “Put more people on the problem”, “Reduce costs”, “Just get it shipped!” – Do any of these sound familiar? We often focus our time on fire fighting and bandaid solutions.
We do not spend enough time focused on being better. Do you want high performing, engaged, happy, and thriving teams? We need our leaders to step up, forge a new path to shift culture, and demonstrate through their example. Then we need everyone else to follow this new path and step into their own personal leadership too.
We need to evoke the Soul of Agile.
The soul is deep and the root of everything else. When we lack soul, we lack brilliance. The soul is a guiding beam of light that enables the growth and success of individuals, teams, projects, and whole companies. We focus on enabling resiliency to flow through change. We find presence in the moment. We connect powerfully with others. We inspire the best of ourselves and everyone around us through our example. In this talk, we’ll interactively explore practical techniques that you can use to benefit in these areas when you return to work, so you can level up your leadership and the performance of any Agile team.
Natalie Warnert
Talk: Owning Your Bias
As a developer turned Agile coach, Natalie Warnert deeply understands and embraces the talent and environment it takes to build great products. Her extensive experience in Agile methods and user experience makes Natalie’s skills an asset to any team’s continuous improvement journey.
From building the right product to building the product right, Natalie drives strategy and learning through validation. Her recognized expertise has earned her a reputation as a thought leader in the Agile industry. You will often find her speaking at conferences, and she has been invited to share her ideas at the national and international level.
Natalie is a SPC, CSP, CSM and has experience in Lean, Six Sigma and Kanban coaching. She recently finished her Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership and is very passionate about her thesis topic: increasing women’s involvement in the Agile and technology community. You can read more about Natalie’s ideas and contact her through her website.
Teams are diverse entities with different backgrounds, experiences, and opinions. This diversity leads to bias-influenced interactions among team members, whether they realize the influence or not. The behaviors and resulting decisions made because of implicit or explicit bias have their own consequences to teams and projects alike. These consequences and biases are more visible retrospectively, but how do we encourage and empower people to understand how the judgments they make wholly affect their behavioral interactions?
This session will discuss the the idea of cognitive bias, both implicit and explicit, using several examples from well known studies, smaller research observations, and individual experiences. A facilitated discussion will be conducted to discuss how the example perceptions and situations, as well as participant’s own experiences, influence behaviors and interactions with others. By talking openly about bias, participants will learn approaches to dissect their rationale and motivations in order to make decisions which are less emotionally charged and more objective. Participants will leave with a self-defined plan to help interpret their judgments and realizations to continue practicing mindful bias exploration in their lives.
Roman Pichler
Talk: Product Roadmap
Roman Pichler is a product management expert specialised in digital products. He has 15 years experience in teaching product managers and product owners, and in helping companies improve their product management capabilities.
Roman is the author of the books Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age and Agile Product Management with Scrum, and he writes a popular blog for product professionals.
As the founder and director of Pichler Consulting, Roman looks after the company’s products and services. This keeps his product management practice fresh and allows him to experiment with new ideas.
Product roadmaps are powerful tools: they paint a rough picture of how a product is likely to grow over time. But applying them in an agile context can be challenging: How is it possible to create a realistic roadmap when markets and technologies change frequently and unexpectedly? How can we build a longer-term plan when agile teams commit to no more than four weeks? How do the product roadmap and the product backlog relate? Who should be involved in roadmapping activities and who owns the roadmap? Roman’s talk answers these questions and shares practical tips to use agile product roadmaps successfully.
Pavel Dabrytski
Pavel Dabrytski
Talk: Requirements Engineering for Agile Product Owners: Hunting value with structured conversations (Discovery Dojo)
Pavel Dabrytski is an agile coach and trainer from South Africa. He helps organizations implement Agile sustainably through mentoring and coaching. Over the past years, Pavel worked with major financial organizations and retail giants improving their organisational processes. He also helped organise multiple international conferences in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Pavel is a seasoned presenter who spoke at events in Paris, Prague, Shanghai, Bangalore, Atlanta as well as in South Africa. Currently, he explores topics on lean thinking, organisational culture change, and financial models behind Agile projects.
Hunting value through conversations. This is a skill that helps Product Owners when working with stakeholders, analysts and requirements engineers. Start with identifying your project partners, and use the 7 Product Dimensions (user, interface, activities, data, control, environment and quality attributes) to uncover correct requirements for your product. Understand how you can use it to focus on value, deliver value and optimize value.
Unfortunately all too often, many Product Owners do much of their work alone. We want the participants to experience the power of the conversation structured to hunt value through a specifically designed dojo, and we want to create better awareness of good requirements engineering practices. This session is intended to help Product Owners and Business Analysts create better requirements and to help them have richer and more powerful conversations. The session is based on the work of Ellen Gottesdiener and Mary Gorman’s “Discover to Deliver” as well as the work of James Shore and Diana Larsen’s Agile Fluency Model.
Richard Lawrence
Richard Lawrence
Talk: Finding the First Slice: How to get early value, learning, and risk-mitigation on every project
Richard Lawrence is co-owner of Agile For All. He trains and coaches teams and organizations to become happier and more productive. He draws on a diverse background in software development, engineering, anthropology, and political science. Richard is a Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coach and Certified Scrum Trainer, as well as a certified trainer of the accelerated learning method, Training from the Back of the Room. His book Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber is due out from Addison-Wesley later this year.
Many Agile practitioners are comfortable working iteratively in small slices once there’s a basic foundation, but struggle with where to start on a new project, product, or other big idea. Participants in this session will learn how to use Richard’s Feature Mining technique to find early slices of any big idea that provide value, learning, and risk-mitigation.
Agile For All clients have used this successfully for all kinds of software products, for combined software and hardware systems, and even beyond software in such areas as park construction and office remodeling. In some cases, projects with apparent significant up-front infrastructure requirements were able to ship a valuable slice to customers after just one or two sprints.
By the end of the session, you’ll have hands-on practice with Feature Mining on a real project, and you’ll be able to take the technique back to your team.
Ellen Grove
Ellen Grove
Talk: Everything is Better When We Stick Together: building team working agreements
Ellen Groveis a business agility coach and trainer, and an organizational change agent with Agile Partnership. Based in Ottawa Canada, she works with companies of all sizes to help them put Agile thinking and being into action. Open Space and LEGO SERIOUS PLAY are her favorite facilitation approaches for getting people to talk with each other about the things that matter so that they can do great work together. Ellen presents frequently at Agile conferences in Canada and around the world. Ellen is an Open Space facilitator, a StrategicPlay® certified facilitator in LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® methods, and a certified Training from the Back of the Room trainer.
Whether a team is brand-new or seasoned veterans at working together, explicitly defining and/or refining a team working agreement will help the team to align on how they will work together effectively to meet their common goal. Creating a team working agreement helps team members set the stage for effective communication and high performance by making assumptions about ‘what really matters to us’ and ‘how we will work together?’ explicit and negotiable. Great working agreements address some difficult topics – what values do we share? how do we want to deal with conflict when it comes up? how will we handle problems within the team? – which are often challenging to discuss openly and honestly, especially when a team is first assembled.
In this fast-paced hands-on session, participants will go through the process of building a team working agreement using LEGO Serious Play (LSP). Participants will learn about the importance of team working agreements in creating team cohesion and common understanding of shared values and operational guidelines, and experience hands-on how to use the LEGO Serious Play cycle of build-share-reflect to have a participatory discussion to identify shared values, explore reactions to conflict, and build a set of simple guiding principles.
Jean Richardson
Talk: Conflict, Collaboration and Consciousness
With more than 25 years’ experience in software development, Jean Richardson’s career has spanned writing, training, usability, business analysis, QA, functional and project management, and agile coaching. Her fondest foci are facilitating a work-as-path approach to individual growth and recovering red projects. Having thousands of hours of agile coaching and project leadership across government, non-profit, and for profit organizations to her credit, Jean’s experience and career path have spanned both traditional and agile methods, frameworks, and cultural perspectives. The leadership model Jean finds most attractive, Pervasive Leadership, is designed to help leaders set a collaborative context while still meeting their own stewardship responsibilities to the organization.
Jean blogs at azuregate.net/blog and has published conference papers for IEEE and PNSQC as well as technology related articles on Agile Connection and InfoQ. In addition to customized courses, she had taught courses in Effective Conflict Engagement, Collaboration for Cross-Functional Teams, Setting Collaborative Context, Working Together When You Can’t Be Face-to-Face, and Facilitative Leadership in both private client settings and university settings.
Agile teams are all about high bandwidth, cross-functional communication. But, we can get really jumpy about conflict. Creative conflict is where the good stuff is in product development and innovation. Come learn about how effective conflict engagement deepens consciousness and what we mean when we talk about consciousness and software development. Jean’s style is dialogic, so expect to interact!
Tricia Broderick
Talk: Training from the BACK of the Room
Passionately focused on the facilitation of high-performance software development environments, Tricia Broderick has more than seventeen years of experience in software development. Her leadership, training and coaching at all levels of an organization, helped lay the groundwork to shift teams from one-year product cycles to feasible daily delivery of high-quality software and services. With this first-hand experience, she openly shares stories and examples to inspire people to reach new heights through continuous reflection and growth. As a coach within the Agile For All team, she is dedicated to making a difference in software development cultures. Prior to joining Agile For All, she successfully performed a variety of leadership roles, such as Director of Development and Manager of Agile Project Management. Tricia is an exceptional leader, coach, mentor, facilitator, trainer, and popular speaker at national conferences. She is a certified Trainer from the BACK of the Room, ACP, PMP, CSM, CSPO, CSP and SAFe Professional Consultant. She is also a recovering developer and checkmark fanatic.
Topic: Training from the BACK of the Room
Ever walk out of a meeting or training class struggling to remember what was just discussed? You are not alone! Leaders struggle with how to create an engaging environment that results in high collaboration and learning. Unfortunately, most leaders start off with the disadvantage of being exposed to practices that recent brain science has proven to be ineffective, such as standing up front in the room and talking with slides for an hour. In an agile environment, learning is (almost) everything. Experience first-hand Sharon Bowman’s Training from the BACK of the Room six trumps that have a significant impact to learner retention. Leave with a variety of tools aimed at helping people engage to learn best. Oh, and it will be FUN
Rob Purdie
Open Space Facilitator
Rob Purdie and a few hundred other interested, committed, free,responsible and voluntary participants open to learning from 3-5pm for the Open Space portion of Agile Day 2016!
Our theme will be: Where Do We Go From Here?
It’s been 15 years since the Agile Manifesto was written, we’ve seen Agile values, principles and practices embraced by teams and organizations around the world – let’s have the conversations we feel should be had around what should, could and might happen next!
Rob Purdie is an Agile Coach at IBM and the founder of the NYC Scrum User Group. He has spent his entire career helping leaders and teams achieve their goals – better, cheaper and faster.
Rob loves people, facilitation, improv and open space.
Open Space is an approach for hosting meetings, conferences and community events. We use open space to provide the community a platform to discuss the most relevant and pressing issues related to Agile at that very moment. Every participant is invited to convene a session but you can also participate in someone else’s session or simply browse around.
Open Space has a long tradition with Agile NYC, going back to our first Agile Day in 2010. Every Open Space received raves reviews and most feedback. A truly uplifting and engaging experience and we are sure that this year’s open space will not be different.