Companies small and large must instead learn to grow their own agility for their own advantage. This sounds simple — and it is, when you know what to look for.

In this keynote, Andrea Tomasini presents guidelines and heuristics for growing an agile organization. You will understand why the first step in any transition must be learning how to change. Small inexpensive experiments and empirical metrics will lead you towards your strategic goal, iteratively and incrementally.

The agile transition never ends — but you know it’s working when transitioning becomes a way of life. This not only lets you adapt to new market conditions: it also allows you to create change in the market, on your own terms.

In this session I’m showing a model that organizations can use to foster the adoption of agile. This model is «locally» based on lean startup, understandig Agile initiatives from different countries as startups, and «globally» it uses the validated learning cycles of every organization to create a validated learning knowledge base with the performed experiments of agile practices in diferent environments. This «validated learning knowledge base» is co-created by the members of the internal international Agile community and shared through A3 report sheets.

Lean Start up principles as foundations for a change strategy, A3 thinking and problem solving as a support for lean continuous improvement, Agile Journey mapping as a strategy designing tool and Validated Learning Knowledge Base as a support for effective sharing, compose a complete and easy to use framework that can help communities, multisite organisations and groups of Agile leaders to boost Agile adoption in their business units.

This model has being experimented in the Dutch multinational organisation ING to lead the global agile transformation

In the age of scaling, we’re thinking of how to master agile in big teams, with big tools and big processes.

As if we’ve already mastered the small scale.

You know those files with tens of thousands lines of code you were debugging last week? Or the ever growing time to compile and run tests?

How about testing a complex system, expanding faster than your team is able to cover? Or reviewing an endless list of bugs, each matters differently for different stake holders? And then the big question: Should we release or not?

We haven’t even mentioned how all these pesky humans that create a complex network of interactions impact everything. Complexity, and our understanding of it, is at the root of IT problems today.

The impact of complexity on our projects is hard to calculate, but it definitely takes a toll. We see it and we feel it – in stress, confidence level and the bottom line.

Sure, we can and should, inspect and adapt. But let’s make it practical. Let’s talk about how small things we do every day, can remove the vague of uncertainty, and make life easier for ourselves.

Let’s make it simple.

Fast-moving markets with multiple competitors and frequent need of new features are naturally fertile ground for agile product development, and there are many examples of successful approaches for transforming such companies.

But what about domains which are heavily regulated (eg. pharmaceuticals, air traffic control) where quality assurance & safety are the top values? The classic agile «sales pitch» of delivering software faster, cheaper and more frequently somehow doesn’t find an echo here. When joining the Swiss Air Traffic Control company skyguide, I had to rethink my approach for positioning Agile in order to convince the management that this would be a good idea.

This presentation will allow the audience a «sneak peek» into a safety-obsessed domain (air traffic control), showing how the agile mindset can improve service & software development and still assure the same quality & safety levels. They will discover some concepts which can be helpful for QA in other domains, as well as aspects of Agile which they hadn’t thought about.

I will also share some Lessons Learned with regards to the role of an Agile Champion in a plan-oriented domain which I have picked up during those three years and of course gladly answer audience questions.

In Agile we like to deliver valuable software to our customers on a regular basis. However, while it’s pretty clear what “software” means, we cannot really say the same about “valuable”. The definition of Value in a project (with an uppercase “V”) is frequently fuzzy and confused.

Even within the same project, asking different stakeholders what Value means to them produces different answers; and the same stakeholder will likely provide different definitions of Value, depending on their perception and role in the project.

Most stakeholders will naturally associate Value to money, sometimes through surprisingly creative correlations; but there are other dimensions, equally valid, such as strategic positioning, company image, innovation and learning, and so forth.

Understanding the multidimensional nature of Value becomes therefore critical to drive the project to success.

However, the traditional approach to defining value stems either from a financial mindset or from and engineering mindset, and both may turn out to be incomplete or inadequate to address the complexity of the Agile projects we face and of the ecosystem in which they exist.

In this talk we’ll address what Value means in Agile for different stakeholders; how to map and categorize the stakeholders; how to describe Value on different dimension and how to track it; how to bring system awareness to your project’s definition of value. We’ll also see what happens when we don’t do that.

I want to be controversial for a moment and propose an end to IT projects, project management & project managers. I propose that the entire project process is flawed from the start for one simple reason. If you need to run a project, you’ve already failed.

By definition, an IT project is a temporary structure to govern and deliver a complex change (such as a new product or platform) into an organisation. However, to be truly competitive, an organisation needs to be able to deliver a continuous stream of change. Managed properly, this negates the need for a project and the associated cost overheads.

This is fundamentally what #noprojects is. The approach, structure, tactics and techniques available to successfully deliver continuous change. At its core, #noprojects is predicated on the alignment of activities to outcomes, measured by value, constrained by guiding principles and supported by continuous delivery technologies.

This presentation will introduce you to #noprojects. You will learn how to define an outcome and create an Outcome Profile. You will also learn how to manage change within the context of an outcome through the Activity Canvas.

LEARNING OUTCOMES

• Why #noprojects
• How to define outcomes (rather than outputs) and use this as the key organisational driver of work
• The structure of an Outcome Profile
• How to use the Activity Canvas to manage a continuous flow of work
• How to identify shadow projects

There is a fundamental bug in the leadership program running in most organizations today. How leaders are selected and the sedentary roles they play are mismatched with the speed and complexity of the market these organizations operate. The Scrum Alliance has been undergoing research in organizations in identifying the leadership mindset, behaviors and focus that drive the organizational agility and value delivery required to succeed in this marketplace. This talk shares the discoveries from that research and uncovers the learning objectives all leaders should seek to study and apply in their organizations.

LeSS, Nexus, SAFe, XYZ — the more years passed since Agile Manifesto was created the more scaled frameworks we get. But is it really the only one way to help dozens of people to self-organise around the single product? What if there are other ways with fewer efforts and more efficiency, meaning, awareness?

I want to tell you the story of our company. One awesome product, millions of users all over the world, several platforms, around 100 brave people and… no backlogs synchronisations, no very special roles, no hierarchical structures, no prescribed aligned processes and no branded scaled frameworks.

On the other hand, there are technical excellence, impact driven development, platform silos absence, meaningful KPI orientation, lean startup culture and teams happiness.

How are we able to do this? Please, come and you will find out. A true HERE Maps team story with a lot of real examples.

Short inside in VUCA World:

• Volatility – Increasing rate of change
• Uncertainty – Less clarity about the future
• Complexity – Multiplicity of decision factors
• Ambiguity – There may be no “right answer”

How to operate there, define and achive goals.

Role of leadership skills

Are you still estimating work to be done? Still struggling to figure out is it time or complexity estimation? Which one is better? If complexity, what to do with simple but long lasting tasks? What is a 3? What is an 8? What is complexity anyway?

At XING, in all of the teams I have been working with, we have found an answer on all of the questions above that satisfies us and the stakeholders. We have stopped doing estimation on the small scale.

The talk will explain the whole process from trenches. From getting the buy-in to make the shift till analysing whether the change to #noestimates was successful. The talk with cover the pitfalls we faced, benefits gained after the move to #noestimates. The presentation will also cover different options of doing #noestimates @ XING.

*Speech in Russian

Coaching and facilitation are the key skills for making changes on all levels, from personal behavior habits to the transformation of the whole company. Both of these skills are based on more basic competence, such as:

• empathy —  “how does it feel to be this person? what are his or her feelings?”
• awareness — ‘what is happening now? what roles are coming up? how does the system work?”
• mindfulness — “what would be my automatic reaction? Which reaction suits the best of all in this situation?”

If you have to help people to change not only their processes, but also their relationship culture, ethics, everyday behavior patterns and even  points of view, you can’t do this without trying it yourself.

Remember the last time when felt sorry about your words or even worse — your deeds, that you’ve produced in the state of emotional turmoil.

Are you familiar with the situations in your work relationship that can be described shortly as ‘nothing can be undone anymore’? Have you ever thought that though you’re working with the colleague at the same office you can see not only the world differently, but literally live in the different worlds?

By exploring yourself, your emotions and reactions, building distance and increasing the mindfulness of your choices you can help others. Modern research in neuropsychology and experiments with the ‘inner lab’ of the coach can come to the aid here.

What will we do in 45 minutes?

1. We will remember typical work situations when emotions have taken over the common sense
2. We will take a look at 5 negative feelings ‘inside out’: anger, jealousy, greed, arrogance and indifference (omg!) can be handy if we use their constructive energy correctly
3. We will master 3 techniques that help to increase time for choosing right reaction
4. We will learn how to expand our ‘mirror system’ for developing empathy to others and higher awareness of what’s happening around us.
5. We will think together how to use these skills for transformation company’s culture

Audience: Organizations’ Leaders and Change Agents, Coaches and ScrumMasters and all who wishes to increase understanding of themselves and the others and who want to form a system of habits for more mindful reactions.

Not running retrospectives is easy — just agree you’re good enough or the sprint was OK.

Running typical sprint retrospectives is not hard either — just collect a bunch of problems and spend some time discussing them, there are always things to complain.

Running high-quality retrospectives that make people take ownership of the situation and then do the agree process experiments in between them — that’s the hardest of all.

The «Retrospective Cheat Sheet» (http://retrospective-cheat-sheet.com/) is not just giving you 16 exercises to choose from. It can become your best friend in preparing your next sprint retrospectives as it helps you combine the exercises in insightful agendas with the total of 250 unique agendas. That’s enough agendas probably for the next few years of a Scrum team’s life span.

This workshop will help you get familiar with 16 most-commonly used retrospective activities; will give you hints on when to choose which and make you train your muscle to keep designing unique agendas for make your teams even greater.

Learning outcomes:

• get an experience of a well-designed highly-collaborative sprint retrospective
• get familiar with 16 retrospective activities
• get insights into retrospective meeting dynamics and necessary design to support it
• get trained in creating various retrospective agendas for colocated and distributed meetings

References

This workshop is based on a mini-book and Retrospective Cheat Sheet

The Wallet Project is 90-minute (plus debrief) fast-paced project though a full design cycle. Students pair up, show and tell each other about their wallets, ideate, and make a new solution that is «useful and meaningful» to their partner.

>> Note: a topic variation for the project is the «Gift-Giving Experience». You can find the materials for that project on the page The Gift-Giving Project. And you can figure out which topic might be better for you on this page: Project Topic: Wallet, Gift-Giving, or other

What is it?

START WITH THIS SEVEN-MINUTE VIDEO THAT EXPLAINS DOING AND FACILITATING DP0:
http://bit.ly/dp0facil

A group activity (from 2 to 100+ participants) in which students rapidly do a «full cycle through the design process.» The project is broken down into specific steps (of a few minutes each), and student have worksheet packets that guide them. In addition one or two facilitators (not participating in the project) prompt each step, and add some verbal color and instruction.

What students learn?

Participants get the feel of a design approach, gain some shared vocabulary, and get a taste of each design «mode» (empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test). [Note: the activity is great, regardless if you choose to teach «process» with these steps.] Specifically, we hope students see the value of engaging with real people to help them ground their design decisions, that low-resolutions prototypes are useful to learn from (take an iterative approach), and to bias toward action (you can make a lot of progress in a little bit of time if you start DOing).

Kill your product with minimal efforts! Best practices and solutions are to be applied to your management, sales, team, architecture and code approaches ever.

Audience: any not indifferent developer of any product.

What do Lean and Agile principles tell us about the way we need to design, build and operate modern businesses? Can we design organisations that are adaptive, innovative and engaging for employees, managers and leaders alike? Can we really change cultures and management thinking in reasonably short time-frames?

The presentation will demonstrate the importance of organisational design in promoting the right behaviours to create adaptive work climates and how to design back in the employees’ willing contribution to establish a real human enterprise that is adaptive, innovative and engaging at both the group and organisational level.

Say you have an Agile software development company with Scrum on all levels. Your teams deliver value every sprint, you have neither estimates, nor budgets, not even a strategic plan. Your customers excite, your employees are happy, but there’s a big question — where should your company develop further?

Teal organizations, flat structures, Holacracy seem to be «the next big thing» in modern business. Though they are in place for decades, today they organically come in sight of IT companies.

So, what’s so different in Teal organizations? What does really flat organization stand for? What are the pros and cons of holacratic arranging the company? And is it a good way to run my own IT company?

I will try to answer these questions in my presentation.

Are your Sprint planning meetings excruciatingly long and hot? At the end does everyone agree simply so they can get out of the room? In that case, it is very likely you need to look at your refinement process, in other words, the flow into the Sprint.

Improving and visualising your refinement process and outflows will help help create clarity, improve results, and save your orgainsation a lot of time, money, and frustration.

In this talk we will try to find a starting place for you. We will look at a simple process to get you started, as well as a few tools you might find useful in the beginning, and finally the secret to all good refinement will be revealed!

Adopting agile often doesn’t go as smoothly as expected in an organization. The road to agility can be hard to travel: You can’t plan your journey up front and there will be surprises along the way. Becoming agile is a learning process which requires that you reflect regularly and adopt your way of working, finding better ways to travel.

Ben Linders will explore what teams, agile coaches, Scrum masters, and managers can do to be prepared for a journey to agility, what to pack and how to decide which road to follow along the way. This talk will help you to successfully deploy ideas and practices that you’ve learned at the conference.

Though never certain, over the last decade the business environment for the manufacturing enterprise has become increasingly turbulent, characterised by relentless change and increasing uncertainty due to factors that include; globalisation, the emergence of competitors in low-cost economies and cost-down pressures, ever-shortening product life cycles, technological and legislative changes and more exacting customers. In response many organisations have turned to Lean Manufacturing and applied the principles and practices to current manufacturing activity as a way of addressing waste within the system, improving product quality and reducing manufacturing costs in order to remain competitive. Though effective in securing existing business, when applied alone this approach has been shown not address the issue of future activity and for many organisations improvement in productivity and quality has simply led to company down-sizing and ultimately in some cases plant closure.

For over a decade, organisational change experts, acutely aware of these powerful trends, have been talking about the need to develop ‘‘agile’’ companies that anticipate and respond to rapidly changing conditions in ways that effectively manage both technical and stakeholder complexity.

This speech aims to defined the benefits of using agile manufacturing tools in manufacturing SMEs

My speech will focus on the following:

— The characteristic of today’s business environment

— Changes and Challenges facing the manufacturing SMEs

— The definition of agile manufacturing

Compare a laptop made 20 years ago to one made today and you’ll find a world of difference in weight, simplicity and power. Compare traditional agile methods with more modern approaches and you’ll find them to be simpler, safer and more efficient.  Yet today, too many shops are practicing agile like it’s 1999!  

In this talk, I will explain what modern agile methods are, how modern agility compares with the agile manifesto and how modern agile methods differ from their traditional forms. I will show examples of modern agile methods at companies like Google, Etsy, Intuit, AirBnB and others.  Finally, I’ll explain why starting with a modern approach may be less painful than beginning with older methods and how to safely modernize your current agile process.

We’re the first and the only team on the market that is creating software products in remotely distributed teams of freelancers, without using any meetings, chats, phone calls or emails. Our unique lightweight process called XDSD allows us to manage programming activities in micro-tasks of 30 minutes size. This is the next generation of Agile. We’re taking programming to the next level, where there are no overtime, frustration, missed deadlines, broken builds, low quality or unhealthy competition between engineers. There are a number of practical examples which will help to demonstrate XDSD in action.

We all know about agile applied to the level of project management and development. But what about C-executive level? Can a business strategy be agile as well? Actually it can be, and in the world of the top managers the idea of agility came under «Balanced Scorecard» label. In this talk we’ll discuss how a company can become an agile in terms of strategy execution.

Imagine working in a large organization (software company, 1000+ employees) which has not (yet) adopted Agile on a company-scale.

• As an Agile-believer, would you dare to initiate the Change?
• What would you start with?
• What are the success criteria?

We have a lot of businesses working in Ukraine as Outsource company. But all we know that outsource is not options as the long-term
business strategy. From the other perspective, there are a few firms that are trying to move to the product development but it too risky
for two reasons:
— You need to invest your money and losing your margin.
— You have no any experience in product management or startup landing neither fundraising.

We in Octoberry, start to work as Product Sourcing company three years ago. We find this way very useful to gain experience in product
management and fundraising and after we moved to own product development and we want to share our case. In this talk, we will
discuss:
— What is product sourcing?
— Why product source.
— Five steps key steps to run Product Source project
— Moving from product source to Product Company

Let’s face it: most developers adopt TDD because they’ve heard someone claim it works. Not that I’d neglect personal experience, but hey, don’t we have something more objective to get our buy-in? Turns out we have — there are numerous studies on TDD, done in both academic and corporate environments.

Research results help us convince others that TDD is worth investing in — at individual, team and organization level. We can also have more realistic expectations of the improvements to come. Furthermore, knowing what metrics does TDD influence, we can measure effects of TDD adoption.

—          Legal matters flow from the inside.

—          How I became scrum advocate among advocates.

—          «All Ladies Do It» or how we became a part of worldwide agile lawyers community.

—          On the way to holacracy.

This is probably a natural evolution of how software product development companies structure their approach to organizing their work. While the classical project management paradigm dominated the industry in the past decades, it shows signs of decay which are accelerated by ever growing influence of agility community. The #noproject is not a mere giving projects a new name while keeping the concept untouched. It is about getting away from goals fragmentation and focusing the delivery organization around what is exactly a value for their customer. That said, this is a further development of culture shift philosophy that is underlying every true agile implementation program.

Still the concept itself cannot be the goal. The goal is always a positive change and solving a customer’s issue. We suggest that in the course of the case study we learn how the concept emerges through culture changes which are necessary for solving a bigger task.

What we aim to achieve in the workshop:

• Learn that the concept is not a purpose. It appears as a consequence of changes applied to achieve some business outcome.
• Agility approach challenges the traditional project management in a natural way.
• Projects constrain a holistic approach to value management and innovation and thus is reactive to any value centric model (e.g. the product model).

How we are going to achieve that is to go through a real life case divided into three sub-scenarios and try to solve that riddle by applying simple change canvas techniques and quantification using a sort of a Boston model.

And of course we will have some fun!

We are drawn to people who share the same beliefs and have had similar relevant experiences. These groups give us strength and a sense of belonging. However, this creates a “self-sealing logic” that can lock out learning, because we state our beliefs as proven evidence. Every missed opportunity of collaboration, may it be at enterprise, organisation, or team level, is a symptom of our inability, as a group, to observe and learn from other group experience and set of values. We are here at the most important Agile Conference, seeking to meet people who have similar experiences, and eventually share same conclusions. What if we were about to create another bubble of «Self-Sealing-Logic» ?

The hands-on exercices used in the workshop use «Liminal Thinking», the latest fabulous work of Dave Gray, combined with examples of «Third Culture Kids» profiles. The approach aims to support organisations become continuous learning entities, that reinforce leadership and trigger cultural shift.

Session’s main goals are:

• create a space of opportunity to «unlock» our own bubble of beliefs through a set of hands-on exercices,
• experience , through the open discussion during the exercices, how learning enhances leadership,
• allow the audience to discover Dave Gray’s «liminal thinking». We will learn to unveil the impact of our beliefs and start understanding why we have needed them. What were the relevant needs that lead to our assumptions? On the other hand, during the session, we will pick some other «self-sealing logic» group and try to understand without judgement their own process that led them from their own relevant experiences to different beliefs.

Learning Outcomes:

• Awareness of our own beliefs as a members of a group
• Experience Concrete tools to acquire this awareness
• Have a new approach to create and foster openness of learning organisation
• Enhance leadership via continuous learning
• Have new ideas how to build sustainable change to Agile

Being an agile coach, a Kanban coach or a ScrumMaster, how clear are you on the following questions:

• What are your main current coaching goals for your team(s) you’re working with?
• What are the main improvement areas you’re focusing on?
• What are you planning to achieve in next few months? In a year? In five years?
• How will you know you’re on the right way? What kind of skills and support you and your teams will likely need?
• How will you be celebrating your wins?
• Once your current dreams are realized, what will be made possible to work on then?

These are important questions to pause on and think of. How sure are you about the answers? How interested are you in allowing yourself to think more about them?

This workshop invites you to enter the world of discovery and search for your bigcoaching vision.We’ll use the Focused Agile Coaching as a framework to guide our thinking.

Focused Agile Coaching is a set of thinking tools and coaching techniques that are to help define coaching visions. It is similar to design thinking and product visioning applied to the field of agile coaching. It is a method to help agile coaches and ScrumMasters elaborate their coaching strategies and lay out necessary coaching tactics.

In the heart of it is the Agile Coaching Canvas. This particular tool helps you think through, co-create and capture your coaching vision as an artefact. It then can be used to articulate your coaching vision and strategy.

During this workshop you’ll be co-creating a coaching vision with a help of mentors. Also you’ll be helping others in defining their visions. This would allow you to see the toolset from different angles and then use it in on your own and with coachees.

And if the answers to the seven above questions were not obvious to you — by the end of this workshop you have a clearer understanding on what to focus in your coaching work and will also have created an artefact capturing your big coaching vision that you can share with your coachees and live by.

In Hugo’s workshop, participants will create a best practice board in teams of 5-6 people. The teams go through each block of ‘The Bridge Canvas’. The goal is to share best practices, ideas and experiences. Per block, each team selects the ‘best best practice’. At the end of the workshop, each team will present the best best practices for each block.

At the start of the workshop, Hugo shares a few best practices (personal ones + from other distributed agile experts). Each person gets a handout with clear instructions. This includes some questions to stimulate thinking within the team + some best practice examples per block.

It can be challenging to estimate a small project with well-documented requirements, experienced team and familiar technologies . But how to increase predictability of the estimates when the requirements dosn’t contain enough details, the team has just been formed and project requires new technologies? It is possible. However, the classical estimation approaches do not work well here, better option is to use agile estimates and rely more on agile metrics in order to provide realistic promises to the business stakeholders.

Through the series of exercises, we will estimate very small project and at the regular pace we will capture metrics and update estimates accordingly.

This workshop will help your team in improving their trust relationships and gaining a deep understanding of trustworthiness.

Learn to use the Team Trust Canvas methodology to strengthen your team performance. During the workshop, participants will learn which factors are essential for trust and how to use this new capacity to create an environment that brings the best of people.  The content is very practical. Participants will do hands-on step-by-step exercises with the differents tools and games.  You’ll be able to use those right away when you go back to work.