• Becca Hiller

The Zen of Agility: Learning, Unlearning, and Why Simple Agile Isn’t Easy

Becoming Agile is just applying values and principles and winning hearts and minds to shift culture and embrace practices and habits that align toward agility. Right? Easier said than done? Let’s peel back the layers and discuss:

What Zen can teach us about Agile (including simplicity, stillness, practice, and the Beginner’s Mind)

Fundamental differences between learning and unlearning

Concepts such as habit building and breaking, singular focus, incremental improvement, and stages of mastery

Explore challenges (and baggage) along the journey to “Agile Enlightenment”

The role of leaders, teachers, mentors, and coaches in bringing a little more mindfulness to agility

• Agile Transformation
• Introductory and overview

Presentation File

BeccaHiller-ZenOfAgility.v4.AM.pdf

• Brian Paulsmeyer

Ever feel like you’re on an agile version of “Nailed It!”? Agile Ingredients In: Failed Projects Out

Agile books and blogs have painted a picture of simple processes that will deliver projects on-time, on-budget, and with high team morale. Unfortunately most companies end up in a real-life version of “Nailed It!” where the dream has evaporated and your team is questioning how the Scrum/XP/SAFe/LESS/Kanban processes are failing as the team repeatedly fails to deliver. Learn the questions to ask when choosing the correct processes while eliminating waste to succeed in your agile implementation.

• Agile Transformation
• Intermediate

Presentation File

BrianPaulsmeyer-AgileMidwest-NailedIt.pdf

• Rebecca Scott

The Time Trials: How to Invest Time in Success and Win Calendar Wars

There’s no time for that. Really, there isn’t time for proper story definition, that backlog grooming session, that prioritization exercise…said no agile team ever. However, we do often hear this message from others in our environment. With tight timelines, aggressive goals, and full calendars, how do agile teams break through time and stakeholder constraints in order to make progress on the important work they do?

In this session, we will discuss the value of time investment toward success. You will be armed with information that you can take back to your leaders, product owner or team to demonstrate effective time management, wrangle calendars, and ultimately deliver value. While today’s calendar may have won the battle, after this session, you will know how to win the war.

• Agile Transformation
• Intermediate

Presentation File

RebeccaScott-TimeTrialsPresentation.pdf

• Jessica Katz

Creating Boundaries, Practicing Curiosity, and Making Requests

We don’t always get to choose who we work with. We seldom get to choose the policies that affect us day to day. We do have the ability to request what we need, the ability to manage our own perceptions, and the ability to choose to act instead of reacting.

This session will lead you down a path towards recognizing where boundaries exist, how to manage your emotions when they’re crossed, how to make space to help others when their emotions create unpleasant reactions, and teach you skills for making solid requests that get results.

• Agile Transformation
• Introductory and overview

Presentation File

JessicaKatz-CreatingBoundariesPracticingCuriosityAndMakingRequests.pdf

• Courtney Shar
• Shawn Scrivner

Zero to (Big Room Planning) Hero

As a growing company, Cerner Corporation often has a need to develop new teams in order to tackle new challenges. One such team, when it was first established in 2017, was made up of a newly promoted Engineering Manager, a fresh Project Manager, and two Engineers straight out of college. As a new team, they were free to establish their processes. So they set out to be the best Agile-practicing team they could be.

Their first planning meeting was an unmitigated disaster.

In the time since, the team has evolved from a team that could barely plan an iteration into a team that effectively uses Lean, Big Room Planning, and data-driven estimations like Monte Carlo simulations using historical JIRA data.

Join Courtney and Shawn as they take you through the team’s journey towards agility. They will go over what went right, what went wrong, and how they fixed it, with a heavy emphasis on how the team learned to be effective at Big Room Planning and forecasting.

Learning Outcomes (That You Can Leverage Tomorrow):
* Deciding what pieces of Scrum and Lean work for you
* Forecasting for Big Room Planning using actual turnaround time data
* Setting up retrospectives with a focus on cycle time

• Agile Transformation
• Introductory and overview

• Clint Edmonson

Flow, the Universe and Everything

The world around us filled a myriad of high performing, large throughput systems that we can borrow ideas from to help our IT teams and organizations perform and higher levels. Join us for a thought experiment where we examine several examples from our everyday world that can help us achieve unprecedented levels of flow and scale within our organizations.

• Agile Transformation
• Intermediate

Presentation Link

www.slideshare.net

• Jolene Jangles

Agile Leadership – Spark Your Greatness

Leadership is essential to an Agile transformation. But what do you do if you need more leaders? Make them! Come hone your Agile Leadership skills. You’re already a good leader, come to this session and become amazing!

In this interactive session we’ll learn and practice the core tools of great Agile Leadership: Your Inner Leader, Systems Thinking, Emotional Intelligence, and more. This session is completely experiential with NO PowerPoint slides, and made up entirely of fun activities. After each game we’ll debrief and review the lessons learned. Come play with us and become the great leader you were met to be.

• Agile Transformation
• Introductory and overview

• Somya Verma
• Joseph Jacob

Agile Scrum – Building high performing team one step a time

The session will take you through the team’s journey of overwhelming Story Churn of >50% every sprint to less than 20% each sprint, and how the team was able to almost double their velocity as a result of reducing the Story Churn. This will be a real world example of utilizing agile practices, metrics and building partnership effectively to influence change across organization and challenges faced during this process.

• Agile Transformation
• Intermediate

Presentation File

SomyaVerma-AgileMidwest2019-BuildingHighPerformingTeams-Slidedeck.pdf

• Lukas Leonard

Making SAFe a Catalyst, not a Killer, to your Agile Transformation.

This session isn’t SAFe: On Trial. It’s not SAFe Is Awesome, Change My Mind. There is already a lot of material in the community on whether SAFe is good or bad. That’s not the point of this session (and things are rarely that black and white anyways.)

The purpose of this session is to give those who are using SAFe or doing agile at a large scale, tools to make the framework a catalyst for their agile transformation.

• Agile Transformation
• Intermediate

Presentation File

TBD.docx

• Mark Wavle

Facilitation Fitness: Get Your Collaboration in Shape

Our organizations, technologies, and solutions are facing more change and complexity than ever before. Solving these complex problems requires creativity and teamwork, and teams need support and guidance to maximize their interactions. But if we want to stay in top form, we have to exercise these skills.

What shape do these collaborative conversations take? What approaches and techniques do we need to strengthen? Through workouts (activities) and discussion, we’ll flex our skills and practice ways to guide these discussions through the necessary stages to reach a valuable conclusion.

Let’s get our facilitation in shape!

• Coaching Agile Teams
• Introductory and overview

Presentation File

MarkWavle-FacilitationFitness-20190926.pdf

• John Clopton

What Do Scrum Masters Do All Day?

How many times have you been asked: “What do Scrum Masters do all day?” Folks typically tend to think all we do is run a few meetings, play with Post-its, and make people talk about their feelings. But the role is so much more than that. Roles are defined in The Scrum Guide, but the section on the Scrum Master gets three whole paragraphs. Beyond facilitation, this interactive presentation will dive into the abstract, intangibles of the role. We’ll go through a typical day-to-day, including experiments I’ve run over the years to gain insights, and understanding.

• Coaching Agile Teams
• Intermediate

Presentation File

JohnClopton-WhatDoScrumMastersDoAllDay-AgileMidwest2019 – Read-Only.pdf

• John Yorke

Agile Software Delivery in a Virtual World

Agile is about the business and the team working together and how face-to-face communication is the most effective method. This often excludes remote teams. But what if being remote actually enabled you to be more Agile?

• Coaching Agile Teams
• Introductory and overview

Presentation Link

www.slideshare.net

• Angela Dugan

Tap, tap, tap. Is this thing on? Communication Matters, from Junior Devs to Directors

In the 20 or so years since I joined the tech community, I moved from an attitude of “please leave me alone in my cube to code and whatever you do don’t talk to me!” to well, giving talks on the importance of communication in the software world. The tools and techniques I’ve come to know and love have changed over time, but a few things have remained constant.
1) Communicating openly and honestly at all times is HARD
2) Speaking from a place of vulnerability is RIDICULOUSLY HARD
3) Without 1 and 2 you’re going to really struggle to be an effective and happy member of ANY software team

OK, there’s a 4th thing.
4) The days of working alone in your cube like a hermit are largely over for software folks. It really doesn’t have to suck. I swear it doesn’t.

During my brief time with you, I’m going to rumble with some tough topics and share some of my own embarrassing and enlightening stumbles. It will include things like delivering “bad news” to clients and/or managers and feeling really good about it, managing conflict with team members in healthy and productive ways, and delivering feedback without feeling like you (or the receiver) will vomit. These things are all very possible, and not that hard to master once you have some key tools and insights in your tool belt.

• Coaching Agile Teams
• Introductory and overview

• Ian Garrison
• Matt House

Minimum Viable Puppets: How to Create a Safe Space for Hard Conversations

How do you engage a huge room full of people and get them to talk openly about sensitive subjects? With puppets! (And humor!) What started out as a joke about doing a puppet show at a SAFe Program Increment Planning event, turned into a real-world training technique that uses puppets to break down social resistance to hard conversations.

Today, in a very special episode of Agile Puppet Theater, we’ll look at the psychology of why people may be resistant to having honest, open conversations across a large organization. We’ll investigate techniques to allow us to discuss problems and make real change a possibility, using puppets, humor and hyperbole. Combining multiple approaches, you will learn how to create a safe space to address the issues in your organization that are holding back your cultural development.

As a team, you will build your own Minimum Viable Puppets and use them in scripted sketches that we’ve actually used to spark candid conversations about tough issues. Along the way, we’ll pull back the curtain on how the different parts of the training work together to create the engagement and safe space we’re looking for. We will also leave you with strategies for creating your own versions of Agile Puppet Theater to bring back to your organizations to encourage communication and improve your own organizational culture.

“When I saw we’d be doing a puppet show, I was extremely skeptical, but I’m really glad we did that!” – actual quote from senior management

• Coaching Agile Teams
• Intermediate

Presentation Link

github.com

• Wayde Stallmann

Clean Language Workshop for the Clean Curious

What are Clean Language questions and why should you care? Working Cleanly will allow you to deepen all of your personal interactions. In this workshop you will start by learning the two lazy Jedi questions. Practicing with the questions will give you an understanding of what it means to be Clean. A flier with the 12 Clean Language Questions will be provided to each participant. This workshop will be especially helpful to you if you are a ScrumMaster, Coach, or a Leader that prefers to illuminate a path for others rather than tell others what to do. In other words you are a servant leader.

• Coaching Agile Teams
• Intermediate

Presentation File

WaydeStallmann-CleanLanguage.pdf

Presentation Link

drive.google.com

• Karen DuBrucq
• Barbara Kryvko

In Praise of Crazy Retros

Are your teams tired of the same old retrospectives? Has this ceremony become just another box to check? Have you ceased discovering new ways to improve or uncover new experiments to try? Maybe it’s time to think about retrospectives in a different way.
In this session, we will share our “crazy” strategy for keeping retros fresh, enjoyable and POWERFUL. We’ve learned to leverage team interests, things we’ve heard on the radio, overheard at the water cooler or just any wild idea to get teams engaged and excited to “inspect and adapt”. We have discovered that by asking different questions and using atypical metaphors, we can get teams to unleash creative juices to uncover new ways of working together better. We will share real world examples and the lessons we have learned along the way – both the successes and the failures, so that you too can take your retrospectives to the next level. Thru hands-on activities, you will build your own creative retrospective, learn from other attendees and walk out the door with fun, new ideas to take back for your teams next retrospective.
Learning objectives:
• Elevate the “inspect & adapt” mindset of teams
• Use metaphors to get people to think differently
• Learn the power of different questions
• Set the mood for difficult conversations with good outcomes – positive, appreciation
• Benefits of mixing it up – different locations, different analogies
• How to easily make a retro out of anything (team interests, things you hear on the radio, current events, holidays, etc.)
• Learn how to get from crazy retro idea to generation of issues to discussion to action

Time spent in session:
o Short presentation, including real world examples – successes and some failures– 10 minutes
o 3 hands-on activities – attendees will leave with new ideas for taking their retrospectives to the next level. They will develop their own retros and see the results of others. – 60 minutes
•
Detail what kinds of activities people will experience in your session and how you will present / facilitate them to support your learning objectives.
o 4 point retro – develop individually, share with table, share a few with larger audience. Create a gallery of ideas for attendees to take away. Instructions: Fold paper into quarters. Decide on a theme and illustrate each of the quadrants. Examples will be provided. 5 min to create, 5 min to share with table, 5 min to view a few. All will be posted on wall to create a “gallery of ideas”
o “You can make a retro out of anything”. Using a kid’s game or household items, teams will be asked to develop a retro. Instructions: Think about an analogy and then think about how to customize game/materials to reflect the analogy and create some learnings. The idea will be to make a fun, interactive and thought provoking activity that will generate good discussion with your teams leading to improvements. (10 minutes to create. 2 min/team to share with everyone)
o Creative note taking – crayons and butcher paper on tables. Participants will be encouraged to “creatively” take notes with crayons. This includes illustrating what is heard.
o Speed retro for feedback on session. Idea is find out what attendees viewed as valuable and then work together to improve upon what we presented.
1. What is one thing you are going to do with your teams as a result of this session? (1 minute)
2. Share idea 1 at a time at table. Each time decide which idea is better. Repeat until have best idea at table.
3. Come up with a way to improve that idea.
4. Write down idea and post to wall so all can see. If there is time, share with large group.
•

Tell us how you will debrief your session to ensure participants have a positive experience and achieve the session’s learning outcomes.
o We will do a speed retro to get feedback/debrief the session. See above

If you’ve presented this session before, what you have learned as you have presented it and how have you improved it?
“In Praise of Crazy Retros” was given to a group of 20 Agile Coaches at Bayer, including the four-square exercise. Feedback indicated that many of the coaches who had previously been doing a simple, repetitive retro format used the fun retros that they created in the workshop (including retros about gardening, the beach, and cricket). We have added the children’s game retro activity, and will be trying it out several times with different groups of coaches.

• Coaching Agile Teams
• Intermediate

Presentation File

In Praise of Crazy Retros.pptx

• Evan VanScoyk
• Christine Lowes
• Brian Cordry

Activities to Activate Agility

This hands-on, immersive workshop is an interactive experience of participating in multiple game-based activities that serve to reinforce key learning outcomes around taking a lean process mindset, a customer focused design thinking approach, working with agility, and an emphasis on creating an atmosphere of communicative and collaborative teamwork. Participants will be able to take away the experience of how you can enable these activities in your business and teams to get them energized and thinking differently.

• Coaching Agile Teams
• Introductory and overview

Presentation File

EvanVanScoyk-AgileMidwest-ActivitiesToActivateAgility.pdf

• Matthew Philip

No (Lab) Jacket Required: Designing Experiments for Learning

Hypothesis-Driven Development is thinking about the development of new ideas, products and services – even organizational change – as a series of experiments to determine whether an expected outcome will be achieved, so we need to know how to design and run experiments properly.

This session helps participants understand the importance of using experiments to help teams and organizations learn and improve, while giving hands-on practice in designing experiments to yield measurable evidence for that learning.

• Coaching Agile Teams
• Intermediate

Presentation Link

slideshare.net

• Jennifer Henry

Resistance is Futile: How to get the Borg to Play Agile

Have you ever had a difficult but essential person on your team? They wield a lot of influence and frequently use this influence to fight progress. If so, you are not alone. This presentation will demonstrate, step by step, one method for addressing the issue and stimulate ideas for resolution strategies.

Resistance is an inevitable part of any organization’s transformation. If you find yourself struggling to address the resistance in a productive way or want to explore new ways to strategically respond, this session is for you.

This interactive session will encourage participants to explore challenges that accompany large scale changes and step through a methodology to address these challenges.

• Coaching Agile Teams
• Intermediate

• Aaron Cox
• Lisa Turnbull

Our Journey Towards Immersive Learning With a Dojo

This is not the Karate Kid Dojo. However, similarities to Wax On Wax Off repetition does apply here and you will have your Mr. Miyagi in your coaches . Centene has adopted the Dojo idea from Target and introduced dojos into our environment this year with success. This is the idea of one team, 2 coaches, 6 weeks, real work, using best practices. We will share our collective experiences through a series of stories on our approach to team learning. We will go over what a dojo is and why it is important. We will cover the roles and how we got started along with sharing how we run the dojo with the lessons learned. We ran into some unexpected wins from the dojo experience we will share. We will include everything needed for the dojo outside of the dojo including the assessments, priority and backlog of the dojos along with the marketing and hiring for the dojos too. Don’t forget the logistics. We will share the different experiences we have had in all of them and share what stuck after we left.

Our goal is to equip you with enough information to experiment with the idea of a dojo in your company if you are in need of a fresh way of revamping your training and coach approach in your organization.

Learning Outcomes:

– What is a dojo and why is it important?
– What are the roles in the dojo?
– How did we get started?
– How do we run the dojo?
– What have we learned?
– What were the unexpected wins in the dojo?
– Outside of the dojo for the dojo
– Assessing, Backlog, Prioritizing, Marketing and Hiring

• Coaching Agile Teams
• Introductory and overview

Presentation File

AaronCox-AgileMidwestDojoDeck.pdf

• Anonymized By Request
• SUVANDHYA RAO

Breaking man-made social barriers to delivering outstanding results

In today’s workplace working collaboratively in teams has become the norm. Team members have complementary skills to complete tasks collectively. They are expected to demonstrate individual and mutual accountability. They form interdependent relationships. But it’s also true that interpersonal issues and status management can hinder productivity and cause friction.
Human bonds matter as much at work as anywhere else, in fact, they sometimes matter more. We do our best in environments where innovation and creativity happens.

The now famous Google’s Project Aristotle has taught people that psychological safety is the #1 trait that set successful teams apart from other teams.

Our session aims to bring awareness by starting the conversation about how to build a culture where making safety a prerequisite is essential for team success supporting high performance and fluency.

In our journey as Agile Coaches working with diverse teams we have observed that
“When people feel heard, they feel valued,
When people feel valued, they are committed,
When people are committed, outstanding results are achieved!”

• Coaching Agile Teams
• Intermediate

Presentation File

Psychological safety.pptx

• Andy Grosman

Time for it all : Productivity Strategies for Agile Leadership

Agile leaders are expected to do it all and rapidly shift to support their teams. You can’t do it all with a to-do list. This workshop will start the participants out to design their own productivity strategies for coaching a team to reduce stress. We will have interactive exercises to review current time management strategies and how to effectively use the latest research on Productivity. This presentation will synthesize a lot of the various gurus and materials out there currently and focus in on how to make this specifically relevant to Agile professionals. Participants will leave with a customized implementation plan they can immediately put in place to balance the hats that we all have to wear to live Agile.

Exercises examples:

Multitasking
Design Productivity strategie

• Coaching Agile Teams
• Intermediate

Presentation File

AndyGrosman-TimeForItAllProductivityAgileMidwest.pdf

• Joe Cisar

Everything I Know About TDD… Well the Important Stuff

My goal to for you to leave with the following information about Test Driven Development (TDD):

What is TDD?
Don’t worry this will be brief just to make sure we are on the same page with what we are actually talking about.

Why use TDD?
I will share my experience about the costs and benefits you and your organization can gain by using TDD. From built in testable code to a safety net for refactoring you will be able to see why the benefits out weight the perceived costs.

When should you use TDD?
It’s not always the right approach! One approach cannot solve all the problems. I will share when TDD might not be the best approach and when it should be your default development technique.

How?
The biggest barrier to getting started with TDD is exactly that! People do not know how to get started. Whether you work in a code base that is “un-testable” or you don’t have any experience with automated tests, I believe you will walk away with useful information to get you started.

Why am I qualified?
I have over 5 years experience with putting Test Driven Development into practice at two large organizations. I have trained several developers who have had little to no experience with automated tests or TDD and now have overcome the learning curve and made TDD a staple in their development processes.

• Agile Technical Practices
• Introductory and overview

Presentation Link

www.slideshare.net

• Mike Clement

Develop your Sense of Code Smell

It has been 18 years since Martin Fowler published “Refactoring” which codified an initial catalog of code smells. But in that time, have our noses been able to sniff them out? What have we done to develop our sense of smell?

We will do a series of Sparrow Decks to increase our sense of code smell by building the pattern recognition part of our brain. This way we can more easily know if there is something wrong with the code. Remember smelling you have a problem is always the first step.

(Note: this technique works for non-programmers as well as programmers so even if you’re not a programmer, come and develop your sense of code smell!)

• Agile Technical Practices
• Introductory and overview

Presentation Link

www.slideshare.net

• Allison Pollard
• Jason Hobbs

The Nitty-Gritty Practices of Agile Coaching for DevOps

How do you coach a team from showing progress every two weeks to delivering multiple times a day? Research has shown that by utilizing the right kind of metrics can promote a generative culture – creating a space where people want to continuously improve and innovate. Allison and Jason will blend their stories with an interactive workshop where you will leave with practices that you can implement with your teams the next day. Regardless of your job title, learn how to ally with 4 key delivery metrics to inspire new thinking and practices from your teams.

• Agile Technical Practices
• Intermediate

Presentation File

AllisonPollard-TheNittyGrittyPracticesOfAgileCoaching.pdf

• John Royle

Defining Value and managing expectations

Organizing work in a backlog is a foundational element of an agile processes. In today’s world, most backlogs are prioritized by business value and are the responsibility of the Product Owner.

This discussion will explore why a business only value perspective often leads to suboptimal results and discuss strategies that could be applied to mitigate those risks.

In other words…. If the goal is to reach a good outcome and not simply more output… to achieve this, business, user, and technology needs should all be considered when assessing value.

Learning objectives include:
Understanding of backlog grooming
Understanding of the risks when backlog value is not balanced
Strategies for keeping backlogs balanced

Discussion Format:
Presentation
Open Discussion

• Agile Technical Practices
• Intermediate

Presentation File

JohnRoyle-DefiningValue-AgileMidwest2019.pdf

• Daniel Topp

How to break stuff less: An introduction to unit tests with React

When you think about writing unit tests for your code, does your skin crawl? Do you feel a sense of impending doom? When introduced to the concept of unit testing, many newer developers struggle to see the value in writing good tests. Having a solid set of unit tests can help you be more confident in your code, build valuable features faster by shortening the feedback loop while developing, and even make you look super smart and capable in that next code interview.

In this presentation, Daniel will briefly cover why we write unit tests and what separates a good unit test from a bad one. He’ll also share important lessons and libraries he wished he knew about when he started developing. This presentation is tailored to newer JavaScript developers but is applicable to a variety of skill levels. Attendees will learn how to write several types of unit tests using the Jest unit testing framework.

• Agile Technical Practices
• Introductory and overview

• Ken Rickard

Will it Scrum?: The Data Project Edition

Do you struggle to deliver on your data projects? In our fast-paced world, data is more important than ever to a company’s strategic position. The complexity of continuously delivering data and analytics to meet both the enterprises and information workers needs has become challenging. Come learn how Kanban and Scrum can be applied to the often-overlooked realms of Enterprise Reporting, Analytics, and Data Science.

• Agile Technical Practices
• Intermediate

• Joel Tosi

Blending Product Thinking with Architecture

Too much design up front and you are bumping into the design all of the time (and losing time). Not enough design and your system can crumble in reality. How do you blend architecture so you have the right decisions at the right time, and give them enough due dilligence? How do you embrace cloud and microservices and not risk getting into different failure scenarios or overly complicated maintenance and ripple effects?

In this session we will walk through visualizations that help teams blend product thinking with architecture. Along the way, we will look at microservices and domain modeling as well as chaos engineering and fault tolerance – blending all of these into a context that is consumable by all and gives the right emphasis at the right time. Interested in CRC cards? You’ve come to the right place

Leave this session with simple visualizations and approaches that you can apply immediately to start blending product with architecture, especially if you are looking to run in a cloud world.

• Agile Technical Practices
• Intermediate

Presentation File

JoelTosi-AgileMidwest_BlendingProductThinking.pdf

• Beth Kiburz
• Jeremy Cook

Agile Hiring: Looking for a long-term relationship

Software Services has the highest separation rates of any other sector. This can arguably be attributed to long-term retention efforts, but what if we can increase associate tenure by adjusting our hiring practices and disrupting the talent acquisition pool? The current supply of Software Developers leaves many companies in demand with a talent deficit. This is as true in a city with 2.3 million people as it is in a city with just over 121,000. Join us for multiple perspectives as we explore efforts to grow and match the right people with our company for long-term success.

We will share challenges unique to our different locations (Kansas City and Columbia), historical iterations of our interview process, the candidate experience, and the results of altering how we interview. In addition, we will explore the less traditional approaches we are taking to find and generate the talent we need.

• Business Agility
• Intermediate

Presentation File

Agile Midwest 2019 – Agile Hiring.pdf

• Marianne Erickson

Agile, Agile, Everywhere! A Tale of Two Surgeons

When Agile Scrum techniques live outside the world of software development, are they still Agile? Johanna Rothman says no. Take away the software development teams, and she says “I see nothing about agile approaches, and everything about management.” Brian Button, on the other hand, notes that “Agile is certainly applicable outside of software, as it is a belief system. The principles may need to be rediscovered for each context, but the ideas are the same.”

Given that the first scrum analogy was applied not to software development but to manufacturing (way back in 1986), we shouldn’t be surprised to find Agility in contexts where it isn’t called “Agile,” let alone “Scrum” or “Kanban.”

This talk tells a story of the speaker’s mild-mannered husband, who acted completely out of character when he fired his first orthopedic surgeon just a few weeks before scheduled surgery. This talk does not render judgement on the capabilities of either surgeon (the speaker is not qualified to do so), but it does outline the vastly different approaches by Surgeon X and Surgeon Y. Surgeon X’s practice clearly reflects his Command and Control Leadership style, while Surgeon Y has adopted both the team framework and stakeholder roles of Agile teams in the world of software development.

After my husband’s decision to work with Surgeon Y, the anecdotal information he shared with me convinced me that Surgeon Y had a great management style and fine people skills. On the morning of surgery, I went along, confident that all would be well because my other half was confident. My husband signed forms that allowed me to get information about his progress, and while I was a little surprised at the warmth of the nurse in charge of checking him into surgery, I was even more surprised when she invited me to come along and “meet the team” while Mick was being prepped for surgery.

The team of seven introduced themselves and then told me their roles – registration, two pre-op, two post-op, one anesthetist, and one surgeon, before they all scattered to perform their various duties. Dr. Y chatted briefly about the surgery itself, and just as I was beginning to get queasy, I was saved by his watch alarm. Curiosity replaced queasiness when he excused himself for the pre-operative “Team Huddle.” Something made me ask… “Is your team Agile?”

“I actually know what that is,” he responded…. “But no. We just do what is best for our patients.” To me that sounded like “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.”

It was beginning to look as though what I judged “good management style” and “fine people skills” was something a little more familiar to me: Agility. The kind of Agility achieved by “continuous attention to technical excellence and good design” or even “individuals and interactions over processes and tools.”

Cut to the family waiting area about 30 minutes later, where Dr. Y informed me that all had gone well and Mick would be waking up soon, then surprised me again by asking whether I would like to join his team for the post-operative huddle. A retrospective? Really? In a hospital?

“What do you talk about?” I asked.

“Essentially what went well, what (if anything) didn’t go well, and how we can improve next time,” he responded. I think I stared at him for a full minute before, as a stakeholder, I decided to attend. It was clear to me that Dr. Y was the lead engineer on the team, but the product owner had been my husband all along. And the team? Well, after the post-operative meeting – which truly was a retrospective – I went into interview mode, and went back to interview them again a week later.

The team works for a number of surgeons, but each member told me they particularly love working with Dr. Y because he empowers them, listens to them, and works in tandem with them, and they like feeling that their work is meaningful. That they would be missed if they were not a part of the team. Not one team member actually said “self-organizing,” but the way they described the synergy of working on THIS particular team included terms like “meaningful,” “empowering,” “important,” and “collaborative.”

What Surgeon Y’s team deems best for their patients illustrates many surprising parallels to Agile practices, hinting not only that Agile isn’t just for software development. The team’s processes don’t exactly “harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage,” but they do embrace change for the patient’s optimum healthcare experience. A growing number of today’s patients (not just “my” patient, but scores of anonymous online reviewers whose comments will further underscore this point) expect and appreciate a team-inclusive approach to health care, and they expect to be part of the team, not just an onlooker.

• Business Agility
• Intermediate

• Danny Presten

The Rise of Business Agility

You’ve started your agile transformation and opened the door in IT, but you’re not getting all the benefits you expected when you first started this journey. In this session we’ll explore how Agile is an entire “ecosystem” impacting the culture and practices in every area of the organization including finance, HR, operations and even sales. We’ll unpack this view with real world success and failure stories and equip you to have the conversations necessary to build a truly agile business.

• Business Agility
• Introductory and overview

Presentation Link

www.slideshare.net

• Hunter McCluer

Selling Agility to your Organization

This fun, fast paced, interactive workshop helps guest quickly see and understand how to showcase the power and value of Agility to their leadership. This topic has been presented at conferences this year that include: Innovate Virginia, Path to Agility, and Agile Indy. All sessions to date have received high marks and audience feedback for presentation, audience participation, learning games, and useable content.

• Business Agility
• Intermediate

• Rick Vance

The Economics of Cross Functionality

Present the economic value of having cross functional organizations, teams, and people. Discuss the types of waste present in non cross functional development and finally present an actual case study to illustrate the magnitude of economic waste when organizations are not cross functional

• Business Agility
• Intermediate

• Stacy Culleton (Rowold)

Keeping a Startup Flowing with Agility

Learning Outcomes:
Attendees of this session will learn how agile practices span far beyond technology companies. It can be expected that clear examples of the application of Modern Agile has our non-tech, utility company growing quickly. After an entertaining story of one company’s journey, we’ll open the session to an on the spot Q&A to delve deeper into the areas that are of most interest.

Session Description:
Picture this……..a small community with only a handful of residents. Birds fly overhead, and we watch as a mother and child walk down the bank of a creek. Full of curiosity, the child bends down, hands cupped, to take a drink from the cool, running water. Suddenly the mother screams “STOP!” and yanks the child away. Mom does this because she knows there is something in that deceptively clear water that could harm her child – the waste water system in their small community has gone without maintenance for many years, sometimes even dumping into that stream. This is happening all over the United States, likely closer than you think.

One company decided to step in and help, applying Modern Agile principles in a way that allowed them to create a safe environment for their customers and their employees.

Water is something we in the United States have a tendency to take for granted. The idea that we might not have access to clean water to drink, to indoor plumbing, or to clean streams and waterways seems foreign. As agilists, safety is core to our very way of being – trying to imagine a world where the very basest of things – water – could pose harm is hard to imagine. In this session you’ll hear how this company succeeded by:

Experimenting with our business model and evolving construction projects within our communities with each iteration.
Making people awesome from the beginning, investing in our people’s education, and supporting their decision making early on
Continuously deliver value to both customers and investors as the communities we serve grew exponentially
Focus on safety, making sure every experiment and every decision we make is an opportunity for learning, not for punishment. Not to mention making safety a pre-requisite is critical in the face of actual risk to life and limb.
What’s amazing about this story is the speed at which we’re learning, and how much our understanding will grow between now and this session. Every day we add more to the narrative and we can’t wait to share it with you.

• Business Agility
• Introductory and overview

• John Krewson

Live from St. Louis, It’s Saturday Night – The Agility of SNL

Saturday Night Live is one of the longest running Agile institutions in the world. For 44 years, they have developed and delivered small batches of comedy in weekly intervals. Talk about sustainable development. But how do they do it? Turns out, the practices and principles they employ are quite agile. From welcoming changing requirements to maintaining technical excellence, there’s a lot we can learn from how they deliver. Join us for a back stage and on stage view into the process SNL has developed over decades to get from concept to cash in one week. Along the way we’ll gain a new understanding of empirical process control, continuous delivery, the care and feeding of high performing teams, dependency and deadline management, what it means to deliver value continuously, and how to understand customers. We’ll see how their use of Scrum ensures that they deliver on time, and how their use of Kanban keeps work visible for the entire organization. And we’ll probably laugh a lot too.

• Business Agility
• Introductory and overview

Presentation File

JohnKrewson-AgilityOfSNLDist.pdf

• Jason Tice

Agile Lounge: Agile and You

Discussion Focus – How do you sustain and guide your personal journey as an agilist inclusive of career and personal activities?

For the first half of the discussion, participants will be invited to share who they are now, and perhaps more importantly how did they get to where they were – hence the discussion may touch on education, training, work/career tracks, work experiences, industry activities, mentoring, advocacy, promotion, etc. Those attending may gain awareness of additional strategies or activities to enable their own growth / journey.

During the second half of the discussion, participants will be invited to share how they sustain themselves as agilists. Discussion in this portion of the session may touch on practices for self-regulation & focus, goal setting, self-care, mindfulness & mediation, and inquire how participants may have been able to integrate / merge activities to sustain their focus on agility within work (corporate) or personal (home) settings.

• Agile Lounge
• Advanced

• Jason Tice

Agile Lounge: Agile Challenges & Mistakes

Discussion Focus – It’s time to be brutally honest and vulnerable with yourself – what mistakes have you made in your practice of agile in the past?

Participants will be invited to share personal stories of their own activities (not the activities of others) which did not achieve their intended outcomes or resulted in other challenges. Those who share their prior mistakes & challenges may be surprised that the mere act of sharing openly helps to enable closure, while also providing insight & awareness to others of potential mistakes / challenges to avoid. Those who do share stories of personal mistakes and/or challenges, will have the opportunity to invite feedback / advice from those in the lounge; however, feedback / advice will only be offered if those who share invite it.

• Agile Lounge
• Advanced

• Jason Tice

Agile Lounge: Agile & The Future

Discussion Focus – You’re attending Agile Midwest 2019 – it’s 2019 – where do you think “agility” will be in ~5 years? What is the vision for what we will be talking about, promoting and celebrating at Agile Midwest 2024, and what are some activities that can be done now to start to make progress toward this vision?

Search Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogs and you can find everything from “agile is dead”, “agile is reborn”, “agile never died”, “agile is great”, “agile 2.0”, “agile 3.0”, “agile needs to go away”, “agile is an excuse”, “agile is a side show”, “agile is not serious”, “agile is all fun & games”, “management doesn’t take agile seriously”, “agile projects do not succeed”, “agile allowed us to deliver successfully” and many many more – you get the idea.

Let’s put all this controversy aside and come together to brainstorm the vision of where those in the agile lounge would like “agility” to be in 2024. As a group, we will complete empathy maps for several personas to identify what we’d like people to be saying, thinking, doing, hearing, etc about agility in 2024. Participants will then be able to suggest activities or insights that agilists can start to enact now (2019) to guide agility toward the desired future vision.

• Agile Lounge
• Advanced

• Jason Tice

Agile Lounge: Agile Success & Happiness

Discussion Focus – 100% POSITIVE sharing of personal stories about all things agile & agility – how has agile provided benefit to you, your colleagues, your team, your company, your community, your family, etc?

Let’s face it – there is a fair amount of negative energy, controversy, heated debate (pick your favorite hashtag) and dogmatism (pick your favorite framework) that reduces the psychological safety of the agile community – eg: why conferences have adopted codes of conduct and other policies / strategies seeking to find balance between controversy, collaboration and overall safety. We will conclude the agile lounge at Agile Midwest 2019 with a space that is focused purely on the positive aspects, impacts and outcomes from agile.

Participants will be invited to share personal stories of how agile & agility have provided benefit & success to themselves and their immediate colleagues, relatives and/or family. Stories are welcomed for all applications of agile & agility including agile software development (where it all started), but also where people may have applied the values and principles of agility OUTSIDE of software development in other professions, in personal, school or community activities and/or within their families.

• Agile Lounge
• Advanced