Agile + DevOps Virtual 2020 - Project Manager
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Customize your Agile + DevOps East 2020 experience with sessions covering project management.
Monday, November 9
Lean/Agile Metrics for the Rest of Us
For many agile practitioners, software metrics beyond a burndown chart are little understood or, perhaps, very scary because poor metrics can be worse than no metrics. In this enlightening session, Larry Maccherone explores how you and your organization can use metrics to bring management and lean/agile teams closer rather than becoming a wedge that drives them into conflict. Larry covers the entire lifecycle of the metrics process—from metric selection to reporting data—in compelling ways. You’ll gain an understanding of a wide range of concepts including common (101-level) metrics,...
An Agile Coaching Practicum in 360 degrees
Let’s face it, agile coaching isn’t for the timid or faint of heart. In most companies, it’s an incredibly challenging and nuanced role. And an important part of it is having the ability to coach in 360 degrees: downward—across your teams, outward – across managers and peers, and upward—towards those pesky leaders. Oh, and did we say that virtually EVERYONE is an agile coach? In this workshop, join Mary Thorn and Bob Galen as they share tools and experiences coaching in all directions. They will review three different coaching models from the X-Wing, to Powerful Questions, to 9-Stances, to...
Fishbowl: Liberating Structures
Liberating structures offer a revolutionary solution to collaboration in groups by using a handful of simple rules to unleash and involve everyone, enabling groups of any size to work at the top of their intelligence. Discuss them with peers and experts in this fishbowl discussion, where the audience members sit in a circle of chairs in the middle of the room. Several brave souls will fill all but one of the chairs in the "fishbowl." When you want to join as a speaker, you enter the fishbowl and sit in the empty chair, and one of the other speakers will voluntarily leave so that one chair...
Tuesday, November 10
What's Your Leadership IQ?
Have you ever needed a way to measure your testing leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine and Jeremias Rößler as they share a toolkit to help you do just that. This toolkit includes a personal assessment of your leadership competencies and the evolution of testing and testing leadership. They will explore a set of eight dimensions of successful leaders, provides suggestions on how...
Creating a High-Performance Agile Team
Many teams have a relatively easy time adopting the tactical aspects of agile methodologies. Usually a few classes, some tools’ introduction, and a bit of practice lead teams toward fairly efficient execution. However, these teams are quite often simply going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could. Borrowing from their experience and lean software development methods, Bob Galen and Mary Thorn explore high-performance team patterns, which are the thinking models of mature agile teams, including large-scale emergent...
Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions
Agile initiatives always begin with high expectations—accelerate delivery, meet customer needs, and improve software quality. The truth is that many agile projects do not deliver on some or all of these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or to get an agile project back on track, this tutorial is for you. Jeffery Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues or mitigate their damaging effects. Poor project management, ineffective requirements development, failed communications, software development...
Introduction to DevOps with Chocolate and LEGOs
PreviewOrganizations today can no longer afford to deliver new features to their respective markets once a year or even once a quarter. In the attempt to catch up with the competition, they jump onto DevOps journey starting with the "How" and losing the sight of "Why" and "What". Join this gamified simulation tutorial to gain a solid understanding of foundational principles of the DevOps culture. Experience the benefits of DevOps transformation even before initiating one in your enterprise! This tutorial is ideally designed for organizations that are evaluating their approach to DevOps...
Learning How to Lead High-Performing Agile Teams
Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, training, and even the empathy—revolves around the agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized at best, and in the worst cases even vilified. But Bob Galen and Mary Thorn contend that there is a central and important role for managers and leaders within agile environments. Join Bob and Mary as they explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders. Examine why those who understand servant leadership know how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the team's...
The Transformation Mindset: A Leader's Guide to Embracing Agile
NewMany leaders want to transform their organization to become more agile, adaptive, and responsive to the market. However, most do not deeply understand how to lead their organization through such a massive change. They install prescriptive scaling frameworks and send employees to training, but discard the elements of true transformation that are difficult. When the inevitable failure ensues, they switch frameworks, fire people, and revert back to what worked for them in the past. What these leaders fail to recognize is that the mindset they used to build their organization conflicts with...
Wednesday, November 11
3 Disciplines for Leading a Distributed Agile Organization
How can you lead people you may never see in your distributed organization? Your personal operating system drives your leadership and guides your organization. While your distributed employees may rarely connect with you beyond a video screen, phone call or chat message, you can model a personal operating system that helps you and them navigate the complexities of a distributed agile organization. In this talk, we will explore three key disciplines composing your personal operating system for leadership: manage change through experimentation, amplify communication and collaboration, and...
17 Metrics to Accelerate Delivery Without Damaging Culture
Some engineering managers confuse using data to make better decisions with using data to monitor and stack rank individual developers. I call this the "data-driven trap". Stack ranking is a culture killer but unfortunately lots of great dev leads with good intentions fall into this trap. It is possible to run a highly data-driven engineering organization without measuring a single individual performance statistic. We do it on my team today. In this session I share 17 team-based metrics we use to accelerate delivery, remove process friction and maintain positive team culture. Plus I explain...
Evolving from Projects to Products: The Product Leader’s Journey
The Product Leader is the link between the products we build and the culture of the organization building them. It's the foundation for operating in a digital economy. There is a shift happening. One that puts the user closer to the center of our work than ever before. We are moving away from the question "Are we building it right?" to asking "Are we building the right thing?" This approach isn't new - it's growing in response to the increasing speed and complexity of competing in today's marketplace. The future of business agility is creating a healthy ecosystem that provides space for...
Thursday, November 12
Before Disaster Strikes: Training DevOps Engineers for the Worst
PreviewPicture this: you are startled awake in the middle of the night by a phone call from your supervisor. An emergency has occurred in production, and the only description is that a heavily trafficked site is down. You rush to a conference call with five of your colleagues to find that everyone has a different assessment about what the problem is and how to fix it. There’s no plan in place for this, and as the DevOps engineer, the decision and responsibility for fixing the problem is yours. There’s only time to try one of these methods; you have minutes, not hours, to find the issue and...
DevOps Your Amazon Skills
Since 2011 voice assistants have been entering our lives little by little. It wasn't until 2014 that Amazon created the Echo devices with its built-in assistant, Alexa. In 2018 they give us the opportunity for anyone to add functionality through skills, it means to be able to create voice based applications for the first time. Developing an Alexa skill can be a lot of fun, but nobody likes to find negative comments and reviews in order to begin to identify and correct bugs. Skills developers use tests and automation to minimize these risks. In this talk, I will talk about how to test your...
High-Performance Teams: Core Protocols for Psychological Safety and EI
Want awesome teams that build great products? Great teams don’t happen by accident. And they don’t have to take a long time to build. In this session, Richard lays out the case for Continuous Teaming. Session participants will join in a flight of fun learning activity-sets. These will give you a taste of team awesomeness and how to start when you go back to work. Richard builds on the work of Jim and Michele McCarthy, Google, Bruce Tuckman, Gamasutra, Standish Group, Peter Drucker, and Melvin Conway. His learning activity-sets are short games, using elements from improvisational theater,...
Developers Gaming the Agile Process? Say it Ain't So!
Who doesn’t like the affirmation in hearing, “Job well done.” Most of us have experienced receiving salary increases, bonuses, and other forms of reward. These rewards are often tied to meeting or exceeding objectives set for us as individuals, teams, and businesses. Regardless of profession, most businesses recognize and reward individuals based on meeting defined goals. Over time, Ray Elenteny has observed an interesting dynamic where the spirit of Agile can take a back seat to leveraging Agile metrics to evaluate individuals and teams. Evaluation by Agile metrics seems very reasonable,...
Monday, November 16
Agile Leadership Summit: Opening Remarks: Jeffery Payne, Coveros (Summit Moderator)
Join Jeff Payne as he kicks off the Agile Leadership Summit right before the first Keynote speaker presentation.
Turning Execs Into Champions for Driving Tech Change
Whether you are responsible for driving transformation in the DevOps, Data, Cloud or Agile spaces, success hinges in large part on your ability to effectively message and engage executive leaders. Knowing how to strategically manage the executive landscape by educating leaders on benefits, earning their trust, gaining sponsorship and motivating them to action is an art, and something that doesn’t just happen—it takes a focused and purposeful approach, hard work, creativity and a lot of patience. Michelle DeCarlo will share proven executive engagement strategies she has successfully...
Managing the People Side of Change
Change in any size organization happens at the individual’s level. Compelling visions, world class strategies, and an army of consultants are powerless to transform the organization if the needs of the individuals are not incorporated into the program approach. Join Perry Riggs while he looks at the application of ideas from various organizational change management frameworks such as Prosci/Adkar, Lewin, and the Kotter change framework. We will also review ideas from recent literature like Drive - Daniel Pink, Start with Why - Simon Sinek, Dare to Lead - Brene Brown, The Fifth Discipline...
Agile Leadership Summit: Think Tank Discussion Part I: Problem Definitions
Join with your peers in an engaging and highly interactive session to discuss the issues that affect you most. Using answers to the question “As a Leader, What is Keeping You Up at Night?” that we will discuss as a larger group, participants will form their own small groups to work on finding solutions to pressing test management issues. Discussions will review identified issues, barriers to change, and focus on innovative strategies and practical next steps. At the end of the think tank, all feedback will be collected and posted online to encourage further collaboration.
Tuesday, November 17
Agile Leadership Summit: Think Tank Discussion Part II: Leadership Solutions
Based upon the problem definitions developed during Part I of the Think Tank, small groups will brainstorm on how to best solve these challenges, leveraging the collective wisdom of peers and Summit speakers. Each group will designate a representative to present its results and practice delivery.
Agile Leadership Summit: Think Tank Discussion Part III: Presentation of Results
Small group representatives will each be given five minutes to present their leadership solutions. Summit participants will vote on which group produced the best solutions.