Jean Tabaka - Agile Fellow

Design thinking is emerging as a way to guide organizations in how to accept mystery and move through heuristics before moving to an algorithmic view of business. Complexity theory asks us to be intentional about the systems in which we find ourselves and the transitions we must be prepared to make in and around our ordered and unordered systems. By combining these two disciplines, you can begin to balance exploration and execution in how you create and sustain Agile adoptions in your teams, groups, and organizations.

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Jurgen Appelo - Author, Management 3.0

How do I make my managers more Agile?
How can I convince developers to educate themselves?
How can I make customers more cooperative?
How do I start a European network of Agile and Lean practitioners?

When transforming organizations and other social systems people usually encounter obstacles. And these obstacles very often involve changing other peoples behaviors. Of course, we cannot really make people behave in a different way. We also cannot really make people laugh, and we cannot really make people happy. But we can certainly try!

This session is about Change Management 3.0. It is a new change management super model which views organizations as complex adaptive systems and social networks. The Change Management 3.0 supermodel wraps various existing models (PDCA, ADKAR, Adoption Curve and The 5 I’s). It lists a few dozen hard questions that can help people in their attempts to change the behaviors of other people in an organization and beyond. No matter whether you are a manager, Scrum Master, Product Owner, software developer or writer, anyone will find it useful to know how to change the world around them.

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Jurgen Appelo - Author, Management 3.0

Many people in the world don’t really like their jobs. And most organizations are not healthy. They are badly prepared for increasing complexity and changing environments. Most managers know that organizations are complex systems. But few understand what that means for the way organizations should be managed. Complexity thinking suggests that we should seek a diversity of conflicting perspectives. It explains that organizations need experimentation, not just adaptation. And it says that most innovation happens by stealing and tweaking existing ideas to fit a new context. Ultimately, what organizations need is a “management workout”. A number of simple practices that make employees happy and the organization healthy, and which satisfy the rules of complexity thinking.

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Cory Smith - Maintainer, JsTestDriver

JsTestDriver is a unit test platform that has been designed with TDD in mind. The emphasis was placed on short iterations on multiple browsers. A brief introduction will be provided covering setup, customization, and some advanced topics including asynchronous testing. There may be a discussion of ducks. JsTD has been adopted by IntelliJ IDEA and used extensively within Google.

Ken Schwaber - Co-creator, Scrum process

The move is on. More and more organizations are abandoning waterfall and opting for agility. The benefits are overwhelming, documented by Standish Group, the GAO, and DOD. Lately, two approaches to becoming agile have emerged.

One is SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), an agile template that can somewhat readily be overlaid on existing organizational structures. Adopting it provides agility.

The other is CIF (Continuous Improvement Framework), which requires organizational change driven by the organization itself, optimizing its particular effectiveness. CIF is aimed at optimizing value.

Ken will provide an overview of both and help organizations understand their alternatives.

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Trevor Lalish-Menagh - co-creator, EnvJasmine

Our teams have embraced the agile spirit for years, and what that means to us is flexibility. Flexibility in management, flexibility in employees, and flexibility to change. Earlier this year, the team I am on decided to experiment with a Kanban board and work in progress limits, bucking the trend of a scrum-based approach. Although we had bumps in the road, through frequent retrospectives and a willingness to change we found a system that works for us. I will share our experience with you in the hope that you can foster the agile spirit in your workplace as well.

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Dan Mezick - Author, The Culture Game

Are you frustrated with your organization’s culture? Are you looking for ways to tinker with it, and change it?

We are commonly familiar with hacking software code to repurpose it, and make it do new things. We are far less familiar with the hacking of cultural code to tip our team and our organization in the direction of more learning, fun and productivity at work.

Attend this session to learn specific techniques to immediately and effectively influence culture in your organization:

• Why your meetings are soul-sucking death marches from hell, and how to fix that
• How to use agreements, interactions and punctuality to greatly increase the learning of your team & organization
• Why asking permission is usually always overrated and in most cases may be just plain WRONG

Everyone will exit this session with tools, techniques and links to PDFs and resources for extending the learning in this session.

Joseph Campbell - Sr. Software Architect
Wally Eggert - Principal Software Engineer, CIM

Many companies have tried speeding up their existing software deployment cycle only to discover that it leads to chaos. As organizations try to deploy more quickly, they are held back by error-prone and unpredictable deployment processes being executed by an Operations staff that becomes increasingly overworked and overtired.

So how did we achieve Continuous Delivery:

1) In a big company
2) Where not everyone was even doing the basics of CI yet?

In this talk we’ll cover the steps that were taken to go from just the basics to full blown Continuous Delivery, discussing who we needed to convince that continuous delivery was THE way to go, the tools and approaches that worked for us, and how we managed to move to Continuous Delivery without any major disruptions to our existing delivery flow.

Video Presentation