Speakers - Optional Conference 2015

Agile Teams: Self-Organizing, Collocated, and Distributed

Agile development requires teams to self-organize. However, this doesn’t happen by chance. Teams have to be set up in a way that allows them to self-organize. And moreover, if you work on a large project with more than one team the team structure should still enable self-organization. The same is true for global development.
In this session we will cover the essentials for building productive self-organizing teams for small and collocated and as well for large and distributed settings.
Learning Outcomes:
– Understand what characterizes self-organization and the evolution of an agile team
– Understand what kind of communication and collaboration ensure a team’s agility
– Learn how teams can be agile in large and distributed environments
– Understand how both – developing business functionality and ensuring conceptual integrity of the architecture can be supported

Keeping Governance and Audit Agile

The Agile approach to system development is one way that CIOs are aiming to deliver more projects in shorter timescales at lower costs. This can be at the cost of control – especially if addressing risks and controls is seen as an overhead rather than adding real benefit to the project. Audit and control managers need tools to help ensure systems are fit for purpose and do not compromise controls compliance.

Is it possible to achieve the right balance between Agile development and control? This session will provide an introduction to the culture and jargon of the Agile approach. It will also provide tools and tips for developing or auditing controls and governance in this environment. This will enable you to be an effective part of the project team, ensuring compliance with good governance and that the delivered product has adequate controls embedded during development. This reduces the risk of failure and the total overall cost of the project if controls have to be added later.

Chris Wright will hold a workshop after the conference, on 26 March 2015. See the details here: Agile Governance, Audit and Management Workshop.

Waste is Optional: Customer Value defines meaningful work; everything else is optional including the waste

What do we need to do to make waste a thing of the past and prevent it creeping back into the organisation?
Of all the ideas associated with ‘Lean and Agile’, ‘cutting waste’ is perhaps the most widely known, but it is also the most misunderstood, primarily because most organisations don’t actually know what waste is. Waste disposal, waste recycling and waste paper – these terms ring familiar bells for almost everyone. However, as Lean shows us, waste is about far more.
The combination to unlock waste and release customer value is:
a. Employee creativity
b. Innovation
c. Willing contribution
The presentation will prove we can design back in the employees’ willing contribution to establish a real human workplace that is adaptive, innovative, engaging and almost waste free.
Pre-reading before the event: Published on-line article Institute of Leadership and Management: Keeping it Lean by Stephen Parry. https://www.i-l-m.com/Insight/Edge/2014/October/keeping-it-lean

The Scaling Dilemma

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: “We used to be small. We made great decisions, got product to the market fast, and were very successful. Now we are big. And slow. Our teams don’t work together very well. Our specialists are spread too thin. Our products are less than awesome.”

Getting teams to work well is hard. Getting teams to work well together is much harder. And the dilemma is, what works in a small organization is often counterproductive at scale. The question is – what do you have to do differently when you grow up?

For starters, scaling is fundamentally a complexity problem, so you should look for ways to reduce and deal with complexity. Second, scaling is a cooperation problem, and understanding what promotes and what destroys cooperation is essential for growing organizations.

Finally, scaling is an organizational problem, and there’s no shortage of models to study for patterns of how to scale organizations. There’s the lean model, the military model, and several unicorn models. These models confirm the fact that scale is possible, and are full of ideas for you to experiment. But they won’t tell you which approach is best for you – you have to figure that out for yourself.

Mary and Tom Poppendieck will hold a workshop before the conference, on 23 March 2015. See the details here: Lean in a Nutshell.

Agile Architecture – How worse can be better

Agile and lean thinking can help us in creating an agile system architecture – an architectural solution that is “good enough”. A “good enough” solution is a solution that is “pulled” by the users requirements and therefore satisfies user’s need. Hence it creates a business value. Since it is just “good enough”, and not perfect from the technical point of view, usually such a solution can reduce both implementation time and cost, being more applicable and providing a faster return of investment.

The agile and lean philosophy could be applied even on big upfront designs, reducing the complexity and simplifying them. Through one real-life story about the Model-Driven Development architecture, from a time critical environment (financial sector), we will show how the agile and lean principles can be applied during architectural decision making, resulting in an agile architecture. It will also be shown how such agile architecture, although being a “worse” solution compared to a technically perfect one, is in fact a “better” solution, since it creates bigger business value.

This talk will provoke you to think about an old, well-known, question by R. Gabriel “Is Worse Better?” It demonstrates “How worse can be better” if the focus is on delivering a business value, which is one of the most important software architecture’s property.

The Power of an Agile Mindset

I’ve wondered for some time whether much of Agile’s success was the result of the placebo effect, that is, good things happened because we believed they would. The placebo effect is a startling reminder of the power our minds have over our perceived reality. Now cognitive scientists tell us that this is only a small part of what our minds can do. Research has identified what I like to call “an agile mindset,” an attitude that equates failure and problems with opportunities for learning, a belief that we can all improve over time, that our abilities are not fixed but evolve with effort. What’s surprising about this research is the impact of an agile mindset on creativity and innovation, estimation, and collaboration in and out of the workplace. I’ll relate what’s known about this mindset and share some practical suggestions that can help all of us become even more agile.

Securely dispose of your waste – Security in your process

Having a secure product is not something most users consider optional, yet still in this day and age, most development teams develop software with marginal knowledge about security. This leads to huge amounts of waste when security bugs surface before release, or even worse, get exploited. In many cases it can even drive the company out of business. On the other hand many teams feel hampered by too rigorous security processes that can slow down the delivery of new features. There is a need for more pragmatic, agile security. In this talk we present practical ways of dealing with security in your product that harmonize with modern development while at the same time integrating crucial security engineering activities to ensure that security is Built-In from the start.

Lean Startup for the Agile Enterprise

The Lean Startup method, created by Eric Ries was admittedly inspired by agile development. However, it seems that Agile also has something to learn from Lean Startup.
In Eric Ries’ definition, “a startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty”. Note, that this definition deliberately omits whether a startup should be a new venture, should be a small venture, or should focus on achieving an early exit. This suggests that established organizations can easily have projects, products, services, initiatives that could be labeled startups.
The question this talk will explore is how well Agile in its current form supports startups being incubated in an Enterprise environment, and how can this support be strengthened.

Advanced Facilitation Techniques

Retrospective meetings frequently yield two, seemingly conflicting results: on one hand, there are too many meetings, on the other, new meetings have to be scheduled to discuss some select topics.
This shows us that while there’s a need to collectively discuss topics, most meetings are suboptimal.

When listing the Scrum Master’s responsibilities, facilitation usually comes up as one of the first items. Yet, few Scrum Masters have a clear understanding and toolset for this challenge.

This talk defines what facilitation is (is it something we only do at meetings?), discusses some advanced facilitation techniques as well as when is it beneficial to invite a guest facilitator, or whether there’s value in pair-facilitation at select occasions (spoiler: there is) and how it works best.

Finding the right practice for the various levels of planning

The planning onion highlights the different levels of planning necessary in agile organizations: daily, iteration, release, product, portfolio and strategy level planning. With new tools and techniques such as Impact Mapping and not-so-new ones like Big Wall or Story Mapping, catering for all the upper levels is becoming more and more easy.

The talk provides a high level overview of the tools we used at several organizations to solve these planning questions, their right places in the onion and also potential overlaps – how can these practices support each other. It also focuses on when using these techniques becomes very important and when can they be omitted; as sometimes not all of the specified levels have to be supported.

The tools placed on the onion will be:
– Mitch Lacey’s Big Wall to support up-front initial estimation
– Jeff Patton’s User Story Mapping to give structure to backlogs and provide fullness
– Gojko Adzic’s Impact Mapping to ensure development is delivering based on business goals
– Dean Leffingwell’s Scaled Agile Framework for scaling for larger organizations
– Eric Ries’ MVP concept for reducing time-to-market

Designing High-Performance into our Organisations: What can ScrumMasters, managers and other leaders do to help every team to excel?

My talk this year will focus on Radical Management’s principle number 2: a shift in the role of the manager from a controller to an enabler of self-organizing teams.

It will include:
– what is a high-performance team?
– the key factors for high-performance teams
– organisational design principles for high-performance teams
– what leaders should do to help create an environment in which every team can become a high-performance team

The talk will be aimed at ScrumMasters, coaches and managers in organisations that have already or are considering adopting Agile.

Manage Yourself!

Manage Yourself! is about concrete management advice for all workers. Practical things that people can do next Monday morning, in order to grow an organization that is fit and healthy. And not only managers, but everyone who is concerned about the organization. Because, management is too important to leave to the managers. The whole organization should feel responsible for a better organizational culture.

How can we measure team performance?

How can we pursue career paths?

How can we replace performance appraisals?

How can we motivate our ourselves?

Nowadays, all knowledge workers are expected to be “servant leaders” and “systems thinkers”. In this session, you will learn how you can do that concretely. As a result, you will have better management with fewer managers.

Adaptive Organizations – Change by Design

As agile Methods are crossing the boundaries of IT, we start considering whole organizations becoming agile – places of collaboration, co-creation & inspiration. It seems to be time for rethinking the organizational paradigm for the 21st century. More than ever in the past few years, the race for survival of the fittest challenges many companies, leaders and employees. And while we experience first ground-breaking examples, the future remains uncertain, calling for action. In this session we explore options for the adaptive organization. Whatever type of business you are in, however your current organization looks like. Join and learn how you can approach current contextual boundaries and deal with change for succeeding in a growing competitive landscape.

Test Lead challenges in Agile environment

What does Agile Testing mean?
How to participate in agile development teams when being a test analyst?
What kind of testing tasks should testers perform when being member of an Agile Team?
What kind of testing tasks should testers perform when being member of a Test Team?
How to test in a continuous delivery process?
What tests and when to run them?
How to create test specifications?
How to form an efficient team from individual agile testers?
How to build an efficient team?
How to lead efficiently the team? How to achieve good overall team performance?
How to reorganize the team?

Leading Agile Teams – Let Them Do It On Their Own!

Agile teams will manage themselves well if they clear goals, if they know how well they perform and if their challenges are stretched enough but not over their skills.

Agile teams need a different leadership. As they work independently, traditional management patterns probably will not provide the right results. The question is: how should we change leadership for agile teams? One possible answer is: let them manage themselves and they will be in flow, perform at their best.

The session will cover the following topics:

– Flow state
– A little bit of brain science and flow
– The 7 flow conditions
– Group flow
– Application to leading agile teams
– Positive consequences to performance

Dániel Kólya will hold a workshop before the conference, on 23 March 2015, with Simon Roberts. See the details here: Leading Agile Flow: The Secret Sauce of Great Agile Teams.

Tightening the feedback loop

Test Early. Test Often. Test Together.

By bringing testing earlier into our development cycles we learn about our mistakes earlier. This allows us to fix things sooner, cut down on waste and ultimately deliver faster.

At Skype we struggled with long feedback cycles, forcing us to deliver with bugs we had no time to fix and even finding ourselves unable to release at all. Over time, we focused on how to get feedback sooner so that we could release more value to our users with better quality.

In this talk you will hear about some of the approaches we employed to reach our goals including:
– UI automation testing
– Continuous integration
– Telemetry
– Beta testing
– Improving collaboration between testers and developers.

Lessons from the Jungle: Negotiating New Situations in the Wild and in Business

Experiential learning is the most powerful way to become better, yet we usually apply a linear approach to it, taking one step at the time and trying to read a new situation based on what we already know to be proven. We approach dramatic change with reluctancy and we try to avoid risks. But what happens when we are thrown suddenly in a totally different environment, for which we are not prepared? How does this transform our way of thinking? How does it make us better managers? Might we gain in business if we deliberately “run with the bulls”? The speaker believes that crossing the jungles of Congo or hitchhiking over the Sahara are great ways to learn lessons that apply well in management. It did for him.

Agile manufacturing and smart SMEs companies

Manufacturing industry today faces a wide variety of challenges. Manufacturing companies around the world are attempting to improve their profitability, reduce business and manufacturing process complexity and gain better business insight in order to stay on top of their industry. Manufacturers must respond to business demands in real-time, make products in response to customer demand and outsource a wide variety of functions.

All businesses today operate in a marketplace characterised by change. For manufacturers, the challenge is to become agile in order to ensure a flexible response to changing market conditions. Managing planned change is difficult in itself. However, managing unplanned change demands the ability to react faster and use new strategies to match market conditions, and customer demands in a way that maintains or creates competitive advantage. As manufacturing strategies have evolved, the focus has shifted away from being big and stable with complete control, to being small, nimble and more responsive to the market. This evolution reflects the introduction of new technology, new trends and, in particular, new customer behaviour. Agility is the manufacturer‘s chance to seize the market by responding faster to customer demands. Today‘s manufacturing world leaders are characterised by their ability to deliver the products that customers want with minimum time to market and maximum capability to improve products to meet market and customer expectations.
In the smart manufacturing enterprises, all business and operating actions are optimised and fitted to achieve enhanced productivity, sustainability and economic performance, most the enterprises that embrace smart manufacturing are flexible, agile and efficient, they are responsive, collaborative and lean, they are safe, predictive and above all, sustainable.

Therefore smart manufacturing enterprises need agility as one of the important improvement tools for handling unanticipated change, that occurring at the early stage of product development cycle, and to be able to face the continuous and unanticipated change to stay competitive in the market place and face these changes and challenges.

My speech will focus on the following:
– The definition of agile manufacturing and it’s important to smart companies.
– Agile manufacturing as a one of most needed tools for the smart companies.
– Agile manufacturing is more appropriate for implementation in smart companies than the other improvement tools.
– How agile manufacturing can be the right paradigm that requires for quick response to customers’ dynamic demands.
– How agile manufacturing can be successfully implemented in smart companies.

Fifty shades of fail – a lean perspective on success & failure

In an ever-faster-moving environment, lean and agile principles help us deal with risks and unknowns by focusing on eliminating waste, validated learning, deferring decisions, responding to change. But even when we fail to apply them, we might sometimes achieve some level of “success” nonetheless.

But what does “success” actually mean? Can we really appreciate the importance of agility, of an exploratory approach, of validating ideas as we go, without defining what success (and hence failure) does looks like?

Going from a personal experience developing an innovative service for a primary european telecommunications company, where we failed to apply lean and agile principles, I’d like to explore the idea of success and how a project can be completed on time, on scope and on budget and win the hearts of customers, and still be a (bad) failure when we consider what could have been.

Being an agile product owner – with a world class product example

Can you imagine that an existing physical product shifts its own product category and market position upwards after a simple firmware upgrade?

A good product owner can.

What is more important, her team can, too. So what is the difference between a classic product manager and an agile product owner? The presentation gives the answer focusing on the meaning of effectiveness, as well as on management behaviour, motivation and on product ownership. Furthermore, the physical product example illustrates in an inspiring way what we can expect if the product owner does the job well. The never seen before real world example shows that how leads a well refined agile/lean startup mindset to an exceptional market fit.

The lean leader: how to nurture droids into thinking people

As a leader, you must have already faced the challenge that though your colleagues do their job properly according to your instructions, but they are not willing to do anything more. During the interview they seemed very promising, but they turned out to be droids.
What do you think the reason may be? Do you think you have any responsibility for that?
This session will show you the potential reasons for people losing their proactivity , the way you can stop this process and turn it back.
This session will provide you with the tools and leadership style that help create an open environment where people are willing and able to continuously improve their organisation.

Technology vs. Processes: Increasing value delivery by doing less (Hotels.com)

Getting new product features released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process.

This talk walks through the evolution of processes and technical practices at Hotels.com that achieved rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Automation of build, deployment and testing process, fundamentally improved collaboration between product management, developers, test engineers, tech operations enabled a world where software can be released to users in a matter of hours; sometimes even minutes.

The first half of the talk will focus on analysing the technology and process changes that led to Hotels.com being able to go from a quarterly release schedule to applications and services releasing on demand. Delivering fast requires new methods and new tools, and we have to have the courage to leave old tools behind.

At the heart of the talk is the notion that any positive change is achieved by constantly re-balancing investment in technology, process and people who drive the change.

The final part of the talk argues that increasing pace of delivery is not enough. We will discuss how Hotels.com focuses on improving the pace of finding out which issues are worthless, to reduce the delivery of features that won’t add value to its customers.

Expedia Inc. is a leading player in the $1trillion+ travel industry. Hotels.com is the hotel specialist brand of Expedia Inc. with 85 websites in over about 74 languages, listing more than 325,000 properties around the world. Hotels.com is a highly distributed and high traffic website with 2.5mln+ daily unique visitors; 800,000+ unique customer searches a day.


The Power of Expectations

Understanding and managing the way expectations are generated is a critical skill if you care for happy stakeholders (from end users to investors to technical teams) and you want increase the chances of success of your projects, on many different levels.

In fact, having guided quite a few Agile and Lean adoptions as part of my professional career, I came to realize how one of the major sources of resistance, as well as of failure, are misplaced or unrealistic expectations.

Among these, the most dangerous and the harder to change are those about the business and organizational dynamics of software development itself. Of course, challenging one’s expectations is something to be expected (pun intended) but that’s easier said than done, especially when the expectations are our own.

In this interactive session, which includes some activity for the audience, we’ll explore what “expectations” really means and we are part of their creation. We’ll also how to bring more to the surface hidden expectations and how to suggest better alternatives.

Product Owner Role: Share or Not To Share?

In an Agile software development project the goal is _very_ simple: “deliver a market ready solution on (or ahead of) time that brings the most business value”. We all agree it is a team effort, but in order for our product to ship successfully by all means, we need a captain. Well, not a captain, but a Product Owner.
We need a Product Owner who can monitor, discover and foresee market trends; channel in, listen to and organize all the requests from a wide group of stakeholders; manage, plan, document and prioritize all of these findings; and then align, clarify and communicate them to the development team(s). And probably most important of all: be available. To everyone. Always.
Can all of these requirements be efficiently met by a single individual?
And how about adding another dimension to the above compiled job description by distributing the team(s) geographically? Can this single person be always available? To everyone? At every location? In every time zone?
This talk will look at the feasibility of such a geographically distributed software development project from the Product Ownership’s point of view by introducing one potential solution. A solution that has worked for us and could be a reference point for you to set-up or fine-tune your own solution.

The Change Agent’s Dilemma – Using The Power of Disruptive Innovation in Changing your Organization

Going agile means changing your organization. If you are lucky you can succeed in one big step, get done, wash your hands and be happy. But most of us can do it only in small incremental steps, so deciding on the next step or steps is crucial, because we need success to keep our momentum in going forward.
In this talk you will learn about the process of selecting the best idea for your current situation. We will investigate how to choose from the many good ideas that you have. How to choose the one that will most probably work.
You may already have gone agile, and have discovered that this is only the first step in the ten thousand mile journey.
Or just want to change yourself, your team, your project, your organization, or maybe the world. Once you get started in the change business, it becomes a habit, and you always have a hundred ideas what to change, and need to decide which one to start with.
Or maybe you have one big idea and curious about whether it will succeed.
We speak a lot about how to change the world. But quite few about what to change. Little is known about the how to select and prioritize your ideas that they will have the most probability of success.
I invite you on a journey to this undiscovered territory to get a better understanding of how ideas and inventions actually born, grow and succeed on the long run.
The targeted audience is anyone who wishes to introduce changes and would like to understand some of the nontrivial aspects of innovation.

Winning a tender with Story Mapping

Is it possible to challenge the ad-hoc estimation?
Would it help if you would have clear scope before you promise something to your customer?

During an ongoing tender for the American Telecom Region it has been identified that our product is lacking a key functionality. Without this functionality it seemed impossible to win the tender. Therefore we needed to quickly come up with an idea how to fill this gap. We had only two days to present a plan to stay in business.
After spending a few hours with a cross functional team and the technical experts gathering the scope collaboratively we managed to put a Minimum Marketable Feature proposal on the table. Within an hour we had a clear business strategy agreed with our Product Manager based on this input that put us back on track in the tendering.

Story Mapping is a powerful collaborative scope definition technique. It clearly visualizes the scope in priority order. Immediately tells the necessity and provides vision for future roadmap. Product Managers and Product Owners love it as they have great understanding of the scope and can easily see how to fit into tight deadline and budget. Estimation is improved, scope is clear, trust level increased.

Feedback on Story Mapping:
“It is crystal clear what is the scope and why.” – Roger, Strategic Product Manager (SPM)
“Very good tool to visualize the big picture and the increments of the feature.” – Máté, Component Area Responsible
“It’s a great tool for me because I can easily find good marketing slogans to sell for future roadmap.” – Roger, SPM

Dealing with legacy projects and multiple customers by transforming to agile

Two strong, business lines competing for resources, an underperforming external software company, a long-running waterfall project, an operational crisis around a recently deployed system – are all well-known phenomenons for software development leaders. But what happens when they all occur at the same time, while the further development of the software is in progress with full speed?

Such an instructive story will be presented during the session, where topics will be discussed like transforming a waterfall project to agile, building an internal scrum team, and when business decision puts two Product Owners on top of the merged code base. Meanwhile a software application in crisis mode becomes an exemplary success story.

About INSEAD: As one of the world’s leading and largest graduate business schools with campuses in France, Singapore and Abu Dhabi, INSEAD’s business education and research spans three continents. Its 146 renowned Faculty members from 34 countries inspire more than 1,300 degree students annually in MBA and other programmes. In addition, more than 12,000 executives participate in INSEAD’s Executive Education programmes each year.

Support teams in the Agile World

According to agile principles, teams shall handle everything possible connected to their product / project work. What are the exceptions? When does it makes sense to carve-out certain topics and handle them to e.g. support teams? In our presentation we would like to show live examples coming from the experience gained in the past 5 years taking part in the development of a number 1 medical product.

Hack-a-ton and Innovation

TJ Ewing will share some insights about LogMeIn with you:
About our way how we encourage our colleague to innovate and how motivating this opportunity for innovation can be. When people have the freedom to do what they imagined, when they own their mission they can create incredible things. At LogMeIn we are creating innovation culture. By doing so empowering everyone to create something useful.

Dreaming big is sometimes not enough. Gábor Mayer invites you on a journey, where he shows how a promising idea became a product at LogMeIn:
Of course along the road there were several bumps. We even realised that our brilliant idea was not that brilliant. But how did we end up finally with a patent and how did we win the first LogMeIn Hackathon? I will tell you at in my talk!

Open Space is a method for self-organizing conference tracks. It relies on participation by people who have a passion for the topics to be discussed. What topic would you like to discuss?

Basic organizing principles of the Open Space:

Use the Law of Two Feet to take responsibility for following your own passions. If you feel that you are not contributing or benefitting from a session, please feel free to move on to something else. Remember it’s self-organizing so prepare to be surprised.

We invite the day’s speakers on stage to give a few minutes long summary of their talk to the audience, to help them decide which talks they would like to attend.

Lightning Talks will be a self-organizing queue of very short (3 minutes tops) presentations, where everyone is welcome to present their topic. What would you like to share?

Read more about the Lightning Talk format here