BOOK OF PROCEEDINGS - WordPress.com...BOOK OF PROCEEDINGS November 18, 2016 Wycliffe Volunteer Activity Center 10306 John Wycliffe Blvd, Orlando, FL GO IN G, GRO WIN G, S US TAIN IN

BOOK OF

PROCEEDINGS November 18, 2016

Wycliffe Volunteer Activity Center

10306 John Wycliffe Blvd, Orlando, FL

G O I N G , G R O W I N G , S U S T A I N I N G A G I L E

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Live Graphic Recording provided by Royal Innovation Design Group (RIDG)


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T H A N K Y O U F O R T R A I L B L A Z I N G W I T H U S !

Dear Agile Open Florida Attendees,

What an amazing event! On behalf of Agile Florida, I want to thank each of you who courageously gave up your entire day to join us in what was truly a wonderful event on November 18, 2016. I hope after participating in this trailblazing occasion, you have been as positively

impacted and inspired as I was.

Although the format was unconventional at first, once we released our res istance and embraced the Open Space concept, our meeting far exceeded our expectations. What a great privilege to

be part of so many relevant and thought provoking conversations. I found it so very difficult to choose among the multitude of topics that interested me. I greatly appreciate all the volunteer

note- takers who helped us capture the outcomes from our insightful and meaningful discussions so they can be shared with our agile community. I believe that our day will lead to future change,

collaboration and establishment of many new relationships within our agile community.

The facility at Wycliffe provided a beautiful venue for our event., Mark Stedman and Glenn Oliver, our Wycliffe ambassadors, have our gratitude for such an outstanding job of hosting our event. And lastly, I must not

forget to recognize our planning committee, our dedicated band of volunteers who spent

many late-night hours helping make our day possible. Agile Florida continues to generate

enormous momentum! This is only possible because of you, who have invested your time

to attend and support our meetings. We’re very excited about the coming future! We thank you again for coming and we look forward to continuing the conversations and connections that will steer us on the path to evolve and prosper together in agile. The Agile Open Florida 2016 session notes, photos, videos, and this Book of Proceedings can be found at: https://agileopenflorida.com/2016-recap/

Mark Kilby, co-founder

Agile Florida

https://agileopenflorida.com/2016-recap/


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CONTENTS

SAFe................................................................................................................................................. 7

How Do You Track And Estimate Business Value?.......................................................................... 8

Management 3.0 ............................................................................................................................. 9

Telecommuting Tools.................................................................................................................... 11

Life After Agile............................................................................................................................... 12

What Are SOme Great Icebreaker Ideas? ..................................................................................... 13

Dev Ops ......................................................................................................................................... 14

Life After Agile (Agile Life)............................................................................................................. 16

Integrating User Testing/User Research Capability Into Cross-Functional Agile Development

Teams ............................................................................................................................................ 18

Coaching Product Owner Teams................................................................................................... 20

Filling In The Gap Between Self Managing Teams And Traditional Management ....................... 21

Tools: Agile Blessing Or Agile Devil ............................................................................................... 22

Product Owner Domain VS Product Manager .............................................................................. 23

WHY Is Core Agile So Difficult? ..................................................................................................... 24

What Are Some Techniques For Retrospectives For Dysfunctional Teams?................................ 25

Using Agile Coaching As A Scrum Master ..................................................................................... 27

How Do You Recharge Your Batteries As A Change Agent Coaching Transformation? ............... 28

Offshore Contract Model Is Agile.................................................................................................. 29

How Do You Integrate WEb Design Into The Agile Framework? .................................................. 31

Agile Manifesto 2.0 – Shall We Slay The Sacred Cow? ................................................................. 32

Create Sustainability With Trust In Innovation............................................................................. 33

Solutions To Remote Work Challenges......................................................................................... 34

Sustainable Middle Management ................................................................................................. 35

Making Sprint Demos Exciting And Effective ................................................................................ 37

Cultivating Kanban: Kanban VS Scrum .......................................................................................... 38

How To Do Agile For Hardware Projects....................................................................................... 39

Agile Telecommuting .................................................................................................................... 40

Modern Agile................................................................................................................................. 41

How Can I have Agility In Non-IT Departments? Agile Beyond Software, Is It Time To Go

Mainstream? ................................................................................................................................. 42

What To Choose To Work On To Be Effective & Client Communication...................................... 45

How Do We Track A Feature Before It’s REady For Code? ........................................................... 46

Outcome Oriented Agility ............................................................................................................. 47

Role Of Software Testing In Agile: Manual VS Automated TEsting .............................................. 48

How To implement Scrum In A Marketing Department............................................................... 49


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Pitching The Agile Antagonist ....................................................................................................... 50

Effective Sprint Planning ............................................................................................................... 51

Working With Vendors.................................................................................................................. 52

How Do We Navigate The Collision Of Corporate And Agile Values? .......................................... 53

Agile For Maintenance Projects .................................................................................................... 54

When To Go From Scrum To Kanban............................................................................................ 56

Managing Sales & Portfolio With Agile Delivery........................................................................... 57

What To Do About AOF 2017? ...................................................................................................... 59


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SAFE

INITIATOR: ROBERT KINNERFELT

PARTICIPANTS:

Stephanie Allen, Farrah Miller, Sam Falco, Timothy Brockman

DISCUSSIONS HIGHLIGHTS:

Larger organizations and programs of 60-120 people

Program level consists of teams, product management and different delivery

functionalities

Value stream level scales product management work on a higher level

One value stream can have many programs

Portfolio level manages strategic themes and organizes value streams and programs

The concept of SAFe is systems thinking, lean principles and agile mentality

Big plannings/PI plannings are large sessions where the entire program plans the next

increment of 5-8 sprints normally

In the end of a Program Increment (PI) there is an Innovation and Planning sprint where

teams do innovative work and key players prepare planning event

NEXT STEPS OR IDEAS FOR ACTION:

Learn that SAFe is not devils invention.

Use SAFe as a bootstrap framework to implement agile and lean methodologies and

mindsets in the entire organization.

Train yourselves before deciding on whether you want to go there.


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HOW DO YOU TRACK AND ESTIMATE BUSINESS VALUE?

INITIATOR: NICK

PARTICIPANTS:

Lakshmi Ramaseshan. and others


How does a Management Team estimate business value? What models do you use for

estimating?

When developing new strategies, or building on existing strategies having a business

case is important

Project Canvas or Lean Canvas is a simple way to understand the purpose/ROI of a

project

Measurable Success is important

Having Stakeholders estimate bus. value using T-shirt sizing is appropriate just like

developers estimate stories

Relative Sizing/Estimating & having a baseline is a good way to bring about consistency

with values over time

It's helpful for developers to know the value of a feature

OKRs are a good way to start

Doing Earned value vs. Traditional Cost/Value Mtg can be used

SMEs are not the best estimator of value - it's important to have them engage in

conversations which not only determines value of an Epic/Feature, but also the

Opportunity Cost of not being able to get it to Market at a certain time

Build or Buy Decisions typically have a Business Value incorporated into the process

since it's the starting point of trying to figure out whether a team would build or buy


Executive Dashboard like Valpak is the ideal = Encourage Your company or Team to take

a Tour (Contact Stephanie Davis)


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MANAGEMENT 3.0


PARTICIPANTS:

George Spantidakis, Michael Glasney, Anitra Pavka, Suzy Jackson, Anjali Leon, Dottye Stewart, Dan Crowley, Adam Ulery, Ken Nordquist, Josh Fruit, Jason Nocks, Alexis Martin, Joshua Friscea


Built to make people understand how to manage a system in a complex environment

How people develop themselves

People vs. Artifact Management

Agile Shows us how to build the product, but doesn't tell us how to get there.

Teams need a brand, name, or logo to give identity

Identities energize people

Make people part of something they can build or change

What have functional managers done to make teams feel ownership or go "cool"?

Knowing WHY you are doing something is energizing

Delegation empowers and energizes (Tools exist such as delegation boards)

Empowering Teams:

Share clear vision and objective

Trust

Built by asking for help

Providing Safe environment - OK to fail

Let teams solve problems

Lead the Chaos for team to become autonomous

Align Constraints:

Manage Outer Boundaries of playing field

Be Transparent

Manage Objectives

Develop Competence:

Manager's Responsibilities

Agree on direction to move

Can team satisfy direction?

It's HOW we do it that's essential


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Grow Structure: Any system is driven by culture

Communication Channels

Information Letters

Weekly Meetings

Easy to say that Agile teams are autonomous

Teach ourselves within organization

Breeding reductionism

Acknowledge that Tree is a trellis that can allow an organization to grow organically

Pathway to Nirvana of compensation

Kudo Cards

"Cheers for Peers"

Day Off buttons

Impact Testimonial by customer

Treat everyone as team members (FTE's + Contractors)

Look for ways to build community with remote or geographically disbursed teams

Personas (Hobbies, photos, about me) to humanize team members

Have remote employees go first in standup meetings

Improve Everything:

Continuously

New course material for Management 3.0 has removed Agile and has shifted to

contemporary

Differentiators of Management 3.0:

Branding

Guilds - 1 hour of work per week that leads to several hours of efficiency

Parallel (Scaled) Agile and Management 3.0 are a good fit with each other

o A bootstrap to expand

o Answers to everyday issues

Personal Maps o A tool to get teams to know each other

3 Books Available by Jurgen Appelo o Management 3.0 o How to Change the World o The Workout Book

Website: http://www.management30.com

o 2 Day Workshop Available with Free 2- hour preview to companies, Workout -

toolbox of 20 techniques that can be applied to organizations.

http://www.management30.com/


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TELECOMMUTING TOOLS

INITIATOR: VLAD FILIPPOV


There are challenges of telecommuting in Agile teams.

List of tools for team communication:

Lync / Skype / Skype for Business.

Slack

WebEx

Zoom

Google Hangouts

Blue Jeans

Sococo

Bria (VoIP client)


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LIFE AFTER AGILE

INITIATOR: LEON SARBARSKY

PARTICIPANTS

Salena Vitkovic, Rene Clayton, Travis Serevich, Susan Shapiro, Jeff Johnson, Jill Shields, Bryan,

Ed Martin, Mark, Farrah Miller, Stephanie


What will Agile coaches look like? Constantly Teaching

AI

Embrace Global Warming - Tech Opportunity

VR Agile Coach

Cognitive Computing - Developers

Bots - Deep Learning

Agile Genetics - (DNA)

Higher Programming Languages - There are 13 languages in the tech stack and to do this

you have to go through this and to get to this you are required to do this...

Will languages be fighting it out? Go, Swift...

NO UI - Amazon Echo, Alexa, Google, Siri, Raspberry Pi

o UI Moving to glass technology - ex. Teleprescence

Loyal to Service and not a company

Watson - IBM Controls your mind

Robotic Development - speak natural development

Would you put a chip in your head? Does it depend on what it can do for you? Would

you be willing to be a BETA for the greater good?

In a society of instant gratification Emotional Quotient/Intelligence value will go up. The

ability to demonstrate self-control will be a differentiator

Elder Care - Would be a hot market as people live longer, the technology/health care

business value will be tremendous

Other possibility - will society/humanity take a step back and back off technology and

move to more human interactions, because as we are freed up from day to day chores,

higher order thinking will prevail and the drive for understanding and relationships will

be the highest priority.


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WHAT ARE SOME GREAT ICEBREAKER IDEAS?

INITIATOR: CHRISTINA ALONSO


Ice Breakers can flop. Ex. Star Wars exercise. Take culture into consideration when you are planning/selecting an ice breaker

If you can, learn about your team members and leverage that when selecting an ice breaker.

Ice Breakers don't always have to be "happy." They can be deep and thought provoking. Ask open-ended questions to open up discussion.


Everyone shares a fun fact about themselves

Everyone states their moods in terms of the weather. i.e. sunny, cloudy, etc.

Everyone says 2 truths and 1 lie about themselves. The others try to determine which

one is the lie.

Ask everyone to share: What animal would you be? (You can change animal to anything else you want.)

Bananagram using Agile terms

Marshmallow Challenge

Untangle

o Line people up and have them all lift their right arms and reach over and grab

someone else's right hand. Then have then lift their left arms and grab a different

person's left hand. Now, they untangle themselves. You can time them and do it

several times.

Do the Wave (like the wave done at a sporting event). Have everyone create a mind map of themselves and then share it with the others.

o You can create mind maps using: work, home, vales, where do you live?, and family

Rock/Paper/Scissors

Mafia Game

o Create teams of 3. 2 people look at the 1 and infer as much information about the

person just by looking at them.

o If you have virtual teams, you can: share a common trait you all my share and talk

about it. ex. food

o What did you want to be when you were 5 yrs. old?

Resources: Managing for Happiness (Book), Tastycupcakes.org, Try to look up "Summer Camp

games" for kids. You would be surprised at learn that some games can be used.


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DEV OPS

INITIATOR: HUNG CHEN


Getting everyone together to work on one thing

DevOps originated with the cloud

Developers would push to the cloud, but standards were weak

Docker makes it easier to deploy to many different place and the pipeline will be the

same

Writing and deploying applications

PAAS vs Container solutions

o Containers are "hot new" idea

o Platform agnostic

o Platforms lock you into vendors

Docker VS Chef VS Puppet

Docker is a container

Chef installs into OS

Documentation vs Code Docs

Some want documentation written

Level of documentation is flexible based on team knowledge needs

DevOps (tools vs culture)

How do you consider culture vs tools?

DevOps is to move away from siloed teams

Everyone needs to understand the tools/flow so not one person is responsible

What recommendations do you have to move a team to dev ops?

o Get upper management buy-ins

o There are advantages to make it easier to sell

o There are day-long dev ops groups you can play to illustrate the point (scripted

events development and ops vs dev ops)

Modularization can help containerize

o Going from older system to containerized can be difficult

o Better to try containerization on a new project

Traditional vs Dev ops

o Traditional is more siloed

o create unnecessary blocks in the process

o monitoring is important get getting feedback


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CI - continuous integration

Quality First

Chaos Engineering (Chaos monkey from Netflix)

o Developers think "How will this work in production?"

o Developers are responsible for fixing things

Monitoring Programs

o Splunk

o Sumo logic

o AppDynamics

o Application Insights

o Dynatrace

o sysdig

o graphite/statsd

Reduce cycle time between events (site down) to the fix (site back up)

Test early and often

Feature flags + A/B testing


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LIFE AFTER AGILE (AGILE LIFE)

INITIATOR: UNKNOWN


What are you thinking about after Agile?

AI (West World)

Millennial running the world

Embrace Global Warming

True Virtual Agile Coach

Agile Genetics

o Inject Agile principles into a person's DNA

o Nurture vs. Nature

BOTs (clone development teams)

Agile is a higher-level programming language

o Languages are lower level that rolls up to a new higher level

No UI

o Amazon Echo with RasberryPi

o Glass technology

o Speaking face to face with virtual device

Connect with your mind

o Interface with your brain

No more waiting! (Millennials)

EQ (Emotional Intelligence)

o Are we going to have more isolation?

o Will there be a time when we don't talk to people?

o Will you seek people who agree with you because so easy to find them and then

ignore disagreement?

Is your best friend going to be a computer?

Maybe technology will pick up all of our work and people will not have to work and

therefore will have more time for personal time, relationships and more social

interaction. This would be a complete full cycle turn back to a more social society.

Eldercare

o Put a chip in your body to administer medication

o Identify diseases and cure before you

o know them

o Older aged people population explodes


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When do our smart phone go away?

o Will we have a smartphone in our head?

o Lens in our eye

Future of security

o Look at 500 elements of you with biometrics (how you turn your head) - behavioral

DNA


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INTEGRATING USER TESTING/USER RESEARCH CAPABILITY INTO CROSS-FUNCTIONAL

AGILE DEVELOPMENT TEAMS

INITIATOR: DANIEL HETTRICK


Development Team is responsible for executing product vision

o Starts with high-level design (designer's mental model of how product/service will

be used/experienced by end-user)

o May involve creating "personas" which are representative of core demographic

o Problem: traditionally, users are not engaged until late in development life-cycle

e.g. tweaks before launch OR A/B testing of final UI design

this is more a validation approach than an iterative design and development

approach

User Testing/User Research domain encompasses multiple concepts and numerous types of testing including (but not limited to):

o Usability Testing (identifies inconsistencies in UI design, differences in designers’ and

users’ mental models, etc.)

Is critically important to do this as early as possible in development cycle

Can be done with small batches of users (~6), expert or heuristic evaluation

o Seeking to quantitatively identify "Gulfs or Execution" or "Gulfs of Evaluation" where

the user either did not know how to perform an action they wanted or could not

understand what they were supposed to do next

"Playtesting" for entertainment products/experiences is similar to Usability

Testing, but focuses on subjective engagement (how did the user feel) rather

than the more quantitative focus of Usability Testing

o User Acceptance Testing (UAT) defines threshold criteria for success of key

interactions

Using a development approach like ATDD (Acceptance Test Driven Development)

may help to ensure team's focus remains on critical user interactions

This type of testing may be requirement for items being considered "DONE"


Advocate for creating shorter feedback loops between users/customers and

development teams

o Feedback early and often!


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Embed User Testing skills within team (hire them or train some team members in User

Testing design and facilitation)

Utilize resources such as

o Online resources:

Usability Hub

usertesting.com

o Consider engaging 3rd party companies such as WAC Research and Key Lime

Interactive in FL to help structure, design, and facilitate user testing

Consider cultivating a database of testing candidates across multiple demographics to

help ensure your tests get fresh insight (do not rely on convenience samples)

Consider adopting ATDD or Behavior Driven Development (BDD) / Specification by

Example to align the team's focus with system response to key customer interactions


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COACHING PRODUCT OWNER TEAMS

INITIATOR: LOUIS TORRES


Be effective more than efficient

List PO responsibility and present to the PO team

Have PO's create a kanban board for their backlog items - 25% ready, 50% ready, 75%

ready, etc.

Don't take/allow stories that aren't 'Ready'

Have strong Scrum Master interaction

Add some metrics for stories that are missing information - what percentage of stories

are not 'Ready'

As a Coach, be a co-product owner until Agile behaviors are natural

Have a PO that is performing Agile techniques well show other PO's

Find/develop an Agile Champion within the PO group

Encourage rapid brainstorming/add-on grooming sessions


Have PO provide a daily dedicated 'Team Time'

Have PO's do 2 grooming sessions per sprint, one at the beginning of the sprint focusing on large Feature stories needed down the road (2-3 sprints away), the other grooming

session near the end of the sprint to groom stories coming soon


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FILLING IN THE GAP BETWEEN SELF MANAGING TEAMS AND TRADITIONAL

MANAGEMENT

INITIATOR: MICHELLE MICHAEL

PARTICIPANTS:

Suzanne Daigle, Michael Okneski, Mark Hernandez and others


Self-managing teams are high performing, don't need basic coaching, pro-active not

reactive, engaged, highly communicative, adaptive leadership, set measurable goals, willing to take on any role, mentor each other, asks the right questions and push back

appropriately.

Accountability has to become everyone's responsibility

PO doesn't become a bottleneck; have transparency with stakeholder

Separation between organizational management and administrative management

Conflict resolution resolved internally

Management and PO need to let go of control and let the team decide how to do the work

Team has choice to decide how to do the work; freedom and choice

Business should focus on WHAT needs to be done

Value the skills/capabilities of individual team members

Mentoring each other gives all teams members a chance to work on the 'cool' technology

Use cross-training and rotation so that teams don't get stale. Beware of 'click' culture that might build.

No one can exert control over another; team members are accountable to each other


Research the filtering of applications for 'practical intelligence'

Apply some knowledge/best practices learned and link up/connect with others in the

group


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TOOLS: AGILE BLESSING OR AGILE DEVIL

INITIATOR: JENS OSTERGAARD


Session started with Jens explaining what he meant by the topic and that he wanted to

focus project management tools. Thereafter the group discussed and listed reasons why

tools are positive and why they can be negative.

Positive Negative

Visibility Does not fit needs

Audit Trail Time Consuming

Notification Impact Transparency

Integration TME

Flexibility Integration

Configurable Flexibility

Metrics Configurable

Savings Metrics

Cost

Group concluded that many of the things could be both positive and negative depending

on the organization. Group moved on to discuss what it meant to be forced to use a

Tool:

Positive Negative

Consistency Frustrating

Audit Lose creativity

Excited to Learn Tool More Time Updating

One Stop Shop Loss of Motivation

Creates more Process

Group concluded some things that can be valuable if you want to use a tool

o Good for large organizations

o Has to be the right tool

o Mold tool to your organization, nit the other way

o Involve end users

o Feedback internally

o Process way more important than tool; Get a tool team

o Do research

o Team flexibility in collection data for tool


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PRODUCT OWNER DOMAIN VS PRODUCT MANAGER

INITIATOR: FARRAH MILLER


Complex large scenario, multiple product lines and teams General setup is one product manager with multiple PO's.

Product Manager is responsible for Product vision and should supply a "one page" vision writeup for the PO to share with the team. Like Roman Pichler's product canvas. Team should get to see the vision. Creates and shares value proposition with PO.

PM also creates roadmap. Also create high level Epics/features they would like to see built with high level acceptance criteria.


PO should be brought into understand the roadmap at some point and be able to weigh in and build release plan.

If a business problem arises unplanned, the PM should include PO and analyze and

scope/request to team to help solve. Multiple POs might work under one PM.

PO - Owns the backlog, gets to prioritize the level below features and how to break down features and order work. They are responsible to bring the value proposition down to the team


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WHY IS CORE AGILE SO DIFFICULT?

INITIATOR: JENS OSTERGAARD

PARTICIPANTS:

Darlene Pike and others


Session started with Jens explaining what he meant by the topic and used the Scrum Guide as an example.

Thereafter the group discussed and listed reasons why it is difficult. From that we voted and this is the Top 3 reasons why it is difficult to do core Agile.

Trust

Change Fear

We then took on the challenge of solving the top 3 reasons. Using the same process, we again discussed and listed reasons to gain TRUST, and then prioritize.

Deliver Value Shared Responsibility

Empowerment

Moving on we did the same with

CHANGE with the following result

Experiment Reward – Benefit

Tiny change – Kaizen mind

And finally, for FEAR

Just Do It – Try Celebrate Success

Training


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WHAT ARE SOME TECHNIQUES FOR RETROSPECTIVES FOR DYSFUNCTIONAL TEAMS?

INITIATOR: CATHERINE PECK-PHILLIPS

PARTICIPANTS:

Christina Alonso and others


The dysfunction

o Dev teams are more interested or committed than other teams.

o Transparency is important.

o Some team members have a fear of process.

o People use buzz words, but are not really doing "it"

o Things get discussed at retro, but it doesn't get resolved. Problems keep coming up

retro after retro.

Metrics can be good, but stay in tuned with how they react to metrics. If they like it, great! If not, use pictures or some other way to inform them w/o making the team feel bad/

Know your team!! Learn what they respond well to.

There are certain issues that should be addressed outside of retro--perhaps by the coach or manager only.

Resources

o Retro wiki

o Tastycupcakes.org

o Strengthfinder assessment

o Belbin (role based assessment)

o Myers Briggs personality assessment

o The Ideal Team Player (book by Patrick Lencioni)


Things to keep in mind for Retros

o Create action items and assign them to someone (Scrum Master)

o Ensure there is actual value in the meetings

o Make retros anonymous. Let the environment be safe!

o Team should select what they want to discuss or to find a solution for.

o Mix up exercises to help the discussion and improve conversation.


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o Make sure to stay focused on the topic being discussed...and timebox discussions to

ensure all ideas are covered.

o Make time not just to complain, but to find a solution.

Create list of impediments throughout the sprint, so you don't forget them/

Have someone record all good/bad things that happen in order to ensure that the "bad" things are also discussed.

Review team improvements Let the team lead the discussion.

Show data when Possible Establish ground rules for the retro before the meeting starts. (technology down)

Retro techniques

o Use tastycupcakes.org for retro ideas.

o Take a walk, talk to someone new

o Try "escape rooms"

o Win, lose, or draw game

o Have teams draw how they felt throughout the sprint, and review with team

o Massage table--"massage" out issues

o The team must follow through with action items


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USING AGILE COACHING AS A SCRUM MASTER

INITIATOR: ALISON RAMOY


Good Times to Coach

o Ad hoc if possible. There is no need to wait

o Retrospectives at the end of a sprint

o Retrospectives on a specific topic

o Weekly alignment meetings with POs.

o Reorg

o At refinement sessions. Get comfortable with the unknown.

o More frequently with new teams, but mature teams need coaching too.

Good Coaching Techniques:

o Shu Ha Ri

o Teach (coach) teams to solve their own problems

o Ask powerful questions

o Substitute terminology for what the team is comfortable with

o Don't invalidate their previous experiences and successes by telling them how they

used to do something (Waterfall) is wrong.

o Use positive terminology (BEST that can happen vs, WORST that can happen)

o It's about us vs. you alone

o Reward system-snacks, lunch, fun activities

o Competition as a motivator

o Coach to change habits for self-improvement


Read Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins


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HOW DO YOU RECHARGE YOUR BATTERIES AS A CHANGE AGENT COACHING

TRANSFORMATION?

INITIATOR: NICOLE TRAVIS

PARTICIPANTS:

Heidi Araya, Lori Townsend, Cristin Hernandez, Nirakar Sahoo, Shasidhar Kalahasti, Jason Nocks,

Michael McGreevy, Camille Guy, Ivonne Woodruff


How to recharge if you're the agile champion/change agent.

Phone-a-friend, Meditate, Be healthy (mind, body, soul)

Ask yourself why is this important to me?

Be the best Scrum Master ever.

Keep perspective.

Identify your "why."

Understand who you are and your characteristics to recharge, introverts unplug and

extroverts go out and socialize.

Seek learning, take a class/webinar or read a book.

Keeping people motivated.

If change is not possible, what then?


Six item checklist to recharge yourself:

Get involved in the Agile community

Treat yourself well

"Reflectrospect"

Take a step back, assess the big picture

Sharpen your saw, add to your toolkit

Consider an exit strategy


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OFFSHORE CONTRACT MODEL IS AGILE

INITIATOR: SUSHIL BHATTACHAN


Discussed about offshore contract model to better engage offshore team.

It was agreed that as we move from waterfall to agile it’s even more important to have

motivated offshore team members as we give more autonomy to offshore teams. And if

team members are not motivated it could make productivity worse than water fall.

In T&M contract model offshore management do not have high interest to motivate

team to provide higher productivity and higher quality cause all they care is no of people

are hired by their client. Offshore management mentioned that they have to pay more

to keep people for multiple years in the same project as in T&M onshore client wants to

keep same person for long. However, they mentioned though they keep people for long

by paying more the team members are disengaged being in same client company for

long. So, they do not have leverage to bring new people as new people are more

engaged for few early years. And they want a way to pay by performance rather than no

of people and higher pay for retention of an employee. Fixed cost would be better but

with Agile we cannot do that as well.

Brainstormed to see if we can help change the contract model from T&M to something

more incentive based so that offshore management is engaged to motivate their

employees better.

Topics we brain stormed with team.

Penalty for not meeting SLA

Reward for meeting sprint goals.

Pay by velocity or incentive by higher velocity with base payment

Measure output by person.

However, we did not find good agile way to change the contract.


P a g e 30 | 65


As we discussed many ways, we could not find good agile way to amend the contract. Team

decided that it is really not a contract issue, but rather an engagement issue. Trying to amend a

contract might not help. So here are some recommendation to engage offshore team.

Have Tech lead/ Proxy PO in Offshore team

Have complete team in offshore; do not mix and match

Offshore team in one location

Use communication tool like Mumble, Discord etc.

Incentive to onshore in charge for better output from offshore

Onshore team value work completed by offshore, that's where the main engagement

energizer

Make offshore team provide full transparency of what they worked and how much they

complete each day

Share vision from onshore executive to offshore team and make them feel part of the

team, and not just once a quarter over market the vision


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HOW DO YOU INTEGRATE WEB DESIGN INTO THE AGILE FRAMEWORK?

INITIATOR: UNKNOWN


This session focused on how to incorporate the UI design work into the development scrum

process and facilitate better communication and efficiency.

Suggestions included:

Have UX & Design spike stories within sprint

QA approve acceptance criteria at the beginning of the sprint & Designer approve UX at

the end of the sprint.

Develop first then refine with the designer

Dependency management is the key to building efficiency and collaboration between

design and development


Use SLACK (web app) for development team to collaborate and share their work with

the design team during sprints

Identify the core design elements needed by the development team at the beginning of

the project - this will be the focus work for the design team

Design lo-fidelity comps then hand off to the development team to build

Work in 5-day Design Sprints then hand off to development team to build


P a g e 32 | 65

AGILE MANIFESTO 2.0 – SHALL WE SLAY THE SACRED COW?

INITIATOR: CURTIS MICHELSON


We started with a collective "moo" sound, and we spoke with appropriate reverence

about the "forefathers" who brought us the manifesto. Acknowledging that what they

created has remained relevant and powerful all these years (15 now?) and also realizing

that the world they were speaking to (waterfall software development) has largely

changed or dissolved. Today, the agile battleground moves to Management and into

disciplines outside business per se; such as, education, government, science research,

etc.

As a refresher, we reviewed the current manifesto and principles, then asked what

about 'software' is hardwired into this document, and what would we need to change to

remove that? Focused on, "developer" becoming "innovator" or "creator". And

software becoming "realized business value". In the principles, we changed "technical

excellence" into "excellent craftsmanship" or "high performance.

Someone noted that there is already a new manifestation of A.M. called 'modern agile'.

www.modernagile.org. There is a beautiful circular graphic that focuses on four

synergistic principles: "Make People Awesome", "Experiment & Learn Rapidly", "Make

Safety a Prerequisite", and "Deliver Value Continuously"

Curtis then introduced an "acceptance criteria" for the effectiveness of this new less

software specific version: "we should be able to speak the native language of anyone in

organizations - school administrators, government bureaucrats, teachers, preachers,

whoever works collaboratively to deliver value to a community.

As a "test" we focused on "Education". Interestingly, some people have already begun

to do this, and have taken agile principles into K-12 schools. One woman said their

company had 'adopted' a school and was actively working with them to bring Kanban

into classrooms. Others said it would be awesome to have "visibility" even into a

classroom. Imagine a Trello board that all parents could access and a backlog of items

that teachers and students 'pull' from. Whoa! Others have already brought agile

principles into their homes. One woman said they have a scrum board for the house

which she calls the "vision board". In the retrospective, everyone came away energized

to take agile outside IT and to find places in their community to introduce the potential

for greater goods that come from it.

In the retrospective, everyone came away energized to take agile outside IT and to find

places in their community to introduce the potential for greater goods that come from it

http://www.modernagile.org/


P a g e 33 | 65

CREATE SUSTAINABILITY WITH TRUST IN INNOVATION


PARTICIPANTS:

Rene Clayton, Parker Melech, Justin, Margaret Callaghy, Tabith, Bhavini Natarajan, and others


Innovation in tech teams: Innovation sprints:

Innovation sprints

Involvement in product definition

Delegation & Empowerment

Structured slack: Prioritizing the top 2 thirds of the BL for each sprint, and leave the rest

of the sprint for innovations on refining the solutions. Live by "the amount of work not

done is essential"

Innovation on Product strategy

Product management, product owners, receivers? Users

Use the same mentality as a team would. Look at the MVP and create a slack where you

can plan new features that have evolved during the last couple of sprints.


So how do we get there?

Force the experiment

Understand the business value

Start prioritizing harder.

Slim down your sprint backlog after the planning


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SOLUTIONS TO REMOTE WORK CHALLENGES

INITIATOR: UNKNOWN


Non-verbal communications missing

Use web cam

Use conference rooms where people present can read the body language of others in

the conference room and add color/interpretations to words

Have in-presence (everyone in the same place) team building activities to bond as a

team so member understand each other better

Why do we have remote workers?

Available skill pool is increased

Have people close to physical resources such as servers/data centers

Better, more convenient time zone coverage


How do we create presence for remote workers?

Have remote workers create a compelling work space for themselves

Create effective feedback loop for remote workers

Bring team together physically for team building activities

Establish continuous presence between remote workers and co-located workers

Let remote workers share weather of local items of interest during stand-ups for

connection purposes

Encourage people to be who they are, to be authentic


P a g e 35 | 65

SUSTAINABLE MIDDLE MANAGEMENT


PARTICIPANTS:

Sarah Urriste, Alvin Providence, Becky Hartman, Prashanth, Prasannathirha, Jens Ostergaard,

Wendy Vigre, Ivy Woodroffe, Anjali Leon, Michelle Michael


The problem is management starting as POs and SMs when a company moves to agile

We're finding that another problem is PMs and Managers impeding the agile

transformation because they have the most to lose

Questions posed: Do we need middle management? Who is defined as middle

management?

Robert proposes that there should be Artifact Management and People Management

Artifact Management: Anything you can put on a board and prioritize. The following

people should perform artifact management:

o Product Owner

o Project Manager: Manage communication between teams and dependencies

o Program Manager

o Technical Lead

o System Architect

o UX Management

o Requirements Management

o Release Management

o Content Management

o Configuration Management

People Management: Manage the environment so people can grow and become better

at their job. The following people should perform people management.

o HR Issues

o Guild Leaders

o Should SMs be considered management? No. SM should not have a "side"

o This person has direct reports?

o Should the team self-manage?


P a g e 36 | 65


How to create sustainability with middle management?

Training

Guild Leadership: Developing the craft & the people in that community (Artifact &

People)

Find your own place in a scrum team

Create/guide the direction people should go

Support from upper C-level management

Help reports find their role

Motivate & Incentivize

Manage expectations

Coach: Assist in the decision making, but don't make the decisions for people.

Issue: Middle management can be absent and unaware of what's happening with their reports

Possible Solution: Implement "Guild Leaders" that pop into standups and meetings, meet with

their reports to see how things are going, meet with the POs & SMs to have a holistic

understanding of how their reports are doing on the Scrum team

Middle management should manage dependencies between different departments


P a g e 37 | 65

MAKING SPRINT DEMOS EXCITING AND EFFECTIVE

INITIATOR: KENNETH DICK


Performing Demos by team benefits

Only certain stakeholders attend

People that attend ask questions

Actively connecting QA with stakeholders creates value

QA aren't as interested in sprint Demo because they have seen it all sprint

Conversation ideas:

Demo length is important

The person who worked on it is the best person to present it

Everyone should have a business perspective for Demos

Inclusive presentations give the team pride in their work and visibility to leaders

Product owners should market sprint demo contents to stakeholders

Support development time described using theme groups help communicate to leaders

Sprint theme can be important when the theme equals the most important business

deliverable

Listeners don't always care about sprint themes unless it helps communication or is FUN

Free food! People pay more attention out of gratitude

Demos can be your last line of defense against faulty product delivery to customers

Attendance rises with WebEx/other digital delivery

Demo Slides Content Consensus

What problem did you solve?

Who did the fix?

One screen visual summary

Major GUI designs planned for next sprint


P a g e 38 | 65

CULTIVATING KANBAN: KANBAN VS SCRUM

INITIATOR: SARAH URRISTE

PARTICIPANTS:

Reid Manchester, Mary Carleton, William Davis, Asif Haque, Allison Ramoy, George Spantidakis,

Vicki Braun, Dan Crowley


Scrum struggle was that staff would sometimes be idle, stories would be too large,

teams could not agree on points for features

Velocity is measured in points delivered per sprint. This can still be used in kanban

Still use refinement session in an ad-hoc fashion

Do hold retrospectives, but less process orientation and more of a team-building and

prep for the upcoming sprint cycle

Still use a scrum/flow master

Implement a WIP limit. Some team members will resist sharing their WIP load for fear of

receiving more work, but press them to communicate, don't let them get away with it

Some teams may find value in running Kanban within Kanban, further breaking up their

work within the lane.

It's still valuable to measure and track cycle time, to see that points delivered goes up or

down and how long it takes to deliver that value


Ensure that WIP items being reported by the team are truly In Progress. If it's not being

worked on right after the stand-up meeting, it's not In Progress. Falsely reporting items

as IP creates waste and prevents others from working on that item

Use a Bi-weekly prioritization process that covers business value delivered and other

metrics. Dimensions to be used could be things like: Business Value, standardization,

complexity, compliance

Use an 'Expedite' lane on the board to cover customer supported tickets, and talk about

those tickets first in the stand-up


P a g e 39 | 65

HOW TO DO AGILE FOR HARDWARE PROJECTS

INITIATOR: UNKNOWN


Prototype the hardware using pipe cleaners and marshmallows

Keep the teams doing agile prototyping (MVPs) for hardware and software separate

Join them later using a Scrum of Scrums approach

For factory floor settings, build modular factories with the components of the assembly

line reconfigurable

Have the different parts of the manufacturing process work in the same open space in

separate teams

Have the testers and QA deal with the physical attributes early, how many times do we

have a hotel lamp that is impossible to turn on/off


P a g e 40 | 65

AGILE TELECOMMUTING

INITIATOR: UNKNOWN


Telecommuting is not an evil. It can be a necessary part of maintaining a loyal, integrated,

engaged team. A Microsoft study has found that fully distributed teams (all remote workers)

are more productive than hybrid distributed/collocated teams.

Rules for Successful Distributed Agile Teams:

1. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate.

Not available?

Issues with workflow?

Problems with tasks?

Notify your team!

2. Set up time for the team to just hangout. Encourage team members to share personal

ideas and talk about non-work ideas. They will get to know each other and build team

camaraderie.

3. Use virtual icebreakers. These are 1-2 minute games to reduce tension and increase

opportunities for idea sharing.

4. Try using mind maps to give people an idea of who you are. Each person can list things

that is important to them. Sharing these gives the team members a way to connect.

5. Treat your team like adults. If they are producing at an acceptable rate, you do not need

to micromanage.


Good Tools for Agile Telecommuting:

Zoom Meetings for video conferencing

Slack for quick notifications and conversations

Appear.in (free video conferencing)

Suggested Reading:

Collaborative Superpowers by Lisette Sutherland

Rework


P a g e 41 | 65

MODERN AGILE

INITIATOR: STEVE SLADOJIE

PARTICIPANTS:

Shannon Nacua, Mark Cruz, Fred Mastropasqua, Adam Ulery, Christopher Duro, Wendy Vigre,

Chase Robison, Phil Zofrea


Is Modern Agile being applied to team currently? This is such a new movement that

Modern Agile is being applied but only in pockets.

Modern Agile is a way to bring Agile from software and apply to non-IT shops

Modern Agile is a 2.0 version of the Agile Manifesto. Modern Agile overlays the Agile

Manifesto

Making People Awesome: Make the team awesome, make the customer awesome with

proving a great product, etc.

Deliver Value Continuously: Always deliver value of the product

Making Safety a Prerequisite: Let teams voice an idea, is it ok for teams to fail, a way to

grow and experiment, make the customer feel safe by providing a great product, etc.

Experiment and Learn Rapidly: Teams need new skill, how are they being fed new skills

and technology, are we respecting and listening to new ideas no matter where they

come from?


P a g e 42 | 65

HOW CAN I HAVE AGILITY IN NON-IT DEPARTMENTS? AGILE BEYOND SOFTWARE, IS

IT TIME TO GO MAINSTREAM?

INITIATOR: SUZANNE DAIGLE, RICK REGUEIRA

PARTICIPANTS:

Dottye Stewart, Christina Alonso, Catherine Peck-Phillips, Stephanie Coleman, Lynn Flannery,

Mark Hernandez, Mira Welsh, Edison da Silva, Diana Flores, Curtis Michelson, Alexis Martin,

Monique Hacker, Kenneth Ashley, John Long, Josh Fruit, Salena Vitkovic, Alison Ramoy, Vicki

Braun, Angela Adams


Initiators describe the "why" behind their topic.

Rick indicates he's been with Agile for 6 years, now tasked to work with the business

units to take it beyond technology. At the leadership level, often beat to a different

drum, can be overwhelming when the organization is not familiar with Agile. Want to

hear lessons learned from others.

Suzanne: deeply committed to Agile beyond Scrum. Has a business manufacturing

background, sees huge opportunity to bring Agile methodology and thinking to business

thinking. Lots of waterfall in management.

Participants jump in to describe why they joined this topic:

Not always receptivity at first, language is unfamiliar, we can appear to be talking above

people's head. We need as a people to step back, make it relatable. For example,

drawing the parallels to waterfall.

Valpak rep talks about their company where every team is doing Kanban. "you'd be

surprised to see how much people are taking it in"

Another individual working in a Fortune 100 company helping the organization

transform. Been going slow due to size but describes that the business units are starting

to see this as "interesting"; it's gaining traction. Important to go in with "invitation", not

imposing. Nor should we be going in with solutions, best to get into the pain points and

where we can help. Helpful if we're describing patterns when visualizing the work, give

3-hour sessions. As IT, we have to become more comfortable with the diversity and

creativity, to be ok with divergence from how we might be doing it. Working towards

building communities of practice.


P a g e 43 | 65

Mark comes from strictly technology. In approaching others, he suggests 4 approaches to take:

Create Empathy. Show that this can work

Use a common language

Get leadership to buy in

Develop habits, patterns of behaviors, look for opportunities to inject new ways of doing

The challenge remains with leaders...not being open. To illustrate, one participant mentions

telling a VP in a coaching way that people were afraid of him. The response was "Good".

A former GE colleague with depth of experience on project management and great

convictions around the benefits of Agile was working with a company interacting at the

C-suite level as the only female and being told that she is not to talk at the meetings,

also being told by the execs in so many words to dummy down her communications. At

a certain point, she said you have to know when to "unhitch your wagon"... she left the

company.

A participant working in Operations describes how people in that sector have no clue

what Agile is. Her approach is to relate it to issues they are experiencing, for example

solving a staffing problem. Also agree to let people come to it on their own terms, to

relate it to internal/external pain points

Sell Agile by what it can do for them;

That said there might be limits to meeting people where they are, these times may call

upon us to take a bigger leap. Another idea is to recruit allies (high performers in the

organization, don't necessarily need to go to the top.

Don't have to go all the way, benefits to going forward with small tweaks, introducing

Kanban to start the conversation (so many applications for it). Promote the value of

visibility and transparency.

Take "small win" approaches. It works. in the Fortune 100 company referred to

previously, have seen major change, we're still figuring it out but there is major

progress. Expose the wins; adopt and transform.

Suggestion to use language of "experiment". Choose an issue, ask for a team for 6

months, you're lowering the risk.

Having skunk teams with diverse members working on projects showing wins can have a

huge impact. A more grassroots approach rallying together high performers at different

levels of the organization. Invite younger generation to be the communicators of the

success stories. Leaders will be floored and will be impressed especially if these stories

can speak the business issues, progress and results.

Pay attention to how your work environment looks, to the physical space in your work

area. Using your computer on bean bags. Coloring books (helps to make your mind

think). That's what one company did. Did not happen overnight but it's getting


P a g e 44 | 65

noticed. People will say: what's happening in IT, becomes cool, piques curiosity with

people being attracted and asking "What are you guys doing?"

There is no end to change. It's be uncomfortable. What does disruptive change mean?

Make friends with folks in IT - often there's a divide between them and other sectors.

It's a two-way street, we need to bridge this divide.

Scrum is going mainstream. It's still below the radar though. Time for it to bubble up to

the surface. Present successes to the C-Suite, speak in terms of ROI. Increased visibility

in the leadership world (Harvard Business Reviews and other business media) showing

the power of Agile. Leaders will soon start realizing that they don't want to be left

behind. It's up to us to mention books, articles and Ted-Talks that are out there. Teds

are good for the short attention span.


Plea for Valpak to do their own Ted Talk. Many attendees have heard of or have visited

Valpak. Huge value seeing it directly, makes it more real and relevant with stories on

how it can be done and is being done.

Agile not just a process. Use Agile and become Agile, lead by example. Scrumming, it's

a verb

Humorous family story: "Mom," says a young daughter "You're scrumming me again."

Agile Florida: WE should create a movement around Agile beyond Software. A lot of

dynamic

things happening in Florida. We need to spread the word, build on what's happening.

Check Daniel James Scott. Connect and partner with Universities and Colleges (good

stuff happening).

Closing Call to Action: Let's make Florida Agile... We become the Silicon Valley of

Agile. Go beyond being a beach or retiree community.

Recommended reading:

Radical Management by Steve Denning

Team of Teams

Ted Talk : Simon Sinek "The Power of Why"


P a g e 45 | 65

WHAT TO CHOOSE TO WORK ON TO BE EFFECTIVE & CLIENT COMMUNICATION

INITIATOR: UNKNOWN


Get it into customer hands ASAP - user testing

Use metrics (KPIs) to make decisions about what to build next

Make sure you have a dedicated Product Owner

Have a clarity on vision. The why. Make sure all members have visibility into the

roadmap

Have a highly visible release schedule and how sprint performance affects that schedule

Set expectations with the client up front about when/how to communicate, how/what

to measure KPIs, that the roadmap will change

Track ROI and evaluate ROI up front

Add "Black Hole" column to Kanban for when you are expecting feedback from the

client


P a g e 46 | 65

HOW DO WE TRACK A FEATURE BEFORE IT’S READY FOR CODE?

INITIATOR: ISAAC KIMBALL


Business Analysis and UI Design can be examples of activities that are part of software

development, including Agile software development. Stakeholders desire to know what is being

planned to work on, but during analysis and discovery, 'we don't know what we don't know.'

Tracking activities in pre-scoped buckets creates the risk of either constraining the outcomes of

analysis and design, or else, the buckets have to change in size, description, content or number

as analysis proceeds.

Solution 1: Don't do it. Leave these activities out of tracking systems such as JIRA until

this level of work is complete; in other words, the end of analysis is when work items are

eligible to enter into JIRA etc.

Solution 2: Begin tracking once a level of solidity is reached. Once enough about a unit

of work such as a feature is known, to roughly estimate it and meaningfully talk about it,

then it may be entered into a tracking system.

Solution 3. Track items at varying levels of scope and solidity as they move through the

backlog; closer to the top is more certain in scope and requirements. This implies that

the backlog contains a variety of sizes of tracked items.

Solution 4. Abandon tracking issues at the same level across professions; track highly

specified, reliably scoped issues in development at story level; track fuzzy, conceptual

ideas through analysis/discovery at a higher Epic or Feature level and don't worry about

syncing them.

Solution 5. Product Owner introduces a high-level concept, which can be tracked

through iterations as it is defined and distilled by team including any of BA, QA, Dev

down to the codable level of definition. However, the final item will be broken into

smaller, tighter units that need to be tracked at a finer grain than the initial concept

item could have been.


The initial attempt that spawned this topic is impracticable in its original form. All

solutions agreed on that. Most ideas and practices mentioned by participants involve

separate tracks for tracking discovery/analysis and coding efforts. Most stakeholder

needs, however, can still be met through a two-track solution.


P a g e 47 | 65

OUTCOME ORIENTED AGILITY

INITIATOR: STEVEN GRANESE


Aligning teams and metrics with outcomes:

o Clarify business outcomes - where do you want your business to go? Outcomes must

be measurable, define the value.

o Form teams based on the outcomes - teams must be cross-functional and

sustainable. Teams will deliver based on the outcomes

o Metrics - start measuring things that will change people's behavior

o Incent - incent the teams based on the metric

Repeat the above cycle - one outcome at a time!


When teams understand the business outcomes and know what/how they are being

measured, they will start to perform!

You know outcome oriented agility is working when teams start talking about the

outcomes instead of technical things.


P a g e 48 | 65

ROLE OF SOFTWARE TESTING IN AGILE: MANUAL VS AUTOMATED TESTING

INITIATOR: AAKANKSHA SEETHA


Discussion: On various manual testing practices in and before the sprint, automated

tools, where does manual testing comes in a sprint flow

Quotes: Manual testing is exploratory testing and reveals the bugs/issues that functional

testing may not and automated testing can never. Automated testing saves a lot of time

of testers by relieving them from doing repetitive testing

Revelations: Agile promotes continues integrations which creates pressure on team to

move towards automation but nothing can replace manual testing

Highlights: QA contributes towards the story creation process to refine and write user

acceptance criteria and QA tests. Story discussed in grooming session should have QA

feedback. When a story is in sprint Dev should write unit tests for the test cases defined

in story as much as possible and QA performs rest of the manual/exploratory testing

and regression and functional testing (if not automated)


Exploratory and session testing is key to manual testing. Scripting is key to automated

testing. Using tools such as Specflow helps manual tester to transition from manual

testing to automated without going deeper at programming levels


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HOW TO IMPLEMENT SCRUM IN A MARKETING DEPARTMENT

INITIATOR: DAN CROWLEY

PARTICIPANTS:

Alison Ramoy, Travis Serevich, Dottye Stewart, Chelsea Coster, David Hogg, Monica Murphy,

Farrah Miller


History of implementing scrum in marketing at ConnectWise

Started with web development team building websites

Website development ended up with 2 teams: Enablement (heavy template

development and backend processing) and Content Population (webpage copy, design,

creating pages from templates, digital optimization)

Additional implementation on non-website projects (product launches, sales campaigns,

etc.)

Not all scrum ceremonies enforced (too many concurrent projects, individuals not

dedicated to teams)

Key Concepts

Hard to implement "potentially shippable increment"

Difficult for teams to be "self-organizing" due to multiple team assignments

Last minute requests (sales enablement) makes planning difficult

How to break away from "master piece campaigns" and move to more iterative

campaigns using testing to feedback to the planning process

Use test results to allow creative teams to be more autonomous on deciding what next

to do


Potentially use different frameworks for different types of teams

Website template development (Scrum)

Website content population (Kanban)

Product Launches (Lean)

Recommended Resources

The Phoenix Project


P a g e 50 | 65

PITCHING THE AGILE ANTAGONIST

INITIATOR: BRIAN BURKE

PARTICIPANTS:

Curtis Michelson, Abbie Field, Adam, Rene Clayton, Salena Vitkovic, Mary, Steven, Nicole Travis,

Vicki Braun, Shasidhar Kalahasti, Tammy Bailie, Steven


Talked about how the problem occurs, what happens when we encounter "the

antagonist". usually someone that has been "burned before" by a failed agile project, or

have heard of bad failures at other companies, sometimes they present

passive/aggressive behavior, and they want to hear the "business case" for this change.

Reverse engineer processes, target naysayers, voluntary attrition, set up a space for self -

realization, leave the door open for exits. (but what if these naysayers are your best

talent?) Be ready to let your top talent go, otherwise they hold you hostage. maybe we

can create a longer adoption curve to ease them in, be sure to always show flexibility in

approach (not Scrum Nazis). Agile can have many different expressions and animations.

Dig into the past failures, tell culture stories, seek first to understand, model

demonstrate wins, walk the talk


Boiled down the ideas above into a 7-part checklist.

1. Listen for culture, hear the pain

2. Get an open-ended conversation with "how might we?" or "how could we improve?"

3. Define the key problems to get 'alignments' with leadership and other objectives

4. Crystallize those alignments in their own language.

5. Find a way to 'demonstrate' or model an agile success in their context.

6. Get a commitment, even if a small one, a next step

7. Leave the exit door open (fall thru case). allow them to leave gracefully

Final retrospective on the session:

Great session, well facilitated, nice to have concrete list to land on. and great to have a real

antagonist amongst us


P a g e 51 | 65

EFFECTIVE SPRINT PLANNING

INITIATOR: LOUIS TORRES

PARTICIPANTS:

George Spantidakis, Theresa Travis, Terry Winslow, David Walker, Asif Haque, Lauren

Honyotski, Bhavine Natarajan, Josh Cundiff, Tealia DeBerry, Kehlia Day, Michael Allarde, Deric

Gainer, Parker Melech, Amy Hall, Lemont Chumbliss


Have prioritization sessions prior to Planning day/Pre-Planning meeting

Team members task out PBI's within the Planning Meeting

Stories must be "Ready"

Vet stories as a team prior to Planning - especially larger projects.

Bi-weekly prioritization

Writing story which can be delivered in on sprint. Smaller user story/smaller task

Everyone has laptops to task stories NOW

Bug fixes are completed the last couple of days of the sprint


P a g e 52 | 65

WORKING WITH VENDORS

INITIATOR: JAY KASH

PARTICIPANTS:

Debbie Mesa, Jackie Baker, Janet Stearns, Tasha Kuecznski, Alexis Martin, Fred Mastropasquae,

Brian Attuso, Philip Casesa, Rick Regueira


Coordinating with vendors - Pain Points

Not the right vendor - vendor is using waterfall

How do we fit sprints into a project plan?

Aligning deliverable

When is the right time to sign statement of work so you and the vendor are ready at the

same time?

Communication lacking between business and IT


Increase trust, sharing, transparency

o Educate the vendors on how and why you work in an agile way

Agreements and SOW to include things like vendor participating in refinement, sprint

reviews and allocating a specific amount of time to be available to participate with the

team

Size the work and ask the vendor for priority as things change

Include vendor in story mapping

Have multiple, smaller SOW - one per phase

Educate you legal people (contract writers) on how to create agile contracts

Shorter contracts – iterative


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HOW DO WE NAVIGATE THE COLLISION OF CORPORATE AND AGILE VALUES?

INITIATOR: UNKNOWN


Corporate value statements are often "World Peace Statements" - they have the "woo"

factor: they feel & sound good, but have no real-world representation or impact. The

actual value is usually "extract value for profit" and collides with Agile values.

But remember, there's a lot of "woo" in Agile, as well, so it's important to communicate

the real, business benefits of Agility. For example, make it visible that 'sustainable pace'

provides actual value.


Lead by example. Be Agile.

Demonstrate the value of Agility

Invite all levels of the business to participate.


P a g e 54 | 65

AGILE FOR MAINTENANCE PROJECTS

INITIATOR: UNKNOWN


Discussed Problems and Challenges and Recommended Solutions.

Developer Enthusiasm:

The Work is Boring – Find out why it’s boring and what holds interest

Term technical debt is negative - Don’t call it that

It seems like a marathon of never ending tasks – See Innovation Sprints

For backend fixes, a lot of what the team works on can't be easily demoed

Developers can't see the shiny new thing they just built

The organization can't see it as well as a new feature build

The organization thinks of the developers as "Resources" and treats them as such,

rather than as "People" - Let teams be more empowered, and let them make some

more of their own decisions

Depends on which of the two kinds of Maintenance work you are talking about:

Here and Now Bugs Fixes – Use Kanban

Planned Maintenance - Use Scrum (teams can commit and deliver increments)

Switching resources from one project to another

It's about how well the PEOPLE work together (to be successful)

Every time you swap out people from one team to another

The new team should go through "storming, norming, forming" cycle again

Don’t call them resources!

The core system is out of our control:

Example: a vendor system needs integration, but there are dependencies, and delays

while waiting for components to be ready – embedding, have the vendor work on site

with you

Example: a vendor system has a bug that impacts a system we need to maintain, and it's

not easy to determine the source

Re-work due to delay, and slow progress (need to re-test)


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Quarterly Innovation Sprint

o Team Ownership -- they get to decide what to work on

o Development team gets to provide creative input

Kanban/Scrumban

o The developers who maintain the system use Kanban, along with a Scrum

(Scrumban)

o They plan 2-week Sprints with all the normal Scrum ceremonies including

Retrospective

o They also plan a % of capacity within the Sprint to be used for "unplanned work"

(e.g., bugs)

o The Scrum part is for the planned maintenance

o The Kanban board is for unplanned work. New bugs come in and team members pull

in whatever work they want. They limit to the capacity that was planned for that

Sprint


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WHEN TO GO FROM SCRUM TO KANBAN

INITIATOR: LAISA DE ALMEIDA

PARTICIPANTS:

Jamie Fulmino, Alex Panrell, Chase Robison, Ben Badio, Monique Hacker, Brian Klenk, Robert

McAfee, Praveen Rathore, Kevin Kaeding, Lani McDaniel


What is the difference between Kanban and Scrum-? - No Sprints, WIP Limitations,

when a team hits WIP the team swarms

WIP is critical to finding bottlenecks and continuously improving

Visualize your entire stream and map out entire business, dev and push process from

end to end

The physical team must represent the way the team works

SM Role in Kanban- still process focused, scope broadens

Kanban was a better fit since the backlog priorities were changing day to day and it

became easier to manage "critical items"

How do you know you're on track without estimating? Track SLAs for each stream and

cycle time from column to column. Leverage the data you build to make improvements

How do you handle complexity without estimating? Still do 'just in time refinement' but

do not invest a lot of time in planning things too far out as priorities can change. Keep

items small

How do you determine WIP? Build a board on resource based WIP then adjust. 2 items

per resource; add buffers where needed; weekly replenishment meetings to create backlog


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MANAGING SALES & POR TFOLIO WITH AGILE DELIVERY

INITIATOR: ANITRA PAVKA

PARTICIPANTS:

Kim Solomon, Shannon Hausey, Ken Nordquist, Stephanie Allen, Timothy Brockman, Dan

Crowley


Important to have foresight to look ahead and see what's coming up

What did sales promise vs. capacity vs. client flexibility in order to determine priority on

Kanban board?

o Weigh these 3 components and look at all holistically

o If you look at each individual thing, you won't maximize throughput i.e. i f you

increase capacity by simply hiring more people, what will end up happening is sales

will just increase the projects

o Assess team to determine what can be done to increase throughput

Not only must the delivery be agile but also the sales process. Each "aspect" owns their

own Kanban board


Tools Recommended: JIRA Portfolio, Trello, VSTS

Incorporate an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) to keep things from staying in hold status

o This also helps set expectation about when the product can be delivered and forces

client to prioritize features

o Make a delivery commitment on the MVP first but not a specific date, only x amount

of month’s post signature

o Announce to other clients once someone has signed to set expectations that their

delivery date may have been impacted

Read Mythical Man Month

Incorporate a WIP limit on certain columns i.e. In Progress, On Hold.

Consider limiting not just the quantity of items but also the size

Use Kanban board to identify and analyze key metrics for business decisions

Helpful Kanban Columns: Proposals, Decision Pending, Sold!, Ready, In Progress (broken

down into more columns at the team level), Hold (do root cause analysis here if project

comes to standstill), Done, Removed (root cause analysis)


P a g e 58 | 65

Incorporate a "Deal Desk" or "Council" during the pre-sales phase where a lead

developer must accompany sales agents and the project stakeholders to discuss project,

determine key features for the MVP and future iterations, as well as provide estimations

and build out the Epics


P a g e 59 | 65

WHAT TO DO ABOUT AOF 2017?

INITIATOR: MARK KILBY

PARTICIPANTS:

John Scalzo and others


Shared a little bit of history

o 2014 and 2015 in Tampa at Valpak

o 2016 moved to Orlando and intend to have in Orlando a second year

o Then see if we can move to another city

We are considering holding it with Agile Coach Camp (ACCUS) where AOF will be on

Friday and then ACCUS will be Saturday/Sunday - or we could have a games day or a

games track (like Give Thanks for Scrum)

Appeal of AOF?

o The honesty of the people involved

o We know we can "suck together" - we realize we are all having the same struggles

and can learn from each other.

Graduated Ticket Sales - Another idea (from Give Thanks for Scrum)

o Longer you wait, the more expensive you get

o The people who buy early are the most passionate about attending; give them the

cheapest rate

o Have rate go up every 2-3 weeks

Other ideas?

o Should we have some scheduled sessions?

o Should we continue with inside and outside sessions (seemed to be appealing for

many)

As we get bigger, what should we consider?

Should we get bigger?

o Get those engaged who normally would not in the community

o Adding more diversity to the event

o In surveys: What brought you here for the first time?

o Focus on some different themes: agile beyond software, agile for life, scrum for

hardware, agile for the rest of us

o How to help adoption where they are


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What will get "new" people here? Advertise that it’s not only for Developers, include

references to implementations by "real people" and that the conference will include

those topics.

What are other ways to appeal to non-IT Agile implementers?


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T H A N K Y O U T O O U R S P O N S O R S


P a g e 62 | 65

T H A N K Y O U F O R Y O U R S E R V I C E !

A special thank you to ALL the volunteers who contributed to making Agile Open Florida 2016 a

success! We could not have done this without you.

Event credits include:

Planning Committee Mark Kilby, Sonatype

Ryan Dorrell AgileThought

Stephanie Davis, Valpak

Glenn Oliver, Wycliffe Associates

Mark Stedman, Wycliffe Associates

Colleen Esposito, Kaplan professional Education

Diana Boucvalt, AgileThought

Photo Credits

Ed Martin, myMatrixx

Darlene Pike, Finer Focus, LLC

Jens Ostergaard, Agile House Ltd

Chris Kilby

Graphic Artist Diana Flores, RIDG


P a g e 63 | 65

A B O U T O P E N S P A C E

Open Space Technology is a method for holding meetings and conferences that creates the conditions for dynamic and engaging conversations. It is a powerful way of bringing

people together to search for solutions to complex issues around a central theme. All participants have the opportunity to express what they consider to be important and to take responsibility on topics that they are passionate about. In doing so, people discover new ways of connecting and working cooperatively. It is a simple way to run better and more productive meetings, for five to 4000+ people.

Open Space was created over 30 years ago by Harrison Owen in response to something he noticed at conferences: people seemed most energized and engaged during coffee breaks. He decided to create a meeting format that would look and feel like “one long coffee break”. Amazingly, what people discovered is that a lot gets done during Open

Space ‘coffee break’ events especially when people are discussing real issues that they care deeply about and want to take responsibility for.

Open Space quickly and powerfully ignites people to engage as they unleash their leadership, individually and collectively. No experts, no panelists, no one leading the process, no agenda and no power point presentations. People unite around a common

theme, post their own topics and in a matter of minutes, discussion groups form and dynamic conversations get underway. When that happens, new ideas and possibilities for action emerge. Everything gets documented at the event in real time.

When is Open Space Technology the best meeting format to use?

Consider if these 5 conditions are present; all are needed!

A real issue of concern – a lot at stake High level of complexity Lots of diversity: people and points of view Genuine urgency (decision time of yesterday)

Real passion and yes even potential conflict!


P a g e 64 | 65

A B O U T T H E F A C I L I T A T O R

Diana M. Boucvalt is a freelance Open Space

Facilitator and an Agile Coach with

AgileThought located in Tampa, Florida.

She is also a freelance writer and blogger who

has been published in numerous publications

including ParentGuide Magazine, Creative Class

Magazine, Tampa Bay Newspapers, and

previously a weekly columnist for AOL/Patch.

Diana is extremely passionate about opening,

holding, and closing space where critical and

urgent business, organizational, and

environmental issues can be addressed.

If you are interested in hosting an Open Space Technology event, contact Diana at:

Diana M. Boucvalt

Open Space Facilitator/Agile Coach

Cell (727) 776-6768

[email protected]

https://www.linkedin.com/in/redwritergirl

mailto:[email protected]




P a g e 65 | 65

Interested in Open Space Technology? Spend three Days in NYC with Harrison H. Owen,

founder of OST, and others that invite a Lifetime of Living. This is a place to deepen your practice of Open Space or to experience the learning of it for the first time.

Facebook Link here: https://www.facebook.com/events/127247154423320/

Official invite: http://www.osius.org/peace-high-performance-2017

Facebook Link

Register

Here

https://www.facebook.com/harrison.h.owen

https://www.facebook.com/events/127247154423320/?acontext=%7B%22source%22%3A4%2C%22action_history%22%3A%22%5B%7B%5C%22surface%5C%22%3A%5C%22group%5C%22%2C%5C%22mechanism%5C%22%3A%5C%22surface%5C%22%2C%5C%22extra_data%5C%22%3A%5B%5D%7D%5D%22%2C%22has_source%22%3Atrue%7D&source=4&action_history=%5B%7B%22surface%22%3A%22group%22%2C%22mechanism%22%3A%22surface%22%2C%22extra_data%22%3A%5B%5D%7D%5D&has_source=1

http://www.osius.org/peace-high-performance-2017

https://www.facebook.com/events/127247154423320/











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