Agile2012

Practice collaborative techniques in a project simulation. Walk away from this workshop with tools and techniques you can introduce to your project teams immediately to encourage more collaboration and cross team communication. See the benefits of increased team interaction and pairing through this experiential workshop developed and first used at Nokia Location & Commerce.
http://submit2012.agilealliance.org/files/session_pdfs/Break Down the Silos - Collaboration Techniques for Teams.pdf

To accomplish anything you need the help of others and others need your help. Successful teams have members that are continually improving how they interact and communicate with each other. Collaboration, creativity, and results grow out of an environment that is positive and affirming. In this highly interactive and fun session, Kupe, an improvisational actor, focuses on key improvisation lessons that will help you be a more attentive and flexible team member. You will walk away with lessons to help you stay in the present, temporarily suspend judgment, keep conversations moving forward and listen generously. These skills are needed to build positive, results oriented teams.
http://submit2012.agilealliance.org/files/session_pdfs/Improving Communication Through Improvisation Half Day Workshop - Student Version V1.pdf

Who is responsible for QA on an Agile team? The answer is “Everybody”. And yet this is rarely the case. Often the Testers write their test cases and automation in isolation and execute them after development is finished. Developers write their code without talking to the testers except to understand how to reproduce the latest discovered defect. Product Owners elaborate requirements in isolation and then hand them off to the team only to check back at the end of the sprint. Business Analysts spend their time in meetings away from the team working on documents that have questionable usefulness. Join Cheezy as he paints a different picture. This picture includes techniques and practices that foster collaboration between all team members that have the side effects of dramatically improving quality and achieving better flow resulting in a more streamlined development effort. This new picture is a picture of teamwork and quality assurance.

This session teaches several aspects of organizational and team dynamics in a fun, interactive environment. Three different games/exercises are played. The first game, Communication Origami, teaches the importance of collaborative communication and how different organizational models affect communication effectiveness. The second exercise, the Bridge, demonstrates facets of team organization and leadership including self-organizing teams. The final session, Close Encounters with the Other Kind, teaches how to increase communication effectiveness between individuals and the team as a whole.

We've all sat through painful requirements, planning, and brainstorming sessions that provide little useful output and where the outcome was already decided by the loudest few before the meeting even started. Learn how silence can increase collaboration and help your agile project be more productive. Silent brainstorming allows everyone to have a voice – the loud people can’t dominate the conversation, the quiet people are provided with a way to contribute, and cognitive fixation is reduced. We’ll discuss the science of brainstorming and then practice several silent brainstorming techniques in order to generate a user story map, do agile chartering, brainstorm a list of user stories, prioritize your user stories, and generate ideas for your retrospective.
http://submit2012.agilealliance.org/files/session_pdfs/TheSilenceOfAgile.pdf

Agile Trends and Future Directions - Come join the leading industry analysts as they discuss the latest trends and emerging best practices around Agile software development. Learn how the most successful software organizations are utilizing Agile to drive business performance. Find out how the latest innovations in Agile practices continue to mature as development organizations deploy Agile further across the enterprise.

• Tom Grant, Forrester
• Thomas Murphy, Gartner
• Melinda Ballou, IDC
• Christopher Rommel, VDC

 

How does your team make decisions? Do they reflect your agile team values & engender mutual trust? Do decisions result in true commitment from the right stakeholders? Are they defensible & sustainable? Agile teams make countless product and process decisions. Ex. include: features to deliver, platforms, tools, backlog management, metrics, delivery cadence, definition of done. Explore how participatory decision-making practices cut to the heart of your team values. Learn practical techniques for deciding how to decide. Leave with a toolkit to align decision-making with your team values.
http://submit2012.agilealliance.org/files/session_pdfs/ThatSettlesIt_Gottesdiener(Agile2012)-WebsitePartialDeck-v2.pptx.pdf

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before… An organization aligns its operation around business products with cross-functional teams focused exclusively on each one. The business likes the focus, but soon people start to complain. Functional experts feel isolated and aren’t able to tap into their technical peers now isolated in other teams. Common practices become difficult. Functional managers feel left out now that their people are permanently assigned to dedicated cross-functional teams. Overall, the organization gains benefit from the re-alignment, but people can’t help but feel they are neglecting their institutional knowledge and have reduced their technical capacity to solve problems. You might think we’re talking about an Agile development team, but actually we’re talking about Chrysler in the 1990′s when they re-organized their engineering around auto lines. (Wenger et al, Cultivating Communities of Practice 1) This session will explore the concept of communities of practice and how they are a vital component for agile organizations. From providing tactical support in issue resolution, to being stewards of knowledge across vast enterprises, and even helping create support for the larger organizational change, communities of practice are a vital component in improving organizational agility. We will walk through the history of communities of practice, from their emergence in fields as disparate as auto manufacturing, consulting, and oil exploration, and show how these concepts apply to agile organizations. Participants will hear several cases about how communities have been used at our actual clients to help support the organizational change, as well as get some tactical steps they can use to implement their own communities of practice at work.
http://submit2012.agilealliance.org/files/session_pdfs/Agile2012_COP.pptx (Read-Only).pdf

In traditional team cultures, feedback has been the sole responsibility of the manager. In Agile teams it’s more important for feedback to be peer-to-peer because the manager doesn’t know the minute-by-minute details of what’s going on within the team. What if managers were not solely responsible for providing guidance for an individuals growth, but rather the team itself? Building feedback into the culture creates a team with a stronger sense of responsibility for one another. They will self-correct interpersonal issues and work-quality issues better and faster than a traditional team.
http://submit2012.agilealliance.org/files/session_pdfs/BuildingaTeamThroughFeedback.pdf

Do your agile team members make optimum use of each other’s skills and capabilities? Do they share their personal development needs? Do they trust each other? If not, consider the “contracting two step” - a metaphor for simple yet powerful ways to identify and monitor mutual working agreements. Like a dance, contracting partners take mutual responsibility to reach shared goals. While not legally binding, the contract represents public, explicit commitments essential for successful collaborations. You will learn 3 techniques to implement the Contracting Two Step on your agile team.
http://submit2012.agilealliance.org/files/session_pdfs/agile 2012-Contracting 2 Step.pdf

It is not enough to tell the members of your team to be more collaborative. Telling them to "try harder" is not a recipe for success. Instead, improved results come from helping your team see the world in a different light, giving them new tools to use, and the opportunity to practice and fail before expecting mastery. In our organization, and in many others that we have coached, there are two frameworks that have had the greatest impact. The first is the Competing Values Framework. The second is the framework taught by Patrick Lencioni in the "Five Dysfunctions of a Team". In this session we will experience these tools, and explore how we have used them in the past, and how you might use them in the future.

In the workplace cooperation is a given. What sets agile apart is *collaboration*. Where cooperation involves everyone doing their part, a collaborative solution is more than the sum of those parts. Where cooperation helps us choose among ideas, collaboration lets us create new ones. In this workshop, you'll learn specific ways to enhance your teams' ability to fully collaborate, discover solutions only collaboration can create, and experience real collaboration first-hand.

A quick way to wreck your organizational culture is to hire someone with a great resume and no kindergarten skills. How can teams grow without sacrificing their communication, trust, and values? Menlo Innovations uses a peer-driven hiring process called Extreme Interviewing to help our team answer the question "Does this candidate belong on our team?" In this workshop, we will show you how we interview dozens of candidates in a single evening by observing them as they work together instead of asking them questions. And you will see why candidates brought on as a result are a better fit for the culture of our team, which is a joyful thing indeed.
http://submit2012.agilealliance.org/files/session_pdfs/extreme_interviewing_slides.pdf

Ever wonder why people behave the way they do, and it doesn't make any sense? Systems Thinking helps explain the unusual behaviour that arises in organisations, teams and individuals. Learning to see what might be driving people's behaviour helps you improve your team and organisation's ability to collaborate more effectively. Fear not as this won't be lecture. It's hard to fully develop an appreciation of Systems Thinking (and often harder to explain it), so why not experience for yourself through a series of engaging activities. Each activity will explore a key concept of Systems Thinking and leave this workshop looking at the world from a different perspective.