Agile2012

If you do not manage culture, it manages you. Much of the Agile adoption failure is a result of not understanding organizational culture. Learn how to use the Schneider culture model to assess your organization’s culture and to work effectively with it. This survival guide will provide you with the essential mental models and tools you need to navigate safely through the treacherous jungle of Agile adoption and transformation. You will apply your newly acquired knowledge to build a plan for working effectively with your own organization.
http://submit2012.agilealliance.org/files/session_pdfs/2012-08 Agile 2012 - An Agile Adoption and Transformation Survival Guide.pdf

When an organization makes a real effort to be Agile, they set in motion a series of changes that ripple throughout the entire organization. The side-effects are often surprising, and dealing with them can be challenging. In this session, Jutta Eckstein, Diana Larsen, and James Shore will present their Agile Change and Transformation (ACT) planning model. This model gives change agents a way to plan and understand their Agile change efforts. It provides a way to understand the context of a transformation, choose which changes to focus on, and decide whether to take a deterministic or adaptive approach. The ACT planning model is new and experimental. It's funded in part by the Agile Alliance's "Supporting Agile Adoption" program. In this workshop, participants will have the opportunity to try the model and help develop it further.

To survive, businesses must balance new product/service development effectiveness and operations efficiency. Companies fail every day from lacking balance between opposing needs of “right now” profit and investing in innovation to thrive long-term. Sometimes they careen chaotically between the two needs. Understanding business dynamics and the prevailing bias toward “stability” will help both agile adoption and achieving appropriate levels of business agility. In fact, agile approaches hold the key to a successful balance, meaning you as an agile practitioner can help your company succeed!
http://submit2012.agilealliance.org/files/session_pdfs/Business Agility and Innofficiency - Agile 2012 final.pdf

How to react as stones fall on our Agile heads from lofty towers? Transcendence of Agile limitations in the quest for Enterprise Agility calls for a planned siege, not a mob. Make a blueprint in this session! Become masters of siege engines delivering customer value, not Barbarians at the Gate. The PMO and keepers of the corporate yearly planning cycle still cling to traditions of waste. The true need to optimize the whole is fog bound by mystic thinking. In revered enterprise Keeps, day is night. It is possible to know all the requirements at the start. Omniscient customers 'do know' what they want a year from now. Interim feedback is a waste of time and only generates scope creep. Interim milestones measure progress well enough. Demanding that work be done, delivers desired results. Complex program management software can squeeze 150% out of a person! Keepers of the enterprise ken know Agile is wrong. The status quo is correct. Affronts are hurled down on Agile teams. Self-organizing teams can never improve processes beyond the team. It is not feasible to deliver value to the customer every sprint. Agile teams can not plan beyond the current sprint. Scrum of Scrums is a failed theory to coordinate multiple teams. It just can’t scale. Agile sees no need for automated testing or up front unit testing. We need documentation!

The Lean Pyramid presents a model to help companies start their agile adoption strategy effectively. Reliably delivering valuable working software frequently is much more than just creating, estimating and prioritizing a backlog and developing it iteratively. In order to succeed with agile you have to understand the needed equilibrium of forces among strategy, management and engineering efforts. Through a deep explanation of the fundamental Lean principles, you will learn how they translate to agile software development in order to create a strong and successful culture in your company.

One of the major obstacles in big change initiatives is manager resistance. Agile transformations do not make an exception. If you don't get middle managers on your side when introducing a change, your changes of success are thin. What might be the reasons for resisting agile? What can be done to get managers to support and drive new, agile ways of working and become leaders for an agile organization? How can my life become better if I am a manager? This talk will give you thoughts from a manager who went through this path.
http://submit2012.agilealliance.org/files/session_pdfs/What to do with Managers Agile2012 final.pdf

Introducing agile into an organization is more than just running people through a few days of training and hoping for the best. Training is part of the equation but only addresses one part of the adoption and transformation cycle. The problem with a training-only approach is that we can learn new ways of working, but if the structure and culture of the organization don't support those new ways of working, the training won't stick. The trick is to create an organizational structure and culture that is congruent with training in agile practices. We need a structure and culture where Agile practices can flourish and grow and produce the business outcomes we all hope for. This talk will start by exploring the main differences between agile adoption and agile transformation and how to distinguish between structural transformation and cultural transformation. Next we'll explore criteria for how to assess your organization and create an adoption and transformation roadmap to help you pragmatically and safely introduce agile methods to your enterprise. Finally we'll explore three primary dimensions of adoption and transformation: competency, frequency, and scale that will assist in guiding your adoption and transformation roadmap and change management strategy. After establishing the theoretical underpinning of a successful adoption and transformation strategy, we'll consider several case studies where these ideas have been applied and what has worked, and more importantly, what hasn't. The case studies will consider 3-5 companies of varying sizes where these ideas have been applied in the past 18 months.

Imagine a reunion in the pub between you, an agile coach, and some Ericsson managers. You met some years before and the seed of an idea was planted. Over a long evening you discussed what the world would look like after completing a large-scale agile transformation. Three years later, you catch up, and learn that the transformation has been a roaring success. Through the evening you share the ups and downs, the lessons learned, and the critical success factors that made the success. Three years ago Ericsson started on a long journey to agility - over 1000 people adopting an agile mindset after over 30 years of entrenched control gate processes. Back then, there was fear and uncertainty, a will to control and preserve what made the organization successful. Today there is a completely different culture. A culture that allows the organization to sustain and keep on evolving, that allows them to achieve significant results long after you, as the coach, left. Obviously, you want to learn what worked so well? Was it your coaching ability (of course!)? Was it the uniqueness of the organization (well, they are special, but unique? No!)? What made this such a persistent and sustainably successful transformation? This is an exciting tale. In just three short years, Ericsson has made monumental changes, including: - Significantly improved predictability, in particular in relation to customers and the business department. The product pipeline is solid and reliable, and managed through business value, not release content. - Significantly improved quality, allowing Ericsson to exceed expectations even of the most demanding customers, releasing newly developed functionality ahead of schedule and skipping previously critical integration and verification gates in the process. Though many organizations achieve this while being coached, Ericsson has built up an internal capability able to continually learn and improve. Reflecting on what went well, we have identified five keys to sustainable change. The first two, People and Practices, are well-understood. The last three, Perseverance, Protection and Patience, are more cultural characteristics. You will learn how these were introduced and encouraged, and how Ericsson was able to bring about widespread adoption of such deep skills in a very short time. If you are interested in knowing how an organization with a couple of thousand employees was able to learn how to continuously improve, and make that transformation to agility a successful long lasting journey, you can't miss this fly-on-the-wall view of the pub reunion. Join us, Andrea Tomasini, the executive agile coach, and Hendrik Esser, VP Portfolio Management, share their story in a relaxed atmosphere.
http://submit2012.agilealliance.org/files/session_pdfs/Ericsson_Success_Story_agile2012.pdf

Are you struggling to gain the value you expected from your transition to Agile practices? Did your move to Agile seem to create as many problems as it solved? If so, this is the session for you. Sometimes organizations get themselves into trouble when they try to "run before they can walk". They want to scale Agile across 20 teams but, at the same, time, can’t even hold an effective planning meeting. The discussion and exercises in this session will suggest an “order of operations” in addressing these impediments. The goal of this session is to help participants move from thinking “We have a million problems” to “We have a million problems but Problem X and Y are where we should focus first and here is how we will do that.”
http://submit2012.agilealliance.org/files/session_pdfs/The Dirty Dozen - Session Pictures Agile 2012.pdf

Despite over a decade of formal attempts at agile transformation, there are very few real examples of large scale transformation success, and many examples of reversion and failures to scale. The most common pattern we see is that teams transform while everything else remains the same. This leads to increased organizational incongruence, disarray, and ultimately failure. What is needed is a notion of organizational agility that does for the broader organization what software agility does for software delivery teams. In this session we help participants make the case for such a notion, describe the paradigm shift which such a notion calls for, and provide participants with initial steps to influencing organizational agility in their workplace.
http://submit2012.agilealliance.org/files/session_pdfs/agile2012 -- Organizational Agility FINAL.pptx.pdf

Don't let "we are agile" become "we were agile." Starting a transition to agile is one thing. Making the transition a lasting transformation is something else entirely. Attend this session to gain useful insights into: - Three important aspects of Agile adoption: corporate culture, the managers’ role, and agile metrics - Keys to sustainability - Pitfalls to avoid - Warning signs of backsliding You will leave this session with specific actions you can take to help ensure that your dream of Agility does not become a nightmare of backsliding.
http://submit2012.agilealliance.org/files/session_pdfs/Agile Sustainability - Agile 2012 - DiFabio-Neumann.pdf

“How do I make my managers more Agile?” “How can I convince developers to educate themselves?” “How can I make customers more cooperative?” “How do I start a European network of Agile and Lean practitioners?” When transforming organizations and other social systems people usually encounter obstacles. And these obstacles very often involve changing other people’s behaviors. Of course, we cannot really _make_ people behave in a different way. We also cannot really make people laugh, and we cannot really make people happy. But… we can certainly try! This session is about *Change Management 3.0*. It is a new change management “super model” which views organizations as complex adaptive systems and social networks. The Change Management 3.0 supermodel wraps various existing models (*PDCA*, *ADKAR*, *Adoption Curve* and *The 5 I's*). It lists a few dozen hard questions that can help people in their attempts to change the behaviors of other people in an organization and beyond. No matter whether you are a manager, Scrum Master, Product Owner, software developer or writer, anyone will find it useful to know how to change the world around them. For example, some of the questions that will be considered are... • What Are the Crucial Steps? • How Do You Get Feedback? • How Do You Make It Desirable? • What Makes It Sustainable? • Who Will Be the Innovators? • How Will You Deal With Skeptics? • What Is the Group Identity? • Can You Incentivize Good Behavior? • Etc...
http://submit2012.agilealliance.org/files/session_pdfs/How to Change the World v2.0 (USA).pdf