Events

Delivering value via projects can be quite different than delivering via product backlogs. Projects and products are often not clearly defined or even discussed clearly. In this session we will align on what projects and products (and product backlogs) are and how they relate. We will dig into the challenges that come from placing long term bets, why having options is better, and how to stop gambling.

Your team created working agreements but doesn’t really use them. They have perpetual issues that working agreements don’t seem to help them tackle as a team. A new person joins the team after working agreements have been established. We’ll explore these common scenarios and how to level up your working agreements. An improved atmosphere of psychological safety and co-responsibility ARE possible!

Making your organization better requires people to behave differently. Whether it's applying Test-Driven Development, sending out meeting agendas in advance, or putting the new cover sheets on their TPS reports, there's something that the people you work with could be doing to be more effective. Yet many change efforts fail because people don't seem to buy in to these new ways of working (even after attending training). This session introduces a way of thinking about what influences behavior: What keeps the current ones in place and what could enable the new ones you want. We'll explore ways to encourage people to "act their way to a new way of thinking" instead of the other way around.

We will always have more ideas than we will have people to attempt to act on them. A key part of managing this type of backlog situation is to start to engage stakeholders in the process. This session will look at what happens when one person tries to manage all of this themselves, what it means to engage stakeholders transparently. We will outline a decent flow of work from stakeholders to the product backlog and what this means for priorities. Finally we will look at stakeholder backlog management and how that might lead to" "no problem" or at least less of one!

Are you sometimes tired from the effort needed to become more Agile? Do you or your team avoid improvements that require more than one sprint to make? Continuous improvement depends upon a willingness to change plus energy, which changes frequently for us humans! A lack of energy or willingness to change can show up as resistance and be difficult to work with. What if improving could feel easier? In this session, Allison Pollard shares a visual technique to see where the energy for a change is and help figure out what to do next. Learn how to work with your change style rather than against it, and discover how to generate more willingness and energy for change within your team.

Working together effectively relies on people being able to say both "yes" and "no." But when was the last time you said "no" to your boss? And when was the last time someone gave you a "counterfeit yes" or the "corporate nod" and didn't follow through with what they agreed to? This session will explore how power and positional authority affect people's ability to say no. We will also introduce three techniques to help you know that when someone says "yes," they mean it.

One of the largest problems in organizations, is a lack of alignment and prioritization around work. There are many challenges around solving this problem. Factors that impact the ability to align and prioritize include, projects, products, the size of pieces of work people see as valuable, budgeting processes, alignment within the organization on direction – and many more. In this session, we will walk through an approach to facilitating a multi-stakeholder Product Prioritization Workshop. This type of session can be used to start to find alignment across a department, division and can be scaled to run for an entire organization. We will work through some key elements, explore the challenges, and discuss potential outcomes.

Many organizations want efficiency and seek to reduce waste. But as Allen Ward pointed out, "What is the most fundamental waste in conventional companies? Hand-offs." In their pursuit of efficiency, most organizations actually increase the number of handoffs, making things worse. This happens when people misunderstand the nature and cost of handoffs. In this session, we will discuss what a handoff is and how it creates waste. You'll learn to spot handoffs in your organization and explore what you can do to reduce them.

Does the thought of speaking in public make your palms sweat? Is there a voice in your head that saying you’re not “expert-enough” to present at a meetup or conference? In this session we'll help you discover that you're more ready to start public speaking than you might think. Leaders can engage with people to listen and explore—even as the featured presenter—to help them become what they can be. If you're thinking about how to become a speaker in the future, now's a good time to start! Allison will share her experience as an introvert and lead activities to get you thinking about what you could share with the community.