Agile2014

Becoming Agile is never easy and never ending. Each of us who works with teams, and organizations spends a lot of time focusing on how to help others become more Agile. Just as critical though, is the need reflect on how WE can improve our capacity for Agile Servant Leadership because in different ways, each of us is our own greatest champion and worst enemy when it comes to Agile adoption.



This workshop is for intermediate to advanced Agile practitioners who are interested in deepening their understanding of how to do more of the things that already enable them as Agile leaders, and would like to explore the things that are holding them back.



This session will introduce the Five Measures and the Personal Agility Canvas, a tool modeled on the Business Model Canvas that Agile Practitioners can use to:

- Gain a better understanding of the facets impacting the potential for Agility in a work environment

- Set goals for improving individual capacity to become a better Agile Leader

- Identify key areas of focus for improvement

- Establish a plan to achieve the goals that have been set



Participants in this session will be guided through how to use these tool to assess and enhance their own personal agility. We will also spend time on how to facilitate the use of these tools with team members and organizations so that the participants are prepare to introduce this on site once they have returned to work.

Healthy conflict helps build stronger teams. This should come of little surprise. Yet, leaders are all too familiar with the struggle to get members of your team to take ownership of resolving their conflict. I certainly faced this challenge until I started leveraging people’s curiosity. Obviously, each conflict situation can be dramatically different. However, underneath most conflict there is often a misalignment between perceptions and intentions. Join me as we step together through a real world example of priming a person for conflict resolution. Expect deep personal reflection as we explore how immediate reactions can influence perceptions and as leaders how we can encourage others to want to resolve their own conflict. All while, learning techniques that leaders can implement to avoid accidentally or intentionally taking ownership for the conflict.

You are leading an agile software development team, stories are being completed, business value is being delivered, and all is well. Out of the blue, you get an email from your manager asking for the 3 top performers on your team. You comply with management’s request only to find out that your top 3 performers end up receiving cash merit bonuses at the next all-company meeting in front of all their peers. Next thing you know, team motivation starts to decline, defects become more common, and the team just doesn’t seem as polished as it used to be. As the team lead, you find yourself having to answer management’s questions about what has gone wrong within a team that used to be a top performer. Does any of this sound familiar?



“Incentive Us Properly Please” is a highly interactive simulation that is intended to allow agile team leaders, management, and stakeholders to experience the challenge of creating a proper incentive system to sustain effective and high quality agile software development. During the simulation, participants work in small groups to decide how to allocate a limited number of incentive points between different intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, as the simulation progresses, participants will learn the impacts of their decisions, and gain insight into how to mix different types of incentives to foster enduring motivation. This fully experiential simulation will provide opportunities for participants to brainstorm, share and experiment with their own ideas for rewards and incentives suitable for teams completing knowledge work.



Participants will leave having gained an understanding of the types of incentives that are most beneficial to self-managing agile development teams and perhaps pick up a few innovative and new ideas for incentives that result from collaboration as the game is played.

George Bernard Shaw once famously quipped that the biggest mistake in communication was the illusion that it happened. Likewise when influencing others to adopt a change, the largest challenge faced is that most of our efforts to change other's behaviors don't realize the changes we hope. Failing this, many organizations become directive and attempt to implement a change they way they may install a large piece of enterprise software. Organizations use consultants and lay out change strategies, which frequently degrade into directives, rules, and mandates that either fall by the wayside or are harshly enforced. This session is an exploration of a broader array of influence and change strategies beyond the traditional top down models of influence by dictate.



Based on the breakthrough research of numerous change experts, we’ll walk you through six dimensions of change that can help create the environment through which people are influenced to adopt the changes you are seeking. Using examples from the field, we will walk you through an exercise identifying influences, understanding their impact and developing new strategies. We will also help you identify which are your preferences and give you a way to better engage with others when talking about change so as to build the broadest and most inclusive approach for influencing positive change.