Presented as part of the Core Agile Series sponsored by Hyperdrive and Bratton. Contact us at info@brattoninc.com
Agile 101 – What’s Agile?
This foundational workshop is designed as a “crash course” to get you started on learning the basics of Agile and Scrum. The learning outcomes include: (1) How Scrum Works: The Roles, Ceremonies, Artifacts, (2) Underlying Values and Principles that Make Agile Effective, (3) Four Lenses of Agility.
Great teams make great products, but what fuels this greatness? It's the common understanding and passion for the product but more importantly the singularity of purpose and the feedback loop and how the users are responding to the teams work.
The new world of product development is no longer about scope management and delivering the project on time and within budget but it's now more about hypothesis validation and learning from the users and their behaviors.
The dynamics of product development is changing. As more and more organizations are moving towards maturing their agile software development approach the traditional barriers of roles are being broken creating new opportunities and fostering a shift in the mindset. Instead of being tied down to scope management and delivering the project on time, Agile teams are focused and inspired by hypothesis validation and learning from the users and their behaviors.
In this case study we will go over how a portfolio of 12 SCRUM Teams adopted a more outcome approach and how they shifted their mindset from project delivery in Agile way to adopting the Experiment-Measure-Learn-Repeat loop which plays a crucial role in teams overall motivation, performance and moved from being SCRUM Teams to "Product Teams".
What if I told you we are experiencing the thrills of a lean startup and the perks of large enterprise? We have proven it can be done, and not in any old environment, but the highly regulated and governed one that is the financial industry.
Unfortunately, it took a few consecutive years of losses for a traditional asset management firm to realize they needed to change their management mindset and view of IT. Could IT do more than keep the lights on? Find out how we took collaboration with the business to a whole new level by adopting a Lean Startup mentality.
Does your organization find it hard to determine “the right thing” to build? You are not alone – studies show that even in very high performing organizations only 10-35% of initial ideas actually generate business value. Agile development should make it easier to obtain early customer feedback, but in most organizations Agile approaches are limited to software development teams with little connection to the rest of the business. In addition, Agile methods by themselves offer few guidelines on how to translate organizational goals and customer needs into the backlog’s content and relative priorities in the first place. As a result, there is a significant, but often underappreciated risk that Agile teams end up very efficiently building “the wrong thing right.”
In this session, we explore how Lean Discovery and experimentation can expand the scope of Agile’s “inspect and adapt” feedback loops to systematically identify and validate critical assumptions about our product’s value proposition. Based on the Lean Startup and Lean UX approach to product development as a series of hypotheses about customers’ behaviors and value perceptions, we discuss ways to derive testable assumptions from organizational goals to enable validated learning. Finally, we explore the implications of this approach on project planning and budgeting to support increased business agility.
Development teams can benefit immensely from breaking boundaries not just within the team but also outside the traditional sandbox of “design, code and test”. In this talk Lasse shares ways how a small team of engineers learned to better connect with their users and stakeholders through practices such as full transparency towards finances, taking lead on operational partnerships, wearing the the publicist’s hat, and reaching out to individual users any way they could. Join us to uncover ways in which you too can get to enjoy the constant stream of hugs, kisses and five-star reviews that follows!
Kanban 101 – The Kanban Method to Agile
This workshop is designed to take you through the basic concept of using Kanban as an Agile practice. You’ll learn key the Principles and Practices of Kanban as well as other related aspects of optimizing flow and managing our work-in-progress. This will be a brief and concise introduction to Kanban methods.
At Verisk Insurance Solutions, we use experimentation to find innovative solutions. Recently we experimented with mob programming to resolve multiple impediments which had prevented both flow and high performance. We did most of this, including the preparation, in just a few days; however, it took about two months of thinking, learning, and walking around in circles before we collectively understood and internalized that mob programming would bring us to where we needed to go. The purpose of this session is to help you understand and internalize what mob programming can do through an interactive exercise.
Expected Learning Outcomes: This session will show you how to set up and run a mob programming session, have a better understanding of the roles of each person in preparation and execution of the mob programming session, and why a CTO, product owner, coach, and team member would want to, AT THE VERY LEAST, experiment with mob programming.
Presented as part of the Core Agile Series sponsored by Hyperdrive and Bratton.
Now that I know how Agile works, how do I plan with Agile? This session will take you through planning concepts including: (1) 5 Levels of Planning; (2) User Stories; (3) Prioritization; (4) Story Mapping, (5) Big Room Planning. This is a lot of content so we’ll be moving fast!
How do we move from a legacy of entrenched silos, distrust and uneven communication to operationally self-sufficient teams that work together in an open, generative way? That was the question we faced when we began our DevOps journey at Advance Digital.
We had two big objectives: One, migrate all of our applications to Amazon Web Services to shut down datacenters in the required timeframe. Two, accelerate the maturation of our novice agile teams into collaborative, self-managing teams who embrace full ownership of their products, including systems and operations.
I’ll talk about our approach to ‘scaling out’ vs ‘scaling up’ our DevOps transformation, including what worked and didn’t work for building trust, alignment and transparency across the organization.