Lean and Agile ME Summit 2016

The research is clear: happy workers are more productive workers. And it’s best when managers enjoy their jobs as well. Managing for Happiness is about concrete management advice for all workers. Practical things that people can do next Monday morning in order to change the organization’s culture, and make it a happier place to work. This is not only relevant for managers, but for everyone who is concerned about the organization. We create a happier environment by managing ourselves, and lead by example, in an environment focused on experiments and learning. How can we inspire workers with a goal? (Answer: start your own work exposition) How can we have a better team culture? (Answer: share your personal maps) How can we address core values? (Answer: start sharing your value stories) All creative workers are expected to be “servant leaders” and “systems thinkers”. In this session, you will learn how you can do that concretely, with a number of inspiring stories and examples. As Gandhi said, “Be the change you wish to see.” A happier organization starts with people managing themselves. The book Managing for Happiness will be released worldwide by John Wiley & Sons in June 2016 in full colors.

90% of Agile teams are using Scrum. With over ½ a million people trained and certified. Scrum has become, for many the de-facto standard in Agile team organization. But what is next for Scrum? In this talk we discuss the success and future of Scrum and what needs to happen to Scrum to continue its relevance. We describe how skills, scaling and DevOps need to be weaved into Scrum to not only ensure its relevance for the next 21 years, but also help the profession of software development improve.

Agile methods have become a de-facto standard in software development. Software is everywhere today - so Agile has been a big step for the industry, though not yet achieved by all. However, its still not enough. The business landscape has changed dramatically over the past 10-15 years. Startups have grown into dominant businesses. And the digital economy is flooding any business corner across the globe. All of this is fostering exponential growth of new ideas, leading very quickly to exponential change. While the future appears even faster, predicting it has become harder. And the only thing we know: what we need for this are more adaptive businesses, end-to-end Business Agility. In this talk we will explore the adaptive organization for the 21st century.

Teams are trying their best to succeed. They plan tirelessly, work hard and try to add beautiful new features continuously. But still, most products cannot make their customers happy. What’s missing? How can teams run towards a common goal? Why can’t teams add value for every feature they build? How can teams innovate and still meet their deadlines? How can development teams and users talk same language? Özmen will talk about what makes a product team focused on delivering benefits. Let's see what we can learn from NASA, a TV show and Uber to succeed.

While there are multiple Scrum Scaling Frameworks, Large Scale Scrum is the leading framework for Scrum Scaling that truly drives success. More than just a prescription, we'll discuss the thinking and organizational tools as well as some of the practices that make LeSS truly unique.

Keep your team Agile; implement the right business processes to plan, track and report any business tasks with JIRA & Atlassian suite of products. Live examples in JIRA with real tools and boards to enhance productivity, visibility and collaboration in both IT and Business Teams.

The workshop “How To Be AGILE In Non-AGILE Environment” is a complete package designed to demonstrate the case for AGILITY in an interactive way. First part of the workshop will address the philosophy and foundations of AGILITY, and connecting it to our work environment through practical cases. The aim of this part is to deliver the right mindset – The Agile Mindset – every Agile Practitioner should have to practice Agility. In the second part of the workshop, we will execute SCRUM sprint to see AGILITY in action. More importantly, second part would also help shatter a common myth that "AGILE Framework is for building software". I have clear goals for the workshop; 1) To introduce you to AGILITY & deliver the right AGILE Mindset 2) To fuel your curiosity & enthusiasm to learn more about AGILITY and put it into practice. Note: Please find the pre-reading material link for scrum guide with request to go through the link before the session: http://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html.

Come and discover the philosopher’s stone of every constant improvement The philosopher’s stone lies in turning any cheap metals into precious metals, or into silver. Does a team (be it an Agile team or not) essentially needs recognition to become well-performing? What are the challenges of recognition? What is the impact of recognition on the performance of men and women, teams, and companies? What is the positive influence of this strong improvement lever on Agile practices? How could a company make its first step towards becoming, or not, an Agile company through a recognition strategy? According to thorough studies, recognition is a vital lever for the improvement of any company’s performance. In fact, recognition is in the heart of many Agile practices. But what if recognition weren’t the essential factor? A recognition strategy is a key factor for an Agile corporate transformation.

How to create the bond between client and vendor that will bring the success in the uncertain world of software development? Communication between client and supplier is a key to successful vendor management. Getting things done in the respect with legal, cultural, resource and location constraints has proven to be challenging. From the perspective of the client, let’s see how to use Agile and create definition of done, obtain team buy-in and how to empower the supplier team. On the other side, from the supplier point of view, let’s see what to give to provide to the client and how to communicate with during the development.

Lean Thinking both supports and enhances agile development practices. Where Agile focuses on enabling organizations to produce software that hits rapidly moving business targets, Lean focuses on creating faster and more efficient organizations that creates more business value, by setting up a framework for both personal and organizational change. Sometimes Agile is perceived as an "IT-thing" and has a hard time getting management support, in those cases it is often more easy to get support for Lean initiatives and Lean Software Development might just be the way to start an agile transformation. This talk will introduce the backbone of Lean Thinking as well as Lean Software Development and will show you how you can start transforming your organization as well as become more productive yourself. It will be an interactive talk including tools and exercises which will help you identify areas for improvement at your own office.

As developers, we often complain about the efficiency problems we face while working. We work hard but produce so little that our whole development life turns into a hamster wheel at some point. One of the biggest reason of such a common problem is working in waste. Waste is in everywhere, in our source code, in the office, in our processes and even in management. In this session, I will talk about the wastes and how we can remove to make our development life leaner.

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) has a special event that is held for every Program Increment (5 sprints-ish). This is a large scale, collaborative event including everyone from the Agile Release Train (50 people plus). This workshop will be a highly interactive event where all participants will be involved in one of many teams collaborating together to plan a single Program Increment for a single product. The schedule will roughly contain: Overview of SAFe Program Increment Planning (Fictional) Business Context Product / Solution Vision Architecture Vision And Development Practices Planning Session 1 Draft Plan Review Planning Session 2 Final Plan Review Risk ROAMing Confidence Vote Retrospective This will be a fast-paced, high octane session with a lot of fun!

Self-organizing teams is one of fundamental principles of the Agile Manifesto and a critical success factor on Agile projects. But what makes an agile team self-organizing? Based on an industry-based doctoral research involving nearly 60 Agile practitioners from 23 software organizations, this talk presents the informal, implicit, transient, and spontaneous roles —Mentor, Coordinator, Translator, Champion, Promoter, and Terminator— that provide initial guidance and encourage continued adherence to Agile methods; effectively manage customer expectations and coordinate customer collaboration; secure and sustain senior management support; and identify and remove team members threatening the self-organizing ability of the team. Understanding these roles will help Agile teams and their managers better execute their roles and harness their self-organizing potential.

Agile is a great word, it's short, suggests an athletic approach to something. It fills our minds with images of gleaming, slick perfect machines, almost "German" in its implementation. So its interesting that our experience is something far more complex and messy then this word will have you believe. Being Agile takes commitment and hard work, work with processes and people, ensuring that there is focus on the goals throughout the organisation while it scales, this also means working with the clients to embrace this mentality. You could say we aren't Agile, rather we are constantly increasing our Agility. This changes the idea from a perfect athlete in the Olympics, to an individual working, sweating and persevering. It is hard, it is complicated! But, by sharing our stories we will tell you why it’s also fun and worth it.

Given the presumption that there is a gap between Academia and Practice in the context of Lean and Agile, this session aims to explore, discuss and debate the various views among participants on the subject matter. A panel of professionals and well established academics who have been working closely with the industry over many years will be looking for answers to the questions that they shall raise, whereby participants will be expected to voice their views, reflections and critique. On the other hand, participants will be given the opportunity to fire their burning questions at the panel and fellow participants, in search for answers. The sought outcome is to identify, compare and contrast the perceived gap from the eyes of academics and practitioners in an attempt to wrap up the session with some recommendations on how to narrow this gap.

Big Data is all the hype in town yet the real value still remain with delivering analytics that create business impact. Agile Analytics sets out to unleash the true promise usually lost in lengthy, elephantine projects and years of data management purists' pursuits of perfection. That is exactly what separates these big data technologies: They promise greater agility. But is a supportive technology enough or even mandatory to become more agile? We will go through the value chain of delivering high impact analytics using agile practices and devise a jumpstarter kit for you to adopt and adapt.

Kanban is a famous lean technique for managing software projects. Actually, it's being used to manage so many types of projects even outside the software domain because of its simplicity and effectiveness. In Software, it's becoming a very famous counterpart to Scrum. Many teams starts with Kanban right away, and keep some practices from Scrum. Others, on the other side, start from Scrum, and move slowly to Kanban. In this dynamic workshop, we will learn and practice Kanban. We will use the getKanban opensource toolkit v2.0, which is a simulation game for managing a project from start to end using a real Kanban board and related charts and metrics. It will be fun, and full of learning at the same time.