Join us as we recap celebrations, frustrations, successes and failures during an 18 month span of our journey that used empiricism to continuously inspect and adapt our transformation.
By the end of the session, you might walk away with a deeper awareness of the unique challenges of Agile @ Scale, along with ideas for some scaling experiments you might try in your own organization.
AGILEWARS - EPISODE MMXV: A NEW HOPE
It is a period of civil war. Rebel Agilists have exposed the fallacy of using clunky PPM tools to manage projects, but must now show Executives and Finance how to deliver on the promises of Agile to the bottom line for organizations to find true peace.
"AgileWars" can break out in any organization due to a divergence of interests often sparked by individual motivators that are disincentives to teamwork. We'll visit a planet "buffet" across the galaxy with discussion of the 5 special ingredients that must be found on your trip to find success. Based on real-world experience, even when the vision is clear for connecting strategy to execution, challenges develop from the resistance to making the work visible. The difference between these two sides serves as the launching pad for diving into pragmatic strategies for success. The "book ends" of the message emphasize a core foundation required in a common Agile vocabulary across ALL roles in the organization and extending to a REAL "Change Culture" that must drive efforts to be successful.
Sounds great, BUT...the path can turn towards the dark side unless we engage the Business stakeholders in our Agile expedition. And just when you thought that Millennium Agile Tooling was ready to be ditched in a junkyard, we may just find the opportunity to empower teams to be a key enabler for real victory - with our only hope being that we find a True JEDI/AGILE MINDSET to wrap around it!
By borrowing lessons from our favorite science fiction movies, we will show how to use the 5 key ingredients to scale Agile to the enterprise level and bring a new hope to our Agile galaxy. If you're looking for a conversation, come actively participate to help bridge our heroes from the past back to the future!
5 key ingredients
What is so special about Agile at Adobe?
You will learn about Adobe’s experience with Agile Leadership and how that led to an experiment with integrating "Intent-Based Leadership" at Adobe and how Adobe was able to advance their mindset and culture to new levels.
Intent-Based Leadership is centered on the set of principles inspired by David Marquet, author of best selling book, Turn the Ship Around where David describes how he turned the USS Santa Fe from the worst performing to best performing ship in the US Navy.
This session will begin with Andy Worshek, former Chief on the USS Santa Fe, sharing with you first-hand the lessons learned aboard the ship, the history of Intent-Based Leadership, and how David Marquet introduced these principles to the Santa Fe resulting in change from a "Command and Control" model to a "Leader-Leader" model with his leadership team and his crew. Workshek, will also share the wide-spread affect this had on the ship's culture and affect on the US Navy.
You'll also learn how Adobe worked with Turn the Ship Around, to adopt Intent-Based Leadership as part of their Agile leadership practice from Jeff Leap, Agile Coach at Adobe. Leap will describe Adobe's partnership to develop new training material and implementation programs for Intent-Based Leadership needed to help Adobe's adoption.
Implementing a new tool like Rally, Jira, etc.? Creating a new continuous delivery model? Rewriting an application in a new language? Adopting Scrum practices? Changing mindsets? Transforming to being Agile?
These are all changes we see every day in organizations from small to large that range from easy to complex. Even if you’re not working on the big bang transformation to being Agile, change is constantly around us. Getting people on board to think and perform differently is not an easy effort. Bring your current or past change experiences as we’ll go through setting up a change management effort that you can take with you to get started on your next change implementation.
An interactive session using story mapping techniques with Agile principles to create a product and shared understanding in 60 minutes or less. We will start with an interactive activity lasting approximately 45 minutes. After the debrief, we will discuss how we practice story mapping at Capital One and our lessons learned. Let’s get started!
The CIO invited me into his office and closed the door. Before he took me for a tour of his operation, he had a few stories to share. Important stories. Last year’s project was a disaster. Late, lots of quality issues, in short, a failure in every dimension. His boss, the CEO, had just presented him with a very personal ultimatum: deliver the next project by April 4th, “or else”.
“Or else what,” I asked?
His team was burned out and scared. They were a hard-working and dedicated group, but fear and demoralization had set in and he didn’t know what to do next. That’s why he wanted to talk to me, he had heard things about my company, things that seemed too good to be true, but he had to hear them firsthand. He wanted hope, inspiration, and a practical way to get there.
I told him about my own journey from joy to fear to disillusionment back to joy. It was simple, but, of course, simple isn’t easy. I wasn’t sure he and his organization were ready; “manufactured fear” is a powerful drug.
In this talk, I will share with you what I shared with him. I will explore what an intentionally joyful culture must choose as its focus. I will discuss what joy looks like, feels like, how it is organized. Along the way, you will be confronted by paradoxical approaches of how workplace noise increases productivity, how two people at one computer outperforms hero-based organizations 10-to-1, how rigor and discipline emanate from a shared-belief system, how transparency conquers fear, how all of the disciplines you study including agile, lean, and six sigma when done well are really about building human relationships at the intersections of business and technology, between project management and software development, between development and design and how quality can be a natural result of a team built on trust.
This is not a theoretical talk, but rather a talk built from well over a decade of experience of leading a team focused on “the business value of joy”. There will be lots of room for discussion with the audience. The audience will begin to understand why thousands of people make the journey to Ann Arbor, Michigan every year to see The Menlo Software Factory firsthand, and why so many more are reading about it in Joy, Inc. – How We Built A Workplace People Love.
