Southern Fried Agile 2016

With the world around us continuing to evolve and speed up, the need to quickly respond to an ever changing set of regulations, user demands, and emerging market disruptors made agile one of the most trendy movements for corporations around the globe.  The reality is, Agile has been around for nearly two decades, so why aren’t there more success stories.  Many are failing because they don’t have the appropriate conditions in place to enable them to succeed and are forcing it without doing the necessary pre-work to establish a foundation.

This discussion uses examples from people attempting a Health & Fitness transformation as a layman’s illustration for the struggles organizations attempting an agile transformation experience.  In both cases there are people who are not ready to embark on their transformation, who disregard the obvious indicators and proceed anyway.  These transformations are highly likely to fail and the individual or organization just ends up wasting a significant amount of money only to end up in the same or worse shape than they started. 

The discussion concludes with a list of key conditions to look for and a recommendation on how to determine if your organization is ready to embark on an agile transformation.  Whether trying to prepare for an upcoming transformation or get one that’s already in-flight back on track, you will leave with an understanding of what areas to address that will greatly increase your likelihood of realizing the successful organizational transformation you envisioned.

IBM is on an agile journey like no other company. This presentation will share how a multinational enterprise has moved forward on the agile journey, unleashing the innovation and team creativity of people around the world to transform how business gets done. A special focus on of this conversation will be on the experiences of the IBM team in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina to jumpstart agile methods and practices across multiple physical locations, multiple business functions, including non-technical functions, and how you can use these same techniques in your company.

The ninth principle from the Agile Manifesto states that technical excellence enhances agility, but when the codebase is ugly and the deadlines are tight, most teams don't choose to refactor mercilessly, adopt TDD, or evaluate automated testing tools - unless they have the proper support. In our experience working with multiple teams in a single codebase, developers can feel victim to a legacy codebase if only a few people are writing clean code or refactoring; guiding them on how to decrease technical debt while delivering their projects helps "unstuck" their other agile practices. We will talk about the challenges we've seen with Product Owners, Managers, and Scrum Masters interacting with teams at various stages of agile+technical excellence and how a focus on technical practices sparked a wider interest in craftsmanship. Learn how can you influence the team towards the right practices while fostering their sense of ownership. Getting serious about technical excellence requires support from technical and non-technical roles, and we'll share how we partnered as coaches to help an organization through a technical turnaround with some tips for others who need to do the same.

A company is a garden and as leaders we're tasked with cultivating the most important asset any successful company has: a healthy culture. The business community is waking up to the fact that companies with positive cultures have the best talent, which innovate and create industry leading products, which impact the bottom line. But how did they do it? How can I do it?

Understanding where we want to take our company, first we must look to those who have already walked the path with great success. We will present detailed examples of companies with positive cultures, how those cultures developed and what impact it had on of the individual employee and the company image as a whole. Then we start to tackle the big question: As A Leader, what is my role in the culture of my company and how can I work towards having people engaged, enabled and energized?

During this session, open two-way dialogue is encouraged as we explore the topic of company culture and how it impacts all aspects of a company, from acquiring new talent to the bottom dollar. We'll examine several examples of positive culture from different industries and take away from them action plans that anyone can begin implementing at their own company, no matter their level of leadership. By the end of this session, participants will have a clear understanding of their role in cultivating a positive company culture, the steps to start making positive, impactful changes at your own company (no matter toxicity of the culture) and know how to communicate the value of these changes to skeptics.