Southern Fried Agile 2016

Most of us believe we are good listeners but we underestimate this skill and are hard-wired to short change it by making assumptions, providing answers and jumping in when we think we know what people are trying to say. In doing so, we rob ourselves of the chance to encourage growth, build trust & respect and promote ownership. Listening is about more than hearing the words; it is about tone, body language and so much more. But wait  - listening well can be learned, so come and join Judith to understand and practice this under-utilized skill.

We will experience how hard it is to listen then understand the effect of good listening and why it has that effect. We will look at ways to identify how you know someone is really listening? We will also practice the art of asking good questions so we can truly listen to the answers. Discover how good listening builds respect, trust and ownership.

A one hour session designed to facilitate an open dialog on conflict.  Not all conflict is bad, it is a reality in the business world that we must be equipped to address.  This session will provide some techniques to avoid negative conflict as well as ways to get a team through conflict.

We live in a world where everyone is overwhelmed with demands for their attention.

Every day, the people you need to communicate with receive an average of 70 text messages, 147 emails/day, and are  bombarded with as many as 5,000 marketing images and messages.

How can you stand out in a positive way and get your message heard?

In this session, we will cover two principles of communication that will make you stand out from the crowd, plus one specific tool you can add you your toolkit to use immediately.

• Connection increases your influence in EVERY situation
• Connection is all about others
• Connectors do the difficult work of keeping it simple

In this session, we will cover specific, actionable steps that you can take to improve communication and make a real connection with your listener.

Your Agile team is killing it: more features, in less time, and with higher quality.  The tracked velocity shows that the once bottomless backlog only has about a sprint’s worth of work left.  If you want to keep delivering that backlog needs to be restocked, and it’s time to start working closer with the creative team.

 The problem is you don’t get what they’re doing over there.  It’s disruptive.  It’s unpredictable.  It’s a lot of throwaway work.  Isn’t this what you implemented Agile to get away from in the first place? How do you work with your creative partners to keep up the delivery you've established while allowing them time to research, test, and craft new experiences?

 This presentation is for teams looking to better partner with their creative counterparts to keep the release train running smoothly.  Find out how orderly agile and creative chaos can mutually coexist.

Agile is no longer the technical destination for digital companies. It’s a gateway for everything that has to happen next.

The Agile wave has already hit the beach, but it’s left in its wake a variety of new challenges to how project managers lead in a world of increasingly self-organizing teams. On top of that, the post-Agile technology innovations hitting Enterprise (DevOps, Cloud, and now MicroServices) represent even greater disruptions to not only new organizational process and delivery models, but will force a complete transformation of the role that project managers play in corporate life.  Join us for a journey -- past the wave of Agile, through its wake, and into the next waves ambitious companies will have to ride and manage in their pursuit of becoming truly digital organizations. It’s no longer enough to be Agile. You have to be nimble and humble to navigate the next waves.

Musicians and athletes spend most of their time practicing, not performing.  As software developers if we only practice and learn on the job, then we will continue to make mistakes on code meant for customers.  On the job, we can only deliver features as fast as the code base and our skills allow us.  We must improve the quality of our skills which will in turn improve the quality of our code base.  We must take the time to practice allowing ourselves to improve our skills and develop better "code sense".  Learn how the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto (http://manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org/) provides a framework for us to improve in our craft. By learning a variety of code games we can collect a full toolbelt of activities that will help us improve as individuals.  We can then take these games and give others the opportunity to improve and raise the level of the whole community.  We'll take a whirlwind tour of some different agile code games that will help us improve our craft.