Southern Fried Agile 2016

One of the most challenging and trouble-prone aspects of agile product development is discovering the right product requirements to deliver at the right time, for the right customer. Many teams rely on user stories to discover and define agile requirements. But in reality user stories often lead to a confusing array of struggles and puzzles, such as bloated backlogs, ineffective or inconsistent planning, and erratic Sprint flow. This thrashing is not how user stories are intended to work!

Join Mary Gorman in this fast-paced introduction of a common sense, tested approach to user stories. With a laser-like focus on delivering value, you follow a story as it’s sliced across the 7 Product Dimensions. You learn how the Structured Conversation framework enables you to quickly explore, evaluate, and confirm stories. See how making your user stories “ready” is the key for incremental delivery of your “Done” product.   

Learning outcomes:

• Practical ways to mitigate user story struggles
• The four functional and three nonfunctional dimensions of every user story
• The holistic approach to stories that smooths the way for successful iterative and incremental product delivery 

Lean-Thinking provides a few key mantras to follow, attend to the system, the workflow and quality.  Most people have heard of "just-in-time" and "stop-the-line" and tend to think Lean is about building cars.  It isn't. 

It's a mindset that can be applied to any industry or type of service.  In software, one needs to shift the thinking from waste (which can be seen in the physical world) to one of removing delays.  There are many aspects of a development organization that contribute to delays. 

These include:

• Having the development group work on too many things
• Not properly aligning the work across the value stream
• Large work items
• Slow feedback
• Not having cross-functional teams
• High technical debt
• Lack of automation

This talk shows how each of these directly causes waste, lowers productivity, raises cost and lowers quality. It also points to steps you can take to alleviate these challenges.

With organizations transforming to agile, how should they transform your communication style? (Yes, we need to change communication styles)

A Non-violent communication style is a must to excel in the new collaborative agile environments. The skill to utilize Self-empathy, Empathy, and Honest self-expression in a high performing agile team and organization separates the good from the great!

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.

We are not practicing the same Agile we did 15 years ago.

Agile at scale is mainstream.‘_ Thousands of companies are actively seeking information on how to scale agile effectively.‘_ There are many frameworks and techniques but they all boil down to a set of common principles.‘_ Agile done well involves teams, programs and portfolios in a way that aligns strategy and execution.‘_ It's important to apply a proper team foundation to build things right but without agile applied at the program and portfolio level all we may end up with is the wrong things built faster.‘_ In this talk Julie will discuss how to effectively apply Agile to your portfolios and programs to ensure you are also building the right things.‘_ Learn to create value, not just process.

This presentation is about an actual project where multiple scaled practices/frameworks have been used to scale agile across teams. during the presentation we will be comparing between different scaling approaches then sharing what was used on the project. lots of tips and tricks will be shared when dealing with distributed teams in international time zones.