Keep Austin Agile 2019

Is Agile in your DNA? Are you being Agile or just doing Agile? How can I get my C-Suite to look at Agile as something more than a methodology for delivery? Given everyone is looking for value, how does Agile get infused into large parts of the company in a way that can transform the company from an organization to a living, growing, and evolving organism? How can you assess and assist your CEO with Agile? These questions and many others will be presented through practical, real-world examples highlighting both successes and challenges from Joyce's company.

Lastly, in a world with so much data, how does Agile help you manage that? According to a McKinsey & Company report, Agile organizations emphasize quick, efficient, and continuous decision making, preferring 70 percent probability now versus 100 percent certainty later. Learning to lean on and into Agile when you don't have all the data takes some getting use to but it's certainly doable. The view from the CEO seat is interesting and might just surprise you.

Historically, Project Managers (PMs) and other middle managers have hustled in a bureaucratic system to drive teams to deliver value. As organizations transition from a project to product model, where can these leaders best add value in a fast-moving, Agile and entrepreneurial world? In this new and exciting world, middle managers are enabling rapid delivery of value and successful business outcomes via the creation of the Agile Value Management Office™. Learn how an Agile VMO™ drives business agility through small batches, frequent releases, and continuous adaptation. We'll explore how to:

• Create a collaborative management team-of-teams
• Bring Lean discipline to product portfolio prioritization
• Establish an End-to-End team model of resource management
• Track in-flight product work using a Visual Management System

We'll explore the transition for PMs and other leaders into this exciting role: facilitating the delivery of flow, value, and innovation end-to-end on the Agile VMO, even as they support their Agile teams in the quest for business agility.

There is a set of organizational practices that seem to work. For example: "two pizza" teams, use of APIs between systems, and, the newly emerging, Service Level Objectives (SLOs). Why is that? Why do these "work"? It turns out that these are design solutions that solve the problem of scaling an organization. These solutions emerge as a consequence of organizational design from first principles, a design that considers scale, contention, coherence, and complexity. Join us on a tour of organizational scalability through the lens of the Universal Scalability Law. See how to tame the inevitable complexity through organizational structure and discover the "why" of it all via Wardley Maps.

How do you convince your boss and peers that Agile is the answer to your organization's issues?

As a former "unconvinced" turned "convinced" leader, the question of "How do I win over my boss?" really hits home. How was I convinced? How was I changed? When did I start to see the results I needed?

In order to convince someone else of the value you see, it's ideal to start by understanding their needs, constraints, and challenges. Once you see things through their eyes, then you begin to understand the precise ways Agile can facilitate the outcomes they're looking for. What better way to understand leaders than to ask leaders questions directly?

Join Erik Cottrell along with panelists, Nicole Tanzillo (CO-Founder & COO, Ceresa), Ron Dovich (Assistant VP of Technology, AT&T), and Amy Green-Hinojosa (VP, Project Management Office, Texas Mutual Insurance) to get an inside look into what it takes to convince leaders of Agile, the challenges and rewards of leading change, and the benefits they realized once they began to embrace agility.

Looking for that session where you can find answers to all manner of Agile questions? Are you wondering where you can find women who are just as passionate as you are about practicing Agile? We've got you covered! We're Austin Women in Agile. Yes, we're part of a national chapter, but we have an Austin flavor all our own. We are building a trusted, personal community of Agile practitioners who live and work with integrity and intention. We practice vulnerability, kindness, and radical accountability. We empower others, celebrate our wins, learn from our mistakes, and step together into our full potential.

Mindy Honcoop, Taylor Frank, Sydney Markle, Kate Kolchier and Erin Randall will lead Lean Espresso round-table discussions. They have experience as Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Tribe Leaders to Agile squads, Product Owners, a Marketing Whiz, a Bikablo fangirl, a Human Resource Dynamo, and even a Chief JIRA Goddess. They banded together to make Austin Women in Agile a reality in the autumn of 2018, and they want to bring intentional, authentic Agile practices to even more people.

How do individual agilists hold themselves accountable? What are legitimate data points to measure and provide context of performance? It's not often that people ask specifically how they evaluate a Scrum Master, especially as a direct report. Development Managers may have developer score cards or measurements for lines of code or commits. Product Managers can be held accountable to feature ideas, implementation, and even P&L. But how do you evaluate your Scrum Master? Do you rely on 360 feedback, velocity, or some measurement of team morale? Is it, honestly, gut feel? Hoping you have a career path for your agilists, how do you know they're progressing?

The reference points of team health, 360 (candid) feedback, and milestone delivery facilitate the discussion of how Jason has evaluated performance of a Scrum Master or Agile coach, their successes, misses and ideas for improvement from the perspective of a hiring manager.

"Whoever can handle the quickest rate of change is the one who survives." - Robert Coram, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War.

Boyd was the king of feedback loops and taught the world how closing feedback loops faster wins wars. Agile teaches the same thing.

One feedback loop in particular makes EVERYTHING in Agile dramatically faster, better, and easier. Strangely, many people do not seem to know what it is. They do not practice it. Would you like to learn what it is?

Agile is not about methods, it's not about practices, it's not about Scrum. It's about sensing and responding to change. But what does that mean? Agile methodologies have given us a framework to sense and respond to change in a product development environment, but how much further can this be applied? Discover how to unleash the power of feedback loops everywhere in your life, including:

• Three feedback loops to make you a better spouse
• Four feedback loops to dramatically increase your effectiveness as a leader
• Two feedback loops to make you a better parent
• One feedback loop to make you a better lover

Most importantly, learn the single most powerful technique to release feedback on everything you do. You will learn it in minutes and practice applying it immediately. Keep doing it and it will change everything