Your mind offers two alternate—and generally unconscious—responses when things go wrong. One response solves problems with snap judgment, hasty advice, and evident policy. The alternate response expands the problem space for new awareness and new-found truth. You are completely equipped for both. The first is fast and solves anxiety about the problem. The second is slower, produces learning and growth, and addresses the real problem.

In this session you’ll explore a life-long practice developed from 20 years of field studies for choosing the appropriate leadership response.

Agile software development means collaboration, and increasingly this collaboration will cross boundaries of organizational and national culture. The session introduces models of culture and explores the impact of cultural differences on software development processes and methods, especially those involving the practices common in agile development. The session will be organized around two collaborative games that illustrate how cultural differences interact in the software development workplace. Our aim is better understanding of the issues and how to manage them.

How do you become agile with all the constraints surrounding you and your team? This tutorial introduces a new way to approach agile adoption efforts. We will go through important and key concepts related to agile adoption such as adopting values not practices, the difference between education and training, readiness assessments, and the process of organizational change. One of the tangible outcomes from this tutorial is a roadmap to agility that consists of five different levels, or steps, along with the different practices that can help an organization achieve each level of

This tutorial is a detailed look at several Agile practices and the HOWTO of Adopting each practice successfully. We will cover the business value delivered and the context where they are most effective. For each practice you will learn what steps can be done to effectively get from “I want to do this practice” to “I’m doing it and getting obvious value” and, just as importantly, what happen when things go wrong and how you can diagnose these difficulties.

A variety of practices will be covered including: Stand Up Meetings, Iterations, Demos, Automate Developer Tests, and Refactoring.

This tutorial, the “small card game”, is a simulation game introducing the concepts of Agile planning, story value, and story cost. Learn to manage scope and optimize return on investment. The students practice planning a project with varying levels of information about the features needed, and experience how “nature” deals with their plan. Again, very appropriate for all team members, in-house customers, marketing, and management, to learn how the process works and what their part in it is.

Setting a clear and engaging vision is challenging and critical for successful projects, so we have evolved an approach that allows teams to articulate the vision by telling the story of a customer’s experience with your product.

We will show you how to map the journey, identifying areas for technology innovation and key features along the way that will help to create a product that people love to use.

Many people can find empathy with a character and their story. This helps in creating a compelling product vision and communicate benefits in order to secure funding.

The use of metaphorical games as a strategy for adopting an agile culture has shown to be weak because most of trainers don’t know the principles of changing beliefs and values of a human mind. The Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) Logical Levels of Learning and Change (LLLC) is a powerful framework to be considered when we need to challenge skeptical and analytical minds in traditional software development environments.

The method of Modeling in Color (MIC) has its foundation in object-oriented analysis and design; however, given today’s modern service oriented architectures (SOA), the approach is more relevant than ever. In any SOA, MIC can provide answers to difficult questions like: How are services properly designed? What’s the appropriate level of granularity for those services? Basic MIC techniques will be discussed and how to break a Color Model into discrete, loosely coupled components will be examined. How to convert the componentized model into XML schema and into XML web services will be explored.

Field-tests about how personal responsibility works in the mind (i.e., how we avoid it and how we take it) now make it possible for coaches to understand and teach the mental processes, language, and keys to personal responsibility. Cool huh?

Doing so inspires your charges to demonstrate far greater ownership behavior as individuals, teams, and even as entire enterprises. You add more value as your charges take ownership and learn, correct, and improve more easily, directly, and quickly.

Come acquire the basic tools and practices for coaching success with personal responsibility.

Coaching helps communities produce real value and grow sustainable agility. Successful coaches know the importance and value of treating each community as unique, helping the individuals and the larger community find a “groove” (style) that truly helps them deliver. If you are coaching or getting ready to coach, and you want to learn a pile of pragmatic coaching tools, based on years of coaching agile projects, this session will pass your tests.