Our Guests for the Business Agility track

Many organizations can increase the return of their investments in going agile by articulating and removing their agile anti-patters, as well as becoming aware of the consequences of having them. Agile antipatterns are sub-par solutions to challenges, and they occur when the intentions of working agile meet the limitations of the organizational reality. When the changes required to go agile are too big or difficult, organizations might take “pragmatic” shortcuts that, on the surface, seem appropriate and sensible, but in the long run can decrease the benefits of the investment—thus, the organization creates agile antipatterns (or “agile debt”). 

This workshop teaches the participants to identify, describe, communicate and remove these antipatterns by using the humorous format of Comic Agilé strips.

Examples:  

• Anti-pattern #1: Product Owners only prioritize business features and not technical enablers and process improvement initiatives. Consequence: Reduced quality of the product and no culture of continuous improvement.
• Anti-pattern #2: Scrum Masters “do” instead of teaching and coaching. Consequence: The team is ineffective because it doesn’t learn self-management and to grow as a team, but keeps being dependant on the Scrum Master to facilitate it.
• Anti-pattern #3: Dependencies are not broken, but instead coordinated through a scaling framework. Consequence: It takes longer than needed for each team to deliver value because of the need for  cross-team coordination.

Key Takeaway:

• Your own Comic Agilé strip based on an actual, current agile pain or anti-pattern from your organization that you can communicate to decision-makers to inspire change.

Artificial Intelligence is already making a huge on the software industry. It is accelerating product development, creating code and automating processes. However, writing code isn't everything teams need to do to create software products. It isn't even always the most important task. One area that makes a huge impact on the success of a product is the team's way of working, and in particular, how well the team applies their way of working. Poorly chosen and executed practices and methods do tremendous damage to team productivity and effectiveness.

Unfortunately, this aspect of software development isn't as straightforward to apply AI to as some of the others. Not only is a team's way of working a complex, nuanced human endeavor - and therefore harder to apply rigid rules to - but existing guidance is variable, flawed and hard to trust. There is lots of bad advice written and many coaches and consultants are not as skilled or knowledgeable as they should be. This makes it a hard environment for AI models to succeed.

In this workshop Ivar Jacobson and Simon Girvan will help you explore this topic and trace Ivar's journey from solving a similar problem with an AI based solution almost 20 years ago through the creation of Essence, a common ground for practices and methods, to today, where we will see that adding Essence to AI leads to vastly superior results than just using AI alone; results teams can trust!

Participants will:

• Understand the challenges of applying AI to the domain of practices and methods
• Learn about the international standard, Essence, and why it is a dramatically different way to think
• See the impact of adding Essence and AI together compared to just using AI
  
  

As organizations become more digital and departmentalized, connecting everyone around the same Vision and around Customer Needs is more critical than ever. More than just delivering the right thing to users, much work also calls for consideration when aligning every part (developer teams, management teams, marketing, operations ...) to achieve the common goal: delighting the Customer.

More than just that, as the Human person is the most complex being in the world, organizations that are made of those have twice (or an infinite times!) these complexity factors. The way people communicate and the level of detail they need to fulfil different tasks varies, so getting everyone to speak the same language is a challenge. However, how can these different teams communicate better and more clearly?

Jon Kern has something to say about that! The Agile Manifesto co-author will discuss the foundations that he considers to be necessary for producing a digital product, aligned with both the Customer needs and the Vision of managers, as everything starts with the approach software development teams have when getting their "hands dirty".