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Without a doubt, agile processes rely on effective collaborative teams. But we can’t just throw a group of individuals together and expect an agile team to just happen. It takes knowledge of team strategies, skillful team building and ongoing coaching to build and maintain high-performing agile teams.

Where are those fantastic, self-propelled teams that were promised by agile? Where they were missing, we took action. It was sometimes difficult. Along the way, not all the pegs fit into their corresponding holes. In many respects, we had been our own worst enemy by allowing poor behaviors and poor teams to manifest themselves before and after scrum. In hindsight, Kelley Blue Book applied an informal intervention model which was useful to address our team deficiencies. Self-organizing teams didn’t just happen - we had to help them along.

Drawing from our experience implementing Agile not only across cultural and physical boundaries with on/off shore blended teams, but within limitations that aren’t so obvious - we play an interactive game to learn about how people from diverse groups with different learning styles can gain knowledge and insight in cooperative and competitive settings. We will draw from this workshop’s experiential learning to feed a larger discussion about intercultural work groups, whether these groups are from different countries or different work disciplines.

Abstract

Over the last few years we have had the good fortune to aggressively apply the agile practices on a number of projects with great success. These successes, however, have not been achieved without challenges and lessons learnt along the way. This experience report specifically highlights examples from three different software development projects of varying sizes within this period and within the same organization. This is the story of three little pigs, where in all cases the pigs were well and truly committed.

Any successful recording artist eventually submits to releasing a “Greatest Hits” album. This is the opposite: a beat-up XP coach putting his biggest and furthest-reaching mistakes in a neat package and releasing them to the public. This talk could also be named “Ten ways to guarantee your Agile transition is a total failure”, or “Apologies of an XP coach”; however I’m sure I’ll mention more than ten mistakes and I make no apology for them.

ORIGINAL SUMMARY:

Cultural diversity has become the norm in the software industry. It’s not unusual to work with people from across the country or across the world.

Working with people from different cultures can be a great opportunity; it can also be challenging and puzzling.

In this session, we’ll use a simulation to explore what it’s like to work with people from a different culture.

We’ll look at the ways that culture determines how people decide, listen, and act. And we’ll learn several tools to reframe differences in order to reduce misunderstandings and improve productivity.

In our personal and business lives, many of us know leaders who successfully foster environments of incredible creativity, innovation, and ideas—while other leaders try but fail. So, how do the top leaders get it right? Going beyond the basics, I explore with you the ways that the best leaders create “safety nets” that allow people to discover and try new possibilities, fail early, and correct faster. Removing fear and engendering trust make the team and organization more creative and productive as they spend less energy protecting themselves and the status quo.

Agile projects require shared leadership and collaboration to be successful, yet many organizations try to use outdated command-and-control approaches.

“We manage property and lead people. If you try to manage people they feel like property”.

This 90 minute presentation exposes the weaknesses of trying to use formal project management on emergent endeavours and outlines the leadership and collaboration based alternatives.

Volunteer organizations are unique because people are not paid for their contribution and your organization is in competition for space in an already over-booked schedule. By necessity, volunteer organizations require a more human-centric approach to leadership. This workshop will explore the 10 things you better be doing if you want to harness the passion and enthusiasm of your team of volunteers. Topics such as empowerment, self-organization, and short-cycle delivery will be addressed using real world scenarios.

The growing trend of companies to widely adopt agile across their organizations has created change far beyond what happens at the level of the team. This panel examines issues surrounding enterprise agile adoption. We will explore topics such as agile transformation and initiation, leadership, culture change, hiring, incentives and technology. Experts from diverse large companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Salesforce.com, The Gap and Barclay’s Global Investors will discuss these issues, grounded by their experiences.