Mike Kelly
Keynote Address
Building a culture of change: why CIOs should sometimes lead from behind
Recording: https://youtu.be/zAlPnSV-61U
CIOs have a critical role to play in change management around a new technology initiative, but it’s not the role you might think. For all the IT work that goes into a change, whether its application modernization or launching a new product, it might seem natural to have a CIO out there in the organization acting as a champion for the change and being its most vocal supporter. But in my experience, the most effective change happens when CIOs are behind the scenes, leading from the back.
Every CIO should know how to recruit and prop up change agents throughout the business. If you are just getting started in this, look for people who have the drive to succeed and advance their role. These are the folks who will make the best change agents. Find them: Your next change initiative may depend on it.
Rebecca Fernandez
Open Leadership: An Invitation to All
Recording: https://youtu.be/CvGJMsvP0vs
To most people, “leadership” is a capability expected of only a select group of people and roles in an organization. Many believe that leadership is required only of managers or executives. But this exclusive view of leadership is antiquated and inadequate. In today’s organizations, leadership is a set of catalytic mindsets and behaviors that enable people to work together to create something of value. In this session, you will explore new ways to demonstrate and develop personal leadership. Gain valuable insights and take away practical tools for extending your influence and impact, regardless of your role.
Bob Galen
Be Vewy, Vewy Quiet… In Search of the Elusive Agile Culture
Recording: https://youtu.be/GZjdw_xRMXM
Some think that culture is something that just happens. Growing as groups and teams are formed. Emerging organically from some primordial ooze. Others think it’s something you can simply train into an organization. Making selections from a menu and instantiating it very specifically via mandatory classes. Some think it has a top-down flow. Others a bottom-up flow. And still others, and inside-out nature.
One thing for sure, in agile transformation and scaling efforts, culture is the soil in which your agility grows and thrives. And Bob Galen posits that it’s crucial for agile success however it is defined.
In this session, we’ll explore culture and try to answer the questions of:
· What is it?
· Where does it come from?
· How does it change and evolve?
· And, what is the best culture for agile transformations?
You’ll leave the session with a renewed understanding of, a respect for, and a focus on culture within your own organizations. Hopefully nurturing your cultural ecosystems so that it can fully support your agile transformations.
Larry Maccherone
DevSecOps: Security at the Speed of Software Development
Recording: https://youtu.be/LFySsdVV3dg
Security specialists, especially at large organizations, believe that better security comes from robust independent gating. On the other hand, DevOps has proven that you can safely deploy orders of magnitude faster than human gating can achieve. What’s needed to add security to DevOps are tools that work well with rapid-cycle CI/CD pipelines and an approach that reinforces the DevOps culture and process changes. This requires significant mindset shift. This talk includes guidance on the characteristics of security tools compatible with DevOps but it primarily focuses on the harder part… THE PEOPLE. This talk introduces the DevSecOps manifesto and provides you with a process model, based upon Agile transformation techniques, to accomplish the necessary mindset shift and an achieve effective DevSecOps culture transformation. It has been successfully used in a large DevSecOps transformation at Comcast and has gained recognition in DevSecOps circles as a leading framework.
Kristine Berry
How to Teach Agile to Anyone and Have Fun Doing It
Recording: https://youtu.be/Br8d-N9SHQE
We know that education is the foundation for any successful Agile transformation, but how do you know if you’re getting through to people? How do you create Agile education that is exciting, fun and effective? What educational techniques work best to encourage learners to not only try new practices but also embrace new behaviors? This session will combine the science of adult learning theory with real-world experience in teaching agile practices to hundreds of software development professionals. You will walk away with practical tips, exercises and advice you can apply to your next class, to make it both engaging and effective. This interactive session will include a combination of presentation, case studies, discussion, and a couple of hands-on learning activities.
Shobha Subramonian
A Continuous Delivery Journey
Recording: https://youtu.be/3RSpuRTUEJ8
This presentation will highlight our journey for SAS Customer Intelligence 360 from a yearly release model for on-premise deployments, to a monthly release model on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environment. It will share insights on:
- the challenges we faced with this transition
- the mindset shift that was needed
- the initial results and how we improved over time
- our current model for continuous delivery
- our Agile culture
- how we scaled for this complex program
While we have made long strides to get to where we are and are now successfully putting out a release every month, we have our sights set on more aggressive goals and are still evolving as an organization to get there.
Heather Shuart
Do I Belong Here? A Newcomers Journey w. Agile Team Culture
Recording: https://youtu.be/0T4O8NUjk90
As a new-to-IT Red Hatter I suddenly found myself thrust into a world of Agile acronyms, technical acumen, and brilliant minds. To say this was an intimidating time would understate the reality of my experience. Fighting insecurity, judgement, and general frustration I slowly found my way. With the help of some key mentors and open opportunities I have learned that this thing called “Agile” is full of community. Come hear how these first interactions have shaped this recovering sales persons mindset to begin adopting the Agile culture.
Laura Di Puma
Scaling Agile Within the Musical Scale: Embracing an AgileMindset in Music Education
Recording: https://youtu.be/RMG1FgwfY3o
During a Music Industry/Business lesson with my students, we studied an organization called, Spotify. What started as a lesson for my students in various ways music has become a digital industry, became a lesson for me on how to more efficiently run my ensembles at school (Band and Orchestra) and create a different culture, one that created enthusiasm from within my organization as well as from the outside. Agile is a way of behaving; it’s a culture, it’s a mindset. The amazing thing about Agile being a culture is that you can apply it to any organization and any aspect of work. I began employing this mindset in my ensembles, mainly, as a way to rise up internal leadership through self-organized and self-managed teams. We gained so much more! Education, unfortunately, is a field that traditionally runs long feedback loops- Semesters being the standard unit of measure for achieving outcomes of learning. Why do we have to be traditional? I imagined shorter sprints, two week sprints to be exact. We gained more opportunity to reflect on what had happened, gained more learning than a traditional approach, and we were able to identify needed improvements, adapt, and change course when needed; before disaster arose right before our delivered product: the concert! Inspired by Spotify, we called our learning teams “Squads” and the result? Audience members, parents, school administrators and the community wondering how we all accomplished so much work, at such a high level, in such little time, with much less of teacher driven direction. The answer? Agile!
Laura Valentine
Almost Agile – Signs Your Team May be Faking It
Recording: https://youtu.be/X9_tceoLoi8
Agile practices are said to be “A minute to learn, a lifetime to master”. While it is deceptively easy to get trained on Agile practices, set up the teams, and schedule the ceremonies – truly being Agile takes a lot of practice, experimentation, and perseverance. This presentation will highlight common examples of “almost Agile” traps that teams may find along their Agile journey especially in a multi-team environment. We will walk through the signs or patterns that you can use to identify such pitfalls and suggest steps to course correct.