Flight Level 3 and PPM Tools by Craeg Strong

When speaking with a “C-level” (executive leadership) customer, we are often talking about flight level 3. However, in their world they are often using a PPM tool such as SoftwareAG Alfabet or PlanView PPMPro, which are often called “Strategic Portfolio Management” tools. They use words like OKRs and budgets and metrics and Agile. It would be good for our community to have awareness of these tools to see where and how they might or might not fit.

Flight Levels Day

Flight Levels Practitioners and Professionals come together to share their experiences about Flight Levels with a wide audience and offers insights into the practical applications of Flight Levels. It demonstrates how companies use Flight Levels as a lightweight and cost-effective approach to foster company-wide collaboration and implement their strategies. Thanks to our interactive platform, all participants have the opportunity to directly engage with the speakers, get their questions answered, or receive ideas and inspirations beyond the scope of the conference program.

Get your seat today

18 April 2024, 12:00 – 19:00 CET Check your local time

• 1 day interactive online conference
• Get insights into the practical applications of Flight Levels
• Get in touch with Flight Levels Professionals and Practitioners

City & State’s Healthy New York Summit will bring together health care decision makers and policy experts from all sectors to identify challenges and discuss solutions to improve our system. Attendees will gain new insights and perspectives on the most critical issues and priorities in New York health care during and post the pandemic.

2024 Healthy New York Summit

Thursday, April 18th, 2024

8:30 AM – 3:00 PM

Museum of Jewish Heritage

36 Battery Place, New York, NY 10280

See you there!

WHAT: Childhelp Shining Stars Gala

WHEN: Saturday, March 16, 2024

WHERE: The Ritz-Carlton Hotel, 1700 Tysons Boulevard – McLean, VA 22102

ATTIRE: Black Tie Optional

EVENING’S EVENTS: Cocktails, Dinner & Dancing, Auction & Raffle

WHY: To raise funds in support of:

• Childhelp’s Alice C. Tyler Village near Culpeper, VA, a residential treatment facility, which provides a safe and nurturing environment to severely abused and neglected children; and
• Childhelp’s National Child Abuse Hotline (1-800-4-A-CHILD, org), a 24/7 intervention lifeline staffed by master’s-level crisis counselors offering life- saving support over phone, chat, and text.

KEY FACTS: Childhelp is one of the largest and oldest non-profit organizations dedicated to the treatment and prevention of child abuse and neglect. Of each dollar Childhelp expends, $.83 directly serves children through programs and services to meet their physical, emotional, educational, and spiritual needs.

• Child Abuse is reported every 15 seconds.
• Five children die each day as a result of abuse or neglect in the United States.
• Each year referrals to child protective services involve around 7 million children.
• Due to Covid-19, the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline saw an increase in contacts with monthly volume ranging from 15% to 43% higher than in previous year.

Interested in hands-on, complimentary training with Atlassian Jira, Confluence and Jira Service Management?

Join Atlassian experts in Reston for a four-part training the week after Atlassian Team Tour: Government 2024!

This event will give you hands-on experience with Atlassian tools – all delivered by Atlassian’s verified government solution partners.

Click here for more details on each session.

Please bring a laptop.

Leveraging JSM’s Unique Features with Learning Queries by Craeg Strong

March 14, 2024 at 12:45pm – 2:15pm

Jira Query Language (JQL) is the magic behind reports, dashboards and agile boards in Jira. JQL enables users to pinpoint important information covering almost any conceivable situation, trend, risk or achievement. We’ll explore real-world examples you can copy to create your “cheat sheet.” We’ll review the basic structure of JQL and examples from simple to sophisticated. Learn how to tweak the examples to suit your specific needs.

Team Tour: Government is a full-day event for government teams to gain valuable insights on how to transform their work at scale, get the latest on Atlassian’s product advancements, and discover our public sector roadmaps.

There will be 4.8 continuing professional education (CPE) credits to those that attend the Team Tour: Government event in person, on March 6, 2024. CPE certification at Team Tour: Government is being administered by Carahsoft Technology Corp. Carahsoft is registered with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) as a sponsor of continuing professional education of the National Registry of CPE Sponsors. For more information on the CPE credits we are offering, the CPE sponsor, NASBA, and submission process, please click here

Configuring Jira for Maximum Agility: A DoD Case Study by Craeg Strong

Wednesday, March 6, 2024 11:30 AM – 12:00 PM (EST)

AFCEA NOVA Air Force IT Day 2023 is an event organized by the Northern Virginia Chapter of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA). The event is scheduled to take place on Thursday, December 14, 2023 at the Crystal Gateway Marriott in Arlington, VA. The theme of the event is “Data Superiority Across All Domains: A Must for the High End Fight”. The event will feature keynote speeches, panel discussions, and exhibits on topics such as data and AI, decision superiority, and digital disruption in the PEOs. The event is open to the public, and registration is required.

We hope to see you there!

Overview

The Digital Government Summit brings together technology focused public-sector professionals with leading industry partners to connect on innovative approaches, get inspired and discover new technologies. Join us and let’s improve the future of government together!

Registration Information

Event Date: November 27 and 28, 2023

Open to Public Sector only.

Join with leaders and enthusiasts in the Kanban space including coaches, trainers, consultants, thought leaders and practitioners. This is an unconference where there is no set agenda. Participants bring topics they want to discuss and the agenda is planned on the first night of the event.

CHALLENGE – Question and confront established ideas.  Present new material and advance the field of Kanban.

EXPLORE – Go deeper into existing concepts. Stretch the boundaries on Cost of Delay, Metrics, Flow, Games, Maturity Levels and more.

What is AgileDC?

AgileDC is method-agnostic with case studies and hands-on workshops from across the spectrum of Agile methods and thinking models. It brings together practitioners and thought leaders in equal parts from Federal government and civilian organizations. You can hear about challenges involved in delivering incredibly complex programs for missions that matter, including saving lives and livelihoods.

About the Workshop

This year our CTO, Craeg Strong, will be giving a hands on workshop on crafting effective outcomes to drive organizational strategy. Are you curious about how to expand beyond agile teams and bring agility across your whole organization? This workshop is for you!

About Craeg Strong

Craeg Strong is the CTO of Ariel Partners, a small digital services company based in Times Square. He has 25 years of experience in information technology, starting at Project Athena during his undergraduate studies at MIT. Mr. Strong has successfully instituted Agile and DevOps practices on large and complex commercial and government software projects, helping them to obtain new capabilities and realize significant cost efficiencies. He works with senior leaders at Fortune 500 companies to help them codify their strategies, align organizational efforts, and achieve transformational goals. Mr. Strong led a successful transformation of a major Criminal justice program from a traditional waterfall lifecycle and manual intensive processes to lighter weight agile processes and full DevOps automation. He provides coaching and training for teams, leaders, and organizations to help them adopt and mature Agile/Kanban practices.

BEG Flight Levels Day is an exclusive online conference designed to empower Bosch employees by providing valuable insights on the flight levels system and allowing them to engage with industry pioneers and thought leaders.

This year our CTO, Craeg Strong, will explore the profound impact of Agile methodologies on commanders’ intent for DOD leaders and executives, discussing how Agile practices enable strategic decision-making within the military domain.

Topic: Team Spaces in Confluence

You probably use Confluence all the time. But did you know that much of what you are doing can be automated with macros and templates? Come see a demonstration of how you can use Confluence to manage teams and programs.

• Standardization? check.
• Automation? check.
• Flexibility? check.

Whether you are a Confluence newbie or an expert, this session has something for everyone.

Craeg Strong is the CTO of Ariel Partners, a small digital services company based in Times Square. He has 25 years of experience in information technology, starting at Project Athena during his undergraduate studies at MIT. Mr. Strong has successfully instituted Agile and DevOps practices on large and complex commercial and government software projects, helping them to obtain new capabilities and realize significant cost efficiencies. He works with senior leaders at Fortune 500 companies to help them codify their strategies, align organizational efforts, and achieve transformational goals. Mr. Strong led a successful transformation of a major Criminal justice program from a traditional waterfall lifecycle and manual intensive processes to lighter weight agile processes and full DevOps automation. He provides coaching and training for teams, leaders, and organizations to help them adopt and mature Agile/Kanban practices.

About DAFITC

The Department of the Air Force Information Technology and Cyberpower Education & Training Event will be held in Montgomery, AL from August 28-30, 2023

In 2022, thousands of Air Force peers, along with private sector leaders in the IT and cyber security field convened to network, discuss, connect and learn about the newest and most prevailing threats to our global networks and national defense. With 205+ breakouts, a trade show with over 175 vendor booths, and nearly 4000 attendees, speakers, and exhibitors, DAFITC came roaring back with its first in-person event in two years, and 2023 is poised to grow even more.

In 2023 you can expect to hear from leading voices in the public and private sectors, hearing a range of ideas, opinions, and assessments of the current state of all things cyber as well as insights into what the keys to future success might look like.

With this year’s theme, Digitally Transforming the Air & Space Force: Investing for Tomorrow’s Fight, DAFITC 2023 will examine the ever-changing ways in which big data and emerging cyber technologies are reshaping the landscape in which we live.

Each year the Department of Air Force Information Technology and Cyberpower Education & Training Event offers well over 200 unique breakout training sessions in several currently themed and engaging topic areas. Call for Presentations for this year’s theme, Digitally Transforming the Air & Space Force: Investing for Tomorrow’s Fight, will be announced soon.

The five breakout training themes for DAFITC 2023 have been announced! To view a short description of each of this year’s themes visit the Breakout Training Session page.

North American DevOps Group presents, DevOps Connect

We hope  to see you at the Renaissance Downtown DC on August 17th from 7:30am to 5pm to a must-attend DevSecOps Conference.

DevSecOps Conference sessions will include:

• Industry Profiles from our supporting vendors
• Fireside Chats featuring customer challenges and use cases
• Software Factory, Department of Defense Acquisition, and System Integrator Panels

Carahsoft will showcase new DevSecOps updates from their supporting panels featuring government, systems integrators, and industry thought leaders who will explore topics such as:

• MultiCloud & Cloud Native Applications
• Security & Compliance
• Application Development
• CI/CD
• Authority to Operate (ATO)
• KubernetesDay 0, 1, and 2 Operations
• Software Factories

  See you there!

About the Intelligence and National Security Summit

Powered by AFCEA International and the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), #IntelSummit23 brings public and private sector leaders together to advance collaborative solutions to critical intelligence and national security challenges. The powerful two-day program features five plenaries and six breakout sessions that examine “ripped from the headlines” issues such as lessons learned from the Russia/Ukraine War, technology futures, AI and emerging technologies, and the future of NATO and regional alliances.

Why Attend

The Summit is the premier forum for unclassified dialogue between U.S. Government intelligence agencies and their industry and academic partners. Attending the Summit provides you with:

• Hands-on access to the latest technological advancements in the intelligence community
• Key insights from senior government leaders, technical experts, leading edge researchers, and people in the field working to overcome challenges with creative solutions
• Opportunities to expand your professional network

About AFCEA International

AFCEA International is a member-based, non-profit association for professionals that provides highly sought after thought leadership, engagement, and networking opportunities. We focus on cyber, command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence to address national and international security challenges. Click here to read more.

About INSA

The Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) is the leading nonpartisan trade association for driving public-private partnerships to advance intelligence and national security priorities. INSA brings together committed experts in and out of government to identify, develop, and promote practical and creative solutions to national security problems. INSA has more than 160 organizations in its membership and enjoys extensive participation from leaders and senior executives in the public, private, and academic sectors. Click here to learn more.

Agenda:

“Modern Project Management with Lean and Kanban”

This presentation will demonstrate how to use Kanban for managing a large, complex project, and the benefits to be gained by using this approach.  Kanban has grown up and is now widely used both within Information Technology and by diverse business professionals including underwriters, researchers, homebuilders, retailers, HR professionals, accountants, claims adjusters and many others.

Kanban has a unique combination of ease of use and low barrier to entry, coupled with flexibility, versatility, and fractal nature (that is, its ability to be applied at multiple levels).   These characteristics make it a perfect fit for managing large, complex programs in fields like government, pharma, finance and insurance.  The presentation will be structured as follows:

• Basics of Kanban (15 minutes)
  • In this segment, we will delve into the key components of a Kanban system: Visual Boards, Work in Progress (WIP) Limits, and the flow of work. We will discuss how replenishment is done, how delivery is scheduled, and some basic metrics.  We will examine workflows of a couple of disparate teams that have to work together.   Attendees will gain an understanding of how to set up their own Kanban boards and how to use them effectively.
• Upstream Kanban (15 minutes)
  • This segment will explore how Kanban can be used to refine fuzzy ideas into “shovel-ready” work items.  We will explore ways to extend our boards to include refinement steps and different ways they could be constructed.  Attendees will gain an understanding of the improvements that upstream kanban can bring to a flat one-dimensional “product backlog.”
• Dependency Management with Kanban (15 minutes)
  • This segment will explore how Kanban can be used to handle dependencies. We’ll explain how to visualize the work of multiple teams that are cooperating together using a higher-level board linked to the individual team boards, how we can display dependencies on the Kanban board and how to manage them efficiently to minimize bottlenecks and delays.
• Using Kanban for Forecasting (15 minutes)
  • In this section, we will demonstrate how Kanban can be used as a powerful forecasting tool. Attendees will learn how to leverage lead time data and throughput data to predict key milestone completion times and manage expectations effectively.
• Conclusion and Q&A (10 minutes)
  • We will wrap up the presentation with a recap and open the floor for a lively question and answer session to ensure that all attendees leave with a clear understanding of how they can leverage Kanban for efficient project management in their respective fields.

Meeting Agenda:

5:50 – 6:00 PM – Meeting Opens

6:00 – 7:00 PM – Presentation

7:00 – 7:15 PM – Q&A/Closing

PDU’s:

Those who attend can self-report 1.25 PDUs (Ways of Working)

Meeting Info: If you are registered for this webinar, you should have received an email from PMINYC Agile on 6/21 @ 7pm with the Zoom link for tomorrow’s meeting. If you did not receive it, please check your Junk/SPAM folders or contact Sheryl Chuang (sheryl.chuang@pminyc.org) to get the link.

Speaker Bio:

Craeg Strong is the CTO of Ariel Partners, a small IT consulting company based in Times Square.

His company works with both federal agencies and artners, commercial companies. He is a PMP, PMI-ACP, Scrum, SAFe, ICAgile, and Kanban coach and trainer, and is currently designing a governance framework for Agile projects at scale for the Social Security Administration.

Speaker: Craeg Strong
Date: Thursday, 22 June 2023
Time: 1:30 PM to 2:15 PM EDT
Location: Online

About the Talk

Speaker: Craeg Strong

Date: Wednesday, 31 May 2023

Time: 11:05 AM to 11:30 AM EDT

Location: Online

About the Talk

The Alamo Chapter of AFCEA respectfully requests your participation in our annual Alamo AFCEA Chapter Event (Alamo ACE) to be held at the La Cantera Resort in beautiful San Antonio, Texas, November 14 – 17, 2022. The Alamo ACE will provide you access and insight to senior leader perspectives on current developments in cyberspace and future challenges in transforming to multi-domain operations strategically, and military cyber and ISR operations battlespace in the future.

The Alamo ACE is an annual event with a national draw supporting the military community. We expect 2800+ attendees at the 2022 AACE. We’ll open with our traditional golf tournament on Monday, November 14 supporting our Wounded Warrior and Military Families Endowment Fund. The ACE program will consist of two full days of expert panels and esteemed keynote speakers and panels focused on IW, ISR and human capital, followed by a full day of acquisition and classified mission updates.

AFCEA is a non-profit organization which directly supports the military and community through ethical dialogue, professional development, and educational opportunities. The Alamo Chapter has made local and national impacts by providing numerous scholarships and awards to students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Since 2014, the Alamo Chapter has donated nearly 1.5 million to STEM education and Wounded Warrior beneficiaries.

I am excited to be speaking once again at All Day DevOps!

What does it mean to implement zero-trust and DevSecOps principles in a serverless environment?  This is our story of hardening an AWS application based on serverless architecture.  It all began with an idea for a brand-new plugin for the Atlassian Jira Agile tool.  Our plugin uses an innovative design based on GoLang, AWS Athena, Lambdas, and DynamoDB, and the Atlassian AtlasKit SDK for ReactJS.  Serverless applications have many nice features that help make them secure.  Lambdas get their credentials injected at runtime, eliminating the need to store keys or credentials.  Our SSO solution improves security still further, by creating temporary credentials for every session, eliminating static keys and credentials.  Given this excellent foundation, we thought our MVP was ready for production!  Alas, how mistaken we were…

In order to meet Atlassian’s strict cybersecurity guidelines, we implemented security tools including GitHub’s dependabot, AWS credential management services, AWS app firewall, gosec, ZAP tester, and Nessus.  We will discuss lessons learned and what was unique to the serverless environment.  We will also cover privilege audits, data, and disaster recovery.

Using serverless architecture confers many benefits, and by reducing the attack surface, they can be inherently more secure than alternative architectures.  Nevertheless, there are important steps that must be taken to further improve security. This talk will shed light on how to get where we need to be.

The Flight Levels framework represents a breakthrough achievement in the Agile community, finally living up to the promise of true Business Agility. It does this by encompassing every part of the organization and encouraging participation at every level, across all disciplines. The flight level model recognizes that we need three “viewpoints” for managing our work—flight level three, or the strategy level, flight level two, or the coordination level, and flight level one, or the team level. Flight Levels provide a simple and clear way to connect strategy to execution—facilitating alignment and enabling innovation to occur at every level. Unlike complex and prescriptive frameworks, Flight Levels fit in smoothly with your existing processes like Scrum or Kanban and can be adopted quickly and incrementally. In this talk I will introduce the flight levels framework, focusing on the problems that it solves and how it differs from other well-known frameworks. Unlike other frameworks, flight levels can be used by the entire company—it is non-IT specific. In addition, flight levels can happily coexist with other Agile frameworks. Rather than specify what teams should be doing, the flight levels framework focuses on helping teams coordinate in value streams and connecting strategy to execution at the portfolio and corporate strategy level. Unlike traditional org charts, the flight level system maps the flow of work and helps us understand the needs for coordination–where we need daily touchpoints and feedback loops. A flight level system consists of a flight level three, or strategy level board mapping corporate strategy to our portfolio of work via OKRAs—(objectives key results and Actions) as well as one or more flight level two boards to help us coordinate the work of multiple teams within a given value stream. These boards all connect to our standard flight level one team-level Scrum or Kanban boards. This talk introduces an exciting new approach to enterprise agility that is neither vague nor overly prescriptive. Participants will come away with a new perspective on scaling Agile that they can apply immediately, no matter which Agile framework(s) their organization is using.

About the Intelligence and National Security Summit

Powered by AFCEA International and the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), #IntelSummit22 brings public and private sector leaders together to advance collaborative solutions to critical intelligence and national security challenges. The powerful two-day program features five plenaries and six breakout sessions that examine “ripped from the headlines” issues such as Chinese threats to U.S. supply chains, commercial space, election security, and the Russia/Ukraine conflict.

Why Attend

The Summit is the premier forum for unclassified dialogue between U.S. Government intelligence agencies and their industry and academic partners. Attending the Summit provides you with:

• Hands-on access to the latest technological advancements in the intelligence community
• Key insights from senior government leaders, technical experts, leading edge researchers, and people in the field working to overcome challenges with creative solutions
• Opportunities to expand your professional network

About AFCEA International

AFCEA International is a member-based, non-profit association for professionals that provides highly sought after thought leadership, engagement, and networking opportunities. We focus on cyber, command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence to address national and international security challenges. Click here to read more.

About INSA

The Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) is the leading nonpartisan trade association for driving public-private partnerships to advance intelligence and national security priorities. INSA brings together committed experts in and out of government to identify, develop, and promote practical and creative solutions to national security problems. INSA has more than 160 organizations in its membership and enjoys extensive participation from leaders and senior executives in the public, private, and academic sectors. Click here to learn more.

The Flight Levels framework represents a breakthrough achievement in the Agile community, finally living up to the promise of true Business Agility.

Missed the the LIVE airing? Click here to watch the video recording on Linkedin.

Join us to know more or meet Craeg at the Enterprise Agility World Conference!!! https://EAWConference.org

Date: September 08,2022

Time: 2:10 PM Eastern Time

About the Talk

Sony Pictures first began its Servant Leadership journey a few months into the global pandemic. Since then, this way of leading has been avidly adopted in the firm. To accomplish this, they developed a deeply engaging 2-hour course on servant leadership, and over 15% of the company has taken it. More importantly, hundreds of graduates went on to enroll in their innovative 10-month follow-on cohort program. This grass-roots movement went global, jumping over to sister company Sony PlayStation.

Learn how the journey started, why they created the course and cohort program, how the pandemic crisis accelerated the program rollout, and the impacts on business agility at Sony.

Sony Pictures first began its Servant Leadership journey a few months into the global pandemic. Since then, this way of leading has been avidly adopted in the firm. To accomplish this, they developed a deeply engaging 2-hour course on servant leadership, and over 15% of the company has taken it. More importantly, hundreds of graduates went on to enroll in their innovative 10-month follow-on cohort program. This grass-roots movement went global, jumping over to sister company Sony PlayStation.

Learn how the journey started, why they created the course and cohort program, how the pandemic crisis accelerated the program rollout, and the impacts on business agility at Sony.

About Nadya

Nadya Ichinomiya serves as Head, Agile Center of Excellence at Sony Pictures Entertainment, working with teams, executives, and the C-suite to transform their work to be more effective, more human, and more fun.

After starting her career at IBM in sales and management, at age 27, she became Vice President of Electronic Data Systems in Frankfurt as the highest-ranking woman in the region and the youngest VP in a global enterprise of 117, 000 employees. From computer screens to movie screens, Nadya changed course and rebooted her career as a Hollywood producer.

After five years working with Bonnie Hunt in both movies and TV (as a producer on ABC’s Life With Bonnie), she returned to the corporate world, beginning in TV Distribution at MGM.

In 2014, Nadya co-founded the Women In Technology: Hollywood organization (WiTH) and serves as chairwoman of the non-profit foundation. WiTH is a cross-media and entertainment initiative with 6000+ members from the major studios. She also serves on the board of these non-profits: Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) and Warrior Films (makers of Hoop Dreams), filmmakers who inspire social change through transformational solutions.
Nadya holds a business degree from USC and lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons.

“I didn’t know you could do that with Kanban!” This interactive workshop explores Kanban boards that can be used in diverse industries and at multiple levels of the organization. We will explore several interesting examples, including Kanban boards for managing non-IT knowledge work, facilitating multi-team coordination at scale, and even planning and communicating corporate strategy.

We will start out simple, and progressively add more elements, moving things around to highlight different aspects – and that’s going to help us pay more attention to the things we want to be paying attention to.  This workshop has been presented a number of times before, but this time I am particularly excited to report that we will be doing something brand new.  In the past, I always demonstrated different board designs using a whiteboard, but this time we will actually show what these board designs look like in some popular online tools.

So… why this change? Well, there are a couple of reasons.

First the obvious one—we are working remotely more than ever before, so in many cases it’s just not practical to use a physical board.

Second—we are living in a golden age of tools.  They have gotten so much better than they were before.

I have been working closely with a number of tool vendors, and I have to say that they continue to surprise me with some very creative solutions to get around various limitations.  I really believe that we are getting close to being able to do everything in a tool that we could do using a whiteboard.

Part two of the session challenges the attendees to construct a series of Kanban boards at progressively higher levels of abstraction. We will start out at the team level (“flight level” one), then scale up to multi-team (“flight level” two), and finally the portfolio level (“flight level” three). Using painter’s tape and sticky notes of all shapes, sizes and colors, we will gain an appreciation of how thoughtfully designed boards can help unlock true business agility.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand that kanban boards can be useful for coordinating efforts of and managing dependencies between multiple scrum teams
• Think about using kanban to manage strategic efforts; understand the importance of limiting WIP at each level of abstraction (team, value steam, portfolio)
• Systems thinking: Understand how well-performing teams can still be seen as non-responsive by business if they are allocated among multiple efforts
• Systems thinking: Understand how a better performing team can actually reduce effectiveness in a large project by causing dependencies/inventory to pile up for other, slower teams
• Understand some simple and effective ways agile methods can be applied throughout an organization, without requiring disruptive moves like adopting the Spotify model, or firing all middle managers
• Understand concept of flight levels: level 1/team, level 2/value stream, level 3/strategy

Date: Tuesday, 21 June 2022

Time: 11:15 AM to 12:00 PM EDT

Location: Online

Every day in large organizations, ALM data is used to make forecasts and key decisions about budgeting, staffing, and risk management. Organizations increasingly rely on ALM tools to generate alerts to proactively warn about variances, risks, and shortfalls. Unfortunately, due to late, inaccurate, and incomplete data entry, ALM tools often end up emitting a large volume of false positives, while the real risks remain hidden. We hope that one day, all ALM tools will include a smart (contextual) continuous validation capability to reduce the incidences of dirty data. In the meantime, we propose a solution to this critical problem.

Kanban Clinic with Craeg Strong & Shahin Sheidaei

Date, Time and Location:

Date: Wednesday, June 15, 2022

Time: 8-9:30 PM EST

Location: Online

Join us for an exploration and discussion on Kanban. We are going to have a brief conversation around and about Kanban; and then open up to a group discussion to answer any questions you might have, or any addition you might have (Lean Coffee Style). This session is meant for all levels, from exploring to mastering it.

Learn Gherkin, the business language specially designed for automating acceptance tests and behavior driven design

BDD is a new, exciting approach to developing software that has been shown to reduce rework and increase customer satisfaction. While other testing tools focus primarily on “are we building the thing right?”, BDD tools attack the problem of software directly at its source: “are we building the right thing?” By retaining all the benefits of automated unit testing, while extending them upstream to cover requirements, we cut the Gordian knot of risk and complexity to unleash hyper-productivity.

Why is BDD so effective?

• As a form of Test driven design, BDD helps produce frugal, effective and testable software.
• As a development tool, BDD frameworks like SpecFlow provide many convenience functions and are pre-integrated with powerful libraries like Nunit and selenium to make writing tests a snap.
• As a collaboration tool, BDD helps ensure the “three amigos” (tester, analyst and developer) sync up – ahead of time.
• As a facilitation technique, BDD enables product owners to efficiently provide the team with concrete examples that clarify the true intent of a user story and define the boundaries.
• As a reporting tool, BDD captures functional coverage, mapping features to their acceptance criteria to their test results, in an attractive hierarchical presentation.

Want functional documentation? How about documentation that is guaranteed to be correct, because every feature maps to its test results? Witness the holy grail of traceability – executable specifications.

We will start with a brief “show and tell” with several examples of reports generated from BDD tools, to provide context and to immediately highlight the bottom line business value that makes an investment in BDD so worthwhile.

We will spend a few minutes talking about the pre-requisites, so attendees have an idea of what type of investment they are signing their teams up for. We will see that in return for a modest amount of investment in tools and training, very significant benefits can be realized, and the benefits compound over time.

This workshop then dives right in to Gherkin, the structured English language technique used to capture BDD specifications. We will spend the better part of the session learning the tricks and techniques that make for robust and maintainable gherkin specifications. We will review and critique lots of examples, both good and bad.

Finally, we will spend a few minutes reviewing how to organize BDD tests for best results while generating reports, and to ensure that they stay neat and tidy even as you build more and more of them over time.

• Overcoming challenges when scaling large operations
• Best practices for implementing agile methods and tools
• Training, coaching and consulting approaches for Atlassian products and applications

Covid-19 changed the game, making remote work and distributed team members the norm. I think we all sense that something fundamental has changed in the nature of work, and many of these changes will persist even after the pandemic. Like it or not, whiteboards and sticky notes can no longer cut it. We have to use Agile tools. So… which one? In this talk Craeg will do an in depth walkthrough of two leading Agile tools: Atlassian Jira and Kanbanize.

He will review the philosophy of each tool, and then walk through a fully featured simulation, complete with sample projects, plugins, and project configurations, that show off the best that each tool has to offer. Atlassian Jira is a “developer’s tool,” and this heritage shows through clearly in the way it is set up, how the pieces fit together, and the problems it tries to solve. But this is really only a small part of the Jira story. The Jira plugin marketplace has exploded in popularity, with hundreds of high-quality plugins that extend Jira in all sorts of interesting ways. Kanbanize is the market leader among a set of up-and-coming Kanban tools including Kaiten, Swift Kanban, Kanban Zone, and LeanKit. Craeg will explore how Jira supports both Kanban and Scrum at the team level, as well as scaling beyond the team level. In contrast to Jira, Kanbanize offers a “batteries included” approach that tightly integrates features in a unique and highly usable interface. Craeg will explore the areas of overlap and the unique strengths of each tool. In the
end, both are highly capable, flexible, and powerful enough to support even the largest of organizations. But…in the end there can be only one. Come to see the results of this legendary battle!

Topic: How Going Serverless Enabled Us to Support an Agile Transformation in the Middle of a Pandemic

We Are Back! Virtual… for now

Covid-19 changed the game, making remote work and distributed team members the norm. I think we all sense that something fundamental has changed in the nature of work, and many of these changes will persist even after the pandemic. Like it or not, whiteboards and sticky notes can no longer cut it. We have to use Agile tools. So… which one?

In this talk Craeg will do an in-depth walkthrough of two leading Agile tools: Atlassian Jira and Kanbanize. He will review the philosophy of each tool, and then walk through a fully featured simulation, complete with sample projects, plugins, and project configurations, that show off the best that each tool has to offer.

Atlassian Jira is a “developer’s tool,” and this heritage shows through clearly in the way it is set up, how the pieces fit together, and the problems it tries to solve. But this is really only a small part of the Jira story. The Jira plugin marketplace has exploded in popularity, with hundreds of high-quality plugins that extend Jira in all sorts of interesting ways. Craeg will demonstrate a Jira configuration that includes plugins including Nave, Structure, Structure.Gantt, Checklist, Story Maps, and JXL. Taken together, these plugins transform Jira into an Enterprise-strength tool. Craeg will explore how Jira supports both Kanban and Scrum at the team level, as well as scaling beyond the team level.

Kanbanize is the market leader among a set of up-and-coming Kanban tools including Kaiten, Swift Kanban, Kanban Zone, and LeanKit. Craeg will explore how Jira supports both Kanban and Scrum at the team level, as well as scaling beyond the team level. In contrast to Jira, Kanbanize offers a “batteries included” approach that tightly integrates features in a unique and highly usable interface.

Craeg will explore the areas of overlap and the unique strengths of each tool. In the end, both are highly capable, flexible, and powerful enough to support even the largest of organizations. But…in the end there can be only one. Come to see the results of this legendary battle!

We will post the zoom link for all who sign up!

How going Serverless enabled us to support an Agile transformation in the middle of a pandemic

Kanbanize versus Jira

With Craeg Strong

Covid-19 changed the game, making remote work and distributed team members the norm.  I think we all sense that something fundamental has changed in the nature of work, and many of these changes will persist even after the pandemic. Like it or not, whiteboards and sticky notes can no longer cut it. We have to use Agile tools. So… which one? In this talk Craeg will do an in-depth walkthrough of two leading Agile tools: Atlassian Jira and Kanbanize. He will review the philosophy of each tool, and then walk through a fully featured simulation, complete with sample projects, plugins, and project configurations, that show off the best that each tool has to offer.

Atlassian Jira is a “developer’s tool,” and this heritage shows through clearly in the way it is set up, how the pieces fit together, and the problems it tries to solve.  But this is really only a small part of the Jira story.  The Jira plugin marketplace has exploded in popularity, with hundreds of high-quality plugins that extend Jira in all sorts of interesting ways.  Craeg will demonstrate a Jira configuration that includes plugins including Nave, Structure, Structure.Gantt, Checklist, Story Maps, and JXL.  Taken together, these plugins transform Jira into an Enterprise-strength tool.  Craeg will explore how Jira supports both Kanban and Scrum at the team level, as well as scaling beyond the team level.  In addition, Craeg will briefly discuss the elephant in the room, Jira Align, and why he still prefers the “augmented Jira” approach.   Kanbanize is the market leader among a set of up-and-coming Kanban tools including Kaiten, Swift Kanban, Kanban Zone, and LeanKit.  Craeg will explore how Jira supports both Kanban and Scrum at the team level, as well as scaling beyond the team level.  In contrast to Jira, Kanbanize offers a “batteries included” approach that tightly integrates features in a unique and highly usable interface.

Craeg will explore the areas of overlap and the unique strengths of each tool.  In the end, both are highly capable, flexible, and powerful enough to support even the largest of organizations.   But…in the end there can be only one.  Come to see the results of this legendary battle!

Innovative Silicon Valley companies like Etsy leverage DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices to achieve new levels of automation and agility, shrinking development lead times and deploying to production many times each day.  However, many companies struggle to implement these practices for the legacy systems that run their core business.  To make matters worse, the agile community offers relatively little practical guidance for implementing DevOps practices in legacy environments.  Fortunately, the Kanban Method provides a practical way to gradually evolve these core systems towards achieving DevOps cost savings and efficiencies—without turning your organization upside down, and even if you don’t have a massive budget.

Through a case study involving a criminal justice system for a US government agency, we will examine how the Kanban method helps us identify and remove the barriers that prevent us from implementing DevOps automation for legacy systems.  Just as importantly, Kanban provides the means to measure the efficacy of our efforts, prompting us to course-correct when necessary.   Both technology-related and human-related concerns will be addressed.  We will review some interesting examples using the Microsoft technology stack.  The end result is better quality and collaboration and faster delivery of value to our stakeholders.  Perhaps it is possible to teach an old dog new tricks, after all.

A poorly tuned Jira is a daily struggle for your team. Join this session to learn tips and tricks for making the Jira experience amazing for teams of any variety. We will show you how to turn all the knobs to 11 and create a state-of-the-art Jira experience. With the right care and feeding Jira can be a significant corporate asset that can help you transform your business. The streamlined interface reduces the learning curve and makes Jira a pleasure to use, which increases adoption. You get more people using Jira, putting better information into it. You get happier, more productive teams, reliable forecasts, and much more accurate information to make business decisions.  We think Johann Sebastian Bach would approve.

A poorly tuned Jira is a daily struggle for your team. Join this session to learn tips and tricks for making the Jira experience amazing for teams of any variety. You get happier, more productive teams, reliable forecasts, and much more accurate information to make business decisions.

Abstract

Remember healthcare.gov?  The Boeing 737Max anti-stall system? Traditional governance methods focusing on heavyweight documentation deliverables and earned value metrics are obviously not working.  In this session we will summarize a governance and oversight framework we put together for large-scale agile software development for the US government.  The framework is designed to be agnostic as to the choice of Agile scaling framework, and to apply to efforts in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.   Oversight groups often do not have the technical skills nor the bandwidth to take a deep dive and truly understand the risks associated with large scale efforts.  And all too often the status is consistently reported as green—until it is suddenly revealed that the project is 6 months late.  How can we fight our implacable enemies: complexity and entropy? Fortunately, there are some relatively simple principles and techniques we can use to proactively detect the danger signs—before it is too late.  We will review key aspects including measuring the right things, avoiding common failure modes, adopting better practices, and keeping track.  We will see how DevSecOps enables us to enforce a “broken windows” strategy.  We will explore how to use counterbalancing metrics to encourage good technical practices and prevent gaming the system.  If you are working at scale, this session is for you.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand qualitative differences between small-team agile and agile at scale: how not just more but different practices are required
• Know how to see warning signs via leading indicators to know when a large effort is getting into trouble, so we don’t wait until it is too late
• Understand which basic metrics, KPIs, and health indicators should be monitored for large-scale agile
• Explore the differences between legacy-heavy and “cold-start” environments such as the federal government and how they require different techniques for forecasting and estimation
• Review the NoEstimates approach, Kanban metrics, and how they can help for large-scale teams—especially scrum teams

Agile Governance at Scale

This is an experience report describing how we used Kanban plus the Theory of Change to begin a transformation of a NYC social services agency away from traditional ways of doing business and towards a more adaptable, responsive, and outcomes-driven approach and ultimately a better steward of taxpayer monies.

Like many health and human services-based agencies, this mayoral agency was originally focused on procurements, contracts with third party providers, and standardized quarterly reporting to run its operations.

The commissioner challenged his agency to become more directly client-facing, data-driven, and oriented on outcomes.  The agency leveraged the Theory of Change (ToC) to establish a conceptual framework including a set of desired outcomes and the high-level steps it will take to achieve the outcomes.   ToC seeks to fill in the gaps between actions (e.g. provide afterschool program) and key results (e.g. reduce school dropout rates).  ToC is especially relevant in health and human services contexts due to the difficulty in making these kinds of connections.

We observed that the ToC approach is compatible with Objectives and Key Results (OKR) which according to Klaus Leopold often plays a key part of a flight-level three (strategic) Kanban system.  In our engagement we focused at the strategic level and worked together to establish a flight-level three (strategy) kanban system for the CIO to manage his initiatives.  We designed and built a number of metrics so that the CIO could measure relative levels of investment and effort between different initiatives.  This was a huge leap forward, since in the past the CIO could only report aggregate numbers and therefore had no way of measuring cost/benefit by matching outcomes to specific investments.

Our work with this client is continuing, and many new challenges have arisen.  Ultimately, however, the agency is making good progress on its drive to improve organizational maturity and a deeper and richer Kanban implementation. This session will dive into lessons learned, results achieved, and key observations.

“I didn’t know you could do that with Kanban!”  This interactive workshop reveals how Kanban systems can help solve the governance and coordination problems that threaten large-scale initiatives.    Too many strategic priorities chasing too few resources.  Dependencies between teams.  Delays due to lack of clear delineations of ownership and responsibility, and a crisp definition of ready. We will explore innovative new Kanban designs that can significantly simplify these difficult problems, ultimately resulting in better outcomes with less stress.  We will start by reviewing Kanban board designs from diverse industries and at multiple levels of the organization.  We will then interactively construct several interesting examples, including Kanban boards for managing multiple streams of work, facilitating multi-team coordination at scale, and even planning and communicating corporate strategy.  Powerful concepts like demand shaping, classes of service, capacity tokens, and order points will effortlessly reveal themselves.  Best of all: these Kanban systems are perfectly compatible with Scrum Scaling frameworks such as Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) and the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).  In fact, one might call them the secret ingredient!  Using nothing but painter’s tape and sticky notes of all shapes, sizes and colors, we will gain an appreciation of how thoughtfully designed boards (and the coordination systems they enable) can help unlock true business agility.

Ariel Partners has developed a comprehensive program for governance and oversight of large-scale agile projects in the US federal government. This program is structured as a set of eleven major focus areas. Within each focus area, there are specific oversight objectives, activities, and metrics. The output is captured in an excel spreadsheet that calculates a set of quantitative measures, which are then aggregated to automatically produce a composite score, using a similar scoring strategy to FITARA. The program is comprehensive, but it is based on a set of simple principles. We have prepared a presentation that summarizes the program’s key points.

Ariel Partners is very proud to have participated in the US Women’s Chamber of Commerce Small Business Summit at the US Senate Finance Committee Hearing Room. Senator Wyden of Oregon explained some new tax incentives that will help promote new Woman Owned Small Businesses (WOSB) and help them grow! #wosb #taxes #smallbusiness

Traditional duties of IT governance and oversight include auditing timely completion of milestones and phase gates and tracking progress versus spend. They place heavy emphasis on correctness and completeness of documentation, managing risks and tracking metrics such as earned value and escaped defect counts. With the adoption of agile methods comes the need to adjust governance and oversight accordingly. But what does agile governance look like? How does it differ from traditional governance? We will show that, in fact, agile methods offer governance and oversight a wealth of new tools and capabilities, enabling a more proactive and collaborative approach—which could ultimately lead to improved outcomes.

Our Presentation

We will briefly cover some recommendations for governance and oversight in each of the following key areas: scoping and planning, risk and stakeholder management, staffing, progress tracking, product design and build quality. Agile projects perform “rolling wave” planning, where business needs are fully elaborated just in time before they are implemented to minimize waste. On the other hand, agile projects must provide roadmaps and forecasts that enable their organizations to schedule and budget efforts, sometimes years in advance. Oversight bodies should ensure that such forecasts are based on sound statistical techniques (i.e. Monte Carlo simulations) and are updated regularly with the arrival of new data. Instead of synthetic quantities like story points, oversight groups should focus on real-world metrics like throughput, cycle time, and work in progress across the entire project, as well as on a per-team level. Oversight should look for early warning signs like working on too many items in parallel, assigning “stretch goals” for product releases, or lack of any formal mechanism to manage cross-team dependencies. We will cover examples that illustrate how agile methods enable a more proactive, collaborative, and ultimately more effective approach to governance and oversight.

Location: 650 Massachusetts Avenue NW, 3rd Floor, Washington DC, Conference Room 3212.

Have you seen or experienced agile transformations that were planned long-term, start-to-finish, and possibly with a plan? Maybe you have also seen agile transformations being “rolled-out”, top-down? How about agile transformations that focused on only on one aspect of agile, for example time to market? If so, you are not alone.

Why do so many organizations plan agile transformations in a traditional project management approach if the desired outcome should be agile? How can we expect teams to be feel empowered and self-organized if a specific version of agile is being dictated? Why are so many agile transformation challenged or have failed? Maybe because of exactly that.

Let’s talk about a practice to change that and introduce agility to a process that transforms organizations to agile. A practice that is called the Agile Transformation Kata. Let’s walk through the Kata together and see why transformations are never really complete, value driven and uses servant leadership as management style. While talking about the Kata, we will keep a close eye on the role of the Agile Transformation Coach.

Speaker: Jochen (Joe) Krebs

Jochen (Joe) Krebs is a Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) and an Agile Coach with Incrementor. Joe has delivered Scrum courses and workshops for over 10 years to thousands of participants world-wide. He is the author of the book Agile Portfolio Management and produced the Agile Transformation Kata. He had hundreds of guests on his podcast Agile.FM over the past years . As a coach, Joe has led several large organizations and start-up’s alike through a successful agile transformation using Scrum. Joe also launched a brand new certification program in the agile community called the “Certified Agile Transformation Coach – C-ATC).

This two-part interactive workshop begins with a look at how to interpret Kanban boards and ask thoughtful questions so that you can improve the work of your teams. I will briefly review the Kanban Method, provide a few example boards and then proceed through a series of several short exercises that will give you an opportunity to review and interpret various Kanban board configurations with other attendees at your table.

Part two of the session puts the attendees in the driver’s seat to create their own board configurations. I will provide several business scenario exercises and ask the attendees how they would go about configuring their Kanban board given the unique system constraints for each scenario. We will start with a team-level board, then a multi-team board, and finally a strategic portfolio board.

Speaker: Craeg Strong

Craeg Strong is the CTO of Ariel Partners, a small IT consulting company based in Times Square. He is currently teaching public Kanban classes and coaching teams to adopt and mature Agile/Kanban practices in the NYC area. He has 25 years of experience in information technology, starting at Project Athena during his undergraduate studies at MIT. Mr. Strong has successfully instituted Agile and DevOps practices on large and complex commercial and government software projects, helping them to obtain new capabilities and realize significant cost efficiencies.

Mr. Strong leverages his experience as a hands-on software architect, trainer and agile coach to help remove the barriers that prevent organizations from adopting new technologies– such as cloud. Mr. Strong led a successful transformation of a major FBI Criminal justice program from a traditional waterfall lifecycle and manual intensive processes to lighter weight agile processes and full DevOps automation.

Guillaume Marceau will present his innovative solution to portfolio and resource management: firepower. With firepower, Guillaume is able to allocate multiple resources across dozens of ongoing parallel initiatives, while avoiding over-committing and preserving the ability to adjust each week. Firepower enables IT to provide full visibility into the way IT resources are being allocated, so we can be sure that what we are doing matches the strategic business goals. Firepower runs on top of JIRA, and incorporates daily statistics so we know what people _actually_ worked on as opposed to what we planned to work on. At BrightPower, firepower has transformed the conversation between business and IT, helping to set expectations and enable IT and business to engage in meaningful strategic dialog. Firepower sharpened everyone’s perception and enabled them to focus on the most important initiatives. It communicates in a simple and visceral way how our limited IT resources are deployed, and the fact that adding another active task has to be balanced with reducing efforts elsewhere or adding capability.

We are super excited to see Guillaume demonstrate this solution, because too many times we have seen and lived the alternatives.

It doesn’t matter how agile specific teams are if management keeps jamming too much work into the system, they will not be effective they will spend too much time task switching. Also it doesn’t matter how reliably and with quality teams deliver software; if the expectations of management are so far out of line, they will still be perceived as not delivering.

Speaker: Guillaume Marceau

Since 2017, Guillaume Marceau has managed the software development team at Bright Power. He has succeeded at transforming teams into high performance, joyful engineering cultures that develop ground-breaking high-tech software, correct their course based on new data, and ship on time.

Prior to joining Bright Power, Guillaume served in technical leadership for different high-tech startups in New York and San Francisco: at Body Labs, Inc, using deep learning and body models, at Stellar using an energy efficient blockchain algorithm, and at Sefaira deploying Scala to bring building energy analysis to scale. Guillaume received the Best-Paper Award from the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) in 2011 and the Best-Paper Award from the Automated Software Engineering Journal in 2006. He participated in scientific research across many topics, ranging from securing the Linux kernel to bringing insights from signal processing to web programs, and on how to best teach programming.

This two-part interactive workshop begins with a look at how to interpret Kanban boards and ask thoughtful questions so that you can improve the work of your teams. I will briefly review the Kanban Method, provide a few example boards and then proceed through a series of several short exercises that will give you an opportunity to review and interpret various Kanban board configurations with other attendees at your table.

Part two of the session puts the attendees in the driver’s seat to create their own board configurations. I will provide several business scenario exercises and ask the attendees how they would go about configuring their Kanban board given the unique system constraints for each scenario. We will start with a team-level board, then a multi-team board, and finally a strategic portfolio board.

Speaker: Craeg Strong

Craeg Strong is the CTO of Ariel Partners, a small IT consulting company based in Times Square. He is currently teaching public Kanban classes and coaching teams to adopt and mature Agile/Kanban practices in the NYC area. He has 25 years of experience in information technology, starting at Project Athena during his undergraduate studies at MIT. Mr. Strong has successfully instituted Agile and DevOps practices on large and complex commercial and government software projects, helping them to obtain new capabilities and realize significant cost efficiencies.

Mr. Strong leverages his experience as a hands-on software architect, trainer and agile coach to help remove the barriers that prevent organizations from adopting new technologies– such as cloud. Mr. Strong led a successful transformation of a major FBI Criminal justice program from a traditional waterfall lifecycle and manual intensive processes to lighter weight agile processes and full DevOps automation.

This two-part interactive workshop begins with a detailed look at how to

In this interactive workshop we will examine multiple examples of Antipatterns observed in real-world Kanban boards. In each case we will identify the issues and discuss ways to improve the situation. We will review a number of better alternatives and see how the improvements map to the core principles of Kanban such as visualization, managing flow, and making policies explicit. Brand new to Kanban? Learning by example is a great way to get started! A long-time Kanban veteran? Come to see how many antipatterns you recognize and help firm up our Kanban Antipattern taxonomy and nomenclature!

Kanban is an extremely versatile and effective Agile method that has seen significant growth in popularity over recent years. Kanban’s flexibility has led to widespread adoption to manage business processes in disparate contexts such as HR, loan processing, drug discovery, and insurance underwriting, in addition to Information Technology. Like snowflakes, no two Kanban boards are alike. The downside to this flexibility is there is no well-known and easily accessible library of patterns for designing effective Kanban boards. Like Apollo engineers, teams are expected to design their board starting from first principles. Unfortunately, sometimes teams get stuck with board designs that may not provide the visibility and insight into their workflow they hope to see. Worse, some designs actually may serve only to obscure the situation. Working within the limitations of an electronic board can exacerbate the problem even further. Is all hope lost? Certainly not!

Let’s learn more about effective Kanban system design by examining what to avoid and why. Learning by example is effective and fun!

For decades, the homeless crisis in major US cities has continued to worsen. Major US metropolitan areas now provide shelter for tens of thousands of vulnerable inhabitants every night. How can technology help “turn the tide” and improve this situation? Come listen to a fascinating case study about IT transformation at a major US municipal social services agency to better serve the needs of its most vulnerable citizens and help get them back on track. Utilizing agile, rapid application development and human centered design, the team developed solutions that have already had an immediate impact for the city and its citizens. Join us to learn how the team went from ideation to prototype to rollout of technologies in weeks instead of years—and discuss the lessons to be learned from this story of digital transformation.

Speaker: Michael J. Jabbour, DACM

What do we really mean when we say that a problem is “complex”? Do we simply mean to say that a given problem is extremely complicated, or are complex problems something fundamentally different? We typically assume we are operating in a deterministic, ordered system where we can identify a cause and effect relationship, when in actuality we are often operating in a non-deterministic complex system, where these relationships can not be known in advance, if at all. How can we sense which context we are operating in and how might we act under varying degrees of uncertainty.

Complexity Theory is a term used to describe a field that is focused on the study of complex systems. Complexity science is not a single theory— it encompasses multiple theoretical frameworks, seeking answers to some of the fundamental questions about continuously changing, dynamic systems.

Cynefin is a framework developed by Dave Snowden and Cognitive Edge which seeks to help us “make sense of the world, such that we can act in it”. By understanding the fundamental differences between directed (ordered) systems and emergent (unordered) systems, we can modify our approach to match the context of the problem we are facing. The Cynefin framework takes a science-based approach to dealing with critical business issues, drawing from anthropology, neuroscience, and complex adaptive systems theory to improve decision making.

Complexity Theory and Cynefin have an undeserved reputation for being difficult to grasp. In this introductory talk, we will break down these approaches so that we can effectively use them to help us to better act under conditions of uncertainty.

Speaker: Jocko Selberg

Jocko Selberg is currently a Lean-Agile Coach with nearly 20 years experience in the industry. He is the co-founder of the NYC Complexity and Cynefin meetup.

This two-part interactive workshop begins with a detailed look at how to interpret Kanban boards and ask thoughtful questions so that you can improve the work of your teams. We will provide an overview of the Kanban Method and then proceed through a series of several short exercises that will give you an opportunity to review and interpret various Kanban board configurations with other attendees at your table.

After a short break, part two of the session now puts the attendees in the driver’s seat to create their own board configurations. We provide several business scenario exercises and ask the attendees how they would go about configuring their Kanban board given the unique system constraints for each scenario.

For those who attended our session at LKNA 2018 (Kanban in Action), this session is similar but with new content and updated examples. For those new to the session, come join us for a fun and interactive workshop where you get to explore Kanban designs in various contexts!

Speaker: Mark Grove

Mark Grove is an agile coach and Management Consultant with Excella Consulting and an ICAgile Authorized Trainer and Lean Kanban University Accredited Kanban Trainer (AKT). He coaches individuals and teams to continuously deliver value to the customer by embracing an Agile mindset while maximizing business performance and team potential. He provides coaching and facilitation expertise on a variety of Agile topics as well as creates and delivers training on a broad range of Agile subjects. Mark holds a Master’s degree in Information Systems and multiple Agile certifications from various certifying organizations.

Agile adoptions are failing at a higher rate more than ever. Industry experience reports indicate that culture change is a major impediment for new ways of working to be accepted and creating a safe environment for sustainability. Many major consulting organizations are mandating and pushing bad practices on people instead of meeting stakeholders where they are at and inviting everyone to an alternative approach to cultural agility. As agile leaders of a global coaching team, we were responsible for a strategy to train and coach a large enterprise infrastructure and operations group to adopt a new agile way of working. In a little over a year, our global enterprise agile coaching team successfully championed and executed the use of the Kanban Method where the nature of the work was on-demand and transactional in nature. We will share our experiences inviting leadership to consider the new approach, how we co-created the strategy, launched the teams, organized an engaged community of practice, and created a safe space for experimentation, learning, and innovation to grow. The achieved outcomes focused on eliminating manual handoffs and dependencies, improving cycle and lead times, and drastically reducing demand for a sustainable and enjoyable flow of work.
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Speaker: Tim Stadinski

Tim Stadinski is an agile leader with 24 years of digital entrepreneurial experience partnering with leaders at all levels focused on increasing employee engagement to implement cultural agility and continuous improvement in organizations. He started his career as a software engineer working for startups in the 90’s and was inspecting and adapting before we called it agile. He has diverse experience in Startups, Automotive, Renewable Energy, Insurance, Music, Publishing, Environmental, Education, Sports, Healthcare, Human Capital Management, Finance, and Internet markets. For the past 10 years, he has been working as an enthusiastic change agent who thrives in environments of ambiguity and uncertainty and passionately believes in a pragmatic, methodology agnostic, learn-by-doing invitational approach to sustain continuous learning and improvements in organizations.

Only 4% of agilists say Agile adapts to changing market conditions in the 2018 State Of Agile survey. Four Percent. And that’s the largest and longest running survey in the agile world. If XP embraces change, and 98% of agilists in the same survey say agile benefits them at a team level, the problem here is Scaling.

Scaling violates YAGNI, disconnects business and tech from customers, and destroys team autonomy. In this talk, XP pioneer Peter Merel – credited in Beck’s 1st XP book – explains how 3 Descaling Metrics and 4 Descaling Patterns solve Scaling and generate Business Agility, not Agile Bureaucracy. This isn’t turning back the clock to 1999 or just wishing real hard – it’s simple and practical. And you don’t need to fight SAFe, LeSS, DA or any of the frameworks to get it going. This works with all of them. Pedal, metal, rubber and road.

Speaker: Peter Merel

Peter Merel created the very first agile training game, the coffeepot game or “Extreme Hour”, and ran it at a plenary session of the very first agile conference, XP2000. Credited in Beck’s original XP book, Peter ran the second XP program in the world at GMAC over twenty years ago. He took part in formation of the original Alliance and Manifesto too. Having led multiple successful agile transformations, five years ago Peter began to teach a “Descaling Business-Agile Unframework” called XSCALE. A thriving Linux-style learning ecosystem of independent agile coaches and consultancies have grown up around XSCALE to covers the Americas, EU/UK, India and Australasia. Game Without Thrones is a key training game in “XSCALE Business Agility”, one of the three pattern languages that make up XSCALE.

Speaker: John S. Badgley

5-year Business Agility Coach: G5, Genesis of Chaordic and Exponential organizations. 10-year Enterprise Agile Coach, Facilitator: Leadership, Portfolio, and Delivery, 20-year Leader and Coach, Transformational Education with Landmark Worldwide, 20-year Portfolio of Web 3.0, Mobile, Social, and eCommerce Solution Delivery, A Visionary, Committed to Innovation, Gamification, and Real Change // Asst Professor/ Guest Speaker – New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, Guest Speaker – Agile and Agility meetup – Stevens Institute of Technology, Alfred University, Author, Speaker – G5 Movement for Personal, Career, and Business Agility success, Founder, Creator – Genesis: Lean Customer Generated Startup, Founder, Creator – Agile Fight Club, Game show host

Speaker: Minton Brooks

Minton Brooks is a business agility coach and executive consultant. He has supported organizational transformation initiatives within Fortune 100 companies for the past 19 years. Clients include IBM, Travelers, Ford, US Bank, Cigna, Wells Fargo, WellPoint, Merck and Aetna. Brooks is an accredited Kanban coach and trainer and an XSCALE business agility and product management coach. He has been an XSCALE Steward since October 2017.

Given an ancient codebase that makes refactoring risky and expensive, how do you clear a path to continued delivery? The old wisdom says the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the next best time is today. But if you already have a gnarled old source tree, preserve your software investment by planting a Strangler: a pattern for reaping continuous value from your existing system while growing new functionality alongside it.
We’ll take a quick look at a Strangler, demonstrate the basics of Mob Programming, then split into small groups to test-drive new features into the system. You’ll leave with a powerful strategy for extending the useful life of working, valuable software — especially when it’s hard to change — and with a free bonus development practice to accelerate your team’s learning.

Speaker: Amitai Schleier (@schmonz)

Amitai Schleier is a software development coach, legacy code wrestler, non-award-winning musician, and award-winning bad poet. He publishes fixed-length micropodcasts at Agile in 3 Minutes, writes variable-length articles at schmonz.com, and contributes code and direction to notable open-source projects such as NetBSD,pkgsrc, ikiwiki, and qmail. Amitai’s ideas, prose, music, and puns have manifested atAgile Roots, Agile for Humans, CodeMash, Self.conference, pkgsrcCon, Pittsburgh Perl Workshop, NYCBUG, the International Rachmaninoff Conference, and the Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest.

Lean and Kanban are not ends in themselves; they are great for shining a light on bottlenecks and enabling an efficient flow of work to deliver business value. But how do we deal with those bottlenecks, anyway? How can we prevent them in the first place? How can we analyze our requirements better so we can understand the business value that we are supposed to be delivering?

This is where good XP Practices come in!

We will talk about story splitting and test automation.

With lots of examples and lessons learned to share, we hope to spark a lively discussion.

As the co-creator of LeSS, Craig Larman (with friend and colleague Bas Vodde), after a decade of working worldwide with large product groups in their adoption of LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum), organizations are starting to realize that the main goal of LeSS is not to enable traditional big groups to “meet their commitment” more efficiently. And they are realizing that LeSS is not “Scrum contained within each team, with something different on top.” It seems some scaling frameworks contain Scrum like a fire fighter contains a brushfire.

Then what is LeSS about? It is to see the ineffectiveness of traditional large-scale organizational design and to change it, by descaling with LeSS towards a simple model for multiple teams that optimizes for agility (flexibility), learning, and flow of value. It is figuring out how, with multiple teams, to apply the simple principles and elements of Scrum that encourage empirical process control, transparency, self-managing teams, and systems optimization.

But any structural change per definition challenges the status quo of middle-management and single-specialist positions, leading to the dynamics of Larman’s Laws of Organizational Behavior.

In this meetup Craig will explore descaling with LeSS.

You recently completed a two-day training, and you are now a Certified ScrumMaster. There’s only one problem: what do you actually do next?

Part of the genius of the Agile Manifesto is that it doesn’t tell you exactly what to do. It gives you a resilient foundation of values and principles that is grounded in discovered truths, and then lets you figure out how to apply it. Scrum describes process a bit more, but still leaves a lot of open questions. Again, this room to adapt is incredibly powerful. However, at the outset it can be quite daunting. Even after going through Certified ScrumMaster training, new practitioners may be a little lost as to what exactly to do next.

Over the years, I’ve built up a set of simple, concrete practices that I use both to get teams started and to help existing teams that are having trouble. Recently, after helping three teams get up to speed in quick succession, I decided to write down these practices as a playbook. While I look forward to the day when these teams grow beyond my playbook and throw it in the trash, I have seen great results from starting with a small set of concrete practices. Come to this session and walk out with simple, concrete things you can do to get your team flying.

Speaker: Matthieu Cornillon

Matthieu Cornillon leads the Agile practice at Amplify, a Brooklyn-based education technology company partnering with teachers to help them do their nearly impossible and utterly essential jobs, by extending their reach, saving them time, and enhancing their understanding of each student.

Let’s get this meetup restarted! This is an opportunity to steer the future for who will speak and what topics we will cover over the next few months

I think there are some interesting topics to discuss– lots going on now that agile has crossed the chasm and is well into mass adoption. Some thoughts I had:

Choosing an agile method: Kanban, Scrum, LeSS, Heart of agile, or what? Does a framework like Cynefin provide any guidance that may be helpful?
Automated tests: tips and tricks. How to reduce the pain. Balancing test coverage vs pain of maintenance. Feature testing, BDD, and other variants. New vendor offerings.

DevOps. IaaS and CI/CD. Different tools? Integrated? Dedicated build master?

Git, GitHubFlow, GitFlow, and GitLabFlow. Discuss…
Limitations of automated code migrations and CI/CD. Can schema migration reliably be automated?

How to deal with an agile implementation that has stalled or “failed?” Post-mortem analysis and brainstorming where/how to go from here.

Just to get things started I will present a talk I just gave at AgileDC on 10/25 for instituting Agile when you encounter resistance: highly regulated, heavy compliance, legacy software, etc.

Is it possible to deliver software improvements faster and with better quality in a highly regulated environment? What if the organization only uses off-the-shelf commercial packages like SAP rather than custom software? Oh, and much of the team is still learning the ropes? And by the way, our business users are unavailable during monthly and quarterly close, and to top it all off whole divisions go off-line for weeks or months at a time during refinery “turnaround” events? How can we improve cycle times, if it sometimes takes us months just to figure out how to design a solution for a single request?

In this session, we will examine a case study at an energy company that needed to increase their speed of delivery and their level of quality, while at the same time controlling costs. They started to adopt Kanban a year ago, by visualizing their waterfall process on a board and holding a daily stand-up. However, cycle times were still unacceptably long, and the board did not change much day-by-day. Worse, the business was getting more impatient and the backlog of urgent requests was growing longer. The team was ready to take the next step and deepen their kanban implementation.

We will examine a number of improvements that were made and the impact of each one of them. Larger work items were broken down into user stories, enabling progress to be tracked at a more granular level and helping the team to break down difficult problems into smaller, bite-sized chunks. Defects were captured individually on the board so large items did not appear to “stall” for no reason. Time-boxed “Spikes” could be created to capture efforts required to identify alternatives and reduce risk in design or implementation. The kanban boards went through multiple iterations as we updated them to better reflect our new process.

Many new projects experience delays in the “fuzzy front end,” resulting in a compressed

In a federal government contracting milieu, once a procurement is finally awarded, the contractor is expected to instantly spring into action and magically “do the right thing.” time schedule, unrealistic expectations, and staff burnout. How do you start “sprinting” when you don’t know which direction you should be headed, and you haven’t even finished staffing up your team?

Scrum’s “Sprint Zero” is an altogether unsatisfactory answer (although it is now appearing in many government RFPs).

What techniques can help us get started?

automated kanban tools helped turn chaos into useful progress and ultimately into In this we will trace the evolution of a project for the US Department of Homeland Security from a vague idea to a completed prototype and see how personal kanban, aggregated personal kanban, kanban boards, physical boards talkandflow.

Behavior Driven Design (BDD) is a new, exciting approach to developing software that has been shown to reduce rework and increase customer satisfaction. While other testing tools focus primarily on “are we building the thing right?”, BDD tools attack the problem of software directly at its source: “are we building the right thing?” By retaining all the benefits of automated unit testing, while extending them upstream to cover requirements, we cut the Gordian knot of risk and complexity to unleash hyper-productivity.

Why is BDD so effective?

• As a form of Test driven design, BDD helps produce frugal, effective and testable software.
• As a development tool, BDD frameworks like SpecFlow provide many convenience functions and are pre-integrated with powerful libraries like Nunit and selenium to make writing tests a snap.
• As a collaboration tool, BDD helps ensure the “three amigos” (tester, analyst and developer) sync up – ahead of time.
• As a facilitation technique, BDD enables product owners to efficiently provide the team with concrete examples that clarify the true intent of a user story and define the boundaries.
• As a reporting tool, BDD captures functional coverage, mapping features to their acceptance criteria to their test results, in an attractive hierarchical presentation.

Innovative Silicon Valley companies like Etsy leverage DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices to achieve new levels of automation and agility, shrinking development lead times and deploying to production many times each day. However, many companies struggle to implement these practices for the legacy systems that run their core business. To make matters worse, the agile community offers relatively little practical guidance for implementing DevOps practices in legacy environments. Fortunately, the Kanban Method provides a practical way to gradually evolve these core systems towards DevOps nirvana—without turning your organization upside down, and even if you don’t have a massive budget.

Through a case study involving a criminal justice system for a US government agency, we will examine how the Kanban method helps us identify and remove the barriers that prevent us from implementing DevOps automation for legacy systems. Just as importantly, Kanban provides the means to measure the efficacy of our efforts, prompting us to course-correct when necessary. Both technology-related and human-related concerns will be addressed. We will review some interesting examples using the Microsoft technology stack, and these lessons can be applied to Java, LAMP, MEAN, or any other set of technologies. The end result is better quality and collaboration and faster delivery of value to our stakeholders. Perhaps it is possible to teach an old dog new tricks, after all.

Agile software development methods are now well established in many commercial organizations and are starting to make inroads into government contexts. There are reports of software development projects using Agile methods that achieve significantly higher levels of productivity and quality compared with projects that used traditional methods. When it comes to brand new “start from scratch” software projects, a wealth of information, advice, training, and literature exists to help guide practitioners and speed them along the path to agility. Unfortunately, most such publicly available resources have relatively little to say when it comes to legacy systems. However, there is a small but growing amount of evidence that agile practices can yield compelling benefits for legacy projects—even those that have been previously successful using traditional methods. Our experience suggests that agile practices need to be customized and introduced in a different order into a legacy project. This presentation provides an analysis of the differences between legacy projects and new software development and the implications for the adoption of agile methods.

Over the last five years, Scrum has made significant advances and is now the best-known and most popular Agile framework by a wide margin. However, in recent years Kanban has emerged as an alternative to Scrum. Many companies are attracted to Kanban due to the promise of a flatter learning curve, easier adoption, and wider applicability beyond just IT to other parts of the company. But – is Kanban really an alternative to Scrum? And what is Scrumban, anyway? This talk describes our experiences transforming a mission-critical criminal justice program for the Federal Government from waterfall to Scrum, and how the Kanban Method has given us the tools to address some significant challenges to our Scrum implementation. This talk should help you answer some important questions such as:

• Within the Agile framework what exactly is Scrum, Kanban and Scrumban? What are the similarities and differences?
• What criteria should be used to choose an Agile method?
• How do we get started?
• If we run into obstacles, what techniques can we apply to help move forward?
• Why should I consider a physical board if I already have a tool?
• I know about visual boards, so does that mean I already know Kanban?