Project Management

Self-selection is a facilitated process that allows people to exercise autonomy by choosing their preferred initiatives and joining new teams. As exciting as it may sound to some, the idea of self-selection may cause others to experience all sorts of fear: fear of missing out, fear of not being selected, or fear of picking a wrong team. Let Dana Pylayeva alleviate those fears by taking you through effective preparation steps and a round of self-selection simulation. Hands-on activities such as drawing, making participants cards in a Team Ingredients Assessment, and playing the Not2Spooky4Me card game will keep everyone engaged and maximize learning. The game-like format creates a safe space for you to ask questions and overcome fears. By the end of this session, you will be able to explain five steps to prepare for self-selection and three steps to run the process, so you can go back to your teams with confidence.

Distributed teams are the norm in Fortune 100 and 500 companies, crossing many time zones and multiple cultures. These teams seldom communicate directly, instead using a point of contact to relay information. While teams don't need to be collocated to deliver significant business value, they must use their DevOps pipeline to their advantage. Through continuous integration and automated testing, stories can be swarmed by distributed teams and completed in a fraction of the time it typically takes. Treasa Overton will discuss how this distributed model allows for faster delivery of business value, which can lead to a greater market share. Learn how distributed teams with dependencies on infrastructure or middleware can integrate continuously, build quality into code, and make feedback and corrections faster, whether for acceptance testing or delivery to customers.

Organizations often declare they are "going agile." This goal is misplaced, misguided, and just plain wrong. In fact, the agile community has become a cult of practice: Teams are too focused on the way to do things and making sure they are doing those methods correctly. We even turned agile into a proper noun so that we could more easily sell it. But what about the outcomes? This workshop will use the Modern Agile principles proposed by Joshua Kerievsky to walk some of those ideas back. The four principles—Make People Awesome, Deliver Value Continuously, Experiment & Learn Rapidly, and Make Safety a Prerequisite—will drive our exploration of what agile can mean today and how to put the focus back on outcomes. Bob Payne will focus on learning and continuous improvement to reach better business outcomes.

When many think of modernizing or altering their firm with the goal of staying competitive in the market, thoughts of expensive, cutting-edge concepts that are difficult to implement usually come to mind. But innovation doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. The fact is that pure modernism is focusing on the benefit of the customer, the team, and the business. It does not always have to be overly technical or costly. As with speed, the most economical method to determine if a company is pursuing innovation is to look internally and discover how the workforce is being utilized. Giancarlo Di Vece will explore some of the key innovation questions: How do we determine if team members are appropriately applied and the project evenly distributed? Which tools do we need to get the job done? How does training drive innovation? Are we collaborating in a meaningful and useful way?