The success of any project depends significantly on one major factor - the people and teams that pull together to deliver value to the business. It doesn’t matter what standards and processes a company employ, the technologies they use, or even what product they are building; if the group of people that is executing against the vision is not performing well together as a team, success is going to be much harder to achieve.
So, what constitutes a high performance team? What factors would set your team up for success? How would you go about creating a high performance team? As a team leader or team member, how do you help your team succeed? And what do you do if your team is not achieving its potential? What measures can you take to improve?
Have you ever seen a successful pilot of agile techniques followed by miserable failure in wider adoption or scaling? The current focus for scaling Agile seems to be on practices, process, and tools. I assert that the success of any Agile adoption effort depends first on the individuals, their interpersonal and self-leadership skills, and the organization's support of these skills. Last year's session on this topic is at: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/scaling-up-by-scaling-down. This year's session has significant new material and exercises.
| Presenter(s): | Ashley Johnson |
| Day and Time: | Monday, 09 August 2010, 09:00 - 12:30  |
| Location: | A-4 |
| Level: | Introductory |
We all want to be part of a team that is producing high quality software as fast as we can. Technical knowledge and experience of the team can help but this experience can also hinder a team that wants to deliver each iteration. This session will tell you about a large team divided into sub-teams and how the 2 teams with less technical experience produced more features each iteration faster. These teams did this with better quality and less rework as well. It was a phenomenon that surprised me at first. The session will cover what the numbers showed and the behaviors that lead to them.
| Presenter(s): | Wes Williams |
| Day and Time: | Tuesday, 10 August 2010, 11:00 - 12:00 |
| Location: | Asia 3 |
| Level: | Practicing |
Trust is a key ingredient for collaborative work. Yet even when things go wrong, the team must recover to remain productive. As team members we must trust, learn to forgive, and move forward when trust needs rebuilding. Taking a look at the origins and the behavioral components of trust - including the individual propensity to trust (or distrust), we’ll build a foundation for discovering the role of trust and forgiveness in teams. We’ll also explore why a clearer understanding of interpersonal behavior across gender and other differences can lead to mistrust or accelerate trust building.
| Presenter(s): | Sharon Buckmaster , Diana Larsen |
| Day and Time: | Tuesday, 10 August 2010, 13:30 - 15:00 |
| Location: | Southern Hemisphere III |
| Level: | Introductory |
| Presentation: | Download Slides |
In an agile environment, the development team is empowered to make most decisions, creating a “pluralist decision making environment.” Team members are faced with decision tasks on a daily basis in a dynamic environment with rapidly changing requirements, expectations, and underlying data. Therefore, this workshop's participants will discuss key decisions an agile team makes; share best practices for decision strategies and methods of data presentation to support high quality decision making in agile IS projects; and provide an overview of contemporary mechanisms to evaluate decisions.
| Presenter(s): | Meghann Drury , Ken Power |
| Day and Time: | Tuesday, 10 August 2010, 13:30 - 15:00 |
| Location: | Asia 3 |
| Level: | Introductory |
Sometimes you just have to call the baby ugly – that is hard to do when the baby belongs to you -- or your team. However, an objective view reveals that software product is in distress, features are getting less and less stable at each release, the user hasn’t been considered, but the team wants to stay positive.
| Presenter(s): | Lisa Moore , Christian Gruber |
| Day and Time: | Tuesday, 10 August 2010, 15:30 - 17:00 |
| Location: | Asia 3 |
| Level: | Introductory |
One of the key values of XP is Feedback. While teams and software development organisations focus on systemic issues and technical improvements for their Agile journey, the importance of sharing feedback amongst each other somehow falls by the wayside. Feedback in peer groups allows us to rapidly move from forming, storming and norming stages, to performing. On Agile teams that are focussed on communication, this is key to success. In this workshop, I will share with you how we approach feedback at my workplace and explain some of the principles we use to give and receive feedback every day.
| Presenter(s): | Sumeet Moghe |
| Day and Time: | Wednesday, 11 August 2010, 09:00 - 10:30 |
| Location: | Asia 3 |
| Level: | Introductory |
hack-a-thon [hak-uh-thon]: a period of time for which team members are given the freedom to work on whatever they want with few restrictions in an environment where creativity is encouraged. Most organizations value innovation, but often it's unclear how to build time for creativity into their development cycles. This discussion will focus on practical hackathon implementations, how to run them effectively and what to do with the results. Hackathons are a great way to keep development teams engaged and their energy high so why not let the rest of the company join in on the fun?
| Presenter(s): | Chris Browne |
| Day and Time: | Wednesday, 11 August 2010, 09:00 - 10:30 |
| Location: | E-2 |
| Level: | Practicing |
One of the challenges of agile is coming to grips with the role of leaders and managers of self-organizing teams. Many go to the extreme of refusing to exert any influence on their teams at all. Others retain too much of a command-and-control style. Leading a self-organizing team can be a fine line. In this session you will learn the proper ways to influence the path taken by a team to solving the problems given to it. You will learn how to become comfortable in this role. You’ll understand why influencing a self-organizing team is neither sneaky nor inappropriate but is necessary.
| Presenter(s): | Mike Cohn |
| Day and Time: | Wednesday, 11 August 2010, 13:30 - 15:00 |
| Location: | Southern Hemisphere II |
| Level: | Practicing |
One of the most talked about and least well understood concepts in Agile is the "self-managing" team. This session will provide a new perspective on self-management by examining the external roots of the practice and by taking a bottom-up look at what it is, the benefits, and how it works. We’ll see how twelve widely adopted Agile practices contribute to self-management by reducing and/or redistributing traditional management activities. These practices provide a framework for delegation, communication and coordination; and encourage team ownership, commitment and accountability.
| Presenter(s): | Damon Poole |
| Day and Time: | Wednesday, 11 August 2010, 13:30 - 15:00 |
| Location: | Asia 3 |
| Level: | Introductory |
*“Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand.”* – Chinese Proverb Agile teams that rapidly learn and apply new-found skills become increasingly adept at embracing change and delivering value. Team members feel more fulfilled, motivated and valued. And they have way more fun! In this session you will learn about agile learning! Learn to recognize learning moments and put in place effective learning patterns tuned to your team and context. Learn how to build and sustain an effective learning culture on your agile team.
| Presenter(s): | Declan Whelan |
| Day and Time: | Wednesday, 11 August 2010, 15:30 - 17:00 |
| Location: | Asia 3 |
| Level: | Introductory |
Creativity can manifest in several ways including creation of something new, refinement of something that exists and problem solving. How do we support, enable and enhance the creative abilities of Agile teams? There are many ways to shape the work environment for greater creativity. We will present a summary of the literature that describes how creativity can be enhanced by providing a safe, nurturing environment, enhancing group interactions, pacing activities that utilize different sensory modes and trusting in the power of subconscious integration.
| Presenter(s): | Roger Brown , Mark Levison |
| Day and Time: | Thursday, 12 August 2010, 09:00 - 10:30 |
| Location: | Asia 3 |
| Level: | Practicing |
Effective retrospectives enable a team to improve iteratively. However, as Agile team leaders and ScrumMasters know from experience, retrospectives can be challenging to facilitate and engage their team in. Come to this tutorial to find out about retrospective smells to avoid. Learn how you can refactor your retrospectives so they become something the team looks forward to rather than dreads. Embed retrospectives deeper into the way your team works by extending other tried and tested agile practices to your retrospectives.
| Presenter(s): | Rachel Davies |
| Day and Time: | Thursday, 12 August 2010, 11:00 - 12:00 |
| Location: | Southern Hemisphere II |
| Level: | Practicing |
Since 1998, I have been a member and leader of volunteer teams. For self-organised and self-motivated teams, agreeing on a mission statement, a 'code of conduct' and a shared mindset and values are indispensable to succeed.
Team collaboration is at the heart of agile, and I found the skills I acquired as a volunteer invaluable in my daily work life. What can we learn from techniques successfully used by volunteer teams? In this workshop, I will introduce team building tools and discuss how a cross-disciplinary 'team manifesto' can improve collaboration, satisfaction and quality.
| Presenter(s): | Johanna Kollmann |
| Day and Time: | Thursday, 12 August 2010, 13:30 - 15:00 |
| Location: | Asia 3 |
| Level: | Practicing |
"OK, find a partner." In high school, did that phrase fill you with dread? And yet here we are bragging about our self-organizing agile teams: high-performing, highly-collaborative, and fun. The basics of the self-organizing team are easily accepted: the team that does the work says how big it is and decides how to get it done. The harder part is that with that freedom comes responsibility. Only by accepting responsibility do we turn the engine on for real. What are those responsibilities? Transparency, Commitment, and Courage
| Presenter(s): | John Martin , Alan Atlas |
| Day and Time: | Thursday, 12 August 2010, 15:30 - 17:00 |
| Location: | Asia 3 |
| Level: | Practicing |
Your Logo Here! |
Producer: Paul Hammond
Co-Producer: Troy Kaser