With the popularity of Scrum, ScrumMaster has become a de facto role on many agile projects.

In this thought-provoking session, we’ll explore the ScrumMaster role and its key challenges. We’ll discuss why teams end up with dysfunctional ScrumMasters, and how that hurts agile projects. We’ll explore common ScrumMaster anti-patterns, and why they occur. We’ll challenge the ScrumMaster role, compare it to other models, and address if agile teams really need a ScrumMaster.

This promises to be a lively and interactive session that may change your views on how to structure a Scrum team.

Fear of decision making often leads teams to exhibit one or more of the dysfunctional symptoms of Agile ADHD. This tutorial will help agile practitioners overcome the fear of decision making by first embracing that there are no right or wrong decisions. Agile development is ultimately driven by a series of decisions, all of which are made in the face of uncertainty. Tutorial participants will take away principles and practices that enable their team to embrace uncertainty and be proactive in making better decisions at the most responsible moment.

Leading an agile development team; what is the role, what’s important, what to do, and how to lead. This is based on my experience in leading a large (600+ people) application development organization that has been practicing Agile since 2001. Over the past eight years I’ve observed, coached, and developed Agile leaders. In my talk I’ll cover the attributes of the successful Agile leader. I will use real life examples that illustrate and validate the attributes that can help or hinder the process of leading an Agile team. Leadership versus management will also be discussed.

How do you do sprint planning meetings when you have, for example, 60 people and 8 teams working on the same product? One neat way is to get them all into the same room and do them together. This is a great way to stimulate collaboration and resolve dependencies - but there are some important practical aspects to take into consideration. Having done this with several different companies over the past few years I’d like to share some experiences and lessons learned.

I will focus on the practical aspects of getting this to work, with photographs and examples from real cases.

We will describe our journey from a process where design/planning work was performed away from development to one where small cross-functional Feature Teams self-organized to complete design, planning, and construction within the same sprint. Each team member is involved in getting READY, planning, executing and being DONE. The results we observed are an increase in team morale, more predictable results and accumulation of less debt, while maintaining a constant velocity. Our process is a deviation from the established approach where upfront work needs to be ready before starting a sprint.

Project managers who are new to agile methods often have questions about how to track progress on agile projects. Some of the traditional measures don’t line up very naturally with agile thinking and agile practices, especially measures that are concerned with tracking team members’ time and comparing estimated and actual task durations. One of the main issues is understanding how to project realistic delivery dates with methods that don’t lend themselves to the Gantt approach.

Leaders can stifle progress when they unnecessarily interfere with team processes. However, as a leader, you don’t want your project to go over the cliff and fail miserably or deliver the wrong results either. There are times when leaders should stand back and let the team work things out for themselves—and other times when leaders should step up and really lead. How do you know which is which? And what do you do to not stifle the team’s creativity, ownership, integrity, and problem solving ability? Come away with tools to both motivate and guide teams and organizations effectively.

In “The Fifth Discipline”, his pioneering work on the learning organization, Peter Senge writes that the practice of dialogue is a key skill for team learning. Dialogue is commonly confused with discussion, but as defined by Senge it is distinctly different. As a result of this confusion, the skills that enable effective dialogue are often underdeveloped or misunderstood by teams. In this session we’ll use a specific dialogue format called World Café to explore the many factors that influence dialogue quality, and how to accelerate agile team learning through the use of dialogue.

Agile Methodology has been widely accepted in the private sector for a number of years and has caught the attention of government program managers as a process for software development designed to make work more efficient. Chief Technology Officers (CTO) and Chief Architects of the Lockheed Martin programs will provide an overview of the challenges experienced by the program’s leadership when balancing between Agile and traditional methodologies used on Government programs.

Agile project teams in any large corporation are put together by drawing resources from various organisational silos where they report to line management. What’s the role of this line management in relation to the Agile project teams? Who is ultimately responsible for delivery?

This talk is based on the two year Agile journey in a large financial services organization in Australia and will outline the challenges, pitfalls and experiences of positioning line management to add value to Agile teams. What leadership role do they play and are they the bane or boon of Agile teams.