People & Teams

Conference Presentations

Agile DevOps East Bring Your Team Home Safely: What DevOps Teams Can Learn from Aircrews
Slideshow

United Flight 232 should have crashed with all 296 lives lost. Asiana Flight 214 should not have crashed at all. However, the actual outcomes were very different. Peter Varhol and Gerie Owen explain that the critical difference between the two flights was the interactions of their respective aircrews. Cockpit crew members work together to best utilize the skills of every team member to make flights safe. Using these principles, a DevOps team can bring their project safely home. The leader of a team is the final authority, but leaders must acknowledge team members’ knowledge and experience; that can make the difference between success and failure. Join Peter and Gerie to experience how you can apply aircrew practices to your team’s delivery of high-quality applications through complementary expertise, collaboration, and decision-making.

Peter Varhol
Agile DevOps East Dominating DevOps with Distributed Teams
Slideshow

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.

Treasa Overton
Agile DevOps East Embrace Our Robot Overlords: Make CI Work for You
Slideshow

When developing software, teams can often get bogged down with mundane tasks such as code linting, manual testing, or even just deploying code to a particular environment. Everyone dreams of setting up continuous integration to automate this work, but they believe it to be too time-consuming for their current budget. Join Brian Thompson as he discusses how, after many years of manually performing repetitive tasks and occasionally making a mistake in mundane work, he learned to embrace the robot overlords. Learn about a variety of different continuous integration services such as CircleCI, TravisCI, and GitLab CI, and how utilizing continuous integration does not have to be a drain on time. Brian will discuss how CI can be leveraged in a repeatable way so as not to use up project budgets before starting development.

Brian Thompson
Agile DevOps East No One Cares About Your Practices: A Modern Agile Approach
Slideshow

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.

Bob Payne
Agile DevOps East Agile Program Management: Measurements to See Value and Delivery
Slideshow

Do you have measurement dysfunction on your program? Are you trying to measure teams and extrapolate each team’s status to the program? That doesn’t work. Teams have personal statuses, and you can’t add them together to understand the program state. But you can use a handful of program measurements that help everyone understand where the program is and where it’s headed. Instead of trying to “scale” measurements, take a new approach. Join Johanna Rothman to learn to use and share quantitative and qualitative program measurements that show everyone the program state. It starts with measuring what you want to see. This simple principle is so effective because it takes your needs into account before you decide on a metric to use. Next, we'll look at the scope. We’ll talk about why you want to measure completed features and how measure at this level can bring clarity to your project.

Johanna Rothman
Agile DevOps East How to Innovate Inexpensively
Slideshow

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?

Giancarlo Di Vece
Agile DevOps East Financing Agile Delivery with Forecasts
Slideshow

Your team's been trained to deliver new features in a short time frame. You're estimating your work using abstractions like story points, and the predictability and quality of delivery have clearly improved. However, you still get asked every December to estimate year-long initiatives for annual budgeting. How agile can an organization be when the finance department is still thinking about large-batch projects with fixed cost, scope, and time? Robert Pieper will talk about how to mitigate financial risk and improve return on investment by working in smaller batches. Using financial forecasting in the project management office, we can solve the problem of large-batch, date-driven projects that are prone to missing expectations. He'll tell you how to help your finance departments and PMOs understand what projects to fund and which to avoid, without the big plans and committed dates.

Robert Pieper
Agile DevOps East Transformational Leadership for Business Agility
Slideshow

Despite thinking that organizations are slow to innovate, innovation actually abounds at many companies. Kodak, DEC, and Xerox did not fail due to lack of new, cutting-edge innovation; they failed because their organizations were tuned to their traditional markets, and a failure to change their business models and organizations led to their eventual disruption. The key to achieving business agility lies in leadership that transforms organizations. Transformational leaders succeed by changing the system, leading with purpose, and steering from the edges. They own their responsibility and boldly lead their organizations into the future. It's time for all of us to undergo personal transformations and start leading for innovation, disruption, and business agility.

Sanjiv Augustine
Agile DevOps East Coaching Around Resistance by Using Humble Inquiry
Slideshow

When coaches encounter resistance to agile transformations, we often treat it as a phenomenon to be overcome, confronted, or combated. But resistance is a natural reaction to change, and that reaction can't be alleviated by violent opposition. Rather than meeting resistance head-on, the clever coach will work around it by helping people recognize and resolve the negative emotions that drive it. Once those negative emotions are resolved, people are more likely to let down their guard and embrace change. In this interactive session, you will learn to use a method known as humble inquiry to help people uncover the emotional roots of their resistance so that they can resolve their reluctance to embrace agile transformation. You'll identify common resistance behaviors, then practice by engaging in humble inquiry. You will learn ways to use humble inquiry to build trust and rapport in your agile team.

Becky Hartman
Agile DevOps East Creating Chaos: Engineering for the Unexpected
Slideshow

Every day we deal with complexity in our systems and multiple layers of dependencies. This complexity makes it difficult to predict when one service or dependency might go rogue for a specific circumstance during a delivery workflow. That's where chaos engineering comes in. Chaos engineering creates these "random" scenarios on purpose and builds resiliency into a system while increasing the velocity at which value is delivered to consumers. Shahzad Zafar will discuss his company's journey into chaos engineering, the principles behind it, how to plan for introducing chaos, and why a culture of DevOps is essential for it to succeed. Learn where chaos experiments should be run, how to use business metrics to evaluate results, the best way to permeate results to all of your teams, and how to scale chaos engineering across a larger organization.

Shahzad Zafar

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