Topic: The value of options

About the topic: Do you ever feel locked into a solution too quickly?  Ever feel like you’re going with an idea just because all other ideas are getting shot down? This happens in a lot of teams, with everything from technical solutions to process problems. In this talk we will explore the value of having many options and solutions to a problem and show you some concrete ways of getting started with this approach.

• We look at how to get better solutions, team engagement and promote innovation in your team.
• We will discuss how to help you to explore the whole problem space before you get locked into an approach.
• We will examine tools to shift your mindset to exploring options and experiments.

About the speaker: Jeff is an Agile Coach who considers the discovery of Agile and Lean to be one of the most defining moments of his life, and considers helping others to improve their working life not to simply be a job, but a social responsibility. As an Agile Coach, he has worked with driving Agile transformations in organisations both small and large and has published an open source book on the subject: leanpub.com/actionableagiletools/ Jeff is also involved in the Agile community outside of the work place being one of the founding members of Gothenburg Sweden’s largest agile community at 1000+ members www.scrumbeers.com, a community run agile discussion group which he has helped to spread to 3 countries. He also organizes the yearly conference www.brewingagile.org.

Workshop: Visualised Flow

Are you having Sprint Planning meetings that are long, hot, boring, it smells bad in the room, and in the end everyone agrees to a Sprint just to get out of there? If the answer is yes, then Visualised Flow will likely help you a lot.

Do your stakeholders know what you’re working on at this moment?
Do they know what you are going to work on next?
Do they know if the things you have just finished are actually in production or not?
Do they know what actions they need to take to get their items to the front of the queue?

If the answer is no, then Visualised Flow will likely help you a lot.
There is nothing more crucial to the success of a product than successful collaboration, at least that’s what we believe in the Agile world. Collaboration is hard in any context, but it’s basically impossible when people are talking about different things. This is what Visualised Flow is for. Not only can visualising this process increase transparency throughout your organisation, but it is built to facilitate and support collaboration across your organisations. The goal is to visualise how value flows through your organisation, from the moment something is requested to the moment it arrives to the intended recipient. Anyone in your organisation should be able to know status of an item at a glance.

In this workshop we will learn what you need to know to visualised your organisations value flow, look at what levels of abstraction you need to provide the right amount of information to the right people, explore how to improve this process once you’ve visualised it, and finally make sure you have what you need to ensure success when you return to your organisation.