A participatory workshop where coaches can share their experiences in coaching agile teams in hostile environments, what they did to avoid the pain, and how they turned toxic organizational inertia and attack against itself or circumvented the same to realize more agility. The session will be facilitated and will be oriented around capturing tricks, tips, and techniques, but will also allow for some sobbing and frustration and ranting. Epic fails are definitely welcome. The most sought after stories and ideas will be those which use the opposition’s own strength to advance the effort.

Field-tests about how personal responsibility works in the mind (i.e., how we avoid it and how we take it) now make it possible for coaches to understand and teach the mental processes, language, and keys to personal responsibility. Cool huh?

Doing so inspires your charges to demonstrate far greater ownership behavior as individuals, teams, and even as entire enterprises. You add more value as your charges take ownership and learn, correct, and improve more easily, directly, and quickly.

Come acquire the basic tools and practices for coaching success with personal responsibility.

Coaching helps communities produce real value and grow sustainable agility. Successful coaches know the importance and value of treating each community as unique, helping the individuals and the larger community find a “groove” (style) that truly helps them deliver. If you are coaching or getting ready to coach, and you want to learn a pile of pragmatic coaching tools, based on years of coaching agile projects, this session will pass your tests.

I think Pair Programming is vital to the success of a programming team, but every time I join a new team I seem to find I’m in a minority of people who feel that way, let alone have any experience of actually doing it.

Regardless of your coaching experience, there are a wide variety of temptations you can fall into that affect the quality of your coaching. This presentation will describe: each of the 10 temptations, such as pride or impatience; the negative effects on you and/or your team for each temptation; and strategies to avoid falling into and overcoming each of the 10 temptations. There will discussion opportunties for people to learn from the more experienced coaches in the audience. Whether a new or experienced coach, this presentation will have information to improve your coaching.

Any successful recording artist eventually submits to releasing a “Greatest Hits” album. This is the opposite: a beat-up XP coach putting his biggest and furthest-reaching mistakes in a neat package and releasing them to the public. This talk could also be named “Ten ways to guarantee your Agile transition is a total failure”, or “Apologies of an XP coach”; however I’m sure I’ll mention more than ten mistakes and I make no apology for them.

Find out why we give personal feedback, how to provide effective feedback, what makes feedback ineffective and how to deal with poorly phrased feedback. Learning what makes feedback effective helps you to seek your own feedback and improve, whilst being able to support the people around you.

This is suitable for anyone who’s nervous about giving or getting feedback. Coaches and other Agile Transformers may find this simple workshop helpful for their own teams.

Agile coaches often need to distinguish when people “do” an agile practice versus “really understand” that practice. This workshop will help coaches develop a tool, mapping agile practices, or more specifically, behaviours people exhibit when using an agile practice, to a learning model. The learning model of choice for this workshop is the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition. We will also discuss how to apply this tool to better communicate and set goals with teams “going agile”.

Increasing gender intelligence strengthens our ability to maximize the contributions of all members of the team while maintaining both equity and uniqueness. New research from neurobiology sheds light on the real differences in male and female brain structure, chemistry, and blood flow. This data underlies the emerging science of gender intelligence, providing a new vision of gender relationships. Gender-intelligent supervision, employee coaching/mentoring and negotiation and conflict management leads to a competitive edge in the toolkit of forward-looking companies.

Agile methods put a great deal of emphasis on trust, empowerment, and collaboration. Agile moves us away from command and control project management toward an approach designed to harness the passion, creativity, and enthusiasm of the team. Mike will tackle the assumptions behind traditional project management and explore a more agile approach to managing time, cost, and scope. He will address the PMI Processes and Knowledge areas and explore how to adapt them to agile projects. Participants will leave with practical tips they can implement today to begin building a culture of agility.