Values can be powerful forces when applied to a small company. From their seed can come personalized principles and practices. By starting with agile values, and then making them your own, you can instill a creative force for change and adaptation necessary for success. Traditional agile practices become personalized through iterative improvement measured against these values. Different teams can create new practices that are applicable to their discipline. Most important, they frame every conversation and decision, enabling rapid execution and shared vision.

Changing the way individuals and teams work is one thing. Changing organizational culture is quite another, especially when so many of us (yes, even us at this conference) have little idea that the assumptions we make, the language we use, the structures we are bound by are the direct antithesis of Agile. Our thinking is locked by the patterns of years and needs to be unleashed in order to make inroads towards cultural change. Using a simple yet effective collaboration game from the Improv tradition this session will challenge our assumptions and open up new neural pathways.

A glimpse behind the scenes of the production of a weekly show like Saturday Night Live offers an incredible example of a team of people who have agility in their DNA. Writers, actors, set designers, producers, studio execs, etc. all have a single-minded focus on delivering an exceptional quality show every single week. Slipping the schedule is not an option. Customer satisfaction (viewer ratings) are the central measure of success. The production team must collaborate and adapt to unexpected challenges every single week.

What happens when your organization practices Agile software development for many years? Well, you get pretty good at Agile: you are able to apply Agile with reducing effort on challenging projects. But there is another interesting side-effect which is that your people internalize Agile values, so much so that Agile becomes second-nature to everyone!

In this photo tour, come see how a culture is infected with Agile thinking, you will see how we apply Agile to many activities like training- sessions, recruitment, staffing, office reforms, strategic decisions and more.