LeanAgileUS 2017

Lean Agile US

LeanAgileUS is taking place in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on February 27-28th. It has a real mix of great speakers and content, covering all aspects of Lean and Agile including Scrum, SAFe, Kanban, DevOps amongst other topics. I expect it to be an event where people come together for dialogue about different perspectives. I hope to hear more of “That’s interesting, tell me more” and less of “That’s wrong, and here’s why“.

My contribution will be twofold.

Firstly I have a talk on the Monday entitled “Good Agile / Bad Agile: The Difference and Why it Matters”, which you may recognise as the title of a recent post. I will be exploring some of those ideas in more detail. Here’s the abstract:

Stories of Bad Agile are common, where Agile is a local and tactical implementation, resulting in failed projects and initiatives. Businesses don’t get the results they had hoped for and Agile gets the blame for not working. Good Agile, however, is possible when it is directly and explicitly related to a business strategy. Thus Agile needs to be deployed strategically, with a clear diagnosis of the critical problem or opportunity faced, guiding policies on the approach to addressing the diagnosis, and coherent actions to implement the guiding policies. This talk will show how this approach can lead to Good Agile which is evolved through experimenting as opposed to Bad Agile being instantiated by copying.

Secondly I have a half day workshop on the Tuesday entitled “Enterprise Agility with Strategy Deployment”. This will be an opportunity to learn more about the X-Matrix, experience the process of creating one, and understand how to use it alongside other A3 templates. Here’s the abstract:

Strategy Deployment is a style of organisational improvement that engages the entire workforce in figuring out how the business can survive and thrive. This course will introduce Strategy Deployment using a framework called the X-Matrix – an A3 format which concisely visualises the alignment of results, strategy, indicators, and tactics on a single sheet of paper. With this approach, a transformation can be viewed as a form of Catchball, a Lean process where ideas are passed around an organisation as teams collaborate to experiment and discover solutions. In this way, solutions emerge from the people closest to the problem, rather than being defined and dictated by management.

The whole event is great value for money. Register soon as I’m sure it will sell out!