Track: Collaboration

Collaboration is a key ingredient for effective teamwork, producing high quality software and having an efficient organisation. But collaboration is not trivial, it can be hard work and requires an environment where it can grow. We will show you what you can do to promote and enhance collaboration at all levels in an organisation, from management to the individual team members.

Wednesday

10:00-10:50

Collaborative Visioning & Learning in the Agile Organization

21st century innovative companies do not rely on a top-down or command-and-control approach for how they create vision and deliver against that vision. In this session, Jean Tabaka gives you straight forward examples of how organizations apply collaboration as a business advantage. Her approach show how the collective wisdom from the entire organization creates better vision and better consensus on how to deliver against the vision.

Jean Tabaka

Jean Tabaka, Agile Fellow with Rally Software, is continuing to learn about software development principles, processes, and practices. She seeks humane approaches that deliver high value in our business communities. Her work in product development flow reaches beyond traditional Agile. She also works in systems thinking and complexity theory. Jean holds a Masters in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University and is the author of “Collaboration Explained” and other articles on Agile organizations. Jean blogs at www.rallydev.com/agileblog and tweets as @jeantabaka.

11:10-12:00

Collaboration by better understanding yourself

Prepare to reflect deeply into yourself and inspect what in-built responses we all have as people. Identifying these behaviours helps us understand their impact on our ability to collaborate with other people, for better or for worse. Only by truly understanding yourself will you really improve how you interact and collaborate with others

Pat Kua

Patrick Kua works as an active, generalising specialist for ThoughtWorks and dislikes being put into a box. Patrick is often found leading technical teams, frequently coaching people and organisations in lean and agile methods, and sometimes facilitating situations beyond adversity. Patrick is fascinated by elements of learning and continuous improvement always helping others to develop enthusiasm for these same elements.

13:00-13:50

Visual Collaboration

Scribble, doodle, draw and be a more effective communicator. Visuals are powerful tool for communication. In this session co-founders of ImageThink will show you how visuals are helping people in all industries see the big picture.

Heather Willems and Nora Herting

Heather Willems and Nora Herting are co-founders of ImageThink, a graphic recording firm. By transforming ideas into powerful visuals, ImageThink increases engagement, retention, and creativity for participants in meetings of all kinds. Imagethink supports strategy workshops, innovation sessions, and brainstorms in industries as different as healthcare to aerospace. Both have backgrounds as educators. Nora taught both at The Ohio State University and Denison University. Heather taught at Minnesota Center for Photography, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and The Ohio State University. When not graphic recording, Nora can be found making fine art photography, while Heather focuses on illustrations that use text as image. As fine artists, they have exhibited their work individually throughout the United States. Heather and Nora live in Brooklyn, NY and travel to work around the country.

14:10-15:00

Pairing is fun!

What is pairing all about? Is it only about writing code or tests, or is it more than that? Come have some fun and learn how to pair without writing code. You might even find yourself laughing and making friends.

Steven 'Doc' List

Steven List (generally known as “Doc”) is the National Agile Evangelist at Neudesic, with a career in software technology spanning three decades. Doc's long-term focus is on the core skills and strategies of management, leadership, team-building, and individual growth, and is an experienced presenter and public speaker, business and agile coach, trainer and workshop leader, and Open Space facilitator.

15:40-16:30

Managing For Collaboration

Managers create a system, an environment, in which the teams can thrive or dive. But which one? And, how do they do it?Agile managers create an environment of collaboration for the teams and for the managers. They do this by optimizing at the highest level of their influence, not the lowest. This is a huge change and challenge, because it’s opposite from how they have worked and been asked to work in the past. We’ll discuss the four prongs of management: to set the strategy, to build trusting relationships, to remove organizational obstacles, and to build the capacity of the organization.

Johanna Rothman

Johanna Rothman works with companies to improve how they manage their product development--to maximize management and technical staff productivity and to improve product quality. Johanna is a leader in the Agile community, having most recently chaired the Agile2009 conference. Johanna is the author of several books: - Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects - The 2008 Jolt Productivity award-winning Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management - Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management - Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People She writes columns for Stickyminds.com and on “extreme project management” for Gantthead.com, and writes two blogs on her web site, jrothman.com. She is a host of the Amplifying Your Effectiveness conference.

16:45-17:35

The Power of Play - Making Good Teams Great

“Screw work let’s play!” Do you sometimes wish you could goof off work and play? In this interactive presentation, inspired by the theory and experience of play, we’ll demonstrate why play isn’t just essential for creativity and innovation, but crucial to our survival and overall well-being. We’ll begin with the definition of play based on a 6-step framework followed by an exploration of why we play and how we play. We’ll investigate the relationship of work and play and demonstrate how, instead of being mutually exclusive, both are necessary for personal and group creativity and achievement. We’ll finish off with 7 guidelines for bringing more play into your life. And if you play your cards right, you’ll leave with plenty of ideas to achieve your recommended daily amount of play!

Portia Tung

Portia specialises in Agile adoption and organisational change as a Consultant-Coach. She's passionate about realising and increasing human potential through Systems Thinking, Real Options and team collaboration. She strives to build effective and meaningful teams by pragmatically applying Lean and Agile Values, Principles and Practices. She's had a number of roles over the years, ranging from Java developer, to development manager, consultant-coach and faciliator. Portia's the creator of Agile Fairytales (www.agilefairytales.org), a series of learning games that help adults rediscover the lessons we learned as children but have since forgotten. She's passionate about inventing and playing games because she believes we can all improve continuously through play to achieve our dreams.