Managing Agile Environments

An Integral Agile Workshop in Applying Adaptive Management within Complex Enterprises

High-Level Overview of the Workshop

We all know by now that no matter how great your agile implementation, it all ultimately hinges on how well your management and leadership not only gets Agile, but how able they are to create the organizational environments needed for it to grow and thrive and, ultimately, to ignite truly great performance across the organization.

Managing Agile Environments is specifically designed to help managers in the middle (director-level and down) develop the awareness and know-how needed to create organizational environments that give your Agile teams what they need to truly grow and prosper.

In this workshop, we’ve assembled all of the learning from our combined decades of enterprise coaching, and from the worlds of lean thinking, leadership development, product development and human systems development and narrowed it all down in order address one simple question: what do agile teams need in order to not just be great agile teams, but to catalyze real organizational agility?

This 2-day workshop has two parts. In the first part, we focus on what it takes for managers to foster dramatic improvements in agile team (and individual) delivery. Understanding and championing the integrity of the agile process architecture and balancing the management of technical debt with a focus on delivering customer value are key here, as is the ability to support the leadership capacity of team members by having skillfully executed coaching conversations.

In the second part, we focus on what it takes for managers to increase throughput and flow throughout their units or departments, and how to cultivate a culture of trust, empowerment and accountability. Developing a lean thinking and a systems thinking mindset is key to identifying and reducing the sources of waste and drag, which prevent your agile teams from performing at their best.

(See the complete course description.)

Outcomes

By participating in this workshop, you will

• Know and “own” your role as an agile manager: when to step in and direct a team, when to step back and let a team make its own decisions, when to coach, when to mentor, and what to pay attention to across the broader organizational environment.
• Have a deeper understanding of the agile process architecture and where you can fudge things and where you can’t.
• Learn how to use professional coaching skills to have 1-on-1 conversations with direct reports that help them grow as leaders.
• Learn how to maximize product life cycle profits by managing the delicate balance between focusing on customer value, on the one hand, and managing technical debt, on the other.
• Learn how to apply systems thinking tools to characterize and resolve your greatest organizational challenges.
• Understand what it means to empower your teams in ways that does not require you to abdicate your responsibility as manager to the larger organization, or your leadership.
• Understand yourself better as a leader in an agile environment.

Key Workshop Topics

Managing Adaptive Environments is oriented around an Integral model of organizational and change work that offers a comprehensive, systemic view of organizations. This model and approach provides managers with the key levers and dials they need to create highly adaptive environments. The workshop’s main topics track this model.

• Catalyzing Product Delivery Excellence: Maximizing lifecycle profit; managing technical debt while maximizing customer value; phases of agile team development and knowing how to best support the team where they are; the deeply interlocking nature of agile practices.
• Leaders Grow Other Leaders: The art of coaching and mentoring; effectively engaging in pivotal conversations; assessing your own leadership capacity using a Reactive-Creative framework.
• Increasing Throughput and Flow Across Your Organization: The hidden dynamics of systems behavior that generate organizational dysfunction; Usingsystems thinking tools to uncover and remediate those hidden dynamics; eight essential lean thinking principles for increasing throughput and flow.
• Fostering a Culture of Trust, Empowerment and Accountability: Developing relational systems intelligence; the true nature of empowerment and how to foster it; assessing your level of agile culture and how you can orient increased agile thinking within your culture
• Inspiring and Supporting Individual & Organizational Change: Helping people navigate individual change; When to push and when to let go; Understanding and leveraging the key stages of individual and organizational change; Exploring models of change.

Who Would Benefit From This Workshop

Managers who have direct responsibility for the performance and development of agile teams and programs and who want to significantly deepen their capacity for managing and leading agile transformation.

Prerequisites

This is not an introductory Agile class. Attendees must already have basic training in Agile, such as Scrum or Kanban, and should be currently managing an Agile implementation, or preparing to do so.

Cancellation Policy

We make business decisions based on how many people have registered for a given event. If you must change or cancel your registration, please know that it impacts everyone. Still, we know that sometimes things happen. Here's how it will work if you must reschedule or cancel:

If you notify ACI at least 15 business days prior to the event, you may receive full credit for a future event -or-
a full refund.

If you notify ACI less than 15 business days prior to the event, you may receive full credit for a future event minus a $25 rescheduling fee -or- a full refund minus a $100 cancellation fee.

If you notify ACI less than 5 business days prior to the event, you may receive full credit for a future event minus a $150 rescheduling fee plus any additional expenses incurred for catering and event charges resulting from your cancellation. No refunds.