AgileDC

September 29, 2024
Washington, DC

What about “those” people who won’t accept Agile?

with MaryLynn Manns

The day before this talk, MaryLynn’s home in Asheville, NC, had been devastated by Hurricane Helene. Yet here she was, giving this keynote.

In fact, she was grateful to be out of town; her car, parked safely at the airport, had escaped the storm at home.

Fearless Change (w/Linda Rising) - tactical patterns for introducing new ideas

Powerless Leader (pattern): authority does not guarantee change.

Kotter Change Model

1. Create a sense of urgency
2. Build a guiding coalition
3. Form a strategic vision
4. Enlist a volunteer army
5. Enable action by removing barriers
6. Generate short-term wins
7. Sustain acceleration
8. Institute change

During times of change, people lose their identity and their ability to predict the future. They often react by trying to take control of something to retain these, however unproductive the results may be.

Patterns

• Elevator pitch
• Wake up call
• Shoulder to cry on (acknowledge what they could lose)
• Emotional connection
• Personal touch
• Imagine that
• Hometown story
• Fear Less (what is their attractor?)
• Champion skeptic
• Whisper in the General’s ear (Linda referenced this one here, remember?)
• Pick your battles

✨ Organizational change is a strange term–orgs don’t change, people do. One at a time.

What’s more important: changing their mind, or your relationship with them?

Agile x AI: The Paranoid Executive’s Cheatsheet

with Sanjiv Augustine

Only the paranoid survive.

— Andy Grove, Intel

Asymmetric impact

Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, 1997
Deepmind (Suleyman, Hassabis, Legg) - AlphaGo, 2016

Strategic inflection points

Agility is the ability to both create and respond to change in order to profit in a turbulent business environment.

— Jim Highsmith

Build the fastest-iterating company the world has ever seen.

— Sam Altman

Accelerate the velocity of decision-making, not just that of production.

CARLA (Compliance, Auditing, Risk management, Legal, Architecture): Bring them in early!

NVidia’s AI red team assessment framework

Domain-Driven Design Meets AI: Crafting Solutions

with Rob Brown and Darren Hoevel

When you have a new team working on old code, begin (toward DDD) by finding ubiquitous domain language, and renaming things that don’t align to it.

A TPM role is a smell: If you need a Technical Product Manager as well as a Product Manager, you have not done enough to build your org’s Product Management capability.

A compelling demo of prompting Qlerify to design a system to automate USCIS’s I-590 form.