Roll with the Changes - Boosting Your Adaptability Quotient

Being a technologist means everything around us is in a constant state of change. Tools, requirements, process, maybe even team members! When things around you change, do you scream, 'Why are we always changing things?" or "What if we just wait?". Or do you instead embrace it and ride the wave of change and innovation? The ability to recognize and adapt to change as it is happening can make or break the success of yourself, your team, or your organization.

Think you're adaptable? How do you know? We've all heard of IQ, but what about… AQ? Not just another acronym, your AQ represents a concrete score of your Adaptability Quotient. Come learn how you can be more aware of your own adaptability, and respond to our complex, ever-changing world. In this session, Angela and Sara will explain AQ in real-world terms, and show us how to measure, test, and most importantly, develop our adaptability. We'll explore tools and practices to help you and your teams effectively roll with the random chaos that life throws your way.

Key Learnings:
- What is AQ?
- Ways to measure AQ
- Techniques for effectively rolling with the random chaos life throws your way

Rethinking Team Metrics in 20 Minutes

Are you still relying on the old standbys like percent complete, velocity, and burndown for monitoring the progress of your teams or projects? Those metrics may not be telling you what you think they are! In this fast-paced discussion, we'll talk about some of the pitfalls of commonly used metrics, and make the case for not so commonly used measures that give you the insights that you're really striving for.

Supercharged Feedback Techniques in 20 minutes

Feedback helps us to build stronger teams, supports more effective problem-solving and collaboration, and ultimately contributes to happier people delivering better products. Without effective feedback, we can spend time focusing on the wrong things, solving the wrong problems, maybe not even knowing about problems in the first place! In my experience, people are generally not confident in their feedback skills. This makes feedback feel risky, vulnerable, scary, even downright anxiety-inducing and so then they give no feedback at all.

Feedback Doesn't Have to Suck. In this fast-paced 20 minute session focused on supercharging your feedback skills, I will help you get a good foothold on where to start. We’ll warm up with an overview of what feedback is, attributes of high-quality feedback, and some “tips and tricks” to getting comfortable with giving and receiving candid feedback that has worked really well for me both as a manager and a team member. You’ll be a feedback champion before you know it!

Cyber Duck Development - How AI tools like ChatGPT can level up your career instead of destroying it

We live in weird times, and the rapid advances in AI technology and tools is leaving many people in technology-based roles feeling a little unsettled. It is easy to get sucked into the sensational stories about how AI is coming for our jobs, and software craftsmanship is doomed. In this talk we'll level set on what AI is truly capable of today, what we're likely to see in the future, and how it can be an amazing tool for increasing our successes, as well as for learning and growing as software developers.

You will learn:
- Artificial Intelligence's capabilities and limitations as it pertains to software development
- Where caution is recommended when using AI
- How and where we can leverage AI to enhance our careers and job performance instead of worrying that it will take our jobs

75 minute session, could do as a fast focus in a pinch

Building a Stronger Team, One Human at a Time

Coming together as a truly “high-performing team” seems like an impossible task these days. Can a truly “cross-functional” team even be built? How do you get introverts and extroverts (yes, they DO exist in IT) to work well together? It may feel like you practically need a degree in psychology to get this right these days. But you don’t.

Over the course of my career, I’ve worked with clients and their software teams to develop high-functioning teams. I’ve found that regardless of focus (software development, marketing, sales), there are patterns to what makes teams successful, and what can hold them back from greatness.

- Are you spending time understanding what the individual members of the team need to be successful or are you trying “one size fits all” solutions?
- Are you creating a safe and supportive environment to foster experimentation and learning, or are you doing the same old stuff you’ve always done, wondering why you don't see better results?
- Are you leveraging people’s individual strengths and balancing the team as a whole or just putting whoever is available on a task or story and hoping for the best?

In this talk, I’ll cover a couple of tools for understanding the needs and strengths of your individual team members, identifying strength gaps, and action items for creating a happy and well-balanced team that can get it done!

Measuring Up! How To Choose Agile Metrics Your Team Won't Hate

How many times have you been asked to deliver on metrics that did not make sense to you, that felt counterproductive to your or the team's effectiveness, or that were seemingly impossible to collect in a sane fashion? Oftentimes, I find that metrics being collected are ones that are easy to collect and report on but are not necessarily the ones that will help the team learn and improve.

When it comes to software delivery, lean and agile practices and methodologies have taken the lead. Metrics have lagged a bit and often rely on very waterfall-style milestones and phase-gates to determine a team's effectiveness. In the spirit of continuous improvement, this session will take a look at the measures we can and should collect from agile teams, why these metrics are relevant and interesting, and how we can use them to help our teams continuously improve.

Key Learnings:
- Why it is so difficult to identify meaningful metrics in the software world
- the importance of developing a healthy “metrics mindset”
- The best types of quality-focused team metrics to focus on in an agile organization

Tap, tap, tap. Is this thing on? Communication Matters, whether you're a Junior Dev or a CEO

In the 20 or so years since I joined the tech community, I moved from an attitude of "please leave me alone in my cube to code and whatever you do, don't talk to me" to giving talks on the importance of communication in the software world. The collaboration tools and techniques we've all come to know and love have changed over time, but a few things have remained constant.
1) Communicating openly and honestly can be HARD
2) Speaking from a place of vulnerability is RIDICULOUSLY HARD
3) Without 1 and 2 you're going to really struggle to be an effective and happy member or leader

OK, there's a 4th thing.
4) The days of working alone in your cube or office like a hermit are largely over for software folks. It really doesn't have to be painful. I swear it doesn’t.

During this session, we're going to rumble with some tough topics and I'll share some of my own embarrassing and enlightening stumbles. It will include things like delivering “bad news” to clients, end-users, or managers and feeling really good about it, managing conflict with team members in healthy and productive ways, and delivering feedback without feeling like you (or the receiver) will vomit. These things are all very possible, and not that hard to master once you have some key tools and insights in your tool belt.

Feedback skills that will supercharge your effectiveness as a team member or leader!

Feedback helps us to build stronger teams, supports more effective problem-solve and collaboration, and ultimately contributes to delivering better products. Without it, we can spend time focusing on the wrong things, solving the wrong problems, maybe not even knowing about problems in the first place!

So if feedback is critical to us growing and thriving, why aren’t we all excitedly showering each other with feedback all the time, and BEGGING others to give it to us? In my experience, people are generally not enthusiastic or confident in their ability to give feedback. Feedback usually isn’t happening because feedback feels risky, vulnerable, scary, even downright anxiety-inducing.

As a manager, leader, and coach of many teams over the last 20+ years, I can help you get a good foothold on where to start. Even better, I can tell you where the bodies are buried so you avoid some of the mistakes I’ve experienced over the years too.

In this session, we’ll warm up with an overview of what feedback is and is not. We’ll also review the qualities of high-quality feedback, as well as the other kinds of feedback so you know the difference. We’ll finish off with a quick summary of some “tips and tricks” to getting comfortable with giving and receiving candid feedback that has worked really well for me. You’ll be a feedback champion before you know it!

You Have a Self Organizing Agile Team, Now What? Technical Leadership Skills for Everyone

Your company is going through a transformation journey and now you are the leader of a self-organizing team. You need to be a servant leader, and the training we often get during these transformations doesn't talk about what that means or how to do it. How do you enable your team while driving the business forward? There's a crisis, how do you lead confidently and compassionately while managing end-users?

Do you fall back on traditional management principals? Do you rely on what you've seen other managers do? There are likely some anti-patterns hidden in there to avoid, what are they?

Topics we'll dig into in our 3 hours together:
- What a self-organizing team looks like
- Level setting on leadership within a self-organizing team
- Team toxins and antidotes
- Skills workshops (Attendees get to vote on topics like active listening, effective decision making, giving/receiving feedback, effective mentoring, managing conflict, etc.)
- Why change is hard

Half-day workshop (3 to 5 hours), can expand to a full day. On-site or remote delivery is possible. The first delivery at a conference, we typically deliver to client organizations as part of our coaching and training.