Joel Tosi
Co-author of 'Coaching for Learning' and 'Creating your Dojo' - helping teams learn to learn, make work easier, and deliver better products.
Chicago, Illinois, United States
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Co-Author of 'Coaching for Learning; the Art and Practice' and 'Create Your Dojo; Upskilling Your Organization for Digital Evolution,' Joel helps organizations evolve through learning. This combines a blend of XP, agile, lean, devops and product thinking practices all to embrace learning in the context of work.
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There is no spoon
Autonomous teams - just as long as they all follow the same process, with the same metrics, and so on.
Why?
Let's look at various types of products as well as team orientation and how that might effect how teams may choose to work.
Leave this session with ideas on how to make your process fit the context of the work and not vice versa.
Blending Product Thinking with Architecture
Systems grow and change over time. You can have intentional design, or accidental design.
In this session we will walk through approaches that leverage product context to keep architecture aligned with the needs of the product. We will look at strategic DDD, C4 modeling, and architecture decision records.
Leave this session with simple techniques that you can apply immediately to start blending product with architecture.
Content isn't the problem - Application is
Content - How to do something; learn a new technique; configure a new tool; write some code in a new framework - the content is everywhere.
Yet, with all that content, why is it not easy to immediately apply new learnings at work?
The problem is we try and substitute content and seeing / hearing with doing.
In this session we will frame up the new for a new way of learning (learning in the flow of work instead of learning as an outlier). We will look at how teams achieve this, what changes occur to the team and organization to support this, and what the outcomes are for teams and organizations that have tried this approach.
Value stream mapping workshop
The work we do is part of a larger system with a goal of ultimately delivering value to a person. Understanding how all of those pieces fit together helps us make better decisions on where to improve. If we automate the infrastructure creation to on demand, but any database changes take weeks, making the infrastructure faster doesn’t help.
In this workshop, we will go through simple ways to start your mapping your value stream. We will create the value stream, calculate lead time and cycle time, look at efficiency, and also look at how to handle ‘machine time’
Leave this workshop ready to create your value stream in your organization
Mob / Ensemble Programming Workshop
Mob Programming: All the brilliant people working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same place, and on the same computer.
Mob Programming is a cost-effective, collaborative and fun way to get work done together. It's a whole-team approach to development, where coding, designing, testing, and working with the "customer" (partner, Product Owner, User, etc.) is all done as a team.
Participants in this workshop experience a day of learning and doing Mob Programming. We cover the mechanics of how to work together as a Mob as well as the techniques that make this form of development so effective.
We’ll learn how a Mob performs sample project work, including user stories, prioritization, test-driven development, refactoring, and retrospectives.
Designed and facilitated by Mob Programming pioneer Woody Zuill, this workshop provides a hands-on education in the art of mobbing and it's significant benefits for your teams.
Make the Work Easy - Culture Shifting through Learning
Culture - everyone talks about it, wants a better work culture. But how, how do you get it?
In this talk, we share one simple way - make the work easy. Make it easy for people to do great work and have pride in what they do. Worst case scenario, people are just happier at work ;)
Scaling - You Keep Using that Word
Scaling - every organizations primary concern. Sure something is great and works, but will it scale?
The problem is no one ever talks about what they mean by scale and what they expect.
In this session we look at different meanings of scale. For each, we look at ways we ‘could’ scale.
The problems that arise when focusing on predictability instead of variability
Many organizations want more predictability - When will it be done? When we can't answer that question, plans become larger - more initiatives, more work in flight.
In this session we will start off looking at the value stream and what variability means when, along with the cost.
We will then explore examples of variability in the right side (dev / test / operations) of the value stream and how that becomes a negatively reinforcing loop.
We end this sessions with simple ways to start capturing the cost of variability and ideas to start addressing it.
Systems Thinking Workshop - Visualizing Relationships and Knowing Where to Act
In this hands-on workshop, attendees will learn how to model systems and look for leverage points as means of introducing intentional, impactful change in an organization.
The workshop will cover:
- Systems Diagramming (Nouns, Verbs, Reinforcing, Balancing Loops)
- Types of leverage points and identification
- Value Demand / Failure Demand
- Determining areas of change where 'good enough' is enough
- Separating signal from noise - knowing your changes made a difference
This workshop is designed for anyone that is interested in helping teams and organizations be more effective and worry less about 'the process'
Systems Thinking - Concepts to see the whole
Ever feel like process changes or change initiatives aren't quite getting the results you had hoped for? Turns out that there is much more to how a team or organization delivers products than isolated optimizations can help with.
Enter the world of Systems Thinking.
Come and learn what Systems Thinking is and why it is important to software. Leave the session understanding how to read and create system models as well as identify leverage points to introduce meaningful, impactful change in your organization.
Creating Continual Learning Organizations - Your Dojo
In the DevOps Handbook, Gene Kim introduces the Third Way - The Technical Practices of Continual Learning. Enter the DevOps Dojo - an immersive environment where whole teams come together to learn and practice their skills while solving real business problems.
Joel Tosi and Dion Stewart say teams learn better in the immersive eco-system of Dojos than they do using traditional forms of training. They explain why and how Dojos help teams bond around product, foster rapid experimentation, and reframe small failures as learning.
In this session, we will frame the need for dojos, tieing into Demings 14 points. From there we will walk attendees through the dojo format and how it addresses the whole value stream, not just tech practices. We will address items people need to think about when creating their own dojo. We wrap up with simple calls to actions for people to take to bring learning forward.
Come to this session not only to learn about what works in creating a Dojo but also how Dojos help upskill your teams and support the cultural DevOps change.
Product Discovery Workshop - OKRs, Personas, Storymapping, Oh My
In this hands on workshop, teams (4-5) will use Product Chartering, Personas, Storymapping, and User Journeys along with Experience Tests to explore a product of their choice.
Along the way we will touch on how you blend architecture needs into this as well as chaos engineering - especially if the audience is more technical
The takeaways are hands on approaches to product discovery and how it blends into delivery
Fostering the Third Way - Your DevOps Dojo
In the DevOps Handbook, Gene Kim introduces the Third Way - The Technical Practices of Continual Learning. Enter the DevOps Dojo - an immersive environment where whole teams come together to learn and practice their skills while solving real business problems.
Joel Tosi and Dion Stewart say teams learn better in the immersive eco-system of Dojos than they do using traditional forms of training. They explain why and how Dojos help teams bond around product, foster rapid experimentation, and reframe small failures as learning.
In this session, we will frame the need for dojos. From there we will walk attendees through the dojo format, including things they need to think about when creating their own. We wrap up with simple calls to actions for people to take to bring learning forward.
Come to this session not only to learn about what works in creating a Dojo but also how Dojos help upskill your teams and support the cultural DevOps change.
Metrics that Matter - Moving from Easy to Impactful
This session is a walk through of a popular blog post we did on metrics. In general, we are leading transformations where the standard questions around metrics (velocity, bug, mttr, come up) - and we use these groupings to help organizations to get some answers for questions organizations want, but also understand their limits. I.e. if code coverage goes up, that might be good directionaly but does not say we are getting code coverage of the important code paths. We wrap up the session giving examples of more impactful measurements and walk through process behavior charts to help separate signal from noise in data.
Blending Product Thinking with Architecture
Too much design up front and you are bumping into the design all of the time (and losing time). Not enough design and your system can crumble in reality. How do you blend architecture so you have the right decisions at the right time, and give them enough due dilligence? How do you embrace cloud and microservices and not risk getting into different failure scenarios or overly complicated maintenance and ripple effects?
In this session we will walk through visualizations that help teams blend product thinking with architecture. Along the way, we will look at microservices and domain modeling as well as chaos engineering and fault tolerance - blending all of these into a context that is consumable by all and gives the right emphasis at the right time. Interested in CRC cards? You've come to the right place
Leave this session with simple visualizations and approaches that you can apply immediately to start blending product with architecture, especially if you are looking to run in a cloud world.
Maturity Models Are Wrong and Legacy Thinking - Let's do better
This idea of maturity models - usually ranking an organization and its teams / people based upon a variety of topics - is frequently asked and sought for by leaders and executives as means of improving their organization.
But Maturity models don't make a difference. And they won't ever.
Come to this session to learn the flaws in maturity models and then learn what actually works - hint - the people doing the work already know.
Reflecting on XP-What is working; what has changed; what did we forget?
When many people think of extreme programming (XP), pair programming and TDD come to mind. For a few others, perhaps minimal documentation or even the foundation of user stories.
Let's go beyond that. To do so, let's discuss the basic tenants of XP along with context of the time. What has stood up well? Things like small releases are finally gaining traction. What about the engineering practices? Have we embraced continuous integration and refactoring as the right way of doing things or is there something better? What have we forgotten about (system metaphor)? What are we still struggling with? Ultimately - are we building better products?
We will share stories and experiences throughout the session. My goal for our time together is we leave with a better appreciation of XP and go back to work interested in looking at problems in a new way.
Growing a Learning Organization
How do you grow a continuously learning organization? If certifications and wikis were enough, organizations would be crushing it. In this session we look at how we learn in complex domains - focusing on tacit vs explicit knowledge; context learning; and growing coaches and teachers.
Modernizing Legacy Code - While Not Bringing Down Prod
Imagine you have some legacy code. It may be on an outdated tech stack, or perhaps you are looking to go to the cloud, or perhaps it just isn't properly aligned with the product anymore. How do you actually go through and modernize the application when multiple teams are involved...and not bring down production?
In this session, you will learn real world techniques to help you with modernization. Including
Realigning product, architecture, and teams with Strategic DDD
Finding seams in your existing product
Questioning product assumptions
Making boring changes to get quick learning
Natural code expansion and contraction
As well as how to decided if you are better of modernizing than migrating.
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