Meeting Topic: Revisiting the Agile Team - The Importance of Mindset

Meeting Learning:

Regardless of your role in a Lean/Agile organization, ask yourself the question “Where is my primary, daily focus?” If your response is something like: “story points, estimating, velocity, backlogs, implementing (fill in your preferred) scaling method,” you are focused on Agile and Lean practices. There are now somewhere between 40-70 Agile/Lean practices and (according to Stephen Denning and others), the practices you’re using are not the determinant of your success. Companies large and small focused on practices and not on adapting the evolving definition of the Agile Mindset fail in reaching Agility.

Description:

This and other key messages were delivered at the inaugural Business Agility Conference in February of this year. In fact, the practices were barely mentioned. The topics were focused on the newly-refined key components in getting organizations to Business Agility. We are evolving as we learn and continuously improve Lean and Agile.

A key component that showed up and was discussed throughout is the team: small, autonomous, cross-functional teams focused on the customer and the service provided. Revisiting your answer to our initial question regarding your focus, if your answer was NOT “creating and supporting Lean/Agile teams,’ this session is for you.

In this interactive session, Kay Harper will facilitate a discussion about the global rise in the importance of the team not only in software but in many other industries, difference between normal vs. high-performing teams, the state of teams in the United States today and provide some steps you can take to begin to create this key asset.

Speaker Bio:

As a professional coach, Kay helps small to mid-sized companies bring efficiency and energy to their teams and organizations, making them more effective.

She partners with organizations in the public, private and non-profit sectors to implement positive change and create resilience, which the data shows lead to increases in productivity. Kay comes at this with a passion of seeing organizations work well, where leaders and team members have focus, energy and creativity. 
Her clients will tell you she does this by bringing alignment to both the people side of organizations (culture, leadership, teamwork) and business side of organizations (strategy, process improvement, Agile and Lean delivery frameworks). Her experience includes over 20 years working with companies varying in size from startup to Fortune 10 in several industries. She is a member of the International Coaching Federation and a Certified Organizational Relationship and Systems Coach; holds ICAgile certifications in Agile Coaching, Agile Facilitation, Agile Project Management and Agile Business Analysis, is a Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Master and Certified Product Owner, and also holds SAFE SPC 3.0 and PMI-ACP certifications. In addition, Kay is a founding board member of Agilehood KC and a long-standing member of Agile KC and the KC Project Management Institute chapter.