In this workshop we are going to dive right in and explore different ways we can visualize the flow of work in your organization. I will present a number of different board configurations and different usage patterns that can help teams better understand the work, prioritize and order it, manage dependencies, and coordinate with other teams. Besides the team level stuff, I will also go over some examples at higher levels—
1) showing how we can coordinate the efforts of a bunch of teams,
2) managing an entire portfolio of work and ultimately
3) managing the organizational strategy.
As we talk about these boards at different levels, we will also go over some patterns for how to connect them together. This is how we can connect strategy to execution.
We will start out simple, and progressively add more elements, moving things around to highlight different aspects – and that’s going to help us pay more attention to the things we want to be paying attention to.
I have held this workshop a number of times before, but this time I am particularly excited to report that we will be doing something brand new. In the past, I always demonstrated different board designs using a whiteboard, but this time we will actually show what these board designs look like in some popular online tools.
So... why this change? Well, there are a couple of reasons.
First the obvious one—we are working remotely more than ever before, so in many cases it’s just not practical to use a physical board.
Second—we are living in a golden age of tools. They have gotten so much better than they were before.
I have been working closely with a number of tool vendors, and I have to say that they continue to surprise me with some very creative solutions to get around various limitations. I really believe that we are getting close to being able to do everything in a tool that we could do using a whiteboard.
20231019 Flight Levels Bosch Engagement Day 2023 Business Agility With Flight...Craeg Strong
In this seminar we will describe agile methods and practices that apply at the executive leadership level-why they are important, what they mean, and how they can be adopted. We will also explore the critical role management plays in supporting, leading, and guiding agile teams. We will also illustrate how the role of leadership and management changes in an agile organization, applying concepts from many sources including Lean, the Kanban Method, Flight Levels, and Management 3.0. We will also talk about what it means to lead a digital transformation and best practices for leading and managing large-scale agile initiatives, and some proven techniques for achieving consensus and changing hearts minds and behaviors. We will review the historical genesis of this work, starting with military doctrine from Clausewitz and Von Moltke, David Marquet, General McChrystal, and Stephen Bungay. Finally, we will talk about agile governance and oversight for agile at scale.
RESPONSIVE TRAINING FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONSCraeg Strong
In this seminar we will talk about responsive training, representing an exciting new breakthrough in didactic techniques adapted for digital and online. Referencing a successful air force training program, we will talk about how to maximize engagement, retention, and enjoyment while minimizing cost and disruption. Responsive training leverages the 4 C’s of training from the back of the room: connections, concepts, concrete practice, and conclusions. We will explore how to maximize the human elements while fully leveraging cloud and container-based technologies to improve training efficiencies. Finally we will explore the essential set of digital training tools including breakout rooms, surveys, bluescape/Miro, Mentimeter, and Kahoot.
20230829 DAFITC 2023 Agile For Leaders And ExecutivesCraeg Strong
In this seminar we will describe agile methods and practices that apply at the executive leadership level—why they are important, what they mean, and how they can be adopted. We will also explore the critical role management plays in supporting, leading, and guiding agile teams. We will also illustrate how the role of leadership and management changes in an agile organization, applying concepts from many sources including Lean, the Kanban Method, Flight Levels, and Management 3.0. We will also talk about what it means to lead a digital transformation and best practices for leading and managing large-scale agile initiatives, and some proven techniques for achieving consensus and changing hearts minds and behaviors. We will review the historical genesis of this work, starting with military doctrine from Clausewitz and Von Moltke, David Marquet, General McChrystal, and Stephen Bungay. Finally, we will talk about agile governance and oversight for agile at scale.
20231004 JiraCon Team Spaces In ConfluenceCraeg Strong
In a one-hour presentation, we explored how Atlassian Confluence enhances operational efficiency for IT project teams. Confluence has emerged as a versatile and indispensable platform for capturing, sharing, and managing information.
Introduction to Atlassian Confluence:
Atlassian Confluence is a collaborative wiki platform designed to facilitate knowledge sharing and teamwork.
It serves as a central repository for documentation, project information, and collaboration within IT teams.
Organizing Information:
Confluence allows teams to create structured and organized spaces for various projects, teams, and departments.
Pages and templates help standardize documentation and maintain consistency.
Ease of Collaboration:
Real-time collaboration features enable team members to work together on documents, eliminating the need for multiple versions and emails.
Inline commenting, likes, and notifications foster engagement and discussions.
Knowledge Capture:
Confluence is an excellent tool for capturing tribal knowledge within operational teams.
Valuable information is documented, searchable, and preserved, reducing reliance on individual expertise.
Project Documentation:
IT project teams can create project documentation including requirements, design documents, test plans, and post-implementation reports.
Version control ensures that the latest information is always available.
Task Management:
Confluence integrates with Jira, Atlassian's project management tool, for seamless task and issue tracking.
Teams can link Confluence pages to Jira issues, streamlining project workflows.
Information Retrieval:
The powerful search functionality allows teams to quickly find relevant information, reducing time spent searching for documents.
Labels, tags, and content hierarchies enhance discoverability.
Customization and Extensions:
Confluence can be customized with macros and add-ons to extend its capabilities, catering to specific team requirements.
Integration with other Atlassian products and third-party tools further enhances its utility.
Security and Access Control:
Granular permissions and access control ensure that sensitive information is protected.
Audit logs provide visibility into who accessed and modified content.
Knowledge Sharing Culture:
Confluence fosters a culture of knowledge sharing and collaboration, encouraging cross-functional teams to work together more effectively.
It enables onboarding of new team members and reduces knowledge silos.
Use Cases and Success Stories:
Real-world examples and success stories demonstrated how organizations have benefited from using Confluence in their IT operations.
Conclusion:
Atlassian Confluence is a versatile, user-friendly, and indispensable tool for operational teams, particularly those working on IT projects.
It streamlines information management, enhances collaboration, and promotes a culture of knowledge sharing
20231023 AgileDC Making Strategy Real with Well Crafted OutcomesCraeg Strong
Let's design some outcomes! This is a hands-on workshop where participants can dive in and learn by doing.
The presentation on leading with outcomes emphasizes the crucial shift from focusing solely on outputs to prioritizing outcomes in order to drive real business value. The speaker introduces the concept of well-crafted objectives that are not only quantitative but also directly tied to the achievement of tangible results. This approach ensures that business efforts are aligned with measurable goals, leading to more meaningful progress. In stark contrast to outcomes, outputs are highlighted as mere artifacts generated by business or IT processes. While outputs represent the completion of tasks or the delivery of specific items, they often fall short in reflecting the true impact on the business. The presenter emphasizes the need to define outcomes that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART), allowing for clear evaluation and tracking of progress.
We will start out with some hands-on exercises to turn outputs into well-crafted outcomes. We will review them and discuss what makes them more or less effective, and how they could help us achieve our strategic goals.
Next we will explore leading and lagging metrics. Lagging metrics are the ones that we all care about: revenue, delivery of government services, crime reduction, keeping our homeland safe. The problem? we cannot affect those directly. By contrast, a leading metric is something we can affect directly. While we can't cause sales to go up, maybe if we reduce out-of-stock situations that will ultimately lead to more sales. we will discuss ways to identify leading metrics and how to know when its time to pivot and try another.
This fun workshop is chock full of exercises and discussion, and is a great way to learn some of the new exciting tools in the business agility toolset.
In conclusion, the presentation advocates for a shift from outputs to outcomes as a strategic approach to leadership. By crafting objectives that are SMART and tied to genuine business value, organizations can better measure progress and drive meaningful results. This transition enables businesses to move beyond the production of artifacts and instead prioritize achieving quantifiable outcomes that contribute to their overall success.
20230829 DAFITC 2023 Agile For Leaders And ExecutivesCraeg Strong
In this seminar we describe agile methods and practices that apply at the executive leadership level-why they are important, what they mean, and how they can be adopted. We will also explore the critical role management plays in supporting, leading, and guiding agile teams. We will also illustrate how the role of leadership and management changes in an agile organization, applying concepts from many sources including Lean, the Kanban Method, Flight Levels, and Management 3.0. We will also talk about what it means to lead a digital transformation and best practices for leading and managing large-scale agile initiatives, and some proven techniques for achieving consensus and changing hearts minds and behaviors. We will review the historical genesis of this work, starting with military doctrine from Clausewitz and Von Moltke, David Marquet, General McChrystal, and Stephen Bungay. Finally, we will talk about agile governance and oversight for agile at scale.
20230622 PMINYC Modern Project Management with Lean KanbanCraeg Strong
This talk will demonstrate how to use Kanban for managing a large, complex project, and the benefits to be gained by using this approach. Kanban has grown up and is now widely used both within Information Technology and by diverse business professionals including underwriters, researchers, homebuilders, retailers, HR professionals, accountants, claims adjusters and many others. Kanban has a unique combination of ease of use and low barrier to entry, coupled with flexibility, versatility, and fractal nature (that is, its ability to be applied at multiple levels). These characteristics make it a perfect fit for managing large, complex programs in fields like government, pharma, finance and insurance. The presentation will be structured as follows:
I. Basics of Kanban In this segment, we will delve into the key components of a Kanban system: Visual Boards, Work in Progress (WIP) Limits, and the flow of work. We will discuss how replenishment is done, how delivery is scheduled, and some basic metrics. We will examine workflows of a couple of disparate teams that have to work together. Attendees will gain an understanding of how to set up their own Kanban boards and how to use them effectively.
II. Upstream Kanban This segment will explore how Kanban can be used to refine fuzzy ideas into “shovel-ready” work items. We will explore ways to extend our boards to include refinement steps and different ways they could be constructed. Attendees will gain an understanding of the improvements that upstream kanban can bring to a flat one-dimensional “product backlog.”
III. Dependency Management with Kanban This segment will explore how Kanban can be used to handle dependencies. We'll explain how to visualize the work of multiple teams that are cooperating together using a higher-level board linked to the individual team boards, how we can display dependencies on the Kanban board and how to manage them efficiently to minimize bottlenecks and delays.
IV. Using Kanban for Forecasting In this section, we will demonstrate how Kanban can be used as a powerful forecasting tool. Attendees will learn how to leverage lead time data and throughput data to predict key milestone completion times and manage expectations effectively.
Conclusion and Q&A We will wrap up the presentation with a recap and open the floor for a lively question and answer session to ensure that all attendees leave with a clear understanding of how they can leverage Kanban for efficient project management in their respective fields.
20230622 PMIC Leveraging the 4 Disciplines of Execution & Enterprise Kanban t...Craeg Strong
The four disciplines of execution (4DX) is an exciting new framework that enables organizations to marshal their efforts and achieve what no one has ever done before. Organizations using 4DX have eliminated decades-long case backlogs, dramatically improved workplace safety, brought lifesaving drugs to market in record time, and transformed sales departments from worst to first. 4DX is not magic, it takes significant discipline to relentlessly focus on most “wildly important goal,” in the face of so many daily urgencies. Steve Jobs once said, he was as proud of what Apple does *not* do as he was about what Apple does. In this talk, we will explore the 4DX framework together with the principles of enterprise kanban to ensure that everyone in the organization can see a scoreboard that visualizes where we are, where we need to be, and how to get there. Finally, we will talk about how to get started, traps to avoid, and what to expect along the way.
20231019 Flight Levels Bosch Engagement Day 2023 Business Agility With Flight...Craeg Strong
In this seminar we will describe agile methods and practices that apply at the executive leadership level-why they are important, what they mean, and how they can be adopted. We will also explore the critical role management plays in supporting, leading, and guiding agile teams. We will also illustrate how the role of leadership and management changes in an agile organization, applying concepts from many sources including Lean, the Kanban Method, Flight Levels, and Management 3.0. We will also talk about what it means to lead a digital transformation and best practices for leading and managing large-scale agile initiatives, and some proven techniques for achieving consensus and changing hearts minds and behaviors. We will review the historical genesis of this work, starting with military doctrine from Clausewitz and Von Moltke, David Marquet, General McChrystal, and Stephen Bungay. Finally, we will talk about agile governance and oversight for agile at scale.
RESPONSIVE TRAINING FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONSCraeg Strong
In this seminar we will talk about responsive training, representing an exciting new breakthrough in didactic techniques adapted for digital and online. Referencing a successful air force training program, we will talk about how to maximize engagement, retention, and enjoyment while minimizing cost and disruption. Responsive training leverages the 4 C’s of training from the back of the room: connections, concepts, concrete practice, and conclusions. We will explore how to maximize the human elements while fully leveraging cloud and container-based technologies to improve training efficiencies. Finally we will explore the essential set of digital training tools including breakout rooms, surveys, bluescape/Miro, Mentimeter, and Kahoot.
20230829 DAFITC 2023 Agile For Leaders And ExecutivesCraeg Strong
In this seminar we will describe agile methods and practices that apply at the executive leadership level—why they are important, what they mean, and how they can be adopted. We will also explore the critical role management plays in supporting, leading, and guiding agile teams. We will also illustrate how the role of leadership and management changes in an agile organization, applying concepts from many sources including Lean, the Kanban Method, Flight Levels, and Management 3.0. We will also talk about what it means to lead a digital transformation and best practices for leading and managing large-scale agile initiatives, and some proven techniques for achieving consensus and changing hearts minds and behaviors. We will review the historical genesis of this work, starting with military doctrine from Clausewitz and Von Moltke, David Marquet, General McChrystal, and Stephen Bungay. Finally, we will talk about agile governance and oversight for agile at scale.
20231004 JiraCon Team Spaces In ConfluenceCraeg Strong
In a one-hour presentation, we explored how Atlassian Confluence enhances operational efficiency for IT project teams. Confluence has emerged as a versatile and indispensable platform for capturing, sharing, and managing information.
Introduction to Atlassian Confluence:
Atlassian Confluence is a collaborative wiki platform designed to facilitate knowledge sharing and teamwork.
It serves as a central repository for documentation, project information, and collaboration within IT teams.
Organizing Information:
Confluence allows teams to create structured and organized spaces for various projects, teams, and departments.
Pages and templates help standardize documentation and maintain consistency.
Ease of Collaboration:
Real-time collaboration features enable team members to work together on documents, eliminating the need for multiple versions and emails.
Inline commenting, likes, and notifications foster engagement and discussions.
Knowledge Capture:
Confluence is an excellent tool for capturing tribal knowledge within operational teams.
Valuable information is documented, searchable, and preserved, reducing reliance on individual expertise.
Project Documentation:
IT project teams can create project documentation including requirements, design documents, test plans, and post-implementation reports.
Version control ensures that the latest information is always available.
Task Management:
Confluence integrates with Jira, Atlassian's project management tool, for seamless task and issue tracking.
Teams can link Confluence pages to Jira issues, streamlining project workflows.
Information Retrieval:
The powerful search functionality allows teams to quickly find relevant information, reducing time spent searching for documents.
Labels, tags, and content hierarchies enhance discoverability.
Customization and Extensions:
Confluence can be customized with macros and add-ons to extend its capabilities, catering to specific team requirements.
Integration with other Atlassian products and third-party tools further enhances its utility.
Security and Access Control:
Granular permissions and access control ensure that sensitive information is protected.
Audit logs provide visibility into who accessed and modified content.
Knowledge Sharing Culture:
Confluence fosters a culture of knowledge sharing and collaboration, encouraging cross-functional teams to work together more effectively.
It enables onboarding of new team members and reduces knowledge silos.
Use Cases and Success Stories:
Real-world examples and success stories demonstrated how organizations have benefited from using Confluence in their IT operations.
Conclusion:
Atlassian Confluence is a versatile, user-friendly, and indispensable tool for operational teams, particularly those working on IT projects.
It streamlines information management, enhances collaboration, and promotes a culture of knowledge sharing
20231023 AgileDC Making Strategy Real with Well Crafted OutcomesCraeg Strong
Let's design some outcomes! This is a hands-on workshop where participants can dive in and learn by doing.
The presentation on leading with outcomes emphasizes the crucial shift from focusing solely on outputs to prioritizing outcomes in order to drive real business value. The speaker introduces the concept of well-crafted objectives that are not only quantitative but also directly tied to the achievement of tangible results. This approach ensures that business efforts are aligned with measurable goals, leading to more meaningful progress. In stark contrast to outcomes, outputs are highlighted as mere artifacts generated by business or IT processes. While outputs represent the completion of tasks or the delivery of specific items, they often fall short in reflecting the true impact on the business. The presenter emphasizes the need to define outcomes that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART), allowing for clear evaluation and tracking of progress.
We will start out with some hands-on exercises to turn outputs into well-crafted outcomes. We will review them and discuss what makes them more or less effective, and how they could help us achieve our strategic goals.
Next we will explore leading and lagging metrics. Lagging metrics are the ones that we all care about: revenue, delivery of government services, crime reduction, keeping our homeland safe. The problem? we cannot affect those directly. By contrast, a leading metric is something we can affect directly. While we can't cause sales to go up, maybe if we reduce out-of-stock situations that will ultimately lead to more sales. we will discuss ways to identify leading metrics and how to know when its time to pivot and try another.
This fun workshop is chock full of exercises and discussion, and is a great way to learn some of the new exciting tools in the business agility toolset.
In conclusion, the presentation advocates for a shift from outputs to outcomes as a strategic approach to leadership. By crafting objectives that are SMART and tied to genuine business value, organizations can better measure progress and drive meaningful results. This transition enables businesses to move beyond the production of artifacts and instead prioritize achieving quantifiable outcomes that contribute to their overall success.
20230829 DAFITC 2023 Agile For Leaders And ExecutivesCraeg Strong
In this seminar we describe agile methods and practices that apply at the executive leadership level-why they are important, what they mean, and how they can be adopted. We will also explore the critical role management plays in supporting, leading, and guiding agile teams. We will also illustrate how the role of leadership and management changes in an agile organization, applying concepts from many sources including Lean, the Kanban Method, Flight Levels, and Management 3.0. We will also talk about what it means to lead a digital transformation and best practices for leading and managing large-scale agile initiatives, and some proven techniques for achieving consensus and changing hearts minds and behaviors. We will review the historical genesis of this work, starting with military doctrine from Clausewitz and Von Moltke, David Marquet, General McChrystal, and Stephen Bungay. Finally, we will talk about agile governance and oversight for agile at scale.
20230622 PMINYC Modern Project Management with Lean KanbanCraeg Strong
This talk will demonstrate how to use Kanban for managing a large, complex project, and the benefits to be gained by using this approach. Kanban has grown up and is now widely used both within Information Technology and by diverse business professionals including underwriters, researchers, homebuilders, retailers, HR professionals, accountants, claims adjusters and many others. Kanban has a unique combination of ease of use and low barrier to entry, coupled with flexibility, versatility, and fractal nature (that is, its ability to be applied at multiple levels). These characteristics make it a perfect fit for managing large, complex programs in fields like government, pharma, finance and insurance. The presentation will be structured as follows:
I. Basics of Kanban In this segment, we will delve into the key components of a Kanban system: Visual Boards, Work in Progress (WIP) Limits, and the flow of work. We will discuss how replenishment is done, how delivery is scheduled, and some basic metrics. We will examine workflows of a couple of disparate teams that have to work together. Attendees will gain an understanding of how to set up their own Kanban boards and how to use them effectively.
II. Upstream Kanban This segment will explore how Kanban can be used to refine fuzzy ideas into “shovel-ready” work items. We will explore ways to extend our boards to include refinement steps and different ways they could be constructed. Attendees will gain an understanding of the improvements that upstream kanban can bring to a flat one-dimensional “product backlog.”
III. Dependency Management with Kanban This segment will explore how Kanban can be used to handle dependencies. We'll explain how to visualize the work of multiple teams that are cooperating together using a higher-level board linked to the individual team boards, how we can display dependencies on the Kanban board and how to manage them efficiently to minimize bottlenecks and delays.
IV. Using Kanban for Forecasting In this section, we will demonstrate how Kanban can be used as a powerful forecasting tool. Attendees will learn how to leverage lead time data and throughput data to predict key milestone completion times and manage expectations effectively.
Conclusion and Q&A We will wrap up the presentation with a recap and open the floor for a lively question and answer session to ensure that all attendees leave with a clear understanding of how they can leverage Kanban for efficient project management in their respective fields.
20230622 PMIC Leveraging the 4 Disciplines of Execution & Enterprise Kanban t...Craeg Strong
The four disciplines of execution (4DX) is an exciting new framework that enables organizations to marshal their efforts and achieve what no one has ever done before. Organizations using 4DX have eliminated decades-long case backlogs, dramatically improved workplace safety, brought lifesaving drugs to market in record time, and transformed sales departments from worst to first. 4DX is not magic, it takes significant discipline to relentlessly focus on most “wildly important goal,” in the face of so many daily urgencies. Steve Jobs once said, he was as proud of what Apple does *not* do as he was about what Apple does. In this talk, we will explore the 4DX framework together with the principles of enterprise kanban to ensure that everyone in the organization can see a scoreboard that visualizes where we are, where we need to be, and how to get there. Finally, we will talk about how to get started, traps to avoid, and what to expect along the way.
ADDO 2022 Putting the Sec in DevSecOps for an AWS Lambda Based SystemCraeg Strong
What does it mean to implement zero-trust and DevSecOps principles in a serverless environment? This is our story of hardening an AWS application based on serverless architecture. It all began with an idea for a brand-new plugin for the Atlassian Jira Agile tool. Our plugin uses an innovative design based on GoLang, AWS Athena, Lambdas, and DynamoDB, and the Atlassian AtlasKit SDK for ReactJS. Serverless applications have many nice features that help make them secure. Lambdas get their credentials injected at runtime, eliminating the need to store keys or credentials. Our SSO solution improves security still further, by creating temporary credentials for every session, eliminating static keys and credentials. Given this excellent foundation, we thought our MVP was ready for production! Alas, how mistaken we were...
In order to meet Atlassian’s strict cybersecurity guidelines, we implemented security tools including GitHub’s dependabot, AWS credential management services, AWS app firewall, gosec, ZAP tester, and Nessus. We will discuss lessons learned and what was unique to the serverless environment. We will also cover privilege audits, data, and disaster recovery.
Using serverless architecture confers many benefits, and by reducing the attack surface, they can be inherently more secure than alternative architectures. Nevertheless, there are important steps that must be taken to further improve security. This talk will shed light on how to get where we need to be.
Coaching leaders: how to get it right, and how to get it really, really wrongCraeg Strong
The document provides tips for coaching leaders effectively and ineffectively. For effective coaching, it recommends finding a champion, understanding problems from the leader's perspective, focusing on problem solving, learning business speak, making plans together, measuring impact, and giving actionable feedback. For ineffective coaching, it suggests relying on platitudes, keeping things theoretical, only pointing out problems, and focusing solely on processes.
20220607 Introduction to Flight LevelsCraeg Strong
The Flight Levels framework represents a breakthrough achievement in the Agile community, finally living up to the promise of true Business Agility. It does this by encompassing every part of the organization and encouraging participation at every level, across all disciplines. The flight level model recognizes that we need three “viewpoints” for managing our work—flight level three, or the strategy level, flight level two, or the coordination level, and flight level one, or the team level. Flight Levels provide a simple and clear way to connect strategy to execution—facilitating alignment and enabling innovation to occur at every level. Unlike complex and prescriptive frameworks, Flight Levels fit in smoothly with your existing processes like Scrum or Kanban and can be adopted quickly and incrementally.
In this talk I will introduce the flight levels framework, focusing on the problems that it solves and how it differs from other well-known frameworks. Unlike other frameworks, flight levels can be used by the entire company—it is non-IT specific. In addition, flight levels can happily coexist with other Agile frameworks. Rather than specify what teams should be doing, the flight levels framework focuses on helping teams coordinate in value streams and connecting strategy to execution at the portfolio and corporate strategy level. Unlike traditional org charts, the flight level system maps the flow of work and helps us understand the needs for coordination--where we need daily touchpoints and feedback loops. A flight level system consists of a flight level three, or strategy level board mapping corporate strategy to our portfolio of work via OKRAs—(objectives key results and Actions) as well as one or more flight level two boards to help us coordinate the work of multiple teams within a given value stream. These boards all connect to our standard flight level one team-level Scrum or Kanban boards. This talk introduces an exciting new approach to enterprise agility that is neither vague nor overly prescriptive. Participants will come away with a new perspective on scaling Agile that they can apply immediately, no matter which Agile framework(s) their organization is using.
20220621 Project Management Innovation Conference Harrisburg PA Seatbelts and...Craeg Strong
Organizations large and small use application lifecycle management tools like Jira, Azure DevOps, VersionOne, Rational Team Concert, and others to manage their Agile products and programs
Every day in large organizations, ALM data is used to make forecasts and key decisions about budgeting, staffing, and risk management. Organizations increasingly rely on ALM tools to generate alerts to proactively warn about variances, risks, and shortfalls. Unfortunately, due to late, inaccurate, and incomplete data entry, ALM tools often end up emitting a large volume of false positives, while the real risks remain hidden.
We would like to propose a new approach that automates governance for ALM tools, leveraging the same proven approach used by linting tools like FxCop, stylecop, eslint, pylint and pmd. Rather than expecting perfection, let's provide some guides and seatbelts to enable mere mortals to use alm tools successfully!
20220216 Lean In Government Conference Harrisburg PA Agile Tool Clash of the ...Craeg Strong
Covid-19 changed the game, making remote work and distributed team members the norm. I think we all sense that something fundamental has changed in the nature of work, and many of these changes will persist even after the pandemic. Like it or not, whiteboards and sticky notes can no longer cut it. We have to use Agile tools. So... which one?
In this talk Craeg will do an in-depth walkthrough of two leading Agile tools: Atlassian Jira and Kanbanize. He will review the philosophy of each tool, and then walk through a fully featured simulation, complete with sample projects, plugins, and project configurations, that show off the best that each tool has to offer.
Atlassian Jira is a “developer’s tool,” and this heritage shows through clearly in the way it is set up, how the pieces fit together, and the problems it tries to solve. But this is really only a small part of the Jira story. The Jira plugin marketplace has exploded in popularity, with hundreds of high-quality plugins that extend Jira in all sorts of interesting ways. Craeg will demonstrate a Jira configuration that includes plugins including Nave, Structure, Structure.Gantt, Checklist, Story Maps, and JXL. Taken together, these plugins transform Jira into an Enterprise-strength tool. Craeg will explore how Jira supports both Kanban and Scrum at the team level, as well as scaling beyond the team level. In addition, Craeg will briefly discuss the elephant in the room, Jira Align, and why he still prefers the “augmented Jira” approach.
Kanbanize is the market leader among a set of up-and-coming Kanban tools including Kaiten, Swift Kanban, Kanban Zone, and LeanKit. Craeg will explore how Jira supports both Kanban and Scrum at the team level, as well as scaling beyond the team level. In contrast to Jira, Kanbanize offers a “batteries included” approach that tightly integrates features in a unique and highly usable interface.
Craeg will explore the areas of overlap and the unique strengths of each tool. In the end, both are highly capable, flexible, and powerful enough to support even the largest of organizations. But...in the end there can be only one. Come to see the results of this legendary battle!
20220329 Ariel Partners Configuring Jira For Maximum AgilityCraeg Strong
A poorly tuned Jira is a daily struggle for Agile teams. Inconsistencies in Jira usage and configurations produce unreliable data that limit an organization’s ability to properly manage Agile projects from the team level to the executive level. Lacking an appropriate level of investment and understanding, Jira can become little more than an expensive task tracking tool, rather than something that can help catalyze improvements and drive organizational change. In order to derive the maximum possible benefit from their investment in Atlassian products, organizations must appreciate the complexity and sophistication of these tools and assign an appropriate level of investment – both initial and on an ongoing basis. This involves three main pieces:
(1) design a set of initial templates, taxonomies, configurations, and reporting metrics,
(2) establish roles and responsibilities for jira administration,
(3) and initiate a process of continuous improvement that welcomes configuration changes rather than discourages them.
20220301 Atlassian Team Tour Government ArielPartners Innovative Jira Configu...Craeg Strong
A poorly tuned Jira is a daily struggle for your team. This demo will show some of the ways Ariel helps teams configure their Jira software to enable true Agility. We will cover tips and tricks for making the Jira experience amazing for teams of any variety. We will cover several scenarios such as scaling up to larger efforts, how to supercharge your standups, enforcing governance, and finally a better way of doing backlog refinement.
With a well-tuned Jira, you get happier, more productive teams, and much more accurate information to make business decisions.
20211202 North America DevOps Group NADOG Adapting to Covid With Serverless C...Craeg Strong
This case study describes how we leveraged serverless technology and the AWS serverless application model (SAM) to support the needs of virtual training classes for a major US Federal agency. Our firm was excited to be selected as the main training partner to help a major US Federal government agency roll out Agile and DevOps processes across an organization comprising more than 1500 people. And then the pandemic hit—and what was to have been a series of in-person classes turned 100% virtual! We created a set of fully populated docker images containing all of the test data, plugins, and scenarios required for the student exercises. For our initial implementation, we simply pre-loaded our docker images into elastic beanstalk and then replicated them as many times as needed to provide the necessary number of instances for a given class. While this worked out fine at first, we found a number of shortcomings as we scaled up to more students and more classes. Eventually we came up with a much easier solution using serverless technology: we stood up a single page application that could kickoff tasks using AWS step functions to run docker images in elastic container service, all running under AWS Fargate. This application is a perfect fit for serverless technology and describing our evolution to serverless and SAM may help you gain insights into how these technologies may be beneficial in your situation.
20211007 PMI LIC Chapter Agile Tool Celebrity Death Match Kanbanize vs Jira C...Craeg Strong
Covid-19 changed the game, making remote work and distributed team members the norm. I think we all sense that something fundamental has changed in the nature of work, and many of these changes will persist even after the pandemic. Like it or not, whiteboards and sticky notes can no longer cut it. We have to use Agile tools. So... which one?
In this talk Craeg will do an in-depth walkthrough of two leading Agile tools: Atlassian Jira and Kanbanize. He will review the philosophy of each tool, and then walk through a fully featured simulation, complete with sample projects, plugins, and project configurations, that show off the best that each tool has to offer.
Craeg will explore the areas of overlap and the unique strengths of each tool.
Both tools are highly capable, flexible, and powerful enough to support even the largest of organizations. But...in the end there can be only one. Come to see the results of this legendary battle!
20211114 Agile DevOps East Conf 2021 Bringing DevOps to an Entrenched Legacy ...Craeg Strong
Innovative Silicon Valley companies like Etsy leverage DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices to achieve new levels of automation and agility, shrinking development lead times and deploying to production many times each day. However, many companies struggle to implement these practices for the legacy systems that run their core business. To make matters worse, the agile community offers relatively little practical guidance for implementing DevOps practices in legacy environments. Fortunately, the Kanban Method provides a practical way to gradually evolve these core systems towards achieving DevOps cost savings and efficiencies—without turning your organization upside down, and even if you don’t have a massive budget.
Through a case study involving a criminal justice system for a US government agency, we will examine how the Kanban method helps us identify and remove the barriers that prevent us from implementing DevOps automation for legacy systems. Just as importantly, Kanban provides the means to measure the efficacy of our efforts, prompting us to course-correct when necessary. Both technology-related and human-related concerns will be addressed. We will review some interesting examples using the Microsoft technology stack. The end result is better quality and collaboration and faster delivery of value to our stakeholders. Perhaps it is possible to teach an old dog new tricks, after all.
20211028 ADDO Adapting to Covid with Serverless Craeg Strong Ariel PartnersCraeg Strong
This case study describes how we leveraged serverless technology and the AWS serverless application model (SAM) to support the needs of virtual training classes for a major US Federal agency. Our firm was excited to be selected as the main training partner to help a major US Federal government agency roll out Agile and DevOps processes across an organization comprising more than 1500 people. And then the pandemic hit—and what was to have been a series of in-person classes turned 100% virtual! We created a set of fully populated docker images containing all of the test data, plugins, and scenarios required for the student exercises. For our initial implementation, we simply pre-loaded our docker images into elastic beanstalk and then replicated them as many times as needed to provide the necessary number of instances for a given class. While this worked out fine at first, we found a number of shortcomings as we scaled up to more students and more classes. Eventually we came up with a much easier solution using serverless technology: we stood up a single page application that could kickoff tasks using AWS step functions to run docker images in elastic container service, all running under AWS Fargate. This application is a perfect fit for serverless technology and describing our evolution to serverless and SAM may help you gain insights into how these technologies may be beneficial in your situation.
20211202 NADOG Adapting to Covid with Serverless Craeg Strong Ariel PartnersCraeg Strong
This case study describes how we leveraged serverless technology and the AWS serverless application model (SAM) to support the needs of virtual training classes for a major US Federal agency. Our firm was excited to be selected as the main training partner to help a major US Federal government agency roll out Agile and DevOps processes across an organization comprising more than 1500 people. And then the pandemic hit—and what was to have been a series of in-person classes turned 100% virtual! We created a set of fully populated docker images containing all of the test data, plugins, and scenarios required for the student exercises. For our initial implementation, we simply pre-loaded our docker images into elastic beanstalk and then replicated them as many times as needed to provide the necessary number of instances for a given class. While this worked out fine at first, we found a number of shortcomings as we scaled up to more students and more classes. Eventually we came up with a much easier solution using serverless technology: we stood up a single page application that could kickoff tasks using AWS step functions to run docker images in elastic container service, all running under AWS Fargate. This application is a perfect fit for serverless technology and describing our evolution to serverless and SAM may help you gain insights into how these technologies may be beneficial in your situation.
Innovation at scale doesn’t happen by accident. And it isn’t magic, either. How can we encourage innovation and at all levels, ensuring that insights and findings are incorporated into organizational strategy so that we can react and adjust quickly — enabling true business agility? Discovery Kanban and Human Centered Design provide the keys to understanding our customers and managing R&D efforts to ensure we build the right things. In turn, Kanban flight levels provides a rich and robust framework to align these activities across the organization—connecting organizational strategy (at flight level three) down to the efforts of individual teams of knowledge workers (at flight level one).
In this session we will explore how the combination of Discovery Kanban, HCD, and Kanban Flight Levels give us a vocabulary and a rich set of tools to visualize and manage customer-centered innovation efforts at scale. We will start out by reviewing Kanban boards that are used by individual teams to manage their work—at flight level one. We will see how each team’s discovery or delivery efforts are beautifully visualized by Kanban so that they can be integrated and managed effectively. We will then proceed up to flight level two and see how Kanban boards at this level help coordinate multiple inter-dependent discovery and delivery teams. Finally, we will see how a flight level three board captures organizational strategy, tying strategic objectives to both current and future initiatives—that are in turn tracked on flight level one and two boards.
Kanban provides the alternative path to agility: a humane, evolutionary approach that works both within and outside of IT. The combination of HCD, Discovery Kanban, and Kanban flight levels provides a powerful, effective and low-overhead method for achieving true business agility.
20210610 AgileDevOps West Conf Bringing DevOps to an Entrenched Legacy Enviro...Craeg Strong
Innovative Silicon Valley companies like Etsy leverage DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices to achieve new levels of automation and agility, shrinking development lead times and deploying to production many times each day. However, many companies struggle to implement these practices for the legacy systems that run their core business. To make matters worse, the agile community offers relatively little practical guidance for implementing DevOps practices in legacy environments. Fortunately, the Kanban Method provides a practical way to gradually evolve these core systems towards achieving DevOps cost savings and efficiencies—without turning your organization upside down, and even if you don’t have a massive budget.
Through a case study involving a criminal justice system for a US government agency, we will examine how the Kanban method helps us identify and remove the barriers that prevent us from implementing DevOps automation for legacy systems. Just as importantly, Kanban provides the means to measure the efficacy of our efforts, prompting us to course-correct when necessary. Both technology-related and human-related concerns will be addressed. We will review some interesting examples using the Microsoft technology stack. The end result is better quality and collaboration and faster delivery of value to our stakeholders. Perhaps it is possible to teach an old dog new tricks, after all.
20210618 PMI XC 2021 Conf Business Agility: What Got You Here Won't Get You T...Craeg Strong
Craeg Strong presented on using an agile transformation approach called Flight Levels and Kanban Maturity Model to help an online learning company address challenges with no strategic portfolio management, lack of end-to-end value stream management, and limited interaction between teams. The approach uses Flight Levels to visualize work at the team, coordination, and strategy levels and implements Kanban systems gradually per the Kanban Maturity Model. Initial results included developing visualizations for the strategy and coordination levels and designing a pilot Kanban system using workshops. The rollout plan is to design Kanban systems for each team through iterative workshops.
20210428 Atlassian Team2021 How a Well-Tuned Jira Can Change Everything For Y...Craeg Strong
The well-Tempered [Jira] Clavier: A poorly tuned Jira is a daily struggle for your team. Join this session to learn tips and tricks for making the Jira experience amazing for teams of any variety. We will show you how to turn all the knobs to 11 and create a state-of-the-art Jira experience. With the right care and feeding Jira can be a significant corporate asset that can help you transform your business. The streamlined interface reduces the learning curve and makes Jira a pleasure to use, which increases adoption. You get more people using Jira, putting better information into it. You get happier, more productive teams, reliable forecasts, and much more accurate information to make business decisions. We think Johann Sebastian Bach would approve.
20210113 Lean in Government Harrisburg Conf Using Kanban and the Theory of Ch...Craeg Strong
This is an experience report describing how we used Kanban plus the Theory of Change to begin a transformation of a NYC social services agency away from traditional ways of doing business and towards a more adaptable, responsive, and outcomes-driven approach and ultimately a better steward of taxpayer monies.
Like many health and human services-based agencies, this mayoral agency was originally focused on procurements, contracts with third party providers, and standardized quarterly reporting to run its operations.
The commissioner challenged his agency to become more directly client-facing, data-driven, and oriented on outcomes. The agency leveraged the Theory of Change (ToC) to establish a conceptual framework including a set of desired outcomes and the high-level steps it will take to achieve the outcomes. ToC seeks to fill in the gaps between actions (e.g. provide afterschool program) and key results (e.g. reduce school dropout rates). ToC is especially relevant in health and human services contexts due to the difficulty in making these kinds of connections.
We observed that the ToC approach is compatible with Objectives and Key Results (OKR) which according to Klaus Leopold often plays a key part of a flight-level three (strategic) Kanban system. In our engagement we focused at the strategic level and worked together to establish a flight-level three (strategy) kanban system for the CIO to manage his initiatives. We designed and built a number of metrics so that the CIO could measure relative levels of investment and effort between different initiatives. This was a huge leap forward, since in the past the CIO could only report aggregate numbers and therefore had no way of measuring cost/benefit by matching outcomes to specific investments.
Our work with this client is continuing, and many new challenges have arisen. Ultimately, however, the agency is making good progress on its drive to improve organizational maturity and a deeper and richer Kanban implementation. This session will dive into lessons learned, results achieved, and key observations.
20210113 Lean In Government Harrisburg Conf Agile Governance at Scale Craeg S...Craeg Strong
Traditional duties of IT governance and oversight include auditing timely completion of milestones and phase gates and tracking progress versus spend. They place heavy emphasis on correctness and completeness of documentation, managing risks and tracking metrics such as earned value and escaped defect counts. With the adoption of agile methods comes the need to adjust governance and oversight accordingly. But what does agile governance look like? How does it differ from traditional governance? Given the lack of detailed plans up-front, the reduced emphasis on documentation, and the eschewing of traditional metrics such as earned value, one might assume that governance and oversight is more challenging in the agile space. Looking at governance and oversight through a traditional lens reveals relatively few effective tools and the necessity of relying upon vaguely defined metrics such as “story points.” However, we will show that, in fact, agile methods offer governance and oversight a wealth of new tools and capabilities, enabling a more proactive and collaborative approach—which could ultimately lead to improved outcomes.
20201111 Agile DevOps East 2020 Conf Now You See It: Observing Flow using Kan...Craeg Strong
“I didn’t know you could do that with Kanban!” This interactive workshop reveals how Kanban systems can help solve the governance and coordination problems that threaten large-scale initiatives. Too many strategic priorities chasing too few resources. Dependencies between teams. Delays due to lack of clear delineations of ownership and responsibility, and a crisp definition of ready. We will explore innovative new Kanban designs that can significantly simplify these difficult problems, ultimately resulting in better outcomes with less stress. We will start by reviewing Kanban board designs from diverse industries and at multiple levels of the organization. We will then interactively construct several interesting examples, including Kanban boards for managing multiple streams of work, facilitating multi-team coordination at scale, and even planning and communicating corporate strategy. Powerful concepts like demand shaping, classes of service, capacity tokens, and order points will effortlessly reveal themselves. Best of all: these Kanban systems are perfectly compatible with Scrum Scaling frameworks such as Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) and the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). In fact, one might call them the secret ingredient! Using nothing but painter’s tape and sticky notes of all shapes, sizes and colors, we will gain an appreciation of how thoughtfully designed boards (and the coordination systems they enable) can help unlock true business agility.
Ariel Partners has developed a comprehensive program for governance and oversight of large-scale agile projects in the US federal government. This program is structured as a set of eleven major focus areas. Within each focus area, there are specific oversight objectives, activities, and metrics. The output is captured in an excel spreadsheet that calculates a set of quantitative measures, which are then aggregated to automatically produce a composite score, using a similar scoring strategy to FITARA. The program is comprehensive, but it is based on a set of simple principles. We have prepared a presentation that summarizes the program’s key points.
ADDO 2022 Putting the Sec in DevSecOps for an AWS Lambda Based SystemCraeg Strong
What does it mean to implement zero-trust and DevSecOps principles in a serverless environment? This is our story of hardening an AWS application based on serverless architecture. It all began with an idea for a brand-new plugin for the Atlassian Jira Agile tool. Our plugin uses an innovative design based on GoLang, AWS Athena, Lambdas, and DynamoDB, and the Atlassian AtlasKit SDK for ReactJS. Serverless applications have many nice features that help make them secure. Lambdas get their credentials injected at runtime, eliminating the need to store keys or credentials. Our SSO solution improves security still further, by creating temporary credentials for every session, eliminating static keys and credentials. Given this excellent foundation, we thought our MVP was ready for production! Alas, how mistaken we were...
In order to meet Atlassian’s strict cybersecurity guidelines, we implemented security tools including GitHub’s dependabot, AWS credential management services, AWS app firewall, gosec, ZAP tester, and Nessus. We will discuss lessons learned and what was unique to the serverless environment. We will also cover privilege audits, data, and disaster recovery.
Using serverless architecture confers many benefits, and by reducing the attack surface, they can be inherently more secure than alternative architectures. Nevertheless, there are important steps that must be taken to further improve security. This talk will shed light on how to get where we need to be.
Coaching leaders: how to get it right, and how to get it really, really wrongCraeg Strong
The document provides tips for coaching leaders effectively and ineffectively. For effective coaching, it recommends finding a champion, understanding problems from the leader's perspective, focusing on problem solving, learning business speak, making plans together, measuring impact, and giving actionable feedback. For ineffective coaching, it suggests relying on platitudes, keeping things theoretical, only pointing out problems, and focusing solely on processes.
20220607 Introduction to Flight LevelsCraeg Strong
The Flight Levels framework represents a breakthrough achievement in the Agile community, finally living up to the promise of true Business Agility. It does this by encompassing every part of the organization and encouraging participation at every level, across all disciplines. The flight level model recognizes that we need three “viewpoints” for managing our work—flight level three, or the strategy level, flight level two, or the coordination level, and flight level one, or the team level. Flight Levels provide a simple and clear way to connect strategy to execution—facilitating alignment and enabling innovation to occur at every level. Unlike complex and prescriptive frameworks, Flight Levels fit in smoothly with your existing processes like Scrum or Kanban and can be adopted quickly and incrementally.
In this talk I will introduce the flight levels framework, focusing on the problems that it solves and how it differs from other well-known frameworks. Unlike other frameworks, flight levels can be used by the entire company—it is non-IT specific. In addition, flight levels can happily coexist with other Agile frameworks. Rather than specify what teams should be doing, the flight levels framework focuses on helping teams coordinate in value streams and connecting strategy to execution at the portfolio and corporate strategy level. Unlike traditional org charts, the flight level system maps the flow of work and helps us understand the needs for coordination--where we need daily touchpoints and feedback loops. A flight level system consists of a flight level three, or strategy level board mapping corporate strategy to our portfolio of work via OKRAs—(objectives key results and Actions) as well as one or more flight level two boards to help us coordinate the work of multiple teams within a given value stream. These boards all connect to our standard flight level one team-level Scrum or Kanban boards. This talk introduces an exciting new approach to enterprise agility that is neither vague nor overly prescriptive. Participants will come away with a new perspective on scaling Agile that they can apply immediately, no matter which Agile framework(s) their organization is using.
20220621 Project Management Innovation Conference Harrisburg PA Seatbelts and...Craeg Strong
Organizations large and small use application lifecycle management tools like Jira, Azure DevOps, VersionOne, Rational Team Concert, and others to manage their Agile products and programs
Every day in large organizations, ALM data is used to make forecasts and key decisions about budgeting, staffing, and risk management. Organizations increasingly rely on ALM tools to generate alerts to proactively warn about variances, risks, and shortfalls. Unfortunately, due to late, inaccurate, and incomplete data entry, ALM tools often end up emitting a large volume of false positives, while the real risks remain hidden.
We would like to propose a new approach that automates governance for ALM tools, leveraging the same proven approach used by linting tools like FxCop, stylecop, eslint, pylint and pmd. Rather than expecting perfection, let's provide some guides and seatbelts to enable mere mortals to use alm tools successfully!
20220216 Lean In Government Conference Harrisburg PA Agile Tool Clash of the ...Craeg Strong
Covid-19 changed the game, making remote work and distributed team members the norm. I think we all sense that something fundamental has changed in the nature of work, and many of these changes will persist even after the pandemic. Like it or not, whiteboards and sticky notes can no longer cut it. We have to use Agile tools. So... which one?
In this talk Craeg will do an in-depth walkthrough of two leading Agile tools: Atlassian Jira and Kanbanize. He will review the philosophy of each tool, and then walk through a fully featured simulation, complete with sample projects, plugins, and project configurations, that show off the best that each tool has to offer.
Atlassian Jira is a “developer’s tool,” and this heritage shows through clearly in the way it is set up, how the pieces fit together, and the problems it tries to solve. But this is really only a small part of the Jira story. The Jira plugin marketplace has exploded in popularity, with hundreds of high-quality plugins that extend Jira in all sorts of interesting ways. Craeg will demonstrate a Jira configuration that includes plugins including Nave, Structure, Structure.Gantt, Checklist, Story Maps, and JXL. Taken together, these plugins transform Jira into an Enterprise-strength tool. Craeg will explore how Jira supports both Kanban and Scrum at the team level, as well as scaling beyond the team level. In addition, Craeg will briefly discuss the elephant in the room, Jira Align, and why he still prefers the “augmented Jira” approach.
Kanbanize is the market leader among a set of up-and-coming Kanban tools including Kaiten, Swift Kanban, Kanban Zone, and LeanKit. Craeg will explore how Jira supports both Kanban and Scrum at the team level, as well as scaling beyond the team level. In contrast to Jira, Kanbanize offers a “batteries included” approach that tightly integrates features in a unique and highly usable interface.
Craeg will explore the areas of overlap and the unique strengths of each tool. In the end, both are highly capable, flexible, and powerful enough to support even the largest of organizations. But...in the end there can be only one. Come to see the results of this legendary battle!
20220329 Ariel Partners Configuring Jira For Maximum AgilityCraeg Strong
A poorly tuned Jira is a daily struggle for Agile teams. Inconsistencies in Jira usage and configurations produce unreliable data that limit an organization’s ability to properly manage Agile projects from the team level to the executive level. Lacking an appropriate level of investment and understanding, Jira can become little more than an expensive task tracking tool, rather than something that can help catalyze improvements and drive organizational change. In order to derive the maximum possible benefit from their investment in Atlassian products, organizations must appreciate the complexity and sophistication of these tools and assign an appropriate level of investment – both initial and on an ongoing basis. This involves three main pieces:
(1) design a set of initial templates, taxonomies, configurations, and reporting metrics,
(2) establish roles and responsibilities for jira administration,
(3) and initiate a process of continuous improvement that welcomes configuration changes rather than discourages them.
20220301 Atlassian Team Tour Government ArielPartners Innovative Jira Configu...Craeg Strong
A poorly tuned Jira is a daily struggle for your team. This demo will show some of the ways Ariel helps teams configure their Jira software to enable true Agility. We will cover tips and tricks for making the Jira experience amazing for teams of any variety. We will cover several scenarios such as scaling up to larger efforts, how to supercharge your standups, enforcing governance, and finally a better way of doing backlog refinement.
With a well-tuned Jira, you get happier, more productive teams, and much more accurate information to make business decisions.
20211202 North America DevOps Group NADOG Adapting to Covid With Serverless C...Craeg Strong
This case study describes how we leveraged serverless technology and the AWS serverless application model (SAM) to support the needs of virtual training classes for a major US Federal agency. Our firm was excited to be selected as the main training partner to help a major US Federal government agency roll out Agile and DevOps processes across an organization comprising more than 1500 people. And then the pandemic hit—and what was to have been a series of in-person classes turned 100% virtual! We created a set of fully populated docker images containing all of the test data, plugins, and scenarios required for the student exercises. For our initial implementation, we simply pre-loaded our docker images into elastic beanstalk and then replicated them as many times as needed to provide the necessary number of instances for a given class. While this worked out fine at first, we found a number of shortcomings as we scaled up to more students and more classes. Eventually we came up with a much easier solution using serverless technology: we stood up a single page application that could kickoff tasks using AWS step functions to run docker images in elastic container service, all running under AWS Fargate. This application is a perfect fit for serverless technology and describing our evolution to serverless and SAM may help you gain insights into how these technologies may be beneficial in your situation.
20211007 PMI LIC Chapter Agile Tool Celebrity Death Match Kanbanize vs Jira C...Craeg Strong
Covid-19 changed the game, making remote work and distributed team members the norm. I think we all sense that something fundamental has changed in the nature of work, and many of these changes will persist even after the pandemic. Like it or not, whiteboards and sticky notes can no longer cut it. We have to use Agile tools. So... which one?
In this talk Craeg will do an in-depth walkthrough of two leading Agile tools: Atlassian Jira and Kanbanize. He will review the philosophy of each tool, and then walk through a fully featured simulation, complete with sample projects, plugins, and project configurations, that show off the best that each tool has to offer.
Craeg will explore the areas of overlap and the unique strengths of each tool.
Both tools are highly capable, flexible, and powerful enough to support even the largest of organizations. But...in the end there can be only one. Come to see the results of this legendary battle!
20211114 Agile DevOps East Conf 2021 Bringing DevOps to an Entrenched Legacy ...Craeg Strong
Innovative Silicon Valley companies like Etsy leverage DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices to achieve new levels of automation and agility, shrinking development lead times and deploying to production many times each day. However, many companies struggle to implement these practices for the legacy systems that run their core business. To make matters worse, the agile community offers relatively little practical guidance for implementing DevOps practices in legacy environments. Fortunately, the Kanban Method provides a practical way to gradually evolve these core systems towards achieving DevOps cost savings and efficiencies—without turning your organization upside down, and even if you don’t have a massive budget.
Through a case study involving a criminal justice system for a US government agency, we will examine how the Kanban method helps us identify and remove the barriers that prevent us from implementing DevOps automation for legacy systems. Just as importantly, Kanban provides the means to measure the efficacy of our efforts, prompting us to course-correct when necessary. Both technology-related and human-related concerns will be addressed. We will review some interesting examples using the Microsoft technology stack. The end result is better quality and collaboration and faster delivery of value to our stakeholders. Perhaps it is possible to teach an old dog new tricks, after all.
20211028 ADDO Adapting to Covid with Serverless Craeg Strong Ariel PartnersCraeg Strong
This case study describes how we leveraged serverless technology and the AWS serverless application model (SAM) to support the needs of virtual training classes for a major US Federal agency. Our firm was excited to be selected as the main training partner to help a major US Federal government agency roll out Agile and DevOps processes across an organization comprising more than 1500 people. And then the pandemic hit—and what was to have been a series of in-person classes turned 100% virtual! We created a set of fully populated docker images containing all of the test data, plugins, and scenarios required for the student exercises. For our initial implementation, we simply pre-loaded our docker images into elastic beanstalk and then replicated them as many times as needed to provide the necessary number of instances for a given class. While this worked out fine at first, we found a number of shortcomings as we scaled up to more students and more classes. Eventually we came up with a much easier solution using serverless technology: we stood up a single page application that could kickoff tasks using AWS step functions to run docker images in elastic container service, all running under AWS Fargate. This application is a perfect fit for serverless technology and describing our evolution to serverless and SAM may help you gain insights into how these technologies may be beneficial in your situation.
20211202 NADOG Adapting to Covid with Serverless Craeg Strong Ariel PartnersCraeg Strong
This case study describes how we leveraged serverless technology and the AWS serverless application model (SAM) to support the needs of virtual training classes for a major US Federal agency. Our firm was excited to be selected as the main training partner to help a major US Federal government agency roll out Agile and DevOps processes across an organization comprising more than 1500 people. And then the pandemic hit—and what was to have been a series of in-person classes turned 100% virtual! We created a set of fully populated docker images containing all of the test data, plugins, and scenarios required for the student exercises. For our initial implementation, we simply pre-loaded our docker images into elastic beanstalk and then replicated them as many times as needed to provide the necessary number of instances for a given class. While this worked out fine at first, we found a number of shortcomings as we scaled up to more students and more classes. Eventually we came up with a much easier solution using serverless technology: we stood up a single page application that could kickoff tasks using AWS step functions to run docker images in elastic container service, all running under AWS Fargate. This application is a perfect fit for serverless technology and describing our evolution to serverless and SAM may help you gain insights into how these technologies may be beneficial in your situation.
Innovation at scale doesn’t happen by accident. And it isn’t magic, either. How can we encourage innovation and at all levels, ensuring that insights and findings are incorporated into organizational strategy so that we can react and adjust quickly — enabling true business agility? Discovery Kanban and Human Centered Design provide the keys to understanding our customers and managing R&D efforts to ensure we build the right things. In turn, Kanban flight levels provides a rich and robust framework to align these activities across the organization—connecting organizational strategy (at flight level three) down to the efforts of individual teams of knowledge workers (at flight level one).
In this session we will explore how the combination of Discovery Kanban, HCD, and Kanban Flight Levels give us a vocabulary and a rich set of tools to visualize and manage customer-centered innovation efforts at scale. We will start out by reviewing Kanban boards that are used by individual teams to manage their work—at flight level one. We will see how each team’s discovery or delivery efforts are beautifully visualized by Kanban so that they can be integrated and managed effectively. We will then proceed up to flight level two and see how Kanban boards at this level help coordinate multiple inter-dependent discovery and delivery teams. Finally, we will see how a flight level three board captures organizational strategy, tying strategic objectives to both current and future initiatives—that are in turn tracked on flight level one and two boards.
Kanban provides the alternative path to agility: a humane, evolutionary approach that works both within and outside of IT. The combination of HCD, Discovery Kanban, and Kanban flight levels provides a powerful, effective and low-overhead method for achieving true business agility.
20210610 AgileDevOps West Conf Bringing DevOps to an Entrenched Legacy Enviro...Craeg Strong
Innovative Silicon Valley companies like Etsy leverage DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices to achieve new levels of automation and agility, shrinking development lead times and deploying to production many times each day. However, many companies struggle to implement these practices for the legacy systems that run their core business. To make matters worse, the agile community offers relatively little practical guidance for implementing DevOps practices in legacy environments. Fortunately, the Kanban Method provides a practical way to gradually evolve these core systems towards achieving DevOps cost savings and efficiencies—without turning your organization upside down, and even if you don’t have a massive budget.
Through a case study involving a criminal justice system for a US government agency, we will examine how the Kanban method helps us identify and remove the barriers that prevent us from implementing DevOps automation for legacy systems. Just as importantly, Kanban provides the means to measure the efficacy of our efforts, prompting us to course-correct when necessary. Both technology-related and human-related concerns will be addressed. We will review some interesting examples using the Microsoft technology stack. The end result is better quality and collaboration and faster delivery of value to our stakeholders. Perhaps it is possible to teach an old dog new tricks, after all.
20210618 PMI XC 2021 Conf Business Agility: What Got You Here Won't Get You T...Craeg Strong
Craeg Strong presented on using an agile transformation approach called Flight Levels and Kanban Maturity Model to help an online learning company address challenges with no strategic portfolio management, lack of end-to-end value stream management, and limited interaction between teams. The approach uses Flight Levels to visualize work at the team, coordination, and strategy levels and implements Kanban systems gradually per the Kanban Maturity Model. Initial results included developing visualizations for the strategy and coordination levels and designing a pilot Kanban system using workshops. The rollout plan is to design Kanban systems for each team through iterative workshops.
20210428 Atlassian Team2021 How a Well-Tuned Jira Can Change Everything For Y...Craeg Strong
The well-Tempered [Jira] Clavier: A poorly tuned Jira is a daily struggle for your team. Join this session to learn tips and tricks for making the Jira experience amazing for teams of any variety. We will show you how to turn all the knobs to 11 and create a state-of-the-art Jira experience. With the right care and feeding Jira can be a significant corporate asset that can help you transform your business. The streamlined interface reduces the learning curve and makes Jira a pleasure to use, which increases adoption. You get more people using Jira, putting better information into it. You get happier, more productive teams, reliable forecasts, and much more accurate information to make business decisions. We think Johann Sebastian Bach would approve.
20210113 Lean in Government Harrisburg Conf Using Kanban and the Theory of Ch...Craeg Strong
This is an experience report describing how we used Kanban plus the Theory of Change to begin a transformation of a NYC social services agency away from traditional ways of doing business and towards a more adaptable, responsive, and outcomes-driven approach and ultimately a better steward of taxpayer monies.
Like many health and human services-based agencies, this mayoral agency was originally focused on procurements, contracts with third party providers, and standardized quarterly reporting to run its operations.
The commissioner challenged his agency to become more directly client-facing, data-driven, and oriented on outcomes. The agency leveraged the Theory of Change (ToC) to establish a conceptual framework including a set of desired outcomes and the high-level steps it will take to achieve the outcomes. ToC seeks to fill in the gaps between actions (e.g. provide afterschool program) and key results (e.g. reduce school dropout rates). ToC is especially relevant in health and human services contexts due to the difficulty in making these kinds of connections.
We observed that the ToC approach is compatible with Objectives and Key Results (OKR) which according to Klaus Leopold often plays a key part of a flight-level three (strategic) Kanban system. In our engagement we focused at the strategic level and worked together to establish a flight-level three (strategy) kanban system for the CIO to manage his initiatives. We designed and built a number of metrics so that the CIO could measure relative levels of investment and effort between different initiatives. This was a huge leap forward, since in the past the CIO could only report aggregate numbers and therefore had no way of measuring cost/benefit by matching outcomes to specific investments.
Our work with this client is continuing, and many new challenges have arisen. Ultimately, however, the agency is making good progress on its drive to improve organizational maturity and a deeper and richer Kanban implementation. This session will dive into lessons learned, results achieved, and key observations.
20210113 Lean In Government Harrisburg Conf Agile Governance at Scale Craeg S...Craeg Strong
Traditional duties of IT governance and oversight include auditing timely completion of milestones and phase gates and tracking progress versus spend. They place heavy emphasis on correctness and completeness of documentation, managing risks and tracking metrics such as earned value and escaped defect counts. With the adoption of agile methods comes the need to adjust governance and oversight accordingly. But what does agile governance look like? How does it differ from traditional governance? Given the lack of detailed plans up-front, the reduced emphasis on documentation, and the eschewing of traditional metrics such as earned value, one might assume that governance and oversight is more challenging in the agile space. Looking at governance and oversight through a traditional lens reveals relatively few effective tools and the necessity of relying upon vaguely defined metrics such as “story points.” However, we will show that, in fact, agile methods offer governance and oversight a wealth of new tools and capabilities, enabling a more proactive and collaborative approach—which could ultimately lead to improved outcomes.
20201111 Agile DevOps East 2020 Conf Now You See It: Observing Flow using Kan...Craeg Strong
“I didn’t know you could do that with Kanban!” This interactive workshop reveals how Kanban systems can help solve the governance and coordination problems that threaten large-scale initiatives. Too many strategic priorities chasing too few resources. Dependencies between teams. Delays due to lack of clear delineations of ownership and responsibility, and a crisp definition of ready. We will explore innovative new Kanban designs that can significantly simplify these difficult problems, ultimately resulting in better outcomes with less stress. We will start by reviewing Kanban board designs from diverse industries and at multiple levels of the organization. We will then interactively construct several interesting examples, including Kanban boards for managing multiple streams of work, facilitating multi-team coordination at scale, and even planning and communicating corporate strategy. Powerful concepts like demand shaping, classes of service, capacity tokens, and order points will effortlessly reveal themselves. Best of all: these Kanban systems are perfectly compatible with Scrum Scaling frameworks such as Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) and the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). In fact, one might call them the secret ingredient! Using nothing but painter’s tape and sticky notes of all shapes, sizes and colors, we will gain an appreciation of how thoughtfully designed boards (and the coordination systems they enable) can help unlock true business agility.
Ariel Partners has developed a comprehensive program for governance and oversight of large-scale agile projects in the US federal government. This program is structured as a set of eleven major focus areas. Within each focus area, there are specific oversight objectives, activities, and metrics. The output is captured in an excel spreadsheet that calculates a set of quantitative measures, which are then aggregated to automatically produce a composite score, using a similar scoring strategy to FITARA. The program is comprehensive, but it is based on a set of simple principles. We have prepared a presentation that summarizes the program’s key points.
20200429 PMI NYC Meetup Agile Governance Ariel Partners for Distribution
20220824 Kanban Global Summit 2022 Now You See It! Observing Flow Using [ONLINE!] Kanban Boards
1. Now You See It!
Observing Flow Using Kanban Boards
Craeg Strong, CTO, Ariel Partners
@arielpartners
cstrong@arielpartners.com
https://youtube.com/arielpartners https://arielpartners.com
https://linkedin.com/in/cstrong
2. Craeg Strong § Software Development since 1988
§ Large Commercial & Government Projects
§ Kanban Coach / DevOps Engineer
§ Kanban Trainer / SpecFlow Trainer
§ Performance & Scalability Architect
§ Certified Ethical Hacker
§ New York & Washington DC Area
CTO, Ariel Partners
FLC, AKT, KCP, KMP, CSM, CSP, CSPO,
ITILv3, PMI-ACP, PMP, CLP, SPC,
ICP-ACC, ICP-ATF, PSM-II, PSK
www.arielpartners.com
cstrong@arielpartners.com
@ckstrong1
4. Learning Kanban
2014 2015 2016 2019
Kanban Coaching
IT Department
2017 2018
Introduced Kanban Practices
FBI Scrum Team
??
Change
Leadership
Masterclass
5. Learning More Kanban
2019 2020
Metrics & Forecasting
Troy Magennis
Focused Objective
Okaloa Masterclass
Patrick Steyaert
KMM/KCP Class
Klaus Leopold
16. a
To Do Done
(3)
Recruitment
Onboarding /
Offboarding
Next Doing
(4)
A
d
a
Training & Career
Development
Administering
Benefits
IT Facilities Legal Finance
(3)
b
(3) (2)
b
d
b
(3)
C
B D
d
HR Example* Thanks to Ian Carroll
33. Lesson Production
Product Design Team
Manipulatives Team
Content Authoring Team
CMS Team
Visual/UX Design Team Student Interface Team
Educator Interface Team
Video Production Team
Visualize Board Relationships On Dashboard
Upstream Team
(Discovery Kanban)
Downstream Team
(Delivery Kanban)
LEGEND:
37. Flight Level 2: Coordination Boards
q Timeline view shows bar
by planned start & end
dates
q Grades up top
q Missions Below
q All child features and
user stories are
displayed
q Progress bar
q Run MCS to check if we
are on track to complete
by the due date
41. Different Philosophies
Batteries Included
Let 1,000 Plugins Bloom
Kanban Tools
Software Engineering Support
Is Most Important
Planning & Coordinating Work
Is Most Important
Kanban Tools
Scrum First Kanban First
Kanban Tools
54. Strategy for Disability Case Processing System: US Govt
Strategy /
Objective KR / KPI
MVP: Support
Initial Disability
Claims for 1
medium
MicroPact state
Initial Adult
disability claim
can be entered
Financial API
Supports
Quarterly Close
Business
Function
Capabilities
Manage
User Profile
Manage
Organization
Manage
Authorizations
Interface to State
Financial Systems
Manage
Disability Case
Manage
Disability Claim
Manage
Authentication
3-6 Months 0-3 Months Active
Basic User
Info
Basic Org
Info
Assign Org
Roles
Manage Org
Users
User
Login
User
Logout
Impersonate
User
Manage User
Relationships
User Financial
Info