Keep Austin Agile 2017

This session will provide information about ChatOps and what makes it important to use in an Agile environment. It will talk about how the technique can be used by everyone within an Agile organization, instead of just the operations staff, as it is widely used currently. We will discuss how it will shorten the feedback loop and improve empowerment - two things that many Agile teams strive to do in order to realize the Agile Manifesto.

In the last few years, we have made a number of advancements in the way we treat applications, their deployments and the corresponding infrastructure. With the rise of microservices, containers, unikernels and now, serverless applications, we have new ways of deploying applications to production, and more importantly, quicker and simpler ways to make our infrastructure more Agile.

This talk will cover the advancements in containers, unikernels and serverless computing and discuss their common use cases. We'll also cover how newer architectures and methodologies using containers and serverless can make application delivery more Agile than in the past, and drive business value at a faster rate.

Operations teams typically struggle to make and keep commitments larger than a few days due to the myriad of break fix, operational change, and tuning work that happens on a daily basis. Larger projects, such as critical hardware replacement, core software upgrades, and other tasks that are often important for security reasons, performance reasons, etc. go undone or end up partially done with the difficult items lanquishing.

At Kasasa, the speakers have worked out a way to handle projects large and small while continuing to maintain the flow style work necessary to "run the business."  They combined the types of work and work center notions from Gene Kim's seminole DevOps book The Phoenix Project with the Scrum and Kanban Agile models in order to organize their teams to address technical debt and business projects.

This talk will not only explore what their company is doing today, but begin by taking a look at the larger situation along with failed attempts at team organization and the application of DevOps and Agile thinking. Attendees will walk away with more than a, "Wow, that is a neat way to organize," but also have a model to think about the application of Agile in a less traditional - and more volatile - situation.

Many organizations are unaware of the benefits of Kanban. DrillingInfo was one of these companies. Using Lean Kanban University's techniques and approach to evolutionary change has created a revolution in the organization. Starting with one Kanban team, lead times, graphs, and slide decks has led to a viral adoption of Kanban that has reached the desk of the CTO, President, and COO. This session will share the case study of a Kanban transformation of a $100 million private technology energy company and what techniques were used to drive influence to change.

Because they have a fiduciary responsibility to the performance of their organizations, executives demand a greater level of assurance that what you plan to do is actually going to work and want a line of sight to how Agile is going to help them make things better.

This talk is going to explore a safe, pragmatic, and repeatable formula for leading change in large organizations. The Holy Grail for an executive is to tie dollars spent and activities performed to internal improvement metrics and ultimately improved business performance.

We'll start by discussing the elements of an Agile transformation business case and how to identify a meaningful value proposition for change. Throughout the presentation, we'll explore the change management and engagement techniques necessary to make sure you are building meaningful organizational support as you engage the enterprise. The goal of this talk is to show you how to systematically and planfully introduce agile into your organization.