Your teams are using agile practices well and starting to understand the principles behind them, but they are still not high-performing. Although they're getting a bit better with each sprint and they're meeting commitments, they are not producing the great results you thought agile was supposed to create. Come learn the framework for guiding teams to those great results using the Scrum values as the root and ground of the journey. The Scrum values that lead to high performance and the fruits of high performance teams are put into a context that causes teams and people outside teams-even senior managers and executives-to "get it." They get what makes agile work and what we are moving toward when we talk about high-performing teams. Lyssa Adkins offers an interactive experience for you to learn and practice how to teach your team to use this Scrum framework so they, in turn, can chart their own paths toward high-performance.

Agility focuses on delivering business value to the customers as rapidly as possible, and user stories are a common way to describe the features and functions that define value incrementally. However, to concentrate on delivering most business value earlier in the project, we must determine and assign the relative business value to each of those stories. Through lecture and interactive exercises, Ken Pugh presents two methods for quickly estimating and assigning business value for features and stories. Ken explains the relationships between business value estimates and story point estimates, and how to chart business value for iteration reviews. Ken demonstrates what estimates really represent in both dollars and time. On a larger scale, he shows you how to use business value assessment as a portfolio management tool to prioritize feature development across several projects.

In tough times, both shoes drop simultaneously and "scarcity thinking" takes over in senior executives, managers, and development teams. In this environment, dysfunction can wreak havoc on your projects in the form of scope greed, death-march deadlines, and budget cuts. Often, the tendency is to say "yes" to impossible dates, take on too much, suffer the budget cuts, and pray that heroics might save the day. This is a disaster waiting to happen. It takes a skillful manager to "rightsize" critical projects-right team, right scope, right dates-at the beginning. Scarcity thinking threatens all three. Michael Mah describes how to lead difficult conversations and discuss the "undiscussables." He shares how to artfully frame trade-offs for stakeholders to set priorities. Learn how to get buy-in by using a blend of common sense, essential measurement concepts, and rules of software estimation.

In this economic downturn, is your company looking beyond knee-jerk cost cutting to focus on creative ways to solve business problems? When businesses tap the innovative capabilities that agile development teams possess and scale up through adaptive governance, they can produce game-changing solutions. Sanjiv Augustine shares how leading businesses are using agile to jumpstart and scale their new product development by incorporating user-centered product design and a user story “maturity progression” to support the creative evolution of system development. To optimize their project investments, these businesses are adopting incremental funding and portfolio-level feature prioritization, reducing team churn by creating stable teams with embedded specialists, and tracking and monitoring project portfolio progress across multiple teams in a visual, agile fashion.