Nike Evergreen campus cafeteria (20540 NW Evergreen Pkwy, Hillsboro, OR 97124)

Now that we’re in an Agile world we’re all happy, aren’t we? Oh. Perhaps you are in an organization that "does" agile without "being" agile. Or, you have sticky pockets of waterfall in your mostly agile group. Or, you are trying to transition and folks are saying it doesn't feel safe. Friday November 22nd on the Westside, we are going to talk about the sometimes bumpy road from waterfall to agile. Come and join in, bring your war stories and insights. Help us work out how we can smooth the road from waterfall to agile.

Limited spots! Reserve your seat at https://www.meetup.com/AgilePDX-User-Group-Portland-Metro/events/266025155/

Events are made possible by the AgilePDX community and our sponsors, including platinum sponsor ProFocus Technology (https://www.profocustechnology.com/). Learn more about our sponsors at https://agilepdx.org/sponsorship.

Coaching is one of the most powerful tools used in agile. And yet... being a great coach is much harder than it seems. This month at the west-side cafe, we are going to discuss coaching in relationship to servant leadership. We will ask ourselves: As a team member, SM, etc how do we coach those who need coaching and may not realize (or admit it)?

Events are made possible by the AgilePDX community and our sponsors, including platinum sponsor ProFocus Technology (https://www.profocustechnology.com/). Learn more about our sponsors at https://agilepdx.org/sponsorship.

Staying Strong in an Agile world

As Agile champions we sometimes wrestle with the unknowable and get up close and personal with organizational dysfunction. It's a perpetual challenge.

So how do you stay strong, calm and effective when your world is just a tad crazy? Join us for a conversation about what helps rejuvenate you when your Agile journey gets bumpy.

Events are made possible by the AgilePDX community and our sponsors, including platinum sponsor ProFocus Technology (https://www.profocustechnology.com/). Learn more about our sponsors at https://agilepdx.org/sponsorship.

Are you in an organization that isn't traditionally associated with agile? Perhaps the water bureau or a non-profit? Or are you in an organization that is committed to a very structured project, process or quality framework? Either way our 4th Friday conversation this month is just for you.

If your organization somewhere in the middle; wanting to be agile but not entirely set up for it OR you are in a well oiled agile shop, my experience is that the folks applying agile in non-traditional places have a lot to teach us. Come join the conversation!

What's it like where you work?

Do the beliefs, attitudes, practices and behaviours of your team or company help you do your best work? Have you found that your organization's culture is holding back your agile transition? Every company has its challenges, and frustration can easily happen, but what positive actions can we take to generate change? Who has seen benefits in nurturing positive values and trends in your org culture, to bolster your path to agility?

We'll be back in our normal location in what promises to be a juicy discussion on positive ways to change culture.

Working from a backlog of small, well thought out, user stories helps the team create value and show progress. Join us in discussing how to move from large features / epics / stories to small actionable user stories.

Once again, someone has brought you a blob of a feature. They want you to start on it in a near sprint. What do you do? What processes help you decompose your feature? What flow of events do you prefer to a last minute drop?

Whether you are a master story splitter or new at story writing, we hope you can join us. Share your experience, or bring you questions and scenarios and we'll all walk away with new ideas to try!

This month we will focus on the Product Owner Role in Agile.

Understanding the role of the product owner can be challenging—it’s complex, poorly defined and has a 1000 different masters.

In this lunchtime gathering, we'll discuss the product owner role and ways we can work effectively with them. What do we do when there is distance between the team and the product owner? Is it possible to delegate some of their responsibilities to someone closer? Can technology help?

Share your practical experiences, techniques, and ideas on product ownership, diving beyond the theoretical to real-world solutions.

How purely should a team follow their chosen agile process?

If you've ever struggled with holding the line on practices that don't support your agile journey, or you feel like most agile processes are too rigid and -need- to be modified; join us for an in-depth lunchtime discussion.

You've just started your agile transformation, or perhaps a couple of years into it, then feel the tug back into the way things have "always been done." The arguments seem logical. Should you change your process to match your company or should you stick to your agile process? What disadvantages are there for making Agile fit into a company’s needs?

Maybe you are doing project work instead of product work. Perhaps your industry is heavily regulated or hardware centric. It's unclear how pure agile would fit your situation. Is ‘some’ Agile better than none or is it dangerous? How do you identify when you are losing the benefits of Agile as you try to adapt it to your situation?

Or possibly you are just the opposite, you've been successful when others were sure agile wouldn't work! Come and learn from your peers about when and how to protect your agile practice.

Many of our agile methods can increase conflict. Collaboration means conflict. Any time we try to solve problems different opinions emerge on what to do. Transparency can trigger insecurities and conflict. Experimenting and failing/learning rapidly is not intuitive to our society and is bound to generate some friction.

The stance we take when faced with conflict can help the team create something new, or it can add to the tangle. What do you do to help yourself stay present in the midst of conflict? What in-the-moment facilitation or coaching tools do you use when conflict is bubbling?

Join us and share your stories about conflict, what you have tried and what you have learned. Hope to see you Friday April 27th for a lively discussion on conflict management within agile teams.

Serving a team as a scrum master while simultaneously playing another role (dev, qa, product owner, etc) can be challenging.

How do you manage things if: - The team has identified one or more blockers, but you have other work that you really need to get done. - You are focused on something else (some head twisting dev work, perhaps) when your product owner has questions about how to write a particular story. - You are in the middle of facilitating a contentious retrospective topic and you'd like to add your opinions to the discussion.

Are you a scrum master who also has other responsibilities on the team? Have you watched others try to do it? What helped? What made it hard? Join us for our discussion of this important topic at the Westside Cafe Lunch.

What do you do, when your product owner has too much on her plate and seems eager to take on more? An overworked product owner likely isn't a healthy contributor. Questions can go unanswered, feedback opportunities are missed, and team safety or delivery success may take a hit. This can undermine everybody's effort to improve. So, what can you do? How can you coach them and help them maintain the sustainable pace that most helps the product and the team?

Join us if you are a product owner or work with one. Have you been successful in helping the product side of the house manage their workload? Are you struggling with this situation? Have you learned the hard way how to coach in this situation? We'd love for you to join us to share your experience and discover new approaches.

How do you grow a scrum practice? What do scrum teams need to do the same? How do we spread our practice as an organization? What can we do to bring on new scrum masters and other team members?

Organizations new and old struggle with these concepts at various junctions in their agile journeys. Share what you have learned, struggled with, and succeeded at. Or just hear from others who have been there and\or sharing these daily struggles so you are ready when it's your turn!

It's happened to the best of us. We hold or participate in a great retrospective with high energy and then…nothing. Retrospectives that identify key learnings but don't cause us to adapt and improve as a team can leave us feeling stalled. With no follow up, teams may no longer see the value of holding these key agile ceremonies and sometimes abandon them altogether.

Why does this continue to be a challenge for Agile teams? What can we do to make retrospectives useful and a key enabler of continuous learning and improvement in our teams? How do we bring the high energy and insightful discussion to our retrospectives and keep that momentum for change going?

We invite you to join us and share your experiences in leading great retrospectives or listen to other agile practitioners share theirs. We will explore what might cause lack of action and identify practical steps we can take to get the most out of our team retrospectives.

Please note that this month we are meeting on the third Friday, Dec 15 to avoid the holiday rush.

As usual we gather on the 4th Friday of the month for a west side lunch discussion.

This time we focus on our Fastest Fails and Quickest Learning Moments. We know we are supposed to fail fast and learn but do we? Come and share your quickest learning moments and encourage the rest of us that failing fast is normal and something to encourage.

And we promise, no agilists will be hurt in the production of this meeting.

As usual we gather on the 4th Friday of the month for a west side lunch discussion. The topic focuses on Product Owners:

• What makes a Product Owner great?

• What does a Product Owner do for the team?

• How can we best fulfill the intention of this role?

Share your experiences, techniques, and ideas on product ownership, allowing us to dive beyond the theoretical and documented responsibilities.

True or false? While Agile is meant to focus teams and companies on delivering customer value, very few Agile adopters today are actually measuring value. What have you have found to be true in your experience?

Strangely, we often hear of teams adopting many great Agile practices but missing this core element of true value delivery. What might be holding our Agile teams back? What stories can we share of Agile teams measuring value in meaningful ways? Why is it so difficult to measure customer and business value? What actually works? Is it measurement that most affects a team's focus on understanding and delivering value or the culture of the company?

W. Edwards Deming said in his book Out of the Crisis, "The most important figures that one needs for management are unknown or unknowable, but successful management must nevertheless take account of them." Are metrics truly valuable for our teams and who is the most important audience? What dysfunction might we introduce with "measurable" metrics? What positive results could we see with collecting team data?

Let's explore the benefits, risks, and how to avoid abuse of metrics as they relate to teams. Bring your worst nightmares, your success stories, then let's compare and see how we can effectively evaluate the use of metrics and the types of metrics we use in our Agile teams.

If we are “doing agile” why isn't every team “doing it the same”? Let’s chat about the reasons (positive and negative) about the differences between teams at your organizations. What it the impact on the individuals and companies? Why should we be similar in actions? Where does it make sense to differ? How do we avoid dysfunctions between teams, management, and other important roles & partners as we honor differences?

A self-organized team is perhaps the holy grail of agile. Ideally, scrum masters work themselves out of a job as the team becomes less dependent on managers, scrum masters, and project managers. But how is this achieved; what does it take to get there? Can a scrum master simply step away from a self-directed team yet everything remains seamless? Or does a team still benefit from coaching and facilitation to improve sprint after sprint? Let’s share our successes and failures of teams past and present so as a community we can seek that holy grail!

Limited spots! Reserve your seat at https://www.meetup.com/AgilePDX-User-Group-Portland-Metro/events/239176786/ before the waitlist kicks in.

Doors open half hour before noon for those who wish to purchase a lunch and settle in before we begin.

Need more hints and tips about one of our newest locations? http://agilepdx.org/westside_hints_and_tips.html

We’re betting a few westsiders will be as excited as we are about this announcement… Westside Café lunches are brownbag sessions facilitated by AgilePDX at the Nike Evergreen campus cafeteria (20540 NW Evergreen Pkwy, Hillsboro, OR 97124) on the fourth Friday each month from 12p to 1p.

Join us on 3/24 to discuss Finding the Optimal Footprint Between Product Owners and their Teams. Teams fall into many categories when it comes to time and attention with their Product Owners: 100% dedicated, 50/50 balance between team and clients, always fighting fires in the field, split between 2+ teams, and many combinations in between. What is the optimal footprint? Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Devs, QA, etc. bring your Product Owners along, so we get to hear from all sides on the ups and downs of the various levels. We will find some best practices on balancing client needs and expectations with feedback and direction to the teams. Some combinations might surprise you!

We strongly encourage you to arrive early, buy\bring a lunch, and settle in by noon. We start on time and end on time in a format very similar to our popular downtown pub lunches!