Heidi Araya

Businesses today must remain vigilant and customer-focused in order to sustain and grow successfully. In this talk, attendees will understand the critical linkage between organizational design and the creation of economic value. They will learn ways to focus employees on the most important things, while enhancing collaboration and improving culture.

Learning objectives:
-Understand different types of organizational designs and determine which may be appropriate for their situation
-Learn the value of collaborative leadership, a feedback-driven culture, and self-organizing teams

The Agile Manifesto touts “people over process and tools,” and the principles mention, “build projects around motivated individuals, and trust them…” as well as “the best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” But how can we hire the right people and best utilize the people we have? Heidi will discuss the criteria for hiring a great agile team and for growing a more high performing team; drawing from experience from her extensive background in teamwork and collaboration, and pulling from sources such as the Google Aristotle study, Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Stanley McChrystal’s Team of Teams, and others. Attendees with leave with concrete ideas on how to find the right candidates for teams and how to work with existing team members to increase levels of self-organization, collaboration, empathy, and teamwork.

Agile teams are everywhere. But management still wants to know “when will this feature or release be ready?” and “how much will this cost me?” Heidi discusses how to have conversations about milestones, phases, release dates and risks and translate these into agile charts and graphs that management will understand. After this talk, listeners will be able to create charts and graphs to show management to begin to have the right conversations around why it is difficult to know “when it will be done.”