The agile manifesto is ripe with insight; take the first value statement: “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” But I am here to tell you the gap has narrowed – in today’s modern world of tools that automate the pipeline [both promoting code and testing] tools are critical, and if you cannot explain that to an Exec, then you will not be able to achieve agility. But after this talk, you WILL be able to talk convincingly about why automation, and the tools that go along with it, is needed. You will also learn why our teams work with discipline and focus – not with an attitude of “Hey, we are agile, so we just do what we want”. We are talking DevOps, CI/CD and good old fashioned hard work here, but its not command and control, and there is no “throat to choke” [we are not cavemen here, ya know]. We have knowledge workers and we know what motivates them, so lets not waste our time with the approaches that have failed in the past, no matter how well-intentioned they were. Yes, this talk is quite a lot about people in fact. We do so much to hire the right people, so now lets treat them as if we did a good job at that. Another Value statement speaks of “Working Software” – easier said than done, especially if you do it every 2 weeks in each team, and top that off by integrating across a DOZEN teams every 2 weeks, but we do. And in my definition of DONE, Working absolutely requires that the right people [many lenses here] like it. We achieve on-going quality by applying the value of Responding to change- in fact, its not change at all if you did not make a huge, big batch project and commit to a big batch project in the first place – it’s really about doing the most important thing next, with cadence and synchronization