Welcome to Agile Hartford! Current / Upcoming Events:

May 2023 Live Event in Hartford!

Choice is a Ninja! Join us at Slalom in downtown Hartford on May 17th for this special event with Damon Poole as he discusses best practices in the Agile Coach / Coachee relationship. Sign up for this event here. 

April 2023 (Virtual) Event 

How can we be more Agile at the Portfolio level? Find out on Tuesday, April 11th, as we welcome Chris Sims, taking us through "The Agile Portfolio Game." Register for this event here. 

March 2023 (Virtual) Event 

On Wednesday, March 22nd, we welcomed James Shore, as he presented "A FAST Way To Scale". View this event on Agile Hartford's YouTube Channel. 

Who We Are

Agile Hartford is an official User Group / Local Chapter of the Agile Alliance, Scrum Alliance, and the Agile Leadership Network.  We are also a designated SAFe Meetup group.  Our member community is over 1000+ strong, with representation from numerous local companies, including The Hartford, Cigna, Aetna, Travelers, and Optum. 

Agile Hartford - 2023 Board Members

Top row, left to right: Steve Nunziata, Dave Kiersznowski, Vin Sukhraj. (Not Shown: Chris Rudnicki)

Bottom row, left to right: Janet Kuster, Larry Bock.

Reach the Agile Hartford Board @ AgileHartford@gmail.com. 

Our Past Events & Podcasts...

February 2023 (Virtual) Event 

Watch the replay of Tommy Norman's "Wherever I May Roam", a discussion on building high functioning Agile teams across the globe, on Agile Hartford's YouTube Channel, here.

January 2023 (Virtual) Event 

On Wednesday, January 25th, we welcomed David Hawks, from Agile Velocity, as he presented "Wrangling an Agile Transformation." The replay of this great event is available on our YouTube Channel, here.  Also, David's slides are available as PDFs at this link.

November 2022 (Virtual) Event 

Join us on Wednesday, November 9th, as we welcome Paula Espinoza and her presentation "Coaching Lenses for Solving Complex Problems." Sign up here! 

October 2022 (Virtual) Event 

On Wednesday evening, October 12th, we welcomed Tricia Broderick and her presentation, "Energize without using Power Over." Catch the replay of this session on our YouTube Channel.  

September 2022 (Virtual) Lunch & Learn Event 

We welcomed Jesse Fewell for a great presentation on Agile Leadership Practices on September 27th. Jesse's slides are available here

September 2022 (Virtual) Event 


We welcomed SAFe SPCT Phil Gardiner and his great presentation, "SAFe, the Second Time Around."  Watch a replay of the presentation on our Agile Hartford YouTube Channel.

May 2022 (Virtual) Event 

Join Agile Hartford on Tuesday, May 17th, as we welcome Sally Elatta, Founder & CEO of AgilityHealth for her presention, "How Being Bold and Leading with Love Helped me Make a Global Impact." 

March 2022 - Two GREAT Events!

First, join Agile Hartford on Wednesday, March 2nd, as we welcome - live from the UK - Agendashift Founder & Author Mike Burrows for a special 'Lunch & Learn' session. Watch the replay of this event HERE. 

On March 23rd, we welcomed Cheryl Crupi for 'Supersizing your SAFe Journey', where she discussed MetLife's Agile transformation. See the replay of this event HERE.

February 2022 (Virtual) Event

Eric Jaeger joined us on Tuesday, February 15th, for an introductory discussion of Kanban and its principles, practices and uses.  Review the presentation on Agile Hartford's YouTube Channel.

January 2022 (Virtual) Event

We welcomed Jen Krieger. The focus of her talk was, 'Your Career Future Looks Different. Are You Ready?' The replay from this session is available on Agile Hartford's YouTube Channel.

Our final event of 2021 had Agile Hartford and our partner group Agile Rhode Island enjoy a presentation from Scrum.Org's Dave West. Dave spoke on 'Increasing the Velocity of Value.' For a replay of this event, visit Agile Hartford's YouTube Channel, or just click here

Do you know how Agile you really are? We spent November 17th 2021 in a session with Agile Coach and founder of the 20 day Agility challenge, Derek Lane. If you missed it, be sure to catch the video on our youtube channel, here.

On Wednesday evening, October 20th 2021, Agile Hartford hosted Dan Gallagher and Becky Kailus of Slalom. Their presentation, "Stop Building the Wrongs Things Faster!" was a hit with our group! See the replay at Agile Hartford's YouTube Channel. 

On Wednesday evening, September 22nd 2021, co-founder and Principal Ronica Roth of elevate.to joined us for her presentation, "Modeling Change Through Everyday Practice." What a great event! Ronica's slides are available here.

On Wednesday evening, June 16th 2021, we had a special international mashup event with Em Campbell-Pretty, one of the world’s most experienced SAFe practitioners and the author of two Amazon #1 best-selling books, Tribal Unity and The ART of Avoiding a Train Wreck. As one of the first SAFe Fellows and SPCTs, Em has been working with SAFe since before it was called SAFe.  We were joined by Agile practitioners from across the US and Australia! If you missed it, Em made the recording of the session available on YouTube (Em starts at the 7 minute mark).

On Wednesday evening, May 19th 2021,we hosted Alex Kanaan, SPC5.0, IT Leader, Portfolio Manager and Business Agility consultant with expertise in transforming organizations to Agile using Scrum, Kanban and SAFe.  Alex's presentation will be, "Stop Spinning your Teams Wheels - It's Time to Revisit your Working Agreements!" 

If you weren't able to join us on Wednesday evening, April 21st 2021, we were fortunate to have Lee Allison join us for a discussion on Gemba Metrics. The Video of this presentation is available here, as are the slides from Lee's presentation.

On Wednesday evening, March 17th, 2021, we welcomed Janet Gregory, co-author with Lisa Crispin of Agile Testing Condensed: A Brief Introduction (LeanPub 2019), More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team (Addison-Wesley 2014), and Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams (Addison-Wesley, 2009). Janet's presentation will be, "How to build Quality into DevOps with the Agile Testing Quadrants."  See the video of this event here!

On February 17th, we welcomed Elisabeth White, Chief Experience Officer of Cornerstone Agility.  She is the author of "The Facilitator's Guide to the Galaxy: A Companion for Undertaking Group Conversation, Collaboration, and Consensus".  Download Elisabeth's presentation slides here.

Our first event of 2021 welcomed Tasktop Senior Value Stream Architect Lee Reid.  Lee demonstrated the value of Flow Metrics in a Scaled Agile adoption. Lee's presentation slides can be found here.

Our final event of 2020! Eliassen Group's Stephen Gristock joined us on December 15th (via Zoom) to discuss how Marketing groups are adopting a new Agile paradigm. You can watch the replay of the event here.

November 2020 Podcast

Hi everyone! Here is our November podcast, where we discuss Disciplined Agile (DA), and its similarities & differences with other methods of Agile at scale. 

On Tuesday, November 17th, 2020, we hosted Colleen Johnson, CEO of ScatterSpoke, and discussed "Evolutionary Patterns of Portfolio Kanban". Colleen's slides are available here.

October 2020 Podcast

Here is our October podcast, where we discuss Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) with Steven Voyles from the 334 group. Great stuff!

We hosted John Krewson for our October 2020 monthly meeting. John told us about Agility in producing Saturday Night live (SNL)! John's presentation slides are available here. Also, video from this session is available for view on Vimeo.

September 2020 Podcast

We're happy to share our September podcast where we discuss Design Thinking with Talli Pinhasi. Check it out!

On Wednesday, September 23rd 2020, we welcomed back Richard Kasperowski, telling us all about the Team Transformation Canvas. If you missed it, the recorded session is available on Richard's website, HERE.

August 2020 Podcast

Here's our August 2020 podcast where we discuss Kanban with LKU Certified Trainer, Eric Jaeger. Check it out!

July 2020 Podcast

Well, we did it - here's our first Podcast, featuring Matt Lasater from Engaged Agility. Join us as we discuss Ender's Game, Dieting, and, oh yeah... Technical Agility and ensuring Agile Leadership is invested in the transformation strategy. Check it out!

February 18, 2020 - Agile Hartford's first Open Space event @ Slalom, with the theme "Product Ownership - Beyond the Scrum Guide."  

March 10, 2020 - We had Wessam Sonbol and Matt Bjornson from CPrime, discussing  "Product Management 101." Sponsored by Brooksource.

February 4th, 2020 - We hosted Todd Miller (Scrum.org), and a workshop on "Improving an Office Environment", joint meeting with SNEC-PMI, and sponsored by TEK Systems at their Rocky Hill, CT office. 

January 14, 2020 - We hosted a Panel Discussion on The Evolution of Agile Planning,  co-sponsored by Rally Software and Infosys. Great turnout and great discussion!

 We were privileged to have noted speaker and author Lisa Crispin lead our November 19th event. Her topic was "Successful Test Automation with a Whole Team Approach."   Lisa's slides are available here. 

Thanks all for joining us for October 2019 event with Adonis El Fakih and his topic "Accelerating Agile Adoption."   Adonis has made his presentation available here

We hope you were able to join us at Optum (City Place I) in Downtown Hartford for our September 18th 2019 event.  Our speaker was Damon Poole, and the topic will be "Grow your Product Backlog, one exquisite Story at a time."  Damon's presentation and exercise materials are available through his website.

We celebrated Agile Hartford's 3 year anniversary on Wednesday, June 12th, 2019 at City Steam Brewery in downtown Hartford.  Our topic was Agile @ Scale: Comparing Different Scaling Methods. Our speaker, Ricky Sheaves from Eliassen Group, has shared his presentation here. See you all in the Fall!   

The speaker for our May 29th, 2019 event was Patricia Kong from Scrum.Org. Her presentation gave us insight into the Nexus framework for scaling Scrum across larger organizations.  

Hope you were able to join us for our April event on Wednesday, April 17th, 2019 at City Place in downtown Hartford.  Our speaker, Tom Bast, has made his presentation (Shifting Left and ATDD)  available here.  

Hope you were able to join us - Wednesday, March 20th, 2019 at City Steam Brewery in downtown Hartford!  This event was sponsored by Broadcom (owners of Rally), and the topic was on meaningful metrics for Agile @ Scale!

Hope you were able to join us for our first event in 2019!  A most sincere thank you to noted Agile Author and Speaker  Richard Kasperowski.  Richard's presentation slides are  available here.