Genuine agility is enormously effective in helping us achieve our dreams. The trouble is, Agile has grown into a complex tangle of roles and rituals, frameworks and tools, processes and certifications. We need a return to simplicity. Modern Agile is here to help.

Designed for people in many domains (not just IT), Modern Agile is defined by four guiding principles:

• Make People Awesome,
• Make Safety a Prerequisite,
• Experiment & Learn Rapidly and
• Deliver Value Continuously.

Understanding and deeply practicing these four principles will help you get better results faster.

In this talk I’ll share how these four principles power world-famous companies and how they can help you work with greater speed, simplicity, safety and success.

There is growing interest in learning more about Agile HR and its impact on individuals, teams and organizations.

It is important to separate fact from fiction: What are the real threats and opportunities of bringing Lean | Agile values, principles, and practices to HR? What can we expect in the future? Through anecdotal evidence and case studies, the session will explore the potential of Agile HR as well as provide guidance on how to approach the transformation.

 Issues covered in the presentation include: information on how to embrace the new talent contract, create inspiring, engaging, and fun places of work, shift to an iterative performance flow, take the issue of money off the table, support growth within an Agile enterprise.

Agility starts with Mind. It’s about open, curious, energetic mind constantly looking for doing better things and in better ways. Such Agile Minds manifest in proactively sensing market/customer opportunities/needs early, quickly adopting to changes  to create new value in the changing contexts, continuously learning, exploring & experimenting new things. It requires courage, self-drive and taking people along. If we notice, all these characteristics are distilled in Agile Values & Principles.

But how to develop Agile Minds? Typically our education system and corporate trainings  are predominantly IQ oriented; whereas Agile Mind is about Emotional Intelligence (EQ) – self awareness, self regulation, self motivation and empathy. EQ is an essential ingredient for a culture of self-organizing, collaboration and servant leadership – which are the tenets of good Agile culture. Mindfulness is a practical & effective toolset to cultivate EQ and create Agile Minds. 

Being a Mindfulness practitioner, this talk will cover my experiences of consulting & coaching on Mindfulness in organizations driving Enterprise Agility.

Many organizations have achieved sufficient success at the single team level with Agile approaches like Scrum that they want to bring Agile to their entire enterprise. They want to reap the benefits of Agile across their whole organization, but they struggle with where to start and how to sustain the change. Scaling Agility has two dimensions: scaling horizontally, across large numbers of teams, and scaling vertically, integrating the work of multiple teams into a single product. Focusing on both dimensions enables organizations to achieve sustainable change by solving 3 main challenges: achieving consistency and the right Agile culture across teams without dictating behaviors, fostering the right interactions between Agile and non-Agile teams when there are dependencies between them, and adapting Agile approaches to deliver products that require a team-of-teams approach. 

Throw a purpose in a middle of a crowd, it will start to self-organize. Many self-organised entities like ... villages or cities have an "embedded purpose", not voluntarily shared out-loud or displayed in common places. Villages and cities have growth aligned to their embedded purpose. Acting in a purpose driven way is less obvious for organisations. More a company grows, more dissolved into the Process the original business purpose becomes. This talk presents the 3 stages of Agile Experience Awareness I've seen unfolded and reveals how aligning to a clear shared purpose triggers growth, Agile culture propagation, and scaling becomes a side effect. 

Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. This is probably the most used word you'll hear from agilists. It sits right at the core of agile principles. How do we reconcile this with the fact that 30% of the population is introverted?

There has been extensive research around introversion that can help us understand this apparent contradiction better. This talk will explore the complexities of introversion, from the distinction between shyness and introversion to the complexities of pseudo-extroverts and "high active" babies. 

Finally, what can we learn from companies like Menlo Innovations and Hunter Industries, where they have high collaborative environments with introverts that say they would not work any other way.

How can new tools and technologies shorten our feedback cycles, and reduce pain and frustration of deployment and maintenance of systems? How do you scale your continuous deployment system to support more developers? This hands-on technical session demonstrates how new containerization technologies like Docker and Concourse CI can be used to build deployment pipelines. Sean and Chris will show how to build a deployment pipeline, configuration-manage it, and deploy software through it. 

No previous technical knowledge of Docker or Containers is needed. 

This will be a 2 part. The first 45 minutes will go into the basics of docker. The second 45 minutes will show how to setup a Concourse.CI continuous delivery pipeline.

Don Reinertsen says that if you only quantify one thing, quantify the Cost of Delay. As we’ve talked about before, quantifying Cost of Delay not only helps improve prioritisation, it also help with making trade-off decisions, creates a sense of urgency, and changes the focus of the conversation. Maybe this has got you interested in experimenting with it, but you’re not sure how to get started? If so, this workshop is specifically for you!

When people hear about Cost of Delay they sometimes doubt whether their organisation is ready for it. They say things like, “We don’t have the maturity for it”, or “We couldn’t do that because our stakeholders wouldn’t support it”. We’ve heard people say this too. And yet, in hindsight, people find it much easier than they thought! We will show you how to get started with using Cost of Delay, despite these doubts.

Building blocks

The first essential building block is to understand the value. To help structure the conversation we will use a simple economic framework to surface the assumptions and drive to the economic impacts. The second essential building block is to understand the urgency. For this, we will look at different urgency curves to help us understand how value is likely to decay over time. Combining these two gives us the Cost of Delay helping us to question and better understand what our gut tells us about value and urgency.

Practice makes perfect!

To get going, we will start by looking at some simplified scenarios that help you put what you’ve learned about Cost of Delay into practice. You’ll work at your own pace through some simple exercises that test different aspects of your understanding. To really embed it, once you’re done you’ll get a chance to help others around you – you become the teacher. We will then quickly reflect on what we’ve learned so far.

Then, we’re all going to work on quickly estimating the Cost of Delay for a real life example for a real company. You’ll do this in pairs making assumptions you need to get to a cost of delay for the feature in dollars per week. To help us learn about what the key assumptions were we will compare results across the group to help us understand what the value might be and the areas of greatest uncertainty.

To wrap up we’re going to ask you to do a mini-retrospective about what you’ve learned and what your puzzles are. If we have any time left, we’re happy to help you have a go with a feature or project you are working with.

“If you only quantify one thing, quantify the Cost of Delay” – Don Reinertsen

Everyone seems to talk about Cost of Delay, but few are actually quantifying it. And yet doing so helps us to better manage stakeholders, improve prioritisation and change the focus of the conversation away from cost and dates onto delivering value quickly.

In this talk you will hear about how quantifying Cost of Delay of our ideas helps with:

– Improving prioritisation

– Managing multiple customers

– Trade off decisions across the whole portfolio

This is not a theoretical session, we’ve actually done this in lots of organisations: public and private sector, in large, medium and small organisations as well as using Cost of Delay across a $100m portfolio at a Fortune 500 company.

When people hear about Cost of Delay they sometimes doubt whether their organisation is ready for it. They say things like, “We don’t have the maturity for it”, or “We couldn’t do that because our stakeholders wouldn’t support it”. We’ve heard people say this too. And yet, in hindsight, people find it much easier than they thought!

From this session you will walk away with all the necessary knowledge and practical tips to get started with Cost of Delay and you will have seen lots of actual examples of Cost of Delay calculations from other organisations who have done this. You’ll also hear some interesting before and after results that might help you to make the case in your organisation. In our experience, quantifying Cost of Delay really helps to discover, nurture and speed up the delivery of value.

We accept that Agile is a mindset, but majority is not sure about how to influence individuals and teams to build that mindset. 

This workshop is more about understanding different practical techniques to influence and accelerate mindset changes. The techniques discussed are through a Social Psychology and game theory perspective. How do we understand the subtle clues individual or team gives and how do we respond to that. 

The awareness about some of the social psychology learnings and human biases can help leaders and teams to make a change inside-out.

One the most significant ceremony of any Agile Team is Daily Standup where the team members get together and plan for their day. But quite often the daily standup turns into a zombie status update meeting where team members come together to blurt out their updates and walk away to their desk without ever maximizing the benefit of that meet up.

In this session I will share a case study of how we created a simple experiment that turned into Standup Poker and revolutionized our Daily Standup. This technique helped us uncover true insights of teams progress and got the team talking about strategic planning and plan to remove any impediments as a "team" on daily basis to accomplish their sprint goal and commitments.

We learnt that when team members started using this technique, hidden impediments and dependencies started to emerge and team members organically started to re-plan and prioritize their work to accomplish the Sprint Goal. Product Owner also found great value in this technique as this helped them see the teams true progress and engage with the team to re-prioritize user stories and even take a story out of the sprint if required. Scrum Masters started to observe a trend in the confidence level over the span of the sprint and brought that information to Sprint Retrospective to discuss and brainstorm ways to improve and keep the confidence levels high throughout the sprint. The discussions and observations due to Standup poker resulted in teams committing better and more confidently during Sprint Planning and got into the rhythm of always accomplishing their sprint goal, but more importantly they started improving everyday and got into "continuous improvement" mode.

The content, exercise and message of this session highlight the agile principles of individuals and interactions over process and tools and fostering the mindset of continuous improvement.

In this session we will share examples, stories and experiences from trying the Standup Poker and how this simple technique converted a bunch of individuals into a TEAM !!!

As a enterprise coach we all need to go beyond team coaching to enterprise transformation process to bring end to end agility into the organization.Coaches are connected with various business lines while coaching.They can visualize and help organization to break the organizational silos.

To be effective, the action taken must alter the interrelationship of the parts or silos. Unless one alters the relationship between or among the parts, there is little hope for effective change.

Using the principles of systems thinking offer coaches to new ways of seeing and of interpreting what we see.

As an enterprise agile coach how we can apply systems thinking at our work context a journey with me.

Sharing my learning and observations with deploying systems thinking for scaling agility into the organization.

In the current work environment agility is one of the most important and critical leadership skills. Leaders need to be agile in order to have the ability to anticipate change and take action amid rapidly shifting conditions.

 Involvement of Leadership in Agility is Key.This session is for leaders, aspiring leaders, Scrum Masters and any agile team members who want to coach leaders. In this talk I'll be sharing my experience relating to how I started working with leaders to garner their support to transform their teams towards being agile teams. It is about how I coached those leaders, the challenges I faced, and the successful outcomes that were achieved in this interesting journey.