Being happy at work makes us 12% more productive, research shows. Happy employees lead to happier customers and better business. In this one-day workshop, Maartje and Fennande share their knowledge and extensive experience with you on how to transform your team into a happier team. Based on the science of happiness at work, their successful approach with teams has helped many teams to better cooperation, better projects, sustainable success and better business. Learn about measuring happiness and practical steps to enhance happiness levels in your team. Train-the-trainer.

Story is a profoundly important device to unite design teams around a shared product vision. This powerful communication tool helps us retain information and empathize with others. As companies scale and teams sprint through product iterations, it’s easy to lose sight of how your product should fit into the lives of your customers. The best way to keep everyone pointed in the right direction is with a clear, compelling story—a story that will unite and guide teams towards success.

But how do we fold storytelling into our design practice? Aarron Walter uses real-world stories of product teams at Disney, Apple, Airbnb, Twitter, and more to show how storytelling improves team communications and elevates design practice.

Business Agility is achieved through proactive & quick sensing of Customer/Market needs and fulfilling those needs through end to end collaboration of Customers, Business Functions and Solution Delivery Functions in a seamless flow. Apart from technology and process elements, the critical success factor for such functioning is the mindset and culture aspects of people and organization units across the value chain. Mindfulness is a great tool to develop Emotional Intelligence which is the bedrock of leadership tenets for Agility Culture like proactiveness & self-organizing, cross-functional collaboration and facilitative leadership styles.

This session covers a case study of Enterprise wide Mindfulness transformation in a 2000+ strong global Technology company. The session covers aspects of:

• Creation of a [email protected] framework called BE-DO Framework – Being Mindful and Doing Mindfully. Being Mindful by Being Aware, Alive and Calm; Doing Mindfully by Perceiving Immersivity, Processing non-judgmentally and Performing Empathetically.
• Mindfulness techniques and practices at individual level like BreathWatch, BodyScan, Balanced Breathing, Journaling.
• Organizational and Team ceremonies to inculcate Mindfulness as part of work practices like Mindful Meeting, Sense Walk.
• Results captured after 6 weeks of practice of Mindfulness practices by the participants on Personal Wellbeing, Personal Effectiveness and Professional Performance.
• Organizational Change Management including unique role called Happiness Evangelist.

The session will be a joint presentation by the Happiness Evangelist and the Mindfulness Coach.

Introduction

Having a clear purpose in both life and work is essential to happiness. Science and business support this view. Companies with a clear purpose perform better than companies without. Purpose is increasingly mentioned as the key to navigate the volatile and complex world we live in. And, people with a purpose in their life, live longer and are healthier. However, finding your purpose, your personal, team and companies purpose, is not an easy task. In this workshop we discuss what purpose means and what the key elements of a sustainable and meaningful purpose are. By playing the Purpose Journey Game, we elaborate the four steps to identify the company or team purpose and build your business around it.

Outline:

After sharing our knowledge, insights from science and best practices, we will immerse in the subject by playing the Purpose Journey Game. We play the game in small groups (pressure cooker experience). By answering questions, role-plays and discussion participants will experience the method and learn how to find the purpose of their company or team.

Ever feel like the market moves faster than your marketing team? Or, wonder how flexible your finance (& leadership!) teams would really be if self-direction glitched and blew $1M? Organizations introduce Agile believing it will lead in part to greater responsiveness and resiliency. Yet, why do so many fail to achieve those outcomes?

It isn’t just that they’re structured and operated by default along hierarchical lines rather than by design for iterative work. Achieving the full benefits of Agile comes from shifting the culture and mindset of a whole organization, sometimes as radically as encouraging it to “Make New Mistakes.” This very philosophy was a driver in the fastest division in HP’s history to reach $1B, a hardware division that was focused on manufacturing operations, with razor thin margins, and markets that changed 3x faster than the development lead time.

Through a series of short stories and exercises, attendees will explore 5 practices from that business which led to roaring success. We’ll probe their parallels in Lean / Agile practice. With each one, you’ll briefly self-inspect the state of your own organization, as well as create a backlog you can use to adapt in your “real world” beyond the conference.

Do you have, or want, a vision that takes you beyond high performing teams, to a high performing, resilient business? Come hear how you can help your organization shift from mechanics that “do” Agile, and walk away with a feel for what’s possible when not just development, but a whole organization surfs the flow of “being” Agile.

We all know that innovative organizations are more successful. But how does happiness at work fit into the equation? Definitely, there is a link between happiness, creativity, innovation, and success in organizations. In this interactive workshop, you will learn about Happiness at work and use the method of Design Thinking to enhance Happiness in your team. How can Design Thinking lead to a happier and stronger (agile) team? We will provide practical tips on how to empower your creativity, empathy and thus happiness at work.

Session name - Outcome based agile coaching

We all want to become good agile coach. But what does that mean? How do you get better outcome from your agile coaching sessions? In this session, participants will experience how to improve outcome of your coaching session. Some areas we will focus in this session are output Vs outcome, why, what, how of coaching, how to make coaching outcome etc.

This will be a hands on workshop with very minimal guidance from facilitator. Participants will have experiential learning through the activities to understand how to align agile coaching to deliver maximum impact on business outcome.

The benefits of a high performing team are endless. They are autonomous, empowered, responsible and effective.

At Atlassian, we've pioneered the Team Playbook, which is our way of scaling teams by getting smarter, not bigger, and driving a culture of continual improvement. Utilised by hundreds of teams within Atlassian, we've made our secret sauce not so secret. Don't come to this session for a lesson on theory...come to this session to hear the philosophies and principles of the Team Playbook from Peter Scobie, Program Manager/Team Doctor. You'll leave this session invigorated, engaged and ready to take action.

Agile transformations are no child's play. There is inertia, restlessness, impatience and the constant desire to run away. Traits that anyone who has been a parent to little kids has encountered, and learnt in their own way how to handle.

This session looks at parallels between parenting and trying to influence teams through an agile transformation. We look at some of the things that successful parents do that can be done by leaders trying to take their teams through a transformation.

Because if teams sometimes behave like children, the leader needs to be a parent too!

How can you flourish and be happy in a world that is changing all the time? One of the most important things for success, happiness and resilience is the right mindset. The only one who can make you happy and successful is you. Carol Dweck did a lot of research about fixed and growth mindset. This workshop is based on her work. First participants will rank their feeling of pleasure, flow and purpose in work. After that we will immerse into the subject of fixed and growth mindset. Besides sharing our knowledge, insights from science and best practices, we will do a few tests and exercises so the participants can experience what kind of mindset they prefer. Besides that they get tips and tricks to work agile on a more growth mindset; because that mindset will add to their success and happiness.

Agility is necessary in our transforming and disruptive world. However, changes can also cause a lot of stress. And if we are not aware of that, it will influence our happiness at work. Keeping our level of stress moderate and learning how to deal with it, helps to keep up teamwork and -happiness. Choosing the right mindset and morale and focusing on results and relations will bring the best performance. It is all about mindset, morale and engagement, relations, results and performance. How to deal with stress and other issues that arise at work? This workshop is a 90-minutes combination of facts and figures about stress and happiness at work and a fun experience by playing the ‘serious’ game ‘Choose [email protected]’. A great experience that you can take home to your team.

T-shirt sizing. Fruit Sizing. Planning pokers. You might be familiar with any or all of these estimation (relative sizing) techniques. Story points based estimations (along with velocity mapping) is touted as a predictable method to plan for software delivery. Teams are expected to get a good sense of the effort needed to deliver a piece of work by comparing estimates with references of similarly complex work they have delivered in the past.

The accuracy of point based estimates fares more or less in the same range as sheer gut feel. So, the natural inclination for software teams is to try and make it more accurate than gut feel. Thereby, we obsess with breaking functionality into smaller byte sized stories. We freak out when there is "scope creep". We debate endlessly about ideal days vs. person days. We fuss over the specific visual representation for the burn-up or burn-down.

Does it matter anymore how many days the team spent chipping hard at a feature that added no value to the business? Have we made agile teams into mini waterfall teams by focussing on the wrong metrics? Can product companies afford this?

Process heaviness in product companies can cost a lot. We need to find better ways to invest in success metrics. We need to change the conversation from productivity to value add.

My talk intends to challenge prevalent estimation practices and contest their validity in product companies. I will also introduce ideas around capturing relevant business metrics and sizing stories using business value.

The org culture mantra is usually considered a silicon valley mumbo jumbo. Although many companies and teams rant about culture, very few in my opinion take it seriously. In this talk I would like to discuss the importance of Org culture and how it makes or breaks businesses and teams. I will lay out some key pointers that will help the influencers in the audience make decisions about their org or team culture. The talk will be in the context of culture in tech companies.

Agile is only as good as the people who use it! Agile mindsets and behaviors often aren't in-built, and don't easily arrive through 'doing' Agile. How can one actively shift teams into an Agile way of thinking and so shift an organization into a more Agile Culture ?

Agile teams are only as Agile as the people inside them and most of those people have been taught to show up using old, traditional, unilateral control mindsets. Bringing in Agile often becomes nothing more than a new way to make the old decisions - we get what we got before but in a new way.

Bringing in Agile Culture Leadership Labs allows people at all level (leaders and especially non-leaders) to see their thinking and expose the hidden values and beliefs that generate behaviour. Without this double loop, new skills revert back to habit! With it, people are able to shift themselves and really live Agile!

Purpose of the session is to discuss about Agile implementation approach and acceptance

In any large scale Agile transformation journey, it is very important to build and sustain continuous improvement culture. What choices are available beyond regular retrospectives and Inspect & Adapt workshops to identify and address improvement opportunities in a systematic approach?

Communities of Practice help create a forum for interested individuals to learn from each other and external resources like eminent speakers, video recordings, books, etc. However, many learnings through these Communities of Practice activities very often doesn't always get converted into practical immediate to short term application. Therefore, the participating individuals gradually loose their interest in such COPs and within in a short time span, such COP initiative meets with its natural end. This leads the COP champions (or promoters, which typically would be Agile Coaches in cases of Agile Transformations) to wonder: what could be done to create an self-organizing environment for continuous improvement that yields tangible results to individuals and their teams/organization?

Above questions were encountered by us in our current Agile transformation engagement and in response, we discovered the WorkingOutLoud concept from John Stepper. This model sounded like a perfect opportunity to experiment with our attempt to build a self-organizing and sustainable Community of Practice to promote continuous improvement culture at the overall organization level. In this talk, we shall share our approach and learnings from this experiment.

Gone are the days when performance engineering for systems and software was done as an afterthought, or after the first performance related escalation from a customer was received. Today, performance is embedded right from design to every stage of the implementation and verification. Sufficient advancements have been incorporated to left-shift identification of potential performance issues and address them as soon as possible. However, performance engineering teams still work isolated from most other teams in the development and research labs.

Given that the performance engineering teams hold the mantle for a successful release and a go-to market strategy in many cases, they become crucial squad members in addition to representatives from other engineering teams as well as from the marketing and offering management teams.

In this session, I will go through a case study of the transformation that I personally led in the Systems performance engineering organisation within IBM. Detailing the structure that existed and the challenges that were posed during the journey of adopting a scaling agile approach for performance engineering, I will cover the synergy that was achieved as well as points for any team that is interested in adopting this approach for their traditionally structured teams.

Servant Leadership by its meaning and definition is not new for India. It has its history deeply rooted in BC's and is being practiced till today, knowingly or unknowingly. Servant leadership was being practiced from thousands of years but got a specific importance now with advent of Agile Frameworks and specifically Scrum.Servant leadership in corporate's vanished with emergence of classical management theory. This presentation we will try to understand basics of Servant Leadership with examples which are relevant to today's leadership in corporate's. This is applicable to small teams to big corporate's. We will understand each aspect from history and will relate it to today's scenario to understand it deeply. This presentation will focus on aspects of Servant Leadership, Its implementation and benefits in different scenarios.

There are many measurement tools for Agile Teams Productivity and Adaptability to Agile. I am introducing a totally different measure for Agile teams. It is called the Agile Culture Index. It is a score for the team for the Agile Culture they build and follow. It is more of being Agile than doing Agile. It is more about the bonding in the team, openness in team, trust in team, readiness for facing any challenges as a team etc. It is more about people part of it than the practices or process, rightly aligned with Agile Manifesto value “Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools”

The objective of this measure is to understand the Agile Culture adaption and Agile Mindset of the team and help for continuous improvement.

In the management theory, we have always study about "conflict Management"

We have also learnt the techniques of conflict resolution.

But is it necessary to resolve conflict? In today's world, its important to live with conflicts. In fact inviting conflicts in a team is a way to innovate.

If you don't have conflicts in your team, worry about it.

So rather than worrying about resolving the conflicts, learn to handle them.