Diversity. It's the topic of the hour. Organisations are all putting 'diversity' and 'equal opportunities' on every job ad. But, for some organisations it still seems to be a struggle.

What's the goal? Do we want diverse teams because it's the "right thing to do" or is it "good for our teams and organisations"? Are we hiring minorities to keep up with quotas or our competition?

This talk will engage the audience in a frank discussion on what diversity is, why we need it and how we might achieve it. Guiding attendees through the latest research with practical exercises to demonstrate the issues and open discussion to find answers to the following questions:

• What does diversity mean? How does it relate to me?
• Why does diversity matter in effective teams?
• How can teams where everyone is different be effective?
• How can we increase diversity in our organisations?
• Is positive discrimination a feasible and ethical way to achieve diversity in our organisations?
• How can I employ a diverse group, when they are not applying?

Diversity is no longer just a moral imperative, it's critical to effective organisations.

Shared Services Teams, such as DevOps, Infrastructure, Security, Networking, etc., for a variety of reasons do not receive agile training and coaching specific to their needs. This often results in failure to consistently deliver expected outcomes, resulting in costly delays in overall delivery, often undetected until it is too late.

Shared Services Teams are expected to simultaneously:
- build assets, such as delivery pipelines, networking, cloud, infrastructure, etc. on time and on budget, and
- support Agile Development Teams and Operations, often at short notice.

These two different types of tasks are typically managed in the same way and usually as a dual priority Kanban, which is not addressing their different nature, thus causing costly delivery delays.

This talk explores this Dual Nature of work and the difficulties arising from addressing both types by a single team. The lecture presents experience with Coaching different types of Shared Services Teams.

It shows ways how their specific needs can be addressed at various agile maturity levels, including areas such as Governance, Capacity Optimisation, Supplier Reliability and Support Mix Optimisation.

Scrum Masters (Servant Leaders) play a major role in Enterprise Agile Transformation. We cannot pronounce that an organization is agile unless its culture and mindset truly changes to Agile. A Scrum Master being representative of Management to a Scrum team play a major role in the Enterprise Agile Transformation.

I would like to discuss the role of Servant Leaders in the Enterprise Agile Transformation and how they play key role of torchbearers in the agile transformation.

Scrum Master role is very important in the age when many of the enterprises are transforming to Agile. As per the statistics available, 34% of the Enterprises are already transformed and using a couple of Agile Practices, 36% of the enterprises considering following some of the agile methods in their organizations to deliver business value and increase the ROI's and 30 are not in the race at all.

This is the right time for the Scrum Masters for an enterprise Agile March past to take the culture and mindset to the DNA's of the enterprises.

Traditionally, businesses like banking and telecom focused high on standardization and national regulation. The development lead times were long. Consequently, the solution providers developed capabilities to influence standards, develop products and interact with the end-service providers. The changing business landscape challenges providers to keep pace. In the slow-moving market, providers honed the ability to run major multi-year projects. Solution Providers became predictable development machinery with extensive mechanisms to enable predictability and control at the expense of flexibility and customer closeness. This, led to organizational setups focusing on the alignment with the project structures and deepening the competencies in narrow areas both in the product and in the functional dimensions. The result? Organizational silos with multiple related hand-over challenges.

My session will cover ideas and lessons learnt, on how did we succeed while working with large-scale program engagements, when multiple teams, geographically distributed, had to come together to deliver a solution.