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.

Since its founding, Google has created six products that each have at least a billion monthly users. Google continues to innovate rapidly, and in many new areas. The organizing principles and cultural elements that drive this monster of innovation are a hot topic among designers. So what are they? Find out in this engaging talk by Google’s Chief Evangelist, Brand Marketing.

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.

The digitalization calls for rapid organizational flexibility and adaptability. This has an impact on all dimensions of a company: its strategy, structure, and the processes. Agile will help implementing some of this flexibility and adaptability yet mainly in terms of processes. Thus, the digital transformation needs companies to change beyond Agile. Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, and Sociocracy provide the missing links for a company to fully embrace digitalization. The combination of these concepts enables a company not only to survive but also to thrive (digital) disruptions.

You have tried Scrum, Kanban, XP, Crystal and other even less known frameworks and methods that claim to help you to become Agile. You have applied them pure, you have tried to tweak them, and even you have made some homemade cocktails out of them. So yet you still can't say your company is Agile. Your Cxx-s are willing to change the company, and themselves. Your employees on all levels genuinely want to step into the Agile journey. Yet there is nearly no progress toward a real organizational agility.

What is the secret? Why is it so hard? Why there are so many crashes on this way in our industry? Why most of the companies will still fail to become Agile, and yours will most probably too.

I'm going to answer all these questions during this talk. We will figure out what aspects of a large-scale agile transformation have a mission-critical impact and how they influence each other. Where to put your efforts? How to cut corners? And moreover, how to survive on this journey.

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.

First came agile, then came DevOps and Continuous Delivery, now comes Continuous Testing. Managing the balance between speed and quality is a difficult decision for many organizations. In this new reality of rapid releases, incremental changes, and short QA cycles, testing is becoming a bottleneck. The adoption of DevOps has brought this more into the forefront as testers find their place in this emerging area. Continuous Testing is a major opportunity for QA leaders to redefine the strategic role in the organization, specifically as drivers of quality within Continuous Delivery.

We will have an overview of the upcoming challenges that you will face as QA leaders and how Continuous Testing will bring you through these changes on top. We will discuss real time experiences as a tester bringing quality into the DevOps process, with key strategies used to ensure quality is infused in every step of your process. Also we would discuss about the different cases where CI, CT & CD are in practice.

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.

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.

Introduction

Culture eats strategy for breakfast, said Peter Drucker. We all agree to that. If our organisational culture is not building up to our goals, we will never reach them. The main question is, how can you create an organisational and team culture that contributes to your goals, to productivity and success? The key for change is to form the right habits, within our agile teams. Like exercising regularly and losing weight you can develop habits for being healthy, happy, more productive and successful at work. Therefore it is important to understand the human nature and its potential for transformation. In this workshop participants get all the insights and best practices to develop habits for an happy and fulfilling (work)life and organisational culture.

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.

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!

In Software Development, Agile is a way of developing code. It is essentially an unspoken promise of new functions, fixed bugs, automated tests etc delivered in a short period of time. Agile has became the reference approach for modern product development in the last few decades. However, we still see a lot of misinterpretation and abuse of its core values. This is so common and I would like to call this unwanted byproduct as fragile. If you don’t handle it with care, it is sure to shatter your product and loudly crash your entire team.Companies worldwide have faced many issues adopting Agile, a lot of the struggles and challenges are shared across different regions.

As organizations embark on agile transformation, many traditional project managers or business and technical leads are thrown into the Scrum Master/Product Owner role after reading a book or two and, perhaps a few days of training. In the midst of changing environments, conflicting mindsets, and other change-related issues, they are expected to start operating within a Scrum team. The main problem I see these days with agile methodologies is that it has become a branding term, many organizations want to "do agile" not because they appreciate or even understand the benefits of doing so, but just because they want to get a sticker that says I'm Agile. You bring a team together, give them some work, and yet they don't meet the organization's or manager's expectations. At the end they fail to jell, fail to perform and fail to deliver.

Why do so many organizations struggle to put in place mature Agile teams that can apply proper Agile principles and deliver awesome products? Some people will say, “Agile is hard” as an excuse to not do Agile or to become frAgile. Here we shall discuss the secrets to reboot any Agile team. Let's discuss why this happens and how we can overcome these to bring in a new cultural shift which will boost the team productivity ?

This talk consist of a series of stories that hopefully can illustrate a different approach of implementing change in the right way. We shall also analyse if what you think of agile is exactly what it is or else what tweak you need to bring in to make it work for you.

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

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.