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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Business agility is all about getting results out in an agile pace. Self organized teams would seem like an answer here.

An honest look into why self organization is a buzz word now. Why is it so important, why are companies shifting gears now. Is something terribly wrong with the normal top-down organizations?

Takeaways:

1. An answer to an important question - Do you need this shift?
2. The bare necessities to get you started towards self organization
3. How you should kill the boss in you
4. From coding to finalizing a new office space

Retrospectives are hard. It’s hard to run a valuable retrospective and it’s hard for all team members to feel that the value has been delivered for themselves, the team and organisation. While facilitating retrospectives many of us has faced a problem of team lacking interest and engagement. Why is that some people embrace retrospectives as a way of getting better and some just feel alienated by it? Even with extremely capable scrum masters and facilitators we often end up with very few actionable team items and we feel not satisfied with team results.

In my experience in retrospective facilitation one of the main reasons is that, we focus on solving the problems that are being discussed between team members and we only give attention to loudest, outspoken team members who can explain their issues very well. We forget about the whole layer of unseen communication. We forget about “what is not being said.” In my opinion that’s the big problem and challenge worth considering.

This session will focus on discovery into non-verbal communication, active listening and enabling team members to share more openly and without hesitation. We will consider techniques for increasing team ability to listen and respect others opinions. We will discuss team and individual biases including some practical experiments that everyone can use with teams during next retrospectives.

I will share with you a few techniques to dig deeper, to try to discover real reasons behind people's opinions and views. We will play the 5 why’s game and see how scrum masters can increase their own empathy.

Together we will consider other aspects of communications including.

• Body language
• Individual and team psychological safety
• “No problem” problems

I will share with you different activities, games and experiments you can run to learn more about yourself and explain those issues to your teams. My talk is designed for people who work with teams on continuous improvements and it does apply to much wider applications than just retrospectives, standups and agile practices.

At the end of the session you will learn practical knowledge how to run a better retrospective, have your team members learn more about themselves and how that knowledge can impact the team deliveries.

We will consider ways to grow individual team members, as well as whole teams. We will also focus on helping scrum masters understand their current failures and learn from them and us. Trust me, we all have been there! At ucreate we failed more times that we can count but no matter what, we never stopped and we are still learning new and better ways to hear “what has not been said”

As you probably realised there are no silver bullets to sort out all your communication issues. But there are practical ways to help team members share more and there are ways to learn more from them even when they don't speak. It will enable you you to focus on unheard voice of retro, to be an active listener, to hear what people want to share or simply “to hear what is not being said”.