If your team uses velocity for planning but you don't find it very useful, this workshop is for you.

If your manager or scrum master or other pseudo-authority figure keeps obsessing over your velocity, this workshop is for you.

If you want to know about better ways to forecast when a piece of work will be done or how to gather data that actually helps your team, this workshop is for you.

In this interactive workshop, Doc and Diane share insights into metrics and how they can be used to improve your team's performance. From cumulative flow diagrams to lead time distribution charts to forecasting using Monte Carlo simulation and more, you'll come away with the ability to better forecast when work will be done and better diagnose issues with your process.

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One of the challenges when driving business agility is the question of how a company should structure its organization to make it fit for the modern, complex business world.

There are many opinions about this - but what is the right thing to do for you? How can you find a structure, that empowers people and teams? How can you keep your business "on track" at the same time?

This workshop will empower you to answer that question for yourself:

You will learn about different organizational models and structural approaches, their philosophies, advantages and disadvantages.

You will learn about several concepts, that are key to increasing business agility in your company and you will learn about how the implementation of needed changes can be driven practically.

The workshop consists of some conceptual/theoretical lectures, group work for experience exchange and exercises to experience and try out concepts and approaches.

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Embrace Change, Execute with Purpose

Unlocking Agility is based on the concepts from the Addison-Wesley book by Jorgen Hesselberg, an agile transformation executive at companies such as Nokia, McAfee, and Intel. In this interactive workshop, change leaders are invited to learn what it takes to create sustainable change and embed a digitalization mindset in large organizations. Participants will leave with a set of concrete actions to pursue at their organizations and a copy of Unlocking Agility for further study.

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Experience Holacracy for yourself!

The workshop introduces the theory and practice of Holacracy, a new way of structuring, governing, and running a company. Holacracy fundamentally changes how decisions are made and how power is distributed. The goals of Holacracy are bold: make your organization more agile and responsive, increase clarity —that means to determine who does what, expects what, and decides what—minimize 'office politics', and enable deeper employee engagement and empowerment.

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Are you fed-up with participating in unproductive meetings that waste time, energy and enthusiasm? We believe everyone deserves well-facilitated meetings and events that make the most of everyone’s knowledge in the room - or the video call. Overcoming old patterns and habits for group interactions can be challenging, but by making small changes to how people are set up to work together you can create surprising improvements!.

In this workshop, we will share facilitation techniques for nudging group interactions towards increased participation, self-organization, and better decision-making. Together we’ll explore what it means to ‘hold space’ and give control back to the group while maintaining focus on getting things done together. In addition to learning about facilitation itself, you’ll learn in two additional ways - in the morning, by being facilitated by us - and in the afternoon, by understanding how we facilitated you, and why it works. You’ll also receive a resource list, so you can follow up on the methods that interest you.

Whether you lead meetings or just participate: you can influence your group’s interactions by introducing simple facilitation hacks. You will leave with a concrete next step, and a set of activities and techniques to start using right away, to enliven your meetings and achieve more satisfying outcomes.

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How can the entrepreneurial spirit and culture scale beyond start-up size? Holacracy® offers a radical new answer to this question, in the form of a set of tested and customizable self-management practices. With Holacracy in place, every team member gains the ability to make meaningful decisions and drive change in service of the organization’s purpose. In addition to clarifying agreements and expectations, and increasing transparency, the Holacracy approach promises to fundamentally rewire your organization’s approach to power.

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Welcome to Agile India 2019

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Is it coaching that’s really needed to help teams transform to an Agile way of working? Or does pragmatic and experienced leadership work better? Is there any other way to upskill a team and change the way they work?

What’s the best coaching style to use especially when the teams are completely ‘green’? The ‘what do you think?’ approach, used in ‘life coaching’ models don’t always work out well, especially with highly resistive teams.

Based on 15 years of coaching teams, executives, transformations and teams of coaches, this talk will outline my key experiences and learnings in the area of Agility transformations.

In this candid talk, I’ll share techniques that have worked wonders and those that have been absolute disasters. I will address how to handle IT teams and how business operations teams can be different and may need a different approach.

I will also cover how to scale coaching. For many large companies, even if they hire every single coach in the country it won’t be sufficient, so how could they keep up the transformation momentum?

I will talk about the malaise in our industry with regard to the quality of coaches and how to select good coaches, be a great coach and avoid being a coach crutch.

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Agile Coaching is a relatively new discipline and there is a lot of misunderstanding about why coaching is useful, what skills and competencies an agile coach needs to have, how they engage with individuals, teams and organisations and how to tell good coaches from mediocre ones.

As someone who wants to become a coach, what skills and competencies do you need to build? There are training courses, but they are not enough. Becoming an effective coach requires much more than book knowledge, it needs deliberate practice and experience working with individuals and teams.

As someone who is considering engaging a coach, what should you look out for and how do you establish the relationship to ensure the best possible outcomes. How do you create the environment where we can grow your own coaches inside an organisation, what is the pathway to competency for an aspiring coach?

In this talk Shane explores these topics and relates it to his own journey to becoming a recognized expert coach through a competency-based assessment (ICE-AC).

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Why are Agile teams supposed to be small? How big are they supposed to be? Most agilists tend to agree that a team of ten people works well.

But what is it about the number 10 that makes it the “magic” number?

Since the start of human evolution, people formed groups to be more effective. Whether it was the hunt for a mammoth or going to war, working in teams ensured a greater chance of success.

There have been various researches from Dunbar’s paper through the Scrum Guide to military formations about the ideal number of people in a team.

We’ll discuss the historical, scientific and cultural reasons why 10 seems to be the magic number of forming effective teams.

Does the number of team members really matter? Is 10 really the magic number. You will get an answer that will help you to create effective teams with the right amount of people.

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Not all team decisions need to be made by the entire team. There. Someone said it. In some cases, we can trust a single individual to make the decision because they have the most experience and insight. In other situations, we want a variety of interests and perspectives included to ensure a well-considered, unbiased decision. But how do we decide who and what and when?

Put down the RACI chart - there's a better way! A Collaboration Contract is a simple tool that allows team members to opt into conversations and decisions. With a Collaboration Contract, teams identify the decision makers, and through an open selection process, establish their desired level of autonomy. This is a not a decision-making tool, but a tool for assembling the decision making team with clear expectations and agreements.

Join Diane and Doc in this hands-on workshop where you will learn what it takes to run your own Collaboration Contract. Learn this powerful technique today and establish clearer decision making for your team tomorrow.

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People can work together while living in different realities because everyone interprets the world in their own way. Assumptions, misunderstandings, information gaps, behavioural habits, biases – these often sit under the radar, affecting performance, motivation, and delivery. We call it ‘The Fog’, and it makes progress difficult, frustrating, and slow.

This session is all about team alignment for effective delivery.

Timothy Gallwey’s acclaimed The Inner Game teaches four parts to the learning process:

• awareness of what is
• focus of attention
• own choice (regarding own decisions)
• trust in self and team.

This transfers to the letter when it comes to developing the Agile Mindset and I specialize in helping teams with the first step. In this session, you'll learn about the research behind team alignment, you'll find out a structured team alignment process works, and you'll see results through a case study with Samsung.

We will workshop a few areas around 'perception differences' and I also offer a free Take the Team Test online tool to assess your team's behavioral and cognitive alignment. Anyone attending this session is invited to take the test in advance and share your experiences of it in this interactive session.

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We like to say that agile teams own their own process by choosing their way of working, their “WoW.” This of course is easier said than done because there are several aspects to WoW. First, our team needs to know how to choose the appropriate lifecycle for the situation that we face. Should we take a Scrum-based approach, a lean/Kanban-based approach, a continuous delivery approach, or an exploratory/lean startup approach? Second, what practices should the team adopt? How do they fit together? When should we apply them? Third, what artifacts should the team create? When should they be created? To what level of detail? Finally, how do we evolve our WoW as we experiment and learn?

There are several strategies that we could choose to follow when we tailor and evolve our WoW. One approach is to bootstrap our WoW, to figure it out on our own. This works, but it is a very slow and expensive strategy in practice. Another approach is to hire an agile coach, but sadly in practice the majority of coaches seem to be like professors who are only a chapter or two ahead of their students. Or we could take a more disciplined, streamlined approach and leverage the experiences of the thousands of teams who have already struggled through the very issues that our team currently faces. In this talk you’ll discover how to develop your WoW without starting from scratch and without having to rely on the limited experience and knowledge of “agile coaches.”

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I had been sitting in a few team retrospectives and hearing the same old tired pattern of "what went well, what didn't, what can we improve". The teams were bored, I was bored, they were just doing mechanical Scrum. Retrospectives are such a powerful tool to drive continuous improvement, but what i was seeing was a stagnation and the true value of this event was being lost.

End of the Sprint was coming up so as the enterprise agile coach, I thought I'd provide some of my favourite patterns and ended up providing my 20 Scrum Masters with a playbook to accelerate and reinvigorate learning and improvement, retrospectives and ideas as well as links to where to find more.

Would love to share these patterns with you, discuss the pain points we were experiencing and how we were able to reinvigorate this event and improve overall quality of our delivery. It will be a workshop so would also love to hear your favourite patterns so we can share them with the group in this workshop and help inspire our teams to strive for activating real improvements.

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Ever wondered why some people prefer to work alone? Or why some people cringe when pair programming is mentioned? It might be that that person, like me, is an introvert. But is is really that simple? Can we really put every person in a box labeled "introvert" or "extrovert" or are we all just ambiverts?

During this session I will talk about introverts, extroverts and everything in between.
Drawing from almost 15 years of personal experience being an introvert on agile teams I will talk about the differences of being an extrovert
or an introvert, how to foster an inclusive team environment, and the importance of psychological safety.
You will hopefully leave this session better fit to help EVERYONE on your team to reach their full potential!

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I’m 22years old and I have started to work between 17 and 18 years old. I’m a freelance and an enterpreneur.

There are a lot of differences between the approach of my dad to the world of work and mine. The world of work has changed and it’s changing.

The company which I’m co-founder count a network of about 20 professionists who callaborate with us in different way and in different countries. All people are under 28yo and for us it’s normal: emergents leadership, different countries, "pull" approaches, continuous feedbacks,...

So:

How young people are approaching the world/culture of work? Are the new generations naturally surfing complexity?

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Agile Principle # 12 defines that at regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly. From Scrum to Kanban and other agile frameworks, this is accomplished through retrospectives and continuous improvement processes. The key to being a successful agile practitioner is to identify areas of improvement and then experiment ways of improving it. But it doesn't stop there; positive improvements ultimately become success stories for other teams and motivates them to experiment with newer ideas which eventually leads to innovation. A negative outcome isn't bad either since it adds to the experience of situations where ideas may not apply. Thus the key to this process lies in being a child, an explorer, and inculcate an experimentation mindset. The SLICE framework addresses this in the following way:

• S hare: Share an area of improvement
• L earn: Explore the area for ways of improvement
• I mplement: Search & apply the learning to identify the success factors
• C ollateral: Publish blogs, white papers, presentations, etc. as observations of the implementation
• E xpansion: Grow, Seed, and Split in order to explore new venues for success

In this talk, I create an environment that inculcates an experimentation mindset and utilise the SLICE framework to drive the exploration.

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In 2008 I was member of a leadership team at Ericsson starting the transformation towards agility for a 2000 people organization. Soon we heard, that agile is a mindset and somehow that sounded right. But it was so hard to get: for me that full mindset change journey took about a year. Through it, I have become one of the transformation drivers at enterprise level. Today I am driving the transformation of a 15000 people business unit as organizational coach/inhouse consultant. Having worked with all kinds of people in all kinds of roles on all levels in the hierarchy across the company gave me a lot of experience with how to get the mindset across. One key learning is, that there is no one-size-fits all approach to it. People are different and different groups of people react in different ways through the group dynamics.

In this talk I will share my 10-year-experience with facilitating mindset change. I will share several examples of different kinds of people and groups of people I encountered and what I found working to facilitate the mindset change.

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After 20 years since the manifesto, the latest state of agile reports more than 80% of organizations as "still maturing" in their agile practice. As agile methods expand beyond small teams and software itself, we are still struggling to answer these questions:

• Why is it that some teams are more 'agile' than others even though they all claim to be practicing agile methods?
• What all dimensions need to change as teams, managers, and entire organizations attempt to become agile?
• How do these dimensions interact with each other?
• Overall, what does it take to become agile and how does that differ from doing agile?

This talk is based on my original theory of becoming agile developed from 10+ years of industrial research of agile practice in New Zealand and India, which received the distinguished paper award at the IEEE/ACM international conference on software engineering (ICSE), in 2017.

In this session, I will explain the key dimensions that need to transition during agile transformations, using industrial examples, and highlight what you can do to progress beyond simply doing agile, to harness the most from your agile transformations.

This keynote will add a unique research perspective to the conference program, sharing agile research in an industry-friendly format and delivery style.

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Deep Work™ is real. It's effective. It's immensely valuable for knowledge work. And yet, it's rare.

Organizations write software in two modes, the focussed mode centered around individual technical skill, and the collaboration mode centered around the communication within the team.

By nature, these two styles are at odds with each other and preferring one means downplaying the other. We know that stellar quality work can come out of an intensely focused mode of working. But we also know that equally stellar quality of work comes from highly aligned teams that work together like a well-oiled engine.

How then should we find a balance between the two? What can leaders and managers do to encourage both? How do we keep the changes small but fundamental?

Modern work cultures and environments are tailored for collaborative work and do not give enough thought to deep work. We will look at how making small changes to the work-day schedule, and the work environment can bridge the gap and support knowledge workers to do the best work of their life.

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When one has fun at work, work becomes fun. However, daily pressures, metrics, KPIs, and what not, have dissolved the fun, and made work drudgery in various ways. This creates stress for individuals, in teams, and across teams, there is mistrust, unnecessary competition, blame, finger-pointing ….

What better way to learn, and re-learn the basics of life, work, team-work - than to play a game, have fun, and correlate it with how life and work indeed should be treated as a game, and we should have fun in this journey. Only then can people truly succeed, and so can organisations.

Here, we will play a game – “Collaboration - A Taboo!” – where you will –

• Re-learn collaboration techniques via a game!
• Learning applicable for individuals & teams, in small or big organisations
• Re-live your childhood when playing this game

Be prepared for a twist which will leave you thinking!

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Anti-Patterns are like patterns, only more informative. With anti-patterns you will first see what patterns reoccur in "bad" retrospectives and then you will see how to avoid, or remedy, the situation.

Based on her experience with facilitating retrospectives, join Aino for an entertaining and informative presentation on the anti-patterns she has seen and how to overcome the problems. We also encourage the audience to chip-in with their experiences or questions along the way.

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ING has been a frontrunner in the banking industry for more than a century and aims to become 'one global ING' that delivers a consistent customer experience to all its customers across the globe. The bank has taken the first big step towards this ambition by uniting its two biggest countries – the Netherlands and Belgium. The project aims to create a single operating model across the border, with simpler, standardized processes and integrated activities that will improve operational efficiency and agility.

While everyone acknowledges that mergers and acquisitions are an essential part of scaling an organization's impact, however, these are usually executed in a very top-down, waterfall-ish approach. Typically such initiatives don't embody any agile values or mindset. As a leader driving this change, Rocky will narrate the story of merging 2 agile organizations with more than 8000 people's workforce. He will share his experience on how the two countries are joining forces, pooling talent plus creativity to deliver one set of customer journeys on an integrated platform, that will result in a truly empowering customer experience.

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This day is all about the “Agile Mindset”, but what about the “Kanban Mindset?” What’s the same and what is different? Kanban is certainly consistent with the “Agile Mindset,” but also brings in concepts from Lean and other management approaches.

Join Todd as he shares how the Kanban Method focuses on the following areas in order to drive continuous improvement:

• Understand the system
• Manage the flow of value
• Balance Demand and Capacity
• Limit WIP to improve predictability
• Find and address bottlenecks
• Make Policies Explicit
• Incremental improvement through experiment and measurement
• Double loop learning (process improvement & product improvement)
• Scale through the enterprise

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What a joy to be in a key leadership position in one of the largest-ever corporate experiments - the transition to new ways of working. I'm accountable for establishing and operating the Centre of Expertise, New Ways of Delivering - how we uplift culture, delivery & technical capability. We're doing this through consulting, coaching, educating, facilitating & mentoring.

The scope - 5000 people, 500 squads, 6 regions.

The process - Think systemically, optimise locally.

The result - it's a process...

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Superorganism is defined as an organized system that is conceived of analogous to a living being. A superorganism is a highly resilient and scalable structure, and social insects such as ants are great examples of it. However, does such eusocial behavior permeate through the human race as well? While we generally accept Darwin's survival theory, the undeniable reality is that our ability to survive and thrive could be largely attitude to our ability to work in larger groups where common interests have brought us together rather than sticking out solo in pursuit of individual self-interests. In this talk, we shall discuss the idea behind superorganism, and describe what constitutes such a mindset, and how could it be used to create more effective and agile structures?

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The Indian Armed forces is regarded as the highly and most disciplined organization in India. The Indian Army lives agility by the second. Unexpected attacks, encounters and sudden change in the operating environments are the norm of the day. In spite of such anxious moments, they give us the maximum business value. The motivations are always high and they are already to deliver in the most perilous environments.

If you look a little deep into the working challenges, I see no difference between complex systems development and the Army operations. Dealing with uncertainty, complexity, preparing for failures, rehearsing of failures, testing in Prod systems are some concepts in IT world, while the same challenges are relevant in the Army world.

My talk would be around some principles and learning in the army that can be used in the IT corporate world in building organizations to deal with dynamic market changes in short doing and living agile. Some interesting aspects that I would like to have share are dealing with motivation and dealing with constant changes. I will also share real time examples how Leaders exhibit the Decentralize decision making that has led to remarkable success and also some aspects of how soldiers take risks and try out new things that lead to remarkable success.

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The communication tools of Liberating Structures will teach you how to facilitate the discussions your org needs. I am going to demonstrate how to use these techniques in the workshop. And all the attendees are going to be fully immersed and ready to wield their new knowledge the very next day at work.

Come learn how to help your team(s), org(s), and company(ies)!!!

For more information, watch my video at http://youtu.be/UNOjqMUv8h0

A version of this workshop that was presented at Agile Tour Sydney 2016 is at http://bit.ly/2f4Bie8

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Quality in Eurofins Genomics is a central focus point - analysis we do or products we produce have critical applications, be it production of drugs, identifying rare diseases or gene editing. IT is a driving force behind the scenes which challenges us to ensure the highest quality standards without compromising on speed.

When we start a new project, we do it with enthusiasm and feeling of doing something meaningful or even cool. Following scrum we quickly establish our velocity and deliver soon first release into production. Overall quality is quite good; results from testing acceptable, deadlines are coming so nothing can stop us. Let’s prioritize last bugs, fix critical, move rest into backlog – now we can be proud of having delivered value to users!

We continue delivering at ever increasing speed as team matures! Unfortunately the idyllic scenery gets soon destroyed by first, more and more effort needs to be spent addressing issues from both QA and production. We spend time arguing with QA and users on what is bug or if this defect is P2 or P3 or can even be seen as P4, from time to time we take a sprint to “stabilize”, but all too often nothing changes. User stories are getting spilled to next sprints, we postpone releases to have more time for testing, club them with next releases and finally find ourselves in downward spiral..

As quality cannot be compromised we quickly decide that Agile is fine, but as we work in regulated environment we need to be pragmatic and adjust Agile to our needs. What comes out is unfortunately not much different to Waterfall or V-Model, we still keep sprints and do reviews, but realize that only form is left. I am directly responsible for IT in Eurofins Genomics so will share experience from the field on how did we overcome this and reanimated Agile.

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We hear so much these days about the difference between being agile, and doing agile. It’s the agile mindset that enables teams, and organisations, to truly adopt the agile values and principles to reap real benefits, not simply do the agile practices and ceremonies.

This session will discuss how mindfulness is the secret ingredient that enables the agile mindset. Mindful agile is the perfect combination of the agile mindset with mindfulness that enables teams and organisations to build an agile culture that truly embodies the agile values and principles. It allows teams to work together with greater cooperation to truly collaborate, overcome difficulties, share ideas, and challenge each other without falling into chaos and conflict. Through mindfulness, teams communicate more effectively, think more clearly and increase creativity that drive innovation. By attending this session, you will gain a practical understanding of why mindfulness is the essential ingredient for creating an effective agile culture.

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There are many suggestions dealing with Agile-friendly performance appraisals, which promise to rely on trust, honesty, respect, safety, and servant leadership. The Agile Manifesto does not address performance appraisal although it does generally mention regular and frequent feedback, which can also be applied to performance evaluation. Two related methods, Beyond Budgeting and Sociocracy, offer interesting approaches to agile performance review. In this session we want to present these two different performance appraisal approaches, how they're are supported by the values of BOSSA nova (short for Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy & Agile) and want to invite the participants of this workshop to discuss the synthesis of the two approaches.

This session looks at several real-world examples from actual companies including Accenture, Equinor, and Google.

The first principle of Beyond Budgeting asks to “engage and inspire people around bold and noble causes; not around short-term financial targets,” the eleventh principle advocates: “Evaluate performance holistically and with peer feedback for learning and development; not based on measurement only and not for rewards only.” Thus, the main strategy of Beyond Budgeting is to separate (financial) bonuses from performance evaluation and to use relative and not fixed targets as a foundation for the evaluation.

Sociocracy suggests holding 360 degree in-person meetings. The person being reviewed should request it when needed, not just on a rigid annual basis, and perhaps not just once in the year. In the 360 degree meeting, the organization itself can be critiqued in the review - “the way we organize is causing performance problems.” Similar to Beyond Budgeting there is a focus on the vision and mission of the specific department as well as the overall company as a source of inspiration and motivation. The output of the performance review meeting should be a development plan that the immediate group of supervision, peers, and subordinates consent to.

Based on BOSSA nova, we invite participants to dive into what Beyond Budgeting and Sociocracy combined offer for performance appraisals. Participants will take away insights that they can use in their organizations.

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Getting new teams to work together is hard. Really. Hard.

Is it because there is so much hype around new Agile teams? Or is it because there is such a focus on “doing things right” (or “doing” Agile right), that we forget about the people actually doing the work? Regardless of the reason, before we can change the way people work... we need to focus on the things that are important for teamwork to work!

We believe that the key to high-performance teams is creating an intentional culture that respects and embraces diversity - whether it be race, gender, class, culture, age, beliefs, language, skills or background. So join us as we explore the Team Canvas – sort of like a Business Model Canvas for teamwork - covering nine essential teamwork elements:

• Purpose - Why we are doing what we are doing?
• People & Roles - What are our names, roles and responsibilities?
• Common goals - What do we as a group want to achieve together?
• Personal goals - What do I as an individual want to achieve?
• Team values - What do we really stand for and believe in?
• Needs and expectations - What do each of us need to be successful in a diverse team?
• Rules & Activities - How do we communicate and keep everyone up to date?
• Strengths & Assets - What skills do we have in the team?
• Weaknesses & Risks - What are the weaknesses we have, as an individual and as a team?

We will walk through our agenda for team lift-offs, facilitation posters and preparation work required, materials needed, and facilitation tips and tricks. All packaged in a handy pocket guide, that you can use to explore tried and tested techniques for each essential element. We will also have an opportunity to practice some of these techniques during the session.

Get ready to lift-off your team in T-minus 10... 9... 8...

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More asking, less telling. As an agile leader, adopt the approach of humble enquiry to build relationships, increase trust and collaboration, and deal with the challenges of organizational transformations.

"Humble enquiry is the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person." - Edgar H. Schein

Working in an agile way asks us to rethink how we relate to each other as we tackle complex problems and challenge the traditional structures of our organizations. Humble enquiry - the art of asking instead of telling - is a critical skill for agilists who seek to improve collaboration and address difficult problems head on. Inspired by Edgar H. Schein's book 'Humble Enquiry, this workshop will teach you the fundamentals of how to do more asking and less telling. Through mini-lectures and interactive exercises, we'll discuss the different types of questioning, consider the forces around and within us that inhibit our ability to ask instead of tell, and examine how this powerful technique can improve collaboration within agile teams as well as help to address some of the challenges of agile transformations.

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Five people at one computer? How can that possibly be productive?

While this seems like a reasonable question, it's not easily answered - until we begin to understand the power of flow.

Mob Programming grew from the quest of one team to learn how to work well together. Once we started We almost immediately noticed that working this way provided better results in a variety of ways:

• We were getting more done, and they were the more important thing
• The quality of our work was increasing dramatically
• Our Knowledge, skills, and capabilities were improving rapidly
• And all while we were having a lot of fun as well!

While we noticed these benefits and more, and it was clear this was in a large part due to working well together throughout the day - we didn't have an understanding of why this was working so wonderfully for us.

A hint came early on when we recognized we were achieving a one-piece flow - but we didn't realize the importance of this until we started exploring the meaning and power of "flow".

In this presentation, we'll share the results of that exploration, and see if we can get a better understanding of Mob Programming and the power of flow.

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I'll present how the dynamics of today's world means that old ways of organizing power in businesses are no longer working.
We need to re-look at our organization structures so that the emerging culture allows for more effective ways of using power.

I'll cover:

The Decay of Power and What It Means For Your Organization

Current Structures Make it Difficult to Get Things Done

Holacracy — A New Social Technology To Organize Power in Pursuit of Purpose

5 Ways Holacracy Organizes Power to Thrive in a Rapidly Changing World

1. The purpose is the new Boss
2. Autonomy: Everyone is a Leader (but lead roles not people)
3. Create Fractal structures (not Hierarchical or Flat)
4. Power vested in rules (not people)
5. Dynamic org structure that evolves (instead of rigid top-down ones)

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Nothing rattles a company more than having unknowns, but this is mostly because we lack the situational processes and frameworks that enable us to maneuver effectively in uncertainty and complexity. This ultimately hurts our ability to deliver high customer value. In this talk, Ray Arell will outline the ways that you can effectively identify unknowns and use proven methods to gain knowledge quickly. This will include helping to identify the right decision-making context with Cynefin and other complexity methods. He will also discuss ways to establish experiments that can exploit novel and emergent behaviors to amplify you to high knowledge faster.

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While Agile organization started to appear in last 20 years, the key principles for how we organize is nothing new and have been with us for thousands of years. In this session, I am taking a martial art "Aikido" (Japanese: 合気道) as example and going through the key principles in leadership, learning and transformation approaches. In these principles, learning Aikido are very similar to build Agile organization. Leaders are practitioners and teachers. Learning is via practices and peer learning. Changes are done in people body and mindset. We need to learn the rules, break away from the rules and ultimately create our own rules fitting ourselves and organization (Shu-Ha-Ri). Aikido is a way of life, so Agile is.

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Throw a purpose in a middle of a crowd, it will start t self-organise. Act in a purposeful way is not an easy attitude in a business environment driven by compliance rather than by meaning. Larger the entreprise, more is the purpose diluted into process. This workshop offers a perspective of meaning as a powerful change agent and a framework of shared leadership development to offer alignment between actions and purpose.

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Everyone has stories of failure. That time you fell off your bike. The day you wore your jumper backwards without realising . That wireframe that confused your customers. The new feature no one used.

Failure is an inevitable part of life and as our delivery practices have matured we’ve celebrated the role that failure plays in building our products.

We Fail Fast. We Fail Forward. We Fail Better.

It almost feels like we want to fail.

It’s as if failure itself is our goal.

Has this obsession with failure clouded our thinking and distracted us from what we are actually trying to achieve?

In this session I will explore the prevailing ideas around failure and how they limit our ability to grow our teams and, just as importantly, the individuals that make up those teams. This talk will leave you with practical actions you can take to create a culture of learning and empowerment…and ultimately create a culture of success rather than failure.

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UX is driving Engineering and Product crazy, a black throwing off timelines and killing ideas. They’re too siloed and not collaborating well. UX doesn’t seem Lean, and popular Agile methodologies haven’t figured out how UX fits in, often suggesting that a Product Manager describing features in stories is enough for developers.

UX is throwing your Agile train off so much that you want to throw them under it. Can’t anybody make wireframes? Can’t we circumvent or exclude these people?

Companies are figuring out that UX specialists and the User-Centered Design process are good investments that more than pay for themselves. Recent highly-publicized UX failures remind us that skimping on the UX process can alienate customers, create negative media attention, and burn millions of dollars.

This session explains how the UX process fits into Agile, saves companies money, augments DevOps goals, and increases customer satisfaction. Learn how to save time, money, and sanity when UX does research, designs, builds rapid UX prototypes, conducts and interprets UX testing, and iterates… before developers write a line of code.

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Would you fly in a plane designed by a craftsman or would you prefer your aircraft to be designed by engineers? Engineering is the application of iterative, empirical, practical science to real-world problems. Craftsmanship is a wonderful thing, and as a reaction to the terrible abuses of the term Engineering in software development Software Craftsmanship has helped in our learning of what really works.

The term "Software Engineering" has gained a bad reputation. It implies "Big up-front design" and "Mathematically provable models" in place of working code. However, that is down to our interpretation, not a problem with "Engineering" as a discipline.

In recent years we have discovered what really works in software development. Not everyone practices approaches like Continuous Delivery, but it is widely seen as representing the current state-of-the-art in software development. This is because at its root CD is about the application of an iterative, practical, empirical, maybe even science based approach to solving problems in software development. Is this a form of software engineering?

Software isn't bridge-building, it is not car or aircraft development either, but then neither is Chemical Engineering, neither is Electrical Engineering. Engineering is different in different disciplines. Maybe it is time for us to begin thinking about retrieving the term "Software Engineering" maybe it is time to define what our "Engineering" discipline should entail.

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The keynote will explore the lessons learned from the journey of vanguard companies as they unleash the power of organizational self-management. Is it possible to adopt an organizational model linking mission-critical processes to individual stewardship without the need for traditional management and formal hierarchy? Is it possible to slash the direct and indirect costs of bureaucracy to achieve strategic competitive advantage? Is it possible to manage great complexity with simple principles? The answer to all of these questions appears to be yes.

What you'll take away:

• Learn How to Create a Highly Scalable Enterprise Without Bosses and Titles
• Learn How to Drive Organizational Agility, Innovation and Resilience through Organizational Self-Management
• Learn How Organizational Self-Management Can Create Strategic Business Advantage
• Learn How to Slash the Costs of Management, the Least Efficient Activity of Any Enterprise
• Learn How to Manage Great Complexity with Great Simplicity

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The Deployment Pipeline is a central concept in Continuous Delivery. It represents an effective, controlled channel through which all changes destined for production pass.

A defining objective in CD is to work so that our software is always in a "releasable state". By applying high levels of automation to our development process, in the form of a Deployment Pipeline, we pass all changes to our production systems through this channel and evaluate them prior to release.

This means that the pipeline quickly becomes a strategic resource.

As our use of this important tool grows, the performance of the pipeline, in terms of the rapidity with which it can give valuable feedback on the quality of your work, becomes a central concern.

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Are the majority of agile transformations failing? Succeeding? Just sort of stumbling along? It’s really hard to tell. You hear a lot of promises and platitudes from consulting firms specializing in transformations, you read case studies that focus on the good and downplay the bad, and there’s a plethora of agile trainers who will certify that you’re a master, a professional, or an agile coach in just a few short days. Who do you trust to share with you what’s really happening in organizations making these transformations? What’s really working? What isn’t?

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Organizations place business agility as one of their top strategic priorities, yet there are multiple reasons enterprise transformations fail. How do you know you're on the right path? What are some of the concrete signs that your organization is becoming more agile? In this talk, Jorgen Hesselberg goes beyond the tools, frameworks, and hype to outline 7 concrete signs that show you're on your way to unlocking agility.

Whether you're an experienced agilist or just getting started on your journey, Hesselberg will help you appreciate your current strategy and highlight where you may want to make some adjustments along the way.

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The talk is to share experiences and learnings with the digital transformation at the company Siemens.

All of us who work in large, traditional cooperation can undoubtedly learn a lot from agile showcase companies like Spotify and Airbnb. But we also understand that these approaches are not easy to transfer in every context. Large companies with structures, processes and culture that evolved over decades have very special challenges in such a transformation.

A few years ago, Siemens embarked on its transformation journey. We are in the middle of the transformation from a classic industrial company of the 20th century to a digital company of the 21st century.

Some typical questions addressed by specific Siemens examples

• What scaling framework to apply; if any?
• Top-down or bottom-up transformation?
• What are the pillars of a transformation initiative?
• How to become efficient and adaptable at the same time?
• How to accelerate leadership development on all levels?

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Stable Teams have long been a known and accepted leading practice in agile. And Tuckman's stages of group development proves the need for stable teams, right? But what if that's not correct? Doc posits that Tuckman's is actually a disproven theory that none-the-less mysteriously persists. What if, by stabilizing teams, we solved a completely different problem? And what if by de-stabilizing teams we could better solve other problems?

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How can an Agile Coach figure out when an Agile “Transformation” is going wrong? Are there signs that they might see, heed, and take action upon? Of course, there are!

Hindsight is 20/20, but in the moment, these warning signs can be hard to see. Let’s explore some of the more common, and frightening, warning signs that your Agile “Transformation” might be exhibiting. We will discuss transformation provider types, frameworks, keywords, and other anti-patterns that might be signs that THE END IS NIGH.

This session will review common themes and help familiarize you with the warning signs. Armed with this new knowledge, you will be able to plan as appropriate, to help navigate your organization through potential impending doom.

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Adaptive handling and flow of financials are an important ingredient to business agility. Essentially what we want to achieve is, to have the money in a company flow to where it creates most value. In the modern dynamic business environment this is an increasing challenge as we on one side see the need to be very adaptive throughout the year to cope with the changes in the business and on the other side people in enterprises as well as suppliers and partners would like to have sufficient financial stability to plan their work. On top of that come regulatory requirements.

For ICAgile I led an international team of professionals in 2018 to create a learning curriculum outlining the most important things you need to know about finance in an agile enterprise. This curriculum is published under creative commons license. In this talk you will get an overview of finance agility based on the professional knowledge of this team.

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Do you want to hire the best? I suppose yes. Do you want them to grow, to improve their skills continuously and to develop your company? Hope so? But what happens if people grow quicker than the company itself? That might be an issue and you need serious changes in your company to keep employees interested to stay, to grow and to develop your company. We are using open salaries, money transparency and an advice process in ScrumTrek company to retain interest, to have a new source of enthusiasm and motivation of our employees. We started our journey 2.5 years ago and we are happy to share how it feels from inside.

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Agile Management, many books, and blog post are written about it, but how do you really do it? What are the tools that you can
use?

In this workshop, we are gonna experience some of those tools by actually using them.

We will start the meeting with what is Agile Management all about. However, we will quickly switch to the games and tools.

The games, practices, and tools we discuss are:

• Delegation Board, delegation is not easy. Delegation boards enables management to clarify delegation and to foster empowerment for both management and workers.
• Moving Motivators, Moving Motivators can be used to identify the impact of motivation and how motivation it is affected by an organizational change.
• Personal Maps, A great exercise for a better understanding of people is to capture what you know about them in personal maps.
• Team Competence Matrix, the Team Competence Matrix is a tool to identify gaps between the current competencies of the team and the required competencies

Attendees will experience the real tools, and when they leave the workshop are ready to apply the tools the next day at work!

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Organisations invest in agile processes, tools, training, and coaching, but how much are they getting back?

Has product delivery improved?

How much happier are users and the business customers?

Are employees empowered and enabled?

Traditional metrics might give you insight into improvements of operational efficiency, but the real conversation is about the value created for your organisation by the improved processes. Without measuring value, the success of any agile initiative is based on nothing more than intuition and assumption.

Evidence-Based Management (EBM) is a framework to help measure, manage, and increase the value derived from product delivery. EBM focuses on improving outcomes, reducing risks, and optimising investments and is an important tool to help leaders put the right measures in place to invest in the right places, make smarter decisions and reduce risk using an iterative and incremental approach. This empirical method alongside the agile principles and values of Scrum enables successful steps of change for the organisation.

Organisations invest in agile processes, tools, training, and coaching, but how much are they getting back? Has product delivery improved? How much happier are users and the business customers? Are employees empowered and enabled? Traditional metrics might give you insight into improvements of operational efficiency but the real conversation is about the value created for your organisation by the improved processes. Without measuring value, the success of any agile initiative is based on nothing more than intuition and assumption.

Mia will discuss Evidence based management and how this empirical process can help agile transformations measure and manage the value derived from the transformation initiative. Mia will focus on the 4 Key Value Areas: Current Value, Ability to Innovate, Unrealised Value and time to market and how these contribute to an organisation’s ability to deliver business value.

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Based on 12 years of experience in numerous transformations, some small, some mammoth, some successful and some not, this talk will outline how to craft a successful Agility transformation from scratch to finish.

The talk will address the following million-dollar questions:

• Why would you even want to transform and why is Business Agility one of the most popular options today?
• Once you’ve decided to transform, where do you start and how to plan and set up the transformation for success?
• What are the parts of a business or organization that need to be transformed? Think of the 3 ‘S’s – Structure, Systems, and Style.
• What is the target transformation state?
• How do you manage the transformation and tackle the issue of scale?
• What to do when the organizational antibodies come for you?
• What does success look like and how do you measure it?
• When should you stop and get the hell out?

A talk filled with real-world stories and ‘too funny to be true’ incidents that will show you the way, or what to avoid?

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At the core to any agile approach is the ability to manage for uncertainty. This is only possible through a process of continuous learning which requires active feedback loops. Linear approaches are doomed to fail in a world of uncertainty. Feedback incorporates new knowledge which enables learning. The key is maintaining healthy feedback loops which will enable success. An iterative approach with broken feedback loops is similarly doomed.

Not only is this the foundation of business agility, empiricism is the foundation of the scientific method, Shewart-Deming process improvement cycles, and the Lean Startup model. Healthy agile approaches incorporate multivariate closed loop process control.

In the original book on Scrum, Ken Schwaber talks about his discovery of empiricism by trying to sell waterfall solutions to Chemical Engineers at DuPont Chemical. Todd’s background is as a Chemical and Petroleum engineer, so his journey was different. Empiricism was natural for him, so when people started talking about agility it fit nicely with the model he was already using. It was even better when the conversation became about “Business Agility.”

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A resilient organizational can not only adapt and respond to incremental change but more importantly, can respond to sudden disruptions and also, be the source of disruption in order to prosper and flourish.

The traditional risk management approach focuses too much on defensive (stopping bad things happen) thinking versus a more progressive (making good things happen) thinking. Being defensive requires consistency across the organization and this is where methodologies like Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) come in. However, PDCA approach does not bake in the required progressive thinking and flexibility required for a fast company organization which operates in a volatile environment.

Professor David Denyer of Cranfield University has recently published a very interesting research report on Organizational Resilience. He has identified the following four quadrants across to help us think about organizational resilience:

• preventative control (defensive consistency)
• mindful action (defensive flexibility)
• performance optimization (progressive consistency)
• adaptive innovation (progressive flexibility)

In this talk, I'll share my personal experience of using this thinking to help an organization to scale their product to Millions of users. I've dive deep into how we structured our organization for Structural Agility and how we set-up a very lightweight governance model using OKRs to drive the necessary flexible and progressive thinking.

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In today's global market, organisations need to be able to adapt rapidly and effectively to change. During this session, Choon Heong LIM will share her insights on DBS' transformation journey to become a more agile and data-driven organisation. To deliver on its customer promise to 'Live more, Bank less', DBS has designed an enterprise start-up culture to drive seamless and invisible banking. Choon Heong will also elaborate on how DBS is re-imagining banking by driving ambitious innovation and productivity and building capabilities that make banking joyful for our employees and effortless for our customers.

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Agile in Medicine

Is it possible to create an Agile clinic? How can cross-functional physicians teams work using Scrum? How does Agile in medicine effect a patient's health?

This is a story of how Agile literally changed lives.

In early 2017, the owner of a major medical network came to me and said that he wanted all his clinics to go through an Agile transformation. At first, I could not believe my ears. I know how to bring Agile to sales, but I had never worked with doctors. However, he managed to convince me, and this turned out to be the most difficult, yet also the most interesting and rewarding, project in my life. Now I know for sure that Agile is the best thing to happen to medicine! Come and hear this fascinating story.

This is the story about how we created Scrum teams including everyone from the security guard to the head physician. About the immense resistance with which the Agile coaches had to face and which almost lead to the death of the project. And how, eventually, Agile helped the clinic to increase income and the patients started to line up to receive treatment in that clinic.

This is a story for everyone. Agile has long transcended the IT borders. Not everyone agrees with it, but this is our reality. Agile transforms people's minds, and without that transformation, businesses will just fail in our quickly changing world. If Agile turned the worst chain clinic into the best among 40 others in just 5 months, and patients drove across the whole city to be treated exactly there, then imagine how your business will improve if your Agile transcends the IT sphere? And, mainly, how much happier will you, your team and your clients or patients become?

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It’s not too easy have agility at individual level especially when that person has a lot ot unlearn, it’s then very hard to scale that out to a team, and extremely hard for larger groups such as a business department or entire organisation. And yet when you do unleash that, the upside is definitely unproportional to the effort and hardship, and surprisingly, it’s actually not THAT hard.

You might have heard self-organising / managerless teams, but it’s less likely you’ve actually experienced one. You may have experienced Agile in the most form of Scrum, but it’s not likely you’ve even heard of a Scrum team who doesn’t even need daily standups. In this talk you’ll see how a radical thought of organisational structure turned into reality, and what it is like to witness a team of teams transformed from brokenness to approaching the realm of organisational nirvana in just a year.

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We live in a world of "getting to yes" or "a positive no"
Yet the world is no black & white.
I live in a world of options. I like to say yes to all the options and only decide about an option at the last responsible moment. In this talk we will teach you to do the same.

Real options is one of these agile tidbits that is applicable to all aspects of life.
- a real option has a value
- a real option expires
- a real option has a cost

In this talk we will give you examples that will teach you how to apply real options to your life and projects.

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If I had a rupee for every time, I heard a CEO, product owner, scrum master or a manager complaining about their teams not caring enough about projects, other team members and users ...

If I had a rupee for every time, I heard a leader asking for advice on how to stop "blaming games" and "political bureaucracy" in his/her organisation...

We learn a lot about an organisation, its culture, and real values not during the times of enormous profits, successful product deliveries or CEO monthly motivational speeches but during the times of greatest struggles. We learn and find out who the real leaders are in moments when everything goes wrong, and everyone is making excuses and finger-pointing at other members or external factors. No one is to blame, and no one knows whose fault was the latest issue? The horror stories of firing employees on the spot, tearing down teams, bullying and threats are familiar to all of us.

I genuinely believe that it does not have to be this way. I believe that there is a more effective way of leading the organisation, teams, and individuals. We have the most extraordinary opportunity to improve, make an impact and improve when things go wrong.

We just have to change our approach to blame and ownership. Together we will learn how to reconsider your leadership skills and how to use them to accomplish team mission effectively. I want the audience to experience what extreme ownership means for them and what it means to be entirely responsible for all possible outputs. Participate in a challenge to create a team with a #noBlame approach to their mistakes. At the same time develop teams where psychological safety establishes an environment where uncomfortable conversations and creative conflict solutions can thrive.

I want to share impactful lessons learned from building teams and company that tries to behave differently in moments of failure. How we started to appreciate opportunities created by accidentally removing production database, what we learned by forgetting to communicate with each other or follow agreed processes, and what happened when we declined to do a very profitable project. How we are seeing signs of people owning their projects entirely, taking responsibility and changing others around them. How we train leaders on all level of organisation and how we share more and more responsibilities with them. Experience our approach to blame concept and #noBlame culture we champion and value.

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Everyone talks about the importance of an inclusive culture, but how do you actually create it? Using the voices of the diverse scaled Agile team I led for 2 years from their entries in my leaving card, I will share how the key themes of their feedback, energy, caring and fun, come together to create a culture where team members feel valued, trusted and able to do their best every day regardless of their cultural background or which team or company they work for.

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Today success comes from building products people love, creating loyal customers and serving the broader stakeholder community. In this thoughtful exploration on the future of work, the authors explore the past, present and future of the “project”. And why, in today’s fast changing & hyper-competitive world, running a temporary endeavour is the wrong approach to building sustainable products and how #noprojects is fundamentally changing the way companies work.

The metrics by which we have historically defined success are no longer applicable and we need to re-examine the way value is delivered in the new economy. This book starts from the premise that our goal is to create value, for the customer, for the organisation and for society as a whole and shows how to empower and optimise our teams to achieve this.

The authors draw on modern management approaches to provide proven techniques and tools for producing, and sustaining, creative products that go beyond “meeting requirements”. By creating teams who are accountable for business outcomes, engineering for customer delight, and creating value for all stakeholders - profitability, customer satisfaction and employee engagement are all increased.

This book is far more than just a catalogue of practices and tools which you can apply in your product development. It contains inspirational stories from individuals, teams and organisations who have switched to this new way of thinking and working. It exposes the risks on the pathway and how others have overcome these obstacles

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The technological, economic and social changes of the last decades have led to such a level of global interconnection that the real potential is no longer in individuals or single organizations, but in the rich and complex network of relationships between them. This scenario opens up new fundamental questions for the survival and growth of our organizations.

Who are "the right people"?
What can we do to enable their full potential?
What can we no longer ignore in our way of managing a team or a company?
What new concrete possibilities and advantages are there ready to be caught?

The answers to these questions will be guided by understanding what it means today for a company to be part of an ecosystem and how this affects in a non-linear way any flow of value within and outside the organization.

In particular, we will introduce a new concept I'm developing in the last years: ecoism.

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A government department is one of the least changeable organisations and yet I have been working with Statistics New Zealand for the past couple of years to do exactly that. How do you even begin to change years of a government culture into an agile workplace where team members themselves are part of initiating that change.

Peter Drucker once stated "Culture eats strategy for breakfast" so how do you put any strategy in place to change a culture?

Come along for a bit of humour and experience to see what was done, and is still being done to change the underlying culture. Hear about how a major earthquake was one of the catalysts for change.

In my experiences, I have taken international oranisations 100 times larger than this department and been able to "start working this way on Thursday", but this was very different and I had to change my entire approach.

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As organizations commence their journey towards better business agility one of the key factors that determines the success of such an initiative is whether there is strong and meaningful ongoing coaching of teams and leadership.

To accomplish that, it is critical that organizations realize early-on that continuous improvement and success can be enabled, encouraged, and assisted by a robust agile coaching team, one that can help them transcend the mundane and help achieve extraordinary results.

At IHS Markit we have created a highly effective, empowered, and deeply impactful agile coaching team that works across silos to enable the organization to take firm and confident steps towards better business agility.

We have seen undeniably great results that are clear and measurable with this approach, and wish to share the story of this extraordinary team and their phenomenal contributions towards successfully initiating and advancing business agility across the organization.

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One of the weakest links in any strategic initiative is the weak or even an orphaned link between strategy and execution. The challenges include the inability to inaccurately and inadequately breakdown high-level goals into tangible goals that could be tracked to ensure progress and improve alignment. OKR system provides a highly effective and scalable way to ensure organization-wide dissemination of goals in a systemic manner and tracking in a consistent manner. In this short session, we shall explore how an organization could go about practicing the same.

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Grofers doubled its revenue every 6 months for the last 2 years. In January of 2019, we did it in one month. During this time, we've gone through 2 funding crunches, brutal government regulation changes and the entrance of two behemoths (AMZ and WALL) as direct competitors.

This talk will explore how to optimize the organization towards big bets, and how we have created a culture of risk taking, managed chaos and rapid alignment to push through changes like:

• The 2nd largest membership program in India in 2 months
• A sale we set up in 2 weeks that doubled our revenue
• A logistic innovation which halved our cost AND errors within 3 months
• Launched 600 private label products in 6 months

If you struggle to get your teams to see the bigger picture, or work together on "the most important" thing, maybe this will be helpful for you.

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Got a burning question you want an answer to and didn’t quite get it addressed during the day?

This fishbowl-style conversation brings a select group of the day’s speakers and other invited Industry leaders to the stage to answer your questions about the what, why and how of business agility. This is your opportunity to explore vexing questions about business agility with our panelists.

Here’s how it works:

• You submit your questions to our volunteers during the conference.
• We'll curate and short-list a few questions
• Each question will be asked to the panelists and then discussed for 5 minutes.
• After that, the audience votes on whether to continue the conversation for a few more minutes or move on.

This is a session where you are in control. Also, this will be run as a fishbowl, which means anyone from the audience can join the panel if they want to contribute.

Come ready to ask hard questions and get practical, actionable answers to your toughest questions.

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In the global marketplace that transfers knowledge at the speed of light, we have a massive time delay and that is modern transportation methods. The hyperloop is the first new mode of transport to be created in over 100 years. The motivation is to connect people, reduce congestion, and protect our planet by eliminating CO2 emissions from terrestrial transport. The hyperloop can best be described as space travel on the ground - a magnetically levitating, electromagnetically propelled, passenger vehicle in a vacuum tube. With the elimination of aerodynamic drag and surface friction, power consumption plummets, speeds can reach 700 mph, and waste and cost are minimized. With the use of autonomy the service is on demand and delays become a thing of the past. Dr. Sengupta will discuss how space-age tech coupled to the VC funded innovation environment are enabling the revolution in green transportation from suborbital rocket flights, to electric airplanes, to space travel on the ground with the hyperloop.

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Why do certain products create passionate users while others struggle to gain traction? Is it Design? Usability? Simplicity? No. It’s branding. In today’s crowded marketplace, making a product that works--or even works well--is no longer good enough. In this talk, we’ll discuss the basics of branding and how branding works in conjunction with your User Experience to establish an emotional connection with your users so you can turn them into loyal customers and brand ambassadors.

This talk is for anyone involved or interested in UX, at any experience level, including creative directors, designers, writers, executives, and product managers. This talk will cover the role of emotion within the decision-making process and how influencing a user’s emotions during a product experience translates to brand loyalty. I’ll explain the fundamentals and purpose behind branding, why it has changed, and why we need to focus on it more when designing experiences.

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The most radical period of change in industrial history is nearly upon us. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, where billions of people have access to vast knowledge and unlimited processing power, brings with it great complexity. Traditional engineering frameworks will no longer be enough to navigate the messiness that lies ahead. Technology will lie at the heart of every industry, and organizations will have to undergo a paradigm shift to harness it and develop innovative business models. This calls for the role of orchestrators who can navigate organizations through all the messiness.

This session will be delivered by Saptorsi Hore -COO of ThoughtWorks and Sneha Prabhu - Product Manager, ThoughtWorks Products.

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Useless \ˈyüs-ləs\

use·less: not fulfilling or not expected to achieve the intended purpose or desired outcome.

[Synonyms: futile, to no avail, (in) vain, pointless, to no purpose, hopeless, ineffectual, ineffective, to no effect, fruitless, unprofitable, profitless, unproductive]

If you want to stop building useless software, then you have to start understanding your customers. Unfortunately, there’s no magic trick for reading their minds. But there is a simple technique that can help you gain insights and build empathy for them.

Empathy mapping is a simple activity for your team, stakeholders and anyone else who is responsible for delivering products and services. It allows you to collectively explore what your customers see, hear, say & do, as well as consider what they think and feel. This leads to insights about their pain and potential wants which are the keys to building more useful software.

In this session, Diane guides you through building an empathy map, showing you how to use silent brainstorming to encourage everyone to contribute. You will see, first-hand, how easy it is to work collaboratively to create a shared understanding of the customer. And that is the first step to start building software that customers find useful.

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Join me for a very short Design Sprint, where we go through the motions meant for 5 days in just 90 minutes, with a commentary from me about my personal experience in facilitating these.

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When we moved to a dual-track delivery approach for our Bank of New Zealand Digital product teams, it felt more like Dueling tracks. People knew why we were doing it but were confused about how to link discovery and delivery. Who should do what, when and how? It became a clash of collective egos, stepping on each other’s areas of expertise. This is about how we brought clarity, alignment and direction to those teams by creating a Product Management playbook and how it had a profound effect on how we work and communicate with one other.

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Shipping your digital product is good, shipping desired features and functionalities is better, and shipping those artefacts in a form that is both highly usable and perfectly fit for purpose is even better.

User research has a long standing reputation of requiring highly technical skills and large amounts of time. Although some topics do require a dedicated research effort to bring meaningful insights, a lot of product insights can be gathered through smaller, repeated research endeavours, and benefit the team by bringing needed clarity in a timely manner.

Designers are not often taught well how to strategise their effort to deliver value incrementally. Borne of my experience or validated by practice, the techniques and recommendations I will share can be brought in and shared with all, and benefit the entire team including the stakeholders.

In this session, I'll share my experience of over 10 years as a designer and researcher on agile teams, as well as my experience as an agile coach supporting teams featuring developers and designers.

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In this talk, Suze explores a case study from her recent work in a London agency, where, working for a large retail client, the programme of work moved from a project-based delivery model incorporating Scrum to a more product-based model. Drawing on aspects of Kanban, Design Thinking and Lean Startup, and implementing a dual-track agile approach, the team is now ‘thinking more product’.

Suze will delve into how the organisation has shifted to this model and how it coped with the change. She will talk through some of the difficulties that she experienced along the way and how these issues were mitigated, and provide take away techniques to help in your organisations.

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Many of the positive changes we will make with our teams will start with one person's insight. Don't leave that inspiration to chance. Set yourself up to make that insight more likely and learn what to do when you have it that will help you help your team grow.

It all begins with ourselves. More than we would like to believe, people tend to seek stability. How do we create the right environment within ourselves to be open to change, to realize there is room for improvement? How do we do this in a way that our primitive brain doesn't find threatening? In order to become the catalyst, we first need to create an environment in which we can do the same thing to ourselves. That is much harder than it sounds. Being able to do so requires the right mindset, but how do you develop it? How do you recognize that it is needed? How do you open yourself up to change, embrace it, and incorporate experimentation into your own practice?

Having insight is not enough. While an insight might start with one person, change is a team activity. Once you recognize an opportunity, how do you share your insight with your team in a way that will be embraced instead of rejected? Do you understand the biases and fears that might cause resistance to your idea? Just as importantly, how do you time your proposals so that they have the highest likelihood of success?

In this talk, I will talk about 6 things that are necessary for you to do to create the conditions where change is possible. I'll share anecdotes from my own experience promoting change within startups, agencies, and big companies. Drawn from diverse sources, such as BJ Fogg, Carol Dweck, Jocko Willink, and Ray Dalio, these 6 characteristics will help you effect change effectively.

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Innovation programs within companies have fallen into the trap of chronic misuse of the word, to the point most programs are shoehorned into traditional project management frameworks that focus more on the word than addressing the needs of the innovator.

In this talk, Ray Arell will talk about how to create the right environments and methods that allow true innovation to thrive. This will include an overview of Innovation Hubs, methods like Solutions Thinking, establishing networks of innovators via communities of practice, and other key methods/tools that can help to accelerate your time to value.

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Design Thinking has been developed as an approach to resolve issues outside of professional design practices -business and social contexts are great examples. Since the framework integrates classic creative problem-solving with art and design methodologies, it matured as a flawless and flavorful strategy for innovation.

Nowadays, even large bureaucracies like the Veterans Administration and IBM use Design Thinking to explore the experiences of key stakeholders and search for insights that allow them to improve product, services and processes.

Not every design thinking project is a success, of course, but as a risk management approach, few innovation methodologies compete with this strategy. As companies continue to adopt agile, Design Thinking gains traction as the right tool to create an intimate connection with final users, uncover the true needs and problems, and propose less risky solutions.

In this interactive talk you will be walked through the 12 steps we followed -for 12 weeks- to understand homelessness, uncover the real issues and propose new concepts. You will be surprised, not only by the insights we found but also by the power of the framework. After listening to this real-life example, you will leave the room looking for opportunities to apply the framework on a daily basis.

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Prosperity is personal. For one person it’s inspirational and aspirational, for many others, the very thought of money inspires fear and dread. For design to be truly human we need to accept and address the varied and polarizing emotions around money. Join the conversation and see how, whether you’re designing for tech giants or the oldest banking institutions, retaining the human touch is key to empowering prosperity for everyone.

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Despite widespread belief that AI will transform the way we do business, 82% of businesses are still in the investigation or non-adoptive stage of AI. This talk will explore the fundamental use cases in AI and how designers and engineers can be at the forefront of prioritizing AI/ML best practices. From user research to MVP iterations, we will explore the core differences between building an AI and non-AI product so that you can feel confident proposing or launching an AI project of your own.

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For a decade of software product agile, we had worked in a structure where business responsibility of what to build was allocated to a product owner and the responsibility of how to build it was allocated to a development team. Product owner would maintain a backlog, act as voice of the customers. Until one day we realized that the choice of what to build or fix is hard, and critical to everyone’s success. If we wanted to do it poorly, we delegated it to a single product owner.

We started a no product owner experiment. For three months, we experienced the development team delivering multitudes of value to what we had grown to expect, and innovate customer-oriented solutions in direct collaboration with customers. Team satisfaction and happiness bloomed. The experiment turned into a continuous way of working.

Customer-focused team directly in touch with their customers performs better without a proxy. Join me to learn how the decision power shared for everyone in the team transformed the ability to deliver, and how collaboration is organized with product experts and business representatives.

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Say the word “Innovation” and it invokes different reactions – Some find it exciting whereas other find it management gimmick and buzz word. In this era of digital transformation, innovation has become even more important with companies expecting to bring in innovation culture to their teams. With agile bringing in culture of rapid deliveries, continuous feedback, teams often face the dichotomy of being innovative and delivering what is asked by the product management at the same time. In such situation only focusing on delivering what is needed often wins with innovation taking a back seat. In large enterprises, often innovation is left to a small focused group which further delineates the larger agile delivery teams which may have differentiated solutions that could translate to next big idea for the company. This talk explores some practical tips and techniques on what can be done to address such challenges and help organization to stay ahead.

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This talk provides an overview of the history of design in technology, highlighting what we have learned over the years in developing for a screen. Designing for the ear is different from developing for the screen though. This talk establishes best practices for voice-first design contrasting them with GUI design principles. You will learn of the similarities and differences when developing for voice, compared to screen-oriented mediums. Learn how to create engaging experiences where customers can speak in their own words, receive individualised responses, and easily find what they need via voice.

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They say that design is a team sport, and if your team operates in an agile/lean environment, strength and flexibility are more crucial than ever.

An effective design team requires a multitude of perse skills, and it's impossible for any one individual to possess them all.

So, how do you go about putting together a team that’s balanced, powerful and can work effectively with other teams? What is the right mixture of junior and senior practitioners?

What skills, soft and hard, do you need to design and deliver outstanding products and services that support meaningful outcomes?

In this workshop, we’ll take a look at (work through) how to assess the skills of our colleagues (as well as our own) to best shape and, inspire and lead a design team that works together (and stays together). A team where more experienced practitioners thrive and more junior ones are supported, mentored and enabled to grow, and where complementarity and teamwork are the foundations of success.

Finally, we will look at how to use the knowledge and techniques we’ve collected over the years to hire, motivate and keep design teams happy.

Bonus round: if you’re looking for work, what does a good team look like from the outside?

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Throughout every step of any project, we are asked to give or receive feedback. Is this on brand? Does this capture the experience or problem we’re trying to solve? How complicated is this? How do we feel about the way a design looks? Whether we’re discussing this with our internal team, other departments at our company, our clients, our bosses or our peers, the art of giving actionable, useful, contextual and valid feedback is one often lost on all sides.

The challenge with feedback doesn’t end with giving it. Receiving it can be challenging. As people in a creative field, we are setting ourselves up for criticism of our work (and feedback can certainly feel overly critical) every single day. Whether it’s a casual white boarding or brainstorming session to presenting “final” comps to the most important stakeholder, we need to be ready to address whatever reaction people come back with.

The bookends of the feedback experience present separate but very real challenges. They are often challenges that we are never taught to handle - or at least maybe not handle as well as we should.

Over the course of this workshop, we will explore why this is so difficult, the common mistakes on both sides, ways to elicit great feedback and some best practices in turning even the worst feedback into a productive conversation. If anything needs to fit more into a conversation around user experience, around agile, and, indeed, around product, in general, it’s how to keep things moving forward with a truly successful feedback loop.

This workshop will include interactive activities and require participants to give on-the-fly feedback based on the best practices discussed over each part of the presentation.

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