Stelian ROMAN

While it is true to say that people’s attitudes and beliefs are key to implementing an agile project, or Agile in itself, much of the use of the term ‘mindset’ implies a mental model that can be defined and engineered. In this presentation, we will look at how we can measure attitudes within an organization and use multiple small actions to trigger the rapid evolution of organizational culture, so that it can sustain agile developments. Mindset and the alignment-based ideas of some on the Agile movement too often imply creating homogeneous beliefs and values that will lead to full alignment. In practice, this damages resilience and can be dangerous. This presentation will introduce the idea of coherence instead of alignment - the celebration of cognitive and behavioral differences that can align if needed to support the delivery of sustainable solutions.

Too often innovative people in medium to large organizations have the feeling of being in a box - with startling new ideas - and no one really listens. In essence, these innovators are trying to “measure performance upwards.” This upward voice intrinsically measures strategies and customer impact, and applying the concept can significantly improve the overall performance without relying on top down OKRs and KPIs. Moreover, “measuring from above,” tends to measure the output of production rather than the truly important outcome: what is really making a difference for our customers and therefore for our company.

Adding “measurement from below” to a company can create a mindset that empowers everyone to follow their passion and interest and nourish the company’s effectiveness. Implementing a “from below” approach to measurement involves a fundamental shift that asks the company to synthesize a variety of new approaches. One such synthesis is Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agile (BOSSA nova). This synthesis enables a company to “measure upwards” without jeopardizing the strengths of “leading downwards.” Fortunately, the implementation can be done in small steps that probe and demonstrate new measurement ideas on a small scale such that the proof cascades beyond the demonstration. This session will enable you to get started on your journey to spreading the idea of upwards measurement company-wide.

This workshop asks participants to start where they are, explains what it means to probe, and helps them develop strategies and experiments they can use in their own situation to create an environment for high performance that goes beyond what OKRs and KPIs can offer.

Do you have a nagging feeling that you may not be investing in building the right thing?

Do your products have features that are rarely or never used? Does it takes your organization the full investment of building and launching a product to validate an idea? Is your organization challenged with striking the right balance between the demands of a scalable, high-quality product and innovating on the most compelling problems and opportunities for your customers?

At Pearson Online & Blended Learning, we met these challenges head-on by creating and implementing a framework that includes early collaboration within a multi-disciplinary team and a light-weight process. Based on Design Thinking principles and practices, the framework effectively balances discovery and delivery efforts. It ensures that, across the portfolio, our investments are focused on the right things, and the efforts of our delivery teams are aligned to solving the most important problems for our customers and addressing the most valuable opportunities for our business.

In this interactive session, learn about this discovery framework, our implementation approach, and our triumphs and challenges. Each participant will have the opportunity to reflect on how a similar approach may help them address challenges within their own organizations.

The rules of the game have changed! Studies indicate that by the year 2030, half of jobs will be ones that do no exist today and half the jobs of today will no longer exist. The volatility, uncertainty, and ambiguity ushered in by this age of accelerations extends not just to our environment, politics, and communities, but our organizations as well. In response, organizations are undergoing a massive transformation in technology, structure, culture, and values - fundamentally changing not only what we work on, but how we work, and who we work with.

Where does this leave our careers? If answering the question ‘Where do you see yourself five years from now?’ leaves you stuck, uncertain, confused and/or anxious, you are not alone.

Join me for “Careers in the Age of Accelerations”. During this workshop, we will look back at your career and look ahead at organizational and cultural trends, and understand the skills and capabilities for new and emerging roles. Build the awareness and confidence to take control and navigate a career aligned to the future of work and guided by your Ikigai (reason for being).

Toxic behaviours in a Team cause damage to the Team. Affecting their performance, causing high levels of stress and demotivation. Conflict Navigation is one of the biggest challenges within the Teams. Can you help them to overcome this challenge? Are there any antidotes?

When a Team member shows a toxic behaviour, how the Team reacts to it? Can we educate the team and help them as a System to overcome these challenges? As a Scrum Master or a Coach, our main mission is to help out teams to be their better selves. By the end of this workshop, you should be able to help your team to be better prepared to deal with conflict.

Millennials, also known as Generation Y or Gen Y, are the generational demographic cohort following Generation X and preceding Generation Z who were born in early 1980s. Millennials are currently 25% of APAC workforcea and not only that, Millennials now have the most spending power of any generation, which means that creating a work environment that they can thrive in matters more than ever.

Let's see some of the interesting charcateristics of millennial,

• Collaborative:
  • They send a median of 50 texts a day.
• Socially connected:
  • They have the highest average number of Facebook friends, with an average of 250 friends vs. Generations X's 200.
• Multi-taskers:
  • In the age of information overload, millennials are able to consume and assimilate more information than ever.
• Tech Savvy:
  • With an internet enabled smartphone, they spend roughly around 4 hours per day consuming the online content through app or browsers.

and much more. As more and more millennials enter the workforce and redefine the workplace productivity, how can organization and agile coaches prepare themselves to nurture and coach the millennials to realize organization/project goals and deliver value to business?

I will also talk about the challenges while dealing the millennials (as compared to Gen X workers who were managed from top-down), coaching models, skills that can help agile coaches to maximize the potential of the millennials, exploiting the characteristics of the millennials to improve productivity and do's and don't while coaching millennials.

I've presented this in one of the PlayScrum Meetups Chennai as well and have received awesome repsonse from the participants.

Agile coaching is big business - there are probably more agile coaches in the world than business coaches, but we're only just starting to scratch the surface of what agile coaches really do.

Geof has been researching the moment-by-moment lived experience of agile coaches for the last 12 months to explore what makes us tick, and what gets in our way.

Come to this highly interactive workshop to find out what Geof learned from his research and what it means for the training, support and supervision of agile coaches - and then to use a new developmental model of agile coaching to share your own experience and practice the skills you need to move from working with your teams as if they were machines to coaching with curiosity.

Join me for this interactive session, where we take a closer look at Flow, understand its benefits and learn how to tap into this optimal state of being to unlock the secret to your team's creativity, peak performance and happiness.

Agile in Enterprise Resource Planning software development is more challenging when compared to full stack development. It is really challenging when the team has 80% detractors and 20% aggressive folks (transactional analysis nomenclature). As an agile transformation coach how would we bring in either the agile mindset or the trust over the process for teams who have worked on waterfall for ages? How would we break the cocoon or push them to come out of the easy zone by not preaching theories? we are inspired from Project Aristotle conducted at Google which speaks about the parameters of winning team which made us to introduce trust metric, the average time the team takes to trust the agile principles in practice. This trust metric directly correlates with the time it takes for the agile transformation in a project. From Modern Agile perspective, Trust metric /transformation time is influenced by major 5 parameters 1. Psychological safety 2. Dependability 3. Structure and Role 4. Meaning 5. Impact.

All these five dimensions are influenced by multiple input parameters ranging from scrum Master's fluency in international languages, regional language, teams transparency with the scrum master, project complexity, team distribution, team unification through tools,openness to fail and innovate, cultural quotient, emotional intelligence of scrum master, team diversity and so on.

The trust metric is computed by rating on all the five dimensions. Those five dimensions are measured by derived parameters which the agile coach perceives in the team. The agile coach would work on the sub layer level to convert the detractors to pacifiers and further to be Agile ambassadors by working closely on the lagging parameters by bringing in kaizens around those parameters.

For example: the waterfall projects that I worked on got transformed to agile methodology were in detractor state at the beginning. Later on they were moved to pacifier state, then on to neutral and now they are Promoters/ambassadors of the agile methodology which got propagated to the complete service line. Thus the transformation coach can make various projects running in the service industry to get their projects transformed to agile methodology which brings in great impact for clients

Retrospectives are critical for a team's success. I participate in and facilitate a lot of retrospectives. I've seen many of them. Fun and boring, productive and useless. Overtime I've started to notice certain patterns, especially for non-productive retros. In this talk, I will share my findings and provide some hints on how to avoid them.

Everyone wasn't to adopt Agile. Everyone wants to find the silver bullet that will make them Agile. Everyone wants the 'quick fix' for old problems. Through our collective experience, we've identified a core set of behaviours, experiences and actions that represent the desired state of Agility in an enterprise.

This core training module is designed to start your understanding of how the Agility Behaviour Model works and how to apply its tools for maximum benefits to your clients and enterprises. The workshop covers 4 specific areas:

1) Designing a new Enterprise Culture,

2)Designing the new Shared Experiences,

3)Creating a Roadmap for Enterprise Agility,

4)Creating a Coaching Plan

• Attendees will receive a digital certificate for completion of the core module.
• Each delegate will also receive a 1-year membership token to the Agility Behaviour Model community portal (valued at $100 each).
• Delegates can pursue full accreditation by completing the recommended self-study and post-training exercises.

Join us for the half-day immersive workshop that has been designed to give you new tools and approaches.

Agile is a buzzword these days. Everyone wants to become Agile. And vou la your company is already in the middle of an Agile transformation. Why? Well. All articles/talks/rumors say how awesome it will be there.

But I would like to share another story. One that is hard to hear. The dark and the sad one. What downsides you will experience on that journey. How it will negatively affect your business. What losses to expect. And how not to make this situation even worse.

I do not want to blame Agile here, but I want honestly to take a look at the dark side of the Moon. Forewarned is forearmed.

Every person working in an agency that delivers digital services or applications to their clients has faced the typical customer that wants a fixed price project delivered yesterday.

With these kinds of requests, you are facing a situation where two corners of the famous iron triangle are already set in stone but you still have to deliver on your high-quality standards. You are left behind with the question of how will I deliver this project in an agile way?

This is one of the problems we were facing with our agency when we decided to move from a waterfall to an agile project approach.

Recent experience with a delivery model that seems to be waterfall to the customer but is still agile following a scrum approach shows the benefits of a hybrid model for both clients and agency.

I will walk through the process of adopting an agile approach for a digital agency with multiple teams and timezones involved that transitions from a waterfall environment into the agile world.

The learnings from the agency can be transferred to other organizations where the management primarily is used to fixed budget waterfall projects and tip their toes into the agile world.

The session will bring insights and help to teams that deal with fixed and scopes, moving scopes and teams and organizations that go on the journey from waterfall to agile in a distributed SMB organization.

Agile is maturing, the success of software development teams is pushing for scaling up to the enterprise level. One significant challenge is that not everybody in the organisation thinks like a developer. As important as adapting to a different way of thinking is to convince the people with money that Agile is way more than a trendy word. It can and it should make the enterprise more profitable.

Using a combination of presentations, case studies and interactive workshops the participants will get a better understanding on what Agile is, benefits and challenges of Agile transformations.