I've been learning about Agile via osmosis for quite a long time by being married to a developer/UX designer. So when I was working on an article about creating a new marketing plan I started thinking about how ridiculously outdated these huge documents were. Two week iterations simply seemed right and sensible to me, and I couldn't imagine that no one else had thought of this idea. I Googled, "agile marketing," and I've been hooked ever since. Using agile principles on my marketing team allowed me to focus on my work as a writer and content strategist while confidently contributing to organizational goals. Basically, it kept me sane during some crazy professional periods. I'm now doing my best to share Agile's potential with other marketers through any means possible.

People are the heart & soul of Agile. Let’s turn your Human Resources into Agile People Operations to boost your enterprise agility.

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“#1 trend 2016: HR embraces agile" | HR Trend Institute

"HR drives the agile organization" | HRO Today

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Inspired, empowered, and engaged people are the heart and soul of Agile – and HR.

Transforming your organization into an agile enterprise is no small deed. And it does not matter where you are on your way towards embracing agility on all levels. There will be a time when you need to align your people solutions with the mindset and demands of agile people and organizations.

We will talk about how to turn your Human Resources into Agile People Operations and boost your agility. We will share stories and examples of Agile HR practices and their implications and impact.

The role of HR in creating an agile organisation is not just to implement controls and standards but rather, to drive programs that create adaptability, innovation, collaboration and speed. To help clients transform themselves, HR as a function also needs to transform; adopting an Agile mindset and understanding of Agile principles and practices is critical to HR's ability to support clients to develop rapid and flexible response to change.

• Unlike traditional wisdom, the innovation is not the birthright of true tech startups. It’s very much alive in the large corporation.
• No doubt, there are challenges to innovate and incubate in a large Large existing customer base and applications to maintain come across as common challenges. However, when a corporation creates an innovation mindset and makes the appropriate adjustment, they unleash the organic innovation train.
• In this presentation, I will share my experience of building strategy and leading the incubation within a large corporation.

How do you create excited, engaged, happy, and effective teams? Start them off right by letting your engineers choose their own teams and projects! Through a proven technique called self-selection, Opower was able to turn a tribe of 40 engineers, many of whom were unexcited about continuing to work on the same old products, into six high-performing teams with engineers who were excited to embark on a new adventure, acquire new skills, and ship awesome code.

Its not enough to have teams do stand-ups, retrospectives, Agile planning, story carding and the host of other Agile practices that are meant to change culture and deliver results. A key success factor is how the organisation is structured. This case story will go through the why, what and how of a restructuring experience to turn around a 10,000 strong operational team of Sales Support people to an Agile way of working and deliver outstanding results of 30% cost reduction and 80% cycle time improvement. This presentation will walk through the why, what and how of the entire approach, sharing the good and gory experiences, the successes and the pitfalls.

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What do Lean and Agile principles tell us about the way we need to design, build and operate modern businesses? Can we design organisations that are adaptive, innovative and engaging for employees, managers and leaders alike? The presentation will demonstrate the importance of organisational design and route-map sequencing to create conducive work-climates for Lean and Agile thinkers.

Lean and Agile workplaces depend heavily on the management choices for work design, measurement, rewards, organisational structures, working practices, methods and approaches to management and staff relationships.
These choices combine in complex ways to create a perception of ‘how it feels to work here’, which we call the ‘work-climate’. Research has demonstrated that work-climate is a proven predictor of long-term business performance.

During any change program, behaviours take time to adjust to new practices. Therefore, measuring and plotting the change in the work-climate provides assurance your changes are having the desired effect. Measuring and monitoring the work-climate will also detect any undesired effects and enable corrective actions to be taken.

By examining the ‘work-climate’, we can then ask the following questions:
What are the best choices for managers to make?
What needs to be eradicated?
What needs to be redesigned?

Our survey method, in addition to assessing behaviours, provides insight into the influence on the work-climate as a result of management choices in the following areas:

• How organisational design impacts collaboration
• Managing practices, such as continuous-improvement and governance
• End-to-end service performance
• Service quality
• Innovation and change ability
• Customer centricity
• Leadership style

The survey provides direction and demonstrable evidence the work-climate is moving in the right direction to support Lean and Agile working.

Although business agility covers many variations in managerial practices, the site visits of the SD Learning Consortium revealed a striking convergence around three themes or “laws”:

The law of the customer: An obsession with delighting customers by continuously adding value for customers and users, as well as a recognition of the current need to generate instant, intimate, frictionless value at scale. As a result of globalization, deregulation, knowledge work and new technology, power in the marketplace has shifted from seller to buyer: the customer has now become the boss. This is more than an increased attention to customers: it is a fundamental shift in the goal of the organization—a veritable Copernican revolution in management.

The law of the small team: A presumption that in a volatile, complex, uncertain and ambiguous world, work needs to be descaled. Big difficult problems need to be disaggregated into small batches and performed by small cross-functional autonomous teams, working iteratively in short cycles in a state of flow, with fast feedback from customers and end-users.

The law of the network: A recognition that, to achieve full business agility, the whole organization needs to embrace the entrepreneurial mindset: the entire firm functions as an interactive network, not merely a top-down bureaucracy with a few teams implementing Agile tools and processes. In effect, Agile is not just for IT: it is a change in the way that the whole organization thinks, is led and managed. Continuous effort is needed to nurture and reinforce an Agile organizational culture, including everything from leadership, strategy and values to on-boarding, training, communications and personnel management.

Achieving continuous innovation is dependent on an entrepreneurial mindset pervading the organization. Where the management tools and processes of Agile, Lean or Kanban are implemented without the requisite mindset, few, if any, benefits were observed.

Pursuit of all three laws is key to sustaining business agility. Individually, none of the observed management practices are new. What is new and different is the way that the management goals, practices and values constitute a coherent and integrated approach to continuous innovation, driven by and lubricated with a pervasive entrepreneurial mindset.

This talk is inspired by the book ‘The Confidence Code’ by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman.

What is confidence and how do you know you have it?   While confidence is partly influenced by genetics, it is not a fixed psychological state.  However, you won’t discover it thinking positive thoughts or by simply squaring your shoulders and faking it.  It requires work and choices: less focus on people pleasing and perfectionism and more action, risk taking and fast failures.  This is why it can seem harder for women because these behaviors aren’t typically the ‘norm’ for women but generally come naturally for men.

In this talk we will explore the roots of confidence and the gender gap between men and women.  To ground the learnings, we will also hear interview summaries from four great and diverse women in agile:

Lyssa Adkins, Esther Derby, Ellen Grove, and Kat Conner

TBC

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How can your organization become truly agile? To do so requires an agile mindset, a flexible learning organization, and a flexible process that is easily tailored to meet your evolving situation. There is much advice about how to gain an agile mindset and how to grow a learning organization, but with the exception of the Disciplined Agile (DA) framework very little process advice is available that isn’t prescriptive or overly simplified. To complicate matters, if your organization is to be truly agile then your Information Technology (IT) must be fully agile beyond just software development. Houston, we have a problem.

The DA framework started out as Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). In 2014 it evolved to address the full range of IT concerns and now it is evolving again to address enterprise agility. The DA framework is based on empiricism, capturing pragmatic strategies from actual practice, from purposeful experiments, and from proven methodologies. Because every organization faces a unique situation these strategies are presented in a context-sensitive manner that is easily tailored, and then easily evolved, to meet your changing needs. Organizations are complex adaptive systems where teams must collaborate with, and learn from one another, to fulfill the goals of the overall organization. To do so requires flexible team structures and team processes, and the DA framework describes exactly that.

In this presentation, Scott Ambler, co-creator of the Disciplined Agile (DA) framework, will briefly walk us through the history and philosophies of the DA framework. More importantly, he will describe strategies at the enterprise level currently being applied in organizations around the world, strategies that are in “beta” for the enterprise agility evolution of the DA framework.

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During the 20-minute presentation, Nick will share his experience as a former Navy Special Operations Officer (e.g., SEALs, EOD and Diving) serving as a coach for other Navy SPEC OPS leaders and how they demonstrated leadership agility. He will also focus on how leaders like Sally Jewel, former CEO of REI and now Secretary of the Interior, embraced leadership agility to help transform REI to a more agile organization. Nick will also share his experience working with Mark Nelson, President at Aramark, to sponsor a decade-long focus on leadership agility, to help create a more agile enterprise, resulting in Aramark’s placement on the Fortune 50 list.

Dr. Horney will reinforce the stories with leadership agility data gathered from several thousand leaders over a period of about 10 years. The primary purpose of the data is to demonstrate where the typical strengths and weaknesses are in developing leadership agility.

The talk will explore the benefits of unleashing the power of organizational self-management. Examples of vanguard organizations willing to embrace the future of work are springing up everywhere, with breathtaking business results and humane, people-centered workplaces.

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

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