Did you recently try to buy a paper atlas in a bookstore? A few years ago you would prefer a GPS to a paper map. Today, smartphones replaced GPSs with their navigation functionality providing more convenience at a fraction of the cost. Does it mean that the business is disrupting itself over and over again? What does it mean for large well-established enterprises? What is the right way for established businesses to use technological advancements to their advantage, and how to integrate innovation in business success?

Lean Startup is a popular concept because it provides a way for large established enterprises to survive disruption in a modern fast pacing world. Lean Enterprise is a popular topic that needs to be demystified and translated into action. In the talk, we will uncover how agile, lean, lean startup, and design thinking create a new framework for large enterprises to avoid disruption and delight their customers.

The talk aims at demystifying the way of market disruption to large businesses to allow for their survival in a modern economy. This practical advice comes from years of experience, containing both success and major failures.

In the majority of organizations on their Agile journey, a gap grows between the self-organized teams and their Leadership. Leaders feel ineffective, lost and frustrated. They see the climate around them is changing, but they can’t follow the dynamics of the system. They have in their hands all the traditional tools which until recently had been working well, motivating people, directing them and giving teams guidance. Now those same tools are failing and getting only a fraction of their previous results. Join Zuzi as she takes you with her on a journey to become an effective Agile Leader. Form the right mix of Agile Leadership competencies, and gain confidence in your ability to drive Agile Organizations.

Running a small business is no small task. Financial management, sales, hiring, managing people, and supporting existing clients are just a handful of activities a small business might address in a single day. So what happens when you use the Kanban Method to manage your business?

I’ll share my experiences while training, coaching, and evolving a small business using the Kanban Method. You’ll see how the Method quickly surfaced issues, revealed hidden opportunities for innovation, and how the business is using the Method to mature the services they offer.

80% of managers believe they support their employees – 25% of employees agree!

Houston, we have a problem – what you don’t know can hurt you! Most leaders are unaware of how their own thoughts and actions work against their leadership objectives. Ineffective leadership fuels the top three impediments limiting your organization’s agility and growth – the fear of losing control, resistance to change and contrasting values.

Leadership Agility improves self-awareness, amplifies decision-making, improves outcomes and grows organizational resilience and capacity in highly complex and fast-paced environments. Through the art of story telling from his own personal experience, as well as the experiences of other senior leaders, Pete highlights six mistakes you may be unaware of in your own leadership practice, how they may be working against your intent, and how to reorient yourself to improve your leadership outcomes.

Organizational agility requires more than “scaling.” It requires deliberately finding the balance between exploring new, innovative ideas and exploiting proven ones. Agile software techniques can enable individual teams to find this balance, but few established patterns exist for harnessing it at an organizational level.

One successful model is the Trimble Software Framework (TSF), introduced by Trimble Navigation in the early 2010s. Borrowing from Agile, Lean, the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), and other proven methods, the TSF provided effective feedback to Trimble’s diverse collection of software teams on the effectiveness of their approaches. Where the TSF differed from other models was in its respect for variability.

The other authors of the TSF and I recognized that by promoting continuous improvement without dictating the path it should take, software teams would be free to experiment with new methods and explore new patterns. This increased overall organizational agility as teams tailored known good practices to their specific contexts and developed new ones. The TSF became a feedback loop that enabled software teams throughout the organization to learn from one another and constantly improve. Come hear how this was done, what we learned along the way, and how we used variability to permit a more effective balance of exploration and exploitation.

Most organizations today are on a journey to adopt an agile approach. And while that journey is difficult, it is not where the majority fall down. The true challenge lies in the years ahead - in sustaining and growing your agility to truly impact your business in a meaningful way. There are a myriad of troubles ahead for agile initiatives to stall out and fail.

Discover the keys to sustaining agility from companies who have not only retained their agility for over 10 years, but have deepened and expanded agility to grow their businesses and surpass their competition. Salesforce.com is outpacing the market 800 to 1 since 2006, McKinsey & Company is rapidly growing a digital transformation profit center from an agile IT cost center since 2007. GE continues to expand their agility across all businesses since 2008.

Pete shares a key story behind the Salesforce.com agile transformation which underlines and illustrates the keys to sustaining and growing organizational and business agility.

Why is “Agile” the right approach to improve the health of our organization?

What about all the other models; Six Sigma, Lean, Holacracy, Teal, TQM, Beyond Budgeting, Cybernetics and more? What should we implement, why will they work and what will stop our success?

To answer this, we need to understand the anatomy, physiology and psychology of an organization. What makes it healthy or sick. This is analogous to knowing the impact that exercise, diet, medicine or learning has on our health and wellbeing.

Therefore, before we inject ourselves with a dose of Agile, or take a Holacracy pill, we need to understand what are the dynamics they introduce into the workings of our organization and why they will succeed or fail.

Gray’s Anatomy for Organizations takes its name from the 1858 book where Henry Gray and Henry Vandyke Carter first collated the medical research to understand how the human body worked. This presentation collates the business and academic research of people, organizations, processes and systems to understand how organizations work. We will cover case studies of how this was applied at the successful “unicorn” start-up, AirWatch, working with global not-for-profits for an upcoming book, titled Giving Hope, and within large organisations.

By the way, Agile is part of the right approach to improve the health of our organization!

An agile enterprise increases value through effective execution and delivery in a timely and reactive manner. Such organizations do this by streamlining the flow of information, ideas, decision making, and work throughout the overall business process all the while improving the quality of the process and business outcomes. This talk describes, step-by-step, how to evolve from today’s vision of agile software development to a truly disciplined agile enterprise. It briefly examines the state of mainstream agile software development and argues for the need for a more disciplined approach to agile delivery that provides a solid foundation from which to scale. We then explore what it means to scale disciplined agile strategies tactically at the project/product level. We then work through what it means to strategically scale across your IT organization as a whole and discover what a Disciplined DevOps strategy looks like in practice. Your Disciplined Agile IT strategy, along with a lean business strategy, are key enablers of a full-fledged disciplined agile enterprise. The talk ends with advice for how to make this challenging organizational transition.

The challenges companies face today in the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world call for Agile throughout the company. There are two challenges: companies in general are trying to survive intense disruption and companies with successful software departments are trying to expand Agile methods to the whole company, including the board and the legal structure of the enterprise. Both the VUCA challenge and the pressure to implement Agile beyond IT, demand guidelines for implementing company-wide Agility.

We discovered these needed guidelines in Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agile. Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Human Systems Dynamics, and Cynefin provide additional insights.

However, in talking with various experts about how to address the challenges companies face , we got answers from within that expert’s framework. For example,

• A Beyond Budgeting expert said, “Stop fixing the budget annually, because otherwise you won't have the flexibility to react to frequent market changes.”
• An Open Space expert said, “You need to make space for what you don’t know and can’t control, for totally new things to emerge. If people can follow their passion, you will be able to implement company-wide Agility, otherwise people will just do what they are asked.”
• A Sociocracy expert said, “You first need to resolve the power structure, because as long as you have a hierarchy defined as top-down you will not become agile.”
• An Agile expert said, “You need to start inspecting and adapting by using regular retrospectives in order to react flexibly, otherwise you will neither be able to learn from the market nor from within your company.”

All of these perspectives are true, but each perspective was always from within the discipline. We synthesized the approach into a wider perspective dubbed BOSSA nova: B = Beyond Budgeting, OS = Open Space, S = Sociocracy, A = Agile.

The synthesis leads to a new organigram that reflects all the sources of guidance to a value center. The new organigram focuses board/CEO, inspiration, and resource and legal considerations on the value center. The value center is thereby free to focus on the customer.

We discuss how to use Cynefin-type probes that enable everyone to apply this new strategy for implementing company-wide Agility in their own organization.

Business Agility is not just the new thing, or a way to increase efficiency. It is a very good response to the challenge of complexity and dynamics (or VUCA, if you like). But while Agile is mostly about transforming the operating system of an organisation, there is little about the changes of individual understanding and competence, apart from "learning how to operate the operating system". No wonder is there an ongoing complaint about people doing Agile, not being Agile, or about the lack of the Agile mindset.

In this talk, Bernhard presents the Complexity Compass, an effective starting point for anyone who wants to navigate complexity. This brand new approach includes a mental framework, a set of principles, activities and tools that encompass the essential basics that help you rise up competently to the challenge of complexity, both within an Agile operating system, and without.

In the rush towards business agility, let's make sure we don't create unsustainable change via Prescriptive Mandates. What's the problem with Prescriptive Mandates? People tend to ignore them or do the minimum required to wait until the storm passes. And the prescription might not work in the specific context we're applying it to. This is especially dangerous when leaving the relative comfort zone of Agile Development into new Business Agility areas.

So what's the alternative? Invitation and pull-based change. Manage change as an internal market - Don't force people to buy into it but sell it to them and help them consume it at their pace. In other words - Figure out and optimize the "customer journey" for your internal change.

Also make sure that you don't apply a "one size fits all" and you aren't religious about methodology and practices. Emphasize values and principles and experiment with what practices work in each context and allow some variability at least initially.

There's a real danger that as people go into Business Agility what they'll take as inspiration from the Agile Development world is the iterations but not iterating. Real agility comes from iterating and experimenting. In this talk we will issue grave warnings as well as point towards concrete tools and practices that can support the real agility mindset of learning as fast as possible what works.

Using marketing as an example, we will see how to apply approaches and tools such as Lean Startup, Minimum-Viable-Play, Validation Boards, Learning as part of the flow, Popcorn Flow, not just when developing products but also when developing experiences/journeys/processes.

Navigating Complexity means navigating uncertainty. Dealing with uncertainty requires emotional maturity and clarity of thought.

Unfortunately politics and power games do more to obscure reality than they do to uncover it.

As managers, leaders and even customers, in order to truly harness the power of Agile, Lean and Design Thinking we need to cultivate an attitude of mindfulness and a sense of equanimity.

When the subject is bringing agility to business, we look at Cynefin and think: “The scenario is complex, we need emergent practices, hence, agile methods are the best alternative”.

However, when we move the subject to learning, this is forgotten, and we keep investing on learning initiatives aligned with simple and complicated scenarios.

This doesn’t make sense at all!!!

Practices only can emerge, if the learning can emerge together.

It is learning by an emergent way, based on real events, that we can find best way to lead with a complex situation.

Due to that reason, there is a high in-satisfaction rate inside organizations related with investments realized on trainings and other learning initiatives during past years.

We need to move from a PRESCRITIVE way of learning to an EMERGENT way of learning in order to bring business agililty. This follows the same logic we used when we moved from using PRESCRITIVE practices and processes to EMERGENT practices.

The learning happens, when reaching the understanding of the subject, we realize the new knowledge makes sense and we are able to aply that with new atitudes.

Prescritive learning is based on knowledge and skills that are pre-determined to the learners. It is not related with sharing learners knowledge and skills. This is the shift most organizations are missing!!!

The knowledge is already inside the organization!!! They only need a mechanism for this knowledge to be spread and bring benefit to the entire organization!!! This is what we are experiencing in Latin America and bringing great results!!! There is no need for high investment!! We are doing this with volunteers inside the organization. People love not having to follow specialists and consultants and being valued per knowledge they have!!! It is being a tremendous experience seeing the impact this brings to business agility!!!

Emergent learning is auto-organized. Facilitators provide assistance in the learning PROCESSS. Not in the learning PRODUCT. The learning PRODUCT comes from collaboration between people that have knowledge and experience in the subject. The learners!!! Not from a single expert!!!

Only with an emergent mechanism of learning within the organization, we can make sure that as long as we bring innovation, our employees will be able to have appropriate knowledge to deal with that innovation.

Only with an emergent way of learning, velocity of learning will be higher than velocity of innovation!!! Otherwise, even being on top of innovation we won’t be able to achieve successful business agility because people won’t be ready to follow innovation.

Using lean and agile practices, Business Value Driven Development (BVDD) involves decomposing changes into small releasable items and sequencing these items to allow for the quickest value delivery. Releasable items include Minimum Viable Product, Minimum Marketable Features, Minimum Viable Features, and Minimum Business Increments. Proper decomposition ensure that these items are as minimal as possible while still providing value.

Releasable items should have relative business value estimated by the business and relative effort estimated by the implementers. Rankings such as Cost of Delay, Weighted Shortest Job First, and Bang for the Buck can be calculated. Using these rankings, the items can be sequenced in an order that effectively creates business value.

Agility is crucial for any modern organization to launch disruptive products and modern digital systems. How do enterprises grow new markets and react to dynamic marketplace?

Technology leaders are attempting ways to leverage emergent forces, realize business strategy through refinement of their portfolios and stay competitive. But organizational and technical challenges impede the possibilities along the journey. Cultural inertia results in slow adoption, Siloed departments, heterogeneous configuration of tools and traditional waterfall practices seems like a dead end.

Cognizant’s OneAgility helps IT modernization by focusing on Agile Frameworks, DevOps automation, modern teams, modern engineering, modern technologies and organizational change management. It paves the way for comprehensive enterprise scale transformation.

OneAgility Platform is fungible end to end Next-Gen IT framework that integrates process blueprints, reference architectures, engineering tools and practices to drive true IT agility.

The talk would outline the growing need of digital enterprises to envision customer future state, with flexibility to jumpstart towards desired state by leveraging accelerators on the cloud such as Cognizant's OneAgility Lab.

FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google) companies achieved business agility by smart variations of inverse Conway maneuver, design system architecture and collaborating tools that impose constructive constraints on the teams to change the way they communicate and manage.

How can we stop humans waiting on computers? How can we reduce chance of human error? How can we build DevOps friendly workflows?

We find organizations need to change the culture of how they build software. The big revelation is that teams want their work being used, it is human nature.

The talk reflects on DNA of above companies built on modern development using scaled agile and DevOps practices, modern architecture and modern teams.

It synthesis the learnings to define target state collaboration, platform and architectural models for interested organizations to deploy and run their workloads, identify the architectural features that empower teams to collaborate and deliver solutions quickly to production easily and quickly.

It concludes with elements of Organization DNA, that needs to be reprogrammed across development and operation delivery value streams to maximize value with teams, who are self-organized around vision and roadmap, cutting across business lines to delight customers.

Self-selecting teams, dynamically reteaming every two days?!?

Shared-consciousness, organic networking, empowered execution, all driven by intrinsic motivation.

We read all the books. We experimented. We are doing it!

Sky Betting & Gaming is fast-growing, award winning digital company. We will take you on an agile transformation within our Human Resources. We will share first-hand experience and openly discuss our approach, our challenges, our results and lessons learned. We will explain how a shift from Human Resources to People Operations was not just a name change, but a game change.

// About Sky Betting & Gaming //

Sky Betting & Gaming is a tech company born out of Sky, and we’re aiming to be the UK’s best digital business. With over 1000+ employees, we are constantly innovating and growing. We don’t have teams. We have Tribes. Tribes of people who work collaboratively with a shared purpose. Each Tribe is made up of small, agile and autonomous squads.

It’s an environment where startup culture, speed to market, agility and continuous improvement are powerful influences. It’s somewhere that values challenge and collaboration, while removing barriers and hierarchy.

We’ve created the kind of workplace that not only retains talent, but wins awards for it too - including a place on the prestigious Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For list.

// Agile Adoption in Human Resources //

As innovative and fast-growing organization, it is important to engage amazing people, shape a great culture and create a unique place of work. For HR to effectively support the agile enterprise, HR needs to embrace Agile values, principles, and practices.

After successful pilot within the Bet Tribe, SB&G decided to scale agile across all tribes and create a dedicated People Operations team. The newly formed team began its agile journey in July 2017. Amanda Bellwood, People Operations Manager at SB&G and Fabiola Eyholzer, CEO & Agile HR Expert of Just Leading Solutions LLC will take you on the journey of going through the People Ops implementation.

The discussion will cover topics on how we approached the transformation and what we experienced along the way. In addition to sharing our journey map, we will reveal our successful kick-start and explain how we achieved a shift in mindset within a short time. But we will also address the challenges of keeping the momentum going and explain how we dealt with constraints and roadblocks.

We will share how we handle the demanding task of co-creating and delivering value in an Agile manner (Agile for HR), but also supporting the Agile organization with state-of-the-art People Solutions aligned with Agile values and principles (HR for Agile).