Watercare, a lifeline utility company with 1.4 million consumers, is undergoing a massive transformation which puts the customer at the centre of the company. Responding to customer's problems and needs quickly is a big challenge and requires a motivated and digitally enabled workforce and agile teams that adapt and flex to different demands.

This challenge also requires leadership and culture that embraces and celebrates rapid experimentation, iterating potential solutions with customers and end users, and disciplined continuous learning and improvement as the normal daily, weekly and monthly routine. Data, analytics and insights are central to enabling this leadership and to driving this culture.

During this address Paul de Quaasteniet, Director of the Strategic Transformation Programme (STP), and Peter Johnston, a strategy, design and change consultant, will share key lessons, hints and tips from the journey so far, including:

- How the Target Operating Model redesign put business agility as a core design principle, driving key decisions including new executive team leadership styles, new team structures and mechanisms for working across business functions

- How the New Zealand business community has recognised Watercare's Procurement team with the Procurement Change of the Year award, for driving business-led agile change, introducing cross-functional squads, scrum masters, and product owners to achieve outstanding procurement outcomes

- How the STP has driven a 1.5 year behavioural change programme with 200 of Watercare's top talent group, setting up over ten squads that are delivering business-led digital change, headed up by Product Owners from the business (not from IT), enabled by an intensive training and communications engagement programme in business agility, high performance teams, leadership agility, product ownership, scrum mastering and design thinking

- How the design of the new Digital organisation function followed an agile, design thinking approach, with design input starting with non-IT business executives and stakeholders, and organisation design prototypes for Digital domains being tested with business leaders before implementing

- How 'HR are going agile', through working in squads to rapidly prototype and build a workforce experience AI solution to test and refine with their end users, Watercare people

- How User Experience Design and Design Thinking are being used to redesign Watercare's digital customer experiences, build Watercare's first customer app, build a Data Hub and customer centred 'Nerve Centre' enabled by data platforms and technology, and redefine how Watercare people work together in teams across Planning and Construction, Operations and Maintenance and Customer and Billing organisational functions

It is time to talk about ‘agile Leadership’.

Reflecting on 7 years of experience in the Israeli army I’ll be sharing stories and insights about how the army REALLY operates.

The army is not as ‘Command & Control’ as people commonly expects – it is much more empowering and agile than you’d think.

At the army, I’ve learnt the true meaning of cross functional teams, the importance of reflection, feedback, creative problem solving, trust, teamwork, conflict resolution, resilience & responding to change.

This talk will be intertwined with army (and civilian) war stories & tips for leaders in an agile world. This talk aims to inspire a new wave of Agile Leaders, through sharing examples of effective leadership, it draws on real, lived experiences and concepts (directly from the ‘horse mouth’) as well as useful takeaways that attendees can take back and apply to their work.

Building a healthy organisation with an aligned executive team can create one of the most powerful and easily accessed competitive advantages, but this will only be achieved with commitment starting at the top. Join us while we share our journey working with the MLC Life executive team, preparing the organisation for the future.

Background:

MLC was an insurance business contained within a large traditional bank, purchased by a Japanese insurance business with a dream to create the best standalone digital life insurance business in Australia. One year into the journey, the CEO identified the need for the executive leadership team to lead differently and optimise the business for change rather than run - he explored agility as the mindset and mechanism.

Our transformation journey:

Building a relationship with the CEO and his executive leadership team, we portrayed the art of the possible – sharing what a healthy, aligned adaptive and agile organisation looks and feels like as well as expressing the risks if they continued with the current operating methods and practices. We reflected on past and present to understand constraints and pain points, co-designed a new operating rhythm to enable the leadership team to think and work differently and executed a safe experiment to test and learn from.

The co-design resulted in a structure and model where the team spends just enough time running the business and have more time to focus on the deep work of changing and transforming the business. This new way of leading includes cascading priorities through the organisation enabling everyone to understand what’s most important, how they individually and with their teams can contribute and how they can innovate to support the strategic direction.

By co-creating and experimenting with the new working practices and cadence, we established the importance of designing how an executive team can amplify their collective time and resources to:

• Understand and leverage the strengths of the team to find ways of working that stimulate and boost the performance of their leadership capability
• Create a shared understanding of what the strategic imperatives are, choosing how to execute on them, and building strong working relationships to accomplish
• Build a cycle and rhythm to deliver value on immediate priorities with flexibility to adapt based on internal and external influences
• Influence the ‘system’ to adopt curiosity, creativity and innovation to solve customer pain points whilst aligning to strategic priorities
• Establish an approach that supports the CEO in gradually dialling up the focus on aligning the team at a course and speed enabling the business to both run and transform

To aid the broader organisation to respond positively to the adaptive ways of working we established a ‘pull based’ approach to change where lower level teams embraced agile, lean and design thinking approaches rather than forcing a particular model or issuing a directive.

Do we know our stuff?
OKR Quickstart coaches and consults businesses on how to create strategic clarity, achieve audacious goals and build high performing teams. We've helped hundreds of people and businesses introduce OKR so that everyone finds crazy value out of them (not just the exec team). We've made every mistake in the book and this session summarises some of our biggest learnings!

Psychological safety is paramount for innovation, capitalising on diversity of thought, and connection with our work. Building teams that are capable of using trust and effective conversations are where we need to be in order to close the gap between what we could do and what we actually do.

We must also be able to stretch our behavioural range, drive ourselves towards our goals of being vulnerable and courageous. How we do that will depend on how safe we are: safety drives courage. By enabling The Safe Space within our team, we can use each other better to make more agile and responsive moves.

In our VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world, we must foster our human connection and collaboration for remarkable achievements.

But how do you aide it? How do your behavioural and thinking habits limit your contribution to the collective? How does your behaviour enable others to bring their best game? How do you build a culture that enables true collaboration where the collective overrules the ego?

Amy is currently writing the book The Safe Space: How leaders make courageous teams.

In 2015, after growing to 150 people, Fraedom established a practice model inspired by Spotify patterns. An additional innovation was the HR advisor now called "People and Experience Partner"

The purpose of this talk is to discuss the challenges of refreshing an org structure to broaden agile practices, during rapid growth, in an uncertain Fintech environment. Incremental change for a mature organisation that has some normalised dysfunction also requires a different approach to a baseline Agile transformation. This all needs to be done without damaging the award winning culture, we are CIO Awards winners 2018.

This year Fraedom comprises over 300 people, is more mature and less mature. After the acquision of Fraedom by VISA it is expected that the organisation will double in size again in the next few years. Also this year, the speaker was appointed as Agile Practice Lead with the brief to coach the team of Scrum Masters to excellence, review and refresh on the Value Stream of product Delivery and consult on an overall upgrade of our Organisational OS, to Practice model 2.0.

Practice 2.0 will build on the first iteration, enable growth beyond the Dunbar number of 150 people, and spread beyond just the technology part of the enterprise. While it will have its own release version, the intent beyond is to have a far more adaptive approach to organisational design.

The speaker will describe cultural challenges and how to embed 'keystone habits' of collaboration, learning, slicing and swarming so that our beliefs and behaviours enable the organisation grow without compromising the 'startup' mindset that exists.

We know agile values and principles have revolutionised the way software projects are delivered. Now we're discovering the same agile mindsets, methods and tools can be adapted to successfully transform the way businesses operate; helping them respond to the changing needs of customers, deliver value faster and leaner, and building a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.

This presentation provides an overview of the application of agile practices at Vicinity Centre (ASX:VSX) across all functions and levels of the business. Co-presented by Damian Zahra, General Manager People and Culture at Vicinity and Eduardo Nofuentes, Founder of The Agile Eleven, we follow Vicinity’s journey through three waves of agile adoption;

• Initially implementing agile methods at the team level
• Broadening out to adopt agile enterprise-wide and
• The continuing journey towards true business agility

Agile was introduced to Vicinity at a time when the company was experiencing a major merger and the presentation addresses how agile approaches provided a powerful agent for driving cultural and organisational change, improving staff engagement, improving collaboration and contributing to the successful integration of two large enterprises in a short twelve-month timeframe.