In her session ‘Decentralising leadership: a story of Holacracy in practice’ Sandy will share her story of implementing Holacracy at a New Zealand tech company, whose CTO gave her a one-line instruction: “I’d like you to make it happen.”

TBC

FailAgility; we've all seen it and let’s face it, we are all guilty of letting it happen in our organisations.

So why is it that so many businesses fail to see the outcomes that the Agile values and principles promise?

This presentation looks at what FailAgility is and the three levels in organisations where it stems from: Organisation, Leadership and the Coaching / Personal level.

We will discuss the types of FailAgility that we see at these different levels, the approaches that cause FailAgility and most importantly what we can do to recognise and fix it.

I remember the year when I received two massive compliments the first was getting my advanced agile accreditation with Alistair Cockburn, which really stripped a layer from my soul through raw and honest feedback, my redemption from the depths of despair was the recognition of an agile signatory. The second was when Alistair called be a black belt in agile and one of his classes.

So where do you go from there, I felt I needed to go back to the very beginning and walk in the beginner mind again and receive the type of humility that truely grows your. This came to see when I started to learning the gentle art of Brazilian Jui Jitsu. There are so many parallels we can talk back into our community. Some of the areas of want to focus on are

1. Learning how to learn

2. What true failure looks like

3. The mindset of entering into a test knowing you are going to fail and why do it

4. The conditioning of both mind and body to support learning

5 Learning techniques is not enough

6 The road from white to blue belt

This year we have something special lined up - The Great Lean Debate.

We will have 2 teams battling it out debating some important LAST topics.

We are very excited to have Steph BySouth lined up as our host and compare, along with Karyl Crick and Ryan McKergow as team captains.

On the day we will be looking for 2 team members to join each of the team captains in a live debate.

The session was inspired by ‘Lean Debate’ a game created by Steph BySouth:

https://www.leandebate.com/

https://www.stephaniebysouth.com/masterclasses-with-stephanie/

Managers are squeezed in the middle of corporate pyramid structures that throw expectations at them from all sides.

We often expect managers to lead like legends with mystical abilities to overcame legacy structures, old process and often toxic cultures. Expectations and judgements are thrown at leaders without consideration that they are also people.

Often managers aren’t afforded the same learning courtesy as Agile teams expect for themselves. That’s OK, because we know; no matter how safe, it’s not nice nor easy to fail people. Especially those we are accountable for.

Over the last 18 months Super Retail Group (SRG) has been on a journey to move to a new way of working.

This talk focusses on the why, what and how of decreasing their time from Idea to Value.

Now more than ever innovation and agility at pace is required to respond to the ever increasing pressures of

the now economy. This pressure is felt enormously in the retail business.

Hear how the SRG agile journey started by answering into the WHY. Once buy in was obtained WHAT did they stop, start and continue

and HOW did they go about doing this? What worked, what didn’t and what have they learnt so far.

The conflict between flexible working and Agile stems from multiple perspectives.

Agile wants a dedicated team space and full time collocation; while flexible working drifts into work from anywhere territory.

How do you make Agile work under hot desking circumstances? What can be done to make teams productive?

I will share experience report from 2 flexible working Agile departments, what worked, what hasn't, and things to watch out for.

Agile transformations are not easy. And if you’ve ever been involved in one, or two (or more!) you’ve hopefully figured out that they’re not all the same.

In my experience, there are some common patterns that are a hinderance to agile transformations. This topic will explore 10 of these patterns which either impede organisations or delay their move to an agile organisation.

Intro and Welcome to the conference.

In this interactive session Shane discuss his experience working in a distributed, virtual organization which is founded on an Agile Mindset. The challenges of maintaining agility when remote, the ways the ICAgile team have consciously designed their team and organization culture and provide actionable advice based on real experience on how to maintain collaboration, teamwork and live the agile values in a remote only organization.

ICAgile is a global, virtual organisation working with partners across over 100 countries spanning almost every timezone. There is no single corporate office and the ICAgile team is spread across seven locations in three countries. We have managed to build a strong collaborative culture and a truly safe working environment focused on outcomes rather than activities, holding each other to account and being really effective and productive while having a joyful workplace.

The classic arcade game Outrun (1986) was a critical and commercial success for Sega. But in 1994 Sega released Daytona USA which became one of the highest grossing arcade games of all time.

The reason - roadmaps! Knowing where you are heading makes it easier for you to create a strategy for success.

This workshop will show you how to level up your roadmaps and break-free of the Gantt chart mentality of many roadmap providers

Do you find your efforts and enthusiasm being ignored?

Would you like others to understand and see the value you provide?

You have tried every possible way to communicate the contribution you make.

When others appreciate your professional set of skills it encourages you to go the extra mile which allows your team to achieve goals and commitments.

There are always different abilities and skills that an individual brings to a team and these differences can cause friction within the team dynamic which impacts on focus, direction and timings.

When we understand the multiple drivers it creates the capacity for a team to achieve effortless results.

Dirty Agile draws on the world leading concepts of Lean, Agile, Change, Customer Experience Oppositional Thinking, Continual Improvement & Psychological Principles of High Performing Teams.

We have led multiple projects across Australia and internationally with successful delivery through driving co-design, team collaboration, continuous improvement and innovation.

We’d like to give you some insights into our experiences, our learnings. We have coined how we do this “Dirt Agile” – Agile from the trenches. Gartner called our last program an exceptional transformation.

User stories are a common agile artefact that are used to capture and communicate requirements. They are the essential narrative of functionality-based Product Backlog Items and while they have a generic and seemingly simple formula, they can sometimes be more art than science. Finding the right balance for your project stakeholders and the development team, between story size and depth of documentation, can be tricky.

This session will cover the theory of how and why user stories are meant to capture the context of user interactions. We’ll then explore interactively what works and does not work, where you’ve experienced challenges or failures, with a view of learning from each other to discover ways to improve and strengthen our story writing.

How does one run 90km in less than 12 hours?

Come along to my session to discover how I used the scrum framework and empirical process to prepare for the Comrades marathon, a 90km road race that is also the world's oldest and largest ultra marathon and how I used the scrum framework on the day of the run to achieve my goal of finishing within 12 hours.

This is a practical example of how scrum can be used outside of software development and it's application to real life problems and projects.

There is a common theme in an "agile" industry where people talk about "doing" lean and "being" agile, but what does that really mean? Having been in a totally different industry of real estate for more than a decade, there was an opportunity that came knocking on my doorstep - becoming a Product Owner. Reading the position description was like reading a different language. Accepting the role was like jumping into an open ocean without knowing how to swim. In just 12 short months, I transitioned from an SME to becoming a dedicated Product Owner and living, eating and breathing this new role... but what does that even mean!?! Practicing what you preach is an art form on it's own but changing parts of my life to "being" lean and "doing" agile made me fall in love with an industry I was never even interested in. It became about building relationships and bridging a gap.

Learn how to apply an experimentation approach (Lean Startup) to move from delivering outputs to achieving outcomes.

Outcomes such as “subscriptions increased by 20%” or “complaints regarding the upload feature reduced to zero” are what makes a real difference in our customers lives and hence to the company’s bottom line. When a team is delivering outcomes like that, there is no denying their performance and hence their value to the company.

Delivering outcomes comes from understanding our customers, producing an output that may result in an outcome and then validating if we have achieved the desired outcome. At the very least one of these cycles produces knowledge. The Lean Start-up by Eric Ries, clearly explained this cycle unfortunately it did not explain clearly how we should design, set up, run or analyse our experiments. I have met many people who agree we should follow the Lean Start-up approach; however, there is rarely any consensus on the experimentation approach that will make it a reality.

In 2017 Australia’s largest independent game studio, Halfbrick Studios, embarked upon a mission to better understand their customer and experiment their way to renewed success. Fruit Ninja Fight is one of the results of that approach. In 2018 Australia’s largest Telco, Telstra, focused on “co-creation” with their customers through a series of experiments; delivering improved customer satisfaction and faster results than ever before. This presentation shares with you my experiences of working with those two organisations as they sought to improve their outcomes through Experimentation.

We are not all created equal. Some, much to my frustration, can eat a lot but remain slender. Some hardly exercise and look really good. Some are tall, some are short, you get the idea. So why do we think that one diet or one exercise routine can change everyone’s health? In the same vein, why do we think that getting a [Insert-Agile-Method-Here] certified person can make a project, program, or worse an organisation, “Agile”? In this workshop, we would hear from the Head of Crime from Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission on how they did it. Also, we would discuss the differences between what I'd call an "Agile Technician" vs. an "Agile Consultant". To truly help businesses "go agile", we must move on from Jira and ticket shuffling to speaking the language of the CEO, COO and Senior Executives. We must study change management.

The Lean and Agile movements thrive upon the adoption of a certain mindset. Living the beliefs and values of that mindset is all that is asked of us as practitioners. (That, and working software!) However, while Agile and Lean methods have become mainstream, the Mindset is often the missing ingredient, preventing teams and organisations from getting the full benefit of their practices.

This talk explores how to coach a mentality by drawing upon those mainstream technical practices, and combining those insights through meaningful dialogue.