Drawing on his experience and community engagement through both ICAgile and InfoQ, Shane explores what is at the edge of agility in 2019. The trends that are impacting the way organisations are evolving; practices and approaches gaining traction in the innovators and early adopters and what’s next for agility.

Do your teams understand how they contribute to your company’s strategy? Are they focused on the highest priorities? Can they be more aspirational? Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are becoming an increasingly popular way to deliver step-change improvements across organisations.

Hear from three Technology Executives on their experiences with successfully introducing OKRs at their organisations. Learn how they were able to link delivery execution to overall strategic intent. And get practical tips on what worked and what didn’t.

You too can unleash your organisation’s potential!

Welcome to the Conference

Just what exactly does an Agile Coach do? Coaches may vary in their response to this question. I would like to think that most Agile Coaches, with some variation, would be fairly consistent in how we perceive our role. However, some companies or orgs or people probably interpret the role of the Agile Coach in ways that coaches never intended.

Let’s explore some of the things that Agile Coaches have been asked to do! Are these antipatterns? Doing what needs to be done? This session will delve into the topic of the role of the Agile Coach and highlight potential challenges and possible solutions.

Presented this in Melbourne recently to their content strategy meetup: https://www.meetup.com/We-Are-Content-Strategy/events/vwqddqyzjbkc/

The IA (UX) revolution: Bringing the great disrupt to your tree structures.

Jilly Magee, fresh from working as a digital specialist on CBA's new intranet, will be breaking our brains with this revolutionary idea. The attendees will get to delve into this in an interactive way, It will be fun and we'll learn a lot.

There is so much white noise about agility, and I wonder sometimes if the "Agile Industry" is creating the complexity to grow it's own importance. To me agility, indeed all modern working practices, boil down to three things: Visibility, Transparency, and Team Work. In this session I will cover what each of these three aspects bring to the principles and practices of working in the modern workplace, delivering value for an organisation, and working in high performing teams.

This session drills into the absolute fundamentals of agility in practical and tangible techniques that allows any team to adopt the practices that will support aligned, collaborative delivery of value. It's from these fundamentals that each organisation can create their own working practices and approaches to support their industry, domain or stakeholder's needs.

Creating "pockets of awesome" agility in an organisation during an agile transformation is difficult, but how do you progress that awesomeness across the entire organisation? In this presentation, Tyler Gale will share how he moved from tribe level agile coaching towards applying agile strategically across the Australian Taxation Office to create an organisation of agility.

A storm is defined as a disturbance of the atmosphere or the state of an environment and life brings them in many forms and sizes. Some bring significant disruptions to normal conditions, while others destroy the existing structures and force a rebuilding. As humans we will experience various storms throughout our lives with the aim of surviving them all.

We are so used to the occurrence of storms that preparing for them has become second nature. We have the technology available to us to help predict them, their size and intensity so we know what to expect and plan accordingly. Best practices exist to manage the storms. However with climate change it feels like there are more ‘freak’ one in a 100 year occurrences happening which take everyone by surprise. The best practices lead to chaos. What’s the future going to hold and what can we learn today to in order to build our resilience for future storms? Do we reflect the shifting environment into our existing practices?

How do we apply these learnings from our life to an Agile transformation of an organisation?

On the horizon, a cyclone is growing in intensity and heading towards your organisation to disrupt the existing paradigms. Everyone is scared and uncertain of what will survive or need to be rebuilt after the agile transformation has hit. What do we need to do to prepare for the transformation? How are we going to work together to build our resilience in the chaos of the cyclone?

How do organisations embrace the storm?

Feedback is a skill that allows you to bring Kaizen into your workplace on a daily basis. By regularly encouraging small changes in your colleagues (feedback); you can collectively be "doing the basics brilliantly" and hence have a high performing team. In the Feedback Dojo you will practise and refining your feedback; learning skills you can immediately apply at work.

Regardless of your experience with giving feedback, this Dojo will help you develop your skill. Participants will be grouped by experience so that they can support and challenge each other.

If you find it hard to give feedback, especially constructive feedback, you are not alone. Many people feel uncomfortable when thinking about giving feedback and lots of us have a bad experience when we delivered constructive feedback. This workshop will provide some guidance and structure that can help with this.

A workshop inspired by the game Monikers where you will form teams and be able to move from a feeling of “We’ll never get this done” to “High fives all round!”. By demonstrating and understanding the value of establishing a common language, leveraging each others strengths, iterating, reflecting and most importantly taking what you have learnt and applying it to your work life. You’ll also laugh a lot and have a heap of fun in the process.

I have played this game alot, most recently at BOQ as our team formed and again as new team members joined. The existing team members reflect on how hard it would be for a team member to join the game in Round 3 and what they need to do to get new team members up to speed. New team members cut themselves some slack recognising that it will take time and effort from everyone to have them running at the same pace.

On the final day of the 2013 EPL season, as Liverpool and Manchester City battled for the title, millions of people logged in to watch the matches simultaneously. Sat in an incident room, a small group of tech leaders and engineers watched as their streaming platform crashed and burned under the strain. Your presenter pressed the button to shut people out of the streaming service until we recovered. Cue a lot of angry football fans and (after a stiff drink) a lot of reflection on how this had happened.

In this short talk I’ll share how, even with seemingly the right ingredients, things can still go horribly wrong. I’ll leave you with the lessons I’ve taken from this to go on to achieve success with agile service management around the world. Disclaimer: you don’t need to be a sports fan to enjoy this talk!

The Art of Storytelling for empowered Teams

Talk outlines:
- Personal journey from working Journalist to Scrum Master
- Storytelling as a coaching tool
- Story types: Vulnerability (Team Building); Craft (Methodologies); Influencing (Stakeholders) etc
- Leveraging your own style
- Sharing knowledge through Story, a little on the craft
- A Single Blog Post - From 0 to 7.5 million distribution in 6 months. How I did it, and how you can do it too - Knowing Your Message

Organisations are striving to use Agile to unlock customer value and competitive advantage. Many organisations focus only on scaling frameworks and adopting Agile practices. While these are important, they’re not enough on their own. We must look to the third wave of Agile: business agility.

Carsten Veit will explore how Agile has evolved through three waves and what each has contributed to the industry… and the world. You’ll gain an understanding of the organisational capabilities that make up business agility, such as Delivery Agility, Product Innovation, Organisational Adaptability and Leadership Effectiveness. Carsten will also stress the importance of holistic thinking in business agility, raising key questions you should consider: what are the business outcomes? What capabilities are needed to achieve these outcomes? What activities and initiatives should businesses engage in to develop and mature these capabilities?

As we continue our forays into Business Agility, we need to ask ourselves "have we lost our way?" "if we don't pay attention to the values, do we exist in the Agile forest?"

A case study in recognising our Agility vs Agile journey, where we are at and why, what is next?

Interestingly a learning oriented organisation is both a great and terrifying place to be. Whilst we totally get investing to learn, we can also cut ourselves with the bleeding edge, lets go for cutting edge and do it well!

• An Epiphany: Establishing a frame of reference
• Returning to the basics
• Moving forward: Our Agile may not be your Agile, let's embrace diversity

When looking at an entire system there are two common mistakes that are made.

We will look at them and how they relate to the two biggest killers of productivity in the work place.

The communication tools of Liberating Structures will teach you how to facilitate the discussions your org needs. I am going to demonstrate how to use these techniques in the workshop. And all the attendees are going to be fully immersed and ready to wield their new knowledge the very next day at work.

Come learn how to help your team(s), org(s), and company(ies)!!!

For more information, watch my video at http://youtu.be/UNOjqMUv8h0

A version of this workshop that was presented at Agile Tour Sydney 2016 is at http://bit.ly/2f4Bie8

As a leader in an agile environment, the change needs to start with you. Agile isn't just for your teams. Agile leadership is a key enabler for creating a high performance culture and to truely appreciating the benefits of business agility.

By leveraging the Heart of Agile, we will unpack what it means to be an Agile leader. By starting with self-reflection and a radical commitment to continuous improvement, you are able to enable collaboration across your software development teams through the use of Social Contracts and Objectives and Key Results. This approach will deliver results. I will share a story on this of how our team built a Test Automation Framework for one of our clients that has saved costs, increased quality and reduced risk.

Through out the talk, I will be share a number of insights, tips, and practices that you can adopt to be an Agile leader. Be the leader your teams need you to be!

This is a case study discussion to share how we are transforming the 2nd largest bank in Australia with a core enterprise team of 3 people and an extended coaching team of 8 professional coaches. We not only transitioned ways of working but also helped with organizational design, transitioned job titles (from over 150 to 7) and workflow management. We are using a model that helps teams change incrementally with weekly measures and understood results. We have been able to have remarkable success using a distributed coaching model, introducing new ways of learning and developing a learning organization.