In the face of market disruption, boardroom strongholds, and technical globalisation bleeding into to the thread of our societies morals how do business leaders stay the course, transform the enterprise, empower the people and still make money. Come and learning about how to build your Leadership Edge; amplify your distributed power as a leader and practical techniques to walk away with to grow your teams well being and productivity.

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.

Organisation Leaders and more importantly customers are looking for faster, proactive and innovative solutions to their problems.

Instead of simply doing ‘better’, organisations must do more.

What does this all mean for the traditional PMO and how can they disrupt themselves to be the valueable business partner they need to be?

During the 30 minute discussion the 2 Becs will discuss and provide insights from a recent client engagement where they assisted the PMO to become:

• Start up Funders

• An Innovation Hub

• Investment Advisors

• LEAN Portfolio Machine.

Lessons learnt about what worked, reinforcements to get the change to stick and the pivots required along the way.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

There are many bad ideas in software and most of them aren’t going to work. Most software environments make it difficult to quickly and safely eliminate these bad ideas. Strongly typed functional programming reduces as many bad ideas as possible by maximising feedback and communication. With a friendly programming environment like Haskell or Elm these bad ideas can be weeded out as you type them and changes can be made with confidence, the tools are the guide and give positive feedback so you know when you're done.

We’ll also address some of the perceived negatives of functional programming: hiring experienced developers is less of a problem than most people would think and you don't need an army of algebraic astronauts in order to write functional programs.

We’ll show how we’ve found functional programming the ideal environment for treating software as collective understanding. It’s allowed us to:

• Clearly define the current intent and specification of the system,
• Incrementally improve our code and keep the interest rates down on our technical debt,
• Test our code through high level properties and reduce or eliminate low level, mechanical testing,
• Reason about what code is doing to data and how you can describe a program through the transformation of data from one structure to another, and
• More easily reuse code at different levels of abstraction.

The talk is about the transformation journey of an IT Department(Heritage Bank) from Silo environment to collaborative environment and the challenges faced as an Agile coach/Change agent during the transformation. It will give insights in to some of the basic concepts of Agile , design thinking, Domain Driven techniques ,change & Program management concepts.Its a tool kit for change agents considering transformation in their organisations.

The Business came to all of our showcases and together we perfected our grooming sessions. Our planning sessions hummed like a well-oiled Harley Davidson and the quality of our dev builds improved with every iteration.

Now, 9 sprints later the business starts talking about change impacts, business benefits and Corporate Communications.

Huh ?

The scrum master shakes his head and says " That’s not part of the Scrum framework"

The product owner states " Hey, I only told the guys what the system needs to do"

Sounds familiar?

Unfortunately, a typical scrum team does not cater for the above and for good reason. It's simply not in the Scrum framework. As we all know, Scrum is about delivering working software and is silent about other aspects of a project.

Even if the above is recognised as a GAP, most Agile leaders or PM’s don’t have a method to incorporate into their methodology. Under a waterfall methodology, its straight forward but if following an Scrum methodology, well, things could get tricky.

The above is an obvious gap for most medium to large enterprises and a gap that most project professionals are not willing to take on. It’s just too hard.

This session is about my evolutionary journey in filling this gap under an Scrum Framework. This session is about how we extended the scrum framework to not only incorporate the above but to also incorporate “devops” and CI/CD under a methodology we created called AgileSwift.

Its new, it’s been validated and its producing real results.

This is our journey.

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

Yup, you read that correctly - colonoscopies. A hallmark study by experts in the fields of psychology and economics has strangely strong links to the themes that underpin the Agile Manifesto. In this short talk, I present how basic human psychology - the tendency to obfuscate the initial and distill the terminal - aligns perfectly with a world of work that based on iteration.

The Agile Mindset is elusive - and gets a bad reputation for being so. Through evidence based research this talk will allow participants to grasp onto the concept of iteration in an innately 'human' way.

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.

Acceptance test-driven development (ATDD) is the god-father of test-driven development (TDD) and behaviour-driven development (BDD), so why does it get such little attention? For that matter what is it?

This workshop will give you an overview of ATDD and a run-through of an elaboration session centred on testing.

By the end - you'll never do BDD without ATDD again!

Many Agile transformations settle for trading old ways of working for newer ones, but leave dysfunctional power hierarchies untouched. Businesses have mistaken agile for a delivery methodology, rather than the disruptive and emergent practice that it is supposed to be. Agile itself is part of the problem however; its strengths are not in scaling governance and policy-making - two processes that are crucial for organisational effectiveness and employee engagement.

Agile has a kindred spirit in Sociocracy - a collaborative decision-making and governance system. With shared roots in systems theory, Agile and Sociocracy have a common language, emphasise human connections, and focus on effective outcomes. By utilising its core principles of effectiveness, equivalence, and transparency, Sociocracy has the power to evolve businesses organically.

In this workshop, Erin and Nick will provide an overview of the shared goals and concerns of the agile movement and sociocracy, and introduce the audience to the concepts and practices of sociocracy in an interactive session. With this knowledge, lasting transformative and evolutionary change can be introduced at organisations, large and small. They will also explore the regenerative design of social permaculture and why it ought to be a goal of any 21st Century business.

Organisations and Leaders seeking innovation and agility should consider complimenting their agility with the processes and principles of sociocracy. We would love to share these insights with you!

Erin Young is a consultant, trainer, mediator, and facilitator. Collaborative decision-making and governance tools (Sociocracy) and holistic design for people systems (Social Permaculture) are her primary frameworks; all nature-inspired and informed.

Nick Emery is an Agile consultant and coach, Scrum Master, and Systems Thinker. His understanding of complex systems and culture has formed through experience, research, and post-grad studies in Sociology.

A couple of years ago Christiaan Verwijs and Johannes Schartau coined the term ‘Zombie-Scrum’. What's it all about?

Well, at first sight Zombie Scrum seems to be normal Scrum. But it lacks a beating heart. The Scrum teams do all the Scrum events but a potential releasable increment is rarely the result of a Sprint. Zombie Scrum teams have a very unambitious definition of what ‘done’ means, and no drive to extend it. They see themselves as a cog in the wheel, unable and unwilling to change anything and have a real impact: I’m only here to code! Zombie Scrum teams show no response to a failed or successful Sprint and also don’t have any intention to improve their situation. Actually nobody cares about this team. The stakeholders have forgotten the existence of this team long time ago.

Zombie Scrum is Scrum, but without the beating heart of working software and its on the rise. This workshop will help you understand how to recognise the symptoms and cuases of Zombie Scrum and what you can do to get started to combat and treat Zombie-Scrum.Knowing what causes Zombie Scrum might help prevent a further outbreak and prevent the apocalypse

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.

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?

Why Design Thinking Should Be At The Core Of Your Business Strategy Development

A primary element of design thinking is simply thinking and ideating on a solution to address a problem or better meet a customer need. Establishing the proper amount of time for truly thinking through the work being done and measuring its merit as a viable solution to solve the challenge at hand is shockingly and overwhelmingly missed a lot of times.

So how can you implement design thinking in your company? Let’s discuss some of the basics.

Center on the customer; shake well

"Of course we know our customer! In fact, we know our customer better than they know themselves!" Really? Then great! You are halfway there. But unlike most businesses, don't fall in to this pitfall of 'thinking' that you know your customer simply because you are an expert!

Customer-centric is the main word here. When you get them in a room, you may be shocked at how unaware certain functional groups are of the goings-on outside of their own function.

This can make or break your business - but find out exactly how you can lead your industry in truly knowing your customer.

Identify and define the problem to form solutions around

Define the right problem to solve. It’s the assembled team’s job to always question the problem at hand and empathise, in a multitude of ways, with the person’s experience they seek to improve. Try to represent in a visual way the problem or scenario you need solutions developed around. We are visual creatures and the more you can “paint the picture” the better off you’ll be at forming viable and valuable solutions.

Create many options for the newly defined problem

Design thinking helps you go about things differently—not solving a problem the same way every time. It’s important that many solutions be ideated no matter what the problem at hand is. Extract ideas from everyone’s mind, but be careful not to overanalyse the thoughts and ideas at the outset.

Fine-tune selected directions

Once you have a few good options, they need to be embraced by the group. Don’t let things like what’s happened in the past deter your from pursuing a good idea. Design thinking creates an environment that lets new ideas grow and lets the group experiment without the threat of making mistakes. Sometimes options will need to be combined, refined, etc. Several rounds may be needed to make sure the right answers are being brought forward to solve the problem.

Pick the winner and execute

This final stage is where a course of action is selected and resources are allocated to achieve goals.

I will detail 14 x executable (simple) strategies that you can start doing right now (assuming the execution is done well of course!). Keep in mind this is not a fully instructional piece on design thinking.

With the guided and evidence-based design thinking approach, I have been able to assist over 50 x start-ups, small businesses and entrepreneurs grow and (in some cases) double their business revenue and scale, simply by working closely with the leaders and decision makers. There is a huge potential to every business and the key lies in identifying and designing a specific strategy(s) to fit your unique skill sets and brand.

Tune-in and find out how and why design thinking should be at the core of your business strategy development.

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?

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

The Great Lean Debate will be back for 2019:

• 2 teams battling it out debating some important Lean, Agile, Systems Thinking topics.
• Team Captains Renae Craven and Phil Gadzinski
• 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/