Continuous improvement is the real engine of success, but scaling it is tricky.

The Theory of Constraints teaches us that at any given time there is one system bottleneck in a value stream and that improvement efforts away from the bottleneck will not improve overall system performance, and may well make it worse.

In almost complete contrast, the various approaches to scaling Agile typically mandate that all teams reflect on and improve their practice, not just those situated at the system bottleneck. This advice seems superficially in contradiction to a key lesson of The Theory of Constraints: don’t boil the ocean, focus your improvement efforts.

In this talk I will resolve this apparent paradox, showing how both sides have part of the truth, and also how by going a little deeper we can give sage advice on improvement to both people working on the overarching system of work and to those working on front line teams, as well as everyone in between.

Join me on a journey through the very practical theory of distributed improvement, culminating in the immodestly titled Prager's Law: "The last thing you should do after making an improvement, is more work".

I had been sitting in a few team retrospectives and hearing the same old tired pattern of "what went well, what didn't, what can we improve". The teams were bored, I was bored, they were just doing mechanical Scrum. Retrospectives are such a powerful tool to drive continuous improvement, but what i was seeing was a stagnation and the true value of this event was being lost.

End of the Sprint was coming up so as the enterprise agile coach, I thought I'd provide some of my favourite patterns and ended up providing my 20 Scrum Masters with a playbook to accelerate and reinvigorate learning and improvement and provided a years worth of retrospectives and ideas as well as links to where to find more.

Would love to share these patterns with you, but also hear your favourite patterns so we can share them with the group in this workshop and help inspire our teams to strive for activating real improvements.

Isn't Kanban just post-it notes on walls? Maybe they're powerful ways of working that can be applied to any process.

Come and learn the power of Kanban and Lean through a fun, interactive simulation involving pizza and teams.

In this workshop, we'll be making (paper) pizza in teams, defining the workflow you create, and learning how to use WIP limits, and other key metrics, to see which pizza team can deliver the most pizza!

What if everything we thought we knew about agile was wrong?

The nature of agile continually changes, which means its analysis must also keep pace. Agilelistics is for practitioners, thinkers, and theorists of agile.

The data analytics revolution and agile metrics gather around agile teams, has become agile's new language and currency.

What is Agilelistics? Agilelistics is the practice where metrics is used to drive the entire product development cycle. The use of just-in-time metrics to drive rapid, precise and granular product iterations. In an organisation who uses metrics, where everything from performance to usage patterns is measured. Every single decision is used by the development team is based on metrics.

Steve Morgan helps you to decipher the statistical data, and to use it to uncovering agile's hidden truths.

• How do I know my team is improving?
• How many story points should my team tackle per sprint?
• How can I fix my team’s estimations which are currently not accurate?
• Is velocity a true measure of an agile team’s performance?

Through a blend of entertaining storytelling, agile metrics and analysis, This Agilelistics session will answer common questions about measuring agile team performance.

How do you deliver a big policy outcome that normally take 6 months when you only have weeks?

An early election was called and we faced having to develop two sets of a comprehensive policy documents -- the red book (left-wing) and the blue book (right-wing) -- to brief an incoming government in 8 weeks. We were caught by surprise, the normal lead time were gone, and news about policy commitments came faster from TV and social media than traditional internal sources. This was a non ICT business team who hadn't done Agile before however we felt given the time frames, it was the best way to approach for such a high profile project.

Come and learn about and application of Lean Kanban and how we delivered the outcome through:

• engagement with the executive to share drafts of chapters, then gather and incorporate feedback in short iterative cycles to improve transparency and alignment.
• team design in non-software environment
• limiting waste and duplication
• visualising flow
• coordination of “Scrum of Scrums” key daily meetings to promote collaboration, visibility and transparency
• supporting team leads to coordinate the collaborative, dynamic planning process, prioritising work that needs to be done against the capacity and capability of the team
• providing visibility and transparency of work in progress and flow and share this with other teams and stakeholders.

Mia will discuss how she addressed business agility through working with a Portfolio Management Office (PMO) to assist the Incoming Government Brief (IGB) task force to work iteratively and apply agile practices to draft and deliver policy documentation to articulate the details and costing of policy initiatives from each of the major political parties in the lead up to the Federal election. This involved working with Executives and Business stakeholders within the policy domain during a hectic period where policy could change or be adjusted and costed daily as policies were revealed by each side during the campaign. The policy team need to improve the enterprises business agility to respond to rapid change and this involved working with the leadership across 12 branches to align iterations of draft policy documentation over an intensive period. (the taskforce was pulled together to deliver the IGB over 8 weeks). Specifically, Kanban and Lean were chosen as the method for delivery.

This approach resulted in executives having earlier visibility of the approach and content of the IGB and improved quality of IGB by reducing the risk that significant changes being identified late in the delivery. The Teams were focused to delivery higher value work more efficiently, while being transparent about delays to lower value activities. The success of this initiative in a non-ICT environment has promoted the PMO to look at other business areas to implement Agile to develop an Agile mindset across the Agency.

Evidence-Based Management (EBM) is a framework to help measure, manage, and increase the value derived from product delivery. EBM focuses on improving outcomes, reducing risks, and optimising investments and is an important tool to help leaders put the right measures in place to invest in the right places, make smarter decisions and reduce risk using an iterative and incremental approach. This empirical method alongside the agile principles and values of Scrum enables successful steps of change for the organisation.

Organisations invest in agile processes, tools, training, and coaching, but how much are they getting back? Has product delivery improved? How much happier are users and the business customers? Are employees empowered and enabled? Traditional metrics might give you insight into improvements of operational efficiency but the real conversation is about the value created for your organisation by the improved processes. Without measuring value, the success of any agile initiative is based on nothing more than intuition and assumption.

Mia will discuss Evidence based management and how this empirical process can help agile transformations measure and manage the value derived from the transformation initiative. Mia will focus on the 4 Key Value Areas: Current Value, Ability to Innovate, Unrealised Value and time to market and how these contribute to an organisation’s ability to deliver business value.

My focus has always been on delivering value rather than adhering to quite prescriptive agile frameworks or set theoretical principles, as these are not always practical.

The real world approach appeals to me, why not take a pragmatic approach to dealing with these realities while striving to still be as agile as possible?

How can we break down the barriers of transitioning from traditional to agile delivery methods?

Is pragmatic agile an excuse for taking shortcuts?

Pragmatic Agile helps us to identify practices that enable individual teams and their environment, with the aim to achieve on delivering value, while gradually transforming their context into a more agile-ready environment. As teams mature and continuously improve, they need to embrace additional practices that help them in delivering tangible benefits.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/emotional-intelligence-power-access-our-agile-mindset-agile-amy/

In this session, I will be describing what good management looks like for agile teams and organizations.

I will present a handful of frameworks for thinking about management, and marry them up to my observations over twenty years of managing experimenting on people in technology-oriented businesses.

I will present examples of good management practices and challenge a few assumptions about what good management requires.