Kerrie's experience across the Goverment and Higher Education sectors, stands her in good stead to open LAST Conference Canberra 2018. She will be recounting what she has done in her career to promote good governance and management of transformations. She will talk about her Agile journey and how she found that this transformation will break your processes, your people and your finances..... but that’s OK.

Agile has well and truly crossed the chasm and every organisation large or small seems to be in the middle of some sort of Agile transformation. Yet, look behind the covers and we have to ask ourselves the tough question of how well we are doing and how agile are we really?

So all aboard as we acknowledge some of gaps many organisations are facing and we question the true value we are delivering. More importantly, we will discuss how we might start to these issues, both inside our organisations and as individuals flying the agile flag.

TBC

This panel will examine how Agile is making a difference to how agencies and organisations in Canberra, approach for digital transformation, organisational change, improvements in productivity and quality as well as organisational agility. The panel will discuss their experiences leading these changes in our industry and look at the innovation that Agile is bringing to the Canberra Community. They will also share their trails and tribulations along the way.

Finally, this panel will give you their predictions for where Agile might be happening with innovative applications of tech and application of agile principles to business organisations as well as Government. Join us as we travel forward in time – to 2020 and beyond - to have a look at the future of innovative applications of agile in Canberra and our industry.

Facilitator - Irene Zhen

Kerrie Campbell – CIO, Finders Uni

Kerrie is a Chief Information Officer with a rich experience in the higher education industry. She is passionate about introducing new continuous improvement cultures and changing the way IT works with organisations. She has experience in the university sector and also with Government, notably with the Department of Human Services. At the DHA, she managed a large team of developers, programmers and systems analysts to develop,design and maintain programs of work.

Petr Adamek - CEO Canberra Innovation Network

Petr is the CEO of the Canberra Innovation Network, a collaboration between the tertiary and research institutions in Canberra with support of the ACT Government. He is passionate about innovation ecosystems with experience in Europe and New Zealand.

Matthew Hodgson - CEO, Zen Ex Machina

Matthew Hodgson is an executive and portfolio-level agile coach. He's an ICT strategist with two decades of experience focussing on coaching executives from strategy through to execution by leveraging organisational psychology, organisational change and modern Agile, Lean, UCD and Lean UX methods.

Kristy Dam - Assistant Commissioner EST Strategy, Innovation and Information Technology Australian Taxation Office.

Other panelists - TBA

Being an Agile change agent can often feel like you’re fightin an uphill battle. Have you ever felt like you’re pushing, instead of having knowledge and support pulled from you? Have you ever felt that the ‘Agile’ you’re championing is completely different from the ‘Agile’ your organisation is pushing for? My answer is certainly YES to all of those things, and it sucks.
This will be an exploration the struggles I’ve encountered, the failures I’ve had and what I have used to solve them.

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.

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".

The rate of change in ICT and demand for services delivered through new modern interfaces by organisations has presented a real and immediate need to address the challenge of how to implement and deliver appropriate solutions to meet these changes. This is not limited to technology, it is as much about technology as it is about the need to address how these changes effect people, process, information and data.

The combined disruptive trends of Cloud, Big Data and the IoT are each disrupting traditional business models in ways never seen before, and when combined, they are impacting organisations at such a rapid pace unprecedented in both business and technology realms, that organisations are having to completely reimagine and rethink how they go about delivering systems, software, services, information and data management across every single part of their operation.

With this change in customer expectations and responsiveness, how do our Agile teams deliver value and outcomes? How do we maintain stability, reliability and security in a rapidly changing environment? How do we deal with old tech and legacy? How do we set Digital strategy? Maybe our Operations people have some of the answers...

‘Normality’ and complexity are so un-alike that we need to use opposite approaches to navigate them effectively. When we enthusiastically explain the latest way to improve our ways of working, we can avoid getting our colleagues offside by bearing in mind that what we are explaining is counter-intuitive.

This session will use examples to demonstrate the subtle differences between our traditional ways of working and lean/agile approaches and how to present them in ways that make it easier for others to accept those ways can work.

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!

This session is a guided walk through collaboration; what it is, why it is valuable and what areas you should focus on to improve your collaboration capabilities.

The purpose of the session is to help participants put some structure around the thinking and to help develop a roadmap for maturing collaboration at their workplace.

Online survey: https://goo.gl/forms/t5piVegrHQrCU2gD2

Slides: https://www.slideshare.net/craigwbrown/collaboration-workbook

Creating meaningful and lasting change in organisations is hard. It requires aligning many different people, from different walks of life, and with different perspectives. But how do we enable a shared understanding of these multiple perspectives?

This challenge is especially real when seeking to introduce agile ways of working. For experienced agile practitioners the rituals, goals and mindset can feel obvious. However, for many people these things can be difficult to grasp, and are sometimes at odds with their perspective and goals.

Through this workshop we will introduce some Systems Thinking frameworks as tools to explore different perspectives and “see” the system and the relationships between the different parts. These systems thinking approaches support us to develop a closer view of reality and take more sensible, purposeful action. Supporting Practitioners to build capability to seek, listen, and co-ordinate different stakeholder perspectives, this workshop will create space for inquiry, exploration and sense-making.

Pete Cohen is a Principal Consultant at DiUS Computing and has extensive experience leading agile projects in diverse organisations ranging from large banks and telcos to startups..

Cass Spong is the founder of Entheos Consulting where she uses systems thinking based approaches to cultivate more effective, sustainable and inspiring organisations. She is also and Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Positive Psychology.

Pete and Cass will draw from their personal experiences and case studies to highlight the differences in perspectives from either side of the agile fence, and will demonstrate how they have gone about establishing alignment in organisations.

Kanban isn’t just for work. How I reluctantly learned to use Kanban to get my personal life in order and why I’ve never been happier.

Agile has provided us with some fantastic ways to improve our teams and help us deliver, but there is always more to learn and improve. In this presentation, we will look at some of the agile approaches used by high performing teams as well as some observations I have had over the years working with really good teams. We will also explore what the authors of the “5 Dysfunctions of a Team” are now saying about great teams.

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 we tackle the move towards Agile Delivery in a Federal Government environment that is so entrenched in waterfall ways of working? What are our opportunities to re-shape the thinking of leaders in this context?

The University of Canberra Hospital was opened in July 2018, Canberra's first rehabilitation-specific hospital. The multimillion dollar design and construction of the hospital is important but the primary success factor is the people and how they work together. Through a variety of methods staff and leaders were engaged to contribute to the culture they wanted to work in, one that would create the foundations for success. This is the story of how that unfolded and the broader change management methodology which achieved so much, utilising systems thinking and related concepts.

"Everyone is already doing their best; the problems are with the system … only management can change the system." —W. Edwards Deming

Systems thinking is a very powerful approach to have a holistic view of the system/organisation and optimise the whole. Value stream mapping is a very powerful systems thinking tool used to identify the most important parts of the system/organisation that need to be optimised. In this session we will use collaborative learning technique to learn value stream mapping and systems thinking in action.

We will explore concepts like:

- Lead time

- Process time

- Percent complete and accurate

- Activity ratio

- DevOps

tldr; Organisations exist to fulfil the promise that they made to their customers. This talk describes an approach that uses customer promise, existing culture and the gap between the two as a guiding light for defining goals of an agile transformation.

Longer version: Leading an Agile transformation is a major undertaking. It is easy to invest all your energies and time at finding the tactical solutions and making strategical changes and not emphasise enough on culture. To ensure that your transformation is more than just a face-lift, it is important to dig deeper into nuances of culture. Attend this talk to walk away with a tool that leaders and change agents can use to understand and evaluate the depth and breadth of their cultural initiative, identify gaps and create action items to address the gaps.
The tool is based on an upgrade of well-known Schneider's cultural model. It provides an approach for leaders of an organisation to centre their transformation efforts around culture, leadership and customer promise. We will start with the Schneider model to assess the existing culture and the leadership style prevalent in the organisation and will then link it to the customer promise. The model will cover the impact of an evolving customer promise and the complexities of managing it when the enterprise has multiple and often competing sub-cultures.