Almost everyone has had a pivotal moment that, on reflection, you realise was the catalyst for you to change the course of your life.

After working in retail for over 15 years, I had one of these moments that lead me to persue a career as a developer, through the developHER program at MYOB.

I will be sharing my story of successes, failures and many MANY learnings which I hope can help or inspire you or someone you know on their tech journey.

Agile is loopy. Nature is loopy. It has no straight lines. Even the whole universe can be explained through quantum loop gravity. Many of us used to work within linear end-to-end processes but now work in loops. But what does working in loops really mean?

Come and learn why agile is loopy. Come and look beyond Scrum to learning and user engagement loops and hear why Product Management and Design Thinking must be at the heart of an agile mindset if we're truly to *be* agile.

Any journey is a combination of planning, expectation, experiences, conversations, and knowledge gained.  The metrics journey that this Enterprise Agile Coach and experienced Release Train Engineer have travelled has all of this and more!  And many travelers like to have a copy of their Travel Guide to hand to not only plan their experiences but to help them manage some of the intricacies of their journey.  Consider this talk your opportunity to dip into an expedition through the wilds of agile metrics – with a cheat sheet.

This presentation will cover:

• Where am I?  Context is king.  Knowing your starting point is key.  Baseline metrics.
• Who’s on the journey?  Knowing your audience, who else is on the journey with you and what are their expectations. Agile vs Waterfall PMO. Internal vs External metrics
• What could go wrong?  Being clear about the challenges for metrics at scale
• Metrics as your compass.  Using metrics to help identify changes in direction

We started our metrics journey with different goals in mind and have uncovered some surprising aspects in what works and in particular what doesnt!  In this presentation they weave their expectations, experience and knowledge to show how these perspectives can meet.

• Assess your situation and prioritize your needs;
• Surviving techniques for the hiring process;
• Assemble your own custom emergency kit with essentials tools;
• Manage extreme work conditions and overtime;
• Survive corporate parties and drinks;
• Build trust network and create allies; 
• Identify your enemies and their habits.

A diverse set of luminaries to discuss how to enhance agility in the enterprise. Covering all the big scale challenges that large organisations face, such as multiple business lines, disparate technology stacks, geographically dispersed teams, 10s to 100s of products, etc.

One principle in the Agile Manifesto talks about the importance of face-to-face conversation. SAFe takes this to the next level with PI Planning which is a routine face-to-face event where teams create their plans for the upcoming Program Increment (PI). PI planning is facilitated by the Release Train Engineer (RTE) and includes all members of the Agile Release Train (ART).

To the non-SAFe practitioner, when they hear about the whole PI planning day palaver, they look askance and shake their heads and think to themselves "what a waste of time".  Is PI Planning a waste of time?  As part of an organisation that have had to embrace a framework to enable them to scale, PI planning is considered the heartbeat of the Agile Release Train.  In this lightening talk, I will share my experience with planning in 10-12 week increments.  Will 5 minutes be sufficient to change your mind?

Please don't assume that Agile is only good for Software Development, Startups, DevOps, Change Management, Personal Productivity, Product Development, Marketing, Sales, Time Management, Organisational Change, Educating Children, Operations, Infrastructure, Design, Teamwork and Saving your Organisation just because they are the only things that happened to be on the list.

Applying Agile principles in everyday life is a great way to not only improve your quality of life, but to experiment with Agile approaches and find out what you've really internalised.

For coaches and leaders practicing Agile in Everyday Life presents a rich opportunity to not just talk the talk, but also walk the walk.

In this talk I'll give a couple of examples of how I've drawn on Agile approaches to help address personal challenges, plus discuss with the audience what areas folks are "doin' it for themselves".

This will be an interactive session, somewhere between a talk and a short workshop.

When we decide to move from big batch, plan driven long dated constructs of change, so projects and programs in the traditional sense, to more agile methods, we need to rethink a whole raft of stuff. Assume for a second, if you will, we are using the historical program and project construct to identify and deliver change. Initiatives are bundled into a sequential approach and governed through stages of largely documentation production accordingly. As long as you are on track to the stages, your documents are reviewed and signed off, you are Green.

Then we disrupt this. We want more agility on how we identify, plan, deploy and release change. We want to deliver outputs to our customers and ultimately value or outcomes earlier and more regularly, which is one of the significant advantages of an agile delivery model. So we get an ROI uplift. Projects can be self funded.

So lets start a new theory and trial it. EVERY project is red until your first release to a real customer. No more debate, hand wringing, angst or arguments. Recognise and accept that until you have delivered something that tests your theories, is validated and works, and your customers are using it, you have done nothing. Use the RED as it is meant to be - a call to action to pay attention, provide support , facilitate and break through barriers, provide resources and time. Help the team get to done.

My goal is for the attendees to use this session to actually crowd source and  develop a model that people can take back to their business and propose, from scratch using design thinking and agile techniques. 

I used to get told to be more flexible implementing Scrum. How can I be flexible when there are all these rules and principals to be followed. It seemed like the more flexible I was the more I watered it down till nothing left. Then I gained agile-enlightenment* when I was de-programmed from the cult of buzzwords and hard rules.

This is what I learnt…

* Disclaimer: There is no such thing as agile-enlightenment as you will soon see…

MVP is about learning, testing assumptions and deciding if its wise to continue working on the current product or if its better to drop it or pivot to something new.

I see teams working on year long projects but saying they are working on an MVP. I hear about projects which once the MVP is delivered the project stops. No matter how you define it MVP is not a destination!

From the outside Spotify is a company who has solved the riddle of scaling agile, but the insiders perspective might surprise you, with our structure more closely resembling a collection of startups sharing a wifi connection.

An anti-pattern: “something that looks like a good idea, but which backfires badly when applied”.

My recent work implementing scaling frameworks showed me the inherent risk of using frameworks as an explicit means to affect change; any framework will always contain anti-pattern risks.

The infographics associated with frameworks (whether SAFe, LeSS or DaD, Nexus) are always drawn with the best of intent but how they are applied is where things can run contrary to agile principles.

Using real work examples and telling the story of a recent 18-month, 40-team experiment in scaling; Niall will highlight some of the "pot holes" to avoid when using frameworks.

Niall will also present his approach to using frameworks including when and how to "let go" of ceremonies/practices when they become redundant.

Lastly, a coaching approach will be presented to enable coaches to leverage the best of what frameworks offer without getting caught up in dogma.

NOTE: this is NOT a framework-bashing presentation but a hands-on report on the risks of mis-interpretation of any principles-based scaling framework.

Over the last 2 years Niall has coached teams of agile teams through the launch of two Agile Release Trains (SAFe). Niall helped leaders, managers and teams through the process of adopting SAFe.

Using his real experience as the basis for the presentation, Niall will make the case for moving past SAFe and going to the heart of scaled Agile using Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS).

One of the principles of the Agile manifesto is build projects around motivated individuals. “Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.”.

However, individuals have different strengths and weaknesses. Our focus shifts quite often on how to improve their performance and how we can “develop” their weaknesses. Science and my personal experience shows that building on the strengths rather than improving our weaknesses will get better results, and not only when we want to build projects around motivated individuals.

We have been lucky enough to work with a not-for-profit organization called EPIC Recruit Assist to offer software testing training to a group of young adults on the autism spectrum, through a new initiative known as the “EPIC TestAbility Academy”.

In this talk, we will describe:

• What is the autism spectrum and why it aligns with software testing
• How this relationship came about
• Why it is important to seek opportunities that drive diversity
• Key relationships, shared goals and building the vision
• The importance of communication
• Building a balanced programme
• Preparation that was required to get the programme off the ground
• Lessons learned in finding participants
• Lessons learned delivering the training
• The outcomes for the candidates on completion of the programme.

Lean change management is an approach to organisational improvement and transformation that uses lean startup principles to drive change. Collaboration, feedback and experimentation allow us to make small and incremental changes that we can measure and learn from and counters the big bang approach that so often makes change painful.  Embarking on a journey of discovery and change, we have adopted lean change management and applied it in ways that have created real change at MYOB. We will share our experiences to give you the tools to both assess if lean change is suitable for your organisations, and how to get started if it is.

A common problem for software development teams is that of career progression for technical people. Experienced programmers stagnate at Senior Developer or move into management roles for which they are not trained or they are sometimes simply ill suited.

This presentation discusses the work underway at MYOB to address this issue.

An Agile approach encourages organisations to form self-organising teams that are empowered to figure out how to work together and deliver value. But it's one thing to tell a team they are responsible for themselves and quite another to understand what this even means and to put it into practice in a healthy, sustainable and rewarding way.

This workshop will explore what it means to self-organise through an understanding of the fundamentals, relaying of experiences helping teams in the field develop their self-organising capability, with some simple role playing to illustrate and convey techniques that anyone can easily adopt to help improve their team effectiveness.