World of work has broken.  According to Gallup in a study conducted worldwide between 2011-2012 - only 13% of employees working for an organisation are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace. 

I'll explain why our current standard patterns in management are no longer good enough, and what we can do differently and better.  I will showcase a number of modern modern management techniques - popularised by Jurgen Appelo and Management 3.0 - that are fundamentally aligned with lean and agile principles.  These will help you get better engagement, better teamwork and make management an easier job.

You will walk away with a number of simple techniques you can use to help initiate teams or projects; change the level of conversation that you will with your peers and team members; and give you a way to build happier teams.

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?

Who procrastinates on a regular basis? Who occasionally self sabotages? Are you sure what you really want from life? Do the experiences you are having right now fulfill you?  Do you think you could be more fulfilled and if you had that, is that a goal worth obtaining? Is happiness the same as fulfillment and where does being passionate come into it? How can understanding fulfillment help us be more connected to what we do and who we work with? 

If there was a structured approach, a formula, to guide you towards fulfillment and help you identify your gaps, would that be worth exploring? 

Join Christiane in an interactive session to collaboratively explore what fulfillment means to you. We will break down the elements of the fulfillment formula and understand how each element plays a vital part in bringing deep, meaningful experiences to our lives. Through self reflection exercises and shared group insights participants will walk out with a clearer understanding on what fulfillment means to them. 

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!

As they say, nothing is more dangerous than using yesterday’s logic for today’s problems, yet we are still working in our organisations with mental models that were inspired by manufacturing. You can see artefacts of it even in the language we use: people are resources and they work in development factories. If we are surprised why our transformations are not progressing as fast as we hoped when Agile took the stage, then looking to these old mental models provides part of the answer.

In this talk I will explain from practical experience in my work, how the old models still influence us every day and how we can break away from them and learn new models. I will give positive and negative examples from real projects to show that it is normal to experience failures and how to course correct from the lessons such failures teach us.

I will also provide pragmatic steps that everyone can take in their own organisations that don’t rely on buying new tools or following specific methods. Charting your own course starts with understanding where the problem is and understanding where our mental models let us down is part of that journey.

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).

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.

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.