How does your team improve? What are the limits to what you can do? Have you set your sights high enough?

We are in this together in everything. We need to improve as a team, as well as deliver work products together. 

Furthermore, best practices lead to dead ends and bad practices. Don’t seek a standard pattern that will drag your team and work towards mediocre. Seek to do better than what you do today. Never stop seeking. Think mindfully about your situation and work to improve from there.

A key thing about this talk is that I won't be telling you how to do your job better. I'll be helping you do that more effectively.

Moving from a technical role to a management role can be a difficult transition requiring a completely different approach and a new set of skills. This will cover my own experience and what I learned to assist others who are thinking of making the change to a leadership role or, as happens surprisingly often, they end up in one.

Every company with a brand identity either needs a styleguide or could do better.

A live styleguide forms the lingua-franca between your engineers and designers. We'll show you why you need one, tell you our own journey, then give you the right tools to build a styleguide that is right for your company.

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. 

In 2008, I became a Scrum Master at a large Dutch Bank. I was sent to Scrum training and I learned how to 'read' and adopt the  Scrum Guide. During my journey as a Scrum Master, I worked with different teams (distributed and local) in organizations big & small. Last year, I decided to become a Professional Scrum Trainer and it was during that grueling track that I again learned more about Scrum, and myths got busted and misconceptions were unraveled.

In this talk I will reflect back on my experiences and share five things I have learned about Daily Scrums, Done, Sprint Goal(s), Sprint Reviews and myths.

Based on a recent Blog post I wrote - I cover what I have learnt from allowing myself to look back on my mistakes.

Bugger, I stuffed that up

There's a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle pressure on managers to have the answers and always be confident, capable and upbeat. But as we are actual human beings the only way to do that 100% of the time is to fake it. The old command and control management systems are giving way to collaboration, cultivation of psychological safety and delegation of responsibility. Managers are no longer required to tell workers what to do, but to support and inspire them to do it. The best managers I've known don't create an artificial aura of omniscience, they can be confused, inquisitive, engaged, vulnerable and above all authentic. Cultivating authenticity at work is easy on a good day but can be terrifying on a bad one. So let's talk about what that looks and feels like, and discuss techniques to help strip away the veneer and get real.

Amazon ECS is a widely-used Docker container scheduling and orchestration platform, but some of the constraints it applies makes for ... interesting ... workarounds. Chief among the challenges are connecting containers to each other, across services, clusters, and even regions. Working in hybrid cloud environments is also a problem.

This talk will show you one way to address these challenges: by using the "weave" Docker overlay network, a self-discovering and self-configuring mesh network that permits configuration simplicity and out-of-the-box parity with the popular docker-compose structure.

Listening to a talk by Jeff Patton around user story mapping and in particular the origins of story mapping left me thinking of similarities to a documentary featuring South Park's Trey Parker and Matt Stone called 6 days to air.

This talk aims to explain and highlight interesting and unexpected similarities between the South Park team's 6 day episode creation sprint and an Agile software team. Throughout it will extract some of the reasons why / how the South Park creation team can do what they do and explain how we can use these takeaways in our own teams to encourage creativity and input from all team members.

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.

The ThoughtWorks Identity team is a globally distributed remote team of 5 people. We deliver IDAAS (Identity as a service) to more than 5000 ThoughtWorkers in 14 different countries and we do it 24 hours a day 7 days a week. 

We don't have an always-on video link.  There is no time of day of when we can all get on a call together, yet we succeed in providing end to end product development and support to our customers. Including delivering new product to production on a daily basis. 

We achieve this through choosing not to fight against our distributed nature, but by embracing it and by leveraging the advice contained in the principles and values of the Agile Manifesto 

This presentation will share our journey and some of the things we have learned along the way and we will challenge the existing thinking behind what is required to thrive as a member of a distributed team.  

This is the journey of a rapidly growing online wagering business from a small startup to a medium corporate. Like most businesses, our journey started grass roots: we transitioned from silo’d delivery teams to feature teams. We won’t talk about how we were growing the individual feature teams, but we will talk about how this change impacted our portfolio team and how we started to build a lean portfolio system, using some of the Lean enterprise principles.

We will talk about our challenges, what we did to overcome them and what we have learned and the journey ahead.

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.

Norman Bodek's mission is to teach managers how to teach their employees how to be successful in life and also to teach teachers how to teach their students how to be successful in life. 

Takashi Harada, a track and field coach, in Osaka, Japan developed a new methodology to lead underachievers to become winners. His students won 13 gold medals, best in all of Japan, and the school went from the worst to the best out of 380 schools. HIs methodology has been taught to over 60,000 people. Shohei Otani a student at high school and also followed the Harada Method, setting a goal to pitch in the Japanese baseball major leagues. He also set a goal to pitch at 99 miles an hour. He attained his goals and was selected into the majors. After just three years, he was Japan's best pitcher, throwing at 103 miles per hour, selected as most valuable player and rumored that the New York Yankees were willing to pay 20 million dollars to get him. The Harada Method might not get you into the major leagues but it will surely help you rise to your maximum capabilities. You can be a hero of your own life when you can learn how to set goals and how to attain them.

Norman Bodek has co-authored a book with Mr. Harada titled The Harada Method - the Spirit of Self-reliance. Self-reliance allows people to operate at their highest level of skill.

Norman played a prime role in introducing Lean to the West. He started with Vern Buehler the Shingo Prize and is a Shingo Prize winner. He was a frequent keynote speaker on Quick and Kaizen, Lean manufacturing and the Harada Method. He has written hundreds of articles; and when he owned Productivity Press he published a 100 Japanese management books in English, over 250 published books on productivity and quality, and has written seven books including his How to Do Kaizen and the Harada Method.

Peter Michael Senge  is an American systems scientist who is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute, and the founder of the Society for Organizational Learning. He is known as the author of the book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization