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So we had this project……

It was big, expensive, 18 months in and was heading for disaster.  It wasn’t the first time this had happened.  Usually we would have just continued to deliver it and taken a good, hard look at ourselves afterwards to see what went wrong. 

But this time was different.  This time we stopped.  This time we got it right and started a revolution.

Monash University is in the midst of an Agile transformation across the IT division and the wider business areas.  When you consider the diversity of the organisation and the scale of change, you can understand the enormity of the task.

We are nearly 2 years into the journey and I am going to share some of things that have served us well in our complex environment.

This is an interactive session

* Identify what are the constraints when we try to communicate / collaborate in an organisation - especially if you have distributed team 

* Understand the frustration of getting the meaning of the message across

* Identify how communication can be improved

In a historical moment where everything is political, and we keep hearing references to "walls", "bans" and all sorts of restrictions that try to inhibit a person's mobility around the world, it has never been so important to discuss global mobility in relation to the future of work. The future of work is, undoubtedly, deeply connected to remote work and global mobility. Forrester Research’s (US) estimates that the number of mobile workers will reach 63 million (43 percent of the U.S. workforce) sometime in 2016. (REF)

While “work from home” has been a common model, the pervasiveness of digital nomadism has changed the face of global work patterns. Remote and mobile work is here to stay.

This exciting trend brings about new work configurations and possibilities, but also new challenges. Tension and contradiction can sometimes exist between our basic social needs and physical disconnection, and between flexibility for the individual and the collective needs of collaboration. If agile is still cutting edge, shouldn’t agile organisations be leading the way in pursuit of answers to these things? Agile organisations can lead the way and provide solutions that enable a team to make the best out of blended work practices while avoiding the pitfalls of remote work.

Agile frameworks that are effective arrive at seamless blended workflows. During this talk I will present the cutting-edge agile practices used at [Company Name] to embrace digital nomadism and shape the future of work. I will share with the attendees the challenges, triumphs, tools and characteristics that make up an organisation that is successfully embracing digital nomadism. [Company Name]'s Work From Anywhere policy is more than just an effective policy. In today's global society, it is also a symbol of another kind of world, of another way to live and work together. It is an example of what is possible when we have trust in each other and in our communities.

Many teams suffer through retrospectives that have lost their spark, if there ever was one. Droning through the same process, iteration after iteration, the magic is gone. Or they may have given up on retrospectives all together. It doesn't need to be this way!

I've facilitated over 200 retrospectives with a variety of team types, maturities, and process philosophies. I've experimented with different techniques to derive value, from uber complicated to mind-numbingly simplistic. All this experimentation and practice has helped me better understand the real value of a good retrospective and how to have a better chance of getting it.

Using a basic Retrospective flow/structure, I will walk through my thoughts on planning and executing retrospectives, and share techniques and examples for different team types and maturity levels along the way. Warning: some minimal audience participation may be required!

My hope is that the audience will walk away with some immediately executable experiments, and new thought patterns for facilitating fun and effective retrospectives.

It would have been so cool to test the myriad of features on the Starship Enterprise, not least the Transporter Room. I would have loved to be the first Tester to say "Beam me up Scotty". Unfortunately, I never got that gig, but I did do plenty of other exciting things that often involved taking risks. When your life revolves around risk you quickly learn to develop tools to help you identify, manage and mitigate those risks and my favourite tool for doing this is the Model Office.

An agile organisation requires a current state (baseline) upon which to anchor its future. It also requires an environment within which to reflect this current state. Fundamentally, this environment has the ability to design, model and test each and every future state, not just from a technology perspective but from a whole of business viewpoint. A Model Office provides such an environment and perspective.

Put simply, a Model Office is a physical manifestation and working model of a business (or some designated part thereof). I have been designing and building Model Offices for almost 20 years and I will privide a snapshot of my story during this presentation.

We build and maintain Model Offices to support Change initiatives so that both the business (and technology) can have a shared vision of how a business looks and functions today and how it will look and function once change has been implemented. We built one for a (startup) online supermarket in the U.K. and used it to show everyone from the Board of Directors down to the cleaning staff what their new business would look like and how that would fit into it. It allowed them to "feel" how their business would function and operate before it was created. The Board of this business were so excited about this concept that they held several shareholder events in the room where we built the Model Office. It later became the hub for all their onsite training program.

I will present a Case Study in order to highlight the benefits of a Model Office approach across all phases of the Change Lifecycle.

This will also be run on Friday.

Want to build highly collaborative and cohesive teams? Looking to be energise your team and bring out the best in people?

Drawing on positive leadership research and how best to apply it, you’ll discover:

• The value of connecting well with colleagues, clients, and stakeholders to be more engaged, energised and perform better as a team.
• The four pathways Professor Jane Dutton has found you can take to rapidly build high-quality connections during micro moments of your busy day.
• How to deal with jerks at work who corrode your energy, effort and crush your soul.
• Ways to help others connect well and build positive relationships at work.

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

Why do we talk about agile coaches rather than agile mentors or agile teachers?

In this workshop we will explore what coaching is, why I believe it is an essential skill if you want to help people develop an agile mindset, and how coaching can enable people to change their thinking patterns and behaviour.

Participants will then practice the core coaching skills of active listening and powerful questioning in genuine coaching conversations with each other, before reflecting on how they can apply these skills in their own lives.

Join Shannon and Tim for a fast paced account of their move from being high-flying consultants to down-to-earth product people.

Where do they now add value? How has their relationship with their team changed? How many timesheets are they doing?

All will be revealed!

In this session, Vikas Joshi will speak about a Test Automation framework created using Selenium integrated with BrowserStack for performing Cross-Browser, Cross-device & Cross-OS Test automation - touching few more topics like Jenkins , headless, Allure reports & more , on Java Stack.

Missions for our teams need to be compelling. They need to be clear. They need to be challenging. They need to be consequential. That sounds like mission impossible! So, how do we get there from nothing when our team starts or from something when it reboots? This workshop will put you through a facilitation format that we've used at Spotify to kick off and reboot teams with great success and very positive participant feedback. In other words, it worked, and people liked it. So, why not give it a try?

We will open the day in the ATC 101 lecture theatre. The morning session will see us all together, with a new for 2017, experiment. We haven't tried anything like this before, so we hope it all goes to plan! No more details for now, we'll let you know more when we see you at Swinburne.

We will open the day in the ATC 101 lecture theatre. The morning session will see us all together, with a new for 2017, experiment. We haven't tried anything like this before, so we hope it all goes to plan! No more details for now, we'll let you know more when we see you at Swinburne.

Sign in to the conference in the foyer of the ATC building

Test

The author worked on a medical technology product development project at an R&D house, working as a team lead for software in multi-disciplinary project, for an overseas corporate client.  The usual mundane challenges of a highly technical software project ensued - aggressive timelines, fixed price contract, a remote and demanding client, no dedicated business analyst, no dedicated software QA, 400 or so abstract software requirements written in a long software specification spreadsheet.

On top of this, as a non-technical agile practitioner your author struggled coming to terms with a highly technical project involving electronic engineers, industrial designers, medical scientists, and a new technical approach to emulating proprietary algorithms to conduct diagnoses on patient samples using a combination of fluid dynamics, surface chemistry, and the emulation of proprietary algorithms designed for use in a previous generation product using a completely different technological approach .  Yeah, I didn't know what all that meant either.

But that's just the context... what I really want to talk about is the challenges and lessons learned from applying Agile in a volatile organisational, compliance and contractually driven context, with the particular challenges of agile for embedded software (firmware).  This poses significant challenges in terms of writing meaningful stories, producing meaningful estimations, what happens when your hardware drivers don't work, rewriting software when the hardware changes, testing device software when you don't actually have a device.   In other words, all you people working in pure software/web have it easy.  

This experience reinforced my faith in agile principles and values, although I did have moments of doubt!   This talk will look at those principles and suggest ways that they can be better applied even in non-embedded software development projects.

The buzz word at the moment is Mob Programming. This is a fantastic way of solving problems collaboratively but it can have negative impacts on the team. During this talk I will explore what these impacts can be and how to deal with them when your team is deciding it wants to try Mob Programming.