A complete working simulation of an Agile Organization - in clay. No pre-made backlogs, no command and control, pure self-organization across multiple teams and streams driven directly by business constraints and numeric metrics.

Teal? Business Agility? Holarchy? Iroquois Treaties? Spotify Chapters? Sure, we got 'em all. Also dragons, walkers, a working small council and the greatest castle in Westeros - built entirely by Wildlings! 

Check out a detailed description here and the slides here. Also there's a description of learnings from the Game we ran at the 2016 CukeUp conference here.

We all started our agile journey with some recommended template practices years ago. Over many many retros some of the practices persevered, pivoted or perished. In this talk I would like to share a team's experiment on why and what happens when you hit the hard reset button.

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.

This workshop is inspired by drama therapy.  This approach can provide the context for participants to tell their stories, set goals and solve problems, express feelings, or achieve catharsis. Bring in your challenges in adopting Lean, Agile or System thinking. We will stage the story and help you find the solution through interactive play.

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).