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.

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.

A mid-sized company tried Scrum once, failed, still thought it was a good idea, hired an Agile coach, and tried again. This is the story of .id’s (called “id”, without pronouncing the dot) 2nd Agile journey (ups and downs) and their experience with

• team structure for the whole organisation
• experiments to drive change
• enhanced communication
• relationship between business and teams

“Actually, we don’t think of ourselves as an IT company…” At .id, demographic data is transformed into knowledge to enable customers to make smart decisions. Where to open the next store. Where to build the next school. These things.

Not being a technology company by nature (most of their 45 employees are demographic data experts), this is a case study of Agile beyond IT.

Are you going to this conference to learn new things like how to practice Agile, Lean UX, and Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD)? Do you want to define the way of working, like you would in a start-up, but exist in a traditional business, like Myer, which has a long history of using a waterfall methodology and may not always have a high risk appetite?

This case study will give insight in to how an Agile team delivered Myer's latest MYER one app by changing directions, overcoming challenges, using team members and customers as testers and making internal and external customers happy.

You are a scrum master or an agile coach that has been working with software development teams for some time; suddenly someone else from a different department (marketing, HR, sales...) asks you if you can help them also to "do" this agile thing...

In this talk, you will learn our successful approach to coaching non-software development agile teams; the tools we use, our approach and a step-by-step guide you can follow when you go back to work the next day.

How to develop habits in an Agile environment to perform better with less energy

Blame in the retro? Threats when work is not finished? Complaints rather than acting? You might have developed some bad habits here.

Are stand-ups taking forever? Are team members not updating the story board? Are retrospective actions not followed up upon? You might want to develop some good habits here.

Habits are regularly repeated routines, most often done subconsciously. Developing (the right) habits is crucial for individuals and teams to minimize the energy needed to perform at a high level. By developing a habit, more effort can be spent on the actual work rather than on the support functions.

Developing habits is not about working harder, but smarter. Habits enable you to:

• get rid of bad behavior and establish good behavior
• save time during meetings
• boost reliability and, ultimately, trust

Research and new findings within the last years have shown enormous potential for habit development having a huge impact on personal and business behavior. Applying this to Agile seems very promising.