Imagine you are a Mad Agile Scientist and have a diabolical experiment to conduct - what would happen if you exchanged the brains of a Product Owner and Scrum Master? Mwuhahahaha!!! How would the body of a Product Owner with the brain of a Scrum Master act? And vice versa?

Perhaps the Scrum Master would now treat the team like a backlog? This Scrum Master would be focused on value and maintaining a coaching backlog of team and person improvements. This Scrum Master is refining the team, crafting a group that delivers value.

And perhaps the Product Owner might treat the backlog like a team? Rather than backlog refining, they coach the backlog. They would be focused on nurturing, protecting, and empowering the backlog. The backlog might transform from an irritation into a labor of love.

Although this experiment sounds terrible, this change of perspective might be what you need to reanimate your dead team or backlog.

Join the fun and come learn what horrifying results await!

Consumers, like never before, have real choice about where they purchase products and services. Organisations large and small need to adapt quickly, or die.

Leading to a number of Australia's largest organisations deciding to 'go agile', in an attempt to tackle this VUCA world head on.

But is putting a nice, customer-centric, wrapper around a whole organisation transformation what agile is actually about?

During the 30 minute discussion Simon will discuss and provide a perspective on:

• Some of the key design principles that need to be considered when undergoing an agile transformation

• Balancing empowerment and control in search of alignment

• Where change like this works; and where and why it doesn't!

Autonomous and empowered teams are a key building block of agile organisations but require a great deal of trust to work. Management and leadership must trust people and teams to do the right thing, and teams need to trust that management will support them when needed.

Transparency is a low-cost means of building trust. Transparency gained through the open sharing of information, particularly visual information, has played a large part in agile and lean thinking - from lean's visual controls, to XP's "big visible charts" and beyond.

We will explore how transparency, and the radiation of information, can build trust and cultures where "safe to fail" is more than a theoretical concept.

How do we make an impact to the starters in our field regardless of your position in the industry? Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a newcomer and explore mentoring from a different perspective.

Coming from being a part of an 18 month Graduate Program position at REA Group, my peers and I have been fortunate enough to find ourselves in an environment where mentoring and pairing is a big part of the culture. This talk is designed to give the attendees an insight on what a diverse range of mentees actually wish and crave for, to empower people to mentor and help shape the future of tech.

Every organisation has legacy systems, and people who know "where the bodies are buried" -- hidden aspects of dependency, communication, process flow and whatnot which every system relies on to function. These are the dirty secrets swept beneath the rug of "business as usual", and they represent risk and friction alike.

As Peter Drucker is famously quoted, "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it", and the first step towards measuring it is to be able to describe it. How can you do this with gigantic, complex, intertwined systems whose origins are buried in mystery and legend, whose very operation and continued existence is dependent, frequently, on specific people, high priests who may not want to share their arcane knowledge?

This session provides evidence-based techniques for uncovering this complexity, visualising it in a machine-friendly but fundamentally human-centric manner, and using the results to drive real organisational awareness that facilitates conversations and change.

The Medici Effect was a coined term by Frans Johansson to describe innovation that happens when disciplines and ideas intersect. Take for example the idea of using something very technically challenging such as blockchain, and an internet favourite such as cats and you have the CryptoCats and the Crypto Kitties! Indeed the most interesting ideas are borne out of collaboration & diverse thinking.

This hands-on workshop will provide an introduction to the Medici effect using the Mashup ideation method by IDEO.

The workshop aims to guide the participants on the steps detailed on the Mashup ideation method of IDEO.

Participants will work in groups and will be guided on IDEO's 4 step Mashup process and will end with a Cereal Box design activity and sharing of the created ideas.

While we talk about rapid change and disruptions, to which we expect todays organisations shall be equipped to respond and adapt to sustain, to me there shouldn't be a second thought in applying the same principles in our professions. As an agility coach, you know there is no one approach that fits for all..

In this talk, I would like to share some of the insights on the coaching moments and how I applied the non purist approach to embed the learnings of the new ways of working. Whilst it is very contextual, I believe it is applicable to many, and share my perspective to adaptive coaching based on the context and dynamics to make it stick.

IMPORTANT - As places are limited, please register specifically for this session. Also, please register for day 2 of LAST Conf, if you wish to attend the 2nd day.

You can also read more about the sessions in this blog post. For a beginner friendly version of this session see Agile Dev Immersion - Fundamentals

Get ready to level up at refactoring at LAST Conference's first Refactoring Developer workshop. Inspired by Code Retreat, we have run a similar session, for the basics of agile development, at LAST Conference for the past few years. We have felt that it's Important to support learning in technical disciplines that are extremely important in agile software development.

Too many Agile and DevOps initiatives are stymied by code bases that are hard to change and understand.

While disciplined teams who rigorously practice pair programming, test-driven design (TDD) and other technical Agile practices avoid producing new legacy code in the first place, cleaning up a pre-existing mess is notoriously difficult and dangerous. Without the safety net of excellent automated test coverage, the risk of breaking something else as you refactor is extremely high. Also, code that wasn't designed and written with testability in mind makes it really difficult to get started. So most don't even try ...

In the Refactoring workshop developers learn how to build an initial safety net before applying multiple refactorings, and have lots of fun along the way!

What's it all about?

We will be following a variation of the Legacy Code Retreat format. Working with legacy code (provided!) participants first learn how to build an overarching electronic safety net using the Golden Master Testing technique, before applying a range of refactorings too dangerous to otherwise attempt (but totally worth it).

As with regular code retreat, we will practice pair-programming, rotate pairs, and continue to practice rigorous unit test automation, and share our learnings.

Unlike regular code retreat you do not have to delete your code at the end of each sprint, and the TDD cycle is a bit more relaxed.

Following the opening session, Refactoring workshop will take the remainder of the day, with breaks synchronised with the main conference. You will also be welcome to attend the end of day drinks!

What is Legacy Code?

Legacy code has beed defined "as code without tests" and equivalently "code you are afraid to change". Unfortunately far too much "professional" code is legacy code.

Why should you come?

• We need developers and architects with the skill to continuously refactor and redesign, and managers and leaders who understand the value in doing so
• Come and practice and share some of the fundamental technical skills needed to safely refactor
• Lift developer engagement and work satisfaction by investing in technical quality rather than drowning in technical debt

This interactive session will explore connections and how personal mapping can be scaled to kick-start a platform to build better communications, trust and psychological safety to underpin your agility journey.

Design Council's 'Double Diamond' model requires teams to shift between divergent thinking and convergent thinking with regular cadence. But what does that actually feel like and how do we do it?

In this session we'll play some Improv games together that prime divergent thinking (creating options), convergent thinking (making decisions) and the pivot point between the two.

This is a participatory session with a pinch of theory and whole lot of game playing.

In this session we will cover a brief introduction to the research by Kegan and Lahey where they discovered that behind each of our habits is a strongly held belief that not only keeps us in our groove, but also fights any change that threatens the status quo.

We will discuss why personal growth and increasing our mental complexity is so important for agile and business transformations in today's VUCA world to succeed.

We will create your Immunity To Change Map which is a simple way to bring to light the your personal barriers to change. We will start by outlining your commitment to an improvement goal. Then we will sketche out the things that you are either doing or not doing that prevent progress towards the achievement goal. The Map then identifies competing commitments, as well as the big underlying assumptions behind those competing commitments.

The objective is to pinpoint and address whatever beliefs and assumptions are blocking you from the changes you want to make.

You will leave this workshop with a better understanding and tools to overcome the forces of inertia and transform your life and your work.

Is your team or organisation in a funk? Seeking some fun ways to shake things up, or change behaviours?

Put simply, a culture hack is an intentional action to affect positive change within a team or organisation.

This session will take you through 10 easy to implement hacks to create an Agile culture within your team or organisation.

Come away with:

• A deeper understanding of how culture hacks work
• The excitement to try one of the ready-made culture hacks
• The confidence to create your own culture hack!

Scrum is a great framework but there are many ways to do it poorly. The average IT worker is interrupted every 15 minutes, which equates to 2000+ interruptions for a Scrum team every sprint. Unthinkable on a production line, yet too often the norm in offices.

I conducted original research with Scrum teams in Australia last year as part of my Master of Management thesis (and achieved an A), to understand the causes, patterns and impacts of these interruptions on the team's effectiveness and their happiness. And, how mature teams control interruptions rather than let themselves be controlled by interruptions.

Attendees will play a short game to demonstrate how destructive the context switching from handling frequent interruptions is.

My talks are always highly practical and I provide 3 takeaway actions for teams to improve their 'flow' and reduce interruptions.

Do you spend a lot of your time trying to solve people’s problems? What if you could learn a simple tool that you could use to help them learn to solve these problems for themselves? A tool that would enable team members to think more creatively and take more ownership of their work. By using coaching conversations to provide support and feedback, you can help individuals or teams to make sustainable changes and improve their effectiveness.

This workshop is based on the Wall Street Journal bestseller The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stainer. You will learn and practice his seven essential questions to help you coach people to find their own solutions to their problems.

There are some awesome prioritisation methods out there.

However, which one do you choose and use?

Often they can be so unwieldy and time consuming that at best all you can do is practically just use one.

In this session, we'll explore how you can quickly utilise multiple prioiritisation methods against each other in order to facilitate healthy discussions.

One of the Larman's law of Organisational behaviour is "Culture follows Structure".

"Culture/behavior/mindset follows system & organizational design. i.e., If you want to really change culture, you have to start with changing structure, because culture does not really change otherwise. By the way, this is an observation in large-scale;

Structural change involves not only changing the groups, roles, hierarchy, and policies but also includes changing the physical structure. In this presentation, I will share the real life case study of an organisation, where I saw changing slight physical layout of the organisation, brought a huge cultural change.

This presentation is filled with real life pictures taken during the transformation process so that the attendees can go back and try some of these simple layout changes bringing the change.

Many of these pictures were taken as part of Large-Scale Scrum(LeSS) experimentation process.

Management and managers have not gone away with the advent of Agile.

Old-fashioned carrot and stick management may have worked wonders back in the early days of industrialisation, but is woefully inadequate for undertaking complex knowledge work in an uncertain and volatile world.

At the other extreme, dropping all structure in favour of radical self-management — mocked as "everyone gathering around a campfire singing kumbaya" — doesn't instantly lead to effective coördination, let alone organisational success.

In this workshop we explore the state of the art of management with a mix of design thinking and facilitated discussion to uncover rich insights and perspectives into the nature of management, and what a re-boot could look like.

Let's level-up management!

"If you don't like the weather in Melbourne, wait 10 minutes."

There isn't an application able to correctly forecast what our day will be like. Many people in Melbourne are frustrated by both the weather apps that all look the same and the unpredictability of the weather changing every ten minutes.

This interactive session will see us reflect on Agile and System Thinking principles to build a prototype through one Lean Startup cycle. Using Melbourne's weather, it will highlight how important it is to question the value brought by things that are established.

Shy inventors will have an opportunity to understand that an idea is never too big and learn a good way to start getting their dreams into reality.