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.

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.

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.

We spend a lot of time talking about our delivery team mix and structure, we put time into reviewing their progress looking for room to improve and we scrutinize their backlog and metrics. But what about the other team. The one regularly forgotten. In most places the team that doesn’t practice what they preach.

The leadership team.

In this session we look at the function of IT leadership and how it can benefit from the processes and approaches we strive to achieve in our delivery teams.

Language sets the tone for change, but we continue to use the same tired language that we have been for years. You know the language, that dialog, those words that fill the pages of Linked In, airline magazines, and 'modern' management speak. Meaningful change continues to eludes us; and in the end, if we don't change our language, our dialog, our words, we're just waiting to fail (and not the good kind of fail!).

Join me for an interactive discussion of my top ~five words / phrases that I believe cause more harm than good. We'll discuss why they're an issue, and I'll suggest alternatives that may help guide you onto a better path.

“Being human totally sucks most of the time. Videogames are the only thing that make life bearable.” ― Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

While this quote is probably an exaggeration, it holds true for all of us at some point or another. Indeed there is something about videogames and gaming that just draws people in and keeps them enticed and addicted.

It is no surprise that concepts of gamification in many industries continue to proliferate. But what really is gamification? Where did it all begin? Is it just a buzzword or is there real scientific proof behind it? And perhaps most importantly, how can you leverage it in improving your teams?

* Many Agile practitioners don't have 100% free rein at work to practise Agile.

* After "failing" at Ironman with a Waterfall approach (multiple times), I experimented with Agile principles over several years, where I had 100% free rein to iterate, continuously improve and adapt. Ultimately, cutting 4 hours off my time and finishing 3rd in Ironman Australia 2017 in my age group.

* This is significant because at 5'2" and without any physical advantages, it was Agile principles (working smarter, not harder) that made the difference.

* You'll learn which principles had the biggest effects, and how you can apply these at work (or in other areas of your life).

Many organisations have benefited from the transformational practices of Lean and Agile at the team level, but how do we apply the learnings within larger enterprises that are tasked with building complex solutions that potentially require hundreds of people to develop?

The Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) is a knowledge base of proven, integrated principles and practices for Lean, Agile, and DevOps that helps large organisations with this challenge. SAFe was released in 2011 and is currently the most popular method for scaling Lean-Agile.

If you’re considering whether SAFe is right for your context, then there are four things you should know about SAFe.

Most of us deal with a great about of complexity everyday. What is complexity? One popular way to identify and understand complexity is via the Cynefin model. According to this, complexity is where cause and effect are difficult to establish, and even when established, are difficult to replicate. The model helps us understand how to identify complexity, and how to deal with it.

What do cane toads have anything to do with any of this, I hear you say? This talk illustrates complexity via a real life problem with regards to the introduction of cane toads to Australia and takes you through the impact of not adequately identifying and dealing with a complex situation.

So, how DOES one deal with a complex situations? The Cynefin framework says safe to fail experiments are the way, where you devise small experiments that have little adverse impact if they fail. And while you're doing this, you can generate new and seemingly impossible ideas to experiment with.

So come along and explore how you can generate ideas (other than just sitting down to think of new stuff), and run safe to fail experiments at work. They are a great tool to deal with situations where many variables are at play, and where the outcome is uncertain. Also, it is a great way to engage your team to come together to find a productive and effective way forward.

Organisational structures are an important part of any agile transformation and their design implies managing trade-offs due to the inefficiencies that can be created in each model.

In this session we will explore organisation structure designs for large organisation and the compromises or inefficiencies when organisational design patterns are applied to certain existing circumstances and the most common workarounds and solutions.

Some of the inefficiencies that are going to be explored in this talk are linked to dependency management, performance management and prescriptive approaches.

We will understand the importance of the Value Stream Mapping for effective organisational design and common workarounds to solve the issues created by the designs such as Bear Hug, Pre and Post PI Planning, Pop-up squads among others.