Conference Time
Local Time

Day 1

Thu, Jul 19
Timezone: Australia/Melbourne (AEST)
08:30
09:00
10:00
10:30

    Morning Break - 30 mins

11:00
11:45
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    Andrew Hatch

    Andrew Hatch - Leadership lessons through accelerated change

    schedule  11:45 AM - 12:30 PM AEST place EN 101 (L100) people 153 Interested star_halfRate

    As the culture of DevOps flourishes, with organisations adopting its fundamentals and rapidly demolishing traditional IT siloes to develop faster with greater efficiency, incipient challenges exist in managing and leading this change process. Keeping the business running, continually improving efficiencies in existing processes while lending support to strategic initiatives is still crucial, but so is building a much greater multi-skilled and faceted engineering culture, unencumbered by traditional processes and management hierarchies. Achieving aspirational goals of providing ephemeral innovation environments to rapidly capitalise on new competitive advantages, re-invigorate Product Delivery with faster and more efficient development and architecture practices, presents fundamental challenges to management roles as does the desire to nurture and grow stronger leadership roles to establish the sense of urgency needed to take advantage of these opportunities.

    At Seek we have been on our DevOps transformation for a number of years, a total of 6 if we go right back to the beginning. Amongst the many success stories that first began to emerge from when we changed our business from solely focusing on marketing and strategy to that of a product and technology company, has been the incredible growth. From a technology perspective we release faster than ever before (well over 1000 times a month into Production) and on the business side record profits and international expansion through acquisition have accelerated.

    However last year it became apparent that as our workforce has doubled in size and our embracement of DevOps as a Culture been so immersive, the very way in how we focus on developing and evolving our people, processes and technology has fundamentally changed. This fundamental change has in turn confronted the very nature of how we consider what are the right ways to effectively lead and manage our technology teams. Traditional techniques and processes specifically targeted at restricting and controlling what people do, and the manner in which they do it, through a culture incentivised against risk and failure no longer works. This change has forced us to look inwards, deeply, at how we lead teams of engineers, guide their work, nurture talent and creativity in order to keep people engaged and motivated as we face competitive threats greater than ever before

    This talk will present on how we have faced these challenges, the strategies we have adopted to lead the way through the chaos and ultimately what we are doing to sustain momentum and development without falling into bad habits. Like our previous talks this is a candid, real-world discussion on the difficult decisions many of us have had to face during this process, including the speaker, to understand what it truly means to be a good leader through developing a greater awareness of emotional intelligence while still being able to maintain a strategic focus on the outcomes and value our teams provide as they evolve and change with us.

  • schedule  11:45 AM - 12:30 PM AEST place EN 102 (L100) people 18 Interested star_halfRate

    Start ups have some interesting challenges and conversely some exciting opportunities.

    • They have a limited runway of cash – this drives an intense focus on delivering value (before the money runs out)
    • They have no existing culture or processes – there is nothing to undo as they create a new culture
    • There is no existing code to build upon - there’s no legacy code to deal with, and you produce applications that match what you need to do
    • There is no set of commonly understood processes – you get to adopt whatever works well and that fits your needs.

    This case study talks about the last 12 months of our start-up where we went from “no team, and limited functionality” – to launching a successful and thriving business backed by completely custom trading platform and fulfilment engine.

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    Robert Lamb

    Robert Lamb - Introduction to Plectica - a collaborative platform to support systems thinking

    schedule  11:45 AM - 12:30 PM AEST place EN 103 (L100) people 17 Interested star_halfRate

    This session introduces and gets you started with using Plectica, a web based tool that supports individual and collaborative thinking about natural, organisational and social systems.

    Founded on academic research, Plectica uses a simple yet powerful model of cognition to help you explore and map systems. It's generalised model of systems thinking complements specific systems thinking approaches such as concept mapping, causal loop, and "soft systems" models.

    Plectica's cognitive model offers a unified point of entry into systems thinking, and its collaborative software is compatible with most systems thinking methodologies.

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    Dipa Rao

    Dipa Rao / Alina Spektor - Level up: Unleash the power of quiet!

    schedule  11:45 AM - 12:15 PM AEST place EN 203 (L80) people 26 Interested star_halfRate

    This talk is given by an introvert and extrovert; we have discovered that we experience our working lives very differently.

    The world we live and work in is biased towards extroverts. We work in open space offices, with Agile ceremonies where people need to assert themselves publicly, vocally, and repeatedly. How does this impact people who don’t display extroverted behaviour? Equally important, how does this impact our ability to harness everyone’s potential?

    What can we do to make our workplaces more comfortable for introverted behaviour? How can we give people the chance to contribute and be recognised equally? Explore options to take back to your workplace and level up!

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    Jon Gedge

    Jon Gedge / Jasmine Hessel - Accessing Relationship Systems Intelligence with Constellations

    schedule  11:45 AM - 12:30 PM AEST place EN 204 (C40) people 27 Interested star_halfRate

    Each of us is a member of complex relationship systems - at work, at home and in our communities. Just as emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and manage our own emotions and social intelligence is the ability to empathise and communicate with another individual, relationship systems intelligence is the ability to view a team or group as a unified whole and to work directly with that whole system rather than with a group of individuals.

    In this session, we will use a relationship systems coaching technique called constellations to listen to the ‘voice of the system’ which is created by everyone who attends the session, so we can explore together how comfortable we are in working with conflict.

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    Jochy Reyes

    Jochy Reyes - IDEO Mashup method: Creative ideation process & the Medici Effect

    schedule  11:45 AM - 12:30 PM AEST place EN 205 (C40) people 20 Interested star_halfRate

    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.

  • schedule  11:45 AM - 12:30 PM AEST place EN 307 (C40) people 12 Interested star_halfRate

    If you’ve ever wanted an invisibility cloak, this talk is for you.

    Cameras peer at us from street corners, from phones, from the dashes of passing cars, and from shopping mall advertisements. Even when you’re not posing for a selfie, you might end up in the background of someone else’s picture while you’re out at dinner — and if that photograph is uploaded to a social media site, facial recognition can pick you out of the lineup.

    Machines are getting better at recognising our faces — but if you want to sneak through the streets of your city like a young wizard in the corridors after midnight, there is still hope.

    This talk provides an overview of the latest urban camouflage technology and how to deploy it in order to foil facial recognition. During this session, you’ll learn the ways machines “see” us, and how to play with them in order to become invisible. We’ll dive into the ethics of biometric identification. And, if you’re feeling adventurous, you can have fun with reflective tape and face paint to disguise yourselves from the algorithmic eye.

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    Peter Lee

    Peter Lee - Using Lean Tools to Create Product Team Balance

    schedule  11:45 AM - 12:30 PM AEST place EN 308 (C40) people 18 Interested star_halfRate

    Product teams must balance the needs of the future with supporting today.

    In this workshop you will learn how to apply lean tools such as Pareto Analysis and the PICK matrix along site the cost of delay to help a product team ensure they are able to make targeted investments around the supportability of their product to ensure they are as effective as possible.

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    Aurelien Beraud

    Aurelien Beraud - Continuous improvement: beyond retros

    schedule  11:45 AM - 12:30 PM AEST place  EN 313 (L100) people 90 Interested star_halfRate

    We seem to try to foster a mindset of continuously and relentlessly striving for improvement with mainly one practice: retrospectives have been our default and often only continuous improvement tool for years. I certainly used to think that retrospectives were the most important ceremony and as a coach I used to consider them as my main tool to drive improvement.

    However, retrospectives are often disjointed from each other. The insights of one retrospective might be lost right after the end of it or until they are rediscovered in a future one. In addition, if we need to wait for the end of an iteration to look at improving, then can we really talk about continuous improvement?

    In this talk, I want to look beyond retrospectives and explore which other tools (Toyota Kata, Improvement Boards, etc.) and other concepts we can inject and explore to foster a continuous improvement mindset. I will present my own journey by sharing experiments I conducted and am planning to carry out, what has worked for me but more importantly what hasn't and where I failed.

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    Simon Minness

    Simon Minness - What your agile transformation needs to get right - more than casual dress and post-its

    schedule  11:45 AM - 12:15 PM AEST place EN 515 (L80) people 30 Interested star_halfRate

    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!

12:30

    Lunch - 60 mins

13:30
14:15
15:00

    Afternoon Break - 30 mins

15:30
16:15
17:00

    Drinks at Holy Moly (by Reece Tech) - 90 mins

Day 2

Fri, Jul 20
08:30
09:00
09:45
10:45

    Morning Break - 30 mins

11:15
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    Mia Horrigan

    Mia Horrigan - Take the Red Pill and the Blue Pill - delivering policy with Agility

    schedule  11:15 AM - 12:00 PM AEST place EN 101 (L100) people 42 Interested star_halfRate

    How do you deliver a big policy outcome that normally take 6 months when you only have weeks?

    An early election was called and we faced having to develop two sets of a comprehensive policy documents -- the red book (left-wing) and the blue book (right-wing) -- to brief an incoming government in 8 weeks. We were caught by surprise, the normal lead time were gone, and news about policy commitments came faster from TV and social media than traditional internal sources. This was a non ICT business team who hadn't done Agile before however we felt given the time frames, it was the best way to approach for such a high profile project.

    Come and learn about and application of Lean Kanban and how we delivered the outcome through:

    • engagement with the executive to share drafts of chapters, then gather and incorporate feedback in short iterative cycles to improve transparency and alignment.
    • team design in non-software environment
    • limiting waste and duplication
    • visualising flow
    • coordination of “Scrum of Scrums” key daily meetings to promote collaboration, visibility and transparency
    • supporting team leads to coordinate the collaborative, dynamic planning process, prioritising work that needs to be done against the capacity and capability of the team
    • providing visibility and transparency of work in progress and flow and share this with other teams and stakeholders.

    Mia will discuss how she addressed business agility through working with a Portfolio Management Office (PMO) to assist the Incoming Government Brief (IGB) task force to work iteratively and apply agile practices to draft and deliver policy documentation to articulate the details and costing of policy initiatives from each of the major political parties in the lead up to the Federal election. This involved working with Executives and Business stakeholders within the policy domain during a hectic period where policy could change or be adjusted and costed daily as policies were revealed by each side during the campaign. The policy team need to improve the enterprises business agility to respond to rapid change and this involved working with the leadership across 12 branches to align iterations of draft policy documentation over an intensive period. (the taskforce was pulled together to deliver the IGB over 8 weeks). Specifically, Kanban and Lean were chosen as the method for delivery.

    This approach resulted in executives having earlier visibility of the approach and content of the IGB and improved quality of IGB by reducing the risk that significant changes being identified late in the delivery. The Teams were focused to delivery higher value work more efficiently, while being transparent about delays to lower value activities. The success of this initiative in a non-ICT environment has promoted the PMO to look at other business areas to implement Agile to develop an Agile mindset across the Agency.

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    Mark Pearl

    Mark Pearl - Code with the wisdom of the crowd - Get Better Together with Mob Programming

    schedule  11:15 AM - 12:00 PM AEST place EN 102 (L100) people 32 Interested star_halfRate

    Build systems faster and more effectively with Mob Programming.

    Mob Programming is an approach to developing software that radically reduces defects and key-person dependencies by having a group of people work together at a single machine. It is a natural extension of Pair Programming and is not restricted to a specific programming language or technology.

    In this session Mark shares his 4 year journey with Mob Programming, what's worked, what hasn't and why you should consider embracing mobbing in your team.

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    Andrew Murphy

    Andrew Murphy - My job as a software engineer is not to write code

    schedule  11:15 AM - 12:00 PM AEST place EN 103 (L100) people 29 Interested star_halfRate

    Many software engineers are lead into the false assumption that we are hired to write code. This talk challenges that perception and discusses the real reason we are paid to turn up to work every day.

    Coding is fun, but we are paid to solve problems.

    I will try and convince you that you can add more value, and have more fun, by concentrating on the problem, not the code.

  • schedule  11:15 AM - 12:00 PM AEST place EN 202 (C40) people 47 Interested star_halfRate

    It's never been easier to work and collaborate with people anywhere in the world. That's really important as ways of working evolve, because not all of the best talent is located in the one place.

    In this session I'll share some insights into how our hybrid remote friendly way of working works at Envato as well as share some of the challenges we have had and lessons learnt.

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    Alex Mackey

    Alex Mackey - Estimates and other lies

    schedule  11:15 AM - 12:00 PM AEST place EN 203 (L80) people 104 Interested star_halfRate

    Whatever language or framework your team prefers to develop with there is no escaping requests for estimates. Estimates are needed for planning, budgeting and prioritization.

    However there is a problem - our estimates tend to be wrong and sometimes very wrong indeed..

    Which leads us to the obvious question: Why are we building plans on something that's probably incorrect?

    In this session we'll look at why we are so bad at estimating and alternative approaches.

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    Tony Fifoot

    Tony Fifoot - Who wants Self Organising, Empowered Teams?

    schedule  11:15 AM - 12:00 PM AEST place EN 204 (C40) people 64 Interested star_halfRate

    There are enormous benefits of autonomous, self-organising teams who are empowered and trusted to build the right thing, the right way.

    Despite this, they simply don’t exist in most companies.

    During this hands on workshop we will collectively tackle this problem and identify a bunch of approaches and changes you can take back to your work.

    I’ll start with a brief intro to the main aspects and complexities of the problem, and reasons why we don’t see happy teams all over the place. I’ll then provide participants with information and options to consider to make progress fighting this challenging problem.

    Focussing on your actual workplace environment, we will collectively workshop how to roll out changes to unlock the “awesome” in your teams.

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    Suzanne Nottage

    Suzanne Nottage - GO WITH THE FLOW: your Scrum teams are interrupted 2,000 times per sprint. Let's talk about flow

    schedule  11:15 AM - 12:00 PM AEST place EN 205 (C40) people 43 Interested star_halfRate

    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.

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    Jon Gedge

    Jon Gedge / Jasmine Hessel - Accessing Relationship Systems Intelligence with Constellations

    schedule  11:15 AM - 12:00 PM AEST place EN 303 (C40) people 39 Interested star_halfRate

    Each of us is a member of complex relationship systems - at work, at home and in our communities. Just as emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and manage our own emotions and social intelligence is the ability to empathise and communicate with another individual, relationship systems intelligence is the ability to view a team or group as a unified whole and to work directly with that whole system rather than with a group of individuals.

    In this session, we will use a relationship systems coaching technique called constellations to listen to the ‘voice of the system’ which is created by everyone who attends the session, so we can explore together how comfortable we are in working with conflict.

  • schedule  11:15 AM - 12:45 PM AEST place EN 304 (C40) people 63 Interested star_halfRate

    Agile teams are constantly striving to "shift quality left" in order to enable faster delivery and shorter feedback loops. Shifting Left often takes two forms: automating earlier, and building quality into your stories.

    How do you build quality into a story? At MYOB, Scott Miles and Peter Baldwin have been helping achieve this goal through Agile Quality Dojos.

    An Agile Quality Dojo is a workshop which helps you understand how to achieve this and helps improve the quality focus of your teams. The skills taught in this dojo are applicable to all members of an Agile team - not just for Testers &/or QAs. Through attending this dojo, not only will we help you improve your own skills, but you will also learn how to run a dojo with your own organisation to help develop "T-shaped" team members and spread awareness of good quality practices.

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    Daniel Prager

    Daniel Prager / Jemma Ritchie - Levelling up management: Beyond carrots, sticks, and kumbaya

    schedule  11:15 AM - 12:45 PM AEST place EN 307 (C40) people 81 Interested star_halfRate

    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!

  • schedule  11:15 AM - 12:00 PM AEST place EN 308 (C40) people 41 Interested star_halfRate

    Being a member of a cross-functional team – such as Front End, Back End, API, UX, Product Owners, Scrum Masters, BA – comes with problems. In this workshop we will gather our problems relating to cross functional teams and form groups to complete simplified A3 Improvement Themes (lean improvement canvas). Our purpose is to clearly identify our problems and the steps which will assist us in tackling these problems.

    We will share our experiences and walk away with a set of A3 Improvement Themes complete with the first steps ready to implement at your own workplace the very next day. Personally, I will walk away with a whole lot of Improvement Themes. It’s a win-win

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    Hamdam Bishop

    Hamdam Bishop - Building great agile teams, but first: Culture.

    schedule  11:15 AM - 12:00 PM AEST place EN 313 (L100) people 34 Interested star_halfRate

    Why are culture, mindset and behaviours so important in growing and transformational agile environments? How is great culture created and killed? What ingredients attract and retain great people?

    In a market where there are so many wonderful and exciting places to work, we need to focus on creating an environment that people feel passionate about being a part of! Come to this session to talk about culture and why it's important, how to create great culture and how to retain and grow that culture in a rapidly changing agile environment.

    You'll walk away with:

    • An understanding of why culture is such an important element of successful agility
    • Practical steps for building and retaining culture in an agile environment
    • An example of what success looks like