An introduction to the event.

What to expect and how to participate.

TBC

TBC

In this session, I’ll explain how a truly awesome team embarked on an Agile transformation using Compliance Driven Development which increased throughput, reduced code and systems complexity, introduced continuous verification using continuous delivery, dramatically reduced failed changes and production incidents, introduced DevSecOps before it became a buzzword and created highly engaged cross-functional performant teams.

DevOps engineers fly from job to job doing the same things - the systems differ, but the problems (technical and otherwise) remain the same. Eventually, we ask questions not about implementation or technology, but meaning: what am I doing all of this for?

In this talk, we'll cover how we provided a converged solution (Docker cluster, monitoring, alerting, and security) from 0 to 70% of the company in three months. We'll cover how we did it - the approaches, the workflows, and the rules - but more importantly, the why: to provide an environment where the things that we produce change whole organizations and make people's lives a little better.

But most of all, how it made us a little bit kinder.

Diagramming and mapping our thoughts changes the way we think. It makes our thoughts and ideas broader and helps us to see patterns. These approaches are great for both individual problem-solving and team collaboration and co-creation.

By learning and applying these visual techniques we follow in the foot-steps of great thinkers such as Leonardo, Edison, and Feynman who used visualisation as a major guide, more so than language and equations, which came later.

Many of us have tried our hand at mind-mapping, which is an excellent tool for expanding our ideas and solving problems by breaking away from linear thinking. In this talk, I will demonstrate other powerful ways we can map our ideas and thoughts to solve problems, both as individuals and as teams.

Techniques include:

- Lotus blossom technique

- Systems mapping

My objective is to offer you options so that you can choose the technique that best suits you.

In this session we will work together in teams to develop a User Persona for the customer service representative in a Health Insurance Fund who uses a Knowledge Management System throughout the day to service customers. Then we will use this persona to develop a Customer / User journey map for the customer service representative to identify and prioritise features to improve their experience.

User Personas help stakeholders share their customer knowledge in a form that assists with design decision-making. During the design process you can use it to say “What would this person think when they see this?” or “What unanswered questions would prevent them from proceeding to the next step?” and so on.

Customer and user journey mapping is a way to deconstruct a user’s experience with a product or service as a series of steps and themes. These methods encourage your stakeholders to think about user needs effectively, identifying pain points and opportunities in a systematic and straightforward way. They help stakeholders determine the most important things the organisation could do to solve a customers problem.

Agile has become overly decorated. Let’s scrape away those decorations for a minute, and get back to the center of agile.”
— Dr. Alistair Cockburn, co-author of the Agile Manifesto.

“When encouraging getting back to the center of agile, I found I kept emphasizing four things:

– Collaborate
– Deliver
– Reflect
– Improve

The nice thing about these four words is that they don’t need much explanation. They don’t need much teaching. With the exception of “Reflect”, which is done all too little in our times, the other three are known by most people. You know if you’re doing them or not.”

Have you ever struggled with getting a retrospective started? Only getting very superficial actions out the team?

What is the best retro you have ever had?

Teams that create products that makes a difference start with getting insights in team dynamics and understanding strengths, talents & passion.

Are you curious about who is actually on your team?

Learn about games you can bring in to build psychological safety, trust and get your team connected to get more out of your retros.

It’s 2018 and Agile working has become the new Way of Working. Once considered the territory of the reckless and sloppy, now most of the free world is considering how they can implement these better ways of working into their teams and orgs.

We've spent many years helping teams move with agility and learn to adapt, to lose low value processes and amplify their performance through these ways of working.

A constant thorn in the side of teams transitioning to these ways of working, is the baggage of OLD ways of working, in particular in Traditional HR processes that plague many teams. Through frustration, we started blogging about the Future of Work where we could ditch concepts like Performance Management Reviews and boxing people into rigid Job Descriptions. We wanted to see if we could spark some interest in trying different approaches that were more aligned to our 'Agile mindset'. For organisational agility can only really be achieved if we truly value individuals and interactions over HR processes and tools.

Our blogs garnered much interest and had companies like REA Group and MYOB reaching out to get involved in How Might We reinvent traditional HR approaches for a workplace of the Future. We even inspired the formation of a Meet-Up in the Netherlands!

Join with us at LAST conf where together we will design a new experiment to Unbox people from the Job Descriptions, and to Free People from the inhumanity of Performance Management reviews.

Leading software engineering teams is hard. There are hidden secrets to being successful in the role that aren't widely spoken about, but make a huge impact to the quality of our software products, and to customer satisfaction.

In this session we will explore these hidden secrets, discuss why they're important and what impact they can make in building awesome products. We will then identify within our own companies, what opportunities there are to put these secrets into action.

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.

In Lean Agile transformation journey people and organisation faced three common issues:

• Struggling in Adopting Agile practices without embracing the values and principles
• Identifying the level of Agility that is required
• Lack of a clear model for continuous transformation

Doing Agile can be achieved overnight, but being Agile is a longer journey. Without the right mindset, it can be incredibly difficult to deal with complex issues in empirical environments and uncertain situations.

level of Agility that is needed for a business depends on many internal and external factors like nature of the market, level of competition, the maturity level of industry, etc. This means some organisations need to be more Agile than the others. The Transformation journey often is misleaded by having the wrong assumption of all organisations and people need to reach to the same level of Agility.

MLAMP (Mazdak lean Agile Maturity Pyramid) is the first three-dimensional Agile Maturity Assessment which helps individuals and organisations (regardless of their type and size) to

• Identify what level of Agility is needed? (the why)
• Transit from the Shu (Doing) level and ultimately reach to the Ri (Being) level?
• Transform less Agile organisations and people to more Agile ones?

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

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.

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!

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. If you are a developer with more experience, you might like to consider Agile Dev Immersion - Refactoring.

Get ready to Level Up your agile developer skills. Inspired by Code Retreat, we have run a similar session 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.

This is an intensive practice event for developers, inspired by the Code retreat movement. It focuses on the fundamentals of software development and design, including pair programming, test-driven development, OO and functional programming techniques, and new languages. By providing developers the opportunity to take part in focused practice, away from the pressures of 'getting things done', the format has proven itself to be a highly effective means of skill improvement. Practicing the basic principles of modular and object-oriented design, developers can improve their ability to write code that minimizes the cost of change over time.

This event is beginner friendly. However it is also suitable for those who have already attended similar sessions as we will be creating a tenpin bowling scorer rather than solving Game Of Life again. There is also a concurrent workshop for Refactoring legacy code that is aimed at more experienced devs.

Following the opening session, The Agile Developer Immersion 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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Over the years REA has mastered the art of delivering products following the lean startup principles, however, working with a bank to create a home loans product was a different ballgame. Functioning in the Build-Measure-Learn cycles requires a fundamental change in the way people (or organizations) think and work.

In spring of 2017, REA made a big leap from being purely a media organization to venturing into financial services. As a result, there is now an innovative product offering in the Australian home loans market that allows consumers to sort out their home finance needs while they are still in the market looking for their dream home, all from the comfort of their living room couch.

This talk is about how to shape up your products with decisions based on data, metrics, and evidence over personal opinion.

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.

This is a game that uses a popular party game called Monikers. It was adapted by our colleague (and LAST Conference BNE co-organiser), Jacinta Streat. She ran a session of this game at 1st Conference and I am doing a version of this for LAST Conf.

The session will consists of teams of players, working together to deliver "value", and competing/cooperating with other teams, along the way. It's a chance to think about how communication, delivery, reflection and improvement happen in teams and in organisations.

The times I have seen and facilitated this game, it's been a raucous and fun learning experience. So come along and let's learn together!

I'm using equipment for this game that is a combo of cards that Jacinta kindly sent ot me and the Creative Commons licenced Monikers cards. Monikers is available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

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.

We are looking at solving a business problem in 100 days using an agile mindset.

Some business problems have multiple elements beyond just systems which includes people, data, systems and process aspects. I will talk about why and how business improvement projects are changing in how they deliver projects and the trend to be more agile. I will then present a multi-faceted business problem that has all of the above 4 aspects to be resolved within 10 sprints.

During the planning note that an iterative waterfall is not agile. In an agile project, the steps involved in system development such as analysis, design, coding and testing should all exist in each sprint of the project.

The participants will be broken into groups of 3-5 people and will be asked to read the business problem and plan for 10 sprints. Once finished we will look at how the teams have performed and assess based on the following criteria:

1. Is your plan realistic?

2. To what extend have you resolved the business problem?

3. Is your plan an agile one or just an iterative waterfall?

"Getting the job done" is a super fun agile game designed to simulate applying Scrum in an environment with various impediments (Just like the real world). There are various levels of impediments baked into this simulation, some are trivial and some are systemic impediments.

The goal is for the attendees to learn in an agile environment it is not enough just to focus on doing their job and they need to actively identify and remove impediments.

Ultimate Giveaway:

• One person will get FREE course valued at $1400 (your choice of SAFe Certified Scrum Master or SAFe Certified DevOps Practitioner)
• Everyone gets 50% off all Sprint Agile courses.

A ridiculous workshop where you'll work in small teams following Design Thinking to deliver a zombie apocalypse survival canvas for your customer. You'll experience what it's like to empathise through a customer interview, create a persona, ideate as a team and test your prototype with your customer.

This is essentially the same session that I did at the recent Scrum meetup. The presentation material is here:

https://www.slideshare.net/DanielPloeg/scrum-and-kanban-92219317

I will need to go through the material a little more rapidly for the timebox and perhaps restrict questions.

Players will split into teams and build their own model for improving organisational agility in a fantasy organisation.

Your games-master will kick off proceedings with a briefing on the rules and the organisational agility model we'll be referring to (the Domains of Business Agility Model - https://businessagility.institute/learn/domains-of-business-agility/) - and then tell you about a number of psychology-based power-ups your team can use to supercharge your business.

Teams will then build a super-sized business strategy canvas and pitch this back to fellow players so they can vote on the winners (I mean, we'll all 'win', but one team will win a bit more than the others :)

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!

This talk is targetted towards the entire team. Supriya will take you on a walk through some dark corners of your software. Places where people hold grim and sensitive discussions around how to provide value to customers when cleaning some old code.

This session investigates several key questions you need to ask when thinking about rewrites and tech debt. Supriya unpacks the standard arguments for rewrites and investigates the risks an opportunities in them. She also addresses how to build a business case for technical programs that everyone can get behind.

Walking out of this session you will be aware of the complexity of the rewrite discussion, have tool to think better about the choice, and be more able to explain business benefits in the language of the business beyond the tech team.

Key learning - how to approach the hard questions that may be asked around the technical tasks. How to ask the right questions to the technical team and be an effective non-technical participant in such discussions.

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

Are you a software developer? Do you ever work on a codebase which is more than one year old? Do you write beautiful, readable code? Do you write unit tests? TDD?

That's great! What about your commit practices?
This talk will attempt to convince you that your commit practices are just as important as the code itself.

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.

Active listening, as the name suggests, focuses on how we listen as humans in a workplace setting and how we can use these skills to our advantage. Anne-Maree has been facilitating in-house sessions for Xero AU examining how the practice of active listening can help teams and individuals to openly communicate, enhance working relationships and ultimately save time.

Posing the question "can you find your voice, by being a better listener" Anne-Maree has been investigating how the outdated ideas of active listening can be enhanced using techniques from the arts industry to be used as a tool to help strengthen our tech teams. Anne-Maree will share her discoveries from working with over 200 participants over two years at Xero AU - what worked, what failed and where to next and what can you do right now to embrace this technique.

I've been on a journey, and I've come to know that apathy and ambivalence are an awful place to be.

I want to talk about big life changes and the uncertainty that comes with them.

We will look at navigating this kind of journey in your own life. How curiosity and self-awareness can lead to meaningful change that will better equip you for new and exciting things in your life.

We will also discuss the importance of healthy company culture as the undercurrent that enables all of this.

Software development has embraced techniques like TDD (Test Driven Development) to help reduce the cycle time between developing code and validating it works.

As application development practice evolved, we needed to respond to change faster while still maintaining our quality - the way we developed our solutions needed to change - and so did our tools.

Now that we have Infrastructure as Code (IaC) a whole new range of cycle time challenges have emerged. No longer are we building simple proof of concept systems using IaC, many of todays cloud deployments are multiple complex servers composed of tens or hundreds of servers.

In this session we take a look at the tools and practices available to Infrastructure developers to reduce the cycle time of change while maintaining a high level of quality and confidence.

As organisations have become more agile and try to build “high-performing” teams, they have started to hire for cultural and team fit. As a result they search for people who can collaborate and are team players; who are willing to develop a deep trust in each other and in the team’s purpose; who freely express feelings and ideas; who engage in extensive discussion; who are adaptable and embrace change and who are comfortable managing constructive conflict towards a better outcome.

There are however, many people who do not meet that criteria, and for various reasons, may struggle to meet that criteria in the future.

Everyone brain is wired slightly differently and not everyone’s wiring fits the mould described above.

Does the exclusivity of the above criteria result in certain people missing out who could have significant positive value.

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.

Working on a software product team can be quite a terrifying experience for new employees, especially when you are a round peg in the square holes.

A year go, I landed in the biggest tech company in town as a non-technical person on a technical team. Looking back on a year full of adventures and scary challenges, I’m here to share with you:

• What to expect in the world of code, API, kanban, MVP and DevOps
• The candid (sometimes, painful) lessons on how individuals can prepare for, survive and thrive in this kind of environment

You cannot just adopt the "Spotify Model" has become a common theme of discussions. The truth is that all transformations are different and are driven by the context they exist in.

In this talk I will share my experiences working with clients on their transformations and how each transformation is it's own adventure rather. There are common themes to successful adventures which i will explore and provide some guidance on how to get started. Many of the ideas that I have seen being successful can be related back to the ideas of the beta-codex, which i will quickly cover and provide references for further readings. I will kick things off with a quick reflection on where we are at as an industry with transformation and themes i have seen in the last 12-18 months.

All this comes with lots of real-life experience, stories of challenge and success and a pinch of humor.

In 2014 the Treasurer in the UK announced major new projects for the road network but with unprecedented time scales to achieve them. One Director, said "We were trying to face up to change and deal with it but it was a bit nebulous. I didn't want to work from to down theories and models of organisational change, because making them real is so difficult."

In this case study, you will learn how to use practical approaches as an alternative to traditional change models. I combined lessons from complexity science that Ed Olson and Glenda Oeyang developed into a simple model of organisational change (2001) and combined it with the future focus and power of Solution Focus. I will take you through how I worked with them, how I made it easy to use agility principles through Olson and Oeyang's model and how I used Solution Focused questions to create a practical future that they could put into place. Agility can give you a framework for constant change, Solutions Focus gives you the content to put that future in place..

The result was a 200% increase in the number of schemes prepared with only a 15% increase in staff plus a 20% increase in staff engagement scores when the rest of the organisation was flat.

As leaders we are expected to help grow the people in our teams.

A powerful way of growing your people is through facilitating mentorship relationships.

Mentorship is a funny word that means different things for different people. In this session I'm going to introduce the concept of what mentorship is to me, share my journey around discovering software mentorship and share a few lessons learned in setting up mentoring relationships in development teams at MYOB.

You'll come out a little better informed around how to set up a successful technical mentoring relationship

Most organisations now understand why they need insights on customers’ needs and behaviours to drive customer-centred outcomes within agile teams. But many organisations struggle to convert insights from their quantitative and qualitative research into value that actually gets delivered to customers.

And whilst many organisations are employing researchers, and building agile teams, organisational behaviours—at a team level, and also at a leadership level—often get in the way of those teams converting insights into value, leaving teams feeling lost at sea.

But there are behaviours and principles that teams and leaders can put into practice to create an culture of effective experimentation based on insights. By being more human, we can enable our teams to deliver efficient value to customers, and even within the organisation itself.

Come on a swashbuckling journey with us, as we show you how to navigate the oft-treacherous waters of organisational culture, to help your teams reach the mystical location we call Value Atoll.

Level up your retro's, team agreements, team forming, or any other session. Don't follow the pack - be the leader.

Something I've always done as an ATF is design my own team sessions - especially retro's - based around the teams needs. It wasn't until recently I realised this isn't what everyone does. I'm planning an interactive session where I can demonstrate and coach other's into designing more effective and engaging retro's etc.

(I realise you said 'no more retro stuff' in your submissions guideline - but hopefully this is more awesome and interesting than just talking about retros)

I've suggested Intermediate because I think it's better people have already facilitated retro's.

Guidance on how to make the most of your offshore team from our 5+ years of experience building and optimising a combined team

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.

The Agile version of Cards Against Humanity. You may have seen versions of this on the internet, but rest assured this version has been enhanced to yield a minimum of 156% more awesomeness. Relatively fresh from its stellar debut at the 2017 Xero Unconference!

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.

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.

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.

I'm regularly asked by male peers and colleagues what specific actions they can take to help make our Technology community a safer and more inclusive place for women and minorities.

And with the rise of the #metoo movement, the conversation around gender discrimination has reached a new level of openess and transparency around what is and what is not acceptable workplace behaviour.

In this talk we will unpack some real-life horror stories from within our own community. From this we will interactively discuss ways in which all of us can combat inappropriate behaviour and stigmatise it when and where we see it. The intent of this session is to help foster a more progressive, inclusive, diverse and thriving ecosystem that we all enjoy being a part of.

The standard we walk past is the standard we accept after all.

MLC Life was spun out of NAB in 2016 and purchased by a Japanese insurance business with a dream to create the best standalone digital life insurance business in Australia. One year in the CEO realised Agile approaches could help the business deliver on its purpose, however he recognised a fundamental culture change was needed to make it happen.

How would we enable the culture change? Why by changing the system of course! A quarterly based operating rhythm won't change the culture itself, but it creates regular reflection and improvement cycle that drives change in itself.

In this talk, we'll cover two key elements: How Lani and Tim worked with the CEO to initiate the journey to agility, and how the new rhythm sparked change across the organisation.

Initiating the change

Building a relationship with the CEO and his executive leadership team, Lani & Tim portrayed the art of the possible – sharing what a healthy, aligned adaptive and agile organisation looks and feels like as well as expressing the risks if they continued with the current operating methods and practices. We reflected on past and present to understand constraints and pain points, co-designed a new operating rhythm to enable the leadership team to think and work differently and executed a safe experiment to test and learn from.

How a healthy rhythm sparks change

The change began at the top with a new operating rhythm that established quarterly goals which cascaded though the organisation. This new operating rhythm was not imposed, however high performing teams quickly identified the new pattern and adapted their operating cadence to match. This created a different way of thinking across the business, where people focused on the vision, purpose and strategy, but optimised for adaptability and value creation.

Do we know our stuff?
OKR Quickstart coaches and consults businesses on how to create strategic clarity, achieve audacious goals and build high performing teams. We've helped hundreds of people and businesses introduce OKR so that everyone finds crazy value out of them (not just the exec team). We've made every mistake in the book and this session summarises some of our biggest learnings!

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.

Vendor management is emerging as a core business competency and organisations are focusing more on how to better manage alliances to minimise risk, improve performance and take advantage of innovation opportunities through great external partnerships.

The relationship an organisation has with its suppliers is one aspect that may impact how a supplier can deliver its obligations as well as how quickly and efficiently it responds to unpredictable challenges that arise during the contract lifetime.

This session is a guided walk through collaboration; what it is, why it is valuable and what areas you should focus on to improve your collaboration capabilities.

The purpose of the session is to help participants put some structure around the thinking and to help develop a roadmap for maturing collaboration at their workplace.

Agile Mindset is highly talked about and prized amongst agilists. Claims for its benefits range from 10x improvement, can’t be agile without it and requires organisational and cultural change to achieve.

Social psychology presnets a different view where mindset is a cognittive toolkit used to understand and taking action in a complex world. This defintion implies everyone posesses an agile mindset.

Is agile mindset a nirvana state which will enable you to levitate and be at peace with the world? Is it what is constraining everyone from achieving life, love and happiness. Or is it something more practical, humanistic and useful.

Looking through the lenses of behavioural and social psychology we will understand what mindset is, how it works and how you can become more aware of how yours and others mindset are operating within the agile domain.

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.

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.

All of us teach and preach about feedback in our daily lives as an effective way to learn and grow. I
do my part on feedback too very diligently. But as always I have an uncomfortable tingling anxiety
when I hear ‘feedback’. And so I decided to experiment with this anxiety. This is talk about my
journey with feedback and my 25 experiments in seeking feedback for myself and my work in
various settings like my training sessions , from my team mates (360 degree) and even in my job
interviews. I will share my top 5 experiments ad my learning from it and also the top 5 techniques
that I found useful in receiving feedback.

Creating an allocation approach is difficult in environments of increasing uncertainty and growing scale. In an organisational context, there's a tendency to default to SAFE's Lean Portfolio Management as a 'lean' response. Having managed Investment Planning in a corporate context for several years, there's an opportunity to integrate lighter, less formalised methods to categorise, prioritise & manage portfolio worktypes.

The desired outcomes are the place to start - the basis of decision-making is a bias to value.

Components of Lean Portfolio Management such as value streams & Quarterly Investment Review (QIR) can be used with more standardised portfolio planning processes.

This talk will review some of the key things to know and do to help transform your portfolio of work to enable Organisational Agility

An introduction to the event.

What to expect and how to participate.

TBC

TBC

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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