How can an Agile Coach figure out when an Agile “Transformation” is going wrong? Are there signs that they might see, heed, and take action upon? Of course, there are!

Hindsight is 20/20, but in the moment, these warning signs can be hard to see. Let’s explore some of the more common, and frightening, warning signs that your Agile “Transformation” might be exhibiting. We will discuss transformation provider types, frameworks, keywords, and other anti-patterns that might be signs that THE END IS NIGH.

This session will review common themes and help familiarize you with the warning signs. Armed with this new knowledge, you will be able to plan as appropriate, to help navigate your organization through potential impending doom.

Do you want to fast track the adoption of Agile & Lean ways of working (& thinking) within your organisation?

If so, I believe a huge help will be to make friends with Finance right from the very beginning! How good would it be, if we could get the Finance function to become one of our strongest allies? In organisations, the reality is, nothing much can happen without funding. This enables absolutely everything. If we cannot establish and evolve suitable ‘fit for purpose’ funding & resource allocation models, right from the start, enabling agility is a wishful dream!

Finance drive this process, and, if we’re serious about creating more Agile organisations at speed which are ongoing and sustainable, then, getting the finance function onboard from the very beginning, will act like a massive steroids injection, and not doing it I believe will sow the seeds for ultimate failure!

In my experience, not enough time is spent engaging with & educating the Finance function. Finance has a very critical role to play in the evolution of more Agile & Lean organisations and the sooner their leadership can understand and embrace these Agile & Lean ways of working (& thinking), the better for everybody in the organisation. We want (& need) them to take an active, & leadership role in this evolution.

Once Finance fully grasp & understand these new ways of working (& thinking) and how they fit with what they do, they will quickly realise, that, these new ways are essential, to help them to cope better with a very fast changing world, but they can also help them, to do critical elements of their own job better (e.g. control, compliance and risk management), and do it more effectively. By embracing these new ways, Finance will become a critical partner, to not only fulfill their existing role, but to play an even more important, ongoing business critical role, to support and & enable organisational performance.

As Agile practitioners, what we’ve got to realise is that, by doing this we will need to get them to unlearn much of what they have been formally trained to do. This covers fundamental areas such as their core beliefs (mindset), how to lead and the management processes to be used. This will not be like asking them to swap out or change a favored briefcase, it’s more like, are you willing to undergo open heart surgery for the organisation? To do this we’ll need them to be extremely brave and courageous, as they will going against the mainstream, leaving what they believe is the safe calm harbor of what has worked in the past! To do this, they will need much help, support, understanding and patience, as this will not be an easy & painless journey!!!

In this workshop Stephen will share his proven strategy and approach, to engage with Finance, to help get them onboard as quickly as possible.

This presentation will come with the goal of teaching attendees;

- How to look out for gamification and habitual depedance in the real world and digital products

- How these features will try to use your own brain chemistry to their advantage

- How to use these features in your own products and assit your customers into building good habits

After walking away from this presentation the attendees should feel they have a much better understanding of habitual loops companies will put in their products to try and get you onboard, the ways in which they will try to manipulate you, and how you can use these powers for good.

The easy case for coaching looks something like this: a prospective coachee wants to change, can articulate their goals, and is matched up with a suitably experienced and competent coach, the two are a good fit, and they quickly get down to the challenging yet rewarding business of growth and change.

But what if a person (or team) doesn't want to change and would rather not be coached? And despite this an external power deems that change is needed and that coaching will bring this change about. What's a coach to do? What about the coachee(s)? What about the role of the client who's engaged the coach?

This situation is not uncommon, and bears more that a passing resemblance to what often goes on in addiction treatment. A person with a drug addiction (and often other problems) doesn't necessarily welcome therapeutic intervention at the outset. But an external authority has ordered it.

In this session we will explore the parallels between the two modalities of addiction therapy and coaching, including the applicability of the Transtheoretical Model of Change and the related technique of Motivational Interviewing.

These approaches offer insights into how to flex and adapt your coaching approach in the face of some of the most common human impediments to change.

Agile is now all grown up and is pretty much the de facto way of working for most teams, but it's proven to be a challenge for adoption at scale. Over the last ten years or so there has been a lot of trial and error figuring out how to break through the cultural barriers, political resistance and technical hurdles that large organisations present. This panel of luminaries (!) brings a wealth of experience helping many different types of organisations transform themselves to be fit for purpose in the 21st century. Come along to hear their stories, some good, some bad and probably a few ugly ones!

PLEASE NOTE: this session will be recorded live by The Weekly Reboot podcast and made available for public consumption. Your attendance will be taken as acceptance to being recorded and publicly broadcast.

This is a practical workshop where the participants will work in two sprints to build a city using the material given to them.

The intention of this workshop is for people to understand all the ceremonies better and it also helps teams understand that collaboration and working together as a team is the best way to achieve the results.

This is going to be a very interactive workshop while teams get to learn Agile while having fun.

Value is often used when designing and deciding on what work to do next. It’s central to both Agile and Lean principles. Together we will explore the question of value and challenge each other on what it is and how we use it?

After defining some language around value and looking at some possible models on how it can be used, we will jump into a group exercise to dig deeper to uncover gaps in our mental models and gain new insights into what this value thing is and how we can use it more effectively.

Coaches Clinics are a unique and free service designed to help you with specific challenges you've encountered on your way to a more Agile way of working. Organized by the training and coaching community, these 15-minute coaching sessions are available throughout the conference. Based on their individual needs, participants are matched with experienced volunteer coaches, to discuss business agility, organization structure and change, Scrum, Kanban, User Stories, XP, DevOps, Technical Practices and topics such as breaking down development silos to coordinating multiple teams and educating upper management for enhanced agility.

Hearing a lot about Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), but still a little unclear what they're about? Maybe you're hearing all the chatter and it's tweaking your interest! Well, join me for a farside chat and all will be revealed.

In this session we'll get under the hood of OKRs to understand the history, the core concepts and cut our teeth in a manner which allows us to take them back to our teams for further exploration.

At minimum, you'll walk out of the session with some clear goals for the coming quarter!

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!

Just what exactly does an Agile Coach do? Coaches may vary in their response to this question. I would like to think that most Agile Coaches, with some variation, would be fairly consistent in how we perceive our role. However, some companies or orgs or people probably interpret the role of the Agile Coach in ways that coaches never intended.

Let’s explore some of the things that Agile Coaches have been asked to do! Are these antipatterns? Doing what needs to be done? This session will delve into the topic of the role of the Agile Coach and highlight potential challenges and possible solutions.

Does the question "Can I give you some feedback?" strike fear into you? You're not alone! We've probably all been on the receiving end of what someone has called feedback but which we know is anything but. We may well have also been given the proverbial "sh*t sandwich", which most certainly is not palatable! This sessions aims to remedy the situation by examining what feedback is truly meant to be and how to apply it appropriately.

Feedback is all the rave with both management and Agile, yet it is so poorly understood and, unfortunately, so badly practiced. We know for organisations and individuals to grow that feedback is essential, but we rarely stop to reflect on how to do this effectively and in a considerate way.

This session will explore the fundamentals of what is genuine feedback, why it is valuable, and where, when and how to provide it in a way that creates desirable outcomes.

Using a simple model of feedback, we will share personal experiences where feedback has and hasn’t worked, and the learning obtained from these situations. With some light role playing, we’ll also experiment with the delivery of feedback, exploring the patterns and anti-patterns of common scenarios you may encounter in the workplace.

This presentation will have a close look at what makes high performing software development teams, as well as what hinders them. It will cover each level of the organisational hierarchy starting at individual software developer, then group of engineers, full cross-functional product-engineering team, wider product-engineering department, and finish at the entire company. At each level, we will see multiple examples of teams to see what factors contribute to high performing software teams, as well as less performant teams.

Due to requests and feedback, this is a repeat of last year's session for those who missed it.

How do you develop an agile mindset? You can't teach it, but you can grow it by changing your beliefs.

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 sketch 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.

Facilitation is among the most important skills for Scrum Masters and Meeting Leaders. This highly interactive 45 minutes workshop session intend to provide any individual with an understanding and a toolset to create and structure their own meetings and workshops. Master the art of facilitation in only 45 minutes.

Everyone thinks they are a good at communication, but... how many times have you been at an event talking to someone you really didn’t want to talk to? Been sold to by someone who didn’t get that you weren’t interested?

These are examples of bad communication and they all have a few things in common, they weren’t efficient and they weren’t effective

.They didn’t go into the communication with the right mindset and the right preparation

Also, sorry to say it, but your own communications probably suck too. But after this talk you’ll have a leg up on your competition: you’ll know your communication sucks... and you know how to fix it.