Ever wondered what on earth is going in your company? Your team? The system of work? Are people acting crae-crae? Is there conflict? Are there pockets of super awesomeness & pockets of unhappiness? Are people pulling in different directions?

In this talk, I will run through my systems thinking approach and experiences to unpacking and diagnosing a company, it’s context, it’s practices and it’s people.

If nothing else, this talk may help you with making the invisible more visible and may lead you to be even more situationally aware of the context you have found yourself in!

In today's world, if businesses aren’t more agile in the way they execute on their strategies, they risk over investing on initiatives that won’t result in the future growth they seek.

In this talk, we will discuss and share stories from organisations driving towards holistic business agility, and present a simple framework that can help organisations better check the performance of future growth strategies, and act earlier when it looks like those strategies are not going to turn up.

"Before you can kill the monster you have to say its name"

As coaches and practitioners of Agile we see role anti-patterns everywhere lurking, sometimes quietly sleeping and waiting to kill (the momentum!) of our teams.

Have you met the Mr.Frost a.ka. the Frozen Middle Manager? The "Busy Bee-ast" so deep in her hero culture she has become a bottleneck and a crutch for the team. What about Hydra, the 9-headed PO, who can't make up his mind on his 10000 requirements. He comes with an extra technical head that takes joy on the fact he still has code access. The head occasionally makes code changes to "help" the team with the backlog without their permission.

This talk is about these monsters. The monsters around us and potentially within us.

We will know them, discuss them and identify how we can equip ourselves and the teams we work with to battle their evil rather questionable forces. More importantly in this talk, whether living around us or living within us, we will uncover how we can help guide the monsters to the right path.

‘Industrial Revolution 4.0’ and ‘exponential change’ are two concepts that are creating a lot of buzz lately, and for good reason. Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and Internet of Things are being adopted at a staggering pace. Platforms companies such AWS have lowered the barrier to entry, and are enthusiastically supporting organisations to experiment and propel forwards into a new way of doing business.

At DiUS we are fortunate to have a front row seat as this wave of change arrives. With our in-house specialists in areas such as AI and IoT, we have formed broad cross functional teams - including engineers, experience designers and agile delivery leads - to help our customers solve their business problems using emerging technologies.

Through this talk I will provide insights based on case studies of DiUS's recent project experiences. We'll contrast the dynamics with the digital software world that many of us are accustomed to working within, and highlight the constraints introduced by factors such as hardware manufacturing, acquiring training sets for machine learning, and navigating the complex systemic challenges associated with entering immature markets. Finally, we will discuss what we as a community need consider as to how we apply the agile practices and mindset in this new context going forward.

Given that Kanban is more than just "Post-its on wall", getting started is often misunderstood and leads to shallow implementations that don't give you much bang for your buck. In this talk, I will give you a brief introduction of how to get a Kanban implementation underway effectively using a technique that has been tried and tested worldwide. We will look at STATIK - the "Systems Thinking Approach to Introducing Kanban". As we unpack it, you'll see that it can be very helpful in getting your Kanban system started in the right way and will help guide the conversations that you need to have to get started.

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.

A couple of years ago Christiaan Verwijs and Johannes Schartau coined the term ‘Zombie-Scrum’. What's it all about?

Well, at first sight Zombie Scrum seems to be normal Scrum. But it lacks a beating heart. The Scrum teams do all the Scrum events but a potential releasable increment is rarely the result of a Sprint. Zombie Scrum teams have a very unambitious definition of what ‘done’ means, and no drive to extend it. They see themselves as a cog in the wheel, unable and unwilling to change anything and have a real impact: I’m only here to code! Zombie Scrum teams show no response to a failed or successful Sprint and also don’t have any intention to improve their situation. Actually nobody cares about this team. The stakeholders have forgotten the existence of this team long time ago.

Zombie Scrum is Scrum, but without the beating heart of working software and its on the rise. This workshop will help you understand how to recognise the symptoms and cuases of Zombie Scrum and what you can do to get started to combat and treat Zombie-Scrum. Knowing what causes Zombie Scrum might help prevent a further outbreak and prevent the apocalypse

Using Origami, attendees will see how flow can work in a "pull system" and compare that to the way it responds to a "push system". From this simple simulation, attendees will experience how increased WiP actually slows down our ability to deliver something to a customer.

Come along and experience flow and how you can start to improve your customer outcomes, not by doing more but by doing less!

Agile was coined in 2001, building on techniques and methods from the prior 10 or more years. We know that (smaller) software projects are more successful with agile delivery methods than with staged approaches like the SDLC. So why is it that 18 years after a better was was identified that managers struggle to adopt agile in a meaningful way.

This is a facilitated discussion - there are as many answers as there are people! So with the late afternoon timeslot - let's get together and have an interactive chat - with the intent that we all leave with some useful ideas, tools and techniques that we can apply when we get back to the office ...

When a group of stakeholders and team members come together to plan a new product or feature, they often focus on identifying stories that deliver end user value through solving a business problem, delighting the customer or disrupting a competitor. While these are critical stories, they are not the whole picture. Every product has non-functional or cross-functional stories which must be played.

Security stories are an important part of these but are often not considered at all. When they are considered, they are often an afterthought or are assumed to be part of the project infrastructure. Trying to bolt on security as an afterthought in this way is a mistake that can lead to disaster at one extreme, and compromises to reduce product usability or don't support good end-user security practices at the other.

The challenge, of course, is that from the stakeholder perspective, security is not seen as a priority. This workshop is for software delivery teams who want to learn how to change this perspective and work with their stakeholders to help them to understand more about the importance of security. The goal is to help technical and non-technical stakeholders understand security and why it should be given priority and built into their product from the ground up. We show participants how to facilitate a structured meeting or workshop with their stakeholders where they use a simplified threat modelling technique to identify risks. The outcome is the identification of user stories (or evil user stories) which when played will mitigate identified risks.

At Myer, we’re well into our digital product journey. Although we still have plenty of work to do, we would like to start sharing our experiences in taking a Product centric approach to ensure we are delighting our customers and leveraging L.A.S.T practices to change behaviour and enable a positive outcome.

In this discussion, we will look at where we started, where we are now, and what our future path might look like. Our hope is that we can help others avoid (or at least identify) some of the more common pitfalls, and to help others develop a proactive approach to navigating their digital product journey.

Some topics for discussion may include:
- How we are working on creating a Product-centric organisation, and why this is so important.
- How focusing on the work that feeds the backlog(s) is just as important as the backlog(s) them self.
- Experimenting with the Google '20% time' practice, and how this helps create a trusting and inclusive environment.
- Constantly questioning the value of ideas, and initiatives. Like many organisations, there is no shortage of great ideas, but how do we make sure we are working on the most valuable ​at any given time?
- What happens without a strong product organisation? For example, what happens when there is no product guidance for UX. Now that we are working on building out our Product practices - how can we ​start to develop a healthy tension between UX and Product?

Experiences shared by Alexis Stuart, Digital Product Owner and Bob Martin, Agile Practice Lead.

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.

We always blame leadership and organization culture for ineffective Agile transformation. So do you think Agile transformation is top down or bottom up?

Agile transformation is not top down or bottom up. Its start with you. Changing the organization starts with changing yourself. We all have things in our life be it work or personal life , we want to change – our eating habits, our hair colour, our productivity. But change is hard! That’s because these things you want to change serve an important purpose – consciously, you may despise the behaviour, but on a deeper level the behaviour you want to change is a protection or a pattern that helped or helps you meet your needs. Until you identify and understand the purpose of this behaviour, change will be extremely difficult.

Here are strategies that can help you change “I” – Insights, “A” – Awareness and “M” Maturity.This presentation is focuses on scientifically proven patterns as well as real-time examples people can relate to and generate insights, create awareness and test their maturity to take up the challenge.

At MYOB we've been improving our graduate programme for software developers. Today I would like to share some of the insights we've gained over the last few years around how to do this better.

In this talk Ruma and Jay will share seven habits of highly effective teams, based on their work at Envato. They'll also share some tips to help build the habits.

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.

Story (or, more accurately, capability) slicing is such a core and necessary practice for creating agility at team, portfolio and even organisational level. Yet it is not explicitly included in any of the popular methods and frameworks teams use such as XP, Scrum and Kanban.

Slicing heuristics are collaborative, contextual, evolving techniques for creating focus on value-generating activities, leading to delivering value sooner and with more predictability. They incorporate all of the 4 core agile values from the manifesto, and many of the 12 principles, particularly:

• continuous improvement (inspect and adapt),
• maximising the amount of work not done (simplicity and focus)
• face-to-face conversations
• continuous delivery of value

Best results are obtained if heuristics are applied for all types of work, by all of the folks collaboratively across the value chain, but they can be used as safe-to-fail experiments by individuals and groups wherever they sit in the product delivery pipeline.

From a practical perspective, they involve:

• slicing deliverables at all levels, not only "story"
• flow metrics (cycle times and variation)
• specific inspect and adapt / continuous improvement activities to improve speed-to-market and predictability
• big visible boards (ideally)

Come and learn about this powerful, practical approach to improving agility in your team or organisation from wherever you sit right now.

Skilled facilitators help groups to collaborate effectively, generate and explore ideas, make better decisions, innovate, challenge each other constructively, and more.

In this workshop we explore three relational exercises that will help you to begin or continue to develop as a facilitator:

1. Facilitator power and presence
2. Listening as a super-power
3. Exploring perspectives without getting triggered

Practicing and refining these skills will help you not just in facilitation, but also in leadership and coaching.