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.

So you walk into a new company, get the lay of the land and then realise, crap! Their development processes are like they were design by a bunch of first-year uni students doing a group project.

There is no DevOps to speak of. There are snowflake servers everywhere. Their git branching strategy is unmanageable. They run tests only every 3 or 4 releases. Their deployment is manual and different for each release. The have no real alerting.

Ok. Take a deep breath! Calm down.

So much to do, but where to start? The business has produced a list of improvement actions, but those actions are focussed around fixing the symptoms of the problems, not solving the root cause. The business does not understand that the path to DevOps improvement is complex and each task has many inter-relations and dependencies.

This is the problem that I faced about a year ago. To overcome this, we went through a process of defining all of the DevOps tasks we could think of and mapped them into a dependency diagram. This diagram was useful to communicate both internal and external to the team.

In this case study, I’ll go through the process to design the dependency diagram, but also our progress through the diagram one year later.

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.

I wrote this blog a short while ago: https://medium.com/@justin.holland/cultivating-quiet-38cec9466feb

I feel like there are other continuous improvement addicts, or perennial impostor syndrome sufferers that feel the compulsive need to be more than they are, and do more in order to reach that unattainable perfect state of being...

And I know that a bunch of us find ourselves in a state of constant information processing & overload... thanks to the infinite information we are exposed to every day.

I have also come to believe this can be super unhealthy, and that there is something fundamental that we are losing, thanks to our perpetual busyness.

Some come and have a little chat, and reflect, about the role of not doing... and instead... being... (quietly)

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.

The importance of having direction and the right focus is not as clear cut as most companies think. Most of the time we try to fit ourselves into principles that make sense on paper but do not make sense in real life. I learned this lesson from trying to teach my 7-year-old daughter to play basketball (Trying to live my dreams through my child) and she constantly asked me why we did things a certain way when we can do it this way and this got me thinking.

This presentation is about ignoring the buzz words, lean, agile and waterfall, and understanding that these are frameworks that we should not be cramming ourselves into. But using them in a way that suits you as a team/ business. To truly realize that our way of thinking needs to be flexible and adjust outside these methodologies, so we can grow to work to our best potential.

We will talk about things we have done wrong, things we have done right and understood your teams and how they look at things, share in our experiences. Do we follow things to religiously and do we really do it right!

In essence, this presentation is about thinking like a 7-year-old and continues discovery vs What We know. It takes a look at how the team is the core of the platform and not something that fits into the latest phase we are going through.

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.

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.

What is our Motivation:

• Share our experience and how we could do things better
• Every time we share, run such a workshop we learn as much as the attendees
• Interest in giving back to the community and sharing

Why this topic is important:

• We believe, ability to effectively story map is a crucial capability for an agile team
• Helps teams learn collaboration, share and prioritise quickly and efficiently

Who are our audience:

• Team members who want to story map, non programmers, any one who wants to build or improve a skill, want to learn about agile

What is the main lesson/knowledge we want to share:

• What is the philosophy behind story mapping, why we do it
• How we can do it effectively

Best Medium to deliver:

• Partly PPT - 15 mins
• Partly workshop - 30 mins

Slides:

https://www.slideshare.net/bhumika2108/user-story-mapping-why-and-how-a-handson-workshop-158829985

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.

What could it be like to work through a real-life security incident at your company? As awareness about security in our industry improves, we hear much about how to keep our applications secure, but rarely do we consider what happens with your employees when something goes wrong. Allow me to share my story about the emotional highs and lows of working through a security incident, as we look past its technical surface and into the human experience behind it instead.

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.

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.

I've been lucky to work with some of this city's most skilled of agile coaches scrum masters and agileists. More often than not group sessions are lost to the more mechanistic aspects of facilitation. The straws and lego become the focus instead of impacting the hearts and minds of those participating.

In this brief but jam packed session I'll will convey a brief deconstructed view of 5 key themes for what makes facilitations stick.

I will share with you what they don't teach in agile, coaching or even workplace training certifications.