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.

This talk is a case study of our architectural evolution over the last 2 years.

Our start-up had licensed a customised warehouse management system in order to demonstrate our innovative new business model. The WMS had a traditional 3-tier architecture based on Java and SQL server, and was lightning fast with most of the business logic encapuslated in stored procedures.

Out our start-up we needed to be able to "test and learn" - ie rapidly develop and deploy new features and test them in the market with our customers. Based on the feedback we would identify tweaks to the business model, and fine-tune the functionality that our customers wanted.

We had a launch date 5 months in future, a need to scale rapidly, growing the team from 2 devs to 20 within 8 weeks. And we needed to be able to work in parallel on multiple features. Whilst ensuring that the application was secure, performant, and reliable.

The answer, according to a bunch of experts, was to adopt microservices.

Three years later, we have a suite of secure, scalable, and resilient applications running in AWS. We deploy to Production multiple times a day, and our MTTR is less than 30 minutes.

And we have Services. Some of them are "micro".

But reflecting on what we learned in that period, there are a lot of things that we wished we had done differently.

In this talk I'll walk you through the evolution of our architecture, explain some of the choices, and highlight what we learned, and discuss what we would do differently if faced with the same decisions today.

This case study talks about the last 9 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 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)

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

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.

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.

Less time waste, more USEFUL meetings!

The Liberating microstructures (K. McCandless & H. Lipmanowicz) are a repertory of workshop formats that enable collective intelligence and enhance trust among the participants.

Inclusivity, collective intelligence, collaboration, innovation; these words resonate a lot in today's business world where companies struggle to keep up with growing complexity.
And that's why every change agent, leader or facilitator needs to know about Liberating structures.

This 90-minute workshop will be an interactive overview of the liberating microstructures, making every participant aware of the diversity of Liberating formats available.
After a quick introduction to the subject, the participants will investigate the framework to finish with the key principles behind the liberating structures.

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.

The Derdians are a rural and peaceful people living in small huts nestled in lush green valleys. Previously renouncing any form of modernity, the Derdians decided this year to open up to the world and welcome new products from around the globe.

Get ready for a clash of cultures!

"The Derdians" is a well-knowed workshop used by cultural hackers to make teams (or people) acknowledge their cultural differences, and find their way to a better communication/collaboration.

The participants of this workshop experiment (and therefore, discover) the gregarious reflexes that human groups have when they are in contact with a different culture. The participants leave the session with key levers to reduce the clash of cultures and to encourage collaboration of culturally-distant teams.

Facilitated by Romain Vailleux, this workshop begins with a role-playing game (hilarious and dynamic!), and ends with a debrief phase to compile the learning of the workshop as a take away.

The best storytelling might be the one that you experienced yourself.

Let me tell you the story of how a 500-employee company completely changed its structure, lead by the employees' impulse.
After 10 years and an average of 20% organic growth every year, it was time to change, for the organisation to keep growing.

Originally, the teams were composed of senior & highly skilled consultants, divided into 3 industry-focused departments.
But over time, consultants started feeling frustrated being stuck in one department, working in 1 industry, on the same types of missions.
The company turnover reached a peak and in 2014 the executive team decided to address the problem.
More than half of the employees gathered to answer the question: how should the organisation be organised, in order to fulfil both business and consultants needs?

This talk will be about how the company organised a bottom-up conversation to invent and to collectively design their very own great place to work.

More than the organisation model itself, the talk will emphasis on the collective design process of the organisation based on a clearly stated problem, on the core principles on which the Tribes lie on and on the benefits that have been observed after 3 years of operation.
Greatly inspired by the book "Tribal Leadership" by David Logan, the employees ended up organising themselves as Tribes of expertise.

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.

As soon as...
You define what 'Agile' is,
You show people what 'Agile' is in your company,
You list what you do to implement 'Agile'...
Everyone has an opinion

And most of the time, that opinion would be... "that's not real 'Agile'''.

Every time you try to go specific with Agile, you lose some of the options available, based on the Values of the Agile Manifesto.
So, what's best?
Stay in an undecided state of 'Agile' and keep a whole and rich 'Agile' concept, or make 'Agile' specific to your context and lose some of the flawlessness of the 'Agile' concept?

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.