Jordana will share her experience over the last two years of introducing and embedding Agile in the Marketing Department at World Vision, Australia’s largest international aid organisation. She’ll provide insights into how her team has broken new ground in adapting Agile principles and tools for a not-for-profit environment, where the business goal is transformation in the lives of the world’s most vulnerable children. She’ll also delve into the unique challenges of applying Agile in the Marketing space and across a department comprising a broad sweep of functional disciplines, from Product, Brand, Creative and Social through to Campaign Management, Marketing Automation and Data & Analytics. You’ll hear what Jordana has learned along the way – evolving from the chaos of competing priorities, resource bottlenecks, and everyone starting everything but completing very little, to a place where continual improvements to shared working rhythms and rituals are starting to deliver real results.

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.

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

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.

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.

Scaling agile frameworks from the bottom up to work at an organisational level has been popular over the last few years. But what if we approached it in another way?

Instead of looking at agile practices and scaling those - how do we take the characteristics and intent of those agile practices and apply them throughout the whole system? More importantly - how do you as a technology leader role model it?

In this session, Tony shares stories and tips from years of agile transformations at multiple organisations.

We all have way too much to do. Personal Kanban helps you visualize and prioritize your work, and keeps you from taking on more than you can handle.