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.

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!

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.

We've all heard that digital Accessibility is the right thing to do. We probably all know it's a legal requirement. But does it really make business sense to put in the effort to become compliant? In this presentation Rick will explore and challenge some of the common justifications for avoiding the requirement - and look at how we can in fact make a very compelling case for building products with Inclusive Design and Accessibility in mind.

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.

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

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 ...

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.

API development is fun! Everyone is doing it, from large organisations wanting to provide developer access to their systems, to small websites wanting to push web application business logic to the browser.

Password security is boring. It's also harder than you'd think. The number of reported system breaches is on the increase, with big names being hit by hackers.

And when it comes to a service-oriented architecture, you have to secure multiple services. That's just tedious.

There are a number of solutions, but few that let you pretty much forget about security and access control.

In this talk and demo, Ben will show how using a third-party identity management system will allow you to ramp up your prototypes and MVPs with more ease, and to concentrate on the core purpose of the APIs, rather than the layers of security that are a must in today's digital world.

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.

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.

In this session we will take an introduction look to Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery workflow.

This session is an introduction session to CI/CD and is best for people new to the CI/CD concepts, or looking to brush up on benefits of using these approaches.