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.

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 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.

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.

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.

For many Agilist the idea of having a project manager attracts scorn and derision. The idea of having one at is laden with bad memories, mental baggage and principled objections.

So, is there a role for a project manager in an Agile organisation? There is, but it requires a different style of project manager and a project manager that thinks differently.

My company’s ongoing transition from project-based delivery to product-led Agile delivery runs in parallels to my own personal transition leading a team of project managers into this world.

Today, almost everyone talks about DevOps but not too many understand what's it and why all companies need it. I will provide real examples of what's not DevOps and what it is.

Just what exactly does an Agile Coach do? Coaches may vary in their response to this question. I would like to think that most Agile Coaches, with some variation, would be fairly consistent in how we perceive our role. However, some companies or orgs or people probably interpret the role of the Agile Coach in ways that coaches never intended.

Let’s explore some of the things that Agile Coaches have been asked to do! Are these antipatterns? Doing what needs to be done? This session will delve into the topic of the role of the Agile Coach and highlight potential challenges and possible solutions.

Single Page Apps are slick and fast. By moving much of the business logic to the browser, they gain advantages both for the application, as well as the load on hosting infrastructure.

But if they're running in the browser, how do we secure them? The code is there for all to see. Cookies and local storage aren't 100% safe. And what if the user refreshes?!

JSON Web Tokens provide a way to make sure that user credentials are kept safe, while still allowing browser-based apps to communicate with APIs.

This talk will take you from knowing what JWTs are to understanding how to use them, and where to get started. We'll look at the request lifecycle of the authentication process, and cover best practices for JWT storage and handling.

We regularly hear of another data breach at another large company, or of governments collecting and storing more of our data. Even if we trust our service providers, they're creating a honey-pot of information that criminals would love to get their hands on.

Data in transit is a mostly solved problem, with TLS securing the connections, but how about when the data is at rest? Encryption is hard, and worse, it's not end-user friendly. One misstep, and it's as good as useless.

Learn the steps you can take to secure more of the data you store, and how you can evaluate the benefit or risk these different approaches will bring you and your customers.

Come along and get involved in an interactive discussion about agile approaches, values and techniques and how they they can be MISUSED to dishearten teams. Hear warstories and how we earned certain scars as we took on the challenge to support teams and flip the pattern.

Background:
Many organisations are adopting and scaling agile / new ways of working. The sheer number of these changes happening at the same time, means that there aren't quite enough people with experience supporting and leading the journeys. This can mean there's a great opportunity for learning but the challenge of learning and then quickly translating theoretical information into on-the-ground knowledge to teach others, will result in obvious gaps. This creates three key problems

1. Practices and approaches being implemented with the best of intent, but missing the important (hard bits) leading to disheartening teams
2. Misunderstanding of the time any change takes to implement and that the pace is set by people's capacity to learn and adapt
3. Extended time being taken to best assist teams because they set out to resolve the 'wrong' problem, using sub-optimal practices and approaches

Come and join in the interactive discussion and presentation which will help set you up for success by

• Identifying key antipatterns
• Proven counter to untangle the pattern

As a coach there are natural tensions that come into play as you execute your role to affect the system of work, influence culture and change behaviours. The EGDE that good coaches are able to find allows them to navigate these tensions whilst maintaining the balance of stance in the moment that the situation requires.

Think of seeing the "trees versus the forest" but on multiple levels/layers concurrently. Being an actor on the stage versus maintaining distance from the system of work (being in the audience).

In this workshop I will take the audience through some of the tensions I've recently experienced and navigated as a coach and how I have assisted other coaches to learn this skill and how you can develop it yourself.