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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.