Do you want to fast track the adoption of Agile & Lean ways of working (& thinking) within your organisation?

If so, I believe a huge help will be to make friends with Finance right from the very beginning! How good would it be, if we could get the Finance function to become one of our strongest allies? In organisations, the reality is, nothing much can happen without funding. This enables absolutely everything. If we cannot establish and evolve suitable ‘fit for purpose’ funding & resource allocation models, right from the start, enabling agility is a wishful dream!

Finance drive this process, and, if we’re serious about creating more Agile organisations at speed which are ongoing and sustainable, then, getting the finance function onboard from the very beginning, will act like a massive steroids injection, and not doing it I believe will sow the seeds for ultimate failure!

In my experience, not enough time is spent engaging with & educating the Finance function. Finance has a very critical role to play in the evolution of more Agile & Lean organisations and the sooner their leadership can understand and embrace these Agile & Lean ways of working (& thinking), the better for everybody in the organisation. We want (& need) them to take an active, & leadership role in this evolution.

Once Finance fully grasp & understand these new ways of working (& thinking) and how they fit with what they do, they will quickly realise, that, these new ways are essential, to help them to cope better with a very fast changing world, but they can also help them, to do critical elements of their own job better (e.g. control, compliance and risk management), and do it more effectively. By embracing these new ways, Finance will become a critical partner, to not only fulfill their existing role, but to play an even more important, ongoing business critical role, to support and & enable organisational performance.

As Agile practitioners, what we’ve got to realise is that, by doing this we will need to get them to unlearn much of what they have been formally trained to do. This covers fundamental areas such as their core beliefs (mindset), how to lead and the management processes to be used. This will not be like asking them to swap out or change a favored briefcase, it’s more like, are you willing to undergo open heart surgery for the organisation? To do this we’ll need them to be extremely brave and courageous, as they will going against the mainstream, leaving what they believe is the safe calm harbor of what has worked in the past! To do this, they will need much help, support, understanding and patience, as this will not be an easy & painless journey!!!

In this workshop Stephen will share his proven strategy and approach, to engage with Finance, to help get them onboard as quickly as possible.

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.

As agile coaches we are often asked by companies to give them what they believe are shortcuts to success. They are scared or unwilling to put in the hard work and want a playbook from someone who was successful to be laid out for them to follow in their footsteps. Explaining why this is not something that will work is often seen as a reason to mistrust coaches. They think we aren’t giving them the quick path because we are just in it for the money. I found a way to help me describe this in a way that makes my clients feel more at ease. Everyone can relate to cooking shows about starting off as a home cook (non-agile organization) and what it involves to become a master chef (an agile organization).

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.

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.

This presentation will have a close look at what makes high performing software development teams, as well as what hinders them. It will cover each level of the organisational hierarchy starting at individual software developer, then group of engineers, full cross-functional product-engineering team, wider product-engineering department, and finish at the entire company. At each level, we will see multiple examples of teams to see what factors contribute to high performing software teams, as well as less performant teams.

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.

Everyone thinks they are a good at communication, but... how many times have you been at an event talking to someone you really didn’t want to talk to? Been sold to by someone who didn’t get that you weren’t interested?

These are examples of bad communication and they all have a few things in common, they weren’t efficient and they weren’t effective

.They didn’t go into the communication with the right mindset and the right preparation

Also, sorry to say it, but your own communications probably suck too. But after this talk you’ll have a leg up on your competition: you’ll know your communication sucks... and you know how to fix it.

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.