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.

The move away from traditional ways of working and thinking to digitization leads to change in the way we work, learn and measure. It is important to understand how the digital economy has shifted our ways of working in a digital organization from strategy to execution.

Join us in game play where we will explore Digital Product Management and the Critical Success Factors, Events and Skills needed to create value flow to customers. We will look at the skills needed for a company to move from being descriptive to one that can respond to emergent needs. Applying this knowledge will help organisations transform their operating model have a competitive edge in a VUCA economy. Plan to Win!

In today's world, if businesses aren’t more agile in the way they execute on their strategies, they risk over investing on initiatives that won’t result in the future growth they seek.

In this talk, we will discuss and share stories from organisations driving towards holistic business agility, and present a simple framework that can help organisations better check the performance of future growth strategies, and act earlier when it looks like those strategies are not going to turn up.

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.

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.

So you walk into a new company, get the lay of the land and then realise, crap! Their development processes are like they were design by a bunch of first-year uni students doing a group project.

There is no DevOps to speak of. There are snowflake servers everywhere. Their git branching strategy is unmanageable. They run tests only every 3 or 4 releases. Their deployment is manual and different for each release. The have no real alerting.

Ok. Take a deep breath! Calm down.

So much to do, but where to start? The business has produced a list of improvement actions, but those actions are focussed around fixing the symptoms of the problems, not solving the root cause. The business does not understand that the path to DevOps improvement is complex and each task has many inter-relations and dependencies.

This is the problem that I faced about a year ago. To overcome this, we went through a process of defining all of the DevOps tasks we could think of and mapped them into a dependency diagram. This diagram was useful to communicate both internal and external to the team.

In this case study, I’ll go through the process to design the dependency diagram, but also our progress through the diagram one year later.

"Before you can kill the monster you have to say its name"

As coaches and practitioners of Agile we see role anti-patterns everywhere lurking, sometimes quietly sleeping and waiting to kill (the momentum!) of our teams.

Have you met the Mr.Frost a.ka. the Frozen Middle Manager? The "Busy Bee-ast" so deep in her hero culture she has become a bottleneck and a crutch for the team. What about Hydra, the 9-headed PO, who can't make up his mind on his 10000 requirements. He comes with an extra technical head that takes joy on the fact he still has code access. The head occasionally makes code changes to "help" the team with the backlog without their permission.

This talk is about these monsters. The monsters around us and potentially within us.

We will know them, discuss them and identify how we can equip ourselves and the teams we work with to battle their evil rather questionable forces. More importantly in this talk, whether living around us or living within us, we will uncover how we can help guide the monsters to the right path.

‘Industrial Revolution 4.0’ and ‘exponential change’ are two concepts that are creating a lot of buzz lately, and for good reason. Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and Internet of Things are being adopted at a staggering pace. Platforms companies such AWS have lowered the barrier to entry, and are enthusiastically supporting organisations to experiment and propel forwards into a new way of doing business.

At DiUS we are fortunate to have a front row seat as this wave of change arrives. With our in-house specialists in areas such as AI and IoT, we have formed broad cross functional teams - including engineers, experience designers and agile delivery leads - to help our customers solve their business problems using emerging technologies.

Through this talk I will provide insights based on case studies of DiUS's recent project experiences. We'll contrast the dynamics with the digital software world that many of us are accustomed to working within, and highlight the constraints introduced by factors such as hardware manufacturing, acquiring training sets for machine learning, and navigating the complex systemic challenges associated with entering immature markets. Finally, we will discuss what we as a community need consider as to how we apply the agile practices and mindset in this new context going forward.

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.

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)

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.

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

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.

In this talk Ruma and Jay will share seven habits of highly effective teams, based on their work at Envato. They'll also share some tips to help build the habits.

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.

Hearing a lot about Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), but still a little unclear what they're about? Maybe you're hearing all the chatter and it's tweaking your interest! Well, join me for a farside chat and all will be revealed.

In this session we'll get under the hood of OKRs to understand the history, the core concepts and cut our teeth in a manner which allows us to take them back to our teams for further exploration.

At minimum, you'll walk out of the session with some clear goals for the coming quarter!

Do we know our stuff?
OKR Quickstart coaches and consults businesses on how to create strategic clarity, achieve audacious goals and build high performing teams. We've helped hundreds of people and businesses introduce OKR so that everyone finds crazy value out of them (not just the exec team). We've made every mistake in the book and this session summarises some of our biggest learnings!

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.