Agile coaches are mostly not qualified in counselling and therapy.

Knowingly, mistakenly or ignorantly, some coaches divert their coaching instances to personal conversations as if they were therapists. Counselling is a skill which requires practice, experience and certification.

It also has regulatory boundaries. While coaching and counselling are different, there is an overlap. Several coaching approaches had their roots in therapy: e.g. Solutions Focus Coaching came from Brief Therapy, Non-Violent Communication from Marshall Rosenberg (via Carl Rogers).

As coaches, it is imperative to have self-awareness that we do not cross the line in explore in unchartered territories of counselling. Join this panel to learn more about counselling and coaching.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

We often come into (or observe) situations where the idea is clear, the benefits irrefutable … and yet there is so much push-back.

The reasons for clearly disregarding the suggestion before seriously considering it can be multitudinal and they are very likely to also include biases which can be formed from almost anything – even unrelated events commuting to the office.

In this workshop we will explore why our experiences limit our ability to approach topics differently, and we will explore ways they can be overcome.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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

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.

"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.