"You better bring it!

Oh, it's already been broughten!"

The purpose of cheerleading is to support and encourage their team to achieve peak performance - they give the team the extra oomph to carry them over the goal line! The cheerleaders not only support and celebrate the wins, they also encourage the team when they need to push through their trials and tribulations. Cheerleaders build the hype of the team fans by creating infectious energy - just imagine your stakeholders hyped up because of your awesome team!

In this session we will take lessons from professional cheerleading and apply them in an agile team context.

We will cover the 3 pillars of agile cheerleading – dance, chants, and emotions and explore the fundamentals and benefits of an agile cheer so that you can super-charge your teams.

BE! AGILE! BE! BE AGILE!

Teams avoid gathering customer insights for the following reasons: 

• time
• money
• expertise

In this session, I hope to solve all three issues by providing a technique and approach to gaining rapid customer insights by answering the questions you really need to know (plus a few tips on hustling).

Building the wrong thing is much riskier than spending a small amount of time and money on getting feature level insights. According to a study conducted by Pendo (2019), 80% of features built by product teams are either not used or rarely used by customers. By understanding if your feature, product or program meets the need of your end user ahead of time, you are far more likely to be part of the successful 20%.

Frederic Laloux's "Reinventing Organisations" introduced the concept of Organisational Layers of Consciousness. 

This workshop will briefly sum them up before helping you dissect your own organisation and understand:

1. what current level the different parts that make up your organisation are at
2. what opportunities and pitfalls you may encounter by levelling up some of these parts
3. what optimal level each of these parts should strive for

Note that this workshop will be underpinned by the real life example of how this is done at Mantel Group.

We are experiencing a tech talent shortage in Australia, which is set to intensify. Onboarding new people into our industry is an important part of addressing the shortage. Designing and running great programs for graduates and career switchers isn't easy though. Some organisations already have progressive programs, while many are still working out where to start. And everybody has a role to play - especially the team members who are providing the mentoring and coaching day by day.

This session is about experience sharing - through roundtable conversations we will hear the stories from those who are doing it, and to hear the questions from those who are keen to try.

The insights from the session will be combined with work being undertaken by RMIT FORWARD (Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation) who are exploring this space and are seeking to create a shared resource for our community.

Metrics on employee happiness, theoretical value, and work not done are just plain dumb. I will reveal the metrics that you need. That mean something. And that get results. Join us as we discover THE BEST AGILE METRICS!

This session is a twinkle in my eye! I have drafted an outline but haven't completed it yet, so it is very much a work in process. I usually write the abstract last, so this is a change for me. Essentially it's about how an agile coach needs to practice the fine art of ZFG. This session is mostly about the "why". For example, I review how fear is the "mind killer" and how fear prevents many coaches from speaking truth to power. As another example, I review "clean bias" and how a coach should not only be explicit about bias, but also also understand what their biases are so that they can provide objective feedback. In contrast, I also cover how ZFG does not mean "I don't care" and I distinguish between the two. My goal in this session is to help coaches understand the philosophy of ZFG and how it is a critical skill to embrace in order to be a truly effective agile coach.

When it comes to agile many people get caught up with the adoption of particular frameworks rather than focusing on the goal of actual agility in work and releasing software.

In this session we'll discuss the fundamentals underpinning all frameworks -  maintaining flow and  explore how the choices you make impact it .

We'll reinforce each of your learnings with some simple simulations using dice and sticky notes that you can  then use with your own teams to teach the same concepts.