The best software is designed when teams collaborate to understand, prioritize and trade-off customer experience, business process, organizational and technology considerations. In this workshop, we will discuss modeling techniques that work together to enable practitioners to engineer robust solutions - for humans, by humans. 

Learn how Event Storming, a workshop-based approach from domain-driven design, can help engineers to better design software in collaboration,  not in opposition with business stakeholders. As we event storm to engineer robust, flexible, and extensible solutions, we'll also look at how to integrate human-centered design practices to identify so that the design responds to customer/user needs and key pain points.

During this session, we'll give you an overview of domain-driven design, and how event storming works, use case studies as an example. For those of you who've missed collaborative workshops and thousands of sticky notes, we'll also have multiple break out sessions where we'll put some of the theory into practice on example scenarios so you'll leave the session with some practical experience on how to apply the technique.

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.

Have you ever walked into a meeting and wished it won’t be boring and people will talk to each other? If your answer is “yes”, then maybe you could be the person who lightens up the environment with some appropriate and impromptu jokes. In this session we are going to learn what a sense of humor is, the benefits, the similarities between a stand-up comedian and a Leader, how stand-up comedy teaches us to be socially aware, and develop better EQ. Can a good sense of humor be the x-factor to build a resilient culture? Are you curious now? Come and explore the answer!

RELEVANCE

A sense of humor and coaching/leading have many relevant similarities. A person with a great sense of humor helps people to connect with each other, gains trust, and improvises their jokes based on the audience. These are also the attributes of a great  leader. Having a healthy sense of humor can help model how to fail with grace, learn fast, and energize the people around you. Humor can help to create a positive environment for teams to be creative. You also need to be aware and understand appropriate humor based on your audience and when not to overdo it.

"You can be a rich person alone. You can be a smart person alone. But you cannot be a complete person alone. For that you must be part of, and rooted in, an olive grove." ― Thomas L. Friedman

They say the best chance to innovate lies in the intersection. It is in here that you will find remarkable ideas that blurr the lines of studies and disciplines. It is in here you will find the unusual, the desirable, the valuable and if we are really lucky valuable to humanity. 

But the smart does not depend on luck and with social issues abound, the clock is ticking. We need to expedite innovation, seek and step into the intersections.

This talk is a conversation in quotes, in stats, uses cases and memes divided into three parts all aimed to have you leaving the room encouraged and excited to find innovations (big or small) addressing social issues.

The presentation covers ideas from the book the Medici Effect, research on global trends and statistics, the UN Sustainable Development Goals and a healthy amount of Twitter quotes.

As analysts, engineers and delivery folk working in areas with a lot of uncertainty, there's often times a need to justify our "why" - why are we investing time and energy building bespoke engineering solutions, and where is the value for the business?

In one of my recent projects working within the area of security and control automation, this question of "why" came up multiple times, to justify how the program of work was shaped, to justify the solution approach, and to justify the value to the business, among other things. 

In our 40 minutes together, I'd like to embark on a journey to address these whys using a Business Analysts' favourite approach: modelling. At this point, you and George Box are likely to say, "but Sonal, all models are wrong". Yes, I agree, but humour me.

Using a case study from one of my recent projects, I'd like to uncover the utility of DDD modelling techniques and bounded context, by demonstrating its creative application. Along this journey, I hope that as we validate or disprove a working hypothesis, we'd also uncover its impact on ambiguity and the ability to shape the program of work.

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.

Let's face it if we have the option, none of us would fly coach. Depending on how long your flight is the seats transform from disagreeable into various types of torture devices, the food is literally peanuts, your chances of seeing where you are going depends on your luck and stretching your legs relies heavily on whether the person next to you is willing to give you the chance to do it. 

Now I know the last 2-3 years meant that quite a few of us have yet to get back to flying but the picture above can also depict being stuck on a project as ye old "bums on the seats".

How many times have you led teams who feel disengaged and demotivated working on projects that made them feel more like part of the furniture rather than experts and problem solvers? How many times have you found yourself in projects that have a massive laundry list of tasks and outputs but with no clear target outcomes? How many times have you as a project sponsor wondered if you are getting the most value out of your consultants?

If any of these situations resonate with you, this discussion is for you -  a discussion on creating meaningful and impactful work for you and your teams using the lens of the Cynefin framework. 

Equipped with the Cynefin framework, we will incrementally move from the lumpy, occasionally painful seats at the back of the plane towards the flight deck, a journey from doing tasks to solving problems that create an impact for both our stakeholders and our teams. 

While this talk will use experiences mostly coming from a consultant perspective, the use case and how the challenges and opportunities for improvement were addressed will be useful for industry practitioners or consultants.