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.

"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.

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.