In 2011 Commbank committed to pilot agile on an experimental payments program that would fail fast. Its first release delivered neither advertised customer experience nor internal business commitments. Business and tech execs were ropeable and disagreed hard on what to do about it.

We'd promoted this program called "Kaching" as the flagship of Agile in the bank. If we did as the business wanted and returned it to Waterfall, the agile transformation would be set back years. And as CBA's first Enterprise-Agile Coach I'd trained Kaching's delivery team myself. If this ball was dropped, I'd wear it, and deservedly so.

So I wound up seconded to the program for the next year and a half. I assembled case-study data on every release and until now I've sat on that data. With most of the Aussie banks wandering in the agile wilderness however, this stuff is all too timely. It's a classic study of how agile goes wrong in an Aussie bank, and how to set it right again.

Most of the challenges we faced on Kaching had less to do with Agile delivery than Agile Product Management. The contract with external Design consultancies left no room for collaboration with the bank's internal delivery streams. The product management hierarchy saw no reason the program should deviate from specs. A dozen layers of legacy made an immovable tech bottleneck. And everyone was blaming everyone else. CBA's Program Steering Group had Kaching marked dripping-red.

Yet within three months this same program went green across the board in PSG - the first in the bank to ever do so. It stayed that way for the next year too. After twelve months it won a dozen external product awards and the CBA Group CIO award for best program in the bank. The next year the AFR reported Kaching as a digital channel worth $9 Billion.

In 2013 this commercial success influenced Group CIO Michael Harte to declare, "Agile has become one of the five pillars of this bank's future". And a few months later Kaching was renamed "The CBA Mobile App" and remains the bank's principal digital channel today.

Meanwhile Agile Product Management has become a burning platform around the world. The breadth-first product management pattern language we pioneered on Kaching has found its way into Deutsche, RBS, ING, ESI, Bank of America, and large and small agile programs around the world.

Pirate Canvas, Behavior Mapping, Business Bingo, Release Refactoring, Leadership as a Service, 3D Kanban and Product Squads aren't agile mainstream yet. But they're well on the way because they're easy, effective and really reliable. So this session isn't just war stories, but a how-to you can apply in any agile value stream.

Product teams often have a huge challenge in balancing the effort towards building for the future and supporting their product today.

In this workshop you will learn how to use common lean tools like Pareto analysis and PICK matrixes, alongside the cost of delay to ensure that your product teams have a continuing focus of maintaining a health balance between the two.

At Boral and Campaign Monitor we use this light set of lean tools to help teams maximise the impact they have on the supportability of their systems ensuring they have a healthy balance between building for the future and supporting their product today.

Being an Agile change agent can often feel like you’re fightin an uphill battle. Have you ever felt like you’re pushing, instead of having knowledge and support pulled from you? Have you ever felt that the ‘Agile’ you’re championing is completely different from the ‘Agile’ your organisation is pushing for? My answer is certainly YES to all of those things, and it sucks.
This will be an exploration the struggles I’ve encountered, the failures I’ve had and what I have used to solve them.

The Medici Effect was a coined term by Frans Johansson to describe innovation that happens when disciplines and ideas intersect. Take for example the idea of using something very technically challenging such as blockchain, and an internet favourite such as cats and you have the CryptoCats and the Crypto Kitties! Indeed the most interesting ideas are borne out of collaboration & diverse thinking.

This hands-on workshop will provide an introduction to the Medici effect using the Mashup ideation method by IDEO.

The workshop aims to guide the participants on the steps detailed on the Mashup ideation method of IDEO.

Participants will work in groups and will be guided on IDEO's 4 step Mashup process and will end with a Cereal Box design activity and sharing of the created ideas.

If there is an option to do a 60 minute workshop, I would prefer to this as a 60 minute workshop.

To succeed and indeed survive in today’s world of accelerating change and disruption leaders need to constantly evolve themselves, their teams and their organizations. This session will outline the need for this type of leadership, present the Evolutionary Helix, a 4-step framework for evolving faster than the pace of change and tools to develop their awareness, teams and stakeholder relationships.

This talk helps teams of software developers getting more quality work done by improving their code review process.

Writing software is a collaborative effort. Long are the days of developers hacking alone in their bedrooms. The majority of successful apps and tools are built by a team.

This communal effort makes the act of reading and reviewing code written by other people as important as writing the code in the first place. Even more so in a workplace that is becoming more and more remote and distributed.

Yet this is a topic that doesn't get much coverage in blogs and conferences.

This talks shares techniques to improve the code review process developed over the years and through much experimentation.

A good code review starts from the code author. Spending time to review the code before submitting it, and adding details in the pull request description goes a long way.

As reviewers is important to use the right language and to practice empathy. The review should focus on what the code dose, not how the code looks. Discussion about style and patterns should be left for another forum.

There is a lot that can be automated in code reviews to remove noise and ensure that important things are not missed.

Time spent improving a team's code review process will pay dividends in better code output and smoother reviews.

Successfully onboarding new developers is vital to the overall success of a development team. This talk provides a framework for evaluating your specific onboarding program. It doesn't pretend to provide a one-size-fits-all program, but rather gives leaders the insights they need to build a world class onboarding program specific to their own circumstances and company values.

Why are Agile teams supposed to be small? How big are they supposed to be? Most agilists tend to agree that a team of ten people works well.

But what is it about the number 10 that makes it the “magic” number?

Since the start of human evolution, people formed groups to be more effective. Whether it was the hunt for a mammoth or going to war, working in teams ensured a greater chance of success.

There have been various researches from Dunbar’s paper through the Scrum Guide to military formations about the ideal number of people in a team.

We’ll discuss the historical, scientific and cultural reasons why 10 seems to be the magic number of forming effective teams.

Does the number of team members really matter? Is 10 really the magic number. You will get an answer that will help you to create effective teams with the right amount of people.

Kanban isn’t just for work. How I reluctantly learned to use Kanban to get my personal life in order and why I’ve never been happier.

This session is a guided walk through collaboration; what it is, why it is valuable and what areas you should focus on to improve your collaboration capabilities.

The purpose of the session is to help participants put some structure around the thinking and to help develop a roadmap for maturing collaboration at their workplace.

This is a lighting talk - It is quick and easy.

It discusses a normally forgotten very early model of an agile coach.

This model still has things to teach us about the role of agile coaches, and should be an amusing 5 min shallow dive into their way of working and why we should aspire to be like them.

This talk is given by an introvert and extrovert; we have discovered that we experience our working lives very differently.

The world we live and work in is biased towards extroverts. We work in open space offices, with Agile ceremonies where people need to assert themselves publicly, vocally, and repeatedly. How does this impact people who don’t display extroverted behaviour? Equally important, how does this impact our ability to harness everyone’s potential?

What can we do to make our workplaces more comfortable for introverted behaviour? How can we give people the chance to contribute and be recognised equally? Explore options to take back to your workplace and level up!

There is a divide between engineering (inc product management) and executives. There is lack of understanding of each others role, their respective mindsets and how to collaborate and work together. This ultimately leads to a lack of trust, poor decision making, ineffectiveness and an inability to culturally move forward.

This is a topic that does not get enough discussion or action. It's time to change this.

A lightning talk on the importance of taking the time to stop, and think and learn? How ironic.

We tend to consume information now almost like we consume our green smoothies - whack our 5 a day in a blender and mush it down into something pre-digested so we can chug it down over breakfast or on the train without having to chew. We are so busy we need information provided pre-digested so we don't need to think.

This talk is a call to arms. A call to ditch our information smoothies. To take the time to stop and think.

Because if we don't think, how can we change? And if we can't change, how can we change others?

Workplace wellbeing is the new workplace safety, and a holistic outlook to managing wellness will not only improve engagement, it will drive productivity and create a winning environment.

Today's ever-changing work environment puts a lot of strain on individuals. Whether it is coping with long commutes, managing stress in the workplace, or disrupted sleep from constantly being 'switched on', work has an impact on both the physical and psychological well-being of every individual.

While the existence of workplace stress is acknowledged in most organisations, current efforts often place the burden of responsibility with the individual; overlooking the actual cause. Health and well-being are largely seen as a private matter of individual choice.

In this presentation, you will discover how to improve your well-being and resilience, and at the same time, improve your performance and productivity.

The work landscape is constantly evolving, especially in IT, providing exciting opportunities for those keen to optimise and manage their careers. With almost 50% of the Australian workforce being contractors, temps and / or casual contributors, it’s important to develop and market a skill set that is not only sought after, but more importantly fuels your feelings of success and professional passion.

This interactive session applies Agile practices to create incremental changes fueling monumental lifestyle and career success.

"This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes" - Matrix

Are you prepared to question your own perception of reality?

If so, join us as we learn how our understanding of reality is shaped by our own beliefs and assumptions and how these can create blind spots.

How does this relate to Agile transformation? As a Scrum Master, we often face resistance to Agile or learning concepts that would seem blindingly obvious to us. We sometimes walk away from these conversations feeling exasperated and frustrated that other's can find it so difficult to understand and adopt.

However, often the problem with others failing to see what you see, isn't purely about them. We often forget that as change agents, we bring to the mix a set of our own assumptions and self fulfilling beliefs that also need to be challenged.

The purpose of this session is to draw on some of the core principles of Liminal Thinking and how they can be applied to Agile transformations.

The Coding Dojo is a fun and exciting hands-on activity to learn a new programming language, enhance your knowledge on an already known one, or participate in a session where you can take advantage of the brainpower of the whole group to solve a problem. Beginners and seasoned programmers can participage and share their knowledge or just learn from watching others doing it. Within its many formats, the Dojo can accomodate even large groups of people, where one keyboard is taken in turns by the participans, whilst the others help looking up information with their own devices. The Coding Dojo comprises all values and principles in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development in the way we collaborate and write great code. We are using the Python programming language for this.

Greg, Will and Jane each lead in significantly different ways, they had different paths to how they found themselves in leadership and are equipped in different ways to interoperate situations and deal with getting things delivered, building teams, and providing direction. Leaders who do undertake a voyage of personal understanding and development can transform not only their own capabilities but also those of their companies.

Join us in an experiential learning activity, examining what sort of leadership we have, what you are using, and how you might want to grow and change to be the leader you need to be, in a world that is transforming around us, leaders need to not only to transform the way we work and the teams but also themselves.

Life is an iterative process, so why are there so many barriers to Agile adoption? Is our approach wrong? How do we leverage knowledge and experience from broader groups not from a DevOps background to increase performance and customer centric outcomes? What can we learn and therefore improve our Agile maturity.

Let's discuss an unconsidered subset of our community that may well be our next generation of 'Agile' champions, that already understand how to achieve successful outcomes.