“Principles aren’t principles when you pick and choose when you’re gonna follow them." – Chidi Anagonye, The Good Place 

Have you ever been in a gnarly situation where you really struggled to make a decision? Should I go left or should I go right? Should I go over or should I go under?? Should I stay or should I go??? How the heck do you navigate these messed up situations?! And at the end of it, how do you know whether what you chose to do was ‘right’?  

Big dilemmas can get us pretty worked up, and when the emotions roll in, we often let our instincts take over, while our brains forget to think. That’s where ethics steps in. Ethics is the difference between what you have a right to do and what the right thing is. Ethics ain’t easy, but having a framework to look at complex situations supports us enables us to put the emotions to one side, and consider things more objectively. In this session we will face some big dilemmas, explore the idea of making decisions with ‘good’ reasons, and discuss how to guide and coach others to develop their ethical reasoning.

• Ever attended a networking event or conference break and experienced 'The Awkwardness'?
• Ever wished you could connect more broadly; beyond the people in your immediate, everyday sphere?  
• Ever wondered how to create pathways into new organisations and industries, and learn from other professions?
• Ever wondered how many career opportunities are based on 'who you know' rather than 'what you know'?
• Ever wished there was a way to network that was grounded, authentic and mutually beneficial? (hint: it does not involve golf)

This interactive session will delve into three different aspects of Agile retrospectives that include remote participants.

The treatment of each aspect will involve an introduction from Keith followed by a facilitated discussion.

The aim will be to distribute the ideas generated to all participants.

Agile coaching is not easy and if you're a coach, you'll hopefully know this already. And if you've ever been coached before, you might recognise some of the habits that are explored in this talk.

In our experience, there are some coaching habits that do not reflect true coaching. There are coaching habits that a detrimental to the person being coached.

As agile coaching becomes more and more popular, there is a tendency for 'coaches' to jump on the bandwagon without the understanding of what a coach is. 

Most practitioners and teams are familiar with sprint planning as an activity for their delivery for a certain timeframe.
When it comes to multiple teams and large organisations, there is a lot of practices and different frameworks to plan delivery. Lots of organisations are familiar with Big Room and PI planning and use it for quarterly planning.
In Australia, many large organisations have tried different frameworks and have also created their own ways of working (often termed as "new ways of working", "better ways of working" etc). 

There is a challenge though, specifically when planning larger initiatives with involvement of different teams from the inside and sometimes from the outside of the organisation. These teams can have different commitments, might use different frameworks and may operate in different release cadence. How much can we and should we standardise processes and how much should teams follow their own ways of working?
There is no easy answer to this. In this interactive session, Rajesh and Gabor will work with you and help you understand what is involved in delivery planning for large organisations, including topics like shared vocabulary (e.g. taxonomy, definition of done), planning activities, tools, team activities, reporting, etc.

Has your delivery ever been inhibited by overarching, archaic governance structures & processes? has your organisation missed an opportunity or not capitalised on an opportunity due to the inability or speed to making a decision? Is your organisation still using lengthy business cases which must go through multiple layers of committees for approval? Ever wondered how governance works when scaling agile within an organisation? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this is the session for you.

In this fun and interactive session, Ally and Jason will talk through the theory and real life examples of how to get the balance between doing things quickly and having the right level of governance using a principles driven approach and concepts such as limiting work in progress, understanding cost of delay and setting up governance structures and process.

You will come away from this session with an understanding of how to scale your governance processes when scaling agile at your organisation by focusing on:

• Doing the right things
• Doing things right
• Doing things quickly with quality

Many organisations struggle with alignment across functions and between senior leaders and teams. Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) have become an increasingly popular approach to addressing organisational alignment problems. On the surface OKRs appear to be a simple way to set goals and measure progress, however the real world application of OKRs (especially at scale) is filled with unexpected challenges and some surprising benefits. Adopting OKRs successfully requires supportive leadership, sophisticated change management, investment in learning and more time and patience than you might think!        

In this talk Ben shares his experiences from introducing OKRs across 100 teams in a 1200 person publicly listed organisation in Berlin.  He will share his hard-won lessons of what not to do, and outline a low risk way to evaluate OKRs in your organisation. Join this session to learn about getting executives onboard, learn why cascading OKRs can be a mistake, learn how to setup an OKR champions and training program and more!

Training workshops also available on Freshwater Academy (20% off link for LAST participants): 

If you would like to get hands-on practice with OKRs Ben also offers a live online training to practice the end to end OKR lifecycle. This workshop is the result of training 100s of people in OKRs and is designed to get you started quickly, while avoiding the most common mistakes.

• Practice writing effective OKRs, and how to spot problems with OKRs. 
• Practice aligning your OKRs across teams and departments.
• Practice the weekly check-in process to achieve results

If you think that bringing your stakeholders to an agile way of working within the same organization is difficult. Imagine the challenges a software vendor face that provides software development services to client from different organizations. Multiply this by a factor of 100 when you are working as a vendor for government departments. The procurement process for governments is still set in the nineties. Often the client demands a fixed scoped and price solution. The vendor and client relationship and restrictions in those relationships make it tricky to run an agile product development in the true sense of agile. The client stakeholders and business owners do not have a deep understanding of the agile process and time for them to gain enough understanding is not planned. The development process is considered the sole responsibility of the vendor which is against all the agile principles.

This presentation is a case study of creating a framework using agile principles that provides a way to engage business and stakeholders in an agile process that helps in creating the best products possible. We will look at the challenges and tactics from the starting point of a highly regulated system. This talk is about how we can change the behavior by making things easy for our clients where there is high resistance to change the way things work. 

Lousy meetings.

We have ALL been there.

And now that most of us are working remotely, it can sometimes seem like our entire 'awake' life is just a series of back-to-back torturous Zoom meetings.

This session will help participants to learn some short sharp games and techniques to liven up and brighten even the worst of remote meetings.

The move away from traditional ways of working and thinking to digitalization 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. The original Plan to Win! game was a physical board game. We have now converted it to an electronic game that can be played by any number of people at once all over the world. We would like to beta test this during a session at this conference.  

Most enterprises struggle with ability to respond quickly to change, get to market faster and innovate. Now more than ever, the ability to respond to change over ‘following a plan’ couldn’t ring truer. Hindsight is 20/20 but none of us could have predicted the unprecedented effect that COVID19 has wrought upon every aspect of our lives. Now we are working from home, readjusting to a "next normal", but all the while living in a state of chaos whilst still ‘keeping the lights on’ in the space of not months or years but in weeks, days and even hours.

Organisations have already had to rapidly change the products or services they ‘traditionally’ brought to market and reinvent themselves at lightning speed to not just stay relevant but to actually survive. How do executives ensure their agile teams remain productive and how do you create a culture that can pivot and adapt to meet market changes? How to create the measures to help you steer when the speed of change is rapid and understand the leading indicators to track to reduce your risk profile.

Have you been working with OKR and wanting to take it to the next level? Then this is for you! After introducing OKRs with 20 odd companies and 2500 people, you make an insane number of mistakes. The good news is you learn a lot about what to do too! So, I've gone through the pain and suffering so that you don't. Here's what we'll cover:

1. How OKR helps your align your people to focus on your purpose
2. Tips to make OKR work well for you and common success patterns
3. Pitfalls to avoid and how to come back from them.

You'll walk away from this session with strong foundation to revitalise your approach to OKR and make it a "Hell yes!" idea for your team.