Organisational Agility Using Scrum, Holacracy and DDO

Dynamic roles instead of standard job descriptions, fully cross-functional Scrum teams instead of departments, personal and professional check-ins with coaching support instead of performance reviews, personal bio pages with strengths and developmental areas, talking partners, consent-based decision making and many more practices, you name it we tried them all to create an ecosystem around our Scrum teams.

It all started with learning about team topologies and Conway’s law when we realised why we have failed to continue grow as a scale-up like the previous years. We hit a wall and that was a great time to start company wide small incremental changes that helped us enter into US market and continue serving Australian market with new products.

When we scaled up from 50 to 160 employees in matter of a year, we could see how our organisational design was hindering our collaboration, resulting in bad customer and end user experience. Our organisational silos created disconnected solutions. We were lucky to sense this early enough and get leadership support. In early 2022 we decided to run some experiments with a new product strategy and a new way of working. The experiments were somewhat successful and we decided to double down on them. And Now we are transforming our ways of working to fully cross-functional value streams from pre-sales, product design and development to customer support. We are using Scrum values, principle and practices to enable all of our previous departments and break down our silos. 

In this presentation we plan to share some of our learnings and also failures, in the hope to inspire change for your teams.

 
 

Outline/Structure of the Experience Report

Presentation including models, short videos, examples of our experiments and artefacts we created.

Learning Outcome

  • Learn about change management using the edge model
  • How to change your organisational design to support your Scrum teams
  • Deliberate developmental practices to make your company a learning organisation
  • Effective decision making practices

Target Audience

Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, People and Culture experts and leaders

Prerequisites for Attendees

A basic understanding of new ways of working 

schedule Submitted 10 months ago

  • Soma Mazumder
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    Soma Mazumder - Adaptability - A Toolkit for Survival

    Soma Mazumder
    Soma Mazumder
    Agile and Kanban Coach
    Independent
    schedule 10 months ago
    Sold Out!
    40 Mins
    Workshop
    Beginner

    The idea of change scares a lot of people! The thought of being uncomfortable in a new environment freaks us out and results in us being unable to adapt. Like IQ and EQ, we need to understand the Adaptability Quotient, or AQ, to succeed in our life. Be it a new relationship, a new role in life or a new workplace, we all need to adapt. If Charles Darwin was with us today, he would have said it’s “survival of the most adaptable“. In this session we will explore what AQ is and how it’s tied to our personal mental model. Our shared activities will help you learn how to identify your mental model and make it more adaptable.

  • Alex Sloley
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    Alex Sloley - The Agile Community - How to grow, learn, share, and become a global agile community leader

    40 Mins
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    Around the world there is a global network of people who, with little fanfare and deep dedication, incubate ideas that change our world.

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    You can join the agile community, too. If you are willing, you are welcome.

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    When agilists get together, they change the world. You can be part of that change.

  • Zuzi Sochova
    Zuzi Sochova
    Agile Coach and Trainer
    sochova.cz
    schedule 10 months ago
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    40 Mins
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    I will tell you some of the secrets you need to know to become a great ScrumMaster. Create a high-performing collaborative environment at your organization, which makes your organization more than competitive in the current complex globalized world.

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  • James Zhang
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    James Zhang - Building on human-centred facilitation

    James Zhang
    James Zhang
    Coach
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    Sold Out!
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    We’ve all been there… having to sit through painful meetings and workshops that leads to more confusion, lack of clarity and frustration with a poor use of everyone’s time.

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  • Nafees Butt
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    Nafees Butt - Coaching for alignment using LandsWork

    Nafees Butt
    Nafees Butt
    Principal Consultant
    Elabor8
    schedule 11 months ago
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    80 Mins
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  • Geoffrey Dunn
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    Geoffrey Dunn - Turn your Backlog into concrete small steps using Example Mapping

    Geoffrey Dunn
    Geoffrey Dunn
    Test Engineer
    ResMed
    schedule 10 months ago
    Sold Out!
    80 Mins
    Workshop
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    Does your product owner write all the stories? Does your team complain that stories lack detail? Are you finding it difficult to move things to done? Is your done work leaving lots of gaps your customers might find? Do you struggle to break down work into small deliverable slices? Example Mapping can help!

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    I've been using Example Mapping as a very quick and effective way to start with a rough outline of the goals I want the team to achieve and come out with a detailed backlog of Stories and key Acceptance Tests. I've been using this over 5 years now both in-person and online. I love how easy it is to engage people at the level their comfortable with. We can walk through example by example or we can start by outlining high level outcomes.

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  • Ant Boobier
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    Ant Boobier - An Above and Below the Line model

    Ant Boobier
    Ant Boobier
    Agile Coach
    Nomad8
    schedule 11 months ago
    Sold Out!
    40 Mins
    Presentation
    Intermediate

    How do I understand an organization’s culture? I draw a line.

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  • Wai Ling Ko
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    Wai Ling Ko - Management doesn't need Managers

    Wai Ling Ko
    Wai Ling Ko
    Head of People
    Bilue
    schedule 11 months ago
    Sold Out!
    40 Mins
    Experience Report
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    When growing an organisation it is easy to follow established patterns for the organisational structure and end up with a situation with line managers, middle managers and executives.

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  • Peter Woolley
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    Peter Woolley - How Metrics Help Tell the Story

    40 Mins
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    Alex Sloley - The Fine Art of Zero F***s Given

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  • Renae Craven
    Renae Craven
    Agile Coach
    Naecrave Pty Ltd
    schedule 10 months ago
    Sold Out!
    40 Mins
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    Walt Disney’s vision started as a 20 year old in the early 1920s. It began with Mickey Mouse and cartoons and moved into theme parks and movies before his passing in 1966.

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    In this talk you will hear the stories of Disney including their failures and how Walt Disney led and fostered an experimental and learning culture that empowered his Disney team members to deliver to the vision he had as a 20 year old.

  • Kevin Loong
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    Kevin Loong - Celebrating Courage with a Capital C: Conducting Courageous Conversations

    Kevin Loong
    Kevin Loong
    Agile Coach
    Westpac
    schedule 11 months ago
    Sold Out!
    40 Mins
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    Can you remember the last time you were courageous? Was it at work?

    How are you as a servant leader, helping your teams to have conversations that matters, promote the flow of ideas and spark innovation?

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  • Craig Smith
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    Craig Smith / Michael Huynh - Have we Outgrown the Scrum Master and Product Owner Roles?

    40 Mins
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    The Scrum Master and Product Owner roles (along with the developers) are well understood and described in the Scrum Guide. As organisations begin to mature and scale, a lot of anti patterns start to emerge with these roles, as well as adding traditional roles (such as change, release and project management) and additional agile roles (such as Agile Coach and Release Train Engineer). Given the simplicity of the three roles in the Scrum Guide for a single team versus the challenges of scaling, do we need to take another look at the key roles to help solve the confusion that so many organisations continue to face?

    Join us as we ponder the question of whether we have outgrown the roles of Scrum Master and Product Owner or whether we just need more clarity on what these roles actually mean in the context of true business agility. 

  • 40 Mins
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    Do you start initiatives in a complex domain by attempting to answer “what are we going to deliver and when”? Do internal stakeholders negotiate a scope and date agreement with development and then expected teams to keep “on track” to deliver the agreed deliverables by the agreed date? Do developers cut corners in order to achieve this?

    In this session we will explore how the scope and date-based “Contract Game” is misaligned with Agile as well as Scrum. Also how game theory can help us raise awareness how this competitive game results in many negative outcomes – most of which are opaque to stakeholders – when reality does not go to plan (inevitable in a complex domain).

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    You can expect to walk away with new language and a practical Scrum-based approach for eliminating the Contract Game so that empiricism and agility can thrive.

  • Sam Bowtell
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    Sam Bowtell - The Art and Science of Facilitation in 10 simple steps

    Sam Bowtell
    Sam Bowtell
    Certified Scrum Trainer
    RedAgile
    schedule 10 months ago
    Sold Out!
    40 Mins
    Experience Report
    Beginner

    Facilitation is both an Art and a Science. The Science is the logical preparation and delivery, with the Art being how you navigate and adapt that delivery to the participants in the moment.  Sam will share his ten simple steps from his 20 years of facilitation experience on how to prepare for and deliver a memorable facilitation experience. Expect an interactive, fun session that we set you up for success working both virtually and face to face

  • Roger Wong
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    Roger Wong - Mistakes made, Lessons learned

    Roger Wong
    Roger Wong
    Agile Coach
    Westpac
    schedule 11 months ago
    Sold Out!
    40 Mins
    Presentation
    Beginner

    'Smart people learn from their own mistakes; Wise people learn from others.'

    Having worked as a Business Analyst in Scrum teams for a while and obtained my shinny Scrum Master certificate, I was trusted to play the role of the Scrum Master, to lead, guide, and support a new Scrum through their Agile journey. 

    Did I enjoy it? Yes. 

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    Did I learn from my mistakes? I hope I did, at least from some of them :)

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  • Lumai Tingey
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    Lumai Tingey / Belinda George - Human Centred Design & Agile: The perfect blend

    40 Mins
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  • Becci Watson
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    Becci Watson - How to Prove Your Agility Value to a C Level Executive in under 17 minutes (and Get a Pay Rise!)

    40 Mins
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    Isn't it frustrating that Agile practitioners are always the first to go when budgets get squeezed?
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  • Stephanie Ireland
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    Stephanie Ireland / Charlotte BIAN - Moving away from Daily Sit-downs. Exploring effective Scrum in a hybrid world.

    80 Mins
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