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.

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

They are the ‘agilists’ — those who adhere to the Agile Manifesto published in 2001. They meet in small and big rooms, around tables and on stages. They help each other to make good ideas great.

If you want to be part of the agile community, this session will open the door to this global movement. With candour and generosity, the speaker invites you to join and shows you how. He reveals why you’ll love it. And he illuminates the path he took to becoming a leader in the global agile community.

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

In this session, you’ll discover how to:

• benefit from being part of the agile community
• plan and win a speaking gig
• lead an in-house agile community of practice
• be seen as a leader within your corporation and your community

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

Tired of struggling to get approval and buy-in for agile improvement ideas you know are good? Action forms are the answer. Turn every "no" into a "sure, why not?" Using the Cynefin action form will gets your idea across the line.

In this hands-on session we'll use the action form and design safe-to-fail experiments that leaders and teams will feel fine about trying. You'll wonder how you ever got permission to try anything without it.

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.

This session is targeted to all leaders of Agile transformation, Agile Coaches, and ScrumMasters who understand the Agile basics but have the dream of achieving significantly better results with Agile/Scrum.

The session is based on my book The Great ScrumMaster, published by Addison-Wesley, Signature Series (Cohn) on Jan 2017.  The Great ScrumMaster - #ScrumMasterWay.

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.

But, we’ve also been to those sessions that have been well facilitated where you think and say, “wow, I can’t believe the day has gone by so fast” and “that was a fantastic session, it really helped..!”

I want to help people and organisations have more of the latter by sharing my principles and practical tips on how to improve yourself to becoming a master facilitator – this is based on taking a human-centred approach by valuing every individual, including yourself. I’ll be using my “facilitation tree” to help everyone visualise what’s needed to always produce fruitful outcomes where value is created and people are valued.

How can executive management build customer-driven product teams?

Agile product development practices provide a pathway to realize the co-creation of desired product outcomes between customers and development teams. Quickly and frequently obtaining feedback on real products directly from customers give them a direct voice into their own value stream. However, orienting your teams and leadership to build and react to quick feedback iteratively is a significant challenge to any organization taking this on. This presentation will provide an overview of core fundamental techniques that bring customers and teams together. 

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 interactive workshop.

In our experience, there are some coaching habits that do not reflect true coaching. There are coaching habits that are 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 truly is. 

This is not a lecture on what coaching is. We intend to explore the topic in this workshop through interactive activities to help you feel and reflect on what coaching is and is not.

Have you ever struggled with creating alignment between the members of a team? What does our approach of coaching individuals leave on the table? What if we focus on interaction between the individuals instead of the individuals themselves? In this workshop, we will demonstrate coaching the interactions between the individuals to create alignment. We will use LandsWork, a group coaching activity from Organisational and Relationship System Coaching, to simulate the coaching technique - a must-have for all coaches.

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!

Example Mapping is a process designed by Matt Wynne ( https://cucumber.io/blog/bdd/example-mapping-introduction/ ) and is a great way to elaborate your features in a collaborative way. Bring together your business people, developers and even your customers to build out detailed stories, acceptance criteria and examples you can run as tests. It is collaborative because everyone can work on their area of knowledge simultaneously. There is no pre-defined order so you can work with the knowledge you have rather than the knowledge you wish you had. It's detailed enough to flush out edge conditions and error states. It's high level enough to engage with customers and business stakeholders. It's fast enough to get outcomes even if your team is time poor. 

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.

In this workshop we will learn about Example Mapping, how to apply it to your backlog to create some great stories the team can execute. We will practice applying it together to see how we can turn a few simple ideas into a detailed plan.

This talk is about how I, as a Product Owner, can supercharge any scrum team by providing them with purpose. I'll talk about the tools and techniques I've learnt through experience and how you can use them to boost your teams performance.

As a product consultant I've had the privilege to work with over 50+ companies. Through my work I've observed teams at all levels and learnt the traits that separate the good from the best.

A strong culture enables the team to perform. Creating a culture of enablement means playing as a team. With transparency, trust and purpose. I'll talk about how to create a strong culture within the team with these these points:

* Vision & Purpose: Understanding not just where to play but how to win, is critical. 
* Trust & Psychological Safety: Nobody should fear getting involved, having a voice or an opinion and expressing disagreement.
* Accountability: In order to perform as a single cohesive unit, individuals must be diligent and disciplined in the role they play and its responsibilities.
* Co-creation: There are many ways to solve a problem, the best way is together.
* Celebrations: A motivated scrum team and the value of reward and recognition.

I'll be talking about the importance of storytelling, problem framing, crafting a compelling vision and prioritising techniques that take into account both business and customer value.

With this talk you'll learn 5 key ways to supercharge any scrum team through purpose:

1. Create alignment through vision and strategy.
2. Ensure a culture of psychological safety. Trust to empower teams.
3. Co-create and build together as one team.
4. Drive accountability and diligence in work.
5. Celebrate outputs and outcomes.

Scrum has come to Canberra and along with it Product Owners. It has been growing for a few years but now just about every Federal Government Agency have Product Owners running around. However, they are still facing the classic issue of how do you empower a Product Owner in such a hierarchical and inflexible organisation?

We’ve all seen it, the Product Owner who can’t make a decision without a committee or approval from above. Let’s break the pattern! Or should I say anti-pattern.

In this session you will learn about:

• How a Product Owner differs in Government
• What anti-pattern indicators are out there for Product Owners
• How as a Product Owner you can break free of these disempowering anti-patterns
• How to enable Product Owners in your team

We all dream of that utopian sprint goal. You know the one that is focussed on customer impact, shippable at the end of the increment, and created collaboratively with the team?

In this workshop, I'll share with you my approach to collaboratively crafting killer sprint goals with your teams, and provide you with my canvas to facilitate it.

No matter where your team is on the maturity scale, this workshop will show you how to continuously improve your sprint goals, keep your team focussed on the customer, and measure that improvement over time.

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

The ‘Above and Below the line’ model. Above the line is about open and positive behaviours, below the line are behaviours that are closed and negative.

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.

But when we did a comprehensive review of our organisation and culture, we found that most of our line managers loved mentoring and growing people, but struggled balancing that with the more administrative and managerial tasks like leave, reviews, recruiting and assigning work.

And so we set out to overhaul our organisational structure into one where we have people dedicated to growing team members through mentoring and coaching and people solely responsible for organising and delivering work.

This session is about sharing insights in why, what and how we did this change.

Many scrum masters will use metrics to help guide their teams. Measures such as velocity, burn downs, burn ups, cumulative flow can provide useful for planning and feedback on how a team is progressing. However metrics can do so much more, they can help the team tell their story, influence decisions beyond their immediate reach and provide creative insights on how the team works and what makes them unique.

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.

Even those who are certain that teams should do Scrum in its entirety might give a team some flexibility on their first day. This activity will kick off a new team - that isn’t necessarily new to Scrum - with the practices that they choose to start with. Over time, you can create the environment where they see the benefit of embracing more. 

We introduce the team’s way of working with a workshop that gives a team autonomy. Instead of “eat everything on your plate”, start with the elements they already value. Rather than debating or enforcing every detail, you will know where to focus your efforts. Hold your expert card for the practices that really matter.

This activity will also give you insight into the team’s misconceptions. There are aspects of Scrum that they may not realise are included. There are also well established practices that aren’t Scrum at all. Some are useful, some are not. 

First, let’s find out what they are not intending to do. Then figure out why. Is a team avoiding practices because of unique characteristics of their work or work environment? Does the system need to change in order for this team to practice Scrum? Or have they just jettisoned the aspects that are too hard to understand? If they have tried something in the past that “didn’t work” why was that? What did success mean to them?

Are the team’s variations reasonable adaptations or do they contradict Scrum values and purpose?The Scrum Guide is really short and teams will benefit from doing everything in it. This activity will help you get there. 

A fundamental and critical skill for any agile coach or leader is the pursuit of the fine art of "Zero F***s Given" ZFG. In contrast to how ZFG is often described on the interwebs, ZFG does not mean "I don't care"! ZFG is a mindset that embraces a myriad of concepts: fear, empathy, objectivity, neutrality, bias, drama, emotional intelligence, and more! Understanding the philosophy of ZFG will empower you to embrace this powerful skill so that you can become a more effective agile coach and leader. 

The aim of this interactive session will be to challenge participants’ thinking about diversity, accessibility and inclusion and provide some practical tools and approaches to help address barriers and biases and make their teams truly inclusive. While Catherine and Brady have a particular interest in disability inclusion, the approach we will be taking you through will be equally applicable to all types of diverse teams.

Catherine and Brady are both active members of Telstra's Employee Representative Group, Telstrability, as well as having experience as coaches and in the accessibility field.  

"You better bring it!

Oh, it's already been broughten!"

The purpose of cheerleading is to support and encourage their team to achieve peak performance – they give the team the extra oomph to carry them over the goal line! The cheerleaders not only support and celebrate the wins, they also encourage the team when they need to push through their trials and tribulations. Cheerleaders build the hype of the team’s fans by creating infectious energy – just imagine your stakeholders hyped up because of your awesome team!

In this session, an enterprise agile coach and an award-winning former professional cheerleader will take lessons from professional cheerleading and apply them in an agile team context.

They will cover the 4 pillars of agile cheerleading – synchrony, chants, formations, and emotions and explore the fundamentals and benefits of an agile cheer so that you can super-charge your teams.

BE! AGILE! BE! BE AGILE!