When it comes to Agility, finance is late to the party and often seen as the enemy. After all, finance is all about numbers and rules, while agile and business agility is all about flexibility and adaptability.

However, if agility is supposed to deliver better customer outcomes, greater ROI and improved value, then shouldn't finance be expected to be leading from the front. Why is this not the case?

I sought answers to this question by speaking with many of our customers' finance departments. What I found was that there is a lack of understanding of what financial agility entails, how it can benefit both the department and the company and importantly, why it is that Agility practitioners and finance teams need to work together more closely in order to bridge this gap to realise the full potential of agility within an enterprise.

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.

Ever had that problem where leaders in your organisation have different views on what dynamics create great agile teams?

We often talk about the transformational leadership skills required to enable agile transformations, but what about the frontline agile leaders leading teams and shipping products?
As Agile becomes commonplace, a new breed of leaders is required that embrace the modern 21st Century leadership practices that sit behind great Agile teams.

This talk pulls together a range of key leadership models and concepts from traditional leadership models, lean Toyota practices and Management 3.0 to provide a set of practical tools and techniques to help you create frontline leaders that can help you build that leader-leader environment you thirst for.

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.

Whole Foods Market adopted agile and changed the way groceries were delivered/ bought and processed.  With my journey as a development team member, the first scrummaster, team coach, agile coach, Enterprise Coach and Executive Enterprise Coach at Whole Foods, join me in reviewing the story, the wins, the losses and the learning from an 8 year agile journey. 

The New Zealand Ministry of Health was operating in mainly waterfall ways prior to the outbreak of CoVID-19. As the agency responsible for most of the government response to CoVID-19 in New Zealand, they were forced to adapt quickly (using agile practices including scrum) in order to literally save lives. As a consultant, I have helped what was the Ministry of Health, and is now Te Whatu Ora, to deliver various outcomes both before and during (cause we're not out of the woods yet) CoVID-19, so have been in a unique position to observe the changes to how they have worked and what they're doing to leverage the changes made through CoVID to create a more resilient organisation for the future. 

In this talk, I would like to bring a few nuances that makes the frameworks like SaFE or Spotify attractive for the organisations to implement compared to Large-Scale Scrum(LeSS).

I would touch upon areas like:

1. Structural change - Team org
2. Change in HR policies
3. Leadership education
4. Product Perspective 
5. Decentralisation 

Technical agile practices like Test Driven Development and Pair Programming come from Extreme Programming and can make a good team into an amazing team.  But, especially in large organisations, software teams often have little opportunity to learn these skills. Coding Dojos are a fun, safe way to develop technical agile skills and also the culture of trust that is so critical for high performing teams.

Many Scrum Masters and coaches don't come from a technical background - or maybe it's been a while since we did any coding - so it can be daunting to even suggest that software teams should practice TDD, pair programming, mob programming etc. However, we don't need to be brilliant coders to run a Dojo. We can learn just enough and provide the context for the team to learn together.