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.

Do you think an executive playing the Product Owner role, remote self-designing team workshops and a multi-team Product Backlog Refinement session is fictional? Do you think that LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) is non-existent in Australia? Think again. It is currently happening locally in a 3,000 person financial services organisation.

You are invited to a candid "fireside chat" with Findex Digital Scrum Master Sam Peacock and independent consultant Rowan Bunning. This is an interactive session during which you can submit and upvote questions for Sam and Rowan to respond to.

Moderator Alistair Thomas will start with some questions aimed to clarify:

• how to get leaders to saying “let’s go” on a radical change in an informed way,
• the advantages of feature teams over component teams,
• the advantages of a broad product definition and whole product focus,
• how a single Product Owner can work with several teams without becoming a bottleneck,
• a more agile alternative to analysts gathering and handing off requirements and
• how Sprint-to-Sprint agility can be sustained and leveraged with many teams.

Come prepared with curiosity. The insights you gain may help you to navigate how your organisation can optimise for product agility and highest customer value at multi-team scale by leveraging good Scrum.

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.

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.

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).

We will also outline how to lead your organisation to the co-operative game aligned with Agile methods. This includes short experience summaries on organisations who have done this.

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.

“If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.” - Zig Ziglar

Are you experiencing constant friction with the broader organisation? Do the overall organisational performance outcomes that you are striving personally for seem to differ from what senior leaders have in mind? How openly and skilfully is this discussed? To what degree does everyone making improvement decisions understand and use outcomes to guide every decision?

Far to many Agile adoptions are failing, stalling or doing harm due to superficially pursuing management fads or a consultancy’s preferred solution rather than what is appropriate for the organisation. Too often, what what the Agile methods being pursued are designed to provide is not what those in positions of power actually want. Poor fit.

Rather than attempting to push someone’s preferred structures and practices into organisations like a square peg into a round hole, a skilled Scrum Master or Agile Coach makes the (mis)alignment transparent and advises as to what choices are aligned to the desired organisational characteristics. Problem before solution.

“Our goal is to be agile” is not the real goal. Optimising for “deliver faster” alone is a recipe for compromising most Agile methods. We need more considered thinking.

A more skilful way to clarify organisational change aspirations is to use systems thinking. In this workshop we explore through realistic case studies, practical techniques for leaders to choose the optimising goal that they believe the organisation should be continuously improving toward. For example, should we optimise for efficient use of resources or effectiveness? For faster flow or highest known customer value? Depending on the answers, the appropriate methods and management systems could vary from waterfall to LeSS and lean startup techniques. Whilst alignment at scale through standardisation of practices stifles improvement innovation, optimising goals provide a healthy true north for all improvement decisions in a way that scales and provides alignment.

As a Scrum Master or Agile Coach, an optimising goal is gold as it gives you a means of calling out what is currently out of alignment with the agreed goal. Also a more objective means of deciding between target structures, methods, practices, behaviours etc. than what people are most comfortable with (usually involving the least change and benefit) or what is in an individual’s localised interest (local rather than global optimisation). “Better” actually has a shared meaning.

In this workshop, we use role play to take you through the process of using optimising goals with leaders. Having done this with senior leaders for several years, we share tips on explaining the concepts, facilitating leadership workshop and exploring the implications of certain optimising goal choices. For example, what optimising goal would lead to DevOps/Team Topologies vs. what would lead to LeSS.

You will also share ideas on how coaches and leaders can use the chosen optimising goal to align the improvement efforts of every team and individual. This includes example perfection visions and an introduction to an organisational design model describing the management parameters that must be reshaped if the organisation is to be coherent and effective.