It's the classic leader's lament. Driving organizational performance in a way that delivers on business outcomes while engaging employees. A year after presenting this at TAC 2018 it is more relevant than ever.

Organizations have been deploying Scrum, SAFe, DAD, and a host of other practices in the hope of achieving better business outcomes. We all know that practices alone don't generate the kind of powerful results you need to succeed. The missing ingredient? We hear the word culture a lot. But it is really about operating norms, or habits and behaviors. What I've observed through dozens of transformations within my company and clients are 5 habits that the leading organizations all possess. When these 5 habits are ingrained, the practices fall into place, and performance starts to rocket.

In this session you'll learn the habits, and why they drive performance. You' also learn about the key questions you can start asking to encourage the habits to take hold in your team, or more broadly, in your organization. The path to performance is paved by changes in behaviors that are reinforced daily. Asking the right questions at the right time can be a powerful way to nudge behaviors in the right direction.

Having said that, it's not enough to create the conditions for new habits to form. Countless studies, including famous ones by Wolfram Schultz, neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, have shown that a cue and reward on their own aren't enough to create a lasting habit. Only when your brain starts to anticipate a reward will the habit become automatic.

Traditional testing approaches can’t predict all failure modes and hence Chaos Engineering is a discipline to simulate these failures and build better applications. It’s a way to fire controlled disruptions into a distributed system and then analyzing the behavior, identifying the weak areas & improving resiliency with automation. To add chaos using DevOps and build anti fragile apps is the need.

We have seen so many Agile methodologies and scaling frameworks in the industry but even after rigorously implementing them, very few organizations are getting real benefits. True agile organizations are not big followers of these out of the box frameworks or methodologies rather we observed four key trends that has emerged to be the game changers:

• Hyper-Decentralization
• Data Intensive Decisions
• Change as a non-event
• Next-Gen Cross functionality

In this session, we will discuss the key emerging trends that are driving agility and how organizations can embrace them without the need for any framework or methodology.

The traditional approach to organizational design is a barrier if you want to grow an organization where smart people make amazing decisions that delight customers and enrich their careers.

This session aims to provides leaders at all levels of the organization with an introduction to a set of design tools that can help them create organizational structures that promote agility rather than interfere with it.

Using a game I call Full Stack Poker, I’ll facilitate a highly interactive dialogue where attendees will play the role of various organizational stake holders tasked with getting the right skills into teams responsible for delivering value.

Loosely based on the planning poker game, attendees will collaboratively select from a number of Team Engagement Patterns, collectively agreeing on an engagement model that lays out how teams can engage with support functions and other teams. Participants will also be able to estimate the amount of organizational complexity their teams will incur based on the Team Engagement Patterns chosen.

The session is aimed at teaching attendees basic concepts behind defining agile organizational structure through a highly engaging / hands on session.

High-maturity DevOps teams are 10-20X more responsive to customer demands and 2X better in capturing business value. Additionally, their teams show lower rates of burnout and are 2.2X more likely to recommend their organization as a great place to work.[1] They also deploy 46X times more frequently and are 7X less likely to deploy defective changes.[2]

These are incredible findings... but undertaking a journey towards higher levels of DevOps maturity is NOT as straightforward as some consultants/literature/bloggers would lead you to believe.

It presents challenges for leadership, business, enginering and operations teams. It means changing nearly everything about how you build, test, deploy and operate software... It means taking risks.

In this session you will hear about how we supported a large (very familiar, yet unnamed) organization in taking this calculated risk, helping it realize superior business results from an investment in a DevOps enablement team.

We’ll cover how the team was built, what worked (and what didn’t), and how it unlocked a new level of business agility for the organization.

1 - Accelerate, Jez Humble

2 – 2018 State of DevOps Report

Challenge: how can we transform the economy of Alberta as an organization of just over 5,500 team members and 770,000 customers?

Join Todd Hirsch, Vice President and Chief Economist of ATB Financial as we explore the ATB Story and how we believe 94 words are about more than Agile transformation. We believe we can and are changing the traditional assumption that Alberta’s economy is all about oil and gas.

In early 2019, I had the honour to work with three highly-talented and passionate agile coaches (Shingi Kanhukamwe, Erick Martinez, and Farshad Gheshlaghi), together we supported a group of 300 people within a large financial institution. More recently, together we four agile coaches have co-created a simple and powerful model to coach, support, mentor, and enable teams. It is called the Faceted Coaching Model.

This workshop will be co-facilitated by Paul Heidema and Shingi Kanhukamwe.

Origin of the Model and Its Initial Creation

Shingi was looking for a way to speak to teams in a simple and jargon-free way without sacrificing insight or key areas of focus. Over the past few years, Erick, Farshad and I have also been seeking simple ways to do the same thing as Shingi. Each of us have been in the field of agile coaching for several years and used many approaches to support teams in becoming more effective, collaborative, and healthy.

Continuing the story, Shingi connected the way that jewelers look at precious stones and gems to how we could work with teams. This process led to the naming and focus of the model.

A jeweler uses a special tool called a loupe. It "...is a simple, small magnification device used to see small details more closely." - Wikipedia

With this loupe, the jeweler can see what a stone can become. By cutting into the gem (called faceting), the jeweler is able to see more of its potential through the light, shine, and clarity.

By using the analogy of a loupe, we four co-created a model that uses facets (showcases many aspects of a group or team) to be able to see where the group that we are supporting is and potentially where it could become.

Key Principles about the Model

1. The model is agnostic. This means that it does not dictate which framework, method, or set of practices that need to be followed. This allows for a variety of thinking, plenty of experimentation, and any team could use this model.
2. The model is pull-based. The work that we do with the teams is based on their desire/needs (not ours) on what they would like to advance and focus on. This allows for greater ownership and a partnership between coach and team to improve.
3. The model is non-linear. Since teams are every changing with its own people and the work to be done, this model allows for each team to advance and regress in multiple ways. This is more closely connected to the reality of life and work.

Some Closing Thoughts About the Model

As I have been using this model for the past few months with multiple teams (and has my co-creators as well), I have learned that this model is still in development. We started with 5 facets, then grew it to 7 facets, and now to 8 facets.

We are in a world where advances in technology result in rapid disruption of every industry, and healthcare is no exception. Implementation of electronic medical records and advanced hospital information systems (HIS) provides a means to reduce deaths associated with medical errors and allows for advanced analytics to improve the standard of care. However, the logistical burden of the scale of the transformation poses a significant challenge to public sector organizations.

This session will act as a case study from a recent engagement completed by our team, which was the largest HIS implementation in Canada to date. We will discuss some of the challenges encountered throughout the two year implementation, how a focus on agile values provided an avenue to overcome the challenges, and some of the lessons learned from the application of agile principles in a non-traditionally agile industry.

Attendees can expect to leave the presentation with 1) an idea of the cutting edge changes occurring in the health tech industry, as well as 2) tips in bringing the strengths of Agile such as resiliency, flexibility and transparency into your own organization.

An Agile transformation based on Google's SRE model for operations and stability supported by Agile By Design (a boutique consulting firm based in Toronto) for the client Scotiabank's global group of LATAM, Caribbean and Canadian banks.

Presenters:

Sam Tabbara - Agile Portfolio Lead at Agile By Design Inc. - - with numerous years leading successful transformations at enterprise clients at scale
Doug McKinty - VP and Global head in the office of the global CIO - leading the integration of a global group of banks

The purpose of this talk is to share the transformation journey that my team and I have embarked on for the last two years at Scotiabank within the Canadian Banking Technology group and to share our hypothesis around the transformation and our learnings so far and how we are aiming to become a full stack organization. I want to share what has worked well and what has not.

CBT is about 4000 employees which services all of Canadian banking businesses which is composed of:

-Branches and it's technologies that serve all Canadian customers

-Insurance business

-Credit card business

-All the underlying infrastructure and systems that enable these capabilities

“The Agile mindset isn't just gained with learning, but unlearning years of current practice”

Everyone wants to do agile but how often do they get it right? The real learning curve is how to ensure the approach sticks through behaviour and mindset shift in the organization and leadership.

We commonly see organizations limit themselves to agile by focusing on software delivery through techniques such as Scrum or Kanban; failing to recognize the importance of the rest of the organization must fundamentally shift their culture. But how can an individual help their organization through this journey?

In this session, we will show how agile is not something you do, but it’s what you embody through 5 key shifts. You will learn how to successfully implement agile while remaining relevant, responsive, and successful in today’s rapidly evolving business world.