How can you make time for real innovation and improvement? How do you know what to automate or invest in? How do you escape process prison? How can you get everyone aligned to make a difference? How can you start to drive revenue from tech?

This talk introduces the one technique I’ve always returned to when I need to answer those questions and drastically improve teams I’ve joined and led. You can use it right away to understand, communicate and improve your work, team or organization - whether you’re a leader or new recruit.

Lean Value Stream Mapping (LVSM) is a software and tech focused version of a classic technique you can use right now, with materials you already have to discover opportunities, build and share your vision and save hours of toil every week so you can invest in what’s next.

Sprinkle it on your:
- Delivery/Data/Testing/Analytics/Logging Pipeline
- Developer/Customer Onboarding
- Environment Provisioning
- Failure Recovery/Incident Management/Support Triage
- SDLC
- Toil/Process of choice, you get it :)
…and start spending more time on what’s next

I’ve come to love and use Value Stream Maps after years of struggling to find time for innovation, rally buy-in and communicate ideas, issues and risks. They’ve helped me many times go from tearing my hair out (and I have the baldness to prove it!) to knowing exactly how to level up.

When the people of an organization embark on their quest for increased agility, they are essentially begin working on the opposite side of a paradox that has been ignored. Often times, though as they take their journey, they begin experiencing the downside of now ignoring the the traditional, control-based approach and there is an outcry to revert. A dilemma is created.

What are these paradoxes? Well, the first four you encounter are described in the Agile Manifesto’s values. If one could have both sides of the “over” statements easily, we’d take them. Successfully maximizing the appropriate upsides of each side of these values while minimizing the downsides becomes a swinging pendulum to manage. This becomes key to leading others in your organization. If you are a manager, team leader, or executive trying help your organization get traction, then this session will provide some new insights into how to balance change with stability.

These four values are just the start of the paradoxes that will emerge as you take your journey. This workshop will help you use a technique called Polarity Management to help manage the upsides and downsides of this balancing act so that you can lead people effectively. Once out in the open, dilemmas created with a swing one way or another become easier to handle and perhaps can even be avoided.

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.

Myth: "Agile teams don't document."
Truth: Some of the best documentation we've ever seen comes from Agile teams.

Agile Engineering practices have revolutionized the ways in which documentation is treated and produced. In high-stakes environments with heavy compliance and audit requirements, a dangerous tendency toward exhaustive documentation is common. This workshop provides direct guidance and simple tools to help a document-heavy workplace think differently about documentation.

I have developed this workshop to help an organization reframe their understanding of documentation with respect to knowledge work in complex environments so that they may eliminate unnecessary artifacts and simplify/automate others.

Your mind is like this water my friend, when it is agitated it becomes difficult to see. But if you allow it to settle, the answer becomes clear.

Master Oogway (Kung-Fu Panda)

When should you coach? When should you teach? And when should you mentor? It’s not always easy to recognize that you probably play different roles with your teams, let alone knowing when and how to switch between them purposefully.

In this session, we will help you consciously recognize the various coaching stances and which stance is appropriate for a given situation. You will practice stepping into the stances and moving between them using coaching katas that model situations you probably see all the time in your companies.

Attendees will leave this session with greater self-awareness of their coaching style, practice working within the various stances, and techniques they can practice to further enhance the agility of their coaching. This focus on understanding our internal thinking leads perfectly into the next session that focuses further outwards on making observations, separating out what we see versus how we interpret what we see.

Transformation programs usually happen periodically and years apart. They introduce new processes and require organizational restructuring, while they often do not create organizational behavior change. They often ignore the inherent behaviors that have led to the unsatisfying status quo in the first place. These programs separate “the work” from “how we improve the work”.

Rather than having transformation programs every few years, can we embrace change and experimentation as the daily way of work? We can, when managers act as coaches for their teams on experimentation as the way of work. Meaning, when teams experiment they enable delivery, improvements and innovation.

This is an activity-based session that demonstrates the non-ending organizational journey towards growth and innovation. We will follow transformation approach based on Kata Thinking Pattern(KTP) to explain how teams experimentally introduce improvements guided by a universal model.

With minimum lecturing and focus on doing, you would experience first hand the KTP mindset for on-going transformation where managers are coaches. We will use Improvement Cards that are based on industry case studies for digital transformation

We will be organized into teams each has 4-6 people.

This session can be relevant to you, if you are interested in Agile Transformation and Lean Management.

This is a case study discussion to share how we are transforming the 2nd largest bank in Australia with a core enterprise team of 3 people and an extended coaching team of 8 professional coaches. We not only transitioned ways of working but also helped with organizational design, transitioned job titles (from over 150 to 7) and workflow management. We are using a model that helps teams change incrementally with weekly measures and understood results. We have been able to have remarkable success using a distributed coaching model, introducing new ways of learning and developing a learning organization.

Let’s travel to the Forbidden Island to learn how teams work together. On this island, a team of 3-4 people will be working together to collect valuable artifacts and then try to escape while the island sinks beneath them. Egad!

Successful cross-functional teams will learn to work together. Less successful ones will sink beneath the waves. Success is harder than you think as a bit of time pressure gets mixed in. What will you demystify as you execute and debrief this mission?

As Alistair Cockburn has said, software development is a cooperative game. By using a simple game simulation with cross-functional roles, we can see how various team dynamics play out. After running through this simulation, we’ll discuss what went well and didn’t and ways to set teams up for more success. The Forbidden Island serves as a perfect petri dish to see what team dynamics grow.

Whether you are a team member or manager, you will get valuable insights from this session.

Teams are self-organizing. That is not a statement of preference or intention; rather, it is a statement of objective fact.

Agile practices, like Scrum, XP, OpenSpace Agility, and liberating structures are among a very small number of management frameworks which acknowledge that self-organization is natural. The Manifesto for Software Development asserts that the quality of decisions and the value of outcomes increase when stakeholders collaborate with and trust the wisdom of their teams.

The opposite is also true: the manifesto implies that the common misbehaviours of managers (intervention, command & control) have costly consequences.

We will examine self-organization in teams and explore examples of self-organization in the workplace. Strong opinions are welcome.