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.

Good retrospectives (you know, the ones that actually lead to real change?) rest on three pillars:

* people,
* process, and
* follow-through

What makes retrospectives so difficult is that if any of these three pillars starts to crack, it's very difficult for the retrospective to be a success.

Ultimately, getting the right people in the room, utilizing a good process to facilitate the conversation, and following-through on the learning outcomes depend on having an organizational culture that encourages learning, transparency, feedback loops, and continuous improvement.

If this sounds like your company already, then great! This talk is not for you.

For everyone else, join me to explore how effective retrospectives can break a downward cycle of disillusionment and malcontent and transform you and your team into engines of learning and growth.

"Early and continuous delivery of value" is one of the promises of a shift towards Agile, and one of the manifestations of that principle is the ability to keep work in a state of "flow": always smoothly moving and reaching its Customers. Flow can be observed (and managed) at multiple levels, but the flow that really matters is that which is perceived by the Customer.

This talk will explore the meaning of "flow" at various levels (teams, systems of teams, and end-to-end Customer workflows), and the practical techniques organizations can apply to move from one level to the next, and as they do so, streamline and smooth out delivery of value to their Customers.

We enjoy having conversations. Who doesn't? We are social animals after all. We like to know more about each other's stories. It is a feature built-in by default. As coaches, it is vital to use this basic instinct to our advantage. The easiest way to influence people is to have a conversation with them. You can use it coaching, mentoring, transformation, or just building a relationship with them. Can you imagine any of the above not to start with a conversation? I can't!

Conversations are two-way streets. The easiest way to have a two-way communication is to ask questions. Questions can be dumb, unrelated, out of ordinary, crazy, or even beautiful. Can they be efficacious too? They can! An excellent communicator knows how and when to use Powerful Questions to make any conversation a mighty one.

Powerful Questions generate curiosity in the listener and stimulate thoughtful conversation. They are usually thought-provoking and challenges the underlying assumptions. Powerful Questions, if asked in the right tone and body language, generates creativity and new possibilities.

Is it hard to ask Powerful questions? It might be. It is not that easy, and indeed not natural for everyone. The good news is that it is something that can be learned, and relatively very easily.

I invite you to join me for a workshop on Powerful Questions. In this workshop, I am going to help you build your muscle to ask more Powerful Questions. I will give you an easy tool to make your questions more powerful, and conversations more enriched. Asking powerful questions will help you build bridges with people, you would become more empathetic with them, and do not be surprised you are going to listen more. Some of the characteristics of a great coach, one might say! Don't you agree?

There seems to be some confusion (not to mention strong opinions!) about when to use Scrum vs. when to use Kanban. At times purists on either side have drawn the lines and set up camp in an almost warlike approach, making it difficult to wade across the middle battlefield of information without stepping on metaphorical land mines or getting peppered with judgmental opinions, rhetorical quips or social media blasts.

In this session we will explore a case study of a department within a financial institution that is currently experiencing a transformation to Agility using both Scrum and Kanban. By the end of the session I will provide evidence of meaningful actions the department has taken and outcomes they have achieved to help move their team and organization ahead on a path to greater Agility.

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.

Building the right thing and building it quickly! How about building it the right way?

"Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday’s code.” – Dan Salomon

Is your delivery team delivering Spaghetti code, all complex and tangled up? Want them out of bed on a Monday and working on Lasagna code, all structured, well defined and layered?

Starting out introducing Agile engineering practices is difficult. What is it? Where do you go? How do you start?

In this session Agile Engineering practices, concepts and philosophies will be introduced. Through structured exercises, attendees will demonstrate the following agile engineering practices:

• Test Driven Development (TDD)
• Pair Programming
• Continuous Integration
• Refactoring

Through this highly interactive hand on workshop, you will learn the concepts and develop an understanding of Agile engineering practices in a playful way without touching a single piece of code.

Target Audience: Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Executives, Managers, Agile Leaders and Scrum Teams.

Do you want people to feel part of a group/team or part of an activity? Then ensure that they are included and engaged. Do you find facilitating a large group of people unmanageable, people disengage? Try Liberating Structures with your teams and organization.

Liberating Structures, created by Keith McCandless and Henri Lipmanowicz, covers a set of easy to learn, yet powerful ways to collaborate as a team. It makes it possible to build the kind of meeting that everybody looks forward to attending and participating. Liberating Structures encompass microstructures that promotes collaboration and trust. It is known to foster lively participation in groups of any size, making it possible to truly include and unleash everyone.

Participants learn how to use these microstructures to simplify scrum meeting outcomes, help teams collaborate and become more productive.

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.

What is design thinking? Is it only for designers? Can I benefit from it?

Design Thinking in its simplest form, is an approach to solving problems. Once you understand the core principles and framework, you can apply it to just about anything. In the enterprise, it asks for cross-functional teams to come together to co-ideate and co-create products and experiences that are centred around the end-user.

Join the Rogers digital team for an immersive workshop as we use design thinking, to explore and create the ideal smart city with 5G technology. By the end of the session, you will have observed, defined, created, and tested your new city. Then, we will reflect on how you can use the principles in your day-to day work supporting and advancing agile practices and adoption.

Forming, or Launching, a new Agile Team is a critical step that is very often skipped due to lack of knowledge, time pressure or just eagerness to get on with work as soon as possible. This workshop discusses and demonstrates the importance of taking the time to launch teams and provides hand-on knowledge on how to Form a Team. This technique has been used by several organizations in the US and Australia. The last being the 2nd largest bank in Australia launching teams in an organization of 4500 people.

A rant, with evidence, on why electronic tools in general, and JIRA in particular, are anti-Agile. Participants will use the Agile Manifesto to evaluate the electronic tools they are currently familiar with. JIRA is used as a case study.

NOTE: Scrum asks us to have courage. The Agile Manifesto asks us to value individuals and interactions over processes and tools. I hope the organizing committee will consider this proposal despite the risk that it might offend some tool vendors. If we can't speak freely about our experiences with tools, we will fail as a community.

The move away from traditional ways of working and thinking to digitization leads to change in the way we work, learn and measure. It is important to understand how the digital economy has shifted our ways of working in a digital organization from strategy to execution.

Join us in game play where we will explore Digital Product Management and the Critical Success Factors, Events and Skills needed to create value flow to customers. We will look at the skills needed for a company to move from being descriptive to one that can respond to emergent needs. Applying this knowledge will help organisations transform their operating model have a competitive edge in a VUCA economy. Plan to Win!

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.

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.

How much of what we do requires courage to ask for what we need? How many times are you asked to make a team agile and the team or leadership is not ready? What stops teams from speaking up about what is upsetting them? Who has the courage in the room to speak up what needs to be said and to do what needs to be done?

Having the courage can be made easier once you have tools and are willing to be vulnerable to take that first step. Teams that can step into this courage are more successful and more productive.

In this talk, Joanne will explore what is needed in our teams and ourselves to bring the elephant onto the table and into the light for all to see. Once we make the elephant visible it can be addressed.

Using a variety of techniques such as team happiness, team agreement, safety checks, assumptions, clean language, retrospectives and self awareness (conscious leadership) you are able to take that step more courageously.

Courage will start with you and can make a difference to our lives and our teams. Do you want to explore more? Join Joanne.

Most of us have heard the mantra, "Slice your User Stories as thin as possible!" In my travels as a coach since the early 2000's, however, I've rarely seen stories that truly are thin. What are these rare creatures? Why don't I see more of them? Having good User Stories is crucial to the success of teams using them as the means for determining what needs to be built to fulfill a customer's need. Having thinly sliced stories is even more important!

This workshop provides a level set on what stories are and explores why slicing stories very thin is important, what benefits thin slicing provides, and how to do it. Through a combination of examples and practical application in the workshop, you'll leave with slicing techniques that you can apply at your next planning session.

Together we'll explore systems thinking theory and the concept of resiliency, and we'll use these concepts to dissect how Control and Culture are limiting you, your team and your organization. We'll wrap up with some Crowbars: approaches you can use to change the system to produce better outcomes, build stronger teams and deliver more excellent products

For agile aspirers and aficionados alike. Come prepared to contribute, learn and experiment.

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.