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.

What is the goal of an agile transformation? How do we define success? What changes? What stays the same? What assumptions have we made about why we need to transform and how we go about it? What if, in our consideration of these questions, we discover that agility isn’t the point, but something deeper? What if we’re focused on changing the wrong things first?

For the past several years, respondents to the State of Agile Survey have consistently identified their respective organizational culture as a major impediment to the adoption of agile practices. Accordingly, if we accept the well-established observation that culture follows structure, transformation efforts need to begin with re-examining our thinking about how we lead and manage organizations.

In this session, participants will engage in an idealized redesign exercise to examine the thinking and theory that shape transformations while revealing the changes that can be made by senior leadership in cooperation with their people that will encourage agile-like behaviours to emerge at all levels of the organization and improve the quality of their transformation efforts.

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.

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.

Are your retrospectives more ranting session than anything else? Are the outcomes seldom actionable? Are people quiet and it feels like only a select few always speak? Sounds familiar...if yes, this session will equip you to truly get measurable results from retros. This session will give you tips and tricks on how you can meet people on their journey and coach them to become a better team player. It will also provide guidance on how a team can continuously improve, and still keep it interesting sprint after sprint after sprint. Let's coach to make retros more "doing" sessions, and help teams truly embrace the spirit of continuous improvement. Make retro your friend and not foe!

From the diary of a fat coach comes the story of how Agile transformation is like reducing weight. She is sure that you have been on some diet at some point of your life, may be you are on one as you are reading it. Are you curious about how it links? During the session we will go through various similarities and shifts which are needed to gain success in both. We will also explore how the common pitfalls are also similar. Coaching both is an ART and calls for humanizing continuous improvement and transformation.

Once upon a time, in the not so faraway land of Corporatedale, was an organization called WeWin. The King of WeWin had an impeccable strategy to conquer the world, until he stumbled upon a mighty challenge of soldiers whose heart did not align to King's vision. The soldiers enjoyed the merit of the present and did not believe in a change. The culture of the army was eating the strategy.

The misalignment was cancelling out the efforts. Everyone was busy, but nothing was happening. The kingdom looked upon the King of WeWin to perform a miracle. One fine day, a switch flipped and they realized that the magic lay in each one of them, and it was up to them to create the environment they craved. This led to strategy and culture joining hands with the power of self-organized autonomous teams. From that day forward, the army of soldiers marched on and went on to conquer their world.

If the story sounds similar to your own, come join the session to discover the story of how to Flip the SWITCH!

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.

Every organization is struggling with the issue of how to reconcile project management and agility. This is a serious challenge for the project management community who often doesn't understand what agility is, particularly within the context of an established organization. This can also be a serious challenge for agile practitioners who may not appreciate the potential value of management. We need to work together.

Project managers have a lot of important skills and knowledge to bring to an agile team if we help them to do so. At the same time they also have some mindset and cultural issues to overcome, something that they may also need help with. In this workshop we will identify the real value that an existing PM can bring to an agile team and explore how they can move into new agile roles to do so.

Whether you are growing an organization or transforming an existing one, you must create a structure that will drive the culture of continuous learning, value creation, and performance to compete in the modern world. Scrum@Scale combines the experience of Jeff Sutherland (co-creator of Scrum) and many trainers and practitioners around the world. It's a Scale-Free architecture that allows you to apply Scrum to an entire organization without unnecessary overhead.

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.

It doesn’t take a lot of time to set the stage to improve participation in workshops and other team events - in less than 2 minutes you can energize and focus participants to help them succeed at the work they will be doing together. In the same amount of time at the end of an event you can also deploy simple activities to help increase alignment and commitment to follow-up.

In this very interactive workshop we will explore why and how to start and close all kinds of meetings effectively. We’ll experiment with a number of activities that will accelerate learning and engagement. You will leave this workshop with several easy-to-try ideas that you can use to jumpstart meetings and improve closings in order to reinforce alignment and commitment to action.

In today’s challenging workplaces, organizations need to continuously focus on delivering value to the customers. Challenged by competition from all over the world, changing technology, increased diversity of the workplace and customers, organizations need to adapt their practices and behaviours. In this session, we will focus on Product Owners and the ownership impact on the business. Also, we will discuss the shift to a product oriented organization and the specifics this approach introduces.This will be done using real life examples and applied, simple yet captivating exercises to find the owner inside you.

One of the first actions organizations follow after deciding to jump into an agile transformation is assembling an agile team. To come with the "team" a hiring process begins. The hiring managers rush to pick the people following a generic profile of the ideal members.

After some time the selected candidate decides to leave you earlier than expected, generating high levels of stress across the project to was he/she was allocated. In other cases the organization is “forced” to keep the person as part of the team even though the performance of the employee is not the desired because of the person’s replacement process can be very complex.

In this workshop, we will share some tips to find the “perfect fit” for your organization. Furthermore, we will learn the power of asking the right questions at the right time so that your organization can get the right fit for your team.

Join us and learn how to improve your hiring process and start enjoying the benefits of finding the right people in your organization.