Agile is about keeping pace with change. Inclusion ensures we bring everyone along with us.

Agile initially brought a bunch of individuals cross-functional specialists together to work as a team. This cross-functional team was able to deliver complex products more quickly. The concept of diverse teammates looking at a problem and sharing their perspective from their skill background proved to be the ideal way in creating solutions that meet the needs of domestic customers.

As companies execute on their digital strategy, products are now global. Having cross-functional teams are no longer sufficient. Agile teams need to be cross-functional AND diverse to meet the needs of global customers.

In our talk, we will discuss the importance and competitive need to make your teams diverse. They will also share their experiences of integrating diverse members into the team.

As leaders at any level of the organization, we sometimes make mistakes that break the trust we’re trying to build, especially when trying to introduce changes. In this interactive session, we’ll explore the kinds of behaviours that build or break trust and introduce a model for rebuilding relationships when trust is broken. We’ll use LEGO Serious Play to examine some real scenarios and consider how trust can be rebuilt (or further undermined!). You’ll leave with insights into how to foster trust in your organization and practical ideas about how you can grow as a leader.

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.

Are you an agile advocate?

• Do you feel that your Scrum teams are not productive?
• Do you have an urge to make changes to your Scrum teams that will flip the switch and make them efficient?
• Do you want to build a workplace that is functional and happy?

Are you an anti-agilist?

• Do you think Agile is a glorified waterfall?
• Are you attending the conference looking for strong reasons to join the masses on the other side?

This talk is designed for agilists and anti-agilists - hence the presentation is not aimed at converting you one way or the other.

At Leonardo Worldwide Corporation, we constantly aim to improve the efficiency of our Engineering teams. In this talk, we present to you the problems we experienced in our Scrum teams and how we overcame them by utilizing one of the often overlooked Agile principles.

This presentation is an experience report of our journey in building multi-faceted teams through mutual transformation. You will also hear from one of our engineers on their experience in being part of this transformation.

Experience reports are not promising without metrics. And hence we have gathered metrics to present the outcome and benefits of our transformation.

You will walk away from this presentation with clear guidelines on how to build teams that are exponentially productive and happier.

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.

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.

"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.

If I had a dolar for every time, I heard a CEO, product owner, scrum master or a manager complaining about their teams not caring enough about projects, other team members and users ...

If I had a dolar for every time, I heard a leader asking for advice on how to stop "blaming games" and "political bureaucracy" in his/her organisation...

We learn a lot about an organisation, its culture, and real values not during the times of enormous profits, successful product deliveries or CEO monthly motivational speeches but during the times of greatest struggles. We learn and find out who the real leaders are in moments when everything goes wrong, and everyone is making excuses and finger-pointing at other members or external factors. No one is to blame, and no one knows whose fault was the latest issue? The horror stories of firing employees on the spot, tearing down teams, bullying and threats are familiar to all of us.

I genuinely believe that it does not have to be this way. I believe that there is a more effective way of leading the organisation, teams, and individuals. We have the most extraordinary opportunity to improve, make an impact and improve when things go wrong.

We just have to change our approach to blame and ownership. Together we will learn how to reconsider your leadership skills and how to use them to accomplish team mission effectively. I want the audience to experience what extreme ownership means for them and what it means to be entirely responsible for all possible outputs. Participate in a challenge to create a team with a #noBlame approach to their mistakes. At the same time develop teams where psychological safety establishes an environment where uncomfortable conversations and creative conflict solutions can thrive.

I want to share impactful lessons learned from building teams and company that tries to behave differently in moments of failure. How we started to appreciate opportunities created by accidentally removing production database, what we learned by forgetting to communicate with each other or follow agreed processes, and what happened when we declined to do a very profitable project. How we are seeing signs of people owning their projects entirely, taking responsibility and changing others around them. How we train leaders on all level of organisation and how we share more and more responsibilities with them. Experience our approach to blame concept and #noBlame culture we champion and value.

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?

Today, product teams are under pressure to be more creative, innovative and delight customers sooner, but lack the knowledge and skills to know where to start. Agile product teams have frameworks and methods for rapid feedback, but generally lack real data from real users to make good business decisions. As product release cycles run long, team members lose enthusiasm and their focus on the customer.

As a tool, design sprints offer Agile teams an effective and transformative formula for testing ideas with real people, whether you're on a small team at a startup, or inside a large portfolio of projects at an enterprise organization. Within five days, teams move from idea to prototyping to better business decisions, ultimately saving time, effort, and energy over the long-run. Join Carlos Oliveira as he introduces design sprints for product teams, a process for rapid experimentation and learning that helps teams solve big problems and test new ideas in less than five days.

Originally created by three partners at Google Ventures, the process has been proven at hundreds of companies. Carlos has run dozens of design sprints for the Fortune 500 and firmly believes that product teams can benefit and harness the power of design sprints to focus their efforts and deliver more appropriate solutions to market sooner.

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.

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.

Your team has hit a plateau in their performance and is no longer improving at the pace you are used to. You, as their leader, are racking your brain to determine what the issue might be. What would cause such a team to stall out. Have you considered that the cause might be you?

The level of consciousness of an organization cannot exceed that of its leader. (Frederic Laloux). Enabling your team to reach ever higher levels of performance requires that you do so first. In this workshop, we will guide leaders through the Immunity to Change framework developed by Robert Keagan and Lisa Lahey and demonstrate how the Immunity Map can be used to catalyze change in your leadership. Participants will practice using the Immunity Map to identify areas of improvement, limiting beliefs, assumptions and behaviors that are holding you and your team back from higher performance. You know that you need to change. Now’s the time. Start here!

"We've held the town-hall to announce the transformation. We've distributed the buttons, mugs and t--shirts. We've even had every leader meet with their teams to roll down the transformation goals. And yet we don't seem to be making any progress?"

Does this sound familiar? How are the change initiatives in your organization going? Do they seem to be missing something but you're not sure exactly what?Many organizations launch change initiatives, like moving to agile ways of working by stating "what" the change will be. Very little time is spent explaining "why" the change is necessary. A critical success factor for any change initiative is a clear, simple and consistent "Why" for the change. Its raison d'etre. Simon Sinek popularized the phrase "Start with why". Start with why? Absolutely yes.

But don't stop there. "Why" isn't enough. "Why" is only part of the story. It's the middle. A good story needs a beginning and an end too. A coherent "Why" bridges the gap between start and finish.

This talk will share some simple yet powerful concepts and tools to help any change agent facilitate the telling of a good change story so that their stillborn or sluggish change initiatives start gaining momentum.

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.

CFOs in today's digital economy are looking to invest significant capital on data driven initiatives to deliver strategic analysis to business partners. However this is often reprioritized due to regulatory requirements.

This session is about how a large European Bank successfully delivered a large regulatory transformation program in 2017 using an agile approach. Driven by Finance & Risk groups and enabled by technology, incremental business value was delivered to Finance and Risk stakeholders.

The key challenges faced required an approach to handle evolving regulatory requirements, lack of trust and collaboration between Business and Technology, lack of knowledge and experience in the solution domain, integration of new technology assets to automate business requirements and an aggressive timeline enforced by the regulator.

As an Agile Coach on the project, my role was to help the Finance & Risk groups with the value stream mapping, formation of cross functional teams, developing an agile delivery approach, and provide training and coaching for the teams and leadership on adoption of agile principles and practices.

The successful delivery was largely due to business foresight to maneuver around typical IT challenges and instead adopt an approach using agile principles that put delivering business value over fixed scope. Through this approach, the clients were able to deliver the solution that addressed the immediate needs but this also position them to leverage for future regulations.

This talk will elucidate the backdrop, challenges that posed the business, the agile approach, culture and mindset that was adopted, and the resulting outcomes.

If you have thought of or thinking of adopting Agile mindset in a non-IT environment, this is the session for you. In this session we will share some techniques we developed and hiccups that we managed along the way.

By the end of this session, you will likely have gained some valuable insights that you can take back to your Organization and adopt agile principles and practices in areas outside of IT.

Many agile talks are about the benefits of cross-functional teams and integrating them with your business and changing their structure to better align to the value delivery. And amazing things happen with you get all of this stuff working together. There are industries and organizations that can't do this. Not because they don't want to or that they are not interested in the modern ways of working, but because they don't have the skills in-house and the cost of bringing all of those skills into the organization are inhibited by constraints of one sort or another.

The use of contractors and outsourcing of IT development was a major push for many years as businesses focused on their core capabilities. Industries like government couldn't compete with the marketplace for IT skills and so turned to contractors to fill the needs in many organizations. Now, these same organizations feel they need to bring the modern agile ways of working to their organizations. So how do they actually get the benefits of modern agile ways of working and delivering products while continuing to use contractors for most of the work?

This talk will focus on 3 areas of achieving most of the benefits of modern agile work while continuing to use contracted work. First, how to decide what to outsource. The decision of which pieces or work to use contractors for is the most important. Second, how to actually hire contractors. The procurement process can be evolved to be more agile and to encourage finding contractors that will drive toward the desired collaboration. Finally, how to manage and work with contractors. The day to day grind of working where real delivery will be accomplished.

Getting benefits from an agile framework and delivery is important and can still be achieved when some of the work is outsourced and the importance of defining and finding the right contractor are vital to achieving the desired success.

Exciting news! Colleagues from a non-software department, function, or business unit are interested in adopting Agile, and they have turned to you for advice!

While you’d like to help them, you realize that copying your Agile practices for software/IT won’t cut it. Maybe even a popular process framework (name starts with “S”) wouldn’t be right for their work. They are already starting to use Agile bits – boards, stickies, sprints, and standups – but you’d like to help them go further and enjoy a context-specific Agile implementation that will transform their world.

What you need to do is help them design their implementation based on Agile values and principles. While you don’t have to be a process expert, you do need to have the right conversations. And, you need to discuss the Agile approach in a way that empowers your colleagues to make suitable choices, without being tied to any prescription, tool, or so-called best practices. Come to this session, led by the author of “The Agile Mind-Set” and the forthcoming “Agile for Non-Software Teams,” to learn how to facilitate a rigorous, collaborative, empowering set of activities for successfully customizing Agile to their context.

Are you stuck in an agile transformation? Are you chasing team velocity without seeing any business impact? Do you manage an 18-month long roadmap, committing to 25 OKRs and shoving new features down the throat of your customers?

Maybe it is time to rethink your approach!

It has taken me over a decade, to make the transition from improving manufacturing environments with Lean, to conceptualizing agility within software and hardware organizations.

Asking the hard questions required to create quality software, faster, often rubs people the wrong way…. but without those questions you’ll keep hiring scrum masters who end up being JIRA admins and going through agile motions without winning the true benefits of lean agile and DevOps – necessary to drive business agility.

In an age of disruption - the balanced mix of agile, lean, design thinking, lean start up, lean UX, OKRs and DevOps injected to high performing teams is crucial to business agility.

We discuss the essentials of successful change initiatives:

• Digital transformation must be simple - Team agility without technical practices and continuous integration is wasted effort;
• Scaling agility is counterproductive when the culture of team empowerment is not retained and focus on fast iterative feedback is missing;
• Value stream mapping of your deployment pipeline without a plan for Toyota Kata of continuous improvement is just another one-off workshop; Success hinges on soak-ability!