Agile mixed with Waterfall exists in every product development organization globally, yet current thinking teaches us to crusade for one approach at the expense of the other - an approach that creates unnecessary resistance and alienates people with different perspectives. The question is: How can we manage the reality of a mixed-methods environment while still receiving the intended benefits of both approaches? In this talk, Brock Argue and Erkan Kadir will introduce Integrated Agile, a groundbreaking and practical approach that leverages Polarity Thinking to manage the predictable dynamics between Agile and Waterfall while maximizing the upsides of both approaches.

This workshop encourages the participants to take the role of a stakeholder in small group priority discussions. We will sample three online games to prioritize items and compare and contrast them.

At Agile 2019 Jeff Sutherland introduced a metric to measure efficiency for agile stories.  A cross-team comparable metric connected to efficiency would be an amazing achievement.  But is this wonderful concept a myth or reality?  Join Neil as we look at the results of tracking this metric for some agile teams over a year.  Come with an open mind and let's review this experience!

Are your retros running a bit flat? Need something to spice them up and make them more effective and also more interesting for your team? Join us as we walk through a collection of techniques from psychology and applied neuroscience to give your retros that edge you need. 

You’ll walk away from this session with immediately applicable techniques that you can use right away.

Next time you are in a conversation with your peers, you could ask them, what is the role of the manager in an Agile environment?  They may say, the role of manager should transition into that of a servant leader.  You may end up being none the wiser with that reply.

One of the best responses to that question we recall is, the role of the manager in an Agile environment is similar to that of a captain of an aircraft or ship, they support the performance of their crew and deal with emergencies if they arise.

Successful Agile needs an accumulation of many things.  One building block is the establishment of leadership at multiple levels, managers are an essential part of this.  In order to achieve this, the Agile manager must be aware of the various stances they could assume at the appropriate time, to provide the best support for their teams.  This session introduces several stances and principle's aligned to each stance to help get you started in an interactive way and hands on approach.

After over a decade of agile transformations, many organizations have several years experience of agile and are naturally looking for signs that the change is complete. Attention turns to the level of skill or maturity an organization needs in order to declare the transformation a success. As a result, models of agile maturity have emerged that promise to somehow measure how agile you are.

The good news is that agile, by definition, should be iteratively delivering value from the moment a transformation starts. Looking back, your ability to deliver has already changed immeasurably. You are already faster, more focussed, and delivering a product with higher quality. The bad news is that you have only just started your journey. Change itself has changed, as Gary Hamel said. What looks mature today will be table stakes tomorrow.

We will talk about what agile maturity looks like today, and where agile maturity will go in the future. We will learn how iterative value delivery is the price to pay to move along the experience curve. The more frequently you deliver value, the faster you move along the experience curve. By introducing a Wardley Maps in the context of business agility, you will be able to map out the path of your transformation, filling in any gaps that you may have, and beginning to understand what direction your transformation may take you in the future. Specifically, you can identify the drivers needed to reap the benefits along the way, rather than at some mythical end point. Business agility is not a destination but a continually evolving journey. Learn how to enjoy the journey rather than long for the destination.

With so many changes coming to organizations - agile, devops, products, etc - how do you learn these new practices and apply them in your context with your constraint? Enter the dojo - an immersive, team based learning environment where teams come together to learn and apply new skills to their work.

Do you have Scrum/Kanban teams frequently releasing high-value, quality product updates? Unfortunately, such agility usually doesn’t last, with features starting to take longer to build, changes becoming riskier to make, and quality getting more difficult to maintain. This common situation – high cost of change, low safety – is often the result of low Technical Agility. The common solution? Lean on the developers to upgrade their “technical practices.” However, this solution rarely makes a lasting, noticeable difference, because what matters is how developers approach work, and that depends heavily on how product and management engage with them. In this session we’ll explore Technical Agility from a mindset standpoint, identify its influence on product management’s choices, and determine how all parties should engage with each other to achieve a level of Technical Agility that enables actual product and business Agility.

The CFD is growing in popularity in the agile community and has been called a successor to the Scrum burn-down chart. It’s a  very effective tool as it  provides a better visualization and typical information for critical decision making.  Furthermore, CFD can help you improve your process by providing insights into issues and by identifying potential bottlenecks.

In this session, we’ll look at the different patterns, behaviors and examples of CFD, reviewing what each represents, and how can they be used in both a Kanban and Scrum context.

The Agile Manifesto came out in 2001. It’s all about teams. And yet, HR processes still focus on individuals. A few years ago, companies in Europe started to ask questions on how Agile affects HR, specifically in performance management and reward & recognition. In the US, this exercise only started recently, even though there were a few voices raising and answering these questions early on. In this interactive talk, we dare you to open the HR pandora’s box and go on a tour with us as we share with you how we navigate the HR waters to increase your business agility. We hope you would be courageous enough to join us in driving this transition in your organisations.

Inspired from the leading book Tame Your Work Flow that I co wrote with Steve Tendon, let's twist! Twist our brains that is. On the new counter intuitive models we need to build to understand the Five Focusing Steps of the Theory of Constraints and the Cost Accounting mirages we need to destroy with the understanding if Throughput Accounting. 

The book has received the most cherished praised from the top experts in the world in Kanban, Theory of Constraints, Throughput Accounting, FLEX, DA, Lean etc. They are right here for you to grasp: 

https://tameflow.com/tame-your-work-flow-testimonials/

TameFlow is based on destroying old mental models - cognitive biases- that prevent us from reaching our goals: making money now and in the future so that we can finance our corporate aspirations. 

This experience report details my 2019 involvement with 3 organizations of 3 different sizes (small startup, small-to-medium enterprise, and giant enterprise) to illustrate how I've used a form of Value Stream Mapping to help them define their current state and leverage data collected in the process to confidently identify (often surprising) risks and opportunities.

Silo, as they say, must be eliminated. But how long does it take, What is the talk? What is the walk? All approaches fail. The remedy is at the system's logical level. Science is involved.

At the logical level, there is only one solution: TameFlow with Throughput Accounting.

Why ? It needs to go straight to the CxO level. 

Culture is a reflection of a company's system, which are a reflection of top management's mental models. Accounting is the most pervasive system of any company. If a culture change is contemplated, the prevailing cost accounting systems have to go.

This talk is about my journey to become an ICF certified coach and how I apply those skills both to my role as a strategy consultant and business leader.

Coaching is a powerful discipline that differs from mentoring, teaching and consulting. Applied correctly it can help you have better, more powerful conversations and allow you to overcome difficult challenges.

I'll talk through the skills what I learned and where they align and differ from Agile coaching practices. I'll talk to the most powerful tools I learned that I now apply to all my work such as logical levels. Throughout this, I'll do a couple of simple exercises for the audience to take with them and use.

These skills are valuable to people at every level of the organization and equally, can be applied to all aspects of your life.

Psychological safety has been identified by many researchers as one of the main ingredients of a high performing team. As leaders, we play an important role in nurturing and growing psychological safety within our teams, but with virtual teaming, the stakes are higher and it is harder to achieve. 

As an external agile coach consultant, for many years I was able to maintain a solid stance of neutrality and objectivity toward client challenges. Now, as an embedded, full-time agile coach, I play by a different set of rules.  I strive to be a catalyst for change and challenge the status quo, but I still need to be mindful of internal politics in the interest of self-preservation. Having experienced agile coaching engagements as both an external consultant and an internal employee, I will share some of my insights. I will also explain how an internal coaching capability is vital to achieving enterprise agility. 

Whilst the shift from project to product intrigues many agile practitioners and leaders, broader acceptance of this concept into practice is challenged with various constraints. The higher adoption barrier to this shift is due to the complexity and magnitude of changes required to the organizational dynamics. Let us explore together a structured framework that can help accelerate your project to product journey. 

Whether you’re researching market opportunities, brainstorming new product ideas, developing products customers love, or managing product roll-outs – product delivery is both rewarding and difficult.  Organizational dependencies often cause the following challenges:  

• Product management and product ownership is often misunderstood, unaligned or siloed.   
• Products don’t meet customer expectations or are too late to market to be impactful 
• Product features are rarely chosen based on hypotheses about customer behaviour, and never tested after deployment 
• Product owners deliver what they're told to deliver, rather than drive scope based on customer need and feedback 
• Governance models are focused on showing the status of agile products using existing tools rather than re-imagined for incremental funding  

Product delivery benefits from a structured Product Office that helps address these challenges by converging capabilities in areas like governance, product management and product ownership.  This session will provide an overview of the Product Office. It will be interactive with activities designed to deepen your understanding of the Product Office and give you some insight into ideas you can explore within your own organization. 

Volatility and uncertainty pervade our business landscapes, and everywhere we look business leaders reference this new complex world we live in. In short, complexity thinking is getting a lot of attention.

Exactly how we address complexity is less clear. The very definition is counterintuitive and hard to grasp. Pulling from contemporary examples, I will explain how complex problems challenge our understanding of the world around us. Using this as a starting point, we can explore what it means to live and work in a complex environment. Perhaps of more interest, we can explore how to stay afloat, and even make headway, when uncertainty and complexity surround us. 

Drawing from some of the longest lived business entities (universities) and some of the shortest (successful sports teams) we will uncover what characteristics organizations that thrive in a fast-changing worlds share. And how your organization's recent focus on agile principles and practices may have saved the day.