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.

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.

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.

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. 

You’ve been working with a team for a while now and you’ve noticed that planning meetings always go overtime, we can never seem to agree on an estimate, design discussions always go down a technical rabbit hole, and the requirements are always too sparse.

On the other hand, the end of the sprint feels like a giant rush, there’s always unfinished work that bumps to the next sprint, and the customer is still complaining about not having their product yet.  What is going on?  Where are all these issues coming from?

It could be that your team has trouble starting, and trouble stopping.  Join this session to learn about what happens in our minds as we think about our work and how to get started, and stopped - with some fun along the way.