Yup, you read that correctly - colonoscopies. A hallmark study by experts in the fields of psychology and economics has strangely strong links to the themes that underpin the Agile Manifesto. In this short talk, I present how basic human psychology - the tendency to obfuscate the initial and distill the terminal - aligns perfectly with a world of work that based on iteration.

The Agile Mindset is elusive - and gets a bad reputation for being so. Through evidence based research this talk will allow participants to grasp onto the concept of iteration in an innately 'human' way.

A couple of years ago Christiaan Verwijs and Johannes Schartau coined the term ‘Zombie-Scrum’. What's it all about?

Well, at first sight Zombie Scrum seems to be normal Scrum. But it lacks a beating heart. The Scrum teams do all the Scrum events but a potential releasable increment is rarely the result of a Sprint. Zombie Scrum teams have a very unambitious definition of what ‘done’ means, and no drive to extend it. They see themselves as a cog in the wheel, unable and unwilling to change anything and have a real impact: I’m only here to code! Zombie Scrum teams show no response to a failed or successful Sprint and also don’t have any intention to improve their situation. Actually nobody cares about this team. The stakeholders have forgotten the existence of this team long time ago.

Zombie Scrum is Scrum, but without the beating heart of working software and its on the rise. This workshop will help you understand how to recognise the symptoms and cuases of Zombie Scrum and what you can do to get started to combat and treat Zombie-Scrum.Knowing what causes Zombie Scrum might help prevent a further outbreak and prevent the apocalypse

There is so much white noise about agility, and I wonder sometimes if the "Agile Industry" is creating the complexity to grow it's own importance. To me agility, indeed all modern working practices, boil down to three things: Visibility, Transparency, and Team Work. In this session I will cover what each of these three aspects bring to the principles and practices of working in the modern workplace, delivering value for an organisation, and working in high performing teams.

This session drills into the absolute fundamentals of agility in practical and tangible techniques that allows any team to adopt the practices that will support aligned, collaborative delivery of value. It's from these fundamentals that each organisation can create their own working practices and approaches to support their industry, domain or stakeholder's needs.

Feedback is a skill that allows you to bring Kaizen into your workplace on a daily basis. By regularly encouraging small changes in your colleagues (feedback); you can collectively be "doing the basics brilliantly" and hence have a high performing team. In the Feedback Dojo you will practise and refining your feedback; learning skills you can immediately apply at work.

Regardless of your experience with giving feedback, this Dojo will help you develop your skill. Participants will be grouped by experience so that they can support and challenge each other.

If you find it hard to give feedback, especially constructive feedback, you are not alone. Many people feel uncomfortable when thinking about giving feedback and lots of us have a bad experience when we delivered constructive feedback. This workshop will provide some guidance and structure that can help with this.

A workshop inspired by the game Monikers where you will form teams and be able to move from a feeling of “We’ll never get this done” to “High fives all round!”. By demonstrating and understanding the value of establishing a common language, leveraging each others strengths, iterating, reflecting and most importantly taking what you have learnt and applying it to your work life. You’ll also laugh a lot and have a heap of fun in the process.

I have played this game alot, most recently at BOQ as our team formed and again as new team members joined. The existing team members reflect on how hard it would be for a team member to join the game in Round 3 and what they need to do to get new team members up to speed. New team members cut themselves some slack recognising that it will take time and effort from everyone to have them running at the same pace.

Organisation Leaders and more importantly customers are looking for faster, proactive and innovative solutions to their problems.

Instead of simply doing ‘better’, organisations must do more.

What does this all mean for the traditional PMO and how can they disrupt themselves to be the valueable business partner they need to be?

During the 30 minute discussion the 2 Becs will discuss and provide insights from a recent client engagement where they assisted the PMO to become:

• Start up Funders

• An Innovation Hub

• Investment Advisors

• LEAN Portfolio Machine.

Lessons learnt about what worked, reinforcements to get the change to stick and the pivots required along the way.

As we continue our forays into Business Agility, we need to ask ourselves "have we lost our way?" "if we don't pay attention to the values, do we exist in the Agile forest?"

A case study in recognising our Agility vs Agile journey, where we are at and why, what is next?

Interestingly a learning oriented organisation is both a great and terrifying place to be. Whilst we totally get investing to learn, we can also cut ourselves with the bleeding edge, lets go for cutting edge and do it well!

• An Epiphany: Establishing a frame of reference
• Returning to the basics
• Moving forward: Our Agile may not be your Agile, let's embrace diversity

When looking at an entire system there are two common mistakes that are made.

We will look at them and how they relate to the two biggest killers of productivity in the work place.

In this workshop teams learn about the 10 key factors of Collaboration, they learn how to apply them in a practical problem solving task (jigsaw puzzles) and they learn how the puzzle analogy relates to our working practices. Teams will get the process as a take-away that they can then apply at work.

Collaboration

1. Be intentional
2. Have a shared (and common) goal
3. Define a process
4. Build a language
5. Build relationships
6. Be brief
7. Listen with intent to learn
8. If you don't know, say so
9. Everyone gets to contribute
10. Iterate

By working together to solve a problems teams can apply this collaboration approach and learn the value of having structure and discipline to the most important skill we can all develop.

Businesses today operate in conditions of high uncertainty. Companies need to be constantly evolving. This means it’s no longer enough to have autonomous agile teams working iteratively. Now the whole organisation needs to be responsive and adaptable.

So what does portfolio management look like in a constantly changing organisation? How can a portfolio be run without relying on traditional command and control practices? In this talk I’ll share lean portfolio management principles that focus on defining a purpose and then aligning autonomous teams to work towards it. Principles that will enable your organisation to become more responsive and achieve your purpose.