Drawing on his experience and community engagement through both ICAgile and InfoQ, Shane explores what is at the edge of agility in 2019. The trends that are impacting the way organisations are evolving; practices and approaches gaining traction in the innovators and early adopters and what’s next for agility.

The Great Lean Debate will be back for 2019:

• 2 teams battling it out debating some important Lean, Agile, Systems Thinking topics.
• Team Captains Renae Craven and Phil Gadzinski
• On the day we will be looking for 2 team members to join each of the team captains in a live debate.

The session was inspired by ‘Lean Debate’ a game created by Steph BySouth:

https://www.leandebate.com/

https://www.stephaniebysouth.com/masterclasses-with-stephanie/

In the face of market disruption, boardroom strongholds, and technical globalisation bleeding into to the thread of our societies morals how do business leaders stay the course, transform the enterprise, empower the people and still make money. Come and learning about how to build your Leadership Edge; amplify your distributed power as a leader and practical techniques to walk away with to grow your teams well being and productivity.

Do your teams understand how they contribute to your company’s strategy? Are they focused on the highest priorities? Can they be more aspirational? Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are becoming an increasingly popular way to deliver step-change improvements across organisations.

Hear from three Technology Executives on their experiences with successfully introducing OKRs at their organisations. Learn how they were able to link delivery execution to overall strategic intent. And get practical tips on what worked and what didn’t.

You too can unleash your organisation’s potential!

Welcome to the Conference

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.

Just what exactly does an Agile Coach do? Coaches may vary in their response to this question. I would like to think that most Agile Coaches, with some variation, would be fairly consistent in how we perceive our role. However, some companies or orgs or people probably interpret the role of the Agile Coach in ways that coaches never intended.

Let’s explore some of the things that Agile Coaches have been asked to do! Are these antipatterns? Doing what needs to be done? This session will delve into the topic of the role of the Agile Coach and highlight potential challenges and possible solutions.

Acceptance test-driven development (ATDD) is the god-father of test-driven development (TDD) and behaviour-driven development (BDD), so why does it get such little attention? For that matter what is it?

This workshop will give you an overview of ATDD and a run-through of an elaboration session centred on testing.

By the end - you'll never do BDD without ATDD again!

Presented this in Melbourne recently to their content strategy meetup: https://www.meetup.com/We-Are-Content-Strategy/events/vwqddqyzjbkc/

The IA (UX) revolution: Bringing the great disrupt to your tree structures.

Jilly Magee, fresh from working as a digital specialist on CBA's new intranet, will be breaking our brains with this revolutionary idea. The attendees will get to delve into this in an interactive way, It will be fun and we'll learn a lot.

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

Why Design Thinking Should Be At The Core Of Your Business Strategy Development

A primary element of design thinking is simply thinking and ideating on a solution to address a problem or better meet a customer need. Establishing the proper amount of time for truly thinking through the work being done and measuring its merit as a viable solution to solve the challenge at hand is shockingly and overwhelmingly missed a lot of times.

So how can you implement design thinking in your company? Let’s discuss some of the basics.

Center on the customer; shake well

"Of course we know our customer! In fact, we know our customer better than they know themselves!" Really? Then great! You are halfway there. But unlike most businesses, don't fall in to this pitfall of 'thinking' that you know your customer simply because you are an expert!

Customer-centric is the main word here. When you get them in a room, you may be shocked at how unaware certain functional groups are of the goings-on outside of their own function.

This can make or break your business - but find out exactly how you can lead your industry in truly knowing your customer.

Identify and define the problem to form solutions around

Define the right problem to solve. It’s the assembled team’s job to always question the problem at hand and empathise, in a multitude of ways, with the person’s experience they seek to improve. Try to represent in a visual way the problem or scenario you need solutions developed around. We are visual creatures and the more you can “paint the picture” the better off you’ll be at forming viable and valuable solutions.

Create many options for the newly defined problem

Design thinking helps you go about things differently—not solving a problem the same way every time. It’s important that many solutions be ideated no matter what the problem at hand is. Extract ideas from everyone’s mind, but be careful not to overanalyse the thoughts and ideas at the outset.

Fine-tune selected directions

Once you have a few good options, they need to be embraced by the group. Don’t let things like what’s happened in the past deter your from pursuing a good idea. Design thinking creates an environment that lets new ideas grow and lets the group experiment without the threat of making mistakes. Sometimes options will need to be combined, refined, etc. Several rounds may be needed to make sure the right answers are being brought forward to solve the problem.

Pick the winner and execute

This final stage is where a course of action is selected and resources are allocated to achieve goals.

I will detail 14 x executable (simple) strategies that you can start doing right now (assuming the execution is done well of course!). Keep in mind this is not a fully instructional piece on design thinking.

With the guided and evidence-based design thinking approach, I have been able to assist over 50 x start-ups, small businesses and entrepreneurs grow and (in some cases) double their business revenue and scale, simply by working closely with the leaders and decision makers. There is a huge potential to every business and the key lies in identifying and designing a specific strategy(s) to fit your unique skill sets and brand.

Tune-in and find out how and why design thinking should be at the core of your business strategy development.

The talk is about the transformation journey of an IT Department(Heritage Bank) from Silo environment to collaborative environment and the challenges faced as an Agile coach/Change agent during the transformation. It will give insights in to some of the basic concepts of Agile , design thinking, Domain Driven techniques ,change & Program management concepts.Its a tool kit for change agents considering transformation in their organisations.

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.

Creating "pockets of awesome" agility in an organisation during an agile transformation is difficult, but how do you progress that awesomeness across the entire organisation? In this presentation, Tyler Gale will share how he moved from tribe level agile coaching towards applying agile strategically across the Australian Taxation Office to create an organisation of agility.

A storm is defined as a disturbance of the atmosphere or the state of an environment and life brings them in many forms and sizes. Some bring significant disruptions to normal conditions, while others destroy the existing structures and force a rebuilding. As humans we will experience various storms throughout our lives with the aim of surviving them all.

We are so used to the occurrence of storms that preparing for them has become second nature. We have the technology available to us to help predict them, their size and intensity so we know what to expect and plan accordingly. Best practices exist to manage the storms. However with climate change it feels like there are more ‘freak’ one in a 100 year occurrences happening which take everyone by surprise. The best practices lead to chaos. What’s the future going to hold and what can we learn today to in order to build our resilience for future storms? Do we reflect the shifting environment into our existing practices?

How do we apply these learnings from our life to an Agile transformation of an organisation?

On the horizon, a cyclone is growing in intensity and heading towards your organisation to disrupt the existing paradigms. Everyone is scared and uncertain of what will survive or need to be rebuilt after the agile transformation has hit. What do we need to do to prepare for the transformation? How are we going to work together to build our resilience in the chaos of the cyclone?

How do organisations embrace the storm?

There are many bad ideas in software and most of them aren’t going to work. Most software environments make it difficult to quickly and safely eliminate these bad ideas. Strongly typed functional programming reduces as many bad ideas as possible by maximising feedback and communication. With a friendly programming environment like Haskell or Elm these bad ideas can be weeded out as you type them and changes can be made with confidence, the tools are the guide and give positive feedback so you know when you're done.

We’ll also address some of the perceived negatives of functional programming: hiring experienced developers is less of a problem than most people would think and you don't need an army of algebraic astronauts in order to write functional programs.

We’ll show how we’ve found functional programming the ideal environment for treating software as collective understanding. It’s allowed us to:

• Clearly define the current intent and specification of the system,
• Incrementally improve our code and keep the interest rates down on our technical debt,
• Test our code through high level properties and reduce or eliminate low level, mechanical testing,
• Reason about what code is doing to data and how you can describe a program through the transformation of data from one structure to another, and
• More easily reuse code at different levels of abstraction.

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.