The Agile version of Cards Against Humanity. You may have seen versions of this on the internet, but rest assured this version has been enhanced to yield a minimum of 156% more awesomeness. Relatively fresh from its stellar debut at the 2017 Xero Unconference!

How do we make an impact to the starters in our field regardless of your position in the industry? Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a newcomer and explore mentoring from a different perspective.

Coming from being a part of an 18 month Graduate Program position at REA Group, my peers and I have been fortunate enough to find ourselves in an environment where mentoring and pairing is a big part of the culture. This talk is designed to give the attendees an insight on what a diverse range of mentees actually wish and crave for, to empower people to mentor and help shape the future of tech.

Every organisation has legacy systems, and people who know "where the bodies are buried" -- hidden aspects of dependency, communication, process flow and whatnot which every system relies on to function. These are the dirty secrets swept beneath the rug of "business as usual", and they represent risk and friction alike.

As Peter Drucker is famously quoted, "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it", and the first step towards measuring it is to be able to describe it. How can you do this with gigantic, complex, intertwined systems whose origins are buried in mystery and legend, whose very operation and continued existence is dependent, frequently, on specific people, high priests who may not want to share their arcane knowledge?

This session provides evidence-based techniques for uncovering this complexity, visualising it in a machine-friendly but fundamentally human-centric manner, and using the results to drive real organisational awareness that facilitates conversations and change.

The Medici Effect was a coined term by Frans Johansson to describe innovation that happens when disciplines and ideas intersect. Take for example the idea of using something very technically challenging such as blockchain, and an internet favourite such as cats and you have the CryptoCats and the Crypto Kitties! Indeed the most interesting ideas are borne out of collaboration & diverse thinking.

This hands-on workshop will provide an introduction to the Medici effect using the Mashup ideation method by IDEO.

The workshop aims to guide the participants on the steps detailed on the Mashup ideation method of IDEO.

Participants will work in groups and will be guided on IDEO's 4 step Mashup process and will end with a Cereal Box design activity and sharing of the created ideas.

I've been on a journey, and I've come to know that apathy and ambivalence are an awful place to be.

I want to talk about big life changes and the uncertainty that comes with them.

We will look at navigating this kind of journey in your own life. How curiosity and self-awareness can lead to meaningful change that will better equip you for new and exciting things in your life.

We will also discuss the importance of healthy company culture as the undercurrent that enables all of this.

Scrum is a great framework but there are many ways to do it poorly. The average IT worker is interrupted every 15 minutes, which equates to 2000+ interruptions for a Scrum team every sprint. Unthinkable on a production line, yet too often the norm in offices.

I conducted original research with Scrum teams in Australia last year as part of my Master of Management thesis (and achieved an A), to understand the causes, patterns and impacts of these interruptions on the team's effectiveness and their happiness. And, how mature teams control interruptions rather than let themselves be controlled by interruptions.

Attendees will play a short game to demonstrate how destructive the context switching from handling frequent interruptions is.

My talks are always highly practical and I provide 3 takeaway actions for teams to improve their 'flow' and reduce interruptions.

Do you spend a lot of your time trying to solve people’s problems? What if you could learn a simple tool that you could use to help them learn to solve these problems for themselves? A tool that would enable team members to think more creatively and take more ownership of their work. By using coaching conversations to provide support and feedback, you can help individuals or teams to make sustainable changes and improve their effectiveness.

This workshop is based on the Wall Street Journal bestseller The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stainer. You will learn and practice his seven essential questions to help you coach people to find their own solutions to their problems.

This talk is given by an introvert and extrovert; we have discovered that we experience our working lives very differently.

The world we live and work in is biased towards extroverts. We work in open space offices, with Agile ceremonies where people need to assert themselves publicly, vocally, and repeatedly. How does this impact people who don’t display extroverted behaviour? Equally important, how does this impact our ability to harness everyone’s potential?

What can we do to make our workplaces more comfortable for introverted behaviour? How can we give people the chance to contribute and be recognised equally? Explore options to take back to your workplace and level up!

We spend a lot of time talking about our delivery team mix and structure, we put time into reviewing their progress looking for room to improve and we scrutinize their backlog and metrics. But what about the other team. The one regularly forgotten. In most places the team that doesn’t practice what they preach.

The leadership team.

In this session we look at the function of IT leadership and how it can benefit from the processes and approaches we strive to achieve in our delivery teams.

DevOps engineers fly from job to job doing the same things - the systems differ, but the problems (technical and otherwise) remain the same. Eventually, we ask questions not about implementation or technology, but meaning: what am I doing all of this for?

In this talk, we'll cover how we provided a converged solution (Docker cluster, monitoring, alerting, and security) from 0 to 70% of the company in three months. We'll cover how we did it - the approaches, the workflows, and the rules - but more importantly, the why: to provide an environment where the things that we produce change whole organizations and make people's lives a little better.

But most of all, how it made us a little bit kinder.

Language sets the tone for change, but we continue to use the same tired language that we have been for years. You know the language, that dialog, those words that fill the pages of Linked In, airline magazines, and 'modern' management speak. Meaningful change continues to eludes us; and in the end, if we don't change our language, our dialog, our words, we're just waiting to fail (and not the good kind of fail!).

Join me for an interactive discussion of my top ~five words / phrases that I believe cause more harm than good. We'll discuss why they're an issue, and I'll suggest alternatives that may help guide you onto a better path.

Software development has embraced techniques like TDD (Test Driven Development) to help reduce the cycle time between developing code and validating it works.

As application development practice evolved, we needed to respond to change faster while still maintaining our quality - the way we developed our solutions needed to change - and so did our tools.

Now that we have Infrastructure as Code (IaC) a whole new range of cycle time challenges have emerged. No longer are we building simple proof of concept systems using IaC, many of todays cloud deployments are multiple complex servers composed of tens or hundreds of servers.

In this session we take a look at the tools and practices available to Infrastructure developers to reduce the cycle time of change while maintaining a high level of quality and confidence.

Diagramming and mapping our thoughts changes the way we think. It makes our thoughts and ideas broader and helps us to see patterns. These approaches are great for both individual problem-solving and team collaboration and co-creation.

By learning and applying these visual techniques we follow in the foot-steps of great thinkers such as Leonardo, Edison, and Feynman who used visualisation as a major guide, more so than language and equations, which came later.

Many of us have tried our hand at mind-mapping, which is an excellent tool for expanding our ideas and solving problems by breaking away from linear thinking. In this talk, I will demonstrate other powerful ways we can map our ideas and thoughts to solve problems, both as individuals and as teams.

Techniques include:

- Lotus blossom technique

- Systems mapping

My objective is to offer you options so that you can choose the technique that best suits you.

Working on a software product team can be quite a terrifying experience for new employees, especially when you are a round peg in the square holes.

A year go, I landed in the biggest tech company in town as a non-technical person on a technical team. Looking back on a year full of adventures and scary challenges, I’m here to share with you:

• What to expect in the world of code, API, kanban, MVP and DevOps
• The candid (sometimes, painful) lessons on how individuals can prepare for, survive and thrive in this kind of environment

Change is the only Constant. From CEO to your industry aspirant, those unprepared are washed away in the wave of emerging trends and technologies. Industry has witnessed multiple process and technological changes. Out of all the process and technological transformations the industry has gone through Agile has been extremely unique. With greatly increased delivery speed, quality and reliability Agile has been the go to stop for many companies, yet it also has been the most misunderstood concept.

With greatly increased success rates in software development, improved quality, speed to market Agile has been the go to stop for many companies. But why do they fail in its implementation or rather Transformation? The answer is simple. Even today Agile is still considered as a process and called Agile Transformation. But Leadership should look at it as Organizational Transformation.

An organization transformation involves Leadership, Vision Strategy, Process, Tools and People transformation. In such a huge make shift leadership is the key piece driving the change, supporting and motivating entire chain below. A vision leader has like a virus. Resilient, Highly contagious. It can grow to define or destroy an organization; the stakes are extremely high. To ensure smooth transformation Leadership needs

• “I” – Insights
• “A” - Awareness
• “M” Maturity

This presentation is focused on providing real-time examples leadership can relate to and generate insights, create awareness and test their maturity to take up the challenge. Moving them from AM I Transformed to I AM transformed.

* Many Agile practitioners don't have 100% free rein at work to practise Agile.

* After "failing" at Ironman with a Waterfall approach (multiple times), I experimented with Agile principles over several years, where I had 100% free rein to iterate, continuously improve and adapt. Ultimately, cutting 4 hours off my time and finishing 3rd in Ironman Australia 2017 in my age group.

* This is significant because at 5'2" and without any physical advantages, it was Agile principles (working smarter, not harder) that made the difference.

* You'll learn which principles had the biggest effects, and how you can apply these at work (or in other areas of your life).

Many organisations have benefited from the transformational practices of Lean and Agile at the team level, but how do we apply the learnings within larger enterprises that are tasked with building complex solutions that potentially require hundreds of people to develop?

The Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) is a knowledge base of proven, integrated principles and practices for Lean, Agile, and DevOps that helps large organisations with this challenge. SAFe was released in 2011 and is currently the most popular method for scaling Lean-Agile.

If you’re considering whether SAFe is right for your context, then there are four things you should know about SAFe.

Often we hear how web application development provides more agility and room for innovation when providing digital solutions to customers. How web approaches better compliment the we way test, develop, and learn when working in agile environments.

And with this, desktop development is often pushed back as an old way of solving problems, with the notion that it carries constraints and challenges that make delivering digital solutions difficult.

With our talk, we hope to provide context into some of the misconceptions around desktop development in the age of agile, and provide our stories on challenges, successes and learnings from our experience in an agile development team.

Organisational structures are an important part of any agile transformation and their design implies managing trade-offs due to the inefficiencies that can be created in each model.

In this session we will explore organisation structure designs for large organisation and the compromises or inefficiencies when organisational design patterns are applied to certain existing circumstances and the most common workarounds and solutions.

Some of the inefficiencies that are going to be explored in this talk are linked to dependency management, performance management and prescriptive approaches.

We will understand the importance of the Value Stream Mapping for effective organisational design and common workarounds to solve the issues created by the designs such as Bear Hug, Pre and Post PI Planning, Pop-up squads among others.