Building an app is easy, right? 16 year-olds build million dollar apps in their garages every other day. But things get a little trickier when the app you’re building is for a bank.

Designing and coding an app with lots of cool new features is the easy part. Creating a whole new customer channel, that is effectively the bank’s most highly visited branch, comes with a whole different set of challenges including:

• Shifting the businesses mindset from a one-off project to treating mobile as a first-class channel that needs to be supported and evolved on an ongoing basis.
• Provide all the features that customer’s expect from web banking and deliver those in a lean fashion, with a mobile first approach.
• Balancing security and fraud constraints whilst still making the app easy to use for customers.
• Pushing the boundaries of traditional brand guidelines that didn’t translate to native mobile environments.

With a conservative financial institution that’s just beginning to understand how mobile is going to revolutionise its business, you have quite a mountain to climb before your designs can see the light of the app store.

This is the journey that Toby Pritchard (Suncorp) and Ben Melbourne (ThoughtWorks) have recently been through. In this case study presentation they’ll share the highs and lows they went through while rebuilding and launching the new Suncorp Mobile Bank App.

Ideas, ideas ideas. New businesses, new products, new features. Innovative ideas, enhancements ideas, BAU ideas. You name it. They come from everywhere. Overwhelming everyone. Wasting money. Paralysing an organisation with low-priority distractions or by creating too much work to deal with.

Ideas are free. Delivering them is hard, expensive and not necessarily worth it.

How do you sort the good from the bad? How do you kill the bad ones quickly and minimise your investment in them? How do get people to let go of their emotional attachment to them?

In this talk I’ll share ways to switch from an opinion to an evidence based prioritisation model. I’ll show how to create rigour in managing the pipeline of ideas. And how saying ‘no’ to ideas can not just reduce that overwhelming feeling, but also improve your organisation’s productivity.

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.