The usual suspects in change management models plot a familiar curve when describing the impact of change on individuals, teams or enterprises as a whole. When a change is implemented, at first there is a “dip”; in knowledge, in competence, in confidence, in emotional state, in cooperation, in performance. Organisations and their people go through a decline before moving on to realise the desired benefits of the changes they are implementing. But what if we could accelerate the learning and smooth out this "productivity dip"?

The traditional change management discipline seeks to address this issue but the approach is hampered by being inherently linear in nature, having grown up supporting traditional linear program management practices. The more complex an organisation’s change portfolio is, the more the traditional linear approach to change management isn’t going to cut it. As contemporary organisations focus more on enterprise level business agility, opportunities arise for the change management discipline to move away from the fixed time, cost and scope criteria of linear change management, towards an agile organisational change management strategy underpinned by continuous engagement, regular feedback loops and the ability to pivot in response to feedback and changes to market conditions.

The terminology of ‘productivity dip’ or even ‘performance dip’ comes with connotations of activity-based measures and have a way of anchoring the change process into a linear predefined ‘push’ of information. Mia will explore that by re-framing ‘productivity’ as ‘value delivery’, the outcome and impact on people is brought back into focus in the change portfolio. Ultimately, an agile change management approach will help you to build a change program that truly welcomes changing requirements.

Mia will show how Agile change management returns the customer to centre stage. In the context of agile product management rolling out smaller changes more often, agile change management activities can start to genuinely deliver their change management outcomes as intended to decrease the depth and duration of the dip. The change curves modelled for individuals, teams and organisations remain relevant, but each step will be small, anticipated, and normalised. This session will explore how to use Agile Change Management approaches to ensure that business readiness is part of each iteration rather than something that is done later downstream. This means that the productivity dip of the traditional change curve becomes downsized into insignificance in a sustainable ongoing improvement journey founded on the small incremental iterations of evidence-based inspection and adaptation.

"Got funding for an idea? Great let’s set up a team" is an all too familiar path that many organisations follow. They may even "tinker" with agile and set up "agile teams" however continue to build their operations around 'project funding" and siloed structural hierarchies with complex governance at the apex from which decisions flow down the hierarchy. As the lessons of COVID pandemic of the last year has highlighted, organisations are quickly coming face to face with the reality that what may have helped them be successful in the past, may not serve them now. A new strategy is needed.

Never before have organisations been faced with such pressure to deliver new products to market quickly, to not just grow, but to survive. To adapt and change to meet constant changing market conditions organisations have found that they are not organised to "win" and need to rethink how they approach setting up their organisations. Moving from a project to a product-based model is vital for their business agility as a more modern way of operating is needed that links strategy to the detailed organisational design.

Mia will look at the elements of an operating model that helps organisations move away from traditional project-based model with its associated rigid organisational structure, to one that is product based and shifts the focus from deliverables to value. This session will discussion how an agile operating model will help you achieve this and will examine a blueprint for changing. The topic will cover the 6 elements in an agile operating model including: accountability, structure, governance, talent, metrics and behavioural expectations and show how these elements all work together as a bridge between strategy and operations.

How do you know if you’re really agile? Like predicting the weather, complex human systems need data analytics and statistical models over simple reporting, to understand what creates business agility from human behaviour. This is the world of psychology, statistics, human behaviour models. It’s how medicine predicts if you have factors that predict heart attacks or if children are likely to have developmental delay. It’s time to apply this to agile teams to growing a true agile mindset.

This talk looks at the psychology of human behaviour and data analytics to provide a playbook for measuring and improve an agile mindset in teams to underpin true business agility. It looks at 10 years of longitudinal data, both from software and non-software agile teams, and large scale agile transformation initiatives, and the model that’s now been produced to help coaches and the enterprise become more agile.

Many organisations are built to thrive in a 20th century business environment: a time marked by relative stability, low levels of competition, and where a focus on efficiency was a proven and repeatable recipe for business success. The 21st century, though, is anything but stable.

21 century businesses operate in environments of volatility, uncertainty, and high levels of complexity and radical change. Customer’s expectations can change rapidly. New products emerge quickly. Governments change legislation. Social media giants change content sharing policies. Google changes how it indexes content. Hyper-competition means that the old approach is not enough. Many turn to Business Agility and new business models that promise capability to optimise for adaptability to their environment. And yet, most agile transformations fail.

In this talk, we will explore the business models that help organisations to thrive in this new world based on real world agile transformation case studies. We’ll look at where they succeeded, where they failed, how they managed their transformation risks, and the 4 key enablers of Business Agility that helped them juggle the balance between a traditional hierarchy to support internal stability versus the adaptability in networks of teams for agile product management.

Most enterprises struggle with ability to respond quickly to change, get to market faster and innovate. Now more than ever, the ability to respond to change over ‘following a plan’ couldn’t ring truer. Hindsight is 20/20 but none of us could have predicted the unprecedented effect that COVID19 has wrought upon every aspect of our lives. Now we are working from home, readjusting to a "next normal", but all the while living in a state of chaos whilst still ‘keeping the lights on’ in the space of not months or years but in weeks, days and even hours.

Organisations have already had to rapidly change the products or services they ‘traditionally’ brought to market and reinvent themselves at lightning speed to not just stay relevant but to actually survive. How do executives ensure their agile teams remain productive and how do you create a culture that can pivot and adapt to meet market changes? How to create the measures to help you steer when the speed of change is rapid and understand the leading indicators to track to reduce your risk profile.

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

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

I had been sitting in a few team retrospectives and hearing the same old tired pattern of "what went well, what didn't, what can we improve". The teams were bored, I was bored, they were just doing mechanical Scrum. Retrospectives are such a powerful tool to drive continuous improvement, but what i was seeing was a stagnation and the true value of this event was being lost.

End of the Sprint was coming up so as the enterprise agile coach, I thought I'd provide some of my favourite patterns and ended up providing my 20 Scrum Masters with a playbook to accelerate and reinvigorate learning and improvement, retrospectives and ideas as well as links to where to find more.

Would love to share these patterns with you, discuss the pain points we were experiencing and how we were able to reinvigorate this event and improve overall quality of our delivery. It will be a workshop so would also love to hear your favourite patterns so we can share them with the group in this workshop and help inspire our teams to strive for activating real improvements.

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

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

Organisations invest in agile processes, tools, training, and coaching, but how much are they getting back?

Has product delivery improved?

How much happier are users and the business customers?

Are employees empowered and enabled?

Traditional metrics might give you insight into improvements of operational efficiency, but the real conversation is about the value created for your organisation by the improved processes. Without measuring value, the success of any agile initiative is based on nothing more than intuition and assumption.

Evidence-Based Management (EBM) is a framework to help measure, manage, and increase the value derived from product delivery. EBM focuses on improving outcomes, reducing risks, and optimising investments and is an important tool to help leaders put the right measures in place to invest in the right places, make smarter decisions and reduce risk using an iterative and incremental approach. This empirical method alongside the agile principles and values of Scrum enables successful steps of change for the organisation.

Organisations invest in agile processes, tools, training, and coaching, but how much are they getting back? Has product delivery improved? How much happier are users and the business customers? Are employees empowered and enabled? Traditional metrics might give you insight into improvements of operational efficiency but the real conversation is about the value created for your organisation by the improved processes. Without measuring value, the success of any agile initiative is based on nothing more than intuition and assumption.

Mia will discuss Evidence based management and how this empirical process can help agile transformations measure and manage the value derived from the transformation initiative. Mia will focus on the 4 Key Value Areas: Current Value, Ability to Innovate, Unrealised Value and time to market and how these contribute to an organisation’s ability to deliver business value.

I had been sitting in a few team retrospectives and hearing the same old tired pattern of "what went well, what didn't, what can we improve". The teams were bored, I was bored, they were just doing mechanical Scrum. Retrospectives are such a powerful tool to drive continuous improvement, but what i was seeing was a stagnation and the true value of this event was being lost.

End of the Sprint was coming up so as the enterprise agile coach, I thought I'd provide some of my favourite patterns and ended up providing my 20 Scrum Masters with a playbook to accelerate and reinvigorate learning and improvement, retrospectives and ideas as well as links to where to find more.

Would love to share these patterns with you, discuss the pain points we were experiencing and how we were able to reinvigorate this event and improve overall quality of our delivery. It will be a workshop so would also love to hear your favourite patterns so we can share them with the group in this workshop and help inspire our teams to strive for activating real improvements.

I had been sitting in a few team retrospectives and hearing the same old tired pattern of "what went well, what didn't, what can we improve". The teams were bored, I was bored, they were just doing mechanical Scrum. Retrospectives are such a powerful tool to drive continuous improvement, but what i was seeing was a stagnation and the true value of this event was being lost.

End of the Sprint was coming up so as the enterprise agile coach, I thought I'd provide some of my favourite patterns and ended up providing my 20 Scrum Masters with a playbook to accelerate and reinvigorate learning and improvement and provided a years worth of retrospectives and ideas as well as links to where to find more.

Would love to share these patterns with you, but also hear your favourite patterns so we can share them with the group in this workshop and help inspire our teams to strive for activating real improvements.

How do you deliver a big policy outcome that normally take 6 months when you only have weeks?

An early election was called and we faced having to develop two sets of a comprehensive policy documents -- the red book (left-wing) and the blue book (right-wing) -- to brief an incoming government in 8 weeks. We were caught by surprise, the normal lead time were gone, and news about policy commitments came faster from TV and social media than traditional internal sources. This was a non ICT business team who hadn't done Agile before however we felt given the time frames, it was the best way to approach for such a high profile project.

Come and learn about and application of Lean Kanban and how we delivered the outcome through:

• engagement with the executive to share drafts of chapters, then gather and incorporate feedback in short iterative cycles to improve transparency and alignment.
• team design in non-software environment
• limiting waste and duplication
• visualising flow
• coordination of “Scrum of Scrums” key daily meetings to promote collaboration, visibility and transparency
• supporting team leads to coordinate the collaborative, dynamic planning process, prioritising work that needs to be done against the capacity and capability of the team
• providing visibility and transparency of work in progress and flow and share this with other teams and stakeholders.

Mia will discuss how she addressed business agility through working with a Portfolio Management Office (PMO) to assist the Incoming Government Brief (IGB) task force to work iteratively and apply agile practices to draft and deliver policy documentation to articulate the details and costing of policy initiatives from each of the major political parties in the lead up to the Federal election. This involved working with Executives and Business stakeholders within the policy domain during a hectic period where policy could change or be adjusted and costed daily as policies were revealed by each side during the campaign. The policy team need to improve the enterprises business agility to respond to rapid change and this involved working with the leadership across 12 branches to align iterations of draft policy documentation over an intensive period. (the taskforce was pulled together to deliver the IGB over 8 weeks). Specifically, Kanban and Lean were chosen as the method for delivery.

This approach resulted in executives having earlier visibility of the approach and content of the IGB and improved quality of IGB by reducing the risk that significant changes being identified late in the delivery. The Teams were focused to delivery higher value work more efficiently, while being transparent about delays to lower value activities. The success of this initiative in a non-ICT environment has promoted the PMO to look at other business areas to implement Agile to develop an Agile mindset across the Agency.

Evidence-Based Management (EBM) is a framework to help measure, manage, and increase the value derived from product delivery. EBM focuses on improving outcomes, reducing risks, and optimising investments and is an important tool to help leaders put the right measures in place to invest in the right places, make smarter decisions and reduce risk using an iterative and incremental approach. This empirical method alongside the agile principles and values of Scrum enables successful steps of change for the organisation.

Organisations invest in agile processes, tools, training, and coaching, but how much are they getting back? Has product delivery improved? How much happier are users and the business customers? Are employees empowered and enabled? Traditional metrics might give you insight into improvements of operational efficiency but the real conversation is about the value created for your organisation by the improved processes. Without measuring value, the success of any agile initiative is based on nothing more than intuition and assumption.

Mia will discuss Evidence based management and how this empirical process can help agile transformations measure and manage the value derived from the transformation initiative. Mia will focus on the 4 Key Value Areas: Current Value, Ability to Innovate, Unrealised Value and time to market and how these contribute to an organisation’s ability to deliver business value.

How do you deliver a big policy outcome that normally take 6 months when you only have weeks?

An early election was called and we faced having to develop two sets of a comprehensive policy documents -- the red book (left-wing) and the blue book (right-wing) -- to brief an incoming government in 8 weeks. We were caught by surprise, the normal lead time were gone, and news about policy commitments came faster from TV and social media than traditional internal sources. This was a non ICT business team who hadn't done Agile before however we felt given the time frames, it was the best way to approach for such a high profile project.

Come and learn about and application of Lean Kanban and how we delivered the outcome through:

• engagement with the executive to share drafts of chapters, then gather and incorporate feedback in short iterative cycles to improve transparency and alignment.
• team design in non-software environment
• limiting waste and duplication
• visualising flow
• coordination of “Scrum of Scrums” key daily meetings to promote collaboration, visibility and transparency
• supporting team leads to coordinate the collaborative, dynamic planning process, prioritising work that needs to be done against the capacity and capability of the team
• providing visibility and transparency of work in progress and flow and share this with other teams and stakeholders.

Mia will discuss how she addressed business agility through working with a Portfolio Management Office (PMO) to assist the Incoming Government Brief (IGB) task force to work iteratively and apply agile practices to draft and deliver policy documentation to articulate the details and costing of policy initiatives from each of the major political parties in the lead up to the Federal election. This involved working with Executives and Business stakeholders within the policy domain during a hectic period where policy could change or be adjusted and costed daily as policies were revealed by each side during the campaign. The policy team need to improve the enterprises business agility to respond to rapid change and this involved working with the leadership across 12 branches to align iterations of draft policy documentation over an intensive period. (the taskforce was pulled together to deliver the IGB over 8 weeks). Specifically, Kanban and Lean were chosen as the method for delivery.

This approach resulted in executives having earlier visibility of the approach and content of the IGB and improved quality of IGB by reducing the risk that significant changes being identified late in the delivery. The Teams were focused to delivery higher value work more efficiently, while being transparent about delays to lower value activities. The success of this initiative in a non-ICT environment has promoted the PMO to look at other business areas to implement Agile to develop an Agile mindset across the Agency.

Improving the alignment of outcomes and benefits to achieve the prioritisation of a policy based (non ICT) program of work to deliver better return on investment for large enterprise s challenging. Mia will discuss how she addressed business agility through working with a Portfolio Management Office (PMO) to assist the Incoming Government Brief (IGB) task force to work iteratively and apply agile practices to draft and deliver policy documentation to articulate the details and costing of policy initiatives from each of the major political parties in the lead up to the Federal election. This involved working with Executives and Business stakeholders within the policy domain during a hectic period where policy could change or be adjusted and costed daily as policies were revealed by each side during the campaign. The policy team need to improve the enterprises business agility to respond to rapid change and this involved working with the leadership across 12 branches to align iterations of draft policy documentation over an intensive period. (the taskforce was pulled together to deliver the IGB over 8 weeks). Specifically, Kanban and Lean were chosen as the method for delivery.

Mia will discuss patterns she used to help teh leaders build basic knowledge of Lean, Kanban and agile patterns and practices to improve efficiency, help reduce risk and contribute to improving the quality of the IGB brief. There was no time for "train everyone" this was a "leaders first" and model behaviour approach to ensure all 12 teams across teh organicsation dlvered and contributed to developing the oucome and involved:

• Coordination of delivery management of 12 teams (each representing their branch) across the enterprise
• Weekly engagement with the executive board to share drafts of chapters, then gather and incorporate feedback from a user-centred perspective to improve transparency and alignment.
• Promoting optimisation of the flow of the work of the brief a whole through a number of draft review cycles.
• Promoting Lean and Kanban approach to delivery of the project.
• Promoting continuous improvement through Inspect/Adapt workshops.
• Coordination of “Scrum of Scrums” key daily meetings to promote collaboration, visibility and transparency.
• Collaborating with the product managers and other delivery managers to coach and lead them and their teams through the adoption of Lean Agile principles.
• Supporting team leads to coordinate the collaborative, dynamic planning process, prioritising the work that needs to be done against the capacity and capability of the team.
• Providing visibility and transparency of work in progress and flow and share this with other teams and stakeholders.

This approach resulted in executives having earlier visibility of the approach and content of the IGB and improved quality of IGB by reducing the risk that significant changes being identified late in the delivery. The Teams were focused to delivery higher value work more efficiently, while being transparent about delays to lower value activities. The success of this initiative in a non-ICT environment has promoted the PMO to look at other business areas to implement Agile to develop an Agile mindset across the Agency.

Business leaders have often quoted Peter Drucker's “culture eats strategy for breakfast” to convey that business or operational strategies will fail if they are not supported by the culture. This suggests that when employee behaviours are guided by and inspired by vision, meaning, and purpose, then business plans have a greater chance of succeeding. This is reinforced in the findings of the State of the Agile Report (Version One) where the leading causes of Agile projects failure is often attributed to lack of leadership support for the change, lack of support for the cultural transition and the resulting organisational culture being at odds with agile mindset and values.

Do we want high performing teams? If so, business agility requires leaders to eat culture for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Come and hear the lessons learnt on culture, leadership and agile mindset from an implementation on large scale enterprise project. Mia will explore the impact of business leadership, cultural and behaviours that lead to some teams performing well whilst others stagnated. Mia will highlight the differences in respective leadership style and approach across the large scale agile initiative, will explore how leaders can make or break a team.This session will explore the techniques used to identify different cultural change factors in the teams and how the leadership team came together to combat these. Mia will also look at the role of "leaders first" in setting up a culture that supports the transition and builds business agility through fostering high performance teams.

Two Teams. Same product. Same Environment. But oh so different! What makes one team Scrumdiddlyumptious whilst another the Killjoys?

Come and hear the lessons learnt on change, agile mindset and implementation on large scale enterprise project. The Patterns and Anti-Patterns that had one agile team stagnating whilst the other team became awesome in a large scale agile enterprise transformation that included 18 teams.

Whilst Scrum Teams are self-organising and empowered, at scale, the Chief Scrum Master (i.e. Master Scrum Master) provides coordination and alignment to support teams’ delivery. In Government, this role is crucial to ensure that alignment not only across the teams, it also needs to be in line with program and portfolio strategic intentions for that government agency and in line with wider whole of government initiatives as such as the digital transformation to provide simpler, clearer and faster public services.
The Chief Scrum Master role is a recent concept in government and Mia will share her experiences of being the Chief Scrum Master on a number of transformation projects across large government agencies (Health, Clean Energy, Industry, Taxation, Finance) and explore some of the unique challenges of scaling in government including:
• Scaling from a team of eight backend developers to eight teams of 100 people across the three platforms with six external vendors on separate government contracts/SLAs
• Introducing scrum roles into a government structure that is traditionally based on levels of hierarchy with associated HR and PMO reporting
• Dealing with expectations that Agile teams will still meet work schedules driven by internal and external Waterfall teams outside of the sprint planning process
• Working within Gateway signoff processes driven by upfront detailed level design
Mia will discuss where the Chief Scrum Master plays a vital role to address challenges of scaling in government including:

1. Coordination of Integration to meet shared goals: As a contractor or vendor into government agencies, often it is hard to navigate the landscape and projects and programs of work can become caught up in “noise”. This is where the Chief Scrum Master as owner of the process and integration can help as their focus on tactical delivery of the implementation, can help those new to government or the agency, to understand the integration points and then work with these vendors and contractors to gain a better understanding of lead times, dependencies, capabilities and capacities external to the team, to work together to support the small batch sized product increments.
2. Facilitating collaboration: Mia will also demonstrate how as Chief Scrum Master of a government service delivery teams, she found patterns such as “Scrum of Scrums” and its counterpart the “Product Owners Council” was useful in ensuring collaboration and integration coordination across the teams and facilitate an effective escalation process. For example, these patterns were key to cementing the Scrum Masters and Product Owners relationship to put the focus on business value and working together towards achieving the goals for the Product Increment rather than working in team silos or formal sections/divisions.
3. Focus on Continuous Improvement: The Chief Scrum Master requires a very different mindset to a traditional program manager as the Chief Scrum Master needs to be a servant leader who coordinates all the team's efforts to facilitate program level processes and execution, escalate impediments, manage risk, and drive program-level continuous improvement through Inspect/Adapt feedback loops.