This experience report shares how ‘Skill the Gap’, a not-for-profit organization, is building the leaders of tomorrow using Agility and thus making sure the next generation have great places to work.

We are doing this by upskilling ‘first job seekers’ from schools and universities in the core individual, team and leadership skills needed for Agility. This is done globally at scale and at no cost to the participants.

What do these ‘new collar’ workers need in terms of skills that they are not getting today and how do they get them at no additional cost? We help bridge ‘the gap’ between what schools and universities deliver and what businesses need.

57% of worldwide leaders say that it’s the soft skills that are more important than core competencies in this dynamic digital world. So, what are these skills and how do we plan to upskill 1 million first-job-seekers in the first 2 years of operations?

“Team working is an individual skill” and training, coaching and equipping the next generation with these key skills before they enter the work place will enable them to be successful from day one and go on to be great leaders.

We don’t stop there…we also place them at our sponsor organizations, thus giving them the opportunity, they need to shine. The sponsors enable us to give the students these skills at no financial cost.

We will share our initial experiences and feedback, the 4 pillars of our curriculum and the 40 micro modules of magic.

We use ‘training from the back of the room’ techniques, volunteers in 4 continents and a unique curriculum, to embed the learning and couple it with mentoring and coaching to deliver a unique learning experience that is scalable and is being currently rolled out in 6 cities from Miami to Melbourne.

Check out www.skillthegap.org for more details.

Is it coaching that’s really needed to help teams transform to an Agile way of working? Or does pragmatic and experienced leadership work better? Is there any other way to upskill a team and change the way they work?

What’s the best coaching style to use especially when the teams are completely ‘green’? The ‘what do you think?’ approach, used in ‘life coaching’ models don’t always work out well, especially with highly resistive teams.

Based on 15 years of coaching teams, executives, transformations and teams of coaches, this talk will outline my key experiences and learnings in the area of Agility transformations.

In this candid talk, I’ll share techniques that have worked wonders and those that have been absolute disasters. I will address how to handle IT teams and how business operations teams can be different and may need a different approach.

I will also cover how to scale coaching. For many large companies, even if they hire every single coach in the country it won’t be sufficient, so how could they keep up the transformation momentum?

I will talk about the malaise in our industry with regard to the quality of coaches and how to select good coaches, be a great coach and avoid being a coach crutch.

Based on 12 years of experience in numerous transformations, some small, some mammoth, some successful and some not, this talk will outline how to craft a successful Agility transformation from scratch to finish.

The talk will address the following million-dollar questions:

• Why would you even want to transform and why is Business Agility one of the most popular options today?
• Once you’ve decided to transform, where do you start and how to plan and set up the transformation for success?
• What are the parts of a business or organization that need to be transformed? Think of the 3 ‘S’s – Structure, Systems, and Style.
• What is the target transformation state?
• How do you manage the transformation and tackle the issue of scale?
• What to do when the organizational antibodies come for you?
• What does success look like and how do you measure it?
• When should you stop and get the hell out?

A talk filled with real-world stories and ‘too funny to be true’ incidents that will show you the way, or what to avoid?

Almost all companies need to get better, faster, cheaper and happier! But how? Business Agility is an option but changing culture is not easy and having teams learn and do all the Agile practices is not enough.
Conway’s law, which states that at the root of all complex systems and processes lie complex structure, is so true and this talk is all about what needs to change in traditional organisational structures in order to drive business agility and deliver great outcomes.

The talk is based on hands-on experience over the last 12 years in structurally transforming organisations to an Agile way of working and will cover how to deal with issues of scale, org design and resistance to change.
This presentation will walk through the why what and how of the entire approach, sharing the good and gory experiences, the successes and the pitfalls.

Its not enough to have teams do stand-ups, retrospectives, Agile planning, story carding and the host of other Agile practices that are meant to change culture and deliver results. A key success factor is how the organisation is structured. This case story will go through the why, what and how of a restructuring experience to turn around a 10,000 strong operational team of Sales Support people to an Agile way of working and deliver outstanding results of 30% cost reduction and 80% cycle time improvement. This presentation will walk through the why, what and how of the entire approach, sharing the good and gory experiences, the successes and the pitfalls.

‘One bad apple soils the barrel’ is a very true saying even in an Agile environment. Not identifying and managing poor behavior and performance can completely undermine any Agile transformation effort.

How can Leaders, both within and external to Agile teams, set higher standards of accountability and hold people to it? Is self organization, peer pressure and the wisdom of the crowd enough to handle the wiles of organisational psychopaths?

The fact remains that most teams will have a few difficult personalities and underperforming members.

Agile is seen in many senior management circles as a softer, less accountable, way of working. Is that true?

This talk will delve into how the human psyche works, drawing on latest studies in neuro and psycho analysis, combined with Harvard studies, to outline the best ways to define, identify and deal with ‘bad apples’ in an Agile environment while honouring the values and principles of Agile

Over the last 2 years, in small pockets all over the world, people have been experimenting with the use of Agile and Lean in formulating and executing corporate strategy.

The finding will astound you and lay the foundations for what may become the next wave of ‘Agilean’ transformations, thus paving the way for vertically transformed ‘Agilean’ organisations that deliver outstanding profitability.

The ‘Lean Startup’ mentality or ‘Management 3.0’ are tips of the iceberg in recent strategic thinking.

This talk draws on experience and real life examples to outline how Agile and Lean, and not just Porter’s 5 forces, can be used effectively to not only formulate and execute corporate strategy but also to enable transformation throughout the organisation.

Understaning the big picture is vital to one's sense of purpose.

In this workshop you will learn how to take an idea in an Agile way of working from its conception, to business case, to project initiation, project setup and then on to delivery. 

You will also learn how to handle production support and enhancements in an Agile way and when to use Kanban and when not to. 

All this will be done agaist a backdrop of the history of Agile from the Pharaohs to today. 

The Agile PMO, the role of the PM, the setup of a project for success and how to link multiple streams into one large program of work in an Agile world. These are some of the issues that will be covered in this workshop, in an interactive and dynamic set of exercises.