Your backlog is (probably) broken - here's how to fix it!

Agile software development introduced the backlog as a beautiful, powerful, and delightfully simple tool for managing variability and uncertainty in modern organizations. Unfortunately,  the backlog can also be a major impediment to flow and break the value stream with substantial economic loss. This happens because our traditional model of backlog management presents the backlog as a stack of plates reservoir for the development team.

Agile grew up, and now so does our model of the backlog.

Based on the recently launched book “The Rock Crusher” (available from Amazon or the IIBA) this session introduces a flow-based model for backlog management.

We explore how some organisations are managing their backlogs well, yet others struggle, show how turbulence is necessary for innovation, introduce the waste gate as a way to help focus on doing the right work and show how using a rock crusher helps maximise the value generated for our customers and stakeholders.

Drawing on the research and content published on InfoQ.com over the last 12+ months, this talk summarises the state of play in engineering culture in 2022.
Key points that will be explored in the talk are:

• Hybrid work needs careful redesign and reassessment of the workplace and will be a
  significant challenge going forward
• Culture matters more than ever before as people are reassessing their options around
  workplaces and styles
• Culture can and should be made visible and tangible
• IT teams are tired, and burnout is a serious problem the industry needs to tackle
• Team topologies and being deliberate about team formation are aspects of culture design
  that can support better outcomes
• The gaps between good and bad workplaces are widening and people are voting with their
  feet (or video conferencing cameras)
• Leadership styles and approaches need to evolve to support the needs of teams and
  individuals today
• Paying attention to physical and mental wellness matters and can’t be treated as an
  afterthought

Building on the work undertaken over the last two years producing a Code of Ethical Conduct for Agile Coaching, this workshop invites participants to explore the latest version of the Code and then examine a variety of ethical scenarios to see how the code plays out in real life situations.
Participants are invited to add their own examples to the scenarios which can serve as learnings for future readers of the code and associated scenarios.

For the last 18 months the Agile Alliance Agile Coaching Ethics Initiative has been working on a code of ethical conduct for Agile Coaching.  V1.o of the Code was published in May this year.   This workshop will explore the contents of the code and then go deeper into the Ethics Scenarios the volunteer team are working on.  The scenarios present real world situations and  explore how they can be tackled using the Code as a tool to help guide the conversation.

Agile Coaching is currently hit and miss – there are no guidelines and standards around what good coaching is and active harm is being done by some unethical coaches. Having a voluntary Code of Conduct will not prevent this from happening but it could raise visibility around what behaviors should be expected of a professional, ethical agile coach.

In this interactive session Shane presents some ideas around what a Code of Conduct for Agile Coaching could be and draws from the participants areas they feel should be included in such a code.

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.

Got a burning question you want an answer to and didn’t quite get it addressed during the day?

This fishbowl-style conversation brings a select group of the day’s speakers and other invited Industry leaders to the stage to answer your questions about the what, why and how of business agility. This is your opportunity to explore vexing questions about business agility with our panelists.

Here’s how it works:

• You submit your questions to our volunteers during the conference.
• We'll curate and short-list a few questions
• Each question will be asked to the panelists and then discussed for 5 minutes.
• After that, the audience votes on whether to continue the conversation for a few more minutes or move on.

This is a session where you are in control. Also, this will be run as a fishbowl, which means anyone from the audience can join the panel if they want to contribute.

Come ready to ask hard questions and get practical, actionable answers to your toughest questions.

Today success comes from building products people love, creating loyal customers and serving the broader stakeholder community. In this thoughtful exploration on the future of work, the authors explore the past, present and future of the “project”. And why, in today’s fast changing & hyper-competitive world, running a temporary endeavour is the wrong approach to building sustainable products and how #noprojects is fundamentally changing the way companies work.

The metrics by which we have historically defined success are no longer applicable and we need to re-examine the way value is delivered in the new economy. This book starts from the premise that our goal is to create value, for the customer, for the organisation and for society as a whole and shows how to empower and optimise our teams to achieve this.

The authors draw on modern management approaches to provide proven techniques and tools for producing, and sustaining, creative products that go beyond “meeting requirements”. By creating teams who are accountable for business outcomes, engineering for customer delight, and creating value for all stakeholders - profitability, customer satisfaction and employee engagement are all increased.

This book is far more than just a catalogue of practices and tools which you can apply in your product development. It contains inspirational stories from individuals, teams and organisations who have switched to this new way of thinking and working. It exposes the risks on the pathway and how others have overcome these obstacles

Collaborative organisational culture doesn't just happen, it needs conscious and deliberate design and careful nurturing. In this workshop participants will explore what a collaborative organisation culture is, why it matters and how to deliberately design culture.

Culture is "the way we do things here" rather than anything written or prescribed, so understanding how leadership attitudes and behaviors influence and create organisation culture is vitally important to successfully establishing an environment where people are able to bring their whole selves to work, are engaged and positively contribute to the organisation's success.

This session is presented as series of facilitated conversations drawing out the key aspects of organisation culture and showing how it is influenced by a wide variety of factors including structure, geography, promotion policies and practices, the conversations leaders have, what gets rewarded, ignored or punished, relationships and friendships and a wide variety of other factors.

Agile Coaching is a relatively new discipline and there is a lot of misunderstanding about why coaching is useful, what skills and competencies an agile coach needs to have, how they engage with individuals, teams and organisations and how to tell good coaches from mediocre ones.

As someone who wants to become a coach, what skills and competencies do you need to build? There are training courses, but they are not enough. Becoming an effective coach requires much more than book knowledge, it needs deliberate practice and experience working with individuals and teams.

As someone who is considering engaging a coach, what should you look out for and how do you establish the relationship to ensure the best possible outcomes. How do you create the environment where we can grow your own coaches inside an organisation, what is the pathway to competency for an aspiring coach?

In this talk Shane explores these topics and relates it to his own journey to becoming a recognized expert coach through a competency-based assessment (ICE-AC).

In this interactive session Shane discuss his experience working in a distributed, virtual organization which is founded on an Agile Mindset. The challenges of maintaining agility when remote, the ways the ICAgile team have consciously designed their team and organization culture and provide actionable advice based on real experience on how to maintain collaboration, teamwork and live the agile values in a remote only organization.

ICAgile is a global, virtual organisation working with partners across over 100 countries spanning almost every timezone. There is no single corporate office and the ICAgile team is spread across seven locations in three countries. We have managed to build a strong collaborative culture and a truly safe working environment focused on outcomes rather than activities, holding each other to account and being really effective and productive while having a joyful workplace.

Make your training classes engaging and ensure the learning sticks!

Drawing on Sharon Bowman’s best-selling books Training from the BACK of the Room and Using Brain Science to Make Training Stick, this two-day program explores how the human brain really learns, which is very different from traditional assumptions about learning.

Join this class to experience the most current “cognitive neuroscience” about effective instruction.

In this interactive session Shane discuss his experience working in a distributed, virtual organization which is founded on an Agile Mindset. The challenges of maintaining agility when remote, the ways the ICAgile team have consciously designed their team and organization culture and provide actionable advice based on real experience on how to maintain collaboration, teamwork and live the agile values in a remote only organization.

ICAgile is a global, virtual organisation working with partners across over 100 countries spanning almost every timezone. There is no single corporate office and the ICAgile team is spread across seven locations in three countries. We have managed to build a strong collaborative culture and a truly safe working environment focused on outcomes rather than activities, holding each other to account and being really effective and productive while having a joyful workplace.

As the world changes at an unprecedented pace, imagine if organisations could navigate through change and use it as an opportunity to get better, rather than simply getting through. This unique program offers an intense, strategic appreciation for leaders and practitioners to understand the ingredients to create an Agile organisation that is responsive to value creation in a disruptive environment.

This practical workshop is designed to help you to speed your business up, to focus on what’s important, reduce waste and red tape and, most importantly deliver value to your business and your customers. This foundation is essential for leaders to jumpstart learning on how to thrive in uncertainty and create organisational success.

The ICP-BAF Certification from ICAgile is granted on the successful completion of this workshop, the subsequent 2 webinars, and a written submission. To obtain the certificate there is an additional $100 USD fee to be paid to ICAgile.

In the 21st century, organisations need to

• Put the customer in the centre of our focus
• Shed outdated ways of thinking
• Embrace an agile mindset
• Incorporate new ways of working
• Leverage the pace of change for competitive advantage

This talk explores what it means to be agile in a business context. It looks at the key elements needed, how they are interwoven and what is needed for organisations to transform their thinking and behaviour into new ways of working.

Business Agility is about putting the customer at the centre of the organization’s focus, changing from measuring activities to outcomes and creating an ecosystem which unleashes the productivity and innovation already present in the people in the organisation.

Business Agility is the latest buzzword – what does it really mean? In this talk Shane examines the underlying drivers and motivation for adopting agile approaches, explores what an agile mindset actually means and shows how the ideas embodied in the Agile Manifesto are applicable in areas of the organisation within and outside information technology. Drawing on current management theories and emerging practices shows how ideas from different sources complement and enhance each other to deliver better organisational outcomes.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, a traditional approach to budgeting and funding initiatives doesn’t cut it. Instead, there is a need for an adaptive and responsive approach to managing the pipeline of work to be done. An approach that constantly measures the investment against the potential and actual returns and rapidly changing direction, without disrupting the flow of the organisation.

This is where Agile Portfolio Management comes into play. This class combines the latest thinking with tried and true methods to provide you with tools and techniques to ensure you’re able to help maximise value returned to your organisation.

This one-day course will provide you with an understanding of ways to identify value, how to evaluate and align initiatives with an organisation’s strategy and goals, and ways to view and categorise initiatives across a whole portfolio. It provides some tools to measure value over time, techniques for budgeting and forecasting both costs and benefits.

Agile Portfolio Management draws on ideas from: enterprise analysis; Management 3.0; Beyond Budgeting; sustainability; incremental delivery; building for learning versus building for delivery; and Lean Start-up among others to provide a rounded understanding of how to build, maintain and manage an agile portfolio across an organisation.

The course explores how an adaptive funding model creates an environment where the organisation can respond to change at a tactical and strategic level while maintaining predictability and ensuring good governance processes are followed.

This course does not focus on the technical practices of product development, rather on the guiding and leadership aspects needed to ensure the right initiatives are funded, and how these practices fit into an agile management framework

A number of agile brands downplay the need for business analysis and requirements management on agile projects, putting large store in the role of the Product Owner.  This paper tackles some of the problems this misconception can result in and shows how effective product ownership almost always requires a team with a variety of skills and backgrounds to be effective.

Product Ownership requires clarity of vision, alignment with organizational strategy, understanding of the development process and the ability to communicate with a wide variety of stakeholders across all levels both inside and outside the organization.  The complexity of the role is most often more than a single person can (or should) cope with – effective product ownership requires a teamwork approach covering a variety of skills and knowledge.

How many times has an innocent comment or statement resulted in unnecessary conflict and confusion in a team?  How unsettling is it when you make a suggestion which you think will improve some aspect of the work being undertaken and the reaction is explosive, almost violent - what did you say that was so wrong, how could you have been so badly misunderstood?

Even in the most collaborative and communication intensive team there are lots of "rules" which people need to learn about how to work together. In distributed teams this gets magnified and intensified due to the myriad filters and layers of meaning we unwittingly apply to communication.

In this talk Shane presents examples of how the most innocent of question or suggestion can send teams into a spin, and suggests a number of techniques to help create an environment where real communication can happen, irrespective is your team is co-located or distributed

A number of agile brands downplay the need for business analysis and requirements management on agile projects, putting large store in the role of the Product Owner.

This workshop tackles some of the problems this misconception can result in and shows how effective product ownership almost always requires a team with a variety of skills and backgrounds to be effective.

Product Ownership requires clarity of vision, alignment with organisational strategy, understanding of the development process and the ability to communicate with a wide variety of stakeholders across all levels both inside and outside the organization. The complexity of the role is most often more than a single person can (or should) cope with – effective product ownership requires a teamwork approach covering a variety of skills and knowledge.

Product ownership encompasses areas covering:

• Product Management
• Marketing
• Business Advocacy
• Customer Advocacy
• End User Advocacy
• Domain Subject Matter Knowledge
• Analysis
• User Experience and Graphic Design
• Innovation
• Communications
• Decision Making
• Legal and Compliance