Two days packed with awesome talks and opportunities to engage and interact with other speakers & participants.
All times are in British Summer Time (GMT+1)
- 24 May 2021
- 25 May 2021
- All Rooms
- Plenary
- Track 1
- Track 2
- Track 3
TBC
The title of this talk might make it seem like it’s going to be just for women. But really, this talk is for everybody. Honestly! It’s important that everyone regardless of gender comes to hear it. Because there’s a reason it’s the first talk of the 2021 Conference. The message is important.
There’s no need to worry. It’s not going to be a telling off. The aim is not to make you feel bad, to make you squirm uncomfortably in your seat, to make you feel guilty about things outside of your control, or to make you spend the rest of the Conference in a funk. There will be things to make you smile, maybe even laugh. There will be things that shock you with their incredulity. There will be things that make you think. There will be real life stories. There will be a truckload of truth. And hopefully at the end of it all, there will be resolution and action.
The truth is that as much as we may wish it to be and as much as we are working towards it, there is not always parity in the world of Agile. The way that we experience the world and our work in Agile is different, sometimes for reasons outside of our control – and it isn’t always fair. But the good news is that we are the ones who can start to change it. Let’s start thinking and talking about how together in this session.
Session Outline:
In Agile organization transformation, one of the key success factors is about fostering an environment to support self-management and to empower the team members to take accountabilities to achieve the shared organizational goal.
How can we foster empowerment in this transition?
What were the common patterns in foster empowerment environments?
In this session, let’s discuss and share what has worked for you whether you were in a management function or if you were an individual contributor in the team.
Key Takeaways:
For management to empower Scrum Teams, the teams need to help them to help the teams themselves! Trust and accountabilities usually are earned over time through close collaboration and behaviours that address the managers’ concerns.
Through crowdsourcing from the participants, let’s explore the common patterns that worked and identify what we could do starting tomorrow!
Human beings are pattern-matchers. Often when we see a problem, we like to look for a root cause; one thing that we could change that would absolutely solve it! But when we're dealing with wicked problems that are hard to solve or urgent disasters for which there might not be a good solution, this pattern-matching (also known as bias) can sometimes get in the way.
In this workshop, Liz introduces the Cynefin framework with emphasis on the ecosystem of constraints that underlie different types of problem. Find out why there's never one root cause, what makes a constraint enabling vs. strict or governing, why constraints can be a good thing, and how you can change, introduce or remove constraints to help your ecosystem thrive.
This talk is about realizing strategy with good Portfolio Management in hybrid organizations.
In hybrid organizations the governance of traditional projects and programs is changing. The mix of stable (agile) teams in one part of the organization (bringing work to teams) and traditional project teams (temporally sourcing people around work) in other parts of the organization requires this change in governance. Agile portfolio management meets traditional portfolio management.
Agile Portfolio Management in the sense of managing the organization backlog by connecting Strategy to Operation. This is a topic in many organizations that started working in an agile way at team level and have come to a point where agile has scaled towards the level of collaborating teams in the value chain. A mix of stable (agile) teams and temporally (traditional) project teams.
This complexity in dependencies between the collaborating teams requires good portfolio management. Portfolio management that, in most cases, is still performed in a more traditional way, leading to a clash between the “forces” in the organization with different mindsets.
This symptom is a good sign, it means you are becoming an agile/responsive organization as a whole. This is the moment where a board of directors should become enthusiastic about the nearby possibilities of short cyclic strategy realization.
Organizations in this stage are in the twilight zone between agile and traditional. Call it hybrid organizations. A characteristic of these organizations is that depending on the person in the organization you talk with, you either get the impression that it is a typical non agile/traditional organization or that it is the most inspiring agile organization you can imagine. The truth is that both exist in the organization and need to integrate.
The challenge to join the forces in a way that they contribute to each other, examples of how to connect the strategy to operation, and tips on how to use the insights from agile portfolio management to de-scale your organization instead of scaling complexity are examples of the topic you can expect in this talk.
It is said that the only certain things in life are death and taxes. Despite having so much uncertainty around us, we are continually pressured to commit to delivery dates. Let’s face it. That pressure is going nowhere. Now is the time to put away the dread and learn how to not only accept uncertainty, but operate, and even thrive, within it.
This talk helps you understand why uncertainty is here to stay and how you can make sense of it with your data to make informed and risk-aware forecasts. You’ll also take away a few simple steps you can take regularly to stabilize your system, become more predictable and make those forecasts even better.
A practical case on wildlife conservation in Kenya's Maasai Mara. The discussion focuses on the applicability of agile in other fields as well as in personal life.
Do experienced coaches adopt/adapt practices by taking context into account? Of course they do! Do a chosen set of principles produce a valuable, enduring outcome in every kind of context? Of course they don’t! Failure to sufficiently take context into account is the number one factor that limits success when adopting methods. The tendency to ignore context in our effort to simplify reality is problematic. Why then is there so little explicit guidance on the context of applicability of principles and practices except for a call for the right culture or mindset? Context is so much more than that. In this talk we will explore a powerful notation that makes context explicit. Step, by step, we will build up a context-based guidance for implementing practices and developing capabilities that goes beyond what most can even dream of. The only universal principle is the principle that context always matters!
In this session Michal & Limor will describe real life experiences from working with managers and leaders in different organisations. They will try to learn from these examples, what a true leader is.
What is the impact of a manager who is also a domain expert?
What should a true leader have in his tool box?
Agendashift is an Engagement Model which includes and integrates many powerful exercises and techniques. These techniques generate a lot of content and ideas, all of which allow teams and organisations to explore how they might be able to begin their transformation towards realising better outcomes. A challenge for all such facilitated models is keeping the essence of those conversations in the forefront, so that transformations that started with good outcome-oriented intentions don't slip back into old solution-driven patterns. TASTE, and its associated X-Matrix A3, is a model which can help visualise some of the key outputs from the Agendashift workshop, and help maintain the coherence of change work as it moves into continuous transformation. This talk will show how this can be achieved and how to enrich Agendashift as a vehicle for Strategy Deployment.
Did you ever ask yourself what Agile has in common with your Dad’s old Ford Cortina? It may sound surprising but this is a question of more relevance than you might think….
Agility targets a business problem. Good! Agility is culture. Very good! This means change. Good, but demanding and not always easy. Agile has grown up and has come a long way and the Agile manifesto celebrates its 20th birthday this year. Agile is a success story.
The problem: Culture has a life of its own and this may turn out to be good or bad. And over time many different definitions and understandings of Agile have come to life. In this talk, we look at certain patterns of Agile and how they evolved over time. Without saying too much: Sometimes we may end up in hell even with best intentions…. So what happened here over the years? Did Agile take a wrong turn or is it just me growing old?
With all that has taken place in the past year such as,
• Racial injustices resulting in loss of lives while being witnessed and recorded by many including children
• Worldwide protests of many ethnic groups demanding change and making awareness of systematic racism
• Stay at home orders, with limited social interaction,
• A pandemic that took many people loved ones without the ability to see them, or to say goodbye, or to have an opportunity for a proper burial,
• Change in the workplace to all virtual teams,
• New jobs created for Directors of Diversity and Inclusion, and their committees,
• Company-wide Diversity and Inclusion conversations, training, and other awareness initiatives.
I believe it is a perfect time to explore Scrum Team Diversity and Inclusion.
1. Have you considered the impact these events and others are having or will have on scrum team members for years to come?
2. Have you pondered the question of, what are the impacts on outcomes of not being diverse? Or even worst, what are the impacts on outcomes of being diverse, but not having inclusion from all team members? Diversity and Inclusion conversations are uncomfortable, but necessary to achieve extraordinary, _________ outcomes while having a healthy team. Through diversity and inclusion, we can achieve _________ outcomes that delight all customers.
A message from Scott:
From this Talk, my goal is to inspire action through love and more awareness. Most of our journey together will be spent on unpacking the loaded question #2. During this time, I will provide some personal examples, share data, and ask more questions for you to think about. Finally, I will share a very powerful and easy tool with many approaches to a solution, that will unleash everyone on your team in shaping the future scrum team you all desire. It’s fun, fit-for-purpose, very effective, and 100% inclusive. In fact, I used 1 of the strategies to organize my research and this message for our Talk. Have a beautiful day!
We at Robert Bosch Power Tools GmbH started our agile transformation in 2014 with one of our 6 Business Units. Meanwhile all 6 Business Units and our Central Functions implemented the agile mindset and agile working methods. We strive for continuous improvement and for that reason we started 2 years ago with the implementation of the OKR method (Objectives and Key Results). We will present our experiences as well as our challenges within one of the Business Unit, but also on the Organizational Level
I would say there are more than just one reason why we should care about DevOps. Agile is not complete without enabling infrastructure and bringing the culture together from top to bottom making the entire engine run smoother.
In this talk, we will look at a few reasons that will highlight the need for our attention to turn towards DevOps on what it is and how to enable it.
A discussion around how Heidi & Tim have been scaling lean/agile metrics across Procore Technologies. Its been a 2+ year journey, and they have new learnings to share.
Checkout their last talk on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8Iv308Obes&feature=youtu.be
Software cannot be seen. To make it visible we need to measure things around it; the work and resources that go into building and operating it, the demand for its use and the impacts it has on the world.
Using metrics we can have conversations, tell stories and conduct experiments in order to increase the value of the work we do.
But how do we do this? Where do we start? What metrics can we use? How do we get them? How do we use them to affect positive change?
In this session we will introduce patterns for gathering and presenting metrics from software development and operations in order to inform decisions on what to work on and when.
We’ll look at:
- Development Metrics – Lean workflow metrics
- Operational Metrics – The IBM RAS model
- Value Metrics – Pirate Metrics
- Wellbeing Metrics – Team Health Metrics
Cutting across all of these we will look at issues of provenance, cleanliness and bias. We’ll look at how the sharing of metrics can have a different impact on different audiences.
Based on the book ‘Team guide to metrics for business decisions’ by Mattia Battison and Chris Young this workshop aims to provide lightweight, tractable models and methods to help attendees grow their own useful metrics practice.
If your Kanban implementation feels like Phase 1: Collect underpants; Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit, you're not alone.
In this session, you'll learn how to detect Underpants Gnomes in your organization's Kanban process, and how to combat them. We'll investigate three concrete solutions—by-the-book, and beyond—and fill your toolbox with simple, proven strategies for restarting your Kanban after it stalls. Downsize the Underpants Gnomes and let's get started!
As much as we want change to happen in a logical and structured way, it has never, and will never work that way. Since 2014, I’ve traveled to over 12 countries, trained thousands of change agents, and visited countless organizations. I wanted to find out how people were getting stuck with change, and what they were focusing on in order to move change forward.
It turns out that regardless of organizational size or industry, there are 5 Universals for Change that serve as a compass allowing us to find the right approach, at the right time. That probably sounds magical, or invokes some eye-rolling, but either way, a path forward is less about the methods and frameworks we hold dear, and much more about our outlook as change agents.
In this session we’ll explore the 5 Universals of Change and take a peek at organizational change through a different set of lenses designed to help us find our way forward when we feel stuck.
Talk details coming soon.
‘Learning by doing’ is a commonly used phrase in agile training today, with at lot of focus on ‘having fun’– but what really is having fun? And how exactly do we as coaches make our sessions fun, apart from using all sorts of games and energizers? Inspired by sports coaching, I will explain 3 forms of learning: free play, isolated play, and constraint-led play. During this presentation, I will elaborate on the latter form, showing its effectiveness in the context of adopting new ways of working. It leads to intrinsically motivated learners that are not only going to have more fun, but moreover, are engaged to continuously learn, think about, and adapt.
Retrospectives are a chance for a team to come together to reflect on how they are working and identify small adjustments that will improve their practices. Teams grow through honest discussions to find specific solutions tailored to the needs of their work. Processes begin to evolve to fit the team and the team takes greater ownership over how they work. Making these improvements are infinitely beneficial to an individual team but they often fail to address the needs of teams working together or of the organization as a whole.
Scaled retrospectives offer teams, programs, and organizations an opportunity to come together to identify critical organizational improvements and create a viable method for delivering meaningful change. Join us for this session and learn how to gather feedback and facilitate large-scale retros that expand the scope of improvements beyond the individual team.
A big trend in the Agile community is to move from projects to products, where an organization sees all work as the creation or modification of its products. The organization funds products for the long term and allows persistent teams and their product owners to determine how to spend that money.
Here's a three-step guide to get started:
1. Identify products – know your products
2. Create persistent Agile teams
3. Align with both finance and portfolio for value delivery reporting
In 2001 the first book on Scrum was published. Since then thousands of people have been trained in scrum & other agile ways of working. In these 20 years, many people have gathered experience working with agile teams.
This presentation is based on the book “tips from the agile trenches”, that collected wisdom from 89 people around the world. https://leanpub.com/TipsFromTheTrenches/
In my presentation I will bring a subset of these tips from the people the trenches, to inspire people.
Moving to predominately remote ways of working has increased the challenges we face in reaching shared understandings of complex problems. And we need to be able to see the big picture together in order to really work effectively towards a common goal, especially when working as distributed teams. It’s hard enough to get people on the same page when we’re sitting together in the same room — achieving this when we are limited to communicating through online collaboration tools can be exhausting.
But even when we are not together, we can make use of simple visualization techniques to help share what we know and to better appreciate others points of view. And we don't need fancy tools to do this – a marker, a piece of paper, and a webcam are sufficient to allow us to harness the power of visualization to improve understanding. In this interactive session, you’ll experience a simple exercise that you can use to help any group use visualization, mental models, and systems thinking to increase comprehension of complex interactions, even when working remotely. Please bring a sheet of paper and a marker — this will be hands-on!
Social Event details coming soon.
TBC
The title of this talk might make it seem like it’s going to be just for women. But really, this talk is for everybody. Honestly! It’s important that everyone regardless of gender comes to hear it. Because there’s a reason it’s the first talk of the 2021 Conference. The message is important.
There’s no need to worry. It’s not going to be a telling off. The aim is not to make you feel bad, to make you squirm uncomfortably in your seat, to make you feel guilty about things outside of your control, or to make you spend the rest of the Conference in a funk. There will be things to make you smile, maybe even laugh. There will be things that shock you with their incredulity. There will be things that make you think. There will be real life stories. There will be a truckload of truth. And hopefully at the end of it all, there will be resolution and action.
The truth is that as much as we may wish it to be and as much as we are working towards it, there is not always parity in the world of Agile. The way that we experience the world and our work in Agile is different, sometimes for reasons outside of our control – and it isn’t always fair. But the good news is that we are the ones who can start to change it. Let’s start thinking and talking about how together in this session.
Moving to predominately remote ways of working has increased the challenges we face in reaching shared understandings of complex problems. And we need to be able to see the big picture together in order to really work effectively towards a common goal, especially when working as distributed teams. It’s hard enough to get people on the same page when we’re sitting together in the same room — achieving this when we are limited to communicating through online collaboration tools can be exhausting.
But even when we are not together, we can make use of simple visualization techniques to help share what we know and to better appreciate others points of view. And we don't need fancy tools to do this – a marker, a piece of paper, and a webcam are sufficient to allow us to harness the power of visualization to improve understanding. In this interactive session, you’ll experience a simple exercise that you can use to help any group use visualization, mental models, and systems thinking to increase comprehension of complex interactions, even when working remotely. Please bring a sheet of paper and a marker — this will be hands-on!
Social Event details coming soon.
Session Outline:
In Agile organization transformation, one of the key success factors is about fostering an environment to support self-management and to empower the team members to take accountabilities to achieve the shared organizational goal.
How can we foster empowerment in this transition?
What were the common patterns in foster empowerment environments?
In this session, let’s discuss and share what has worked for you whether you were in a management function or if you were an individual contributor in the team.
Key Takeaways:
For management to empower Scrum Teams, the teams need to help them to help the teams themselves! Trust and accountabilities usually are earned over time through close collaboration and behaviours that address the managers’ concerns.
Through crowdsourcing from the participants, let’s explore the common patterns that worked and identify what we could do starting tomorrow!
It is said that the only certain things in life are death and taxes. Despite having so much uncertainty around us, we are continually pressured to commit to delivery dates. Let’s face it. That pressure is going nowhere. Now is the time to put away the dread and learn how to not only accept uncertainty, but operate, and even thrive, within it.
This talk helps you understand why uncertainty is here to stay and how you can make sense of it with your data to make informed and risk-aware forecasts. You’ll also take away a few simple steps you can take regularly to stabilize your system, become more predictable and make those forecasts even better.
In this session Michal & Limor will describe real life experiences from working with managers and leaders in different organisations. They will try to learn from these examples, what a true leader is.
What is the impact of a manager who is also a domain expert?
What should a true leader have in his tool box?
With all that has taken place in the past year such as,
• Racial injustices resulting in loss of lives while being witnessed and recorded by many including children
• Worldwide protests of many ethnic groups demanding change and making awareness of systematic racism
• Stay at home orders, with limited social interaction,
• A pandemic that took many people loved ones without the ability to see them, or to say goodbye, or to have an opportunity for a proper burial,
• Change in the workplace to all virtual teams,
• New jobs created for Directors of Diversity and Inclusion, and their committees,
• Company-wide Diversity and Inclusion conversations, training, and other awareness initiatives.
I believe it is a perfect time to explore Scrum Team Diversity and Inclusion.
1. Have you considered the impact these events and others are having or will have on scrum team members for years to come?
2. Have you pondered the question of, what are the impacts on outcomes of not being diverse? Or even worst, what are the impacts on outcomes of being diverse, but not having inclusion from all team members? Diversity and Inclusion conversations are uncomfortable, but necessary to achieve extraordinary, _________ outcomes while having a healthy team. Through diversity and inclusion, we can achieve _________ outcomes that delight all customers.
A message from Scott:
From this Talk, my goal is to inspire action through love and more awareness. Most of our journey together will be spent on unpacking the loaded question #2. During this time, I will provide some personal examples, share data, and ask more questions for you to think about. Finally, I will share a very powerful and easy tool with many approaches to a solution, that will unleash everyone on your team in shaping the future scrum team you all desire. It’s fun, fit-for-purpose, very effective, and 100% inclusive. In fact, I used 1 of the strategies to organize my research and this message for our Talk. Have a beautiful day!
A discussion around how Heidi & Tim have been scaling lean/agile metrics across Procore Technologies. Its been a 2+ year journey, and they have new learnings to share.
Checkout their last talk on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8Iv308Obes&feature=youtu.be
As much as we want change to happen in a logical and structured way, it has never, and will never work that way. Since 2014, I’ve traveled to over 12 countries, trained thousands of change agents, and visited countless organizations. I wanted to find out how people were getting stuck with change, and what they were focusing on in order to move change forward.
It turns out that regardless of organizational size or industry, there are 5 Universals for Change that serve as a compass allowing us to find the right approach, at the right time. That probably sounds magical, or invokes some eye-rolling, but either way, a path forward is less about the methods and frameworks we hold dear, and much more about our outlook as change agents.
In this session we’ll explore the 5 Universals of Change and take a peek at organizational change through a different set of lenses designed to help us find our way forward when we feel stuck.
Retrospectives are a chance for a team to come together to reflect on how they are working and identify small adjustments that will improve their practices. Teams grow through honest discussions to find specific solutions tailored to the needs of their work. Processes begin to evolve to fit the team and the team takes greater ownership over how they work. Making these improvements are infinitely beneficial to an individual team but they often fail to address the needs of teams working together or of the organization as a whole.
Scaled retrospectives offer teams, programs, and organizations an opportunity to come together to identify critical organizational improvements and create a viable method for delivering meaningful change. Join us for this session and learn how to gather feedback and facilitate large-scale retros that expand the scope of improvements beyond the individual team.
Human beings are pattern-matchers. Often when we see a problem, we like to look for a root cause; one thing that we could change that would absolutely solve it! But when we're dealing with wicked problems that are hard to solve or urgent disasters for which there might not be a good solution, this pattern-matching (also known as bias) can sometimes get in the way.
In this workshop, Liz introduces the Cynefin framework with emphasis on the ecosystem of constraints that underlie different types of problem. Find out why there's never one root cause, what makes a constraint enabling vs. strict or governing, why constraints can be a good thing, and how you can change, introduce or remove constraints to help your ecosystem thrive.
A practical case on wildlife conservation in Kenya's Maasai Mara. The discussion focuses on the applicability of agile in other fields as well as in personal life.
Agendashift is an Engagement Model which includes and integrates many powerful exercises and techniques. These techniques generate a lot of content and ideas, all of which allow teams and organisations to explore how they might be able to begin their transformation towards realising better outcomes. A challenge for all such facilitated models is keeping the essence of those conversations in the forefront, so that transformations that started with good outcome-oriented intentions don't slip back into old solution-driven patterns. TASTE, and its associated X-Matrix A3, is a model which can help visualise some of the key outputs from the Agendashift workshop, and help maintain the coherence of change work as it moves into continuous transformation. This talk will show how this can be achieved and how to enrich Agendashift as a vehicle for Strategy Deployment.
We at Robert Bosch Power Tools GmbH started our agile transformation in 2014 with one of our 6 Business Units. Meanwhile all 6 Business Units and our Central Functions implemented the agile mindset and agile working methods. We strive for continuous improvement and for that reason we started 2 years ago with the implementation of the OKR method (Objectives and Key Results). We will present our experiences as well as our challenges within one of the Business Unit, but also on the Organizational Level
Software cannot be seen. To make it visible we need to measure things around it; the work and resources that go into building and operating it, the demand for its use and the impacts it has on the world.
Using metrics we can have conversations, tell stories and conduct experiments in order to increase the value of the work we do.
But how do we do this? Where do we start? What metrics can we use? How do we get them? How do we use them to affect positive change?
In this session we will introduce patterns for gathering and presenting metrics from software development and operations in order to inform decisions on what to work on and when.
We’ll look at:
- Development Metrics – Lean workflow metrics
- Operational Metrics – The IBM RAS model
- Value Metrics – Pirate Metrics
- Wellbeing Metrics – Team Health Metrics
Cutting across all of these we will look at issues of provenance, cleanliness and bias. We’ll look at how the sharing of metrics can have a different impact on different audiences.
Based on the book ‘Team guide to metrics for business decisions’ by Mattia Battison and Chris Young this workshop aims to provide lightweight, tractable models and methods to help attendees grow their own useful metrics practice.
Talk details coming soon.
A big trend in the Agile community is to move from projects to products, where an organization sees all work as the creation or modification of its products. The organization funds products for the long term and allows persistent teams and their product owners to determine how to spend that money.
Here's a three-step guide to get started:
1. Identify products – know your products
2. Create persistent Agile teams
3. Align with both finance and portfolio for value delivery reporting
This talk is about realizing strategy with good Portfolio Management in hybrid organizations.
In hybrid organizations the governance of traditional projects and programs is changing. The mix of stable (agile) teams in one part of the organization (bringing work to teams) and traditional project teams (temporally sourcing people around work) in other parts of the organization requires this change in governance. Agile portfolio management meets traditional portfolio management.
Agile Portfolio Management in the sense of managing the organization backlog by connecting Strategy to Operation. This is a topic in many organizations that started working in an agile way at team level and have come to a point where agile has scaled towards the level of collaborating teams in the value chain. A mix of stable (agile) teams and temporally (traditional) project teams.
This complexity in dependencies between the collaborating teams requires good portfolio management. Portfolio management that, in most cases, is still performed in a more traditional way, leading to a clash between the “forces” in the organization with different mindsets.
This symptom is a good sign, it means you are becoming an agile/responsive organization as a whole. This is the moment where a board of directors should become enthusiastic about the nearby possibilities of short cyclic strategy realization.
Organizations in this stage are in the twilight zone between agile and traditional. Call it hybrid organizations. A characteristic of these organizations is that depending on the person in the organization you talk with, you either get the impression that it is a typical non agile/traditional organization or that it is the most inspiring agile organization you can imagine. The truth is that both exist in the organization and need to integrate.
The challenge to join the forces in a way that they contribute to each other, examples of how to connect the strategy to operation, and tips on how to use the insights from agile portfolio management to de-scale your organization instead of scaling complexity are examples of the topic you can expect in this talk.
Do experienced coaches adopt/adapt practices by taking context into account? Of course they do! Do a chosen set of principles produce a valuable, enduring outcome in every kind of context? Of course they don’t! Failure to sufficiently take context into account is the number one factor that limits success when adopting methods. The tendency to ignore context in our effort to simplify reality is problematic. Why then is there so little explicit guidance on the context of applicability of principles and practices except for a call for the right culture or mindset? Context is so much more than that. In this talk we will explore a powerful notation that makes context explicit. Step, by step, we will build up a context-based guidance for implementing practices and developing capabilities that goes beyond what most can even dream of. The only universal principle is the principle that context always matters!
Did you ever ask yourself what Agile has in common with your Dad’s old Ford Cortina? It may sound surprising but this is a question of more relevance than you might think….
Agility targets a business problem. Good! Agility is culture. Very good! This means change. Good, but demanding and not always easy. Agile has grown up and has come a long way and the Agile manifesto celebrates its 20th birthday this year. Agile is a success story.
The problem: Culture has a life of its own and this may turn out to be good or bad. And over time many different definitions and understandings of Agile have come to life. In this talk, we look at certain patterns of Agile and how they evolved over time. Without saying too much: Sometimes we may end up in hell even with best intentions…. So what happened here over the years? Did Agile take a wrong turn or is it just me growing old?
I would say there are more than just one reason why we should care about DevOps. Agile is not complete without enabling infrastructure and bringing the culture together from top to bottom making the entire engine run smoother.
In this talk, we will look at a few reasons that will highlight the need for our attention to turn towards DevOps on what it is and how to enable it.
If your Kanban implementation feels like Phase 1: Collect underpants; Phase 2: ? Phase 3: Profit, you're not alone.
In this session, you'll learn how to detect Underpants Gnomes in your organization's Kanban process, and how to combat them. We'll investigate three concrete solutions—by-the-book, and beyond—and fill your toolbox with simple, proven strategies for restarting your Kanban after it stalls. Downsize the Underpants Gnomes and let's get started!
‘Learning by doing’ is a commonly used phrase in agile training today, with at lot of focus on ‘having fun’– but what really is having fun? And how exactly do we as coaches make our sessions fun, apart from using all sorts of games and energizers? Inspired by sports coaching, I will explain 3 forms of learning: free play, isolated play, and constraint-led play. During this presentation, I will elaborate on the latter form, showing its effectiveness in the context of adopting new ways of working. It leads to intrinsically motivated learners that are not only going to have more fun, but moreover, are engaged to continuously learn, think about, and adapt.
In 2001 the first book on Scrum was published. Since then thousands of people have been trained in scrum & other agile ways of working. In these 20 years, many people have gathered experience working with agile teams.
This presentation is based on the book “tips from the agile trenches”, that collected wisdom from 89 people around the world. https://leanpub.com/TipsFromTheTrenches/
In my presentation I will bring a subset of these tips from the people the trenches, to inspire people.
- All Rooms
- Plenary
- Track 1
- Track 2
- Track 3
Today it’s common for company leaders to express a desire to be more agile, and many embark on expensive change journeys, to make their teams more agile.
After years on this journey fraught with “resistance” and lots of change, and yet seldom able to show results that are meaningful to customers or the business
Part of the problem is the core assumption that the problems, and therefore solutions exist at the team level or with the individual humans.
My experience is that to delight customers, collaboration is required between the humans, teams and departments. This focusing on the parts (individuals and teams) rarely improves the whole, in ways customers will appreciate or pay for.
Holding the space for a team to grow is the heart of team coaching.
Self-organising teams are, by their nature, a complex system. Our role as team coaches is to help them create a coaching habit, freeing you up to help other coaches do the same!
Join us to explore what helps teams achieve this nirvana-like state and what you can do as a team coach to help make coaching part of how teams work together.
A modern take on a 70's classic, we take some of the tools of modern product and organisation development and plug them into Stafford Beer's Viable System Model, a model that (still) describes organisations of all sizes that have the drive to survive in a changing environment. The result of this exercise will feel remarkably familiar to Lean-Agile eyes, and yet it helps to reveal some of the serious dysfunctions too often experienced with current frameworks, both team-level and larger.
Leadership comes in many forms. In this talk Sath will be sharing his journey into Social Leadership, its potential and how he adopted it's mindset and behaviours whilst building and nurturing a knowledge sharing community of engineers across a population 000s in financial services. We are in the Social Age.
When people hear about Flight Levels as 3 levels of interrelated goals: strategy level, end-to-end coordination level, and operational level, they cannot help but trying to map which current roles in the organisation should be at which levels.
This is a misunderstanding because Flight Levels is not about organisational structure… but what is it really about? This talk is an attempt to present a pocket guide of Flight Levels that can help you quickly get started in the right direction of the journey.
WorkVisible uses visual storytelling to engage large groups and allow them to go fast, enable change and get things done. They call this “Change by Adventure.” According to Andy, the combination of visuals and story contains a magic ingredient that makes this possible. It also happens to make transformation work a lot more fun, relatable and effective. In this short, interactive talk Andy shares some of the secret sauce of the Why, How and When of Visual Storytelling. To get the most out of the session participants will need to bring a pen, paper, a sense of fun and a tiny bit of courage.
In the online environment, it is difficult to read body language because we only see faces and a small part of the body.
How can we, with this limitation in visibility and boxed individuals looking at a screen, get the most out of the interactions with other people?
In this session, we will explore how you can do that by reading body language, recognizing non-verbal hints and facial expressions and we will practice with this information so you can use it with your Agile teams in different events where you interact with each other.
After this session you are able to:
- Differentiate different elements of non-verbal interaction
- Map non-verbal signs to a personal sentiment
- Test non-verbal signs in your own environment
Challenges we face at work can become visible on different levels — as an inner conflict, in relation to a specific other person, in our team or with another group. But the level at which we encounter this challenge is not necessarily the one on which we find an adequate solution. Therefore, this session is about reframing challenges in order to find a different perspective and thus have alternative approaches for dealing with the challenge at hand.
For years I was telling you how awesome self-organization and autonomy are in the context of organizational design.
Well, I lied.
Let me share a story about a company that has been a poster child of self-organization and autonomy, bringing them to the extreme and building its organizational culture around them. Everything was as rosy as you might have expected if you'd read books about progressive organizations. That is until it wasn't.
The engagement fell flat on its face. The atmosphere nosedived. Attrition crept in. Self-organization, vast autonomy, and radically decentralized control became as much a solution to address the old problems, addressing vastly outdated management principles, as a source of a ton of new friction.
We'll look at what went wrong and why. We'll make a sobering realization that making our organizations “fit for the future,” as some management thought-leaders propose, is much harder than it looks on paper.
It is a failure story. And a personal one, as I'm going to talk about the company, I've spent almost a decade with – Lunar Logic.
2020 Remote Work Trends research by Gallup shows that the number of employees working remotely doubled from 31% to 62%. Many remote workers, especially millennials have discovered that they are more productive from home than from the office. These happenings have re-defined what it means to be a manager, introducing new complexities that managers were not faced with just a few years ago.
Organizations on their journey to agility and digital transformation require managers who are servant leaders and coaches enabling agile values. Managers of new remote teams can no longer be just ’bosses’, they must develop a new set of leadership skills for their teams to be productive. Data shows that well-coached teams tend to considerably outperform less ably managed teams in engagement, retention, safety, productivity, and profitability metrics. In this talk we shall discuss how the role has changed, agile values managers must imbibe and the organization’s role in equipping them for the transition.
Whether we like it or not — establishing business agility often means engaging with large groups. What is needed to facilitate such groups? Why does it make sense to address 30, 50, 100 or more people at the same time? Which formats and techniques have proven helpful for cultivating agile interactions in large groups?The talk provides tried and tested answers to these questions and offers a broad variety of practical examples.
Smart working & Being: The music of your days
Being in quarantine is not the same as working from home. Adapting to changes requires finding a healthy pace for our days. “Smart Working & Being”, when Agile (not going fast but adapting and creating changes) and Slow (our ability to consciously and continually choose the pace to be connected with us and our teams) meet. Smart Working is creating productive and healthy ecosystems, oriented towards business and people. Tips for grounding these values through concrete practices.
Do more with less! Retail is undergoing rapid change and is faced with unprecedented challenges.
The need to be lean and disruptive is clear and urgent.
How can this be achieved? How can more value-adding work be delivered and work made more predictable?
Ben will talk through his stumbles and leaps to flow improvement mastery.
He sees flow everywhere he looks – delivery of IT, recruiting, budgeting, waiting in the hospital, helping his son with his homework.
It’s a blessing and a curse!
AGENDA
– Fitness, fine wine and flow
– Flow Finesse in 3 tries
– Flow Surgery
How can we make predictions in the presence of uncertainty? More importantly, how do I figure out what my whisky budget should be? Come find out how we can use Monte Carlo simulations to answer the two most important questions for anyone involved in developing products – “When will it be done?” and “How much whisky will I consume?”. We will step through simple implementation of Monte Carlo simulations that does not require understanding of any advanced math or engineering concepts. We will also talk about easy ways to update our forecasts when we receive new information. We will also discuss how continuous forecasting can prompt early interventions.
Isn’t it wonderful how everyone knows the best ways to work remote now? Our diaspora from the office accelerated remote work practices and technology to truly rethink how we work and what we truly need. What’s that? Did you miss that memo? Then let’s briefly explore the best ways we can work together anywhere in sustainable ways. We’ll take a quick tour from habits to technology.
Have you ever wondered why you read books, watch videos, read articles or attend trainings… just to realize that later on there's only a very small fraction of the information that you remember and are able to use in the future?
In the knowledge economy, your knowledge is one of your biggest assets. When was the last time that you considered if you can learn more efficiently?
In this session, you're going learn how to learn by trying to provide answers to the following questions:
– What are different ways to consume content and which one is more effective?
– How can I use the pareto principle to optimize what content to learn?
– How can I quick capture the nuggets of knowledge that are most relevant to me?
– How can I approach different ways to look at the content by leveraging different levels of cognitive complexity?
– How can I use an evidence-based learning technique to achieve learning in the most efficient way?
– How can I integrate the learning as part of my daily habits?
I'm really thrilled to share my insights from the last 5 years learning to learn differently.
One of the characteristics of Flight Levels is that it is an agnostic thinking model, which works perfectly as a framework, a container for other practices, techniques and methods. In this presentation I am going to tell you about my experience in a multinational company; implementing Flight Levels and combining it with various techniques and methods including Team Topologies, Value Stream Mapping, Program Boards and others!
Whether you are an Agile Coach, an Agile transformation facilitator or a Scrum Master, did it happen to you to feel frustrated because the change you wanted to see was not the one that was taking place? Did you ever think that the values and principles you promoted had not the desired echo? Did you ever feel the pressure to succeed in a transformation, while people had other operational priorities? If you are a manager, did you feel excited by a more collaborative way of working, then felt lost because your hierarchy has the same “old ways” type of expectations from you?
If you ever felt this way, this session invites you to explore another path toward leadership, helpful either for coaches, facilitators, and managers, the path of the “leader at service”.
The challenge of a “leader at service” posture is letting go of our own fears, our ego and eventually, our own involvement in power games. We will discover together, from a systemic point of view, how our own fears may reinforce our ego and may push us in group power dynamics. The “Human Element” model created by William Schulz will be used to explore root causes of fears, how we can use them to reach selfless leadership, and be at service of a shared purpose driven Agile organisation.
Regular retrospective meetings are a standard in most Agile teams as a valuable way to investigate and improve working practices. However, retrospectives often fail to dive deeper into how humans interact, collaborate, and appreciate each other. They also rarely seize the opportunity to explore and mediate interpersonal conflict.
In this session, I will share experiences from my work at Deutsche Bahn Digital Rail, where we have introduced dedicated formats for giving feedback and solving conflicts in addition to regular team retrospectives.
What role do you play in your organisation? Are you a leader? or an organiser? or perhaps a creative catalyst? All three of these roles are key for an innovative and effective team: the leader gives us direction, the organiser plans the details. But what about the creative catalyst, what do they do and why are they so important, and especially now in our ever-changing world.
This session will unpack modern leadership from the perspective of these three roles, and show how different situations demand a different role. You might discover, as I did, that you are more comfortable being a creative catalyst than a leader!
The shapes of our teams have shifted dramatically since early 2020. Once we worked in clusters, in the same physical space. Now, many of us work from home, some from the office, others in cafes and co-working spaces.
As you’ve noticed, that has changed how we work together – not always for the better.
Research has shown that one of the most effective ways to understand the way people think and interact with each other (and to shift it when necessary) is through metaphor. In this session you’ll use a precision inquiry tool optimised for the task, Clean Language, to uncover some shapes that may be shaping your thinking, and explore the shape of teams may change in the future.
One of the big pain points in a company looking for transformation is that normally the destination it wants to reach is Business Agility, and even without understanding what and where to start it simply begins, with attempts that often take longer and/or higher cost to be performed. And one of the main reasons is that before they started they didn't really understand how the company works. Before taking off, understanding how the company operates is one of the main points for success with a better ROI and visualizing the situation(one of the 5 flight Levels activities ) is to observe how things really work in your company and after this understanding find the best point to start. Points that will systematically influence more parts/ areas of the organization. Visualizing the situation is essential to making the best flight to achieve Business Agility!
While SAFe is the premier method for scaling agility, many organisations think of SAFe as ‘only' applicable to ‘Scaling Agile'. This limits the benefits that they get from SAFe. In this talk I will present how we are using the Portfolio Configuration of SAFe to create FirstRoot, a new fintech focused on creating financial literate children capable of transforming their communities as they become financially independent adults through creativity, communication, critical thinking and collaboration. The lessons learned are applicable to organisations of any size, including organisations who seek to accelerate innovation in Horizon 3 of their LPM portfolio.
Today it’s common for company leaders to express a desire to be more agile, and many embark on expensive change journeys, to make their teams more agile.
After years on this journey fraught with “resistance” and lots of change, and yet seldom able to show results that are meaningful to customers or the business
Part of the problem is the core assumption that the problems, and therefore solutions exist at the team level or with the individual humans.
My experience is that to delight customers, collaboration is required between the humans, teams and departments. This focusing on the parts (individuals and teams) rarely improves the whole, in ways customers will appreciate or pay for.
While SAFe is the premier method for scaling agility, many organisations think of SAFe as ‘only' applicable to ‘Scaling Agile'. This limits the benefits that they get from SAFe. In this talk I will present how we are using the Portfolio Configuration of SAFe to create FirstRoot, a new fintech focused on creating financial literate children capable of transforming their communities as they become financially independent adults through creativity, communication, critical thinking and collaboration. The lessons learned are applicable to organisations of any size, including organisations who seek to accelerate innovation in Horizon 3 of their LPM portfolio.
Holding the space for a team to grow is the heart of team coaching.
Self-organising teams are, by their nature, a complex system. Our role as team coaches is to help them create a coaching habit, freeing you up to help other coaches do the same!
Join us to explore what helps teams achieve this nirvana-like state and what you can do as a team coach to help make coaching part of how teams work together.
When people hear about Flight Levels as 3 levels of interrelated goals: strategy level, end-to-end coordination level, and operational level, they cannot help but trying to map which current roles in the organisation should be at which levels.
This is a misunderstanding because Flight Levels is not about organisational structure… but what is it really about? This talk is an attempt to present a pocket guide of Flight Levels that can help you quickly get started in the right direction of the journey.
Challenges we face at work can become visible on different levels — as an inner conflict, in relation to a specific other person, in our team or with another group. But the level at which we encounter this challenge is not necessarily the one on which we find an adequate solution. Therefore, this session is about reframing challenges in order to find a different perspective and thus have alternative approaches for dealing with the challenge at hand.
Whether we like it or not — establishing business agility often means engaging with large groups. What is needed to facilitate such groups? Why does it make sense to address 30, 50, 100 or more people at the same time? Which formats and techniques have proven helpful for cultivating agile interactions in large groups?The talk provides tried and tested answers to these questions and offers a broad variety of practical examples.
How can we make predictions in the presence of uncertainty? More importantly, how do I figure out what my whisky budget should be? Come find out how we can use Monte Carlo simulations to answer the two most important questions for anyone involved in developing products – “When will it be done?” and “How much whisky will I consume?”. We will step through simple implementation of Monte Carlo simulations that does not require understanding of any advanced math or engineering concepts. We will also talk about easy ways to update our forecasts when we receive new information. We will also discuss how continuous forecasting can prompt early interventions.
One of the characteristics of Flight Levels is that it is an agnostic thinking model, which works perfectly as a framework, a container for other practices, techniques and methods. In this presentation I am going to tell you about my experience in a multinational company; implementing Flight Levels and combining it with various techniques and methods including Team Topologies, Value Stream Mapping, Program Boards and others!
What role do you play in your organisation? Are you a leader? or an organiser? or perhaps a creative catalyst? All three of these roles are key for an innovative and effective team: the leader gives us direction, the organiser plans the details. But what about the creative catalyst, what do they do and why are they so important, and especially now in our ever-changing world.
This session will unpack modern leadership from the perspective of these three roles, and show how different situations demand a different role. You might discover, as I did, that you are more comfortable being a creative catalyst than a leader!
A modern take on a 70's classic, we take some of the tools of modern product and organisation development and plug them into Stafford Beer's Viable System Model, a model that (still) describes organisations of all sizes that have the drive to survive in a changing environment. The result of this exercise will feel remarkably familiar to Lean-Agile eyes, and yet it helps to reveal some of the serious dysfunctions too often experienced with current frameworks, both team-level and larger.
WorkVisible uses visual storytelling to engage large groups and allow them to go fast, enable change and get things done. They call this “Change by Adventure.” According to Andy, the combination of visuals and story contains a magic ingredient that makes this possible. It also happens to make transformation work a lot more fun, relatable and effective. In this short, interactive talk Andy shares some of the secret sauce of the Why, How and When of Visual Storytelling. To get the most out of the session participants will need to bring a pen, paper, a sense of fun and a tiny bit of courage.
For years I was telling you how awesome self-organization and autonomy are in the context of organizational design.
Well, I lied.
Let me share a story about a company that has been a poster child of self-organization and autonomy, bringing them to the extreme and building its organizational culture around them. Everything was as rosy as you might have expected if you'd read books about progressive organizations. That is until it wasn't.
The engagement fell flat on its face. The atmosphere nosedived. Attrition crept in. Self-organization, vast autonomy, and radically decentralized control became as much a solution to address the old problems, addressing vastly outdated management principles, as a source of a ton of new friction.
We'll look at what went wrong and why. We'll make a sobering realization that making our organizations “fit for the future,” as some management thought-leaders propose, is much harder than it looks on paper.
It is a failure story. And a personal one, as I'm going to talk about the company, I've spent almost a decade with – Lunar Logic.
Smart working & Being: The music of your days
Being in quarantine is not the same as working from home. Adapting to changes requires finding a healthy pace for our days. “Smart Working & Being”, when Agile (not going fast but adapting and creating changes) and Slow (our ability to consciously and continually choose the pace to be connected with us and our teams) meet. Smart Working is creating productive and healthy ecosystems, oriented towards business and people. Tips for grounding these values through concrete practices.
Have you ever wondered why you read books, watch videos, read articles or attend trainings… just to realize that later on there's only a very small fraction of the information that you remember and are able to use in the future?
In the knowledge economy, your knowledge is one of your biggest assets. When was the last time that you considered if you can learn more efficiently?
In this session, you're going learn how to learn by trying to provide answers to the following questions:
– What are different ways to consume content and which one is more effective?
– How can I use the pareto principle to optimize what content to learn?
– How can I quick capture the nuggets of knowledge that are most relevant to me?
– How can I approach different ways to look at the content by leveraging different levels of cognitive complexity?
– How can I use an evidence-based learning technique to achieve learning in the most efficient way?
– How can I integrate the learning as part of my daily habits?
I'm really thrilled to share my insights from the last 5 years learning to learn differently.
Whether you are an Agile Coach, an Agile transformation facilitator or a Scrum Master, did it happen to you to feel frustrated because the change you wanted to see was not the one that was taking place? Did you ever think that the values and principles you promoted had not the desired echo? Did you ever feel the pressure to succeed in a transformation, while people had other operational priorities? If you are a manager, did you feel excited by a more collaborative way of working, then felt lost because your hierarchy has the same “old ways” type of expectations from you?
If you ever felt this way, this session invites you to explore another path toward leadership, helpful either for coaches, facilitators, and managers, the path of the “leader at service”.
The challenge of a “leader at service” posture is letting go of our own fears, our ego and eventually, our own involvement in power games. We will discover together, from a systemic point of view, how our own fears may reinforce our ego and may push us in group power dynamics. The “Human Element” model created by William Schulz will be used to explore root causes of fears, how we can use them to reach selfless leadership, and be at service of a shared purpose driven Agile organisation.
The shapes of our teams have shifted dramatically since early 2020. Once we worked in clusters, in the same physical space. Now, many of us work from home, some from the office, others in cafes and co-working spaces.
As you’ve noticed, that has changed how we work together – not always for the better.
Research has shown that one of the most effective ways to understand the way people think and interact with each other (and to shift it when necessary) is through metaphor. In this session you’ll use a precision inquiry tool optimised for the task, Clean Language, to uncover some shapes that may be shaping your thinking, and explore the shape of teams may change in the future.
Leadership comes in many forms. In this talk Sath will be sharing his journey into Social Leadership, its potential and how he adopted it's mindset and behaviours whilst building and nurturing a knowledge sharing community of engineers across a population 000s in financial services. We are in the Social Age.
In the online environment, it is difficult to read body language because we only see faces and a small part of the body.
How can we, with this limitation in visibility and boxed individuals looking at a screen, get the most out of the interactions with other people?
In this session, we will explore how you can do that by reading body language, recognizing non-verbal hints and facial expressions and we will practice with this information so you can use it with your Agile teams in different events where you interact with each other.
After this session you are able to:
- Differentiate different elements of non-verbal interaction
- Map non-verbal signs to a personal sentiment
- Test non-verbal signs in your own environment
2020 Remote Work Trends research by Gallup shows that the number of employees working remotely doubled from 31% to 62%. Many remote workers, especially millennials have discovered that they are more productive from home than from the office. These happenings have re-defined what it means to be a manager, introducing new complexities that managers were not faced with just a few years ago.
Organizations on their journey to agility and digital transformation require managers who are servant leaders and coaches enabling agile values. Managers of new remote teams can no longer be just ’bosses’, they must develop a new set of leadership skills for their teams to be productive. Data shows that well-coached teams tend to considerably outperform less ably managed teams in engagement, retention, safety, productivity, and profitability metrics. In this talk we shall discuss how the role has changed, agile values managers must imbibe and the organization’s role in equipping them for the transition.
Do more with less! Retail is undergoing rapid change and is faced with unprecedented challenges.
The need to be lean and disruptive is clear and urgent.
How can this be achieved? How can more value-adding work be delivered and work made more predictable?
Ben will talk through his stumbles and leaps to flow improvement mastery.
He sees flow everywhere he looks – delivery of IT, recruiting, budgeting, waiting in the hospital, helping his son with his homework.
It’s a blessing and a curse!
AGENDA
– Fitness, fine wine and flow
– Flow Finesse in 3 tries
– Flow Surgery
Isn’t it wonderful how everyone knows the best ways to work remote now? Our diaspora from the office accelerated remote work practices and technology to truly rethink how we work and what we truly need. What’s that? Did you miss that memo? Then let’s briefly explore the best ways we can work together anywhere in sustainable ways. We’ll take a quick tour from habits to technology.
Regular retrospective meetings are a standard in most Agile teams as a valuable way to investigate and improve working practices. However, retrospectives often fail to dive deeper into how humans interact, collaborate, and appreciate each other. They also rarely seize the opportunity to explore and mediate interpersonal conflict.
In this session, I will share experiences from my work at Deutsche Bahn Digital Rail, where we have introduced dedicated formats for giving feedback and solving conflicts in addition to regular team retrospectives.
One of the big pain points in a company looking for transformation is that normally the destination it wants to reach is Business Agility, and even without understanding what and where to start it simply begins, with attempts that often take longer and/or higher cost to be performed. And one of the main reasons is that before they started they didn't really understand how the company works. Before taking off, understanding how the company operates is one of the main points for success with a better ROI and visualizing the situation(one of the 5 flight Levels activities ) is to observe how things really work in your company and after this understanding find the best point to start. Points that will systematically influence more parts/ areas of the organization. Visualizing the situation is essential to making the best flight to achieve Business Agility!