Joanne Molesky joined us via video link, from British Columbia. She was a Principal Associate at ThoughtWorks, a global software delivery and consulting company. Joanne is currently a key member of their internal TechOps Management team, with responsibilities for IT Governance, Risk and Compliance. She has lead both the global Continuous Delivery and InfoSec teams at ThoughtWorks and is co-author (with Jez Humble and Barry O'Reilly) of the book Lean Enterprise, published by O'Reilly Books. 

Joanne’s passion is for finding ways to reduce risks related to software delivery and its use without compromising creativity, experimentation and learning. Over the course of her many years of work experience in both IT and Healthcare, there is one important thing she has learned: "Things change, get over it and to learn to adapt."

Joanne’s talk will focus on the biggest criticism of working in an agile manner; that it doesn't scale well in large organisations. This generally starts with tightly integrated, spaghetti-plate systems and technology, but as we remove the technical problems with new architecture and restructuring the way delivery teams work, we reveal the actual reasons many organisations will continue to fail at scaling Agile.

Drawing on her experiences from working with numerous midsize to large global companies, Joanne will present some of the key reasons that have stopped them from being Agile, despite well organised, supported, and funded efforts to do so. She will present some approaches and ways of thinking about these problems that can be used to help organisations improve their chances of being Agile.

Stephanie discussed how high levels of trust leads to a level of what she calls, “magic trust”. If you can achieve this, you can achieve outstanding levels of collaboration that results in high performance for individuals, teams and organisations.

From her talk, you’ll gain insights on how Stephanie builds trust within and for teams, with stories from her deep experience across multiple scenarios; many different teams, companies, projects and industries.

Adelaide’s own Stephanie BySouth, offers a wealth of experience as a business leader, product innovator, agile coach now specialising in Business Growth. 

Her passion for high performing cultures comes is partnered with an insatiable appetite for growing holistic business performance.

Stephanie BySouth is an engaging, creative and insightful public speaker at national events & international conferences. As a visual story teller Stephanie brings to life topics on leadership, high performing teams, lean agile enterprise transformations, and start-up ventures. 

Synopsis

In 2009, the REA group started a process of working with greater “agility”. This came out of a need to learn new capabilities to be resilient in a new, competitive era. It started as a way of relaunching a website, but since then, it has grown to be a mainstay of how REA works, as a whole, across the whole company.

Their “agile system of work” is a hybrid of various practices; a foundation of the lean principles of value, flow and waste reduction, is one of them. However, it’s only one of the four key elements of the way work “works” at REA, the others being, “management resilience”, “creativity” and “agility”.

Nigel will closed Be1st Adelaide, and will showed how REA has built their capability to the point that they are one of the principle businesses in our region, and right up there in world standards, as a progressive and future oriented place to work. You will learn how the principles that REA have evolved, allow them to innovate in the face of frenetic competition from the likes of Facebook, constantly improve the experience of using realestate.com.au, and help their teams work together, in highly collaborative ways.

Nigel is known as the “godfather of agile” in Australia, and is Chief Inventor of the REA Group and has been a CIO of both Lonely Planet and REA; he knows a heap about leadership and tech.

Just as importantly, he is a most wonderful storyteller and teacher. He both entertained and inspireed everyone as he always does. He is also super passionate about education and future skills programme, and is also a champion of women in tech and return to workers at REA.

Workshop Outline

This session is a guided walk through collaboration; what it is, why it is valuable and what areas you should focus on to improve your collaboration capabilities. The purpose of the session is to help participants put some structure around the thinking and to help develop a roadmap for maturing collaboration at their workplace.

Craig has run this workshop in multiple cities and brings with him a growing dataset of what constitutes great collaboration. Come and help to grow the knowledge, even more!

Workshop Outcomes

An increased awareness of what collaboration is and how it can be matured to a higher level of performance.

Craig’s roles over the past 15 years have involved leading project management teams, projects and programs, consulting, training and coaching in a variety of aspects of project delivery. Most recently Craig was a program manager on Telstra’s Customer Advocacy journey, working with culture change, Net Promoter Scores, and lean-style customer centred process improvements. Until recently, he was the Vice President of Collaboration with Aconex.

Apart from the disciplines of project and portfolio management Craig is also an Agile and Lean enthusiast with a focus on the collaboration and cultivation aspects of agile practices and methods. Craig runs the Melbourne Scrum User group and also runs meetup groups for Agile business analysis and agile project managers where he helps people navigate their way from traditional roles and thinking to modern ones.

Craig also co-created the LAST conferences, community driven events focusing on lean, agile and systems thinking.

Workshop Outline

Experiential learning workshop which will simulate a team self-selection event based on the book by Sandy Mamoli and David Mole 'Creating Great Teams - How Self-Selection Lets People Excel’. Frank and Chetan have created this workshop, with guidance from Sandy, and this collaboration will extend into the workshop.

Workshop outcomes

• Experience a team self-selection event, from preparation to execution

• Consider how this may be applied in your own context, how to overcome any fears or challenges

Frank is a highly qualified IT Delivery Leader with extensive experience in agile and traditional methods. He has over 25 years experience in both public and private sectors in Australia and in the United Kingdom, across a number of industries, including Utilities, Natural Resource Management, Land Administration, Taxation, Insurance, Agribusiness, Criminal Justice, Health, Retail and Education. His roles in these organisations have included all aspects of the software and systems development life-cycle, specialising in the management and delivery of enterprise wide IT programs and projects meeting strategic business objectives and customer requirements. For the past few years Frank has worked for SA Water as the IT Delivery Program Manager for their Operational Technology Program, which is a series of technology investments aimed to improve the safety and efficiency of SA Water’s resources delivering customer services in the field. In conjunction, he has been a key member of their agile transformation and change, which has been led through program and project delivery. Frank has recently started a new role as Agile Practice Lead, leading and establishing a practice to provide coaching to build capability and culture in the agile ways of working across the organisation.

Chetan is an agile enthusiast, Scrum Master and aspiring agile coach. He has been working in the agile space for over 6 years and learning technology space over 10 years. Chetan is a strong advocate of people centred organisational culture and the need for valuing the people that help an organisation deliver their goals. He sees agile as a way of living and feels that agile principles can be applied to any form of problem solving outside of software development and even outside of workplaces. He is also an aspiring stand-up comedian which comes from a recently developed interest in public speaking.

Workshop outline

The principle of delivery of useful “value” for a customer, as early as possible in any development initiative (software or otherwise) is a worthy goal . This principle makes what we want to do clear enough, but what about the risks that may be inherent along the way?

This workshop addresses this, by providing a step-by-step guide to one approach to identifying the risks that may affect your project. The approach is called Risk Mapping, and is a technique that Kelsey has used successfully on a variety of projects. Risk Mapping is applicable in a wide range of contexts, from software development through to business process change.

Kelsey will run through what Risk Mapping is, and you will run through a Risk Mapping exercise that you can take back and use with your colleagues.

Kelsey is the Identity Product Owner and resident Okta Certified Administrator for the ThoughtWorks' global identity team. This team is a globally distributed, remote-first team of six people, serving more than 5000 employees across 14 countries, and provides 24/7 support. 

How do you select the right people to institute change? What are the factors to consider based on the organisation, the department and the drivers for change? What is the role of leadership?

In this workshop, Natalie and Michelle will walk you through a number of team based scenarios drawn from hands-on experience working with organisations in Australia and abroad.

Through these scenarios, you will work through how to identify what you need from your change partners, where there may be unique needs based on the departmental or geographic culture and how to engage.

Natalie is passionate about changing the way business people are engaged developing strategies for business transformation and tactics for change implementations. Her experience has been gained through consulting to local and state government, finance, utilities, health and defence clients nationally.

Her passion for change management led her to be a founding partner in Change Connect, chairing the association and leading Adelaide’s first ever change management conference.

Natalie has a Diploma in Change Management, and Advanced Diploma in Instructional Multimedia and holds a Bachelor of Business | Marketing Major.

Michelle is an entrepreneur, author, speaker and thought leader. With over 20 years’ experience in business transformation, she is one of Australia's most engaging and thought provoking experts on change, culture and leadership.

As a qualified change agent she helps business leaders to get real results that affect the bottom line.

As a continual learner, she holds post grad qualifications in legal studies, HR and leadership, and is an accredited practitioner in the Human Synergistics integrated diagnosis tools (LSI, OCI, OEI, GSI), APMG Change Management and the HBDI whole brain thinking tools.

Games are like prototypes of real-life experience. In a short period of time we get to experience abstract concepts and understand them much deeper in compare to when reading about them. This workshop is designed to introduce the mechanics of games and anatomy of fun, and how this structure can help us design our own games. Agile concepts are sometimes abstract and hard to understand, and games can help with putting these concepts into practice. In this workshop you will get to design a game with a group of people from different backgrounds and you will be able to use the learning from the workshop to design games for your agile retrospectives or training sessions or design workshops.

Workshop outcomes

• Why use games to teach? What makes a good game? Game mechanics and how to build your own game

• How to facilitate agile ceremonies, design and use games for organisational transformation and team building activities

Saman is an experienced IT professional with over 13 years of expertise as a Project Manager, Scrum Master and software developer across a range of projects including, IoT, software development, system integration and business automation. Saman is very passionate in coaching individuals and organisations to build high performing and self-managed teams. He loves to share his learning journey with others and inspire them to embark on theirs. Saman has over 5 years of experience practicing and implementing agile mindset and methodologies in various organisations.

As an experienced Scrum Master, David has provided guidance and coaching to development teams using the Scrum Framework. David works hard to ensures that all levels of the business (from executives to end users) understand the "Agile Mindset" and the values and principals as well as dispel the Agile myths and pre-conceived ideas.

David's aim is to continue to develop his understanding of "Being Agile" rather than "Doing Agile", building his Agile knowledge, to facilitate the adoption of Agile values and principles within organizations.   

We will run through the principles of Design Sprints and conduct a number of the activities to allow people to experience getting their hands dirty. The purpose is to allow attendees to understand how they work, the value they can add to product delivery, tangible outcomes and benefits for the business.

Workshop outcomes

• Understand the key components for a Design Sprint

• Discover how Design Thinking and Scrum can be complimentary Agile approaches

• Level-up your problem-solving skills

• Learn how to reframe problems from a customer perspective

Dan is the principal of “More Space for Light” an Adelaide-based consultancy that specialises in strategy and human-centred design. More Space For Light’s mission is to remove the ‘mystery of digital’ to empower organisations to better connect and engage with their audience through the products and services they create. This involves training and facilitating teams using innovation programs such as Google Venture’s Design Sprint. More Space For Light is also the AUNZ partner for the Design Sprint Academy. An exclusive global network of Product Strategists and innovators.

Your teams are all using Scrum or Kanban. You have close alignment and cooperation between your developers and operations support. Your IT and business teams are working together to continuously deliver new improvements against your business strategy. But then it happens. It looks like you'll need a new technology platform that will cost you millions of dollars over the next three years, and that's before you'll be able to see any real benefits. How can we use agile, lean and lean startup principles to break through this procurement problem. Don't come to this workshop expecting all of the answers. This is an opportunity to work through this challenge with other agile architects and strategists. Learn from their experiences, and share your own. Bring an example that you have in front of you or a recent experience you would have liked to do differently.

Workshop outcomes

• How to apply lean startup techniques in new technology innovation

• Gain insights into how to improve business and vendor collaboration to partner towards better outcomes

• New technology platform actions to try in your own workplace

Ian is a systems engineer, solution and enterprise architect who attempted his first agile project in 1997. He has been scrum master, manager or architect for projects in defense, government, commercial engineering, mining and utilities. He has tried agile techniques to improve research, strategy and business case development, fixed price contracts and the introduction of new technology platforms. Since 2014, most of his working time has been spent coaching Adelaide organisations in their agile transformation. His interest is in developing their ability to sustain a learning environment where agile teams can flourish and work can flow seamlessly between business units and IT.

Seeking to work with increased agility, requires aligning many different people with different perspectives. How do we reflect on these multiple perspectives (e.g. people with differing levels of agile understanding), create a shared understanding and use it to improve the way we implement change in an organisation?

Through this workshop we will introduce some Systems Thinking frameworks as tools to explore different perspectives and “see” the system and the relationships between the different parts. They will help you to reflect on the system of work, and varying perspectives. In turn helping you to enact purposeful improvements. Supporting Practitioners to build capability to seek, listen, and co-ordinate different stakeholder perspectives, this workshop will create space for inquiry, exploration and sense-making.

Pete is a Principal Consultant at DiUS Computing, where he leads agile software teams in helping to build products for a broad range of clients. This usually involves introducing new ways of working to organisations, and an opportunity to ‘teach by doing’ through the course of product delivery.

He co-founded Flying Robot School, a non-profit with the mission of inspiring kids to study STEM by teaching them to problem solve by using drones.

Reflecting the diverse nature of his work, Pete has shared his experiences at several conferences about topics including the business model canvas, product ownership, chaos engineering and community based innovation.

Cass has two decades of international consulting experience and in 2012 founded ENTHEOS Consulting, a Systems based organisational development consultancy. Cass is passionate about partnering to cultivate more effective, sustainable and inspiring workplaces.  She has worked in multiple industries and geographies across Europe, Asia and South America.

Cass has channelled her passion into developing ENTHEOS Collaborative Systems Thinking®̀ an approach to build shared understanding of the dynamics of complex organisational systems and take collective action.

 She is a Melbourne University Honorary Fellow collaborating with the University’s Centre for Positive Psychology to develop the emerging field of “Systems Informed Positive Psychology” or “Systems of Wellbeing”.

Agile in Operations – Applying an agile lens on an operational team

How we have actually done it. How to visualise and prioritise an operational backlog. Applying agile thinking with an Ops team. What worked & what did not?

Workshop outcomes

• Visualising your Operational Backlog, rapidly sorting this into Complexity and Business Value and sequencing the work in a sustainable manner

• Applying the Heart of Agile as a 4 step process within your operations team/s

John has been working in IT Ops for over 20 years. He is a student of IT Management, ITIL, Lean and Agile. John has been applying Agile to operations work management practices for the past several years. Focusing on 2nd and 3rd level support teams he has a sound understanding of how work flows through an Operations team. Planned work (Non-Standard, Problem, Improvement, Maintenance & Project related Requests) & Unplanned work (BAU, Incident & Standard Requests). John has worked with teams to implement Scrum, KanBan, XP practices to Visualise and optimise work through operations team.

The Role of the ScrumMaster is a widely misunderstood role in the industry. Can a Project Manager become a ScrumMaster overnight? Or are we better off calling Business Analysts Scrum Masters because we want to ‘do’ Agile, or can our Tech Team Lead be the Scrum Master? The answer is not simple. However, Scrum Mastery requires a unique mixture of skills to perform the job well. Great Scrum Masters need to think and act swiftly and change their ‘stance’ with each conversation they have with the team members, Product Owner and stakeholder. This workshop is for those who want to understand the different shades or stances of a Scrum Master. It will delve into the different shades (eg. Mentor, Servant Leader) using real world conversational examples. The audience will play a major part in this workshop as it is conversation driven. Come prepared to challenge each other and grow together.

Workshop outcomes

• Different roles the ScrumMaster plays. How to have effective conversations with others by being a Good or Great ScrumMaster

Project Manager turned Scrum Master and Agile Coach, Yohan is a Pragmatic Agilist. He has a strong conviction that ‘being’ Agile is right at the Centre of the 4th Industrial Revolution. At SA Power Networks, the electricity distributor for South Australia, he currently acts as the Scrum Master for 3 - 4 IT value streams delivering Enterprise Systems and Digital based solutions. Yohan is an Advanced Certified Scrum Master, Agile Project Management Practitioner and a Certified PRINCE2 practitioner. He also has a Masters degree in ICT Management from University of South Australia. Yohan has a passion for communicating knowledge through experiential learning and to keep in touch with his academic interests, he also lectures at University of South Australia every now and then. He was awarded the Australian Young ICT Professional of the Year award in 2015 and the Australian Young Professional of the Year award in 2016.