The world is changing, and the ability to hire the right talent will be key to future successes of Australian businesses. As competition for technical talent increases, the innovative potential of one’s team becomes paramount. The need to hire a balanced, high-performing team has never been so crucial.

The team of collaboration software makers at Atlassian has implemented methodology from their own software community (pilot, test, iterate, improve) to fundamentally change who and how they hire.

An innovative, iterative, data-informed, diverse and inclusive strategy can not only help you attract the right talent but also retain it. Come and learn how you can apply basic social science research and an iterative approach to disrupt the inefficiencies in your People processes. This session will provide you with actionable strategies to implement today, as well as the methodologies you will need to build balanced, high-performing teams at scale.

To know more about Aubrey Blanche >>

What is it about interactive narrative that sets video game storytelling apart from other mediums? How are they reshaping the player experience, allowing players to become far more invested in the outcome of the narrative, and the game itself than ever before?

Explore the brave new world of modern video game narrative.

To know more about Stephanie Bendixsen >>

Agile software development has since moved from a disparaged, short-lived fad into the mainstream. I’ll reflect on this journey, where we are now, and how we are both succeeding and failing to realise the aims of us early pioneers.

To know more about Martin Fowler >>

In the worst of cases, each discipline on these teams – product management, design, and software engineering – learns a different model. This short, tactical talk reconciles the perceived differences in Lean Startup, Design Thinking, and Agile software development by focusing not on rituals and practices but on the values that underpin all three methods.

The tactics outlined in this talk are informed by Jeff’s years of experience as a team leader and coach in companies ranging from small high-growth startups to large enterprises. Whether you’re a product manager, software engineer, designer or team leader, you’ll find practical tools in this talk that can be immediately applied to your team’s daily methods.

To know more about Jeff Gothelf >>

This talk will follow The Food Bank For New York City’s inspirational journey of rethinking and improving operations from top to bottom. In this presentation, you will discover how the Food Bank adopted kaizen in their Harlem-based soup kitchen in 2011-2012, then forged a partnership with Toyota (TSSC – The Toyota Production System Support Center). Margarette will share how this Lean partnership became instrumental during the near-crippling repercussions of Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

Margarette will explore the challenges of rethinking one’s own processes and developing new habits, as she discusses how implementing operational improvements has created a new level of problem solving and creativity amongst the team. Learn how Food Bank team members have enthusiastically made the concept of “kaizen” their own; translating Lean principles, tools, and ideas to their sector. Hear about the “kaizen lab” the team created at their Food Distribution Centre in the Bronx to serve as a model line for the rest of the organisation.

To know more about Margarette Purvis >>

The highest priority for Agile teams is, in the words of the Agile Manifesto, producing “valuable software.” We’ve all seen plenty of emphasis on the software portion of this phrase, but what about value? We know that not all software is valuable. So how do we turn our methods towards a greater emphasis on delivering value?

Today, we give that responsibility to Product Managers or Product Owners (depending on your faith). But Product Managers are often measured on how much software they produce, rather than on how much value they create. Let’s correct that by refocusing on what matters: creating valuable outcomes for users, customers, and our organisations. Let’s turn Product Managers into Outcomes Managers!

To know more about Josh Seiden >>

We see this on individual, team and organisational levels. However, we are leaving out one crucial piece of the puzzle: we are forgetting to forget, or rather, UNLEARN. Even though old habits are hard to break, the more we can unlearn the more likely we are to experience a sense of growth.

In this interactive talk, Jessie will share learnings and unlearnings from her own career, stories from the companies she has worked with, and the techniques she teaches in order to make breakthroughs and forge ahead.

To know more about Jessie Shternshus >>

Deng Xiaoping once described managing the economy as crossing the river by feeling the stones — in other words, have a direction but be adaptive. But in a world of constant change, how do you determine the right thing to do? Which stone do you tread on? How do you understand where you’re going and where you need to go? How do you know if your strategy is right? Is there even such a thing?

In this talk, Simon starts by examining the issue of situational awareness and how it applies to technology. Using examples from government and the commercial world, he will then explore how you can map your environment, identify opportunities to exploit, and learn patterns of change.

To know more about Simon Wardley >>

In this session, you will gain a basic introduction on how to practically apply outcomes driven User Story Mapping to help you:

• Motivate and focus teams by defining meaningful outcomes
• Actively minimise user stories required to achieve outcomes
• Create a more effective and collaborative product backlog
• Plan smaller and more frequent releases
• Navigate ambiguous domains by overlaying an experimental cycle of ‘build, measure, learn

To know more about Sharjeel Aleemullah >>
To know more about Sylvia Yanto >>

Please note we use this approach at CBA however this talk will centre on a hypothetical case study.

Everyone has stories of failure. That time you fell off your bike. The day you wore your jumper backwards without realising . That wireframe that confused your customers. The new feature no one used.

Failure is an inevitable part of life and as our delivery practices have matured we’ve celebrated the role that failure plays in building our products. We Fail Fast. We Fail Forward. We Fail Better.

It almost feels like we want to fail.

It’s as if failure itself is our goal.

Has this obsession with failure clouded our thinking and distracted us from what we are actually trying to achieve?

In this session Elise will explore the prevailing ideas around failure and how they limit our ability to grow our teams and, just as importantly, the individuals that make up those teams. This talk will leave you with practical actions you can take to create a culture of learning and empowerment…and ultimately create a culture of success rather than failure.

To know more about Elise Aplin >>

When we think about Agile, it is usually in the context of software development, and yet Agile is relevant across many disciplines. In this talk, we will share our experiences with ‘Agile Hardware Innovation’, which involves rolling out innovative hardware initiatives through the “Discover, Define and Deliver” process. Using a recent client example, they will talk about using Agile to create a Smart Cane for Guide DogsVictoria, plus challenges they faced along the way..

Guide Dogs Victoria (GDV) is a charity that provides vital support to Australians with impaired vision or blindness, helping them achieve independent mobility. People with low vision face daily challenges, including navigating busy intersections, where they can easily veer outside of the safe crossing zone. This can significantly restrict their ability to travel individually.

ThoughtWorks partnered with GDV to observe and understand the challenges and needs of their clients, before exploring a number of potential prototypes that could be developed to address this issue. Together they designed and built four low fidelity prototypes, helping users ‘line-up’ while preparing to cross the road and providing them with feedback to ensure they stay in the safe crossing zone. After this initial discovery phase, they tested each solution with real users and narrowed the focus to build the most ergonomic and technically feasible solution.

To know more about John-Ross Barresi >>
To know more about Chen Zhu >>

Organisations around the world are investing heavily in the business and financial benefits of agility. Agile practice adoption is a step in the right direction, however dramatic financial improvements are rarely achieved. The steps to deliver business agility have, up until now, been complex and undocumented.

The Enterprise Business Agility (EBA) Model is an ICAgile Certified approach which provides strategy, measurement and practical tools to guide comprehensive business agility transformation. Developed through studying successful Agile organisations, the EBA is a holistic method of tackling the key challenges faced by leaders and teams during a business agility transformation.

By leveraging the collective wisdom of Agile organisations who have put in the hard yards, business agility is now more achievable than ever.

To know more about Brad Bennett >>
To know more about Lisa Duty >>

Software, and ultimately business value for software company customers, is delivered by people. Those people are the most important factor in success for a product or a project. Not ideas, not tools, and certainly not processes. If this is true, perhaps we have been focussing on the wrong things. Perhaps process improvement and development methodologies are not what has made Agile such a success in improving outcomes for delivery teams and companies.

Agile has been a significant change agent and has experienced rapid adoption. It may well be that some of us have lost our way. This talk explores people and what it is about Agile that seems to attract great talent. It explores the Agile principles that allow us to harness that talent and it looks at some of the things that may look Agile, yet inevitably seem to drive off those talented people.

To know more about Adam Boas >>

This session will suit anyone trying to move their operation to be Agile, but also anyone really trying to operate Agile in a wider organisational context.

To know more about Dan Fischer >>

In the process, almost everything about how this team of 800 people work has changed. We had to figure out how to do Agile at scale, how to transform into a microservice cloud architecture, complete restructure of teams and roles, threw out a suite of 10’s of thousands of tests and started over, went from almost 0 telemetry, to 8+TB/day and figuring out to do anything meaningful with all that data. Many mistakes were made along the way, and lessons learned. In this session I’ll share some of the stories about how we changed our culture and accelerated the delivery of value to customers.

To know more about Anthony Borton >>

We’ll share the story of how we cultivated a high-performing culture of rapid continuous improvement (and failure).

Join us as we walk through our journey to autonomous, customer-focused, cross functional teams; sharing the highs and the lows, some funny tales and some perspectives on how we see our future.

To know more about Oliver Brennan >>
To know more about Piers Warmers >>

For decades we have been striving to create high-performance teams by focusing on processes, ways of working, culture, and leadership that are Agile, Lean and customer-centric. During more recent years we have learned to understand the challenges of the ever-increasing pace of change and the disruption that it causes. Team and organisations that aren’t creating disruption will be disrupted – we must disrupt or die!

In this session, James and Marina will explore the human elements that impact a team’s ability to create and respond to disruption. The Human Full Stack model provides a framework to help us understand why some teams (and individuals) are able to create change, challenge the status quo and continually adapt to achieve sustained success and why others fall by the wayside – even when they build great software.

If you are a member of an Agile team, a leader of Agile team(s) or a business leader concerned about disruption, this session is for you.

To know more about James Brett >>
To know more about Marina Chiovetti >>

Humans design the systems and tools that make new forms of AI faster. Humans are the data sources that make AI smarter. Humans will make decisions about how to use AI. The laws and standards, the tools, the ethics. Who benefits. Who gets hurt. This thought-provoking talk will build on research conducted from Ellen’s forthcoming book Made by Humans which explores our role in automation and the responsibilities we must take on.

To know more about Ellen Broad >>

Many organisations espouse the need to build adaptive, sustainable cultures. Yet, in reality, these organisations typically use traditional change management methods that only serve to reinforce the corporate culture status quo. Adaptive methodologies that demand significant organisational learning are required to build more Agile cultures.

The purpose of the session is to provide you with practical insights and strategies that you’ll be able to use immediately to sustainably evolve yourself, your organisation and your world. You’ll leave the session armed with:

• A practical framework for identifying the current stage of cultural evolution of your organisation, allowing you to take the steps required to help your organisation achieve its aspirations and progress further on its unique culture journey.
• Valuable insights into how the development of human consciousness is essential to create sustainable transformation (and how this starts with you).
• The key principles you need to apply for a successful and sustainable cultural evolution.
• An awareness of the biggest mistakes organisations make when transforming culture and how you can learn from them.

You’ll leave this session equipped with the frameworks and methods needed to spark a cultural transformation. This is essential knowledge for organisations looking to adopt an Agile mindset.

To know more about Alison Cameron >>

Agile was once considered a fad and popular in the realms of crazy startups with cowboy coders, but now Agile methodologies and working in an Agile way are being adopted across all industry sectors.

Quite frankly ‘Agile is the new black.’

Agile has drawn its fair share of advocates and opponents and both are as passionate about their views as each other. Agile will not help you with disengaged people, poor culture or low levels of capability – its not a silver bullet. But it will improve your teams work quality, timeliness and your customer’s satisfaction.

Agility in delivery and Agile customer focus need to be adapted to the changing context of the new enterprise, this means that stuff will break. Agile will break your people, your processes and your org structures – but that’s OK!

This session will present one research institution’s journey and the issues they faced transitioning to an Agile workforce within in the constraints of a long standing waterfall mindset. Kerrie will share her team’s experiences in breaking down their thinking, changing their culture and the powerful effect that Agile has had on delivery and adoption. She will also discuss the power of a customer centric structure and culture.

Kerrie has delivered Agile cultures and continuous improvement mindsets as a senior leader into three very different organisations. Come and hear the tales of what went right and what didn’t.

To know more about Kerrie Campbell >>

Areas that were typically thought safe havens of humanity – from music, creativity and the arts to encryption, medicine and driving – are already being taken over by the machine brain!

What does the rise of this machine brain mean for testing? What are AIs capable of when it comes to testing?

In this presentation, you’ll learn the answers to the following questions:

• What is an AI really?
• How do they learn?
• What can they do?
• What would an AI really test?
• Where does that leave us?

To know more about David Colwell >>

In a world of continuous integration, shorter release cycles and faster development sprints, how do you encourage people outside of the shrinking dedicated testing team to help out with finding bugs? This talk will cover 5 activities you can run in your business to engage more people in the bug hunting efforts.

1) Bug bashes
2) Bug bounties
3) Running a quality guild/knowledge sharing practices
4) Dogfooding
5) Introducing soap opera testing

To know more about Samantha Connelly >>

Sprint planning? Check. Stand-ups? You bet. Retrospectives? We can do those in our sleep. Most Agile teams have a good grasp of some tried-and-tested patterns of working together, and yet following these patterns can actually get in the way of the team’s true potential. Too often we settle into a default mindset of using others’ tools and patterns in Agile practice, when it might actually be better to come up with our own.

Join Atlassian design strategist and author Ben Crothers for a highly visual and practical look at how you and your team can make your own patterns together, to break bad habits and generate greater insights, both for your products and your own productivity. Ben will share some examples of this in action (from Atlassian and other organisations), that you can adapt and use with your own team.

To know more about Ben Crothers >>

The REA Group, home of realestate.com.au, amounts to a large, long-term, social science experiment in the field of modern workplaces. Since 2010, thousands of people have visited their HQ in Melbourne on pilgrimages seeking an elusive ‘Agile miracle’ – and some patterns have emerged from the many challenging conversations that have ensued. Above all, creating an Agile factory without understanding the prerequisites for success is a futile journey, with one of those prerequisites being Australia’s most hated business word – MANAGEMENT. Get the REA recipe at this talk by Nigel Dalton, long-time agilist and lean protagonist. It will save you reading his book one day.

To know more about Nigel Dalton >>

Being a part of a UX practice that doesn’t research and test everything ‘by the book’ feels a bit weird! But we still achieve great results and release a lot of valuable and intuitive work. We have other measures and ways to sense what is going on with our product and while it goes against my more hardline UX upbringing, it still works well and I’m okay with it (most of the time). This topic might be useful and relatable for those who feel like they’re not doing so well with UX because it isn’t textbook perfect.

To know more about Megan Dell >>

Most discussions of the future of work start with the robot question: will a robot take my job? But we already know the answer to that question, and the answer is yes. The more important question is, what happens then? What happens not just to our work but to our lives more generally when technology is able to do the things that until recently, only highly trained professionals could do? In this talk, best-selling author Tim Dunlop discusses current thinking on the future of work and offers a positive perspective on this most pressing of issues. As the robots gather on the near horizon, he argues we have choices about how we respond.

To know more about Tim Dunlop >>

Case studies will be shared presenting the adoption of Agile within the Australian Marriage Survey. This presentation will cover the Agile journey the Australian Bureau of Statistics has embarked upon and will share the story behind what hasn’t worked, what has worked and the key to getting buy-in from business teams who are pressured to deliver operational programs. It will be an opportunity to learn what Agile practices and techniques are being applied now within ABS business teams and hear a case study on the adoption of Agile within the Australian Marriage Survey.

To know more about Juliet Fallace >>

Agile was born to serve the team level. Scaling it is a challenge. Add the complexity of the operations side of the business and you’ll find it a super-challenge.

Demand from the business to deliver faster solutions, combined with increased software complexity, is driving organisations to adopt DevOps practices and scale them across the enterprise.

Over the last couple of years, Micro Focus’ customer success group has successfully engaged with some of the largest organisations in the world, accelerating their DevOps transformation by using a combination of consulting services and a broad set of the Micro Focus software tools.

In this session, Omer Felder from the Micro Focus R&D labs in Israel will share what is needed to achieve the transformation to DevOps at scale. He will share the biggest challenges companies and governments face during this process. Omer will also address the need for a better integration of the wide range of commercial and open source technologies used by DevOps teams. Following this, Omer will demonstrate how the Micro Focus DevOps suite can help you maintain the required levels of management, visibility, and governance needed to deliver high quality software with speed.

To know more about Omer Felder >>

Discover how a shift to product engineering is changing the way Australia Post is maximising customer results – through a focus on outcome, measurement and autonomous teams.

In 2012, the Australia Post Digital Delivery Centre was established to provide a focal point for digital delivery and also to incubate a new way of working that could scale for the enterprise. Since then SAFe has become a normal part of the way we work, and we are now exploring our next evolution – Product Engineering.

Learn about why and how we are making this happen through a team-wide focus on the product and our customers.

To know more about Lambros Kallianiotis >>
To know more about Brett Wakeman >>

I’ll be honest, there are times when the Risk, Regulator and Restructure trifecta makes me yearn for my free and easy piano teaching days! Regulators, increasing compliance, restructures and the belief that ‘Agile can fix everything’ even when an Agile mindset is not well understood has made working in financial services a tough gig.

This session is not a ticket to financial services bliss, it’s about what keeps me coming back, the rush I get when I make it out the other side, people intact and the business in a better place. It’s a peak into my world and how I’ve learned to navigate the chaos, governance overload, and constant influx of unreasonable and immovable dates whilst managing my own internal fear of failure.

On a happier note, it’s also about me sharing my insights on how to make good decisions in complex systems. I manage to have a laugh and celebrate the success of accomplishing more in three months than some expected to happen in years.

To know more about Alyce Katsanos >>

Many stakeholders are unwittingly slowing or, in extreme cases, killing their key projects. This presentation will explore and explain these threats and will suggest techniques to help expose and avoid these ‘Agile taxes’.

To know more about Stuart Mitchell >>

As REA has grown so has the number and nature of their product development teams. Designing teams (and refactoring those designs) is an important part of growing the business and building a strong delivery capability. It would be nice to able to google the perfect team structure, but how should you design for distributed teams, mobile teams, platform teams and international teams? This talk will discuss:

• What does a typical REA team profile look like, and is that important?
• How have we evolved team design to support a mobile-prime strategy?
• We love autonomous teams, but teams often need to collaborate to meet their objectives.
• What collaboration models have we experimented with?

Hear about some of the ways REA has refactored team design to meet our evolving business and technical challenges, and some of good and bad experiences we have had along the way.

This talk will draw from past experiences, research and a continuous search for better ways to support Product Managers.

Leandro will start with a bit of history, outline some of the problems faced and finally explore an alternative way of building product roadmaps.

Join this talk to learn:

• Where product roadmaps came from and why we need it in the first place
• What’s changed since then and why it doesn’t work anymore
• The alternative to traditional roadmaps
• The components that make up a good product roadmap
• How to build an impact/outcome focused roadmap and stop thinking about features
• How to help your organisation to take the first steps towards an outcome driven culture

To know more about Leandro Pinter >>

He will provide some key insights on the strategic ‘Why’ that led to the Chief of Air Force establishing Plan Jericho, how Plan Jericho operates as a mindful disruptor, and how design thinking has been used within the RAAF to drive transformational change.

To know more about Jerome Reid >>

Developing the capacity to thrive in uncertainty calls for a radical change in our way of thinking (mindset), working, and behaving. This session will explore some differentiating and thought provoking first principles and practical insights to break out of old mental models and patterns and share a proven and practical framework. Pat will also share case studies from Silicon Valley and Large Enterprise Business Agility transformations and provide a practical playbook you can take away and apply to accelerate your own business agility transformation.

To know more about Pat Reed >>

Our culture has come to value anything fluid, flexible and adaptable but has failed to acknowledge that the Agile figure skater is supported by a rigid body of ice, the flexible trapeze artist is held up by a stiff overhead structure and the endlessly adaptable rock climber is held up by an unyielding mass of rock. In a cross-disciplinary exploration ranging from the engineering of large software systems to the “wetware” we carry around in our heads to the path to peaceful relationships between individuals and teams, this talk will challenge you to consider that there’s more to agility than, well, agility.

Attend this talk to learn:

• Where we are now: agility good, rigidity bad
• Where we need to be: balance good, imbalance bad
• How Event Sourcing supports agility in software based on rigid, immutable events
• How the Theory of Constraints supports agility in systems based on inflexible focus
• How Concept Mapping supports agility in communication based on stable, rigorous language
• How Crucial Conversations supports agility in relationships based on hard, unchangeable facts
• Your challenge: build the ice beneath your figure skaters.

To know more about James Ross >>

For decades, traditional enterprises have treated technology as a collection of independent assets funded as capital investments. Usually, those assets have to be integrated to deliver value. This combination of capital investment and system integration has become the dominant paradigm of the IT industry. But changes in technology have disrupted this model. Now, CTOs, enterprise architects and engineering leads are searching for a new framework to guide technical decision-making. They’re being called on to continuously operate and evolve a consumable business asset rather than integrate information silos. In this talk, Scott will explore the meaning of “architecture” in a 21st-century enterprise. He’ll explain how effective technology leaders can combine design thinking, deep technical expertise and business acumen to facilitate, rather than dictate, engineering choices.

To know more about Scott Shaw >>

Agile in Australia has been on a 12+ year journey from its humble beginnings of extreme programming designed for development teams to a process that transforms the way whole organisations are structured and how they work. Companies, in their droves are embarking on organisational Agile transformations. Agile Transformation is now almost the default strategy for established companies. What has driven this adoption and how can a process originally designed to help delivery teams be successful be applied to a whole organisation?

My career has has followed the same path, I’ve moved from a leader of delivery team transformation to a leader of organisation transformation. This presentation takes the audience through both Agile’s and my evolutionary journey from development change to an organisation level changes, identifies the market pressures which have driven this change, highlights what has worked and failed and gives the audience areas of focus to make an organisational level change successful.

To know more about John Sullivan >>