Learning from your customer
Stream Captain: Andy Kelk
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning” – Bill Gates
Every organisation claims to be “customer focused” but how many actually are? To really be driven by the needs of your customer, you have to be willing to listen to them and learn from them. Knowing when to listen, when to observe and when to dictate is a delicate balance.
This stream is for case studies and stories about working closely with customers to create products and services that truly meet their needs. Attendees will leave with a better idea of what works and what doesn’t when trying to develop a customer-driven organisation.
Evolving Agile Organisations
Stream Captain: Erin McManus
“So you’re Agile, what next?”
For some businesses, working in an Agile way is now part of their DNA, but what does that mean for their future? It has moved them so far, but what’s next for Agile organisations? If anything, it must surely mean that the learning never stops!
I’m interested in hearing about what Agile organisations have learned so far and where that will take them next.
What have they learned about the way they learn? What practices do they use? How do they evolve these from the traditional Scrum/Kanban/XP practices of the world?
Are Agile organisations thinking differently about the way they hire? What kind of Agile coaching do they believe in? How are they teaching the next generation of Agilists? How are they evolving Agile into the future?
The Future of Work
Stream Captains: Guy Geron, Dipesh Pala and Michael Stange
There has been 3 main revolutions which fuelled our economy:
- The steam and the usage of mechanical production equipment
- Electricity and the division of labour which enabled the opportunity for mass production
- Electronics and automated production
Through the emerging technology breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing, the fourth revolution is inevitable and is just an evolutionary corner away.
On the supply side, many industries are seeing the introduction of new technologies that create entirely new ways of serving existing needs and significantly disrupt existing industry value chains. Disruption is also flowing from agile, innovative competitors who, thanks to access to global digital platforms for research, development, marketing, sales, and distribution, can oust well-established incumbents faster than ever by improving the quality, speed, or price at which value is delivered.
Major shifts on the demand side are also occurring, as growing transparency, consumer engagement, and new patterns of consumer behaviour (increasingly built upon access to mobile networks and data) force companies to adapt the way they design, market, and deliver products and services.
A key trend is the development of technology-enabled platforms that combine both demand and supply to disrupt existing industry structures, such as those we see within the “sharing” or “on demand” economy. These technology platforms, rendered easy to use by the smartphone, convene people, assets, and data—thus creating entirely new ways of consuming goods and services in the process. In addition, they lower the barriers for businesses and individuals to create wealth, altering the personal and professional environments of workers. These new platform businesses are rapidly multiplying into many new services, ranging from laundry to shopping, from chores to parking, from massages to travel.
On the whole, there are four main effects that the next industrial revolution has on business—on customer expectations, on product enhancement, on collaborative innovation, and on organisational forms. Whether consumers or businesses, customers are increasingly at the epicentre of the economy, which is all about improving how customers are served. Physical products and services, moreover, can now be enhanced with digital capabilities that increase their value. New technologies make assets more durable and resilient, while data and analytics are transforming how they are maintained. A world of customer experiences, data-based services, and asset performance through analytics, meanwhile, requires new forms of collaboration, particularly given the speed at which innovation and disruption are taking place. And the emergence of global platforms and other new business models, finally, means that talent, culture, and organisational forms will have to be rethought
Overall, the inexorable shift from simple digitisation to innovation based on combinations of technologies is forcing companies to reexamine the way they do business. The bottom line, however, is the same: business leaders and senior executives need to understand their changing environment, challenge the assumptions of their operating teams, and relentlessly and continuously innovate
In an environment that doesn’t require so many employees (if any) to create, where the most important is the ideation and its marketing, what role would Agile play in the emergent work space? how would it support the future of work?
Klaus Schwab, 14th of January 2016, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution: What it means and how to respond”, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-what-it-means-and-how-to-respond/
Inclusive Culture
Stream Captain: Alex Stokes
If “Culture eats strategy for breakfast – Peter Drucker” then diversity will naturally eat culture for lunch and dinner.
This stream will tackle the elephants in the room, from gender in-balance and LGBTI inclusion in our tech populations and diversity in ethnicity of teams, to divergence of ideas across organisational cultures and the dangers of ‘group think’ in organisations.
What will the organisations of the future look like? What qualities do we need to nurture, and what are the practical ideas we can explore in our teams, to create team cultures that are welcoming and inclusive and harness the power of diversity for our organisations?
Agile Tech
Stream Captain: Ted Tencza
In the spirit of the Learning and Leading theme, this stream will encourage talks aimed at getting teams to learn “across the aisle” and close the understanding gap between tech and non-tech, using Agile. Talks should focus around themes like:
- “How can tech teams help non-tech teams?” and vise-versa.
- “Agile is expanding well beyond traditional tech teams, how do we take advantage of this?”
- What technologies and/or practices can help the organisation learn to be more Agile, learn to be “better”?
- How can we use technology to simplify and/or streamline the development process to get to production more rapidly and deliver value sooner?
- Have you learned what process work better for technical teams in an Agile environment?
Adopting Agile in your custom context
Stream Captain: Nish Mahanty
Making the decision to adopt Agile for your team or organisation is the easy bit. Getting started – building teams, agreeing your practices and processes, engaging and educating your stakeholders, defining governance and reporting, defining your culture – is the hard bit.
This stream aims to bring together case studies, coaching talks, tools, technologies, and war stories to present a coherent stream that will equip the attendees with a set of ideas and strategies on how to get started for themselves.
Metrics – a critical guide to Leading and Learning
Stream Captains: Peter Lam and Steve Lawrence
Metrics and measures are a key element of any Agile project or transformation. Capturing the ‘right’ metrics will lead to “informed” and proactive dialogue.
Now more than ever it is critical that teams and organisations invest in understanding the measures and metrics they are collecting. Decisions made on the executive floor should be using core measures and metrics gained from delivery teams. Delivery teams should be using metrics to learn about their processes and to continuously experiment, evolve and improve. The type of measures and how they are applied can be critical to success.
What Metrics do you use and why? How do they influence the organisation, from the key decision makers to the delivery teams? What are you learning and how are you applying the lessons learned along the way?
In this global age of cost cutting, trying to deliver more with less and optimising the workforce ,metrics and measures have a key part to play. We would welcome your experiences.
Learning Leaders
Stream Captains: Stephanie BySouth and Chris Chan
“Leadership and Learning are indispensable to each other”
John F Kennedy.
If businesses, cultures and teams are to thrive in the age of disruption our leaders must stand in the face of the unknown and lead with learning. It’s not enough to fail, fail fast, fail loudly, fail quietly – it’s time to explore the unknown within our capacity as leaders. Often this takes the grace of humility, the authenticity to admit we don’t have all the answers, and the acknowledgement to admit that leaders don’t know everything. Leading agility starts with learning leaders; they question, they envision, they explore, they engage, they provide the platforms for teams to learn the best path to deliver outcomes.
This stream is all about embracing learning leaders; the challenges to overcome when they are not? The benefits of when your culture has? What’s valued in your teams to ensure Leaders Learn? How do your leaders learn? Why do you embrace Learning Leaders?