Topics
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Day 1: Monday 18 June 2018
A full day of keynote speakers in just one stream
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Day 2: Tuesday 19 June 2018
A magic mix of the AgileAus community talks
Day 1: Monday 18 June 2018
Leading an Agile company
Jeff Smith | Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, World Fuel Services
Come along and hear from Jeff on how to:
- Squadify an organisation from the bottom up
- Make culture tangible – something you can learn, practice, improve
- Measure what matters – and build great leaders and talent!
Data-Informed HR for high-performing teams
Aubrey Blanche | Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion, Atlassian
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.
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.
What can tomorrow’s leaders learn from Indigenous stewardship?
Jirra Lulla Harvey | Founder and Director, Kalinya Communications
What can tomorrow’s leaders learn from indigenous experience? Hear from Jirra on the stewardship, community, values, knowledge-keepers and resilience that contribute to a different approach to leadership.
Fireside chat – Agile at ANZ
Shayne Elliott | Chief Executive, ANZ
Sally Warhaft
Hear from directly Shayne Elliott on how he is leading the charge of the Agile transformation at ANZ.
Narrative storytelling in video games
Stephanie Bendixsen | Television presenter, broadcaster, author
As an industry – video games have evolved well beyond the scope of what we could have imagined when the first console was created. It’s an industry bigger and more lucrative than film, earning more than double what was brought in by the global box office in 2017..
Explore the brave new world of modern video game narrative.
Fireside chat – strategic agility
Nigel Dalton | Chief Inventor, REA Group
Steve Denning | Author
In conversation with Nigel Dalton, Steve Denning will share what’s involved in what he believes to be the next frontier of Agile management – Strategic Agility. Drawing on his book The Age of Agile – How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done, they will discuss why companies need to move from operational to Strategic Agility in order to thrive.
To know more about Nigel Dalton >>
To know more about Steve Denning >>
Agile in 2018
Martin Fowler | Chief Scientist, ThoughtWorks
Just over twenty years ago, I was lucky enough to be on the birth project of Extreme Programming, and thus saw the early days of Agile methods up close.
Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking
Jeff Gothelf | Author, Speaker, Executive Coach
As companies evolve to adopt, integrate, and leverage software as the defining element of their success in the 21st century, a rash of processes and methodologies are vying for their product teams’ attention..
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.
Creating a kaizen culture
Margarette Purvis | President and CEO, Food Bank For New York City
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.
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.
Product Manager? Product Owner? Nope. Outcome Manager!
Josh Seiden | Designer, Product Leader, Coach
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!
Unlearning: The challenge of change
Jessie Shternshus | Author and Owner, Improv Effect
The world we live in requires us to acquire new skills and absorb new knowledge in order to stay afloat. We must learn to SHIFT as things around us are changing.
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.
Crossing the river by feeling the stones
Simon Wardley | Advisor, Leading Edge Forum
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.
Day 2: Tuesday 19 June 2018
Lessons about failure from the girl who came last
Elise Aplin | Product Development Coach, Property Exchange Australia
Has this obsession with failure clouded our thinking and distracted us from what we are actually trying to achieve?
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.
Agile Internet of Things innovation
John-Ross Barresi | Project & Innovation Coordinator, Senior O&M Specialist, Guide Dogs Victoria
Chen Zhu | IoT Director, ThoughtWorks
In this talk, Chen and John-Ross will share our experiences with ‘Agile Hardware Innovation’, which involves rolling out innovative hardware initiatives through the “Discover, Define and Deliver” process.
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 >>
The 7 steps to Enterprise Business Agility
Brad Bennett | Founder & Director, EPiC Agile
Lisa Duty | General Manager, EPiC Singapore
Sponsored by EPiC
The Enterprise Business Agility (EBA) Model is an ICAgile Certified approach which provides strategy, measurement and practical tools to guide comprehensive business agility transformation.
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 >>
People
—
Process
Adam Boas | CTO, MyXplor
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.
Qantas’ digital transformation
Dan Fischer | Senior Manager, Digital Experience and Services, Qantas and Board Member, Digital + Technology Collective
Come along to hear about the things we got right and things we would do differently if we had our time again at Qantas!
Lessons learnt from Microsoft’s Agile Transformation
Anthony Borton | DevOps Architect, Microsoft
Sponsored by Microsoft
This is NOT a session about MS DevOps tools. This is the story of how the VSTS team transformed from shipping an on-premise server product every couple of years, to shipping a cloud service multiple times a day.
Wardrobe startup to awesome scale-up at THE ICONIC
Oliver Brennan | Head of Development, THE ICONIC
Piers Warmers | Technology Manager, THE ICONIC
In this talk, we will reflect on how our 7 year old scaled startup consistently grew 60% year on year and maintained a Net Promoter Score of 85+ while we simultaneously managed to constantly evolve our ways of working and stay ahead of our competition.
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 >>
Creating high-performance teams using the Human Full Stack
James Brett | Digital Leadership Coach, Author, and CTO
Marina Chiovetti | Director of Acceleration and Leadership Coach
In this session, James and Marina will explore the human elements that impact a team’s ability to create and respond to disruption.
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 >>
The AI condition
Ellen Broad | Independent Data Consultant and Author
AI can be all too human: quick to judge, capable of error, vulnerable to bias. It’s made by humans after all.
Enabling cultural evolution
Alison Cameron | Founder and Director, Adaptive Cultures and The Leadership Retreat
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.
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.
Agile will break your people, processes and structure… but that’s OK!
Kerrie Campbell | CIO, Flinders University
Best for Beginners
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!
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.
A new way of working at ANZ
Kath Bray | Customer Engagement Lead, ANZ
Sponsored by ANZ
A little over a year ago, ANZ embarked on a major transformation to a new way of working, leveraging Agile practices to energise our people and deliver great things for our customers at speed. We’re fundamentally changing our culture and building a very different ANZ for our customers and our people. It’s early days but the future has never looked brighter! Come along and hear about how we are doing.
Can Skynet Test? Outlook on AI Driven testing
David Colwell | Manager of Solution Architects APAC, Tricentis
Sponsored by Tricentis
Artificial intelligence has already risen beyond what we would have thought possible. Some areas of your life are already reliant on machine brains; whether you know it or not!
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?
The bug hunt is on
Samantha Connelly | Quality Coach, Campaign Monitor
Best for Beginners
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
Breaking bad habits by making your own teamwork patterns
Ben Crothers | Principal Designer, Atlassian
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.
Agile is the last thing you need
Nigel Dalton | Chief Inventor, REA Group
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.
Sometimes I feel like a UX phoney
Megan Dell | Head of UX, 99designs
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.
Is the future of work no work?
Tim Dunlop | Author
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?
The ABS journey with Agile so far…
Juliet Fallace | Agile Transformation Capability Lead, Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)
Best for Beginners
Come and listen to how Agile is being applied within government business teams in pragmatic ways and how the ABS learnings can be applied in other industries.
DevOps at scale – success stories
Omer Felder | Director, Customer Success Application Delivery Management, Micro Focus
Sponsored by Micro Focus
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.
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.
Maximising customer impact with product engineering
Lambros Kallianiotis | Head of Digital Engineering, Digital Delivery Centre, Australia Post
Brett Wakeman | Iteration Manager – Digital iD, Australia Post
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.
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 >>
Trials of the financial services trifecta
Alyce Katsanos | Scrum Master, Program Coach, Lead Consultant, Elabor8
Sponsored by Elabor8
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.
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.
Agile stealth taxes – the deadly threat from within
Stuart Mitchell | Certified Scrum Trainer, Certified Team Coach, Agile360
Sponsored by PM-Partners
Just like fish cannot see water many organisations cannot see the true effect they are having on their Agile projects.
Refactoring team design
Peter Moran | Engineering Manager, REA Group
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?
- 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.
Product roadmaps in the self-driven car age
Leandro Pinter | Head of Software Engineering – Digital & Data, Tyro
Product roadmaps have been around for quite some time now and the reasons for their existence are unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
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
Plan Jericho: Transforming the RAAF
Jerome Reid | Group Captain, RAAF
Group Captain Jerome Reid will speak about Plan Jericho; the Royal Australian Air Force’s (RAAF) seminal transformation program.
Accelerating business agility
Pat Reed | Executive Coach and Transformation Leader, SoftEd
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.
In praise of rigidity
James Ross | CTO, Envato
In our obsessive pursuit of agility over the last decade or so, something important has been missed: that agility cannot exist without its opposite, rigidity.
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.
Tech leadership in a responsive organisation
Scott Shaw | Director of Technology, Thoughtworks
In this talk, Scott will explore the meaning of “architecture” in a 21st-century enterprise.
An Australian story of principle adoption
John Sullivan | CEO, Elabor8
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.
Deep Dives
Immerse yourself in a Deep Dive experience! These sessions are an opportunity to go deeper with keynote speakers by asking questions in an intimate setting. Deep Dives are where the audience drives the agenda. Come with your questions and see what unfolds! Please note that seats are strictly limited to 50 people for all Deep Dive sessions.
More topics coming soon!