AgileAus is thrilled to welcome you to learn, share and connect with your peers at the AgileAus Circles!

AgileAus Circles are an interactive opportunity for curious minds from across Australia and beyond to share better ways of working.

AgileAus Circles will be offering creative ways to address burning questions, tackle current challenges and keep the conversation flowing!

In addition to hearing insights from a stellar lineup of local and international thought leaders, you will be invited to connect with like-minded folk and ‘deep dive’ into the topics of your choice by engaging in in-depth discussion. At AgileAus Circles, you can expect a curated blend of illuminating content (with a focus on tangible takeaways), serendipitous conversations and valuable connections.

Format: About two hours per session – comprising a 20-30 minute recorded speaker presentation + ~15 minutes of general Q&A, followed by facilitated 30-45 minute intimate, off the record ‘deep dive’ discussions (capped at 10 attendees per group). Dive in as deep as you like – attend all or some!

 AgileAus Circles will be held online and are free to attend.

Please note this is a moveable feast so do keep checking back as more Circles are added!

Linda Rising

Tuesday 18 August 2020 @ 9:00am AEST

Busting myths around organisational change
You’re smart, and the people in your organisation are smart. So making an organisational change should be easy – simply craft a transition plan and transparently explain the benefits, and all will all go smoothly, right? Not quite. Linda Rising will tackle this assumption and other organisational change myths. Learn about patterns for introducing new ideas and some useful tips for helping you grow any innovation step by step.

Jessie Shternshus

Tuesday 25 August 2020 @ 9:00am AEST

This interactive session will explore what we can do to be more curious and uncover the importance of unlearning in times of uncertainty.

Alexandra Stokes

Monday 31 August 2020 @ noon AEST

The importance of collaboration & autonomy to the speed of adapting
The lockdowns and necessity of remote working and remote schooling have given us a unique opportunity to reflect on how we handle massive and unavoidable change in our organisations and way of life.

We have witnessed an accelerant to many ways of behaving that companies should be looking to build on as routine. Collaboration and autonomy are essential to overlapping work, and overlapping work is essential to speed of communication and decision making. This virtuous circle of organisational behaviour has proven itself and will continue to prove a factor in the speed at which companies are able to adapt to unavoidable and radical change like a Pandemic.

Attend this Circle to explore how to boost collaboration and autonomy and adapt with speed!

Sherif Mansour

Tuesday 1 September 2020 @ noon AEST

The fine line between data driven and data informed teams
Over the last ten years we’ve seen an explosion of data which teams are exposed to help build better products. It seems crazy that in 2020 we’d consider making decisions without access to all this data… or is it?

Sherif Mansour, Distinguished Product Manager at Atlassian, will share stories where his teams have learnt (the hard way) of what happens when you’re too data driven. Come and be equipped with practical tips to avoid common pitfalls and learn how to bring balance to your team’s conversations. It’s time we shifted our mindsets from being driven by data to being informed by it.

Aubrey Blanche

Tuesday 8 September 2020 @ 10:00am AEST

How moving from “D&I” to equitable design builds better products
How many products are poorly designed or produce real-world harm because the right voices weren’t let into the room where the building…happens? How much money has been spent on “diversity & inclusion” while companies remain homogenous and underrepresented employees struggle to thrive?

Funding external partnerships and PR don’t address daily microaggressions underrepresented employees face, while unconscious bias training has been shown to potentially increase bias in the workplace. An almost singular focus on women in the workplace has left women of color behind, erased the experience of people with disabilities, and left almost everyone with “diversity fatigue”. Progressive business leaders are questioning many traditional “best practices” that haven’t shown to have a positive impact on employees, and are building new, data-informed and intersectional strategies to truly move the needle. Join The Mathpath Aubrey Blanche, Director of Equitable Design & Impact at Culture Amp, to learn how you can evolve your programs to create fair experiences for every employee and build better, safer products.

AgileAus Circles trivia!

Thursday 10 September 2020 @ 5:00pm AEDT

Lynne Cazaly

Thursday 17 September 2020 @ noon AEST

Making sense of what’s going on
No matter how work changes or what technology brings to our door or devices, we can forever make sense. We’ve experienced many things – read, listened, talked and thought. We connect the dots and try to understand the deeper meaning of what’s going on. This happens in work roles, in our family, community and in our inner life, in our mind. We look back and make sense in hindsight; we can look forward and do the best we can to project with foresight. In this session with Lynne Cazaly, you’ll gain some of the best sensemaking tools and techniques to make sense … particularly when you’re not sure what’s going on! The sooner we can make sense, the sooner we can decide and act and gain some certainty from momentum.

Andrew Blain

Tuesday 22 September 2020 @ noon AEST

In this talk Andrew will talk about how remote:af, the world’s first framework for effective remote working, is helping organisations to navigate the remote now, and the hybrid next. He will focus on patterns that organisations are currently using to support remote leadership teams, to design operating models that are optimised for remote and hybrid working, and to take strategy into execution.

Ben Hogan

Thursday 24 September 2020 @ 11:00am AEST

Bringing Purpose to Life with OKRs
On the surface Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) appear to be a simple way to set goals and measure progress, however the real world application of OKRs (especially at scale) is filled with unexpected challenges and some surprising benefits. Adopting OKRs successfully requires supportive leadership, sophisticated change management, investment in learning and more time and patience than you might think.

In this talk Ben shares his experiences from introducing OKRs across 100 teams in a 1200 person publicly listed organisation in Berlin. He will share his hard-won lessons of what not to do, and outline a low risk way to evaluate OKRs in your organisation. Join this Circle to learn about getting executives onboard, learn why cascading OKRs can be a mistake, learn how to set up an OKR champions and training program and more.

Esther Derby

Thursday 1 October 2020 @ 9:00am AEST

But if you want people to own the change and shape the change, you need to go about things in a different way. I call this change by attraction. In this interactive talk, I want to engage you, as I share strategies to activate curiosity, build credibility, and engage people to change.

In this session I’ll share how to gain influence and credibility, create reciprocity, and get your ideas put to use (or at least try!).

Ben Crothers

Tuesday 6 October 2020 @ 11:00am AEDT

Why we get problem-framing wrong, and how to do it better
What problem are we trying to solve?” It’s the new black of questions to ask in meetings to look smart, after you’ve asked “Yeah, but will it scale?” The answer to that question could unlock amazing innovation, but getting to that answer is often really tricky. Join Ben Crothers in a conversation about problem framing, where we’ll unpack what a problem statement should be, how to tackle biases that get in our way, and the essentials on how to run a great problem framing session with your teams.

Jutta Eckstein

Thursday 8 October 2020 @ 5:00pm AEDT

For being Agile as a company you have to think beyond Agile
Agile has not only originated in software development, it also is focusing on processes (only). However, for a company to be Agile more needs to be considered than software and processes. For example, what does company-wide agility mean for the company’s strategy, its structure, or budgeting? In this session we will look beyond the Agile horizon for showing a path towards company-wide agility.

Jen Frahm & Lena Ross

Tuesday 13 October 2020 @ 9:00am AEDT

Agile Change: Getting past frameworks and methodologies
Urgh. Those change managers keep coming at me with spreadsheets to fill out. Double urgh. Those Agile people want me to do a change plan in a two-week sprint. Is there a way for change practitioners and agilists to coexist in harmony? Maybe even in gleeful collaboration?

Lena Ross and Dr Jen Frahm think so and in this learning circle they will invite change practitioners and agilists to come together in a safe space of inquiry and positive intent and look at Agile change from a capabilities approach that transcends frameworks and methodologies.

Leandro Pinter

Thursday 15 October 2020 @ 10:00am AEDT

Yet, research shows that the vast majority of the employees are NOT engaged at work.

What are we doing wrong?

In this session, I’ll take you back in time to examine potential causes of these systemic issues and then explore alternative ways to make work more humane, equitable and fulfilling.

Federico Lopez Laborda & Amjad Sidqi

Tuesday 20 October 2020 @ 1:00pm AEDT

The Spotify model, the imperfect solution to the wrong problem
Many organisations are adopting the model taken from Spotify’s original paper on the subject, assuming that it will solve their development challenges and help to get more successful products into the hands of users. Major transformations are being funded and conducted based on this model. While there is a booming industry around the Spotify transformation, how successful are transformations based on this approach?

In this talk will explore some of the common challenges organisations face and how effectively the Spotify model solves those problems, as well as exploring other solutions to common software development challenges.

Spoiler alert, the Spotify model is not the answer!

This AgileAus Circle is sponsored by 

Sean Blake

Thursday 29 October 2020 @ 12:00pm AEDT

Eliminating the flat backlog for better customer focus
We’ve all experienced the dreaded flat backlog. Thousands of issues, captured over years or decades.
All these business requirements and bright ideas pile up to form an impressive wall of ‘everything we didn’t do’.

It’s incoherent, depressing and has no sense of being customer-focused. So why do we keep them? There’s a better way. Sean will explain how user story mapping can be used to create a customer-focused view of prioritised work. A user story map creates a 3D of customer touch points and gives the team better clarity into what they are trying to achieve and which persona they are seeking to serve.

Lachlan Heasman

Tuesday 3 November 2020 @ 11:00am AEDT

John Garratt

Thursday 5 November 2020 @ 11:00am AEDT

Legacy Apps Matter. Are your legacy applications slowing you down?
Attend this session and learn how to change the OLD at the pace of the NEW. There is one question that always makes its way into the Agile/DevOps conversation. And that is “Agile/DevOps is much harder in my department.” And of course it is.

We don’t all live in a world like Facebook, Flicker, or Netflix. We live in a world with an application landscape that is far more complex where we have to deal with applications that share data and processes, or we rely on other departments that are either outside of our control or even in different locations, and sometimes in a different country.

Often the success of a business is built on a foundation of legacy applications. Making changes to these applications introduces a higher degree of risk given the potential of shared data and backend processes, not to mention regulatory compliance or governance that needs to be in place.

Join this session to understand why legacy applications matter and the need to be part of the Agile/DevOps Ecosystem if a coherent approach to software delivery is the goal… the question is how?

David Kari

Tuesday 10 November 2020 @ 1:00pm AEDT

Deploy apps into production in seconds, not weeks

How can you ensure an idea in the morning ends up in production that afternoon?

In order to be Agile, you need an application platform that enables rapid time-to-value for your custom code by managing everything else – dependency management, load balancing, container orchestration, logging, auditing etc.

In this session we will discuss the supporting platform requirements you need in order to deploy apps into production in seconds, not weeks.

This AgileAus Circle is sponsored by 

Rachel Worsley

Thursday 19 November 2020 @ 12:00pm AEDT

How to work with neurodivergent team members in the Agile space
At least one in ten people are neurodivergent, including people with autism, ADHD and dyslexia, so there’s a good chance that you are already working with someone in that category. But do you know how to bring out their best in the workplace? In this talk, Neurodiversity Media Founder and CEO Rachel Worsley will discuss the importance of neurodiversity and how it relates to broader D&I efforts, refer to a case study of the most common stresses facing autistic software developers and share best practice tips and practical resources for collaboration and communication.

Catherine Drury & Stuart Knight

Tuesday 1 December 2020 @ 11:00am AEDT

Using Agile to spearhead change in the healthcare industry
Healthcare is changing rapidly, even more so now in the time of a pandemic. But how does an organisation like Swiss biotech, Roche, get ahead of the game and be the change maker? They take the unprecedented and bold move to be the first in the biotech industry to go Agile.

Join Cat and Stuart from Roche Australia as they share the unique way the Australian arm of the business has transformed including a new approach to business planning, customer engagement, organisational structure and ways of working. They’ll share the journey so far, their inspiration, their learnings and the positive impact already being experienced with partners for Australian patients.