David Tran

Agile Coach, Open Universities Australia

OUA Australia gets educated… in Agile WoW!

An education business getting itself educated. A bit ironic, right?

If you’ve worked in a Contact Centre, or know someone who does, you’d know the daily struggles they face. Staff with stiff targets, trying to get a `sale at any cost’, often ignoring the real needs of their customers.

Yes. Well-defined procedures, good Knowledge Management, Telephony and Customer Relationship Management systems may exist. Yet, the `traditional’ approaches often create ‘micromanaged’ environments of frustrated leaders and staff. Most teams yearn for a better work culture, that could make it easier for them to provide a better Customer Xperience!

In this engaging and thought-provoking presentation, Anand and David tell the story of the journey of the Student Advisory team at Open Universities Australia (OUA). They share how the team successfully transformed its culture by embedding an Agile mindset, which led to:

• Continuous learning, unlearning, and adapting v/s traditional approaches.
• Simplified sub-systems across recruitment, remuneration, IT projects, etc.
• Highly empowered leadership, team engagement and collaboration.
• Improved Customer Experience, Employee Experience and Financial Results, turning around a 5-year decline into 3+ years of new student growth.

They had many challenges along the way (and still have a few!). But, the team has found a better WoW (Way of Working) and continues to raise the bar in their ongoing journey. As Anand shares his leadership vision and David shares his 360-degree experience of starting out as a Student Advisor, became a Team Leader and now is an amazing Agile Coach, we hope you’ll gain a few good ideas to help you in your own journey.

David Tran is a coach and facilitator who is passionate and determined to usher in new and smarter ways of working within an organisation, through transforming collective mindsets with Agile principles to build teams with higher morale who deliver greater results.

Currently David is an Agile Coach at Open Universities Australia (OUA), an online education platform in Australia that transforms lives for those that never would have thought possible through access to degrees and subjects from credible Australian universities.

Though very successful prior, OUA in the last year has undergone a tremendous cultural and process shift. David has experienced firsthand the way in which this organisation has successfully adopted and implemented an Agile way of working.

David has lived on both sides of the fence. Initially a student advisor then tasked with co-leading an experimental cross functional team and is now himself leading the way of Agile across seven cross-functional teams in addition to the Advisory Leadership team at OUA.

David, who is also a qualified personal trainer, has carried over with him his past challenges and successes in helping people transform their minds and bodies at an individual level and now at an organisational level through Agile.