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Digital transformation is often a multi-year and multi-million-dollar journey for large enterprises. Adopting the ‘Agile way’ is no longer a question; it’s the norm. At Tanzu Labs, we recently concluded an engagement, where we advised a large Australian organisation against following their program plan. The transformation program had a valid business objective and the support of its executives. When we partnered with the customer, the program was already three years into its journey. Projects got delivered on time with cutting edge technologies, modern programming languages, and teams with the right skills. How did the organisation still end up sinking millions of dollars without any return on investment? What went wrong in the middle? How did the right objectives yield poor results?

Industry and academia alike are focusing on the wrong things! We see Agile practices, frameworks and models as tangible interpretations of what Agile is, but it is the human interactions at the heart of it all. From 70 academic papers selected between 2020-21 concerning Agile transition, 45% of them cited organisational culture as being a major, if not the main, influencer of the success or failure of an Agile transition, but only 7% of them actually investigated further. So it seems that we are aware of the impact that organisational culture has, but there isn’t much literature about what organisational culture is, let alone how we can influence it with respect to Agile transition.

In this session, SAFe Fellow Em Campbell-Pretty will share the ten critical success factors for getting started (and sustaining success) with SAFe Agile Release Trains (ARTs). Participants will be guided through a self-diagnostic to help them determine if their organisation might benefit from forming an ART or in the case of existing ARTs, diagnose implementation problems. Participants will leave this session with a completed diagnostic and some self-generated action items.

The armed forces often have a reputation and are guilty of being the most bureaucratic organisations. Yet centuries of history from ancient times through to the modern day have repeatedly demonstrated how the best military leaders and warfighters, by focusing on people and teamwork at every level from the squad to the strategic, have achieved mission success using Agile-like patterns and principles which disproves their organisational inertia and impediments.

What is it to be in connection with ourselves and to others? How do we foster self-awareness, seek out our shadow spots and why is it important to do so? As a species, we are hardwired for connection, it gives our lives meaning and purpose, yet many of us struggle to cultivate authentic, un-armored and nourishing connections.

She will discuss mirror neurons, the attributes of empathy, nurturing optimism and the benefits of choosing a mindset of generosity.

Discover the liberation, empowerment and health benefits of dropping the veil and being in true connection to yourself and others.

Red light! Green light! A fun children’s game can become an instrument of terror in the wrong hands, like on Squid Game, the hit Netflix series. And just like Squid Game, Agile in the wrong hands can wreak terror, confusion, and hard-to-remove tracksuit stains on an unsuspecting team.

Ben will share some hard-won insights that are great for those fairly new to Agile, or helping their organisation to adopt Agile practices, plus some practical diagnostic questions to use in your own team, so that your Agile hopes won’t be… eliminated.

Join Cat and Adri 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.

Attend this talk to learn some strategies on building connection:
Lesson 1. Focus on making communication fun and safe
Lesson 2. If the business is in flux, prioritise providing clarity and establishing certainty.
Lesson 3. Stay curious. Lean into innovation and learning.
Lesson 4: Be human and show that you care.

Most attendees at an Agile Conference would agree: your most meaningful purpose in life is NOT maximising corporate profits. Yet, over time, Agile practices gained significant management buy-in primarily on the prospect of faster and more reliable increases in profit margins. (Naturally, this rather blunt commercial goal is often disguised in purpose-washing language). In an increasingly digital world, Agile adoption and digital transformations often ran together.

Geoffrey Dunn will share how his team trail blazed Agile development for medical devices, established tools and practices to cope with the regulations and documentation demands, and made some difficult transitions to becoming a self-organised team.

If you’re a team member working in an Agile environment, you’ll find that many of these challenges are familiar. Learn how you, too, can not only survive, but thrive, and improve your ways of working remotely.

Rebecca Gordon has had 20+ years driving transformational programmes and government projects and has taken what she’s learned to guide herself through her own personal project.

Rebecca will share the story of what happened following her diagnosis and the reflective journey it forced her to take.

Agile is how we work in the 21st Century. How about some 21st Century leadership? Most leadership styles have a single leader providing guidance down to their followers. This doesn’t make sense for a cross-functional team where collaboration is paramount. We now know that teams, where leadership is shared (where there is more than one person providing leadership), perform better than teams with a single leader.

This is a very new area of understanding for teams and reflects how organisations are starting to work in the 21st Century. It also helps us understand how self-organising and self-managing teams work and can work better. This will be an interesting 20 minutes where we can explore individuals interacting. It will be engaging, dad jokes galore, some opinion, well lots of opinion, and be totally worth attending.

Numerous industry surveys have shown organisations receive a number of benefits from being Agile – improved ability to pivot, reduced costs, and improved delivery effectiveness. Unfortunately, the collection and analysis of empirical evidence is rarely conducted. Without robust empirical measures, many turn to the symbols they can see – measuring velocity, team happiness, and getting teams to “self-assess” their capability. While useful, self-assessments and surveys provide only a snapshot of what agile teams have done in the past. What, though, is needed to accurately predict the behaviours that will take Agile teams and programs to the next level?

This talk with enterprise Agile coaches Matthew Hodgson and Mia Horrigan will give you a playbook to truly measure and predict agility based on a data modelling approach:

• The empirical evidence and data on what makes an enterprise Agile
• How you measure an Agile culture from an organisational psychology perspective
• The antecedents of Agile leadership
• How to grow and sustain an Agile culture across the enterprise.

In this lightning talk, we will explore some of Dr Seuss’ most loved books and find deep meaningful connections to Agile. From titles such as ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ and ‘Horton Hears a Who’, we look beyond the rhyme and riddle, and listen to the messages that echo the core Agile principles that are vital to the success of any team.

After almost 20 years of working in tech and then product, Marina realised that the organisations that succeed aren’t actually focused on the product or technology – the most successful companies are the ones that get leadership and culture right. So how do we do that?

In this talk, she’ll explore how stages of leadership development play out in Agile teams, product portfolios, and across the C-Suite, and you’ll walk away with tools to raise the level of awareness and impact of everyone you work with. As we climb the “stage ladder” we open up the capacity to solve bigger problems for our customers and our communities – and collectively, we can create a better world.

Viticulturists and winemakers have been creating products that people love, long before Agile methodologies were documented and practised. They have successfully honed in on what matters most when it comes to their craft.

Join Paru and find out what a modern Agilist can learn from a career detour into the centuries-old world of winemaking.

A dexterous team performs with ease. More so during the most uncertain of situations. It achieves this by maximising everything its members have got to offer. All available knowledge, skills, and experience. Surfacing and balancing appropriate responses from its members. With no perceptible internal friction.

What if I told you can enhance your team’s dexterity through playing games?

Improv teams are among the most dexterous teams in the world. And the secret formula is Improv games. Improv games have been around since the ’40s. Producing the most dexterous (and funniest) teams in the world for decades.

We’re transitioning from crisis and uncertainty through ‘the great resignation’ and into a new stage of life. At this major punctuation point, the old rules and familiar playbooks have been cast aside. Transformation and leadership coach, Cherie Mylordis, offers insights, tips and a model for sustainable change.

Are the Agile values and principles from the 20-year-old Agile Manifesto still conducive to today’s remote ways of working?

We need to recognise that while new technologies bring some consolation for overcoming the challenges of remote working, the real secret to success is hidden in the cultural shift. The highest performing teams have one thing in common – psychological safety. Leaders who focus on providing psychological safety in a remote workforce culture are helping their employees be the best versions of themselves, both physically and mentally.

Drawing upon more than a decade of working with remote teams, Dipesh explores these notions and provides clear guidelines, organised around seven key areas that will be useful for any organisation wanting to unleash the full potential of their remote teams.

Food Agility is a government-backed CRC with a mandate to adapt Agile methods to unlock the potential of Australia’s agrifood research sector.

This talk will focus on the successes and challenges of adapting Agile to an academic research environment. How the combination of design-thinking, lean startup and Agile can be used to inform impactful research, and talk to how they have addressed cultural barriers to change.

Resilience is typically seen as a personal characteristic – one that is largely psychological. Yet despite significant investment in supporting psychological resilience, people are burning out at higher rates, and we are now witnessing what has been called the “great resignation”. In this interactive session, Dr Michael Cavanagh will explore why our current models of resilience are not helping us. He will offer an alternative approach and discuss how this might be incorporated in organisations as a key part of the leadership agenda.

In this talk, Sheena Saigal will share the building of an Agile culture of learning and experimentation in the eCommerce team. She will narrate the story of her team’s journey of creating and advancing a culture of learning and experimentation from top down, providing some active examples of pitfalls, learnings, ways the team responded to failure, how the teams are empowered to take risks and what effective techniques to use when engaging people – both supporters and resistors in Agile ways of thinking and working than just coaching the theoretical principles. The essence of this talk is sharing the story with the audience of the exciting transformation journey and the importance of done rather than being perfect!

Who should attend – transformation enthusiasts, Agile coaches, Scrum Masters, Project Managers, Product Managers and anyone who is an Agile enthusiast!

Technology is increasingly important and becoming the core of most business functions, yet in many cases, IT is separated from the customer. This makes it harder for their involvement in new, differentiating products and services aimed at ever more discerning and empowered customers.

While Agile has been in play for many years, changing the organisational structure with Agile paradigm may not be a straight-forward decision for the non-tech organisations. ING has been pioneering Agile Transformation for many years and in the recent transformation in 2019, we have created Tribes with shared accountability between business and IT.

The significant structural and behavioural changes were designed to ensure development kept their customer at the front of mind. This was truly tested during lockdown when the transformation was in early stages. This session is a share back of learnings from this journey

In this talk, Guido and Natalie will share ING learnings for the past 2 years in recent Agile Transformation and how it has helped with bringing technology and business teams together to put the customer first.

Gartner predicts that in just a couple of years from now, 70% of organisations will be using Value Stream Management platforms to improve flow, leading to faster delivery of customer value. “Smart leaders know they can’t improve their processes without data,” says Gartner. ©2021 Gartner, Inc., 2020

In the old project-oriented paradigm, organisations had strong governance mechanisms that somehow worked (most of the time with a high price tag). It gave organisations a sense of control and understanding of what was happening (or at least the narrative created about what was happening – A.K.A watermelon reports).

When the world started shifting from a project-to-product paradigm, that governance mechanism became lost in translation. Trying to apply the old pattern was expensive and cumbersome. Organisations started to trade governance for value delivery unnecessarily. Who would’ve thought!
Value Stream Management platforms are now enabling organisations to measure the effectiveness of their product delivery, regardless of scale or which tools they use. It provides near real-time, end-to-end visibility and deep insights into the product delivery flow, enabling data-driven governance in a more sustainable, effective, and efficient way.

You can’t miss it!

In this session, we’ll be unpacking feedback, highlighting its role in Agile and sharing some ways to make part of your team culture, with some stories and case studies along the way.

In this talk, we’ll explore a counter-cultural view of this which we don’t talk about: Sometimes, it’s okay to start with the solution.

Sherif Mansour, Distinguished Product Manager at Atlassian, will share stories of where he’s observed and encouraged teams to do the opposite of what they’ve been told: start with the solution. Whether you’re conducting customer research, building products or involved in product strategy, Sherif will introduce a different approach to thinking which creates better outcomes for our teams and our customers.

Agile can help you develop ways of creating value servicing people’s current pain points and jobs to be done. But it is less useful when trying to help bring about change in everyday practices and expectations. Australia is in the midst of a transition to a distributed energy system, with households shifting from being consumers of energy to also being producers of energy, a transition that will hopefully contribute to mitigating climate change. Designers of the way householders will interface with their energy systems and the electricity grid can help scaffold whole new ways of being at home.

If your organisation is following Agile, it likely has Scrum Masters and maybe even Agile Coaches. But what is an ‘Enterprise Agile Coach’?