AgileAus24 Streams
AgileAus24 will pivot on the theme of Building Value Together. The Conference streams are how speaker Expressions of Interest (EOI) are grouped. Each stream has a dedicated team of volunteers to review it. The stream descriptions shown below are signed off by stream chairs and aim to give those submitting EOIs a better idea of the kind of content the community is eager to hear. We have gathered these ‘wishlists’ in a number of ways: ranging from face-to-face planning meetings with community members to surveys and more!
Stream descriptions are intended to be a provocation to help to get your thinking processes whirling – not to act as barriers to entry. If your idea doesn’t appear below – we would still love to hear from you! If you are unsure what stream your talk belongs to, you can say “I don’t know” stream and we will allocate you as best we can.
Delivery
AgileAus24 pivots on the theme of Delivering Value Together and we want to hear just that – your stories on how you are delivering and measuring value in your organisations.
- How do you prioritise when everything seems to be a priority #1?
- How do you balance optimising for fast, flexible flow vs the need to keep everyone busy and happy?
- How do you create the space to adopt new skills, techniques and ideas – balancing the demand to ‘do everything now’?
- What structures did you put in place to enable better delivery and increase productivity?
- What changes have you made? How have they helped your teams deliver more value together?
- What changes were made to measuring organisational performance and identifying the delivery metrics that matter?
- How do you maintain cohesion when inconsistent practices exist across team members and teams?
- How do you know you needed to improve your delivery and how did you know when it was improving?
We’d love to hear stories of common wisdom that is often forgotten, and stories of uncommon wisdom from lessons learned!
Culture
Stream chairs: Sue Hogg, Katrina Kolt & Brett Wakeman
Let’s talk about culture!
While bad cultures can demotivate people and kill innovation, great cultures help people, teams and organisations to thrive.
We’d like to hear stories about culture in your organisation and the part it plays in shaping your ways of working.
Who is responsible for shaping culture? What role does leadership play?
Can you intentionally craft culture? How do you measure culture and efforts to change it?
How has culture impacted your organisation’s agility? Is there such a thing as an “Agile Culture”?
How has your culture evolved through remote and hybrid working?
Change
Stream chairs: Hayley Cronin & Kevin Loong
Change is the only constant, but it seems we’re increasingly suffering from change fatigue. The Change stream focuses on how we can do change better to improve outcomes for people and organisations. We would like to hear about choosing change wisely (if/how/what to change), executing it well and building resilience to thrive in our ever-changing environment. If you have insights into effective change management or anything else relating to delivering great change – we’d love to hear from you.
Choosing Change wisely, executing it well and building resilience to thrive.
Tech
Stream chairs: Steve Lawrence & Nish Mahanty
In the technology stream we want to celebrate how technology adds value to our delivery processes and our customers. We would love for you to share your experiences of utilising best practice Agile principles in the realm of technology. Technological change is constant and is the heartbeat of progress and this is an opportunity to shine a light on the value and excitement of innovative technical practices in an Agile world.
We are looking for those thought leaders, practitioners, and enthusiasts who share a common passion for driving innovation and technical excellence. In an era defined by rapid technical advancements and digital transformation, we want you to share your strategies, successes, failures and learnings, case studies, and insights that illuminate the true value well planned, structured and run technical practices can bring.
Suggested topical areas include –
- AI & tools
- Security
- Agile Engineering/Technical Practices
- DevOps and Continuous Delivery
- CI/CD
- Innovation in Technology
- Scaling Agile in large Technology Organisations
- Distributed collaboration insights
Who might be in the audience –
- Technology Leaders & Executives
- Agile Coaches & Practitioners
- Software Engineers & Developers
- Quality Assurance & Testing Professionals
- DevOps Engineers.
Leadership
Stream chairs: Chris Chan & Dipesh Pala
Leadership is a broad and complex topic. The need for organisations to adapt and transform has never gone away. Today, the need to change is a response to economic turbulence and global challenges. Without leadership, the best we can hope for is a managed shift from one state to a more or less similar state, not holistic transformation. For leaders to be successful in leading transformational change in organisations, they must go through their own personal transformational change.
In this stream, we will explore a leader’s most important tool for transformation, which is our own selves. We welcome thought-provoking presentations that delve into key topics such as leadership in both status quo and transformative contexts, the pivotal role of conscious leadership, and the distinction between creative and reactive mindsets.
Topics you might want to consider submitting include –
- Growing one’s inner game to improve leadership effectiveness
- The pivotal role of leadership in shaping organisational culture and success
- Leadership Development: Creating Agile leaders at every level, mentorship/coaching, effective hiring, and a commitment to continuous learning
- Leadership self-awareness – understanding what drives motivations, decisions, behaviours and how leaders impact others
- Developing mindsets and capabilities that are needed in both personal and organisational transformation.
Future of Work
Stream Chairs: Lani Beer, Stephanie Ireland & Peter Lam
The world continues to accelerate. In 2023 the key themes of Sustainability and AI started to hit the mainstream. The question is how do we and organisations respond?
In this stream, we want presentations to tackle the big questions.
- How do we set up organisations to respond to the accelerating change?
- How can we get organisational governance to adapt to the accelerating environment?
- What are the jobs of the future? Will we need Agile specialists in the future?
- How do we educate and prepare ourselves and the children for the future where entry level training and jobs are predicted to be replaced by AI?
- How do we make sure we aren’t left behind? How do we ensure we don’t leave others further behind?
We want to hear your stories and ideas. This stream may be for you if you or your organisation have –
- Made changes that resulted in quantum shift in speed at how you get things done
- If your shift towards an inclusive and diverse environment has changed how you work and how you deliver
- If you have managed to incorporate sustainability into ‘how we do things around here’
- If you are using AI and have concrete ways to stop it being creepy and made it ‘safe’
- Have war stories of changing the capability mix of the organisation to set up for the future.
Product
Stream chairs: Elise Aplin & Clarissa Meffan
Frequently Agile practices are seen as a guide to building software, ignoring the ways an Agile approach can support the myriad of different activities required to define, fund, launch and support a successful product. This stream will delve into key approaches to product management and strategic decision making that enable products, experiences and business to truly benefit from an Agile approach.
In this stream we are looking to explore challenging questions like –
- How can funding decisions can be made when the definition of value extends beyond commercial success towards making real-world impact?
- How can we navigate the dichotomy between building products vs building projects/systems?
- How do we balance the dynamics between product, technical, functional and project teams?
- How do we encourage a fail-fast mentality that allows experimentation to flourish unprompted?
- How do we bring an Agile and product thinking approach across the entire organisation to ensure product and organisation strategies are in harmony?
This list isn’t exhaustive; we’re also interested in hearing approaches to questions that we haven’t thought to ask! In particular we are keen to learn from people who have stories to tell about what they’ve tried in the real world, whether it was a resounding success or had some hiccups along the way.
Lightning Talks
Sometimes the smallest talks have the biggest impact. Lightning Talks are short and sweet, 5 minute talks that share one idea really, really well. Don’t let their size fool you – it’s more of a challenge to be succinct than you’d think!
We invite you to throw in your bite-sized learnings from across the world of better ways of working into this stream.