Accommodation

Blitz Planning

With Kelsey van Haaster - Lead Consultant, Thoughtworks and Adam Hope - Lead Consultant, Thoughtworks

This workshop teaches a technique which builds upon and extends the familiar (from XP) planning game. Blitz planning is a fast moving activity which supports the development of the first three month planning horizon for any technology project. Technical and business stakeholders work together to rapidly identify project dependencies and bottlenecks and out any potential hidden surprises in your project. This is not a story writing or story mapping exercise but can be used to inform those activities. It provides technical and business stakeholders with sufficient information to make crucial decisions as early as possible in a project and can be used in any technology related project.

What you will learn:

• How to identify and estimate the first three releases of your project
• What should your iteration zero tasks be
• What the project walking skeleton will look like
• When can we obtain the earliest possible feedback
• What is the earliest point at which business value (revenue or savings) can be delivered
• How to spot hidden dependencies on people, technology or equipment
• Which activities have long lead times
• How collaboration can lead to better outcomes between business and technology stakeholders

Who should attend:

This workshop is relevant for anyone involved in a technology project. The technique is best used when both technical and business stakeholders are present, for example during an inception workshop. It’s hands on, fast paced and lots of fun!

Visual Management Masterclass

With Ben Hogan - Lean Kanban Coach | Certified LeSS Practitioner | SAFe Program Consultant

How do we move beyond visualising “To Do, Doing and Done”? How can great visualisations support more energised and focused teams? How can the best visuals encourage better practices without management intervention?

Many teams are disengaged, underperforming and too busy to improve. In this Masterclass you will learn techniques to lead teams from too busy (Chaos) to visualising purpose and performance (Clarity), onto visualising demand and capacity (Control), then visualising teamwork (Collaboration), and finally visualising improvement (Kicking Ass).

This class shows you how to create happier and more energised teams that have better managed work and measurably higher performance.

This Masterclass includes:

• A fun and hands-on half day workshop covering:
  • How visualisation can improve Clarity, Control and Collaboration
  • Visualising Collaboration in cross-functional teams
  • Managing demand and capacity visually
  • Managing process improvements and experiments visually
  • Extracting valuable insights and data from your visualisations
  • Using visualisation to extend agility outside IT teams
  • Navigating available office space and usage policies
  • Real world examples and lessons from industry
• A copy of the eBook 99 Visualisation Examples
• A copy of my whitepaper ‘Principles of Visual Workspace Design’
• Membership in an exclusive visual management practitioners community for ongoing peer support beyond the classroom

Target Audience:

This Masterclass is ideal for ScrumMasters, team leaders and Agile coaches who are ready to take the next step in their mastery of Visual Management techniques including applying advanced Kanban techniques.

Product ownership is a team sport

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the difference between Product Owner and Product Ownership
• Understand what is needed for Product Ownership to be successful
• Understand the impact different product ecosystem elements have on the way teams are able to work
• Understand the important relationships needed for effective product ownership
• Understand common mistakes and antipatterns

The Vanguard Method in Service Organisations: A Leadership Masterclass

With David Joyce - Customer Centricity Specialist and Author, ThoughtWorks and Tim Banner - Director, Vanguard Australia

“We’ve delivered some absolutely brilliant results. The great thing about Vanguard is that it actually focuses on customer value.”
Peter Reid, Island Director, Lloyds Bank International, Isle of Man

“We’ve saved over £100m; we’re at the highest Net Promoter score we’ve ever had and wherever we do this work, our morale tends to improve between 20 and 30 points,”
Rob Brown, Director, AVIVA UK, 2009 – 2014

“Vanguard are the pioneers of whole system transformation. It’s painful but it works.”
David McQuade, Chief Executive of Flagship Housing

These are just a few examples of the outstanding results that can be achieved by changing management thinking.

This Leadership Masterclass will illustrate the power of studying service organisations as systems and - using the knowledge gained - redesigning them.

The results are nothing short of remarkable: Net Promoter Scores jump by 60 points or more, efficiency jumps by as much as 40% and sales also jump by a similar amount. The improvements in performance are matched by a profound change in morale, and, importantly, by an overall cultural change.

The Vanguard Method is a change without a plan: instead, change begins with studying; using a systems perspective to gain true knowledge of performance; seeing the opportunities to improve; employing systems principles for the design and management of work; and removing the dysfunctional consequences of ‘command and control’. The Method is the secret behind the outstanding results you will hear and learn about during the day.

During the day, we will hear from leaders in Europe (via video) on transformations in their businesses, including Katharina Haase (Chief Operating Officer, Barclaycard Germany), Justin Watts (Head of Systems Thinking, Lloyds Bank), and Clive Nicholls (Chief Executive Officer, UK & Ireland, Crawford & Company). These leaders will share insights into how the Vanguard Method differs from other approaches on topics including how to change, how to design digital services that work, and how this Method can help organisations to rethink and redesign their processes.

Learning Outcomes:
The Leadership Masterclass will cover:

• Conventional designs in service organisations and their associated management beliefs
• Principles to follow when studying service organisations as systems
• How studying reveals the flaws in both design and beliefs
• Archetypes for effective service design, with case examples illustrating how outstanding results follow better design
• Understanding critical relationships: Thinking > System > Performance and Purpose > Measures > Method

Target Audience:
This Leadership Masterclass is restricted to leaders of service organisations, regardless of function.

The masterclass is designed for participants to undertake significant work when they get back to their companies, where the real learning occurs. Participants will need to have time to implement this.

Intentional Agility

With James Brett - Leadership Developer and Coach

Organisations, leaders and teams that get the people elements right (collaboration, motivation and direction) are the ones that will succeed this decade and the next few to come. They are the ones that fight complexity, do more with less, create the leading edges of innovation and attract the best talent (from the global stage).

This workshop will introduce the framework of Intentional Agility, which promotes an Intentional mindset that powers the implementation of a suite of Intentional Agility tools.*

Attendees will learn how to apply a new mindset and how to use Intentional Agility tools to improve individual and organisational success.

Learning outcomes:

• Understand the components of the Intentional Agility Framework and how it can be leveraged for increased success in your organisation
• Learn how the Intentional Agility Mindset provides the foundation for success
• Describe the importance of Consciousness, Curiosity and Compassion as part of this mindset
• Learn tools and techniques that raise the leader's level of Consciousness
• Discover how to apply deep personal insights into yourself and others to achieve greater success
• Understand what the key components of the Intentional Agility toolset are including Intentional Purpose, Strategy, Product Development and Capability building

Who should attend:
This course is focused on leaders and anyone looking to take their leadership and influencing skills to the next level.

Prerequisites:
A basic awareness of Agile concepts and ideally experience in leading and influencing at various levels throughout an organisation.

*What is the Intentional Agility mindset and toolset?
The Intentional Agility Mindset is based on three fundamental components that allow us to break through to new heights and new levels of experience. These three components are what we call the Three C's: Curiosity; Consciousness; and Compassion. We use the Intentional Agility Mindset to power the concrete implementation of the Intentional Agility toolset.

The toolset provides a set of practical tools that are applied across the whole depth and breadth of the organisation. These tools cascade down from the organisation’s mission and purpose through strategy, products and services and culture and capability. The most impact is gained when an organisation applies the Intentional Agility tools at all levels from top to bottom.

The Essentials for Success as an Agile Business Analyst

With Jody Podbury - Head of Agile Delivery Services, Sydney, Elabor8

The role of a business analyst in Agile teams has often been questioned – are they still relevant when they are seen as just writing stories? Business analysts are not only relevant but are often critical to success in Agile delivery when their responsibilities and value are viewed more broadly and they move beyond “just” writing stories.

True success comes when the responsibilities of a business analyst in an Agile team incorporates creating continued shared context for the Agile team whilst maintaining the role of the navigator/yardstick and asking “Are we there yet?” This workshop will focus on thinking beyond software through the entire process, from problem definition through setting business outcomes, building business value and user experience.

Learning outcomes
Through this session participants will learn techniques to supplement their story writing and slicing skills, including:

• Learn and practice techniques to create a shared context problem definition
• Learn and practice techniques to create and model business outcomes
• Learn and practice techniques to create a shared beyond software view of “Are We There Yet”

“Simply Buurtzorg”: philosophy in practice with Self-managing Teams

With Nicole Koster - Advisor for Buurtzorg Netherlands

“From both an organisational and an ICT point of view, it doesn’t get more Agile than this in healthcare.”

Do you think you know ‘Agile’? When Buurtzorg quickly grew into the Netherlands’ biggest homecare organisation, we began to think again. The Buurtzorg Foundation puts humanity over bureaucracy and delivers community and home health care via self-managing teams working without a management structure. In 2015, there were 9700 Buurtzorg nurses working in 850 teams, supported by Agile organisation and software.

In this workshop, you will discover more about the phenomenon of Buurtzorg, and learn how Agile self-organising serves a higher purpose.

Learn about an incredible and unique organisation from one of its advisors, and then discover how you can apply its Agile self-organisation framework for yourself.

What you’ll learn:

• How Agile can be implemented in the healthcare industry
• Using real case studies and practical examples, we will explore some common problems for leadership, IT and frontline staff, including hierarchic behaviour, always wanting to be right, and overregulation
• How to support real entrepreneurial behaviour
• How to change your mindset: see opportunities instead of problems - or as the Dutch saying goes, ‘bears on the road’
• How Buurtzorg creates new ways of thinking and taps into innovative, progressive, out-of-the-box thinking
• Reconsider Agile as a process rather than a goal
• How ‘teal’ organisations and Agile can be related

Who should attend:
This workshop is for anyone interested in learning from a truly remarkable story about the growth of a special organisation in a sector recognised as the slowest in the world when it comes to both IT and organisational change.

Intended for policymakers, IT specialists, CEOs and team coaches, this workshop will encourage you to question your own beliefs and discover what lies at the heart of a ‘teal’ organisation.

How to Lead by Enabling Growth Mindsets

With Peter Heslin - Associate Professor, UNSW Business School

This workshop will focus on the "How" and less on the "What" and "Why" of mindsets.

People can't bring out the best in others unless they know how to bring out the best in themselves. Based on this premise, in this highly interactive, fast-paced, and fun one-day workshop - which will be run mostly as a series of hands-on experiential and collaborative exercises – you will:

• Learn what cutting-edge scientific research has revealed about the role of mindsets in resilience, openness, learning, and collaborating effectively.
• Reflect on some of the major challenges you’ve had and your confidence to deal with them effectively.
• Become more mindful regarding the role of mindsets in creating or undermining a safe space for transparency and the raising/escalation of impediments.
• Increase your mindfulness about how your prevailing mindset affects your resilience, development, and productivity.
• Develop a personalised practical toolkit of scientifically-validated strategies for fostering the growth mindset-enabled continuous improvement of yourself and others.
• Receive feedback from a peer on a trial application of your toolkit as you rehearse coaching someone in your workplace to lift their performance.
• Develop a list of high-value insights and related initiatives for cultivating shared growth mindsets in your workplace.
• Have the option to give and receive ongoing peer support in implementing your plans.
• Conduct a personal retrospective regarding the extent to which this workshop has increased your insights and confidence to tackle the challenges you face.

Attendees may have an opportunity (though no obligation) to participate in an ongoing mindsets research project.

Target audience: Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, and other people with delivery or stakeholder management responsibilities.

Agile Testing Techniques for the Whole Team

With Karen Greaves & Samantha Laing - Agile Coaches, Growing Agile

Summary:
Agile testing is about more than how to squeeze enough testing in on the last few days of the sprint. However so many teams have adopted agile and not yet changed the way they test.

In this hands on workshop we will look at how agile testing is different to traditional testing and introduce some simple techniques that everyone in the team can use, to change the way they think about testing.

Testing will no longer be a phase at the end to break the system and find bugs, it will be an ongoing activity, involving everyone on the team, that constantly strives to build the best possible product by prevent bugs before a single line of code is written.

Learning Outcomes

• Experience how testing early and often can actually save you time.
• List five ways the agile testing mindset is different to the traditional testing mindset.
• Learn how mind maps can be a great tool for requirements and test case management, and sharing understanding.
• Learn which questions to ask in backlog grooming and sprint planning to avoid bugs before any code is written.
• Use the testing quadrants to decide on your test strategy and find ways for the whole team to own quality.
• Use the automation pyramid to assess where best to focus your test automation efforts for the biggest impact.
• Learn some simple techniques for your taskboard to help focus on doing testing activities before development (even if you don’t do TDD).

Each attendee will get a free copy of our ebook A Coach's Guide to Agile Testing, which includes workshops you can run with your team.

Target Audience
Any agile team members looking to improve the way they do testing. This is not just targeted at software testers, it's also applicable to business analysts, product owners, and developers.

Facilitation Skills

With Karen Greaves & Samantha Laing - Agile Coaches, Growing Agile

Summary:
Agile is all about collaboration and this means more time talking with people and truly understanding requirements. Mostly this results in more meetings. You need to make every meeting productive and effective, and the way to do that is through facilitation.

It's taken us several years to master the skill of facilitation, and it continues to amaze us how few people learn the skill, or even understand what it means. People spend much of their lives in meetings, and yet so many meetings lack facilitation.

In this half day workshop we will cover the basics of facilitation including planning, techniques, and recording. We will take you through our process for preparing for a session, and share tips it has taken us years to learn. This will ensure that all the time your Agile team spends collaborating is worthwhile!

Topics we will cover

• The role of the facilitator - whether you're a Scrum master or manager we’ll cover what the role of a facilitator is and how this is different from the owner or chair of a meeting. We’ll include the importance of planning as a key skill and activity for a facilitator. If you've ever wondered what a Scrum master should be doing all day, proper facilitation preparation is one of those things.
• Facilitation techniques - we will introduce some techniques that can be used to get teams to collaborate. We will also look at how to introduce an activity, and the room setup to achieve the best results. There will be lots of hands on practice! We will particularly look at techniques that work well for Agile meetings like Backlog Refinement, Sprint Planning and Sprint Reviews and Retrospectives.
• Dealing with large groups - facilitating large groups (20 or more people) brings its own unique challenges. We will cover tips and techniques to ensure large groups stay engaged, and most importantly how to manage time with big groups. These skills are crucial for anyone with more than one Agile team working on the same product. These techniques work well for shared sprint planning meetings or large scale retrospectives across multiple teams.
• Remote meetings - it is not always possible to do everything face to face. Many companies are distributed, and even in different timezones. We will look at specific skills and techniques to facilitate remote meetings with globally distributed participants. If your Agile team aren't fortunate enough to sit together, they can still benefit from collaboration.
• Recording and Actions - what are the different ways of recording a facilitated session? Do you often have actions that come up but then are never done? Who is the best person to take note of retrospective actions, or feedback from the sprint review? We will show you techniques to use as a facilitator to help make these actions happen, without you having to follow-up or nag.

Each attendee will get a free copy of our latest ebook A Coach’s Guide to Facilitation, which includes over 35 techniques.

Target Audience
If better meetings would improve your life then this workshop is for you. Attendees might include Scrum masters, Team facilitators, Agile Coaches, Trainers, Product Owners, leaders, managers, or anyone who needs to facilitate teams or group sessions.

Self-selection: Minimising Chaos through Effective Team Design

With Sandy Mamoli - Co-founder, Nomad8 and David Mole - Agile coach, Nomad8

Here's a radical idea: Trust people to know best and let them decide which team they should work in. Let them self-select! Drawing on our experience and our book "Creating Great Teams – How Self-selection Lets People Excel", we will show you how to make this possible.

Self-selection is the simplest, fastest and most efficient way to form stable teams, based on the belief that people are at their happiest and most productive if they can choose what they work on and who they work with.

In this workshop we will share learnings and experiences from more than two years of running self-selection processes in large organisations. We will show you a repeatable process for how to establish efficient teams and will answer questions such as "Why would I do that?" and "How do I convince management?".

Learning outcomes
After this session participants will be able to:

• Run their own self-selection events
• Explain why self-selection is the best way to ensure the best team design
• Describe a tried and tested process for self-selection that scales to hundreds of people
• Anticipate and address people's questions and concerns before asking them to self-select into teams
• Create a plan that includes a number of pre-requisites for self-selection success

Do-It-Yourself Usability Testing

With Steve Krug - Usability Consultant and Author, Advanced Common Sense

• A complete explanation of how I recommend doing testing (hint: very simple, very fast, and very cheap)
• A live demo test on an attendee's site, so you can see the whole process in detail
• Hand-on practice doing a test on your own site or app
• Plenty of time to answer your questions about testing or any other aspect of usability

Who should attend?
Anyone involved in publishing a website, application, or mobile app. Designers, programmers, writers, editors, project managers, sole proprietors, and VPs can all benefit from this session.
Whether you already do testing and want to know more, or have never tested and want to start, or even if you don't ever intend to do your own testing but are responsible for hiring, managing, or paying other people to do it, this session will prove valuable.

What you will learn

• What I mean by "do-it-yourself" usability testing, and why it always works
• What kind of people--and how many--to test with
• What to test, and when to test it
• The art of specifying test tasks
• How to facilitate--when to listen and when to probe
• Why I don’t use exit and entrance questions
• How to decide what to fix
• Why you should avoid writing test reports, and what to do instead
• Remote testing methods and tools
• ...and much more.

Collaboration Frameworks for Agile Teams

With Luke Hohmann - Founder and CEO, Conteneo

Many of the practices and processes followed by Agile teams are enhanced and improved through the integration of Collaboration Frameworks. This one-day intensive course will enable agile practitioners to use the Innovation Games set of collaboration frameworks to identify customer requirements, improve retrospectives, prioritize backlogs, create better release plans, product roadmaps and much more.

What You Will Learn

• Identify customer requirements for an ideal product through the Product Box framework.
• Improve retrospectives with the Speed Boat framework.
• Prioritise your backlog using the online platform Decision Engine (formerly, Buy a Feature Online).
• Plan a successful project using Remember the Future.
• Develop better release plans with Prune the Product Tree / Prune the Future.
• Understand product usage with Me and My Shadow and Start Your Day.
• Agile should be fun and effective! And when you integrate the frameworks described in this class into your Agile practice, it will be.

Who should Attend?

• All members of Agile teams with a focus on product planning, product development and product management.
• Anyone who wishes to create more innovative product and service offerings.

The Toyota Kata Experience

With Håkan Forss - Agile Coach, King

You have been doing Agile for a few years now. With a regular cadence you have retrospectives and a lot of problems and great improvement opportunities are raised but you don't seem to really improve. Let us put your retrospectives on steroids. Start using Toyota Kata!

Building on the power of habits, Toyota Kata will help you build a daily continuous learning and improvement culture, a kaizen culture.

In this intense one day workshop, you will be introduced to the two main Kata* of the Toyota Kata, the Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata. We will do a deep dive into the fundamental behavior patterns at the core of the Toyota Kata methodology: the rapid experimental cycles and the 5-Question Coaching Dialog. You will gain direct insight into the power of the Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata through repeated personal practice. You will experience how these daily habits or routines will help you to strive towards a state of awesomeness through small experiments focused on learning. Small teams will work together striving to achieve ever higher levels of awesomeness using the Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata, thereby gaining practical hands-on familiarity with Toyota Kata.

Learning outcomes:

• An introduction to the core routines, mindset, and behavioral practices of Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata.
• Experience the core routines of the Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata through interactive, hands-on exercises.
• Learn how you can start applying the Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata in a software development context as a compliment or a replacement of the agile retrospective.
• How Toyota Kata can become the catalyst for creating a culture of continuous learning and improvement, a kaizen culture.
• How Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata can become your “muscle memory” for continuous learning and improvements in your organisation.
• How the Coaching Kata will form the habits of the agile leaders of the organisation to help the learners learn and improve.
• Understand how Agile leaders and managers can create a lasting culture of continuous improvement through simple, easy-to-use, time efficient daily routines.
• How Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata can become a compliment or a replacement of the Agile retrospective.
• How to apply the Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata in a software development context.

Who should attend:
The target audience are Lean/Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, managers and anyone interested in continuous learning and improvement methods. Anyone can attend.

Prerequisites
No prior knowledge needed. If you want to prepare, the following two books are highly recommended: Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results by Mike Rother and Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale by Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, Barry O'Reilly.

Time to stop collecting problems and start forming new habits of learning and improving!

(*) Kata means pattern, routine, habits or way of doing things. Kata is about creating a fast “muscle memory” of how to take action instantaneously in a situation without having to go through a slower logical procedure. A Kata is something that you practice over and over striving for perfection. If the Kata itself is relatively static, the content of the Kata, as we execute it is modified based on the situation and context in real-time as it happens. A Kata is different from a routine in that it contains a continuous self-renewal process.