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:
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!
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:
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.
Learning Outcomes
Chief Knowledge Engineer and Agile Practice Lead, Software Education
Shane Hastie is the Agile Practice Lead for Software Education, responsible for the direction, development and delivery of all classes, mentoring programmes, consulting services offered by SoftEd to their clients globally. Lead Editor for all Agile related topics on InfoQ,com, Member of the board of the Agile Alliance Shane has over 30 years experience delivering software intensive products in a wide range of industries all around the world and now shares his experience and knowledge through his role at Software Education. He was elected to then board of the Agile Alliance in 2011 and re-elected in 2014. Among other things he looks after the Agile Manifesto Translation Program of the Alliance. At InfoQ he leads the team of editors bringing agile topics and ideas to the global community through writing news items, sourcing and publishing articles written by others and publishing mini-books. He led the team who produced the Agile Extension to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge, and is a member of the core team producing Version 3 of the BABOK.
“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:
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.
Prior to emigrating to Australia, David worked as a leader in various organisations in the UK. Today, as an interventionist, he works with Executives, Senior Managers, and Front-Line teams, helping them to understand and improve organisational performance from a customer’s point of view.
With particular focus on the service industry (which he differentiates from manufacturing), David’s ideology, the Vanguard Method, has enabled results that are nothing short of remarkable: organisations have seen their Net-Promoter Scores jump by 60 points or more, efficiency increase by as much as 40% and sales improve by similar amounts.
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:
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 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:
Jody Podbury is Head of Agile Delivery Services and an Agile Coach at Elabor8 – Sydney. She is passionate about improving the capability of those around her at work and at play including colleagues, clients, partners and friends. Jody has extensive experience as a coach and leader in places like Vodafone, mi9 and Suncorp. She has also worked in both Product Manager and Business Analyst roles. Jody is passionate about collaboration, Agile, people and knitting, always with multiple work and personal projects on the go.
“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:
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.
The Buurtzorg Foundation was started in 2007 by Jos de Blok with one team and four nurses – delivering community and home health care with a philosophy of putting humanity over bureaucracy. In the following years, new teams started forming throughout the Netherlands on a weekly basis, rapidly growing to the Netherlands’ largest homecare company. In 2015, 9700 Buurtzorg nurses work in 850 self-organised teams without a management structure. Due to an Agile organisation and software, only 45 staff members are needed at the back office and 15 coaches are needed to support the teams. Nicole: ”from both an organisational and an ICT point of view; it doesn’t get more Agile than this in healthcare”.
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:
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.
Peter has won a number of teaching awards, most recently the 2014 UNSW Business School’s AGSM MBA Programs Teaching Excellence in a Core Course award.
Since 2002, Peter has relished the opportunity to continually present, adapt, and refine this renowned mindsets workshop in leading organisations across the US, Europe, Brazil, and Australia.
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
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.
Together they have over 30 years' experience in software development, ranging from development to testing to managing. Of these, more than 20 years have been dedicated to agile software development. They are authors of the Coach's Guide book series, regularly present at international conferences, maintain an active blog at www.growingagile.co.za/blog and are looking to inspire a million coaches at www.agilepath.me.
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
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.
Together they have over 30 years' experience in software development, ranging from development to testing to managing. Of these, more than 20 years have been dedicated to agile software development. They are authors of the Coach's Guide book series, regularly present at international conferences, maintain an active blog at www.growingagile.co.za/blog and are looking to inspire a million coaches at www.agilepath.me.
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:
Sandy and David Mole have recently co-authored and published their book "Creating Great Teams - How Self-Selection Lets People Excel".
Sandy Mamoli and David have recently co-authored and published their book "Creating Great Teams - How Self-Selection Lets People Excel".
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
In 2010, he followed it with the usability testing handbook Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems.
The books were based on the 25+ years he's spent as a usability consultant for a wide variety of clients like Apple, Bloomberg, IBM, Lexus, NPR, the International Monetary Fund, and many others.
His consulting firm, Advanced Common Sense ("just me and a few well-placed mirrors") is based just outside Boston, Massachusetts.
Steve currently spends most of his time teaching usability workshops, consulting, and watching old black and white movies from the thirties and forties.
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
Who should Attend?
Luke is also co-founder of Every Voice Engaged Foundation (EVEF), a nonprofit that that helps citizens, governments and other nonprofit organisations collaborate at scale to solve both technical and wicked problems. EVEF has been a leader in the Participatory Budgeting movement, helping citizens prioritise hundreds of millions of dollars through Budget Games. EVEF has also partnered with The Kettering Foundation to create Common Ground for Action, the first platform for scalable Deliberative Decision Making. Endorsed by both the Agile Alliance and the Scrum Alliance, Luke is thankful for the thousands of colleagues from the Agile Community who have donated their time to EVEF.
The inventor of several patents and the author of four books on topics ranging from organisational behaviour to software architecture and portfolio prioritisation, Luke is an internationally recognised leader in the Agile Community. He co-founded the first Agile Conference in 2003 and has served on the Board of the Agile Alliance, sponsoring the first track devoted to Product Management. Under his leadership Conteneo has conducted market research and strategy services development for the Scrum Alliance and the Agile Alliance. Luke is also the creator of ProductCamp and Playcamp, the world's largest series of unconferences for Product Managers and Innovation Gamers/Gamestormers.
A former United States National Junior Pairs Figure Skating Champion, Luke likes spending time with his four kids, his wife's cooking and long runs in the Santa Cruz mountains. Luke is an old school Silicon Valley entrepreneur: instead of building a company to flip, he's building a company to change the world. Luke's keynote comes with a warning: after listening to his keynote you might find yourself focused on a higher purpose than just getting a standup meeting finished in 15 minutes
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:
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.
Håkan is an active member of the Toyota Kata, Kanban, Lean and Agile communities. He is an Accredited Kanban Trainer (AKT) and a Kanban Coaching Professional (KCP). He was nominated for the Brickell Key Award 2013 and 2014.
Håkan is also known for his all LEGO presentation style.