Speakers

Proud to bring inspirational speakers from across the globe

Matthew Philip

Senior Agile Consultant

@ Accenture

Metrics at Every (Flight) Level

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Organizational change often stalls out at departmental boundaries, whether that is IT or another division. How do we help organizations connect vertically and horizontally to realize the outcomes that they have when undertaking large-scale change efforts?

Join this session to learn from a case study of a bank that combined flight levels and metrics to bridge their departmental boundaries and recognize gains not only in software delivery effectiveness but unifying higher-level strategy.

In this session, attendees will learn:

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• How to introduce flight levels, truly making all work visible and aligning all work to highest-level strategy

• How to invite and engage stakeholders beyond the “target” for transformation, such as business and human resources

• How to use three dimensions of metrics —Delivery Aspect, Perspective and Level — to support the work of Flight Levels

• How to respectfully and sustainably reduce organizational work in progress in order to focus on accomplishing the most important organizational goals

Zuzana Sochova

Agile & Enterprise Coach 

Agile Leadership

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In order to change organization, leaders have to change first. Be one of them and turn your organization into the successful Agile organization.

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Abstract:

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Organizations are constantly evolving, they change their structures, processes, and rules. Last decade they’ve been changing into Agile, and surprisingly despite all the effort and money they put into transformation, they’ve been often failing. The same way as culture follows an organization, the culture follows leaders. Companies were trying to break that rule for years and change the culture without changing leadership style. Nowadays this rule seems to win and organizations are moving towards different leadership styles and surprisingly becoming successful. In order to change organization, leaders have to change first. Be one of them and turn your organization into a successful Agile organization.

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LO:

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• Understand the culture model, how the two halves of mindset and structure are wired together and what are the implication of that for the leader.

• Learn how the culture mirrors the leadership style.

• Raise awareness of Agile Leader competences and metaskills.

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Necmetin Özkan

IT Quality Management Team Leader   @Kuveyt Turk

is Agile really agile?

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The Agile Software Development movement itself emerged from practice just like most of the works in the Agile Software Development is evolved through practice. Thus, the creators and consultants of the Agile world may evangelize it with commercial concerns, resulting in “selling agility” to organizations as an object in a form of packaged practices (of methods/models/frameworks). As a result, the real agile mindset may easily lag behind the “sold practices”. As a part of the “sold practices” of the market, there are issues in Agile like binary selection, many trade-offs, misconceptions and concepts inflated or understood as part of agility.

What would you think if I say that some mindset elements such as self-sufficient (!) and self-organized (!) cross-functional teams, very customer orientation, fixed iterations and even the Agile Manifesto itself that are globally accepted by the community do not support agility in an absolute sense or even inhibit it. This talk delivers such elements of the invented agile mindset and discussions on how and to what extent the each element in the set supports/inhibits the real agility. Thus, it can serve as a basis to identify in what ways a particular entity (team, organization, or method) differs from the real mindset.

Anna Radzikowska

Product Manager  

@Mauvius Group

Mahesh Singh 

General Manager

@Digite, Inc

Justyna Pindel

Kanban Practitioner 

Alex Sloley

Agile Coach Facilitator 

Toby V Rao

Enterprise Agile Coach

@Ventera

Clarke Ching

Chief Productivity Officer

 @Agile plus ToC

Oana Juncu

Agile Leadership

 @ cOemerge

Cunning Kanban. How did Kanban Method help you in #coronaworld?

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Coronavirus changed our world. But it was (is) also a chance to observe, how people try to organize a new reality using well-known method. And they don’t even know they use it! What method, you ask? Kanban Method, of course!

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Do you remember the day when you have learned about Covid-19? Can you recall a moment, when your government had to take difficult decision to deal with a crisis? Or maybe it was you, who decided to do something and (re)organize your life? No matter who did it first, I bet you might have observed introduction of a well-known method to make your life simpler over these, not that easy, days. What method, you ask? Kanban Method, of course!

You do not need to experience corona-crisis to allow Kanban for changing your life and work for better. And even if a change does not happen overnight, a Kanban-driven improvement does! I will show you the way you, your friends, and multiple companies have already applied Kanban not even realizing that! So, why should you stop here, if you proved it works?

Kanban Success with Portfolio and Upstream Kanban

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In spite of being evolutionary, organizations have struggled to implement Kanban for the same reasons as other Agile methods, such as culture, leadership buy-in and change management.

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There are many reasons why Kanban has been successful in organizations – from its original promise of evolutionary (non-disruptive) change management to improving teams’ agility in terms of lead time, throughput and flow, to helping organizations balance their capacity with the demand on their services.

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However, in spite of these benefits, Kanban coaches and practitioners have struggled to implement Kanban for some of the same challenges that earlier Agile methods have faced, including organization culture, leadership buy-in and organizational change management.

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Over the last 2 years, based on the experience with some of our customers, two factors have emerged as real catalysts to successful – sticky, enterprise-wide – implementation of Kanban in the organization. These are Portfolio Kanban and Upstream Kanban.

In this session, I will present what these two techniques mean, how to implement them, how our customers as well as we ourselves at Digité have implemented them, and how they have contributed significantly to Kanban’s success

Kanban Compass: in the Direction of Team-Driven Change

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Welcome to MarAvel.inc where missed deadlines, blaming others, overloaded systems, disappointed stakeholders, firefighting, and superhero work culture is just business as usual.

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Join the quest of learning and discover how STATIK, Training from the Back of the Room, and Accelerated Learning can assist you while introducing Kanban to tired teams.

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My session will guide you through:

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• a story about an anti-Kanban team and their system discovery process.

• an introduction to the basic concepts of Training from the Back of the Room (TBR) and Systems Thinking Approach to Introducing Kanban (STATIK).

• a step by step guide on how to design or redesign workshops to maximize learning opportunities for attendees.

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Start your Kanban adventure now. Take your time and use your newly gained knowledge to cope with your training challenges.

Dammit Jim, I’m an Agile Coach, not a …!

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Just what exactly does an Agile Coach do? Coaches, with some variation, would be fairly consistent in how we perceive our role. However, some companies or orgs or people probably interpret the role of the Agile Coach in ways that coaches never intended.

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Agile Coaches are continually asked and challenged to do work that represents the existing culture of the org they are working within. Some of these activities directly conflict with the values of Agile and support unhealthy cultures. Agile Coaches need to be aware of the scope of their role and how they can defer work that doesn’t support or nurture an Agile culture.

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Let’s explore some of the things that Agile Coaches have been asked to do! Are these antipatterns? Doing what needs to be done? This session will delve into the topic of the role of the Agile Coach and highlight potential challenges and possible solutions

Let’s demystify the role of an Enterprise Agile Coach! 

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Abstract The mission of Enterprise Agile coaches is to transform an entire organization through agility for better business outcomes. The role of an ‘Enterprise Agile Coach’ is not well defined nor understood. Many perceive it is a great sounding and fancy title that looks great on one’s LinkedIn profile and resumes. In fact, many folks actually put it as their title, without really understanding what the role means.

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Do you know what the Job Title/Role ‘Enterprise Agile Coach’ means?

• How is it different than an ‘Agile Coach?

• What does the role entail?

• What skills, traits, experience, and qualifications are needed?

• Can my organization benefit from Enterprise agile coaching

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If you’d like to get answers to these questions - Please join Toby Rao for a fun, interactive, and informative discussion.

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Business Not Engaged? Let’s Fix That.

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If you’re agile team is fast, but it’s going in the wrong direction because your “customers” aren’t engaged, then you’ll find this session fascinating and useful. The problem isn’t motivation or politics ... it’s something else and it’s far easier to fix than you think.

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Clarke Ching wrote the amazon best-sellers Rolling Rocks Downhill and The Bottleneck Rules. Rolling Rocks Downhill teaches 3 things: the fundamentals of Agile combined with ToC; how to use those fundamentals to deliver big projects faster and on time; and how to deliver quietly huge transformations. The Bottleneck Rules takes the lessons from Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints out of the factory and makes them accessible for everyone. It’s been featured in The Guardian newspaper and The Spectator magazine. It was one of Barbara Oakley’s top 10 books of 2019. It was the #2 best-selling Leadership book on amazon.com, just behind Steven Covey’s 7-habits book.

Clarke has been Agile / Lean / ToC expert in: GE Energy, Dell, Royal London (life insurance & pensions), Gazprom and Standard Life Aberdeen among other organizations. He is the past Chairperson of Agile Scotland. He is a lecturer at Victoria University School Of Management in New Zealand where he now lives.Today he is the founder and Chief Productivity Officer of Odd Socks Consulting.

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On Ego, Fear, Power and... Leadership

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Whether you are an Agile Coach, an Agile transformation facilitator or a Scrum Master, did it happen to you to feel frustrated because the change you wanted to see was not the change that was taking place? Did you ever think that the values and principles you promoted had not the desired echo? Did you ever felt the pressure to succeed a transformation, while people had other operational priorities? If you are a manager, did you feel excited by a more collaborative way of working, then felt lost because your hierarchy hase the same “old ways” type of expectations form you?

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If you ever felt this way, this session invites you to explore another path toward leadership, a path that I believe helpful either for coaches, facilitators, and managers, the path of the servant leader, who I’d rather call “leader at service”.

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The challenge of a “leader at service” posture is the letting go of our own fears, our ego and eventually, our own involvement in power games, therefore we will discover together, from a systemic point of view, how our own fears may reinforce our ego and may push us in group power dynamics. The “Human Element” model created by William Schulz will be used to explore the root causes of fears and how we can address them. As a bonus Robert Greenleaf’s Servant Leadership principles may be also mentioned as a support.

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More Speakers to be announced soon!