• Agile Coach Track (Hall – 5.1)

• TeleSoftas Track (Hall – 5.2)

• Present Connection Track (Hall – 5.3)

• Workshop 1 (Hall – 1.2)

• Workshop 2 (Hall – 1.3)

• Workshop 3 (Hall – 1.4)

9:00 – 9:15

Introduction

9:15 – 10:15

Versatile Organization Design with the unFIX Model

Jurgen Appelo

What comes after Management 3.0, SAFe, Holacracy, and the Spotify Model? Well, it’s not hard to see in which direction the world is moving: organizations that consist of networked individuals who work from anywhere, who form teams on the fly, who focus on the customer experience (CX), who aim for objectives and achieve results, and make that a whole lot of fun for themselves. Let’s unFIX our organizations! The unFIX model is a simple tool that helps you with the versatile organization design. Unlike many agile scaling frameworks and self-management methods, unFIX has its focuses on continuous innovation and the human experience. It facilitates gradual change, and dynamic teams, and has an important role to play for managers.

10:15 – 10:25

Break

10:25 – 11:10

Transforming the IoT Manufacturing Enterprise. Journey: from Guerilla Agile to Startups Portfolio

Tomas Mikelionis

Teltonika is a world-leading company with a complete manufacturing and service cycle in Agile transformation. The company was established in Lithuania more than 24 years ago and still is family-owned.  At the moment, Agile in manufacturing business development is an emerging theme, so there aren’t “gold standard” frameworks or practices, and there are no recipes for switching from Enterprise to Agile-driven company. Starting with the small scrumming teams is a good starting point for Agile to confirm effectiveness. Still, after some months of rapid Startup-like development, time for Agile scaling, daily Teams coordination, and product platform and portfolio management comes. What is an excellent scaling (or rescaling) approach – keep teams strictly independent or introduce some hybrid model? How do we manage hardware, firmware, and software development in parallel to ensure the timely delivery of the product in the global market? What is a good practice of Agile scaling preparation for full-cycle hardware startups and enterprises? Tomas will share the company’s Agile experience in easy-to-adopt action protocols and management tools in the transformation journey from enterprise to startup and from startup to scaled Agile full-cycle company (not an enterprise).

11:10 – 11:15

Break

11:15 – 11:35

Insights for a Career in Tech

Matteo Taddei

In this talk, Matteo will provide insights into evergreen topics related to career progression in the Tech industry. He will share an approach that worked for him, mainly focusing on the ability to self-reflect, embrace failure, and own change.

11:35 – 11:40

Break

11:40 – 12:25

Keeping Your Head Above the Water: Startup & Agile vs Scale & Discipline

Gintarė Stundytė

Gintarė Stundytė has experienced a few very different sides of Agile. The corporate world talks about Agile as a framework, methodology, and discipline to learn and boost employees’ creativity. Startups have it in their DNA and do not even name it Agile. Doing Agile and Living Agile face different challenges and approaches. In this talk, Gintarė will share examples of what it means to be Agile in a Startup and Corporate, and how to reap the benefits of it, keep discipline, be responsive to change, and get alerted that something is not going according to the expectations.

12:25 – 13:25

Lunch break

13:25 – 14:25

The 12 steps of an Agile Transformation

Pierre Neis

Agile transformation is a trendy theme, and many companies have taken its way. But what are we talking about? How to turn a giant whale into a swarm of fishes? How to move from robustness to responsiveness?

Fifteen years of research have brought to common light points. There are phases to moving from a “business as usual” work organization to a dynamic environment. How do you go from “What-you-know-now” to a company where each team, each entity, operates as an internal startup? Pierre will walk you through the main stages of transformation and 12 tactics for working in the 21st century.

An Agile company has a very particular design. This collaborative platform has automated its routines and freed them with all the talents available to recreate themselves perpetually. The company framework is limited to what is strictly necessary to direct its vital forces mainly towards creating value. Platform, Plexus, Programs, projects, and swarms are the new forms of work in this environment.

You cannot transpose this model overnight; for this, there are intermediate phases. These phases make it possible to define your organization’s achievable objectives and design your alliance.

14:25 – 14:35

Break

14:35 – 15:20

Running Uphill: 3 Practical Lessons in Collaboration from a Unique Team in a Complex SAFe Implementation

Thomas van Zuijlen and Linda de Roo

Running Uphill is an interactive experience report by PO Linda de Roo and Scrum Master Thomas van Zuijlen.

Over the course of seven months, Linda and Thomas worked together in a unique team set up as part of a SAFe Agile Release Train within the Netherlands’ largest insurance corporation.

Their session is aimed at POs and Scrum Masters, who get to actively reflect on collaboration challenges using real-life wicked problems from Linda’s and Thomas’s teams.

Running Uphill uses those examples as the jumping-off point for stories from two perspectives, sharing doubts, losses, and wins from both sides of the Product Owner/Scrum Master sandwich.

Take-aways are presented as three concrete learnings to apply, around escalations, trust, and taking small steps toward empiricism in the unlikeliest circumstances.

15:20 – 15:25

Break

15:25 – 16:10

LeSS to Scale Unicorns – Experiences from Revolut and Uncapped

Vaidas Adomauskas

Revolut is known for its fast product development. Vaidas learned the way they work while leading Revolut Business. They did not “use LeSS”. But for sure they used many practices that LeSS advocates for. When he joined Uncapped as a Chief Product Officer, he had a chance to build organizational structure, culture, and ways of working from scratch. Vaidas summarized it in this article early days of this journey. In this talk, he will share more details of the lessons learned, LeSS practices they used (without calling them LeSS), and why everyone willing to build a Unicorn should learn LeSS as early as possible.

16:10 – 16:15

Break

16:15 – 17:00

BYOSF – Build Your Own Scaling Framework!

Bob Willis

As organizations reach the tipping point for change to support an Agile transformation at scale, many foundational factors need to be considered. Whether you are considering implementing SAFe, Scrum at Scale, LeSS, Nexus, or something else, understanding the building blocks that enable successful delivery at scale with appropriate team structures, a focus on the true product and mechanisms for that product’s release is of paramount importance. In this talk, we will discuss how to design your agile transformation at scale on a firm footing by understanding Systems Thinking, Lean, Team Topologies, and Organizational Designs that promote the culture that is needed to support Business Agility at scale. We will compare and contrast the main scaling frameworks with a view to aiding your journey based on your own organizational context – one size does not fit all! We will also consider whether you should even be scaling at all!

17:00 – 17:05

Break

17:05 – 17:50

The Agile Executive: Activating the Full Potential of Your Organization

Peter Stevens

Agility started out as something that software developers do. But as organizations strive to deal with the challenges of today’s complex world, agility offers a way forward. Discover how agility applies to leadership, how today’s most responsive companies apply agility to meet their challenges, and how easily you can get started on the path of becoming an agile executive.

10:25 – 11:10

From Agile to Agility

Necmettin Özkan

The Agile Software Development movement emerged from practice just like most of the works in Agile 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 the form of packaged practices (of methods/models/frameworks). Owing to the “sold practices” by the market and misleading misconceptions in the minds of the creators of Agile, there are certain issues in Agile like regarding it as a “holy” product and solution for (almost) everything, binary thinking, neglected trade-offs, and determinism. Those issues do not support agility in a sense and even inhibit it, which ultimately leads to the end of Agile™. This talk handles and discusses these prominent misconceptions and makes a prediction about the possible course of Agile™ and the rise of agility.

11:10 – 11:15

Break

11:15 – 11:35

Why Scrum Fails You Again and Again. A New Perspective!

Martin Berg and David Symhoven

There is a misunderstanding about Scrum, even in the Scrum Guide it is stated: “Scrum is a lightweight framework that helps people, teams and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems”. But from a complexity theory point of view, that is wrong! This misconception, however, is the reason for a lot of trouble. As the world gets more and more complex, we need to work smarter and smarter, but is Scrum really the best way to solve complex problems? We take you on the journey of some of the most frequent symptoms when using Scrum, what the potential causes are, and some remedies to help fix them instead of the symptoms. Management and Devs are welcome alike.

11:35 – 11:40

Break

11:40 – 12:25

What’s the Sweet Spot?

Artur Margonari

There are many different interpretations, pitfalls, and misconceptions about Agile values, principles, and practices. It’s not an assumption but rather what Artur has been witnessing in almost a decade of working with agility. In this session, we will dive deep into the Agile values and other common Agile principles/practices, demystifying some of them and discussing what would be ideal for your specific context. By the end of this interactive session, you will be able to visualize better where your company or team stands regarding the values and some practices. You will also get some insights and tips & tricks about it.

12:25 – 14:35

Lunch break

14:35 – 15:20

Bring Democracy to the Next Level with Agile

Gustav Messany-Oberwandling

When certain key concepts of agile are properly implemented, they sustainably strengthen democratic structures. This talk explores these concepts and how they can be linked to democratic theory, especially by Castoriadis, an insider’s tip to political and economical philosophy. Autonomy is foundational to both worlds. We need to distinguish the term from other terms such as self-organization, self-responsibility, or freedom. How did Kant define autonomy and what additional perspectives are helpful to prevent systemic dysfunction? Transparency is a pillar of agility and radical democracy. But how and what should one make transparent and for whom? Where should efforts be made to make things transparent? We’ll learn about three spheres of influence, how the Athenians structured themselves in ancient times  – the most advanced democracy to date  – and a proposal for how to use them in modern systems. Finally, dealing with alienation is the nourishment to keep democratic and agile structures alive in the long run. Retrospectives and reflections are common in the agile world, and we will make explicit two qualities that are common in high-performing agile organizations but usually absent in systems with a lower level of maturity.

15:20 – 15:25

Break

15:25 – 16:10

Teams Self-Design: Benefits & Side Effects

Denis Salnikov

In the Agile community, we talk a lot about the “self-organized” or “self-managed” teams – the ones that control and manage their work themselves. But many organizations have already gone beyond that and let people not only choose HOW to work, but also WHICH problems to address or WHOM to work with. As suggested by Richard Hackman, we can call these teams “Self-Designing”. In his talk, Denis would like to share his key findings and lessons learned while conducting self-design events and providing further support to self-designed organizational structures over the last four years. You will learn how having the freedom to choose whom to work with and what goal to pursue affects motivation, commitment, focus, quality, and outcomes of the Product delivery and its contributors. Denis believes that, by possessing this information and a ready-to-apply facilitation design, you will be able to make Self-Design happen at your own company to benefit both the people and the business.

16:10 – 16:15

Break

16:15 – 17:00

Fostering Partnerships Between Client and Developers, Not Silent or Revolting Workforces

Yannick Vanderstraeten

When talking about Agile teams, we hear the usual terms: roadmap, product goal, sprint goal, it’s about the outcome, not output, etc… All that is true, but there are a lot of things that can be hidden underneath all that, which may not be immediately visible.

In software development, things like code debt, legacy, and CI/CD are also very common terms, yet they don’t always tend to play nicely with the team’s delivery roadmap. In his presentation, Yannick will show how a Scrum Master can foster a healthy partnership between clients and the dev team by actively incorporating these aspects in the day-to-day, using some examples of his developer-to-Scrum Master journey along the way.

10:25 – 11:10

Fortress Agile: Nurturing and Growing Healthy Practices in a Hostile Environment

Cheryl Hammond

When the broader organization isn’t agile, teams can get stuck. They’re waiting for their knight in shining armor – the ‘enlightened’ executive – to transform it all. What happens when the hero isn’t coming? Is it possible to realistically accept an organization’s limitations without killing morale? Can a manager or coach ‘shield’ a team without losing momentum? Is there any point in making incremental change at the team or division level when ‘real’ progress seems eternally blocked by external impediments? This session explores practical tips to care for the humans in your realm; provide them a safe, comfortable, and defensible space in which to work; and make it inviting enough to win over (some of) the forces outside. Help your teams become self-rescuing princesses, and create the happily-ever-after that your people deserve!

11:10 – 11:15

Break

11:15 – 11:35

How OKR Bridges the Gap Between Agile Teams and Management

Felix Handler

While agile and OKR are hype, there is also a more profound challenge at the moment: How to empower teams from a management perspective with a clear goal to self-organize and thrive around a topic. This has the challenge of mutual trust to get there, alignment across teams, and being/staying an attractive workplace for the right talent. This talk addresses these topics and shows how management can make their own life easier and their company (more) successful while not compromising on results.

11:35 – 11:40

Break

11:40 – 12:25

Retrospectives Antipatterns

Aino Vonge Corry

Do you ever feel that your team is tired of retrospectives? Based on her experience with facilitating retrospectives, join Aino for an entertaining and informative presentation on the antipatterns she has seen and how to overcome the problems. Antipatterns are like patterns, only more informative. With antipatterns, you will first see what patterns reoccur in “bad” retrospectives and then see how to avoid or remedy the situation. This talk is focused on retrospectives but will be interesting to everyone facilitating any kind of meeting.

Key takeaways:

• How to plan, and facilitate a retrospective
• How to avoid the most common antipatterns in retrospectives
• What to be aware of in online retrospectives

12:25 – 14:35

Lunch break

14:35 – 15:20

Swinging OKRs to Make Sure Agile Delivery Makes a Real Impact

Gražvydas Šedys

Agile helps a lot to make sure we are great at executing and delivering the product/service we are supposed to. But we also need to make sure that those things we do are the ones that really make the impact we want as a company. That is where OKRs come to help. It is a really agile way to set the goals of the company/department/team. During the session, Gražvydas will tell you about his real-life experience (both, success and failures) in empowering companies to create really ambitious goals and ensuring they achieve them.

15:20 – 15:25

Break

15:25 – 16:10

The Mythical Sprint Goal – 20 Reasons to Skip the Sprint Backlog

Staffan Nöteberg

Do you stuff your sprint up front with small tasks? Do you prioritize based on deadlines, dependencies, and competence capacity? Isolated tasks are completed, but did we create any value for our customers? Tomorrow, try something new. What would make the most value right now? Come together as a truly cross-functional team and work in one direction. Skip the sprint backlog and let the sprint goal be the first topic in every daily scrum. Come and listen to Staffan explain why this is more agile, productive, and fun.

16:10 – 16:15

Break

16:15 – 17:00

What are the Odds? Forecasting with Probabilities.

Julia Wester

Are you tired of spending more time estimating and forecasting when work will be done than you spend actually doing the work? Exaggeration or not, if you calculate the value of the time used by your experts to go deep into requirements to break down tasks and estimate time, how much does it cost? How often do those expensive estimates turn out to be wrong despite your investment? The exciting news is that there’s a way that you can save money and stress to quickly generate forecasts that are as reliable, or better, than the ones you’re slaving over today. In this session, you’ll learn about the components of a probabilistic forecast and how to use two simple metrics, cycle time and throughput, to create and continuously update your forecasts. You’ll learn that if you track the start and finish time of your work, then you can use your historical data to learn the possible outcomes and the odds of each, allowing you to choose the appropriate forecast for the level of risk you’re willing to accept. When you leave this session you’ll have solid tactics to answer the questions “How much can we complete by X date?” and “How long will this take?” for both individual and multiple work items.

10:25 – 12:25

Agile Vitamins for Leadership

Vladimirs Ivanovs and Marija Maijere

Interest in Agile Leadership has tripled over the past 10 years, but still many are asking the same questions over and over again – “Why shall I bother?”, “What is it?”, “How can I master it?”. You should be brave to start looking for answers. Two authors have combined practical experience in agile coaching and art therapy, as a result, a role-playing workshop game “Agile vitamins for Leadership” was born. Participants will have a chance to use their imagination and help fairy-tale characters realize their leadership potential with the use of 9 Agile Leadership competencies. Character and competency choices are gamified, there are a few rounds of interaction within small groups, which then lead to a role-play on stage and debrief. Through fun and laughter, you will discover new behavioral patterns and strategies for personal growth as leaders. Anyone can do it!
Registration here

12:25 – 14:35

Lunch break

14:35 – 17:00

Agile Way of Thinking and Operating: Diagnostics, Decisions, Long-term Productivity

Tomas Lekavičius

Your ability to think critically, make smart decisions, and ensure your team’s long-term productivity depends on many aspects. But a lot of Agile users and leaders fail at the very first phase: diagnostics. How to identify the real causes of any problem you have, and how to operate from a place of clarity and certainty? Cookie-cutter methods and tools do not work. The level of success, ROI, and goals you achieve will depend entirely on how aligned your pursuits (and business model, and processes) stay aligned with you and your team’s unique disposition.
Registration here.

10:25 – 11:10

A Spoonful of Sugar: Harnessing Language to Achieve Team Goals

Ceri Newton-Sargunar

The words we use, internally and externally, change how we feel, how we see and interact with our teams, and what we get back from the people we work with.

We may not realize the effect we have when speaking to others and ourselves – but the way we communicate can change our brain structure: every interaction we have alters our neural makeup and affects how we think and communicate afterward!

In this talk, we’ll take a closer look at the ways we use language and explore some simple exercises you can practice to change the words you use, improve your personal and team outcomes, and propel you towards where you want to be.
Registration here.

11:10 – 11:15

Break

11:15 – 12:25

50 Shades of Retrospective

Chris Stone

50 Shades of Retrospective is an interactive exploration of Chris’s top tips, strategies, flim flams, agile hacks, and otherwise for enabling continuous improvement. Choose your own adventure and influence which direction the session goes in. This session could be delivered 50 times and each time would be different. You’ll learn about everything from setting the environment for continuous improvement to how to turn insights into action in this highly interactive session.
Registration here.

12:25 – 14:35

Lunch break

14:35 – 17:00

Leadership Dojo – Discover and Practice Behaviours & Skills Needed in Your Role

Martin Berg and Daniel Wester

“That is obviously wrong and you are stupid!” a team member suddenly burst out on the daily standup.

You didn’t see this coming. Even when this was directed to another member of the team you, the Scrum master, were shocked. But as a good Scrum Master, you acted and tried to handle the situation, you picked up and got things to calm down. Afterward, you had a feeling that you could have done better in that situation. But how? How could I have been better prepared?

As a Servant Leader and Scrum Master navigating in the complex environment of team dynamics and external system influences, it is important to practice. We bring you the Leadership Dojo where you will have the possibility to experience real-world situations in the different Scrum events, together with co-coaches and co-learners. Research has shown that practicing and preparing for different situations makes challenging situations easier to handle. Like firemen or elite athletes that train to handle different situations, we must also.

Registration here.

10:25 – 11:10

The Power of Visual Communication

Olina Glindevi

The Visual Agile Coach: How to enhance Agile practices with Visual Thinking to improve engagement, enhance communication and have fun!

Including an introduction to Visual Thinking, and tips on how to get visuals and tools from the Visual Agile coach’s toolkit.

Registration here.

11:10 – 11:15

Break

11:15 – 12:25

Fairy Tales at Work, Why Not?

Charles-Louis de Maere

The workshop is focused on high interaction between people. At the beginning of the session, they will get acquainted with a story. Some might know it, others might not.

Throughout the storytelling, they will be invited to work in small groups to create meaning from what happened, bringing their own perspective in groups, then back in plenary.
Registration here.

12:25 – 14:35

Lunch break

14:35 – 17:00

Mastering Agile Coaching

Bent Myllerup

According to the State of Agile Coaching Report 2021, only 19% of people who consider themselves to be Agile Coaches have a master-level certification in this area. Bent doesn’t believe that you can blindly evaluate people’s competencies based on their collection of badges, but he thinks there is a degree of truth within the numbers. Bent sees it as a potential risk of damaging the reputation of the profession when the numbers are as low as indicated.

What does it take to be a master Agile coach?

Well, first you must have your Agile foundation in order. You must know where Agile comes from; you must live the values and principles; you must know the various frameworks and practices, and you must have the personal experiences of practicing it yourself for years. You must have had your hands on the hobs for a while and know how it feels and smells.

Another important matter is your awareness of your personal experiences and opinions as not directly applicable to the context of those you are coaching. Often Agile coaches are contracted for a limited time to help an organization implement agile approaches. There is no chance you are going to gain a deep insight into the dynamics of the organization in this short time. You need to rely on the members of the organization and, in Brent’s opinion, you serve them best by enabling them to manage the change. In other words, unlock their potential to succeed with Agile.

This is where Systemic coaching comes in. Bent’s experience is that the clients of Agile coaches highly benefit from their coach being skillful in professional coaching techniques, as this enables them to take ownership and act during the change.

Bent has been educating Agile coaches in professional coaching techniques for more than a decade, and in this workshop, he will take you through the fundamentals of Systemic coaching and some of the advanced techniques as well. Most importantly, Bent will do this by making you practice it throughout the workshop. He will also address when coaching is not the answer.

You do not become a full-blown systemic coach after these few hours, but you have started on your journey of mastering Agile coaching, and you will be ready to apply the learnings in your practice right away.
Registration here.