Conference schedule

14th of October (Online)

Time is set to EEST time zone (UTC+3).

Sign in using Your Whova account

9:00 - 9:15

Introduction

9:15 - 10:00
Daring You to Jump onto the Trojan Horse to Lead Your Agility Adoption

Daring You to Jump onto the Trojan Horse to Lead Your Agility Adoption

Mun-Wai Chung

Did your enterprise Agile transformation start with the Finance and HR departments? No? You are not alone. Are they on the roadmap to be next? Maybe they should be…

Agile is a mindset and a habit, using some frameworks and practices. However, it is hard to be agile when we need to provide all the answers at the end of each year for the entire following year or when we report in a waterfall manner. So, the way we do budgeting, forecasting, performance assessment, rewards & recognition, and cost control can be either enabling or hindering agility.

In this talk, Mun-Wai will walk you through an example of how she transformed the whole organization by stealth by evolving the Finance and HR departments. By evolving it this way, you achieve the transformation at a fraction of the price of traditional transformation programs.

10:00 - 10:10

Break

10:10 - 10:55
OKRs Misunderstood

OKRs Misunderstood

Cansel Sörgens

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) promise focus, alignment, accountability, and commitment. These promises might fill the hearts of many managers with joy. They hear the idealized stories of how OKRs helped organizations to become successful and want to have a piece of this cake, too. “When Google works with OKRs, we must too!” Some believe a framework alone would fix everything like it’s magic. Most of the time they're not aware of what it takes to enable an environment for OKRs to work well. If you want to apply an OKR to become more focused but keep changing your playfield every 2 months, the OKR is not the remedy you’re looking for. For OKRs to work well, organizations need to be prepared to undergo some serious changes. In this talk, I'll uncover some of the misconceptions such as Vertical vs. Horizontal Alignment, Score vs. Conversation, and Outcome vs. Output. I’ll also offer some practical advice on how to avoid or fix these common mistakes.

10:55 - 11:00

Break

11:00 - 11:45
Minimalism: The Key to Maximizing Value and Great Product Ownership

Minimalism: The Key to Maximizing Value and Great Product Ownership

Vineet Patni

As per the Scrum Guide, “The Product Owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Scrum Team.” A lack of more profound understanding of this, coupled with the misunderstood stance of a Product Owner as the output maximizer, results in suboptimal products and wasted efforts of the Scrum team members.

Well, keeping people busy and producing much stuff is not the intent of Agile Product Development using Scrum. But then, what is the missing ingredient to create successful products? Simplicity and doing less are the mantra!

In this participatory session, the speaker will bring fresh perspectives about successful Product Ownership through success stories of great achievers, connecting principally to Lean Thinking and Agile values & principles.

11:45 - 12:30

Lunch break

12:30 - 13:15
Product Roadmaps in Scrum

Product Roadmaps in Scrum

Roman Pichler

Product roadmaps are an important product management tool. But applying them in Scrum is not straightforward. The framework offers a product backlog but does not recognize a roadmap. In his talk, Roman will share practical tips on how you can effectively use product roadmaps in Scrum. He will explain how you can align the product roadmap and backlog, use product goals to describe future outcomes, and balance strategic, longer-term planning with tactical, shorter-term aspects.

13:15 - 13:20

Break

13:20 - 14:05
Visualise Your Roadmaps and Options Using a Strategy Map

Visualise Your Roadmaps and Options Using a Strategy Map

Craig Cockburn

“Most strategy dialogues end up with executives talking at cross-purposes because…nobody knows exactly what is meant by vision and strategy, and no two people ever quite agree on which topics belong where” (Geoffrey Moore Escape Velocity)

Lack of alignment and vision is often cited as one of the reasons transformations fail. Where there is a plan, it's often developed in a management silo with little input from the rest of the organization. In this new technique, first presented at Agile Tour London, Craig uses thinking from cynefin, wardley maps, and visualization to introduce strategy maps - a way to see everything on a page from context to vision including your competitor's moves.

There's a new line of thinking that existing roadmaps don't really work as summed up in this tweet which blew up and some people referencing my earlier approach which went into more detail. Let's not roadmap or railroad product owners into only one way forward that hides what competitors might do.

 

14:05 - 14:10

Break

14:10 - 14:30
Why is Nobody Talking About Bruno? A Talk About Psychological Safety, Toxic Positivity, and Culture in Your Organisation

Why is Nobody Talking About Bruno? A Talk About Psychological Safety, Toxic Positivity, and Culture in Your Organisation

Carmen Guerra Jurado

Inspired by the movie Encanto, Carmen compares the character Bruno and negative or awkward events that may transpire in our day-to-day work life. Having established the context for the talk, we dive deeper into the importance of psychological safety, organizational culture, and toxic positivity. In conclusion, we discuss the potential effects for not only the people experiencing a 'Bruno', but also what having 'Brunos' in your organization could mean for the organization itself, and why it is important to actually talk about your 'Bruno(s)', unlike the song in the movie Encanto suggests.

Takeaways for participants:

  • Why is psychological safety so crucial in a workplace?
  • What is toxic positivity and how can you recognize it in your workplace?
  • Hopefully a positive reminder of why people work where they work and why it's important for them (to continue) to make their workplace a joyful place to work.

14:30 - 14:35

Break

14:35 - 14:55
How to Align Business and IT with OKRs and Jira

How to Align Business and IT with OKRs and Jira

Viktor Grekov

The divide between IT and business is so culturally evident that it reads like a punchline to a workplace joke. The tech guys don’t understand what the business is doing, and the business folks think technology is just about turning PCs on and off again.

Every organization today must become a technology business, no matter what product or service you offer. This shift is inevitable, and with it comes the concept of IT-business alignment: that IT enables business and business drives IT efforts. Neither is less necessary; both are revenue-generating.

Achieving alignment requires strategy. Let's talk about the strategy of aligning Business and IT and how OKRs and Jira can help.

14:55 - 15:00

Break

15:00 - 15:45
About the Love of OKR and Agile

About the Love of OKR and Agile

Christina Lange

How can Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) help to be more agile? How to create more impact for customers? And how can the framework be used to set goals that connect Agile product management practices with organization performance metrics? We will explore these questions together in a session about OKRs, Product Management, and how it is practiced in an enterprise organization.

15:45 - 16:00

Break

16:00 - 16:45
DamnGoodLeadership - is it that simple?

DamnGoodLeadership - is it that simple?

Leise Passer Jensen

We should never stop learning. Nevertheless, the principles of power hierarchies in organizations have not been updated with learnings from the industry since we saw the first org. diagram of The New York and Erie Railroad 200 years ago.

In this inspirational speech, Leise will investigate if it is really that simple to create a modern organization with no bureaucracy. Are two crucial principles enough? Can people really have fun at work instead of being forced to ask less specialized colleagues to take the important - and top-motivating - decisions?

Is "You don't have to motivate me, Boss" a possible new mantra of our workforce?

Leise claims we are all leaders and, if you want to control, you really need to let it go. But what does that take?

16:45 - 17:00

Conference closing

10:10 - 11:45
Leader’s Role in Enabling Organisational Competitiveness

Leader’s Role in Enabling Organisational Competitiveness

Dean Latchana

How well is your organization responding to rapid change and uncertainty? In responding to change, as a leader, how are you engaging individuals across your organization? How are you enabling organizational learning in order to enable organization competitiveness? These are crucial questions that will be discussed in this talk. We’ll discuss the principles for nurturing and promoting continuous transformation. A transformation that is respectful of legacy, recognizes established success, and is accommodating to each individual’s growth journey. Supported by the speaker’s experience, the talk will help leaders use the following approaches to foster exploration and emergence – prerequisites for organizational competitiveness.

11:45 - 12:30

Lunch break

12:30 - 13:15
6 Ideas to Make your Team Great

6 Ideas to Make your Team Great

Andreea-Ruxandra Peter

Are you part of a virtual team, spread across continents and time zones, or just “forced” to work from home? Do you feel you are talking with strangers, but you need to work with them anyway? Then Andreea-Ruxandra Peter can tell you what her teams did to improve their remote collaboration and communication. Together we will talk about the small things we did in order to help ourselves and our team to become stronger and better.

Before the pandemic, most companies moved from collocated teams to remote ones in order to decrease their overall costs, now working virtual is a fact of life. The simple fact of copying the collocated way of working into the virtual is not helping us – we struggle and we get frustrated very often.

So, what can we do? Can we make our day better and be happy at work? What if the answer is right in front of us?

Andreea-Ruxandra wants to show you how to identify your team’s challenges and what you can do to help your team. Or how you may fail when trying specific ideas.

There is no perfect recipe for success that is for sure. But she wants to talk about choosing the right people for virtual teams (or educating them), creating team agreements that have a focus on the virtual aspect of work, talking about the need for virtual events, and of course the respect of our time zones when setting up a time for different activities.

Her hope is that by the end of her presentation you will see key differences between how collocated teams work and how virtual teams work.

13:15 - 13:20

Break

13:20 - 14:05
Professionalising the Scrum Master Role

Professionalising the Scrum Master Role

Jan B. Olsen

Jan has set out to professionalize the Scrum Master role and competency development. In this session, he will share lessons learned and challenges encountered.

Why is this important for you?

In order for Agile to work to its fullest potential, Scrum Masters need to have the necessary competencies to support and challenge the organization. Still, this is not enough, as the Scrum Masters’ focus needs to be based on the organizational maturity of the organization to achieve maximum results. Misalignment between the two will keep the organization dead in the water, and self-orientated Scrum Masters will be seen as less valuable.

What you will learn:

In the session, you will learn how to effectively align Scrum Master's purpose and competency development with organizational maturity, which will enable you to communicate the focused effort to the organization. You will also learn the importance of building a strong community of practice within the Scrum Masters, to ensure continuous learning of Agile and Lean practices and various Scrum Master stances.

14:05 - 14:10

Break

14:10 - 14:30
How To Theme Your Retros

How To Theme Your Retros

Dave Westgarth

Retros are a great tool in your delivery manager arsenal and can be used to improve quality and effectiveness, increase team cohesion and add more of the human element to your role and work life.

This talk will cover how to theme, frame, and revitalize your retro sessions. Retrospectives don't need to be pedestrian, boring, and done on autopilot. From sports to video games, Netflix, and music you can use almost any subject matter to spice up your retrospectives, drive team engagement and freshen up your approach and retro session formats.

14:30 - 14:35

Break

14:35 - 14:55
Why I Hope Your Last Retro was the Worst You Ever Had

Why I Hope Your Last Retro was the Worst You Ever Had

Algirdas Milašius

This presentation is a short journey of "what are" and "why people do" retros (i.e., retrospectives). Algirdas is going to tell you how it became important to have a default "fit all" format, and how we can adapt it to fit your team better. For example, you could introduce different kinds of online tools, use various types of retros (liberating structures, continuous retros, timelines, etc.), and talk about people's motivation (personal motivation types, energy). The presentation is inspired by the "Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great" book, written by Diana Larsen, Esther Derby, and Ken Schwaber.

14:55 - 15:00

Break

15:00 - 15:45
Beating the Feature Factory

Beating the Feature Factory

Maarten Dalmijn

Most companies working with Scrum end up producing Feature Factories, focused on shipping new features. The central belief underpinning the Feature Factory is that all proposed features are guaranteed to deliver value. When organizations are confident all features on the roadmap are valuable, the main challenge then becomes to get them out of the door quickly and reliably. Feature Factories may seem productive — they churn out a lot of features after all! But features are shipped without any assurance of delivering value to customers and the business. What should we be doing instead? In this talk, Maarten will discuss:

  1. Why Scrum often produces Feature Factories.
  2. What are the most common signs that you are working in a Feature Factory are.
  3. What obstacles do you need to overcome to move away from the Feature Factory and concrete ways on how to do so.

10:10 - 10:55
Enterprise Agility – a Holistic Approach to Succeed With Your Business

Enterprise Agility – a Holistic Approach to Succeed With Your Business

Oliver Perner

Many companies tend to only look at one side of agility - mainly the delivery frameworks out there. Few look at real innovation frameworks or try to develop their own solutions. And almost no company has both at the same time. We think Enterprise Agility should consist of 2 components. 1. Delivering the right thing (business and product innovation) 2. Be able to deliver (build and run a flow system) Building a robust business requires thinking about both components. Why and how this can be achieved will be part of our journey.

10:55 - 11:00

Break

11:00 - 11:45
The Art of Obeya Hosting

The Art of Obeya Hosting

Mark Marijnissen

The Obeya is a digital and physical room where people come together to move from strategy to execution, and from insight to action, by making inclusive and sustainable decisions. Although people often highlight visual management as the key to a successful Obeya, hosting the space is equally important. In this talk, Mark will share the Art of Obeya Hosting with examples and techniques: What does it take to stop bad meeting habits from ruining your Obeya Session? How can you host a space which cultivates good habits for collaboration, shared understanding, and creative problem solving that allows participants to move from insight to action?

11:45 - 12:30

Lunch break

12:30 - 13:15
How to Teach About Agile Through Comic Strips

How to Teach About Agile Through Comic Strips

L. Ratnaravi and M. Noe-Nygaard

The format of comic strips is a very effective way of highlighting what goes wrong when Agile meets reality. Its humor, exaggeration, and provocations make the reader reflect on how to avoid the often relatable situation depicted in the strip. In this talk, the creators of the globally popular agile comic strip Comic Agilé – Luxshan Ratnaravi and Mikkel Noe-Nygaard – will break down the mechanics of how to create an educational agile comic strip. They will talk about its components, such as setting the scene, introducing some Agile theory, building an expectation, and delivering a punchline in the form of an anti-pattern, misunderstanding or just plain craziness. They’ll also show and analyze some of the most popular strips from Comic Agilé, as well as share the agile lessons to take away from each of them. All of this will be delivered in a highly entertaining and dynamic manner that invites any Agile consultant or educator to join this journey of telling the story of how to successfully become agile

13:15 - 13:20

Break

13:20 - 14:05
Self Mastery and How to Get There. A Practical Approach

Self Mastery and How to Get There. A Practical Approach

Julia Kung

From The Agile Coaching Growth Wheel explanation: "Self Mastery: At the heart of great agile coaching is the need to invest in yourself through learning and reflection and take care of your wellbeing. Self-mastery starts with a focus on yourself, having the emotional, social, and relationship intelligence to choose how you show up in any given context.

14:05 - 14:10

Break

14:10 - 14:55
What is Quality? Traditional Agile Ideas and A New Embodied Approach

What is Quality? Traditional Agile Ideas and A New Embodied Approach

Meredith Finkelstein

One of the pillars of Meredith Finkelstein’s team is quality. Quality is usually considered something a product has. A product either is or has high quality or does not. However, the software is never finished!

Her experience of quality has changed over her career. What if we think of quality as the feeling we experience when we build software and not a metric to measure, like test coverage, or a goal?

This workshop is for agile practitioners, technology leaders, product owners, scrum masters, and developers. We will begin with a case study of my embodied experience of building a piece of software and how that correlated to traditional quality metrics. Then we will share our own experience of what writing software feels like,  from an embodied perspective.  Prompts include deployment to production, code review, and story grooming, but this is intended to be open to what the participants want to discuss.  What is the feeling quality when we engage in these activities?  Time permitting, we can discuss how we can begin to incorporate this new notion of quality into traditional agile practices.

The quality of the experience of building a software product informs the quality of whatever we are building.

14:55 - 15:00

Break

15:00 - 15:45
Building a Successful Company with the TOP Structure

Building a Successful Company with the TOP Structure

Michael Küsters

Every day, thousands of companies worldwide ask the question, “How should we structure our software development in order to maximize our probability of success, while minimizing overhead, time to market, cost, and defects?” Due to its popularity, the Scrum framework is often the first choice for organizing teams. Unfortunately, Scrum requires massive adjustments to the way an organization works – and its scope is limited to single teams. As soon as a development organization extends beyond one team, organizations typically look for “scaling frameworks” – all of which have their own challenges in adoption.

The TOP structure condenses the essentials that successful organizations share and highlights the challenges where unsuccessful organizations waste opportunities, time, money, and energy – and often also staff motivation. The TOP Structure – Technology, Organization, Product – is a scale-free approach to successfully structure effective software development organizations of any size, and without any regard to adherence to any specific “agile framework,” although it can be utilized in conjunction with them. It can therefore be utilized by all organizations without running a major transformation program.

Since the TOP structure is based on First Principle Patterns, it can be utilized immediately to highlight needs for action and builds on Continuous Improvement in order to shape a more effective development unit. In his talk, Michael Küsters, the author of the TOP Structure provides a brief overview of the model and demonstrates:

  • The TOP domains
  • Responsibility distribution in a TOP structure
  • How the TOP structure creates a sustainable balance
  • Some key principles and patterns that already apply in your company - although you've never seen them.

10:10 - 11:45
Agile for the Sake of Agile. How Do I Know I Need Agile?

Agile for the Sake of Agile. How Do I Know I Need Agile?

Mikhail Sorokin and Alexander Lemiasheuski

The participants of the "Agile for the sake of Agile" workshop will finally answer the question of when Agile is an effective approach, and when it's simply inefficient and damaging to the success of projects.  We will explore how to navigate through complexity and uncertainty, and model cases where Agile is just counterproductive and otherwise.  The participants will analyze their projects/products and will leave the workshop with a heap of thoughts on how to improve their delivery approaches.

11:45 - 12:30

Lunch break

12:30 - 14:30
Coaching Agile Teams to Achieve High Performance

Coaching Agile Teams to Achieve High Performance

Anna Zakoyan

Anna is now running an Agile Team Coaching program online. The program helps teams achieve high performance, identify weaknesses, gaps, and opportunities, and improve by working through 10 practical areas of focus. There are visual templates and group exercises. Thus, she thought that she could use one or two exercises to facilitate some important topics like effective communication, dealing with conflict, or setting goals using Mural or Zoom with breakout rooms. Anna believes that you may reap the benefit of such a practical workshop and use the knowledge when working with your team later on.

14:30 - 14:35

Break

14:35 - 15:45
Metrix & Chill - Teams Articulating Their Value

Metrix & Chill - Teams Articulating Their Value

Susannah Chambers

How do we explain the value we’re creating through the effort we invest? Metrics for measurement are often seen to be the answer to this challenge. However, what do we do when people gravitate to their own view of which metrics are important? The Metrix & Chill model, designed by Susannah Chambers and offered to the software development teams she serves in the tech environment, helps teams and individuals make sense of how to move forward meaningfully and strategically through gaining alignment around understanding which metrics matter. In this interactive session, Susannah will share the Metrix & Chill approach and explain how the strategies it incorporates (including value statementing, a basket of measures, and financial proxies) can rapidly create positive outcomes in teams articulating their value. This session will create value for anybody working in any sector in any role and with any level of experience!

10:10 - 11:45
Building the Right Things by Asking the Right Questions

Building the Right Things by Asking the Right Questions

Alexander Gijsbers

Most product teams spend the majority of their time focusing on shipping features quickly and reliably. Often making progress in this area feels like the right thing to do. However, how do we know if we're actually delivering the most value for both our users and the organization? In the product discovery process, we actively validate what is valuable to our users, before moving on with the development & delivery.

In this workshop, Alexander will discuss:

  • What Product Discovery is and how it can help your organization?
  • What the key elements of Product Discovery are and how you can navigate them?
  • How you can structure your Product Discovery process?

11:45 - 12:30

Lunch break

12:30 - 13:15
The Importance of Psychological Safety in Agile Teams

The Importance of Psychological Safety in Agile Teams

Ceren Yildirim

Do you feel psychologically safe at work? Do you think your team has a psychologically safe environment?

It is really important to encourage your team to share and discuss problems, errors, and failures and to ask for help.

As Ceren Yildirim is passionate about both agility and visuals, in this workshop, you will be experiencing the power they bring together.

If you are focusing on the conditions needed for the agile teams to become autonomous, happier, continuously improve, and have a psychologically safe environment, please come join Ceren with your pens and papers and discuss psychological safety while drawing together and having fun!

13:15 - 13:20

Break

13:20 - 14:30
Increase Your Throughput of Books to 50+ a Year

Increase Your Throughput of Books to 50+ a Year

Noel Warnell

Got a pile of unread books, but keep buying more?  It’s called Tsundoku and agile folks are masters of it!

What if you could pick up an unread book and within an hour consider it ‘Done’? This workshop is designed to do exactly that. Noel will challenge how you read and provide practical tips that will change your relationship with books. Forever.

Come along, find out how to break tsundoku, and never feel guilty about buying another book again.

14:30 - 14:35

Break

14:35 - 15:45
Growing Your Leadership Agility with Positive Intelligence

Growing Your Leadership Agility with Positive Intelligence

Ann-Marie Kong

“The solutions to our current problems cannot be solved from the same level of consciousness that created them.” - Albert Einstein

You live in a rapidly changing, volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and interconnected world. To meet the adaptive challenges you face today, you need to evolve in your consciousness, in your ways of thinking and being.

Leadership agility is your ability to take wise and effective action amid complex, rapidly changing conditions. Positive Intelligence is a pathway to developing your leadership agility.

Positive Intelligence enables you to recover faster and shift from your inner critics/saboteurs to your Sage by developing your mental fitness muscles. Mental fitness is your capacity for handling life's great challenges with a positive mindset rather than getting stressed and upset.

What’s possible for you when you get out of your own way?

Learning outcomes

  • To experience your saboteurs and how to shift to your Sage
  • To develop your mental fitness muscle with Positive Intelligence repetitions

Pre-work (optional): You are welcome to take your Positive Intelligence score assessment and saboteur assessment.

Recharge Your
Knowledge!

Facebook