Lean and Agile ME Summit 2020

Welcome from Lean and Agile Middle East and Heriot-Watt University Dubai

Each speaker gets 30 seconds to tell the audience why they need to attend their session

A fundamental philosophy from the early days of Agile is that teams should own their process. Today we would say that they should be allowed, and better yet, enabled, to choose their own way of working (WoW). This was a powerful vision, but it was quickly abandoned to make way for the Agile certification gold rush. Why do the hard work of learning your craft, of improving your WoW via experimentation and learning, when you can instead become a certified master of an agile method in two days or a program consultant of a scaling framework in four? It sounds great, and certainly is great for anyone collecting the money, but 19 years after the signing of the Agile Manifesto as an industry we’re nowhere near reaching Agile’s promise. Nowhere near it. Agile had it right in the very beginning, and the lean community had it right all along – teams need to own their process, they must be enabled to choose their WoW. To do this we need to stop looking for easy answers, we must reject the simplistic solutions that the agile industrial complex wants to sell us, and most importantly recognize that we need #NoFrameworks.

Almost 19 years since Agile Manifesto was published, organizations are still struggling to adopt and mature Agile. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to Agile transformation strategy, but plenty of learning from other successful/ failed initiatives. I will discuss one of the crucial prerequisites of Agile transformation, Cultural assessment, referring to some of the popular models, such as Schneider and Laloux. But most importantly which framework would be most suitable, mapping to cultural type of a department/organization. Not limiting to Scrum, or Kanban, but considering other methods such as Lean, Design Thinking, DevOps etc, to formulate one that aligns with organization's culture. At two levels, first Adoption and then Scale (Scale -up or -out). Along the way, I will share insights from my experience, some use cases, from working across organizations of various sizes and shapes, and the factors that enabled success in their transformation journeys.

This topic will cover about how-to build the culture of agility and collaboration using Scrum and DevOps. With the help of Atlassian tools including JIRA, Confluence, Bitbucket, Bamboo & JIRA Service Desk, one can start small to build the culture to embrace the change and incrementally improve and evolve. Scrum and DevOps unites Agile, Continuous Delivery, Automation, and much more, to help development and operations teams be more efficient, innovate faster, and deliver higher value to businesses and customers.

In order to remain competitive, companies need to re-design their existing development processes to constantly capture the customer needs, rapidly conceive innovative, highly customer-oriented solutions, and perform these developments with an increasingly short time-to-market. To rapidly deliver solutions in this flexible environment, many companies have adopted agile software development processes, such as Scrum. But even though Scrum can help to deliver software solutions in a highly dynamic environment with unclear solution requirements, its main focus is not the delivery of radical new innovations. Two methodologies are Scrum & Design Thinking are compatible and the merger of the two into one integrated Design Thinking _ Scrum approach would result in an agile software development process that could deliver the innovative customer-oriented products and services required by competitive companies. Despite everyone's good intentions, hard work and solid ideas, too many teams end up creating products that no one wants, no one can use, and no one buys. But it doesn't have to be this way. Agile and design thinking offer a different--and effective--approach to product development, one that results in valuable solutions to meaningful problems. In this session, you’ll learn how to determine what's valuable to a user early in the process--to frontload value--by focusing your team on testable narratives about the user and creating a strong shared perspective.

Lean Product Development developed by Toyota had some wonderful hidden secrets that have not been understood by the masses. In this talk, I would like to share you the wonderful principles that govern the concept of product development which results in building products that are cheap, fast and good (cost effective, Quick and good quality).

The Good Bad & Ugly continues into its second season at Agile ME with the true story of Amin Najjar and his post-industrial transformation. We will cover through conversation and Q&As with the audience key elements of his journey. Our focus is to talk about Agile Transformations from a business perspective, there is no mention of IT nor Digitalisation. Here we talk about how agile actually happens. After 5 years they are still evolving towards a post-industrial organisation. We will avoid the buzz words and the blah blah blah one hears from consultancies and experts that talk agile and have little factual proof in terms of KPIs that Agile has worked. By KPIs we mean not just velocity we mean profit/ employee, revenue per employee, market share etc. Agile is putting the customer first not doing things faster and cheaper. Ultimately we transform to scale up an organisation not to blah blah blah about who’s framework and tools are best!

When teams, product development and entire organizations move from traditional processes to Agile, we as Managers, have to be prepared for it. It’s a new world were teams are self-organizing, the project has no deadlines, and we as managers are no longer Kings on the Mountaintop. Leadership and autonomous teams are the buzz-words of today so we as managers have to go through our own agile transformation in order to survive. In this interactive workshop we will discover together, through debate, learning and fun exercises try to find our new path as servant leaders.

When teams, product development and entire organizations move from traditional processes to Agile, we as Managers, have to be prepared for it. It’s a new world were teams are self-organizing, the project has no deadlines, and we as managers are no longer Kings on the Mountaintop. Leadership and autonomous teams are the buzz-words of today so we as managers have to go through our own agile transformation in order to survive. In this interactive workshop we will discover together, through debate, learning and fun exercises try to find our new path as servant leaders.

Alef Education is a fast growing start-up established only in 2017? and we are now delivering our blended learning platform to over 55K students in over 150 schools in the UAE and a few in the USA. Starting small, with a handful of developers, working Agile was easy peasy. Nowadays, with over 70 developers in 13 teams things got a lot more complex and retaining agility a constant challenge. In this presentation, we will cover a few of the issues that we faced and how we dealt with it. We will cover the introduction of DevOps, applying scaling techniques, dynamic re-teaming, organize around microservices and the introduction of CoP's. Don't expect a huge success story, however... we are still learning and experimenting and we certainly don't have all the answers yet (or ever will). But we know that what we have experienced is of value for many companies and we are not afraid to share our mistakes as well for the sake of learning.

Digital Transformation and Agile are an umbrella concepts covering many tools and processes. In this session, we will discuss some of the practical, modern IT tools that enable and implement Agile in the organizations. We will talk about digital transformation in general, cloud concept its benefits and applications, and DevOps methodology as one of the strongest tools enabling Agile. The aim of this workshop will be to demonstrate in simple non-IT, business language the mechanics of each of the above, how do they work hand in hand with Agile, why should you care and how to apply them in your organization.

Guiding an organisation through an Agile transformation is difficult, enabling it to change, almost impossible. Many Agile coaches rely on a variety of scaling frameworks that focus on specific processes and practices across the Agile transformation. Such an approach can only affect the climate of the organisation but rarely the deeper aspects of the culture or organisational personality to enable lasting change. We need more of a principles-based approach that enables the organisations to take ownership and make changes that are created for its context. In this way, we can apply Agile principles to achieve agility across the entire domain of the organisation. In this workshop, I’ll share with you the 10 principles of enterprise agility and walk you through how these principles can make a difference to your enterprise transformation and what every agile coach should be doing to help apply these principles in any setting, for any organisation to flourish.

In the world current disruption and volatility, corporates are under intense pressure for new innovation, transformation and implementation, where most of them were adapting the traditional approach of an annual plan for project innovation, this include, ideas, budget, allocated team and KPI’s, which considered as waterfall approach for managing innovation project. Indeed, many of these innovation projects struggled to be realized if it’s successful or real ones till year end, or till the project fall and collapse by itself unfortunately, where by then, huge amount of investments been lost, time wasted and most important it’s block the opportunity for the real innovation projects to be noticed and have exposure inside the corporate, especially if the yearly (long term) ones have occupied all the budget and intention. Therefore a new mindset of managing innovation project should be adapted and implemented, new agile approach will need to take over to manage the ideas, finance, team and testing how desirable and viable each innovation project is in the market and how it’s feasible to the company.