Lean and Agile ME Summit 2019

Self-organization needs direction. Scrum-Teams, Kanban-Teams even Holocracy Circles need a purpose and a vision and someone who can guide and enable them. Leadership - not Leaders are even more essential in environments in which teams shall become self-managed and hyper productive. Most organizations have teamleads, and other managers on different levels. Their role needs to change in organzations that want to go the agile path. And they are the ones who need to play an active part in the transformation towards a flexible organzation that is able to cope with the demands of the digital storm that will destroy more and more traditional business models. Thus the role of middle management in agile organizations is pretty clear: They have to create an environment that fosters self-organization. But what does this really mean – how does the behaviour of middle managers will change? The good news: the necessary actions to take are simple! However it demands a paradigm shift of all involved parties. Boris Gloger will talk and demo about how to do this, based on real life experience – and it all starts with listening.

Today companies are expected to be flexible and both rapidly responsive and resilient to change, which basically asks them to be Agile. Yet, doing Agile (the mechanics) is different from being Agile (the mindset). The mindset lets you apply flexible Agile patterns not only for software development teams but for the whole company. Yet implementing company-wide Agility isn't straight forward, it asks for combining principles from Beyond Budgeting (adaptive budgeting), Open Space (leveraging the power of innovation from all employees), Sociocracy (flexible organizational structure that allows decentralized decision-making), and Agile (continuous learning via experiments and feedback). This combination provides company-wide agility.

The pace of change will never be as slow as it is today. In fact, it’s predicted that over the next two years, converging technologies will cause change to happen at a rate exponentially faster than ever before. And when that happens, today’s disruption will seem relatively tame in comparison. Great news for ‘disrupters’; bad news for the ‘disrupted’. In this interactive and thought-provoking session Enterprise Agile Consultant, Coach and Trainer Ade Shokoya will be sharing some simple but powerful strategies for getting maximum value out of Scrum. You will leave this highly informative and engaging session knowing how to: Reduce the risk, cost and time associated with taking innovative products and services to market in today’s highly competitive business world. Identify and maximise the returns from your company’s most valuable asset. Organise teams to effectively deal with the uncertain and disruptive nature of the digital age.

Agile has been a trend over the years and has proved its adding value for business and IT respectively. Join us to check out one of the top modern gears, Jira, that promotes Agile methodologies and assists in the agile culture adoption in organizations.

A journey to build a product with Lean & Agile has been a viral trend globally for years. There are several key challenges when adopting Lean & Agile practices at the enterprise level like Samsung. The rapid, flexible and iterative design approach has been conflicted with development teams which use traditional methodologies. In 2015, we organized Samsung Agile Core Team, dedicated for developing products based on user-centered practices. For the first time in Korea, as a big enterprise we have made the grounds for Lean & Agile breakthrough. As a designer lead of Agile Core Team, I'd like to share how to a build products in enterprise-scale team with a rapid prototyping and user validation. Especially enterprise where products involve many stakeholders and changes affect many teams across the organization needs solid confidence and sympathy from the early stage. I want to share my experience and tips to overcome these issues through user data and tangible design.

Successful transition and transformation in a traditional banking institution, covering the good, bad and ugly, and how the transformation successfully merged Lean and Agile practices. How Mashreq Agile manifesto came about and how strong leadership ensures customer and employee delight.

If your organization wants to become agile and lean, teams need to be able to handle impediments quickly and effectively. Playing the impediment game, you will practice how to recognize and analyze impediments, understand how they hinder teams, and decide what to do by deploying agile and lean principles and good practices. You'll learn to become more effective by recognizing impediments early and get rid of them before they become a major issue. The impediment game teaches you the five steps for handling impediments effectively: recognize and analyze impediments find out how they hinder the team find effective solutions to deal with them decide what to do and who can do it learn how to become more effective in dealing with impediments Benefits for attendees: recognize impediments and understand how they hinder teams deploy agile and lean practices to deal with them learn how to become more effective in dealing with impediments Come play the impediment game!

We are in times of unprecedented change. The exponential disruption is affecting all facets of the way organizations operate, including the technology they use, how employees relate with each other and how companies interact among them. Are we ready for exponential change? How can we create change plans that impact the whole organization? In recent years, brain-analysis technologies such as electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have allowed us to track how the energy of a thought flows through the brain, in the same way, that we trace blood flowing through our circulatory system. We have concluded that our brains are not well prepared for large-scale change in companies or exponential disruptions. Different techniques are needed in order to increase knowledge, accelerate adoption and deal with exponential change. This session shows how to use powerful change plans and strategies to deal with these situations.

"Building the Agile Business through Digital Transformation" is a book by Neil Perkin and Peter Abraham. During this session, Dr.Hind Zantout will present three chapters on the Agile Innovation Process, Agile Strategy and Planning and Agile Structures and Resourcing. This will be followed by a discussion in which panelists from both academia and industry will consider the ideas and proposals put forward by the authors and evaluate those from different perspectives.

The review meeting is a critical ceremony for the team and for the initiative that is underway. Do it right and you'll get all the valuable feedback you need. Do it wrong and you'll get angry and frustrated business stakeholders and no objective feedback that helps you determine where to move next. Too many review meetings fail almost before they start. This is because the stakeholders expectations are not properly managed. The lack of focus on the critical goal - validate items against objective acceptance criteria - brings a sort of a chaos inside the demo, with the users not knowing exactly what to validate. A lot of times, the team doesn't do a proper wrap-up, letting backlog remain in an "almost done" status, just because someone didn't ask directly to the business stakeholders and Product Owner to accept the Work item. Within this presentation I'll share an effective way to structure your review meeting, while providing some tools that will help the team stay on the right track.

We all have witnessed companies that seem to effortlessly turn innovation into value. What do these companies have in common? They innovate! But how? Innovation comes with high complexity, cost and inherent risk. Embracing innovation demands that products, services and processes are reimagined. So how do you mitigate the risk of boldly going where no man has gone before? How do you structure innovation projects and apply proven methodologies and practices to unchartered territory? How do you establish an innovation culture? There is not one holy grail of innovation, the right and unique blend of various techniques will drastically improve the chance of success of one’s innovation journey. We will look into examples of companies that disappeared due to the lack of innovation and into companies that demonstrated how their biggest setbacks have become realized opportunities.

"User stories" are building blocks of the products. It brings concepts to tangible form. The quality and completeness of the features are critical for the customers, on the other hand, realistic sizing, estimations and completeness of a user story is critical for the teams to make their customers happy. Mike Cohn has said it beautifully "User stories are a promise to have a conversation about the requirements" that indicates user stories are not requirements. In this workshop, we will refresh the concept why user stories are "a promise of having conversation" and not requirements in themselves. Then we will dive into some of techniques used to break down user stories for realistic sizing, estimations and completeness taking a real product example. [This workshop has one surprise gift too! (to be revealed at the end of the workshop)]

During this talk, Ashwinee will go through his SAFe transformation experience at Target and share few patterns that contributed to the successful Value Delivery. The talk will explore and traverse through these patterns and provide few quick tips and tricks for the audience trying to implement agility at Scale.

A satirical discussion on scaling concepts and some advice and guidance on how to achieve strategic agility along with operational agility with the hope of actually reaching business agility.