Sessions & Speakers

Invited Sessions

Neil Harrison

Neil Harrison is an associate professor of computer science at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. Before that, he was a distinguished member of technical staff at Avaya Labs, where he developed communications software led software development teams. He has studied software development organizations extensively and is a co-author of Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development. He is the author of numerous publications and book chapters on software patterns, effective organizations, and software testing. He is acknowledged as the world’s leading expert on pattern shepherding and the pattern conference (PLoP) shepherding award is named after him. He is currently co-authoring patterns of Scrum.Dr. Harrison has a BS in Computer Science with High Honors and University Scholar Designation from Brigham Young University, an MS in Computer Science from Purdue University, and a PhD from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

“Agile and Patterns: so Happy Together!”

The Agile Software Movement grew out of the Software Patterns Movement. Most of the people who formulated the Agile Manifesto were also early Patterns people. This was not an accident, as the Agile movement and the Patterns movement share many things. We will explore their shared history, culture, and values. You will see how they fit together, and will get a glimpse of the foundations of Agile. We will also take a peek at current work in Patterns and Agility.

Cesario Ramos

Cesario Ramos is the founder of AgiliX Agile Consulting, a network organisation that guides agile improvements throughout Europe. He graduated in mathematics and computing science in 1999 at the University of Eindhoven, and started working with agile teams back in 2001. Nowadays he works as a management consultant and certified Scrum trainer from Scrum.org, and strongly believes that fun at the workplace is essential for success.In the past he was CTO at codecentric NL, a product manager at Atos, a hard-core developer and the lead software architect at PANalytical.Over the years Cesario wrote numerous papers on agile development and is the author of the book ‘EMERGENT – Lean & Agile adoption for an innovative workplace’. He is happy to be an active member of the ScrumPloP® community and is a frequent speaker at conferences around the world. You can contact Cesario at cesario@agilix.nl

“Scaling Scrum @ Thales Case Study”

“What if you could get the benefit of Scrum across your whole organisation? What would that do to your competitiveness? If you want to find out how you could manage your own Scaling journey this talk is for you.

Cesario Ramos will discuss how he guided the Scaling of Scrum with 70+ people developing a single product at Thales Netherlands. Cesario will discuss the process for adoption, the Scrum scaling techniques used, what organisational design changes were made and how management and development teams changed their collaboration.

After this talk you’ll have an overview of how to start your own scaling process and also have some real life techniques that you could use in your journey.”

Lachlan Heasman

Lachlan Heasman is an independent coach and trainer. He has wide experience and knowledge from working on several major and many small Agile change programs in Australia. He also has all the requisite certifications to boot. He has deep experience in all facets of Agile practice but in the interest of quality leaves the development work to people who do it well. Lachlan has a Masters in Coaching Psychology from the University of Sydney which gives him a unique (and often annoying) perspective on coaching, leadership and change in the Agile community (which he often shares without being asked). His industry experience includes retail and online banking, insurance, telecoms, media, retail, legal and government.

Science of Teams

Teams are the engine room of the agile organisation that can lead to great performance and innovation. We love to have small, collocated cross functional teams focused on delivering high value product increments Sprint after Sprint. But some teams are horrible to be part of, and have you wanting to do anything but work with these people (even go back to using waterfall). The how and why some teams work well and some teams don’t has been the subject of 60 years of research and in this talk we will look at some of the highlights in this research and see how this can be used to help your team.

This session uses the results from peer reviewed research that will challenge commonly held perspectives on teams. You will gain a non-linear view of team development, explore the factors that support and thwart teamwork, consider how a team can develop their work, and understand how to lead in the flat power structure of a modern team.

Kiro Harada

Kiro Harada is a supply chain management consultant, agile and lean coach and domain modeler from Japan.Having working experience both in manufacturing and software, he explains and trains methods or processes from various aspects. He’s been actively working to improve software and hardware development process. Making your work easier and safer so that you can try even harder challenges.

“TPS, Lean and Agile – A Brief History”

TPS, Lean and Agile have changed our ways of work in various field
and in various countries and cultures.
Manufacturing, Designing, Logistics, Health Care, Government and of
course Software Development.

We’ll see how these were born and how these interact each other to
evolve. By carefully inspecting how they
changed our ways of work, hopefully we can see how these change
continues in the near future.

Talks

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David West

David began his career as a computing professional in 1968, the same year that NATO convened the 1st Software Engineering Conference to address the “software crisis.” In the subsequent decades, David worked as everything from computer operator to Chief Information Officer. A parallel career in academia included three graduate degrees and the title of full Professor of Computer Science. He is the author of two books, Object Thinking and Ars Magna: the great art of living system design; and co-author of Design Thinking: key for business innovation, agility, and sustainability; a book chapter, with Kent Beck on “User Stories in Agile”; and well as more than one-hundred papers and conference presentations on Software Engineering, Objects, Patterns, and Agility. He currently works as a mentor and consultant.

User Stories: Missed Opportunity

The user story, as one of the original practices of eXtreme Programming (XP), was introduced fifteen years ago. Few understood what a story was supposed to be or how it was supposed to be used.

The intent

  1. To redefine the relationship between client and developer, which had become increasingly adversarial.
  2. To provide an essential mechanism – which requirements could not do – for accommodating change and supporting incremental development.
  3. To serve as “an invitation to a conversation to come and reminder of a conversation past” – to provide an essential tool for realizing Peter Naur’s concept of “software development as theory building.”
  4. To define a deliverable, within a single iteration, “unit of work.”

Instead, the story became little more than a verbose requirement. The number of stories used in Agile projects and their product backlogs multiplied far beyond need. Although, the volume of users stories in an Agile project never equaled the number of lines in an old spreadsheet-based list of discrete requirements, they did multiply far beyond their intent.

Most notably, user stories are seldom completed by users and, coupled with the lack of “on site customers” ensured they would never succeed at or provide the means for redefining relationships between clients and developers.

This talk will demonstrate how user stories could have been so much more effective – and how they might still be. The intent, structure, and deconstruction of stories will be covered along with showing how they can be integrated and inter-related to provide a comprehensive narrative of the entire project, one that encompasses the world views, hopes, and dreams of both clients and developers.

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Pedro Gustavo Torres

Pedro Gustavo Torres is a Delivery Manager @ Blip, in Porto, Portugal.
He has started doing / being agile since 2010. He’s an experienced Scrum Master and Agile Coach. He also has experience acting as a Scrum Product Owner. He’s passionate about scrum, agile and all the tools that can help teams deliver value to their customers. He has started his career as a developer but he had always an “appetite” for managing and facilitating teams and projects.

What I wish I knew on my first Scrum sprints

The scrum guide is a (quite straight forward) document under 20 pages. The guide describes the essence of the scrum framework… but is that enough to implement it in the most effective way?

After using the scrum framework since 2010 I have two hands full of tips and tricks that I would like to share with the audience in order for them to be more successful with scrum.

I’ll talk about User Stories, Task, Sprint, the ceremonies and how to make the most out of them.

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Inês Almeida Santos

Inês Almeida Santos graduated in Electronic and Computer Science Engineering in 2000 at Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto. She started working with agile teams in 2004 at Siemens PT. At the moment, Inês works at Primavera BSS as Scrum Master and Process Owner, transforming the Product Development area into an agile organization.

Agile Project Management

The organization and coordination of projects following the agile methodology faces different challenges while compared to the traditional project management.

Stakeholders expect a date and cost forecast for a project go ahead.

How can one plan and budget an agile project? And how about monitoring it?

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Lucas Olczyk

Lucas is an experienced Agile coach, currently serving as a consultant. While gathering years of diversified experience in IT, ranging from universities to large telco corporations, he found out that working with people felt better than engineering. He kept switching, from administration to programming to management to inspiring. Being passionate about psychology helped him provide unique experience through coaching, from personal via organizational to executive level.

Large scale Agility – how to get there and what will go wrong

It is not easy to transform a small company, especially once we decide to reshape the whole organization. But what if you’d like to go bigger? Hundred people? Five hundred people? A thousand people, just within development teams, not accounting for all the back office? That’s where the fun starts.

I will tell you a story of three companies, each choosing their own way. You’ll learn the frameworks they used, the caveats that manifested and mistakes they’ve made. After all, even if your organization is small one – you do have big dreams for the future, right?

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Ricardo Fiel

Ricardo currently leads all things technology and community as CTO of Rupeal, a Staffing and SaaS products company with 100 people. His passions are product development, technical communities and coaching teams. The one thing he really hates is a Gantt chart. He was a member of the Fullsix team that adopted Scrum in the early beginnings of the Portuguese Scrum community. Strong believer in companies that follow purpose over profit and experiment with different management mindsets. Ricardo has a Bsc in Computer Engineering from ISEL (Lisbon) and likes to be insanely loud when playing guitar on stage. Tweets at @theplastictoy.

Don’t Blindly Follow

How do we create a culture of peak performance? Nowadays there seems to be a myriad of options for software development methodologies, but is there one that’s really right for us? Why are most companies that set higher standards the ones that break the rules? We’ll cover Agile, Lean and Waterfall, mix it with lots of company culture and cross the border to unlimited PTO policies, autonomy and the difference between monitoring and controlling. This is a provocative talk, based on a post by Mike Cohn, that will get you asking different questions. And, as Tony Robbins puts it, “the quality of your life is the quality of your questions”.

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António Arrais de Castro

Antonio is a passionate technology addict. Currently CTO at Jumia, by Africa Internet Group and Rocket Internet, he really loves to discuss agile software development and how the software industry can be pushed to the next level. Antonio is a big fan of continuous improvement processes focused on increasing team motivation and effectivity. He has deep experience in software development, having assumed the role of CTO, General Manager, PM Director, PO, PM and Developer in several distinct companies. In the past, he has also been an online mentor for Waite Group Press and SAMS publishing, independent IT consultant, and coach and trainer on a wide set of technology areas. Antonio deeply believes in servant leadership and continuous learning and he considers that driving fast and passionately is the main key for success.

Too fast for Scrum?

Agility is not a process, it is a mindset, based on a culture, focused on delivering the most value as soon as possible. Taking scrum (or kanban) as a structured recipe for success and applying it as if we were making a delicious cake may, at the end, cause some stomach pains (and even food poisoning on extreme cases)!

Jumia belongs to Africa Internet Group, and has more than 2000 people employed across 18 countries. Its IT division is based at Porto Tech Center, in Portugal, along with four additional AIG companies. One of AIG’s key stakeholders is Rocket Internet, which established more than 70 ventures since 2009, with businesses live on more than 100 countries. In this universe we find multiple approaches, for multiple challenges, which in turn are shared by the vast majority of companies. Being agile is one common challenge for all. Jumia itself has started with Scrum, then changed to Kanban, then Scrumban, then again to Scrum.

The goal of this presentation is to share some lessons learned along the way, focusing on the key aspects that contributed for an effective agile culture in the company.

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Manuel Padilha

Manuel Padilha holds a degree in Computer Engineering by FEUP and is currently the CTO an VP for Engineering at grupo@work, a national software house and consulting company.
In another life he worked at a startup that was born and perished within a year, and also for a swedish publicly traded multi-national. For the last 11 years he has worked as a systems and network administrator, IT consultant, software developer, team leader and product manager. He’s only happy with a keyboard under his fingertips and people nearby.

From the trenches: Doing Agile with an ISO 20000 Telco

A story from the trenches regarding a software project developed for a Telco company. The challenges faced while dealing with a mostly Agile customer that is part of a larger company with heavily defined processes.

The “way out” and how to deliver working software with close to zero spec and still complying to project management requirements, customer timings and own company budget.

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Hugo Lopes

Hugo Lopes is one of the founders of |create|it|, a software development and integration company based in Lisbon, Portugal. He graduated in Computer Science in 1995 at the Instituto Superior Técnico of Lisbon, is a Certified Project Manager by the International Project Management Association since 2002 and a Certified Scrum Master by the Scrum Alliance since 2008. His company and the projects in which he has participated as scrum master and project manager have been awarded with several national and international awards like Partner Ambassador of the Year (Microsoft, 2014), Solutions Partner of the Year (Microsoft, 2013), Best Public Website (Sharepoint Community Awards, 2011).
He is passionate about Mindfulness Meditation, Nonviolent Communication and Focusing, some of the tools he believes can help people and organizations shift from a culture of fear and judgement to a culture of love and compassion, creating a better and happier world.

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Paula Aroeira Tudella

Paula Aroeira Tudella is currently the Product Owner of eight Mobile Apps at Banco BPI, working with two different development teams and external contractors. She worked as a business analyst in Macau from 1992-1995, at Companhia de Electricidade de Macau, in what was a rich multicultural and life-changing experience in the Far East.
Back to Europe, she has been working since 1996 at Banco BPI. As a business analyst she integrated several teams, developing large and complex bank applications and worked as the Product Owner of |create|it|’s team to develop a Corporate Credit Risk Management Application.
She is a Certified Product Owner by the Scrum Aliance. Her experience includes insurance, utilities and banking software.

Critical Success Factors: Retrospective on a complex project

Banco BPI’s “AGILE” project consisted in the implementation of a system for managing corporate credit exposure limits. Integrating 11 other applications and directed at a user base of 3000 people, this project was developed by a team of people from Banco BPI and |create|it|, both companies that use Scrum exclusively in the implementation of their projects.

In this talk, the project’s Product Owner and the Scrum Master will share their experiences and what were the critical success factors of this project. This will be an overview of three years of work, over 50 sprints and hundreds of thousands of lines of code, focusing on aspects such as Management Methodology, Software Engineering practices, Risk, Scope and Team Management.

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Adrian Lander

Adrian Lander is an Enterprise Lean Agile Transformation Coach who started in Lean in the mid 90s and officially in Agile in 2001, after turning around several large global waterfall programmes. He practices Scrum, XP, Kanban, Lean SW Development and various scaling frameworks (e.g. SAFe, LeSS, DAD). His experience is cross-industry, from aviation to manufacturing, telecommunications and banking. In 2007 he moved to Asia to introduce Agile into Asian enterprises. The teams he coached at Cathay Pacific Airlines in Hong Kong won a business award in their first half year in Agile. In addition to Agile, he is also a certified Executive Coach and has an extensive background in Organisational Change and Business Transformation. His current focus is Product Management, Innovation and Digital Transformation.

YAGGA – You Aint Gonna Get Agile!

Agile adoption is increasing across the world. Certifications and certifcation bodies rise. But a certain disease is spreading faster: UnAgile. What seems to have been Agile at the start, often actually turn out not or turns at some point into UnAgile. We look undogmatically at the key reasons why some transformations are doomed from the start and why some suddenly turn sour. The result is the same: YAGGA! We share a few horror stories that started as romances. Then we’ll examine how to keep your Agile instead of Waterfailing back or how to prevent the adoption of actually Unagile at the start and get out of there!

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Carlton Nettleton

Carlton Nettleton, is an international speaker, consultant and thought-leader on Scrum and Agile software development from San Diego, California and the author of Fourteen Observations of Good Scrum Practice. He provides advice, consulting, mentoring and training to teams and organizations from small start-ups to businesses that develop products regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. As President of Look Forward Consulting (www.lookforwardconsulting.com), Carlton he has over fifteen years of experience working side-by-side with his clients to improve quality, increase productivity, build great teams and apply Lean Thinking to software programs. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, bilingual in English and Spanish and part-time resident in Lisboa.

Write User Stories Maravilhosas

Does the idea of writing user stories get you and your Team down? If you feel there has got to be more to a user story than that tired, old “As a [user], I want…” template, then this session is for you! In this hands-on and practical session, Carlton Nettleton will show the essential elements to writing great user stories and you will practice two techniques to find hidden requirements using Innovation Games® and Story Cubes®. Start writing better stories today!

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Bruno Cacho

Bruno Cacho is passionate about sharing knowledge, emerging learning and innovation. With 4 years experience in the Agile world, Bruno is CSM and CSPO certified, practicing on the ground their ideas about developing people and building hyper-productive teams, currently performing functions of Agile Coach in Farfetch.Bruno has over 12 years experience in the IT world, and in 2010 accepted the challenge of working in a small startup of 4 developers named Farfetch, in what became one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world.

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Nuno Rafael Gomes

Nuno Rafael Gomes is currently the Product Owner of the Digital Production Unit of Farfetch, where he has the opportunity to develop Software for a Kaizen awarded Production Line, in what he believes is an unique challenge on balancing efficiency (Lean) with effectiveness (Agile).Nuno has joined Farfetch back in 2010 when the company was a very small startup (roughly 30 people). Today Farfetch is one of the biggest fashion e-commerce companies in the world, worth 1 billion dollars, and has +600 employees across the globe.Nuno is passionate about everything related with product development, which can be traced back to 2003 when he founded his first startup. He also is a CSPO, CSM and CSD certified by the Scrum Alliance.

Agile: The Power of I(n)teration

Today, more and more companies are adopting Agile methodologies to improve their “time-to-market”, delight customers with their products and services, and build hyper-productive teams.

Agile community around the world presents us Agility, mainly, in 2 forms: Agile as cultural change and Agile real practical examples or, as we see it, Agile real life patterns. This all makes sense since Culture settle Values, Values structure Behaviours, Behaviours trigger Actions, and from Actions Patterns emerge. Based on the excellence of ideas, and content, available about Culture and Patterns, one question popped up to us: What about the Gap?

In this session we accept the challenge to present you a refreshing view of Agility going through the Gap of Values, Behaviours and Actions, on two of the most powerful concepts in the Agile world: Iteration and Interaction. We will dive into the world of Iterations & Interactions, relating these two powerful concepts with each other, tracing them to the core Values of Agile, what Behaviours are structured by them, what Actions are triggered in consequence, and finally, ending with real life patterns and how we dealt with them, analysing the Gap.

Last but not the least, since the most people are “left brain” persons, we will guide you through a contemporary narrative about some mathematical and economic concepts that will reinforce our ideas.

Back to the basics we will show you why and how Iterations & Interactions are deeply embedded into Agility from every point of view that you look at it, giving you some real examples to substantiate our arguments.

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Marco António Silva

Marco António Silva is a Consultant for Microsoft Consulting Services in Portugal. He has several years of experience on agile methodologies from different projects and teams he worked on, both in Portugal and abroad. He graduated from Oporto Engineering University (FEUP), lived and worked in Oporto, Lisbon and London. He has been a Tech Lead / SCRUM Master both in Portugal and London. He’s a Techie for sure, but he’s also a enthusiast of  processes, ALM and Agile in general. In the past 8 years he has only worked with agile methodologies in all of his projects, using different approaches and learning not only from what he reads, but also from what his teams have taught him. He worked on a wide range of industries, from online interactive marketing, Telco, Entertainment, Media,  BI, GIS, and many more.

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Ricardo Jesus

Ricardo Manuel de Jesus is a Senior Consultant for Microsoft Consulting Services in Portugal. In the last 8 years he has developed tier-1 solutions using SCRUM either in “fixed fee” or “time & materials” priced projects. He graduated from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) in Computer Sciences specializing in Information Systems. He has been leading dev teams composed by a mix of customer and partner members where, due to the extensiveness of the engagements, had to tackle with the high rate of member rotation which offered the challenge on how to onboard and bring up to speed new hires facing a complex system and, oftentimes, a new and agile way to deliver work.

Tales from the Trenches – Leveraging Agile on Fixed Fee Projects

We come here to share our experiences on the last 6 years delivering various waves of 2 very large projects, for 2 very big customers of Microsoft Consulting Services, on 2 different teams we’ve lead. We would like to share our mistakes, our wins and how we leveraged Agile methodologies to deliver on time and on budget projects that were scoped and planed as fixed fee, with all iterations built on top of a Waterfall model, and as most projects, with a very tight schedule.

As you may know Agile methodologies like SCRUM, XP, KANBAN are most commonly used on Time & Materials type of projects where the Stakeholders control a budget (time and/or money) and decide the best way to use that budget on each iteration. In the case of Fixed Fee the scope of the project is set at the start of the project and now the team has to deliver on time and on budget all the features defined in the scope.

On top of that Microsoft Consulting Services has a very strict delivery framework built on top of a waterfall model… So we had to adapt and build a agile framework that would optimize the team’s performance and would deliver all the milestones that were set with the stakeholders and project management team. We learned a lot from these projects: the value of a strongly committed teams, the price of wasteful processes, the value of rapidly adapt and facilitating change and, most importantly, that what works now may not be so on the next iteration. We want to share all these lessons and practical examples that we’ve lived and learned from.

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Tiago Garcez

Tiago is a consultant, coach, trainer and facilitator – with an MBA in change management. He has worked in multiple large-scale Agile transitions across Europe, supporting change leaders and teams in their continuous improvement efforts. He is passionate about promoting Agile and Lean thinking to organizations and leaders interested in cultivating high performing teams.Tiago is a frequent speaker at international conferences, based in Brussels and an active member of the Agile Belgium community.

How NOT to scale Agile

Scrum has gained wide acceptance as a framework for developing high-performance, collaborative and adaptive teams. So it should come as no surprise that organisations have been trying to adopt the same principles and practices at scale in order to reach the Agile utopia of a high-performing, collaborative and adaptive company.

But scaling Agile has proven to be a challenge. This challenge has lead to the appearance in recent years of scaling frameworks such as SAFe, LeSS and DaD. We have also seen an exciting collaboration across disciplines, with market thinking and complexity science being invited into the conversation. This brought in frameworks such as Lean Startup, Design Thinking, Management 3.0 and Beyond Budgeting. Each introduced interesting concepts into the scaling conversation, yet, the scaling discussions continue. The root causes are many, ranging from cultural clash to technical and practical challenges, but the most prevalent thought across the minds of Scrum coaches and Agile managers is that “nobody has really cracked the scaling Scrum nut – there is no clear answer… yet.” Why is this so? Why are the discussions only getting louder instead of converging?

In his book “Anti-Fragile”, Nassim Taleb re-introduced the concept of Via Negativa. Originally the term was used in theology, where it described a mean of defining God by negation. The underlying assumption being that one could never actually describe God, but one could approach an understanding by defining what God is not. Similarly, Taleb uses the term to indicate the value of omission, arguing that avoidance (unlike addition) does not have risky side effects and unintended consequences. In this session, we will use the Via Negativa lens to look at the issue of scaling Agile, trying to get a better understanding of the topic by defining what is NOT Agile at scale.

The key to the Via Negativa approach is that it requires a deep understanding of the principles at play. And it seems appropriate to apply it in a context where there is likely no clear-cut answer. Our reality is much too complex, with multiple variables in constant interplay, a situation only made more challenging by the increasing speed of innovation and creative destruction. We’re trying to solve a complex problem. In such an environment, understanding what an organisation scaling Agile does NOT do is a key first step in creating a vision of how to scale Scrum in a (unique) organisation. That is the other key benefit of the Via Negativa perspective, it leaves room for people to introduce the challenges of their own work environment into the picture. Via Negativa doesn’t prescribe, it discovers.

Workshops

Lachlan Heasman

Lachlan Heasman is an independent coach and trainer. He has wide experience and knowledge from working on several major and many small Agile change programs in Australia. He also has all the requisite certifications to boot. He has deep experience in all facets of Agile practice but in the interest of quality leaves the development work to people who do it well. Lachlan has a Masters in Coaching Psychology from the University of Sydney which gives him a unique (and often annoying) perspective on coaching, leadership and change in the Agile community (which he often shares without being asked). His industry experience includes retail and online banking, insurance, telecoms, media, retail, legal and government.

Improving your team with science – Using over 50 years of science to make great teams

Agile runs on teams, where we share our collective ability to create something that is greater than anything we could create as individuals. Having a functional and productive team can be the difference between loving what you do and a living hell. The factors that can help make a great team have been the subject of scientific research for over 50 years, and in this workshop we will explore some of the strongest findings on teams and how this can be applied to your team. We will work from the basics of teams and teamwork, and into some of the more interesting findings. The results will be based on peer-reviewed and validated results to help us get past opinion and into the best opportunity for you to create a great team.

What you will learn

During the workshop we will explore how various factors aid or hamper team development and performance. Using exercises, we experience how these factors work before exploring how to use this knowledge in other situations you are working in. The overall goal is to help you understand some of the most important factors in teams and teamwork and how you can use these to help teams you are working with.

What is the science?

There have been thousands of articles published in peer reviewed journals on teams and teamwork. From expert opinions, through case studies and experiments to systematic reviews and meta analysis. This is a rich source of information on how teams perform or fail to perform. The research and peer review process can help us develop a better understanding of teams that is based on more than our personal experience, as well as letting us understand in different ways leading to new ways to help teams improve.

Topics

Teams and workgroups
Team and group development models
Cohesion
Climate

Cesario Ramos

Cesario Ramos is the founder of AgiliX Agile Consulting, a network organisation that guides agile improvements throughout Europe. He graduated in mathematics and computing science in 1999 at the University of Eindhoven, and started working with agile teams back in 2001. Nowadays he works as a management consultant and certified Scrum trainer from Scrum.org, and strongly believes that fun at the workplace is essential for success.In the past he was CTO at codecentric NL, a product manager at Atos, a hard-core developer and the lead software architect at PANalytical.Over the years Cesario wrote numerous papers on agile development and is the author of the book ‘EMERGENT – Lean & Agile adoption for an innovative workplace’. He is happy to be an active member of the ScrumPloP® community and is a frequent speaker at conferences around the world. You can contact Cesario at cesario@agilix.nl

“Innovation Games® Bootcamp”

“Discover the how, why and when you can use Serious games and Innovation Games® in particular to create an innovative workplace where you increase your changes of developing the highest values at the lowest possible risk.

In this workshop we will discuss numerous case studies and you will play numerous Innovation Games®. It is going to be fun!.”

Kiro Harada

Kiro Harada is a supply chain management consultant, agile and lean coach and domain modeler from Japan.Having working experience both in manufacturing and software, he explains and trains methods or processes from various aspects. He’s been actively working to improve software and hardware development process. Making your work easier and safer so that you can try even harder challenges.

“Improving Scrum with Kaizen”

Kaizen is a Japanese word meaning “continuous improvements” and is one of the core concepts of Agile. Continuously improve your product and process.

The last of principles behind Agile Manifest says “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”

Agile adoption encourages continuous improvements, it is often hard to make them continuous.

If you try to adopt many practices, a team quickly becomes exhausted and reluctant to try new ideas or processes. Or when you’ve released a product successfully, the current process becomes another status quo. On both cases, retrospectives become just superficial and value-less.

Why?

Let’s see how we can continuously improve by Kaizen techniques, concepts and mindset.

Through a lecture of how Kaizen has been established and workshops experiencing how Kaizen works, participants would understand and grab the concept and mindset of Kaizen.

Participants will learn:

  • Kaizen Core Concepts
  • How to implement Kaizen in your dev team
  • Kaizen Examples / Case Study

If TPS(Toyota Production System) is tomato, then Lean is tomato juice and perhaps Agile is Bloody Mary. Westerners did a good job of extracting Lean juice from TPS, but why don’t we learn it directly from someone who has grown up and live his life in the tomato farm. Join Kiro Harada, one of the best Agile Coach from Japan, in the one-of-a-kind Improving Scrum with Kaizen workshop.
Course Synopsis: Learn how to improve your Scrum team beyond the typical Sprint Retrospective by understanding Lean/TPS principles and applying its practices.

Course Outline:

  • Introduction / Team Setup
  • Current Issues/Problems (workshop)
  • Brief Intro to TPS / Lean
  • Value Stream Mapping (workshop)
  • Kaizen Game (workshop)
  • Kaizen Intro
  • Pull System and Kanban (workshop)
  • Production(Manufacturing) vs. Designing
  • Misc. Topics
  • Questions & Answers

 

Neil Harrison

Neil Harrison is an associate professor of computer science at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. Before that, he was a distinguished member of technical staff at Avaya Labs, where he developed communications software led software development teams. He has studied software development organizations extensively and is a co-author of Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development. He is the author of numerous publications and book chapters on software patterns, effective organizations, and software testing. He is acknowledged as the world’s leading expert on pattern shepherding and the pattern conference (PLoP) shepherding award is named after him. He is currently co-authoring patterns of Scrum.Dr. Harrison has a BS in Computer Science with High Honors and University Scholar Designation from Brigham Young University, an MS in Computer Science from Purdue University, and a PhD from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

“Organizational Patterns: the Foundations of Agility”

It’s not just agility. What do some organizations have that enable them to deliver software with high quality and high productivity time after time? We studied highly successful software development organizations, and found factors that are deeper than the agile (or non-agile) processes they used. Successful organizations have many similar structural characteristics, which we have captured in patterns of organizations. Some of these patterns underlie the foundations of many agile methodologies, and provided inspiration for some of them. Beyond agility, though, they are at the basis of many successful teams, regardless of whether they are agile or not.

In this tutorial, you will learn about the dynamics of organizations that help them be successful. You will learn many of the key patterns that we have found in particularly effective organizations, including a few organizations that have been so productive that we call them hyper-productive!

You will also have a chance to observe or even participate in a mock organizational analysis. In this exercise, you are sure to recognize characteristics of your own organization, and will learn about things to watch for in your home organization that may be indicators of strength – or signs of trouble!