Renee and Craig are at the Agile Australia conference and talk to Anders Ivarsson, an organisational coach at Spotify, and learn some of approaches that make Spotify tick:

• Agile Australia talk “Autonomy and Leadership at Spotify” and workshop “Organisational Improvement: Design-inspired Problem Solving”
• Agile Coaches spend time with squads versus a new role of organisational coach that looks at the culture, ways of working, vision and systemic wastes
• Spotify is not a model
• Original Spotify scaling paper, never imagined the spread or the impact
• Spotify have shared a lot of the things that have worked well, but they do also have challenges as well – one is alignment across teams as the organisation gets bigger so they have been working on visualisation and prioritisation
• Spotify Culture videos (Part 1 and Part 2)
• use microservices to ensure that the organisation can work in the…

Renee, Craig and Tony (with a lurking Em Campbell-Pretty) in a very busy corridor with random bells ringing, catch up with Dean Leffingwell, author of numerous books including “Agile Software Requirements” and “Scaling Software Agility” and the creator of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) in a very candid discussion:

• the journey to SAFe included as a developer building the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ride and infusion pumps and generally a mission to make quality better
• epiphony around Agile was the step change around how teams perform and how they like their work when they perform better
• not everything that is old is stupid, “we are discovering new ways of developing software” and we need to ask ourselves are we still discovering
• Scrum is the only method that defines what a software team is (roles and size)
• SAFe is not a war it is…

Tony, Renee, Craig and special guest host Tyson Nutt catchup with David Marquet, author of “Turn The Ship Around!” and the “Turn Your Ship Around” companion workbook at the Agile Australia conference and talk about how similar a nuclear submarine and an Agile team really are:

• leadership is not about telling people what to do and how to do it
• all investments in human beings are long term
• the approach spread from the bottom up, now the book is on the official reading list of two Navy’s (including New Zealand)
• “I intend to” does not mean they get to do it – gives psychological ownership and to spark the conversation
• thinking out loud is about saying what is going on in our head, this even works when teaching your children how to drive!
• feed the beast – don’t respond by hiding, feed them with as…

Craig and Tony wander the lunchtime floor on day 2 of Agile Australia conference in Sydney, looking for more interesting people in the Australian Agile community. They chatted to the ones who couldn’t quite run fast enough away from the microphone including:

• NZ Ben Gracewood (Vend) and Anders Ivarsson (Spotify) – overview of Ben’s talk “What if there were no rules?“, Tony learning a new word (connaissance) and the motto of not being a “duck” is his talk and Anders about his talk “Autonomy and Leadership at Spotify” and that we shouldn’t call Spotify a model!
• Chris Chan and Dylan Verheijden – the (Agile) Australian tradition of the Tim Tam Slam, Linda Rising’s keynote and her myth on smart people not being rational, James Shore’s keynote and inspirations around the Agile Fluency Model
• Bernd Schiffer and Poppy Schiffer (#agilebaby) – Bernd’s talk “Concrete experimentation in Agile environments

Craig and Tony are once again roaming the floor, this time at the Agile Australia conference in Sydney, looking for interesting people in the Australian Agile community. While walking around the floor they run into:

• Rachel Slattery (SlatteryIT) – organiser of Agile Australia talks about the record crowd, selection of speakers and the number of first timers new to Agile
• Kim Ballestrin – organiser of Cynefin Melbourne Meetup Group discusses what’s new in the Cynefin world and enjoyed the talk learning about the model used by Flow Perth
• Ben Melbourne and Jean D’Amore (ThoughtWorks) – discussed applying Agile techniques to reality television (and podcasts), Ben’s workshop on “Using Design Thinking to Drive Agile Planning” and Jean’s talk on “Delivering with microservices or how to iterate towards sophistication”
• Daniel Luschwitz (SoftEd) – talked about the strengths of ICAgile over other approaches and the Agile…