Today ‘agile’ is no longer just a buzzword. From building spacecraft to manufacturing, some of the most complex and largest organisations in the world are using agile ways of working to deliver better outcomes, respond to change, improve quality, foster more productive and happier teams, and reduce risk.

This hands-on and interactive session is aimed at showing how public sector organisations can support agile ways of working, from policy development through to service design and delivery.

Presenters, Craig Smith an Enterprise Agile Coach and Consultant from SoftEd, and Julian Smith, Head of Agile Practice for Australia’s Digital Transformation Agency, will provide an interesting and informative view of how agility can be applied in the public sector and will introduce the Government Agility Model, a framework that you can use to assess where to apply agility in your agency.

Craig is based in Australia and works extensively with the Australian Public sector and as a member of the Agile Alliance Board of Directors, brings a global perspective.

Julian is a digital leader and entrepreneur who specialises in public sector agility. He is experienced in lean-agile policy development, digital transformation, user-centred design and digital technology.

This will be an interactive session, so please be prepared to share your own experiences as well as introducing and encouraging anyone that wants to bring agility to their department or agency to attend the session.

Many thanks to Andy Cooper for inviting myself and Julian to present this session.

Today ‘agile’ is no longer just a buzzword. From building spacecraft to manufacturing, some of the most complex and largest organisations in the world are using agile ways of working to deliver better outcomes, respond to change, improve quality, foster more productive and happier teams, and reduce risk.

This hands-on and interactive session is aimed at helping public sector organisations build capability to support agile ways of working, from policy development through to service design and delivery.

Belle Hogg from the DTA did an amazing job of capturing a visual scribe of the workshop and managed to capture my headset, glasses and lack of hair a little too well!

With 73% of the world using Scrum as their predominant Agile method, which has a direct impact on service management, this session will open up your eyes to the many other Agile and edgy Agile methods and movements in the world today. For many, Agile is a toolbox of potential methods, practices and techniques, and like any good toolbox it is often more about using the right tool for the problem that will result in meaningful results. You may also be surprised about how many methods have a direct relation or reliance on service management as well as the wider organisational structure and culture. So let’s take a rapid journey into the world of methods like Mikado, Nonban, Vanguard and movements like Holocracy, Drive and Stoos where we will uncover 40 methods and movements in 40 minutes to help strengthen your understanding and toolbox.

It was an honour to be invited to Darwin to present this talk to the Darwin tech community who are a small but extremely passionate community. Here are some photos:

When you look for inspiration in the Agile Coaching community, the name Gordon Ramsay is probably not the first name to come to mind. He has been known to be belligerent, condescending and downright rude, but underneath this brute facade is a treasure trove of skills and talents that influence change.

In this presentation we will draw insights from his ‘Kitchen Nightmare’ escapades and draw parallels with how much his work aligns with that of an Agile Coach and the goal to successfully drive change and introduce a number of models and techniques that are indispensable in the coaching toolkit.

Here are some tweets and feedback from the talk:

When you look for inspiration in the Agile Coaching community, the name Gordon Ramsay is probably not the first name to come to mind. He has been known to be belligerent, condescending and downright rude, but underneath this brute facade is a treasure trove of skills and talents that influence change.

In this presentation we will draw insights from his ‘Kitchen Nightmare’ escapades and draw parallels with how much his work aligns with that of an Agile Coach and the goal to successfully drive change and introduce a number of models and techniques that are indispensable in the coaching toolkit.

Some pictures:

Here are some tweets and feedback from the talk:

First time to Agile meetup, exceeded expectation, will be back – Steve S

Awesome presentation. Thanks very much Craig! – Emi

This was my first Agile meetup. A great presentation and a well run event. – David Wilkinson

Excellent presentation. Some great reminders! – BronwynSC

This was my first time and it was a great presentation – Arthur

Always a pleasure hearing you speak Craig. I’ll be sharing your slides with the Elabor8 team! – Ryan McKergow

Thanks for a great presentation – Rob Lawes

When you look for inspiration in the Agile Coaching community, the name Gordon Ramsay is probably not the first name to come to mind. He has been known to be belligerent, condescending and downright rude, but underneath this brute facade is a treasure trove of skills and talents that influence change.

In this presentation we will draw insights from his ‘Kitchen Nightmare’ escapades and draw parallels with how much his work aligns with that of an Agile Coach and the goal to successfully drive change and introduce a number of models and techniques that are indispensable in the coaching toolkit.

Learning Outcomes:

Understand the difference between coaching, advising and mentoring

Approaches to having confronting coaching conversations

Dealing with denial and unengaged staff

The criticality of a burning platform to invoke change

Why it is important to have coaches as experts

Agile coaching is more than the GROW model (or other coaching models)

It was extremely disappointing that my partner in crime on this talk Renee Troughton could not make the trip to Atlanta to deliver this with me, I certainly hope I did her parts of the talk justice.

Here are a few of the tweets from the talk:

With 73% of the world using Scrum as their predominant Agile method, this session will open up your eyes to the many other Agile and edgy Agile methods and movements in the world today For many, Agile is a toolbox of potential methods, practices and techniques, and like any good toolbox it is often more about using the right tool for the problem that will result in meaningful results.Take a rapid journey into the world of methods like Mikado, Nonban, Vanguard and movements like Holocracy,Drive and Stoos where we will uncover 40 methods and movements in 40 minutes to help strengthen your toolbox.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

Software developers, Agile coaches / Scrum Masters, technical leaders, business analysts, testers and anyone with an interest in the variety of approaches available to Agile teams and organisations.

It was a privilege to be invited to speak at YOW! 2015 which is considered to be the leading software development in Australasia. The talk was delivered in 3 cities: Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. It was also an honour to have some of the most influentional people in the Agile community attending including Dave Thomas, Dan North and Don Reinertsen.

Here are some of the live tweets from each of the 3 conference talks:

Ideas can come from many different places, but how do we best turn these ideas into initiatives and ensure we are working on the right things at the right time? We tend to throw the idea around, discuss it with our team and management, and undertake a lot of analysis to decide if it’s worth spending time and money on. Unfortunately this approach means we have already spent a bunch of time and money, often without realising it! A number of the early Agile approaches described a lifecycle for kicking off projects, but many of the newer and more popular approaches start with a backlog or an assumption that you are already building something. Go back to basics and look at different approaches for kicking off initiatives and the tools and techniques that make up what is often called the discovery, ideation or concept phase. If your team or organisation has too much work in progress or your pipeline is unclear, then learn (or re-learn) approaches to kicking off the right initiatives so you can ensure you are building the right thing! Learning Outcomes

• Understanding techniques to kick off a project or initiative
• Techniques such as impact mapping, idea canvas, problem pitch, finding features, etc
• Knowing when you should proceed with an idea or park it
• Prioritising ideas

It was awesome to have such a large audience, particularly as I was up against Dean Leffingwell in the same session. The session was recorded by InfoQ so I will add the video here when it becomes available. Thanks to all those who live tweeted throughout the session, here is a sample:

With 73% of the world using Scrum as their predominant Agile method, this session will open up your eyes to the many other Agile and edgy Agile methods and movements in the world today For many, Agile is a toolbox of potential methods, practices and techniques, and like any good toolbox it is often more about using the right tool for the problem that will result in meaningful results.Take a rapid journey into the world of methods like Mikado, Nonban, Vanguard and movements like Holocracy,Drive and Stoos where we will uncover 40 methods and movements in 40 minutes to help strengthen your toolbox.

It was a priviledge to have Marcus Hammarberg (author of Kanban In Action) in the audience for this talk. It was recorded as well, so I will post the link to the video when it becomes available.

Here are some of the live tweets from the talk:

My notes from the session:

• if you need to give the audience bad news, give it first
• instantly does not mean effortlessly

1. Talk about your passion

• to feel more confident, you need competence – talk about subjects you genuinely understand
• seeing someone who is excited… is exciting
• energy, enthusiasm and passion through your actions and speech will translate to your audience
• find something in the required topic that gives you passion – even if you loathe the topic or have been forced by your boss to present it

2. Tell them a story

• our memory is very volatile – stays for 8-10 seconds unless we do something with it
• 7+/- 2 is horribly optimistic and not backed by research, real number is 4 +/- 1
• stories are our oldest information processing tool
• stories have a flow to assist acquisition and memorisation (all our memories are reconstructed from a storyline), have a hierarchy to assist comprehension and recollection
• tell the historical story or the story of what happened, process or funny anecdotes
• story is for your benefit to get the sequence and content right – audience don’t necessarily need to know
• stories make complexity comprehensible, structure recognisable, information easy to remember, make audiences feel more comfortable

3. Don’t search for content, select it

• what should I say is the wrong question, question you should start with is what could I say
• humans are good at recognising important stuff rather than recalling important stuff
• start with a blank sheet and write down everything you know about the topic that you might want to say – stream of consciousness
• whittle down to 3-5 most relevant and important topics to talk about
• these 5 points becomes the chapters, so go looking for the narrative that connects them – they may not connect so look for a couple of lesser topics that better connect the 5 important things
• competency – think about the questions you were asking when you were learning

4. Simplify your slides

• tools encourage a bad job
• content matters but not as much as style
• content is your payload to explode the audiences brains
• style – the stuff the audience doesn’t see that prevents them seeing what they should see
• bad style – anything that prevents the audience seeing what they should see
• a wall of text – technical audience will read everything, regardless of whether it is relevant or not
• Apple is good at presentations – simple but effective
• big words – people at the back can still read them
• slide numbers turn your presentation into a death march – get rid of background, name and title on every slide, get rid of the logos (audience sees salesperson)
• slide deck is to focus audience on the presentation – if they need context give them a separate PDF or notes
• each message is a different slide
• cluttered is overwhelming and as a result they switch off the attention channel as they are trying to read everything
• show less on more slides

5. Manage the questions

• a presentation should always be for the benefit of the audience – give them what they need
• have an explicit questions policy – hold to the end of each topic, end of the talk, or interactive through the talk (can however affect the flow)
• always be keen to take questions – shows you care
• make the questions fit in with your question – “that’s a really good question” makes others more comfortable to ask question

6. Animate code simulations

• explain code temporally, not spatially
• use animations to reveal information one thing at a time
• walk through code as an animation and highlighting
• low tech animations – use the same slide over and over – cell animation
• don’t export your slides – notes
• live coding – synthesise, automate or have a partner – need to keep contact with the audience

7. Deliver your message fearlessly

• use your nervousness – turn fear into energy
• never give a presentation for the first time – practice it live at least 3 times
• use an audience image on a big screen