Tony and Craig catch up with Tony Christensen and Steve Berez, co-author of “Doing Agile Right: Transformation Without Chaos” as well as from Bain & Company and they chat about:

• Saw a lot of companies doing agile wrong and a lot of pain suffering and probably worse off than when they started – book is to try to share learning and get agile on the right track
• The conditions for agile to flourish need to change, particularly beyond team level
• RBS – one of the key impediments was funding, changed to funding persistent teams
• Most organisations have a dissatisfaction with their financial process – need to have an honest conversation around the pain points of trust and process and seeing the promise of early return
• Bosch – were not innovating as quickly as they needed to, now using Agile for product design, manufacturing process and supply change…

Craig is at YOW! Hong Kong and is sitting with Nigel Dalton, Chief Inventor at REA Group and the Australian “Godfather of Agile” and they reminisce about:

• Anita Sengupta’s YOW! Hong Kong keynote “The Future of Mars Exploration“
• Akin’s Rules of Spacecraft Design – “don’t mess it up, there are people involved”
• Nigel Dalton’s YOW! Hong Kong talk “Agile is the Last Thing You Need“
• The two early experiments of Agile in Australia – Lonely Planet and Suncorp
• The success of the REA technology teams today was the move into multidisciplinary teams where the influence comes from product – it was a difficult decision and chaos at the time
• John Sullivan’s YOW! Hong Kong talk “A Presentation to Myself on Organisational Agile Transformations“
• ANZ is disrupting the power base of senior management – Shayne Elliott video about their way of working and Bluenotes…

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…

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