ScanAgile18
Program
ScanAgile 2018 took place March 14th – 15th at the Clarion Hotel in Helsinki Finland.
Wednesday 14th of March 2018
9:00
Opening words
9:15 – 10:15
Keynote – Sami Honkonen
Building a responsive organization
As we’ve all read everywhere the amount of complexity in the world is increasing. What’s the impact of complexity on our organizational structures and practices? How do we create an organization that can deal with the increased complexity? In this talk we’ll look at the at the building blocks of responsive organizations. Responsive organizations are capable of quickly adapting to changing environments. Whether there’s a shift in the market, a new technology emerges or a crisis is looming, responsive organizations immediately adjust their operations to match the new landscape.
10:15 – 10:45
Coffee break
All day (10:30 – 15:30)
Coaches’ Corner organized by Solita
Nonstop coaching for ScanAgile guests – powered by volunteer coaches from the Finnish agile community
Do you have a small problem at your work or business you’ve had a hard time breaking down? Come to the Coaches’ Corner to get help! In the 45 minute quick session a professional agile coach will help you find new perspectives and move towards the solution. Book your appointment or find a free coach at the Coaches’ Corner stand. The Coaches’ Corner is powered by volunteer coaches from the Finnish agile community.
10:45 – 11:30
Successful Agile Transformations with vision, co-creation and experiments
In this presentation I have summarized all I have learned about the principles and practices of what it takes to succeed in Agile transformations into aneasy to understand model. The Presentation covers all the key steps 0) Piloting, 2) Vision, 3) Co-creation of the blue print, 4) implementation through experimentation, 5) continuous improvement. For all the steps I will give advice on the critical do’s and don´ts that I have discovered through years of trial and error. After this presentation you should have a collection of new practical tools and ideas on how to succeed in bringing end to end Agile to your organisation.
Availability, Meetings and Collaboration
– Hi! I have a thing I’d like to share with you!
– Oh, no problem. Only thing is, I’m on my way to a meeting now. Are you available at 11 tomorrow instead? I have a slot then.
– Let me see… Nope, that doesn’t work for me. What about 14 tomorrow? Would that work?
– Sorry, can’t do, and then the remainder of the week is fully booked. What about next week? Being stuck in this kind of conversations, I ended up doing some calculations to understand what is going on. I’d like to share them with you! (If your’re available…)
Workshop (10:45 – 12:45)
Jani Turku & Simo Routarinne
Kickass Improvisation - be the superhero of communication in your life
Let’s explore the core skills of improvisation applied in our everyday life in and outside work. In this workshop we define a framework: Let Go, Notice More, Be Obvious, Be Affected, Bring Out The Best In Others, and Yes, and.. We explore these skills with experiental learning in the hands of two professional business improvisers. Workshop includes lots of exercises and practical applications.
11:45 – 12:30
Transform in an ocean of Product Owners
Every organization is different, and every organization has its own unique challenges while transforming. In my previous role at Ericsson, as the Head of Transformation Support Centre, I had worked with different types of organizations, software, hardware or service product, which were developed by their teams distributed globally. Over the recent months, I have been working with organizations which again are unique in their own way. They are strong with outsourcing culture, and they have all their development done by consultancy teams. In their organizations, when I went in, there were product owners, and product owners only. The talk is about experience and learning around how to work with organizations depending on Development Teams somewhere else, how to grow the product to continuously lead with innovation, technology through fantastic product ownership and portfolio management, and how to build products with great system and software architecture.
Scrum Patterns: The New De Facto Scrum Standard
Implementing Scrum is hard. It is hard for most people to properly learn even the basics (test yourself at: https://www.agilechallenge2018.com/how-well-do-you-know-scrum-basics/). But the basics aren’t enough: it’s crucial to understand the “why” behind the constructs of Scrum to be able to adapt them to accelerate any given team to excellence. International Scrum experts have been working seven years to document the Scrum framework in an encyclopedic collection of patterns. These patterns can guide people in learning Scrum, in implementing it in powerful ways, and in following up with ongoing kaizen and kaikaku to get better and better. The patterns are publicly available at http://scrumbook.org. Come and learn where they came from and why they’re important.
12:30 – 13:30
Lunch
13:30 – 14:15
Sociocracy 3.0 - organizing peer decision-making
Codento is a software development and effectiveness transformation company that has used Sociocracy 3.0 for distributed decision-making for a year now. The session is a brief introduction to Sociocracy 3.0 decision-making patterns with a short demo exercise. It is also a travel story of (un)organizing people starting making their own future together.
#NoEstimates - remove estimation, focus on reducing complexity
Estimation meetings usually focus on effort (plus they are SOOO BORING!). We all know how failure prone that is. With most projects being late or failing to deliver on value we need to find better alternatives to the fragile Estimation games people play. In this talk we explore the reasons why estimation of effort is a losing game, and one concrete technique you can start using tomorrow that will improve your understanding of your work, improve your predictability and remove estimation of effort from your workflow. Trust me, your team will thank you for bringing this technique to them.
Workshop (13:30 – 15:30)
Sami Paju & Jani Turku
LEGO Serious Play: A Method in Madness
LEGO Serious Play methodology was created to solve complex business challenges with something you love. Despite it being a structured and rigorously researched method for dialogic processes, self-reflection, knowledge creation and sense-making in complex systems, it is also highly engaging and fun! We will present the key concepts of LEGO Serious Play method, and use LEGO Serious Play itself to explore different possibilities for how you can benefit from LEGO Serious Play in your own work and organisation. So meta.
14:30 – 15:15
Team's gain, manager's pain - why are agile transformations so hard for the management?
Why do all agilists complain about managers and executives? Why is it so hard for management go go agile? Are you struggling with agile transformation? Pick your worse habit. Something that you really would need to change. Now, pick a habit that you like, that feels safe, makes you feel good. Next, think about the effort required to replace both of these habits with new habits. Multiply this effort with, say, twenty. That gives you an idea of how difficult it can feel for a manager to change his way of feeling and thinking going from traditional top-down organized management style to self-directed teams with agile ways of working. Riina will take us through chain of thought combining recent neuroscientific findings to what makes agile transformations so challenging on an individual and social level, especially for managers. This talk is suitable for people who already have knowledge about agile methodologies and fundaments of lean/agile philosophy and are working on enterprise level influencing and management development.
Designing Minimum Lovable Product with Design Sprint
Design Sprint is a method developed by Google Ventures to crystallise, prototype and validate an idea in 5 days. Over a year ago, our team was in search for a method to as quickly as possible concretise, validate and analyse desirability, viability and feasibility of an idea or solution proposal. We found the Design Sprint, which we started applying and modifying to our needs. We call our “flavour” Service Sprint, and it includes considerations of MVP scope, technical feasibility and viability. We will share in the presentation both how to run a Service Sprint, when it’s a great weapon of choice to gain momentum and speed, and learnings about best practises and do’s and dont’s.
15:30 – 16:00
Coffee break
16:00 – 17:00
Keynote – Joshua Kerievsky
Are You Curious?
Learning is key to improving. Yet without curiosity, learning stagnates. Are you continuously curious about your customers and their needs? Are you curious to understand what’s behind a colleague’s anger? Are you curious about how a change to your process might improve flow and outcomes? Curiosity may just be a superpower. We’ll explore this topic in depth in this new keynote talk.
17:00
Closing remarks
17:30
Evening Party by Siili Solutions
The Evening Party is held at Nosturi, just on the other side of the bay. There will be a bus transportation from Clarion hotel.Thursday 15th of March 2018
9:00
Opening words
9:15 – 10:15
Keynote – Sari Torkkola
What Lean transformation changes in a traditional organisation
Six years ago I was CIO in a defence and aerospace company running the corporate IT. Despite having great people in my team, they were burning out due to constant fire fighting. The traditional way of managing simply did not work. In my quest to find something totally different, I ended up googling the word “Lean”. This new path changed both my personal and professional life for good. Unfortunately, Lean thinking is against common practice and sometimes even common sense, when looked from the traditional management point of view – and that’s where most of organisations still remain. Once you understand it, you cannot return to the past mindset, but you may be quite alone before the gains appear. Today, I share learnings from my amazing journey with you.
10:15 – 10:45
Coffee break
All day (10:30 – 15:30)
Coaches’ Corner organized by Solita
Nonstop coaching for ScanAgile guests – powered by volunteer coaches from the Finnish agile community.
Do you have a small problem at your work or business you’ve had a hard time breaking down? Come to the Coaches’ Corner to get help! In the 45 minute quick session a professional agile coach will help you find new perspectives and move towards the solution. Book your appointment or find a free coach at the Coaches’ Corner stand. The Coaches’ Corner is powered by volunteer coaches from the Finnish agile community.
10:45 – 11:30
Becoming an Agile Coach
Being an Agile Coach is a never ending journey full of surprises and reinventing oneself experiences. Everyone’s path is unique still we share lots of lessons, discoveries and insights as we grow. Let me share with you a few funny, ironic, maybe sad yet inspiring stories – own ones and heard in the communities. This is a patchwork storytelling session about finding own way and Agile coaching stance, typical challenges and unexpected scenarios, thinking pitfalls and power of intuition, ways of learning and building new habits, tremendous failures and little every day victories… Some life scenes and lessons to share and reflect.
Culture is the New Black
From individual Lean-Agile Development to Cultural Change: Yle´s Agile and Lean journey started in 2009 in the internet development teams. Since then, agile and lean have spread to different units throughout the organization. Currently more than 40 teams are using lean and agile, including 4 executives teams with over 60 C-level participants, and 25% of the organization’s workforce is participating. Even small steps in everyone´s work are important. Now we can talk about cultural change. New company culture and leadership is in focus at Yle. New strategic thinking: change occurs through people, it is part of everyday work, it is not a project: Yle Lean-Agile Culture Accelerator is based on organic grow and speeding the company cultural change, training and coaching teams and individuals, providing support for management and hosting and planning events. Culture is an essential part of the digital mindset and it ́s a global phenomenon. Live the culture that embraces experiments. Have a good situational awareness with data-driven agile development. Get an ability to follow through (ability to deliver and systematic culture of experimentation). Networks will replace organizations. Your value as a leader is measured by value given at networks.
Workshop (10:45 – 12:45)
Piritta van der Beek, Sami Sarén & Tanja Korvenmaa
Facilitation methods for agile retrospectives
Learn and practice facilitating an efficient retrospective so that everyone gets heard. Good retrospectives allow fast learning among the (project) team members and enables improving shared ways of working. This is a hands-on training session for all scrum masters, project managers and team leaders who are boosting continuous improvement. You will learn essentials facilitation skills and get an introduction to concrete methods: Challenge mapping, Appreciative Inquiry and Heaven&Hell. We will try out the methods in three simultaneous groups and then compare them. Thus the retrospective session ends with a retrospective – you will be guided to apply your key learnings to your own work – any meeting or workshop. Trainers: Piritta van der Beek, Sami Sarén and Tanja Korvenmaa from the Finnish Association of Facilitators
11:45 – 12:30
Coaching in a data-driven world
In a world which is becoming increasingly data-driven it is still surprising how little teams use data. 39% of executives say their companies are already highly data-driven, yet mention data to any Scrummaster/Coach having conversations with the same execs and many shudder at the thought. “Oh you’re a metrics guy…” is quite often the response I will get when coaching teams and/or Scrummasters. Why is this? Is it the toxic nature that “metrics” have become synonymous with or is it because we view using data as a dangerous flirtation with placing more value in tools and processes? This talk will challenge the taboo that data has in our industry. Through examples of data-based coaching using visualisations of information that may typically remain hidden I will aim to debunk the myths around metrics. I will aim to highlight how effective data-based coaching still has it’s foundations in Agile, whether it be through Scrum’s “three pillars of empiricism” or Kanban’s “scientific method”. The aim of this session will be to come away challenging the traditional view of metrics, and state the claim that if a user story is an invitation to a conversation, then the same should be said for data…
The Science of Happiness
“I’ll be happy once <I get this done/I get a promotion/I change job/etc>”. How many times have you said something like this? We think happiness comes from success, but science has proven that it’s the other way around: being happy makes us more successful. Happiness has huge benefits on our professional life. Let me show you how we can help our teams be happier and achieve more, using some science and practical exercises.
12:30 – 13:30
Lunch
13:30 – 14:15
Kick-start for Continuous Improvement
Do you want to have continuous improvement as part of your everyday work? Come and listen this talk to learn which building blocks help you to create the culture of systematic improvement in a SW development organization. This talk discusses how the Deming cycle – Plan-Do-Check-Act – has been applied concretely in two different R&D organizations. The practices have been evolving during the years and the talk will also share the lessons learned from this journey. The presentation is targeted to people who are interested to enhance their continuous improvement practices despite their organizational role.
How do we learn and why is it important?
Ever got bored in a meeting or while listening to a lecture? What does modern brain science say about learning and how should this affect to our work? Improving whatever we do requires a systematic way of learning instead of just delivering information. Is it a meeting or a training class, Sharon Bowman’s great concept “Training from the back of the room” offers lots of insights, used by world’s top coaches, trainers and managers to get their message trough. I will present her useful and practical 4C-method to organise any learning event to achieve learning objectives of all kind. Let all of us learn!
Workshop (13:30 – 15:30)
Wim Heemskerk & Eddy Bruin
Take ScanAgile to Work
Learned exciting things this conference? Now wondering how to use and spread them back at work? Use this last workshop of the conference to prepare! In this session, you’ll create a workshop about the content of this ScanAgile that most stood out to you, so you can spread your learning and enthusiasm when back on the job. We’ll help you create it an while doing so we’ll explore together how the brain really learns and how to make great, interactive training based on this knowledge. For our concepts and practices we will draw mainly from Sharon Bowman’s excellent book and course Training from the BACK of the Room, which we’ve been applying in our own trainings for some years now.
14:30 – 15:15
Let Me Tell You A Story: The Power of Storytelling in Agile Coaching
Picture the last time you were told a great story about change…how did it make you feel? Were you inspired, motivated, or moved to action? As Agile Coaches we must influence teams to look at the world through a new lens, and storytelling is one of the most powerful tools we have available to help us to do this. During this interactive session you will learn the basic framework to construct a powerful story based on the work of great storytellers, including Stephen Denning, Walt Disney, Richard Branson, and Steve Jobs. You will learn about the different types of stories you can tell and which situations are best for each type. Narratives can change the way we view the world, so gather round everyone and let me tell you a story…
Lasse Ziegler
“Stop changing our culture!”
Adhocracy, holacracy, sociocracy or idiotcracy. We are constantly talking about changing our culture in organizations.
At the same time the majority of people just want to be left alone and get on with their work.
So how do we know what our culture was to begin with? A survey once a year asking if you are collaborating isn’t really a good way to “measure” culture.
On the Christmas party the leadership holds a great motivational speech on how we are now self-organizing and tell you to go and self-organize. How do we know that today we have a different culture from yesterday?
Telling people to change isn’t working. Putting up motivational posters don’t magically change our culture. So how do we get to a different culture?
In this session we will explore culture, ways to quantify culture in real time and ways how to grow and influence instead of “change”” culture.
15:30 – 16:00
Coffee break
16:00 – 17:00
Keynote – Mary Poppendieck
Beyond Proxies and Permission – Thinking Differently about Complex Systems
Agile is well past its prime. In 2001, when Agile was a new idea, there were no smartphones, no clouds, no Internet of Things. It’s time for some fresh thinking about managing complex software systems. One of today’s biggest trends is the shrinking middle – the disappearance of the intermediary – the direct access of consumers to pricing, to reviews, and to each other. In modern systems, the same thing is happening – engineers have an immediate connection to the problems of their customers, to the solutions they create, to the outcomes of their work. This disintermediation represents a fundamental shift in the design and evolution of complex systems. Another big trend is the shrinking size and increased frequency of changes to our systems. One thing we know for sure about complex systems is that when they are smashed with a big change, unintended consequences are sure to reverberate far and wide. But it has become increasingly easy to apply small changes with a limited blast radius and adapting immediately to any consequences. This makes frequent change not only possible, but much safer. The absence of dependencies represents a second fundamental shift in the creation of complex software systems. It has become essential to think differently about managing complex systems. We used to manage through proxies – intermediate indicators that today serve mostly to separate engineers from the results of their work. Be suspicious of proxies. Teams used to require permission – from managers or other teams – before they could change ‘the plan’ or deploy their work. Remove the dependencies that make permission necessary. It’s time to adopt a contemporary paradigm for developing software- intensive products.
17:00 – 17:15