Agile Business Day 2019

[Versione ITALIANA del Talk]Training people to give feedback better doesn’t bring the results we want because the receiver must be willing to accept it. In fact, telling people how they can improve may actually stop people from improving. So, rather than figuring out how to get better at giving feedback, we need to solve for asking for feedback instead (perhaps, even begging for it!). That’s what creating an ask-for-feedback culture is all about. Jenni will share the latest neuroscience about feedback. Learn how our brains react to feedback, and how you can change the way you treat feedback to continuously improve yourself and your organization.Speaker:Jenni Jepsen

[Versione ITALIANA del Talk]Great products come from great product teams. In this session we'll talk about how to assess, develop, and foster the skills of an Agile team to sustain a culture of innovation. The 5 Dimensions of great products can help identify gaps in skill-set and expertise so that the product and Agile teams can improve. We will review specific activities and frameworks that teams can use to plan a product across the 5 Dimensions and increase the likelihood of success. Participants learn how to plan for and avoid the "Delivery Gap", that is delivering a product to market but failing to meet customer needs. The team assesses its expertise in each of the 5 Dimensions: Discover, Design, Develop, Deploy, and Deliver. It then identifies the areas in the product plan that need improvement. This helps the team grow its expertise and develop a more robust development plan for its product.Speaker:Valerio Zanini

[Versione ITALIANA del Talk]When you and your team members aren’t in the same place, what happens to trust?Many distributed team members - especially Agile coaches and Scrum Masters - find themselves with doubts and fears.They may wonder:- Can you trust remote colleagues to get the job done?- Will they really grasp what's wanted, and why?- How will they find out that things are going wrong, soon enough to help to fix them?- Could remote team members be less loyal than you would hope, and how might that manifest?When you’re a distributed team, you *really* need an Agile approach! But because of their doubts and fears, distributed teams often find themselves falling back to "command and control" styles. That undermines the very trust they want to build, and can block performance improvements.In this short, highly-interactive online session, you'll learn three specific ways to enhance trust remotely, so that you and your team can develop a richer, more collaborative way of working.Speaker:Judy Rees

[versione ITALIANA del TALK]The Future of Teamwork in an Agile worldWhat are the trends affecting Teamwork now and in the future? How is Atlassian facing these challenges with our culture, our tools and our practices?Speaker:Vlad Cavalcanti

Have you ever thought about applying your Agile knowledge to learn something you want? Want to learn how to play an instrument? Want to learn a new language? Or how to juggle balls? Whatever is the new skill, believe me: Agile can help you with it.In our life, we often face the need of learning something new. It can be to use in our jobs, to impress the person we love, to simply for fun or as a new hobby. Whatever is the reason, we know it can be challenging to acquire this skill and it cannot be (yet) downloaded straight into our brain like in some nice movies. We still need to read books, follow classes, research, practice and be patient. Because the learning curve might be very slow… or not!I’ll share with the audience a technique to learn anything new very fast! It’s basically 5 simple steps. The reason why this method caught my attention: it’s incredibly similar to Agile values, principles and practices! Thus, if you know what Agile is about, you are half way to use it in your favour to learn anything you want, fast.

[Versione ITALIANA del Talk]Organizations place business agility as one of their top strategic priorities, yet there are multiple reasons enterprise transformations fail. How do you know you're on the right path? What are some of the concrete signs that your organization is becoming more agile? In this talk, Jorgen Hesselberg goes beyond the tools, frameworks, and hype to outline 7 concrete signs that show you're on your way to unlocking agility.Speaker:Jorgen Hesselberg

Closing rap

The Future of Teamwork in an Agile worldWhat are the trends affecting Teamwork now and in the future? How is Atlassian facing these challenges with our culture, our tools and our practices?Speaker:Vlad Cavalcanti

Great products come from great product teams. In this session we'll talk about how to assess, develop, and foster the skills of an Agile team to sustain a culture of innovation. The 5 Dimensions of great products can help identify gaps in skill-set and expertise so that the product and Agile teams can improve. We will review specific activities and frameworks that teams can use to plan a product across the 5 Dimensions and increase the likelihood of success. Participants learn how to plan for and avoid the "Delivery Gap", that is delivering a product to market but failing to meet customer needs. The team assesses its expertise in each of the 5 Dimensions: Discover, Design, Develop, Deploy, and Deliver. It then identifies the areas in the product plan that need improvement. This helps the team grow its expertise and develop a more robust development plan for its product.Speaker:Valerio Zanini

Working in multitasking mode, as many knowledge workers are doing today, drains some of our cognitive skills. I will be talking about focus and creativity highlighting how they are affected by the way we mostly use digital devices. The talk wants to raise awareness on what happens in our brains while we deal with tech and how we can use tech in order to empower ourselves by lowering the cognitive cost it sometimes has. The goal of the speech is also giving people tips and tools to apply in their everyday life in order to become more conscious of how they use tech.Speaker:Monica Bormetti

Between 2015 and 2016, over 130,000 asylum seekers requested asylum in Austria - taking the country of 8.7 million people by surprise. As politicians were reluctant to act, civil society jumped in and founded hundreds of grassroots initiatives intended to alleviate the integration process into Austrian society. However, seeing as there was no central coordination, high language barriers and little marketing budget, there was a missing link between the thousands of refugees and the surplus of offers by civil society. This is where radical innovation was needed and “I am Refugee” stepped in - our non-political, online platform that holistically depicts the user journey of a refugee on his path to integration in Austrian society.This talk will show you how we used elements of the Lean Start-Up to go from domain name to wireframes to a registered society and an up-and-running website within just 4 months. How we built a story map around the integration journey of a refugee. How we gained and integrated our users’ feedback to pivot and grow our product portfolio. How the agile elements of a strong vision, transparency, team work, iterations and pull principle are the best mechanisms for managing and leading an intercultural team of volunteers. How we dealt with our diverse variety of impediments ranging from governmental funding to right-wing trolls. And you will hear about how our culturally-adapted and yet solution-focused coaching approach makes our product range more than unique.This talk will not only show you how Agile methods are great for starting an innovative initiative in a low-to zero-budget sector, it will also show you how you can use Agile to make a difference in this world.Speaker:Stephanie Gasche

As coaches we have learnt the skills of comfortable debate and we have learnt to prize rapport highly in our everyday relationships. The world is running out of easy answers, so what happens when our conversations become more edgy and how does the individual and team respond? In this session we’ll explore challenging coaching and how breaking rapport is necessary for breakthrough to really happen.Speaker:Tony Richards

Being an Agile change agent can often feel like you’re fighting an uphill battle. Have you ever felt like you’re pushing, instead of having your knowledge and support pulled from you? Have you ever felt that the ‘Agile’ you’re championing is completely different from the ‘Agile’ your organisation is pushing for?You're not alone, I know I certainly have and it sucks! You'll also find that the answer of many of your fellow coaches, Scrum Masters and agile leaders is also a resounding "YES" which leads to many of us feeling isolated and frustrated. Shouldn't there be a better way?This will be an exploration of WHY we see some of these symptoms, how we've arrived where we are and what we can do to avoid them, all told through stories about how I've messed up!Speaker:Tony O'Halloran

The level of VUCA; volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity in our business environments is at a record high. People also expect more from work than just a paycheck. How can we enable performance in these new business and people realities? How can we create more VUCA-robust management models, which also works with and not against human nature? How can we create a more engaging work environment, where people perform at their best because they want to, not because they are told to, and where learning faster than others is key?This speech will inspire you to try new ways of working, where people and interactions are more valued than processes and tools, and where responding to change is more important than following a plan.Learn from the fringes! Understand how management innovation can provide just as much competitive advantage as technology– and product innovation!Speaker:Pia-Maria Thorén

In the new competitive landscape, traditional firms have to turn into tech companies and this means rethinking their organisation, processes, policies and culture.The Big Corps have, at last, understood they have to become Agile, but they are trying and doing some experiments to find the right formula that mixes Agile Coaching, Software Architecture, Dev and Design Ops, Product Management and Leadership so to scale their product-service operations.In countless iterations working with them, we have learned some good lessons on how to shape the operational and development model. (Spoiler alert: Design Ops plays a big role)So, don't panic!Speaker:Luca Mascaro

We approach our projects and teams in an agile way because we really believe that giving people the opportunity to express their full potential is the best way to make an organization thrive today.The eleventh principle of the agile manifesto says: The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.But our job lies in making decisions continuously.What is the right way to have teams that organize themselves and at the same time make decisions effectively and efficiently?How can we avoid anarchist teams where everyone goes in a different direction or (perhaps even worse) risking immobility because we having to agree before making any decisions?During the talk, we will see ideas, principles and techniques that help us to have teams that organize themselves effectively.Speaker:Lorenzo Massacci

When you and your team members aren’t in the same place, what happens to trust?Many distributed team members - especially Agile coaches and Scrum Masters - find themselves with doubts and fears.They may wonder:- Can you trust remote colleagues to get the job done?- Will they really grasp what's wanted, and why?- How will they find out that things are going wrong, soon enough to help to fix them?- Could remote team members be less loyal than you would hope, and how might that manifest?When you’re a distributed team, you *really* need an Agile approach! But because of their doubts and fears, distributed teams often find themselves falling back to "command and control" styles. That undermines the very trust they want to build, and can block performance improvements.In this short, highly-interactive online session, you'll learn three specific ways to enhance trust remotely, so that you and your team can develop a richer, more collaborative way of working.Speaker:Judy Rees

Organizations place business agility as one of their top strategic priorities, yet there are multiple reasons enterprise transformations fail. How do you know you're on the right path? What are some of the concrete signs that your organization is becoming more agile? In this talk, Jorgen Hesselberg goes beyond the tools, frameworks, and hype to outline 7 concrete signs that show you're on your way to unlocking agility.Speaker:Jorgen Hesselberg

Training people to give feedback better doesn’t bring the results we want because the receiver must be willing to accept it. In fact, telling people how they can improve may actually stop people from improving. So, rather than figuring out how to get better at giving feedback, we need to solve for asking for feedback instead (perhaps, even begging for it!). That’s what creating an ask-for-feedback culture is all about. Jenni will share the latest neuroscience about feedback. Learn how our brains react to feedback, and how you can change the way you treat feedback to continuously improve yourself and your organization.Speaker:Jenni Jepsen

On April 2019, a high-profile consultancy firm was sued by a leading car rental company to the tune of $32M. The reason? A failed website and apps redesign project.Available information points to obvious mistakes made by the supplier. However, looking at the customer’s approach and logic it’s just as obvious that all the signs were pointing to a failure in the making. In other words they were asking for trouble.This news created quite a stir in the business world, but it’s just one example of many similar and often repeated failures in technology and methodology change initiatives. Failures of this kind usually have three things in common:1. changes are applied from predefined recipes (other’s success stories)2. changes are limited to just a part of the organisation (i.e. R&D or IT)3. change strategy and execution is delegated to external ‘partners’.
There are alternative ways to approach change that don’t rely on magical recipes. Successful change happens by taking people on an evolutionary journey. Small steps are validated through natural selection. This journey needs to be aligned and coherent with the organisation strategy and vision. It is also one that is bound to be unique and specific to each organisation.Speaker:Gaetano Mazzanti

In this talk we intend to explore the theme of "Psychological Safety" in Lean Agile contexts.Referring to the first value of the Agile Manifesto, we note that the nature of the relationships between the members of the organization (and of the teams, of course) influences learning behaviors as well as value production. In fact, work is increasingly interdependent and complex.Psychological Safety is a key construct that promotes the dissemination of knowledge and collaboration.The concept of learning organization itself is fundamental when we talk about Business Agility and resilient organizations.Learning in an organization depends on the dissemination of knowledge, from sharing among its members. Deep learning is possible only real psychological safe environment.Since Psychological Safety is the perception of being at ease in being able to be oneself, feeling able to show ideas, emotions, thoughts ... without fear of consequences for one's image, one's status or one's career, it is possible to team up that self-organize and create value.Speakers:Fabio ArmaniGiulia Armani

When HR and marketing meet, true employer branding is born.Employer Branding is a key component of every successful Talent Acquisition strategy. Having a clearly defined Employer Brand can help you find the right job candidates, attract, engage and hire them.In this world of "War for Talent", a well-planned Employer Branding strategy can be a huge competitive advantage that sets you apart from your competitors.Employer Brand is what your current employees and potential future job candidates think of you as an employer. It is their perception of how you treat your employees and candidates as well as your Employee Value Proposition.How can you set up your Employer Branding Marketing Strategy?Discover the Canvas and best practices at the Agile Business Day.Speaker:Deborah Ghisolfi

The agility of an organisation relies on the agility of the people within it. In this talk, Cheryl explores a powerful and simple way to grow the agility of the humans in your workplace.Technology is setting a new pace on human development. It’s forcing us to grow and adapt at a rate we’ve never experienced before. So how do we prepare for this in the workplace?In this talk, we’ll explore the fundamental beliefs and behaviours behind an adaptable human mindset, and how we can start to grow this within our teams and organizations.We will cover:- The three levels of adaptability- How we can start to measure our adaptability- Experiments to run to develop your own capacity to adapt.Speaker:Cheryl Tansey

Inspired by the Lean Value Tree, we choose to make talk description as it works.Vision: Lean Value Tree, as sustainable development processes tool for stakeholders, developers, and managers working on digital products strategy.Goal: show how it worksThe aim is to show the Lean Value Tree (LVT) as a visual tool that makes it easy to get from plans for a value-driven strategy. It allows leaders and teams to structure and manage options for change and improvements. It offers an effective way to share and analyze desired outcomes, examine risks and opportunities, and continuously redefine what is needed. It’s based on the idea of prioritization by results (and not features) introducing optionality as a crucial element of planning.Each aspect of the tree contributes to the accomplishment of the leading vision through experiments directed to produce behavioural change.Bet: true story as example to demonstrate how it worksBased on a true story we would show that Lean Value Tree and Kanban board works as agile models for people, teams, organizations and innovation process. It transforms from hierarchical and bureaucratic to a flat and flexible organization by distributed decisional processes among teams and governance board. It makes visible and understandable the vision, goals, bets and metrics. Thanks to this CherryChain and its industrial partners had a shared and sustainable research and development processes, stakeholders, developers and researchers should be able to keep up a constant pace and focused actions.Intiative: CherryChain storytellingNew ideas are never a problem. Everyone working in an organization has multiple thoughts on how to improve the management, the process, or the product itself. But not all the ideas are the same. Some reveal unexpected complications and dependencies. Some others may create opportunities for specific customers only while generating backlash for others. CherryChain is a Fintech start-up working on research and development of hybrid blockchain protocols, into Trento research center. It’s a case study where a different industrial partners (Bank, Energy Utility and Retail corporation) work together for developing new digital products based on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and Smart Contracts. For example a new digital onboarding of customers.How can we move through wealth of insights and transform them into an actionable strategy among different domains?In this context, making digital products means moving through multiple domains and technology uncertainties, and the best way to operate in this condition is through experimentation and test, instead of upfront decisions. In this scenario, selecting ideas is an entirely different game. When you want to innovate through experiments, it’s not essential to avoid wrong ideas; instead, what is crucial is to quickly and cheaply test as many promising ideas as possible, and to learn which ones will work. That means doing a research and development process based on rapid prototyping and feedback loop from governance board and technical teams. Thanks to LVT and Kanban board, CherryChain and its industrial partners had a shared and sustainable research and development processes.Speakers:Carlo RizziMatteo Cavucci

The old system is at its end. It doesn’t deliver anymore. On the contrary: it destroys, it exploits and leaves a trail of dead bodies. The newest generation of consumers does not like this. They take to the streets and push back against what we are doing to their future. They punish politicians and companies that take no responsibility.While we in Europe are still clinging to our old paradigms and trying to drag ourselves and them into the future, the most valuable companies in the world have two immediate advantages. They are leaders in profitability because they make themselves responsible for the well-being of their employees and for society in general. Companies focused on sustainability attract the best minds of the younger generation because their attitude, rather than money, make them more desirable. These companies have greater earnings and increase their value, even though they forego quick revenue in order to do what is ethically right. They create liveable working environments and integrate responsibility for society and the environment into their business models. The operating system of these companies is called Agile.Real agile companies see implementing agile methods as just a first step. With this new culture, they also help determine how our society will evolve, because Agile is more than just a method of working. It delivers the values, attitudes and tools with which we can transform our digital, knowledge-based network society into a more humane society. Into a society where the abilities of the individual are allowed to be developed, in which work is inspiring, in which productivity and quality of life are simultaneously possible, and more people are able to profit from this progress.Speaker:Boris Gloger

Engineering Practices in Scrum for HardwareHow to iterate quickly a physical complex product, composed by Software,Electronic, Mechanics, and Plastics, using an Agile framework like Scrum?How to speed up the feedback loop, reducing risks and adding creativityand innovation at the same time? How to start transforming a companyinto an Agile Organization? In this talk, I'll try to answer to thetypical hot questions I deal with doing Agile Coaching in themanufacturing industry and I'll show the journey of an Italian company,Sisma Spa, with their CEO Vittorio Gaudino.Speakers:Paolo SammicheliVittorio Gaudino

Metriche e strumenti retrospettivi e predittivi per aiutare il Product Owner ad aumentare il valore rilasciatoSpeakers:Ilaria MauricGiovanni Puliti

Customer Obsession and customer centricity are part of Vodafone's DNA and definitely are the main objectives for our business strategy. The Digital Transformation program enable the maximization of opportunities which come from the digital ecosystem in order to offer better products and services, close to our customer’s needs and with very short cycle time.The HR and Organization Department plays a fundamental role in the implementation of the Digital Transformation program: the agile organizational design, the introduction of new skills and a new governance system have been the target of our first year but new challenges are awaiting!Cultural change and our way of working settle within the whole organization in an organic, harmonious and sustainable vision of digital change. The organizational effectiveness and business results are achieved integrating ways of working, deeply different rhythms and areas, for the wellbeing of the entire organization and the people who live it, in a way of minimizing organizational entropy.Enrica and Dario, in a double role of "Agile Transformation" and "Traditional Organization", will share with us how the two worlds meet and challenge each other every day in order to balance the opportunity to adopt agile organizational models in harmony with traditional organizational structures, with the need to preserve organizational efficiency and achieve a real business agility.Speakers:Enrica LipariDario Giannoccaro

People who's job is to build organisations do exactly that - build organisations. The closer you get to the specific situation in which people work and produce results, the more detailed the organisation builder's tools: from structure to process, to procedure or workflow, to tools and rituals. This talk invites to look at what is left open - and what should better be left open. The "last mile" of organisation, where individual behaviour adapts to the situation at hand. The more complex the environment, the more openness should be left in the structure, and the more important it is to "manage" this last mile. So while this last mile should be left open by the organisation, it should not be left alone. How can you help here to make the result as good as possible? We look at how different types of support can be derived from the Cynefin framework, and what skills of leadership and management can be used particularly in highly complex environments.

Have you ever thought about applying your Agile knowledge to learn something you want? Want to learn how to play an instrument? Want to learn a new language? Or how to juggle balls? Whatever is the new skill, believe me: Agile can help you with it.In our life, we often face the need of learning something new. It can be to use in our jobs, to impress the person we love, to simply for fun or as a new hobby. Whatever is the reason, we know it can be challenging to acquire this skill and it cannot be (yet) downloaded straight into our brain like in some nice movies. We still need to read books, follow classes, research, practice and be patient. Because the learning curve might be very slow… or not!I’ll share with the audience a technique to learn anything new very fast! It’s basically 5 simple steps. The reason why this method caught my attention: it’s incredibly similar to Agile values, principles and practices! Thus, if you know what Agile is about, you are half way to use it in your favour to learn anything you want, fast.

Agile is old. Good and old. The fathers of Agile started experimenting with its principles and practices back in the ‘80s, when the problem they faced was how to provide a software production team with a more sensible way to develop code and deliver actual value to the stakeholders.The second wave of Agile, a couple of decades later, was about scaling the production beyond one single team (we are still in that wave).The third wave of Agile, which just recently started and went well beyond the realm of IT alone, finally realized that true agility can only be achieved when: 1) it’s adopted, in context-specific ways, throughout the entire organization and; 2) it includes the way the organization interacts with its market and environment (call it Business Agility or any other similar term).What we are seeing today in the most innovative organizations, even outside of the IT industry, is that the underlying values and principles of agility are applied with an holistic approach to all organizational functions (finance, marketing, HR, operations, governance, procurement, production and so forth).We also seeing how the organizational structure itself and the style of leadership in these organizations have evolved, to be consistent with the way agility works and delivers on its promises.I know quite well from my experience with clients (working with tech teams, design teams, program and project managers, executives, HR, finance) and from helping them to rethink and restructure the way their organization works, that there are many challenges that an organization has to face to make this transition — and many pitfalls as well.Among the different challenges (learning new skills and practices, descaling processes, decentralizing decision making and accepting inherent uncertainty, just to name a few) one that is often overlooked is how to change the perception of the organization itself, so that it can become a 21st-century, adaptive organization.In fact, while “traditional” organizations revolved mainly around production — and were therefore perceived through that set of lenses — adaptive organizations include continuous organizational learning and high-efficiency collaboration as part of their operational DNA and of their long-term sustainability and success.Therefore, one critical question is: how can we help people shifting their perception of “what needs to be done” considering three different but interrelated dimensions? And what are the practical implications of this?In this session I’m going to share some of the lessons I’ve learned while helping companies to rethink themselves. I’m not going to provide recipes or instructions (I don’t believe those can be replicated in a different context). Rather, I’d like to share the challenges that we encountered and talk about how the way we faced them helped the organization to grow into an adaptive one.I’d also like to provide food for thought that might, hopefully, help executives, managers and leaders move in the direction of agility with a clearer sense of direction and with more realistic expectations.

Aristotle as Manager, and Nietzsche as Managing Director. Ancient and modern philosophy for the companies of tomorrowToday's work is highly present in everyday life. We are always connected with peers, partners and customers. And we are costantly thinking in order to innovate, to create and find solutions, and to find better ways to working together.Everybody is saying that people must be the most important key in our companies. Never like before we're surrounded by practices that aims to foster involvement, inclusion, motivation and growing passion of individuals and groups. All these knowledge is built on our modern thinking: management, economy, psychology, and it seems a neverending quest. But guess what? We are forgetting our roots. The history's wisest thinkers still can provide us simple ideas and strategies that we could apply to both life and work.Since Aristotle, the search keyword of mankind is "happiness". What is happiness: pleasure, peace or having chance to participate in something fullfilling? Can we find Truth, Beauty, Virtue and Spirit in our companies? Being able to retake this quest in our companies can give new energy to the business, reinvigorate the cooperation and creating more value.There's no need to anything new, because it has already been said, and it still works.