Agile Australia Day 2024 - Day 2

Continuing the theme of recapping Agile Aus 2024, we started the day with a lot of inspiration, and yes, I will admit, a few tears—which was not what I was expecting!

Keynote – Are you drowning your autonomy in good intentions?

Sandy Mamoli
Nomad8

What a pleasure it was to watch Sandy Mamoli on stage to keynote Day 2. A long-time attendee and speaker at Agile Australia, she’s now a board member of the Agile Alliance, an impressive achievement, and on top of that a Keynote at Agile aus!

It was great to see her evolution into this powerful keynote, which starts with some disturbing observations. “Things have become worse” in the workplace: mental health, anxiety, fear, people complaining about management, learned helplessness. Anxious people cannot think creatively and are more prone to depression. Sandy tuned us into some harsh realities of our workplaces, where people using AI for ideation produce fewer, more mediocre ideas. It reminded me of a stat I had recently heard (although I can’t remember whether it was from a podcast, article, or talk!)—that code quality was measurably lower for those using Copilot. I need to find out where that stat came from because it stopped me in my tracks! While Sandy cautioned against ignoring AI, as some Agile coaches had recently done at a conference—writing it off as irrelevant to Agile coaching or ways of working—she suggested, conversely, that we should learn as much as we can about it. More on her talk found in this great article!

Sandy’s talk was inspirational, and a great reminder of where Agile coaches need to be operating. That is, getting leaders to let go. Sounds like a familiar theme to me! Sandy reminded me of the importance of accepting and embracing reality, and doing the hard work—doing one difficult thing every day.

Keynote – Getting to the Next Phase of Agile - FAST

Quinton Quartel

This keynote was fascinating to me, having been watching from a somewhat close distance the evolution of FAST Agile—Fluid Scaling Technology. We shared a link to a case study of FAST in a newsletter last year. I really like the FAST concept, although it’s still considered controversial and experimental in some circles—I know this because I’ve been in debates on various Slack groups about whether anything with such a fast cycle can result in stable, quality software. Learning more about FAST is easy; just visit Fluid Scaling Tech.

Highlights that intrigue me include the very fast cycles: for example, twice a week, the whole collective of software delivery folks gather and decide what to work on. They then choose what to work on for just a few days, before coming back together again and repeating the process. The premise is: “What if we used open-source techniques to solve Agile @ Scale?” It’s an excellent provocation and much more appealing to me than “What if we used a massive trademarked framework to scale Agile?” The first question creates curiosity, active problem-solving, and engagement. The second shuts down curiosity, requires us to follow heavy rituals and techniques, and makes me feel my engagement levels draining. But I digress! Quinton gave us an excellent digest of how FAST Agile works, and I was hooked. It also, somewhat coincidentally, links nicely to Sandy Mamoli, as one of the authors of Creating Great Teams – How Self-Selection Lets Teams Excel. Her approach provides many ingredients that would make FAST Agile a possibility in many environments.

FAST Agile will no doubt continue to gain interest as more people experiment with it, and will likely fuel some debate in the software community. But experimentation and debate are good things, wouldn’t you agree?

Keynote – Connecting Te Ao Māori with Agile - how values from the Māori world (te ao) can help create connection as leaders

Brian Osman
SoftEd

Wow, this keynote blew me away. Coming off the back of two decently long keynotes, it was a tall order—I almost left the room briefly, but I’m so glad I didn’t!

Brian Osman connected us impressively to his Māori culture by showing us how to create connection, and he did this by connecting powerfully with everyone in the room. “We are all in this together.” He shared an intensely personal story and then lifted us up by making a unified and connected space. A wonderful Haka rounded off the keynote and brought a tear to my eye. Imagine having this feeling in your teams at work?! What a storyteller Brian is!

The engagement spark: using NLP to ignite change

Lata Hamilton
Passion Pioneers

I caught Lata Hamilton’s talk on using NLP to ignite change. I did enjoy it, but I was standing at the back, so I took fewer notes! (By this stage, my nerves had started to build for my talk in the afternoon, so I was much less attentive during the midsection of Day 2—just being real here.)

Lata was an engaging speaker and did a great job of highlighting what many of us Agilists overlook—the importance of navigating the change we bring, and appreciating it from the individual’s perspective. There’s much we can learn from the Change Management community, and that’s coming from someone who used to dismiss these professionals somewhat. Hats off to Lata!

Regeneration not transformation

Genny &
Andrew Noble
Jetstar

It was a pleasure to attend this talk and to meet Genny and Andrew! I happen to know one of Genny’s team of scrum masters very well, and she came highly recommended as a fantastic boss. And that wasn’t the only reason to attend. Although it wasn’t in very large print in the program, Jetstar had applied a Team Topologies approach to guide and change their teams to a great outcome. Amidst the Covid driven challenge of going from 200 to 20 people overnight—(can you imagine?!) They then had to rapidly scale and adapt with a new organisational model.

Genny and Andrew gave an engaging and accessible guide to how they applied a Team Topologies approach, with some excellent tips and takeaways.

Team Topologies is an area of great interest to ReBoot Co., as we recently helped an organisation apply the approach. Similar to Jetstar, it worked very well, and we decided to partner with Team Topologies as advocates. It was great to hear that our experience wasn’t an anomaly and that success is being achieved via Team Topologies around the world. It’s no coincidence, as the approach and its applicability are more relevant than ever.

Frameless - empower your Agile transformation

Alex Stokes
Reboot Co.

It me!

I was delighted to see many familiar faces in the crowd and to give away copies of my book, which all went to folks I knew for answering a few Lean and Agile questions (looking at you, Emily Gloyns, Aurelien Marando, and Erik Peterson!). It’s always fantastic when people attend your talk to support you. It’s vulnerable to get on stage, and even though I’ve been speaking at conferences since 2009, it’s always a little scary—so having friendly faces in the audience is everything. Thanks to all the excellent pals out there from, Kmart, REA group, TAL, AIA, Envato, Auspost & ThoughtWorks. Stay tuned to our blog, as I’ll write up the Frameless talk in more detail in the coming weeks. The TLDR being: You don’t need a framework or a large consulting company to achieve successful transformation to better ways of working. Let me show you how.

I stopped taking extensive notes after my own talk, a combination of post-speaking adrenaline-spiked exhaustion and being two days into a densely packed agenda. By that point, my ability to absorb and make meaningful connections from presentations starts to wane, so I usually defer to socialising with people I know and love in the community—which is also a great thing to do at a conference.

Forging ahead: the unpaved road to Engineering Management

Javier Turegano
Canva

Approaching the end, I attended and enjoyed listening to Javier—my former REA Group colleague. He’s now Director of Engineering at Canva and has also worked at other digital household names like Slack. I’d say Canva is lucky to have him! He shared his journey from individual contributor to leader, and how he turned that experience into opportunities to teach and mentor many leaders stepping into engineering manager roles for the first time. Not all tech leaders find opportunities to give back to the community and multiply their effectiveness. I really like Javier's humble approach to his own leadership, which translated well to the stage in this talk, the lucky last I attended.

Agile Aus Retro

Finally, I joined in the Agile Aus Retro, a space where in-the-moment feedback and appreciation are collected. I’m always impressed by the Slattery team and their willingness to create this moment, especially when they must be at the end of their energy levels.

One hands-down winning factor was noted at Retro, the amount of energy and support Slatts and the community devoted to getting everyone’s talks in shipshape. It was great to see the results in terms of speaker ability, adherence to time, and the quality and preparedness of the talks. It’s rare to attend a conference where you can say that about every session you went to.

It’s always great to be in a group at the Retro, seeing what resonated with others at the conference. Shoutout to Elise Aplin—it was lovely to see her in Melbourne again.

Thanks to Slattery for putting on a great event for the Agile community in Melbourne. Long may it prosper!