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Platform

Lindsay Baker

Agile principles and practices present opportunity to truly embrace the strengths of diverse cognitive styles. Creating an inclusive environment, which enriches team dynamics and empowers the collective capability is integral to building teams with the diversity of thought, skill and experience to succeed in delivering valuable software products & services. In this meet up we will explore what neurodiversity means and look at opportunities to recognise the strengths and needs of individuals in teams. I will share some of my experiences as a neurodiverse colleague. Moving away from working patterns that contribute to burnout, the two sides of emotional hypervigilance and overcoming the overwhelming concern that I may lose all my words when presenting to large groups of people (still working on this one!) We will explore ways we can overcome barriers to inclusion by sharing practical tips and strategies across our community, focused on leveraging strengths and building collaboration

Embracing Neurodiversity in Agile Teams

Catherine Bonner

Great public speakers aren’t just born that way…it’s a skill that can be learned, developed and honed. In a tech landscape where sharing ideas, concepts and opinions is integral to your success, developing your ability to connect, engage, and inspire an audience is a great way to further your career. Our new Public Speaking Partner, Catherine Bonner from Ambient Tribe, shares practical tools and techniques to up your presentation game, whether you’re just starting out, refining your skills or preparing to speak on the main stage.

Build and Refine Your Public Speaking Toolbox

Our May Agile Yorkshire meetup is set to be a vibrant and enlightening gathering, featuring two engaging talks. Lindsay Baker will delve into "Embracing Neurodiversity in Agile Teams," offering a fresh perspective on team dynamics. Catherine Bonner's session, "Build and Refine Your Public Speaking Toolbox," promises to equip attendees with essential communication skills. It's an ideal opportunity for those looking to spice up their professional toolkit while keeping the vibe light and engaging. We'll be announcing more details about Catherine's involvement in due course, keep an eye on our news feed and socials. 

2024 May Meetup

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Sharon Dale

I have spent the last ten years working with agile teams in a variety of roles with remits as varied as supporting stakeholders new to agile, user centred, design led ways of working, building effective teams, building capability for service owners in government, supporting teams to build out a service for a new policy area with multiple parties from agencies, contractors, policy team and other departmental stakeholders plus a bit of delivery. This is a run through of my go to techniques to influence and inspire.

The Things I Go Back To When Working With Agile Teams

Lauren Ackroyd

Have you considered disrupting your ways of working to improve your teams? I want to talk to you about how as Scrum Masters, in many cases, our focus is on improving our teams, how we can change them, how we can experiment with them, how we can make them more efficient whilst delivering more value, and whether you could make a greater impact by changing that focus.

It's Not You, It's Me

Hello Agile Enthusiasts! Summer's here, and so is our next Agile Yorkshire Meetup! We're thrilled to invite you to our July gathering for an evening of inspiration, learning, and camaraderie. Gain practical insights and techniques from our industry experts that you can apply directly to your teams, connect with like-minded professionals and build your agile network. Plus, relish in delightful refreshments, city centre venue and snacks that will keep you energised throughout the evening. Don't miss out on this opportunity to learn, network, and have a great professional time of agile awesomeness! 
Looking forward to seeing you there.

2024 July Meetup

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Robin Hackshall

"The only constant in life is change." - Heraclitus Change within organisations is often driven by the need to adapt to evolving market conditions, technological advancements, and competitive pressures. Despite knowing that change is always likely to be 'hiding around the corner', it is often disruptive and can be challenging to deal with. In this short talk, we begin to investigate the problems associated with change and the impact that change initiatives can have on organisations, teams and individuals. This will lay the foundational 'building blocks' for a longer interactive workshop in July where we look to demonstrate how the emotions felt by individuals when change occurs and explore the techniques that could be used to contribute towards successful change initiatives.

The Problem With Change

Vernon Richards

How I Think Quality Engineering, Glue Work And Quiet Quitting Are Related and what we can do about it!

How We're Setting Up Qes To Fail

Agile Yorkshire's June Meetup is here! With expert speakers Robin Hackshall and Vernon Richards with an exploration into the complexities of organisational change and the hidden pitfalls facing quality engineers. Robin's talk on "The Problem With Change" will shed light on why transformations often falter, while Vernon's "How We're Setting Up QEs To Fail" will uncover the challenges in quality engineering roles. Join us for an evening filled with knowledge-sharing, networking.

2024 June Meetup

Flutter HQ

Matthew Skelton

In this talk, Matthew Skelton - founder at Conflux and co-author of the book Team Topologies - explores techniques and metrics to help you untangle your software delivery, together with real-world examples of organizations successfully applying Team Topologies and related approaches to decouple teams and improve flow: Independent Service Heuristics (ISH) User Needs Mapping (UNM) The 4 key metrics (DORA) Flow efficiency and proxy measures.

Untangling software delivery with Team Topologies, flow metrics, and careful decoupling

Supporting presentation TBA

Welcome to the September edition of the Agile Yorkshire community of practice meet up! We are thrilled to announce that this month's gathering is going to be something truly special. We are super excited to have Matthew Skelton, the co-author of the best-selling book "Team Topologies," as our headline guest speaker.
"Team Topologies" has made a significant impact in the world of delivery management, earning its place as #3 on the "100 Best Product Management Books of All Time" list. Matthew Skelton's insights into optimising team structures and dynamics are invaluable for anyone involved in delivery organisations, whether you're working at the team level or influencing organisational change.
Don't miss this chance to learn from one of the leading voices in the field and connect with fellow Agile enthusiasts. We look forward to seeing you there!

2024 September Meetup

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Amy Thompson

These days there are becoming less 'Agile Transformations' from scratch and more 'Agile Aversion' due to previous failed and expensive attempts. This talk will explore how and why Change Strategies go so wrong and offers practical steps to get back on track with positive business change approaches that apply to everyone in the organisation.

Reagility: How To Fix a Broken Agile Implementation

Andy Burgin

The DevOps and SRE community is focusing on product-focused platform teams, managing platforms, pipelines, and tooling as products to speed up development and reduce complexity. This shift brings renewed attention to Developer Experience, with industry experts debating its definitions and benefits. As a Platform Engineer, how can you enhance speed for your customers? Which aspects of Developer Experience matter, and how do you curate a successful experience? What works, what doesn't, and how do you measure success? Andy, part of the Container Platform squad at Flutter UK and Ireland, has been involved since its inception in 2016. In 2019, he was asked to lead a newly formed Platform Developer Experience team, ensuring a streamlined experience for developers across the business.

Curating a Developer Experience (for Platform Engineers)

Get ready for an action-packed August meetup with the Agile Yorkshire community! As we gear up for the excitement of the Olympics, we're thrilled to present our very own gold medal speakers, Amy Thompson and Andy Burgin.
Join us for an evening that promises to be as engaging as the games themselves, filled with valuable insights, practical advice, and maybe even a few laughs. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to learn from the best and get your Agile game to the podium!

2024 August Meetup

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Ian Carroll

The two questions that have haunted development teams since the beginning of 01/01/1970. In this session we explore the fear associated with deadlines, milestones, and commitments and how to turn this fear into positive focus to embrace the constraint.  We introduce a new estimation technique to help you to manage expectations more effectively.

How long will it take? How much will it cost?

John Le Drew

While business knowledge and domain expertise is useful and essential, is this only achievable with a 'single wringable neck'? What would happen if the whole team could be encouraged to take ownership of product direction?

This session looks at how we have often created dysfunctional relationships with our product owners through both the way we collaborate (or don't) with them and the language we use to talk about the role itself.

We will discuss questions like:
 - What is actually the role of the product owner?
 - Why do we discourage 'hero' developers but encourage 'hero' product owners?
 - How do we know what the right thing to do is?
 - Can the whole team engage in product ownership?

The product owner is an agile anti-pattern

One of the nice things to have witnessed over the last few years is the growing number of people regularly speaking on lean / agile topics across and based in the north of England. With a slight change to our normal format this months gathering is a showcase of talent with three speakers all from our region. 

Ian Carroll runs Lean Agile Manchester and we've been trying to coax him along for some time, John Le Drew ran an excellent session at Agile Yorkshire on safety a few months and hosts the Agile Path podcast and Ian Lister is making his debut appearance. Hope everyone is having a great summer and see you in a couple of weeks.


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Jutta Eckstei

The Remote Challenge - Agile Software Development

Team Interactions with Team Topologies

The Agile Yorkshire team are pleased to be able to bring you all the insights from our monthly event to the comfort of your home.

We’ve got some incredible speakers confirmed to discuss a topic that’s never been more relevant: keeping your distributed teams agile. 

Not only will attendees get a surprise delivery the week of the event, but we’re also running a short Kwizzbit quiz after the webinar for the chance to win a £25 voucher for a local independent of your choice. 

The quiz will test your knowledge of Agile practises, Yorkshire and some other random knowledge subjects thrown in for good measure.

Agenda
5.30pm - Welcome
5.45pm - First talk
6.05pm - Second talk
6.25pm - Agile Yorkshire Kwizzbit Quiz & Beers
6.45pm - Agile Yorkshire Quiz Winner announced & end

Agile Yorkshire Online - Agile Distributed Teams

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Malcolm South

Many teams estimate work to make development safer - to avoid committing to more than they can deliver. But safety features can be dangerous if not used correctly. I'll be looking at some of the ways estimates can be misused and what you can do about it.

Do Estimates Make Us Safer

Kev McCabe

In this talk Kev will cover the journey of Transformation from not only current places of work but also former. Looking at why they fail, and what the common themes are. There will be areas that you will see in your own organisation and this will be a change for people to share their views on the transformations they are on or have been on. 

How many transformations does one company need to become a continuous improvement organisation where the normal is transformation all the time, and not just BIG BANG FLOPs

1, 2, 3 Transformations More

Agile Yorkshire is back. We've had a few months off to recharge the batteries with everything in standby, but the boot loader has been re-invoked and we've spun up with a December event to round off the year. 

There's plenty of work going on behind the scenes to bring a great program of speakers for 2020 and we'll have more announcements to make soon.

We have two great presentations from two great speakers to top off the year and a great new venue in the William Hill offices in the St. John's Centre on Merrion Street in Leeds - register a place now, space is limited.

Transformations and Do Estimates Make us Safer?

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Mark Kirschstein

Far too often team retrospectives suffer from classic anti patterns, including but not limited to:

1. Unproductive/circular debate
2. Following the ideas of persuasive but incorrect team member
3. Implementing solutions that address symptoms not causes

This talk aims to improve your retrospective effectiveness by introducing thinking tools to combat these anti patterns.

Collaborative Logic Based Retrospectives

Steve Trapps

This talk aims to improve your retrospective effectiveness by introducing thinking tools to combat these anti patterns.

Far too often team retrospectives suffer from classic anti patterns, including but not limited to:

1. Unproductive/circular debate
2. Following the ideas of persuasive but incorrect team member
3. Implementing solutions that address symptoms not causes

We will consider:

- Why does this person view the scrum master role as not important?
- What can I do to change their mind?
- Why is it that you can go from one company to another and have different experiences of what a scrum master is responsible for?

I'll look at the different scrum master types I've experienced whilst working in different organisations and then compare the scrum master role to the Scrum Guide and what it says the role should do. 

The session will also cover my personal journey through the process of becoming a professional scrum trainer for scrum.org and how that experience helped me in responding to the email.

Dear Mr Scrum Master

Much of the value of our meetups not to learn about the theory of lean / agile product development but to hear from practitioners talk about their experiences putting theory into practice. Much of the value of experienced agile coaches come from their knowledge of what can work when and help an organisation see when something is likely to fail, saving time, disruption and ultimately money. 

Both our speakers this month fall squarely under the banner of experienced practitioners and both will be passing on their real world experience. As Peter Drucker said - Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

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Andy Butcher

Small companies can move fast and stay aligned because communication is easy with a small team. But as companies grow, communication becomes exponentially harder. A command and control, top-down hierarchy inevitably emerges. And to protect the culture, companies often adopt an ""internal marketing"" narrative which software teams can find disingenuous.

This talk is based on the challenges we've faced at Sky Betting & Gaming, which has tripled in engineering headcount over the last 3 years as we've become the number one sports betting company in the UK by customer volume. I'll explain why the concepts of choreography and orchestration apply to horizontally scaling an IT driven organisation, and how splitting into autonomous teams (with the right alignment and accountability) can create a workplace where you can get things done, and people feel excited and passionate about what they do.

Using Conway's Law to tackle the company scaling problem

Matt Skelton

For effective, modern, cloud-connected software systems we need to organize our teams in certain ways. Taking account of Conway&#39;s Law, we look to match the team structures to the required software architecture, enabling or restricting communication and collaboration for the best outcomes.

This talk will cover the basics of organization design using Team Topologies, exploring a selection of key team types and how and when to use them in order to make the development and operation of your software systems as effective as possible. 

The talk is based on the forthcoming 2019 book Team Topologies and first-hand experience helping companies around the world with the design of their technology teams.

Key takeaways:
1. Why using the “Spotify Model” of team design is not enough
2. The four fundamental team topologies needed for modern software delivery
3. The three team interaction modes that enable fast flow and rapid learning
4. How to address Conway’s Law, cognitive load, and team evolution with Team Topologies

Using team topologies for fast flow and organisation evolution

Small companies can move fast and stay aligned because communication is easy with a small team. But as companies grow, communication becomes exponentially harder. A command and control, top-down hierarchy inevitably emerges. 

And to protect the culture, companies often adopt an "internal marketing" narrative which software teams can find disingenuous.

Using Conway Law to Tackle Company Scaling Problems

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Royd Brayshay

A dive into some product development economics and tactical risk management that delivery teams might employ to improve their commercial effectiveness. Resources are never infinite and any marketplace is continually changing. 

Every delivery team works within a commercial context whether they are aware of it or not and can influence better delivery outcomes by thinking about their skill and experience as an asset and the business context as a design constraint. We'll be talking about real world examples throughout.

Using Technical Experience and Judgement to Commercial Effect

Jason Simpson

Engineering teams are often the furthest removed from the customer, especially as companies grow. Without the customer as the North Star, it is  easy for us to get carried away building over complicated solutions that are challenging to deploy, uses technology we cannot support and when finally delivered, does not have the desired customer impact. These are the fundamental reasons that over 50% of software built is never used. 

We’ve been there, we’ve lived the tale and can tell the story about coming out the other end. This talk intends to do just that.

Agile Puts Customers First, Why Don’t You?

A dive into some product development economics and tactical risk management that delivery teams might employ to improve their commercial effectiveness. Resources are never infinite and any marketplace is continually changing. 

Every delivery team works within a commercial context whether they are aware of it or not and can influence better delivery outcomes by thinking about their skill and 

Using Technical Experience & Judgement to Commercial Effect

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Tom Hoyland 

How would you build a team from scratch? What techniques would you use? What metrics should you respond to? In this talk you’ll see how we assembled a team, embedded agile values, a DevOps mindset and a clear purpose to create a squad with an infectious, high performing culture. 

We’ll demonstrate the coaching and visualisation techniques we used to reduce batch size and improve quality. You’ll see how to reveal ‘hidden’ product backlogs, make the invisible visible, and use domain driven design, theory of constraints and language to optimise team resilience.

Building and Growing an Agile Team

Jon Fulton

We hear much about the state of agile in 2019 - fake agile returns to waterfall and the resurgence of command and control. 

Jon will tell you a story about software delivery. It's a story of success against the odds by a great team. Jon hopes to restore your optimism as he tells you about 'The Art of The Possible'.

The Art of The Possible

How would you build a team from scratch? What techniques would you use? What metrics should you respond to? In this talk you’ll see how we assembled a team, embedded agile values, a DevOps mindset and a clear purpose to create a squad with an infectious, high performing culture. 

We’ll demonstrate the coaching and visualisation techniques we used to reduce batch size and improve quality. You’ll see how to reveal hidden product backlogs, make the invisible visible, and use domain driven design, theory of constraints and language to optimise team resilience.

Building and Growing a Successful Agile Team

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Mark Stringer

In this talk I examine the powerful reasons why most projects are perceived to be late and over-budget and suggest, possibly controversially, that this is probably going to be the default state for most software projects for a long time to come. 

I then go on to suggest some strategies for continuing to deliver value to customers on late and over-budget projects whilst at the same time easing the stresses and pressures on developers and project managers and allowing them to feel they are doing a good job.

Overtime and Overbudget

Agile project management methodologies and agile project management books give the impression that if you follow their recommendations and implement their practices your projects will be on-time and to budget. However, my own experience is that most projects, even if they are good examples of Agile project management practice, are still perceived by most of the people involved, and especially by customers and stakeholders, to be late and over budget.

Why should this be? Why does being late and over-budget feel so bad? What can we as developers, project managers and even customers do to make the situation better? 

When a Project is Overtime and Overbudget

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Over 3 months John recorded over 60 hours of interviews and spoke to some of the most respected people in the industry to produce an audio documentary that attempts to answer the question “What is safety? And why is it important anyway?”.

This highly interactive talk will present the findings and guide and challenge you through a journey to understanding safety. 

This talk has grown as John created the new podcast The Agile Path. The first season on this podcast is about safety in teams. John has interviewed world renowned specialists in the field Christopher Avery, David Marquet, Jerry Weinberg, Esther Derby, Johanna Rothman, Woody Zuill and many more in over 60 hours of audio. 

This has been a fascinating deep dive learning experience for John and he hopes to explore these insights with the audience.

Swearing, Nudity and Other Vulnerable Positions

Chris Cheadle

Towards the end of last year, we decided to remove as many constraints as possible and let our let team at NHS.UK work on what they wanted for 2 weeks. 

We borrowed the idea, and the name, from GOV.UK but of course they weren't the first and won't be the last.

 This is our story. What worked, what didn't, what we will do differently next time and why we think you might want to consider one where you work.

Firebreak Tall Tales - A Break From Routine

This month John Le Drew, host of the Agile Path podcast is previewing his talk about safety - and it looks great. 

Also, Agile Yorkshire regulars Sean Craig and Chris Cheadle will be presenting an experience report on an innovation experiment they ran within the NHS. 

They'll be sharing their insight - warts and all.

Swearing, Nudity and Other Vulnerable Position

David Harper

An engaging, witty and at times irreverent look at why ‘the Grown-Ups’ in Board Meetings and Steering Groups make the decisions they do. And how they all love Agile – until it requires a big decision! By taking us on his own unique journey from IT Coder to CIO, David shares his own techniques on how to survive in the Boardroom as the ‘IT Guy’ representing Agile projects, and how his own adversity has unlocked a fear he has held since childhood.

For anyone frustrated by the apparent lack of understanding of Agile in the Boardroom or mystified by the Waterfall or Fragile decisions that often come back – this is the session for you!

It's Alright for You, You've Had Cancer!

A treasure trove of simple, practical methods to stimulate critical conversations and liberate the full potential of any group, from the frontline to the C- suite.""Cheryl M Scott – Global Programs Senior Advisor, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

What would be made possible if you could unleash the intelligence and creativity of everyone? Liberating Structures are a collection of easy-to-learn facilitation patterns that make this possible. They're field tested, rooted in complexity science and freely shared under a creative commons licence.

In this short session, participants will gain practical hands-on experience of at leas one Structure, and an appreciation of some of the possibilities offered.

How might we involve and unleash everyone?

We're back after two months off with two great speakers and two great topics. 

David Harper reflects on his former role as CIO to give a sneak peek into boardroom IT decision making and Sharon Dale will throw some light onto the Liberation Structures body of knowledge. Plus the venue is back at the Platform office above Leeds train station.

It is also that time of year where we start thinking about our annual Lightning Talks Competition that we have held as our December meetup for a good number of years now. We'll be announcing the CALL FOR SPEAKERS in the next few days, so get your thinking caps on!

How Might We Involve & Unleash Everyone?

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Matt Barnaby

Times are hard in public services. An increasing demand for providing services to the most vulnerable members of society is being undermined by crippling bureaucracy, continuous budget cuts, increased stress and 'more for less' as a mantra. In fact, times are really hard! How on earth do services cope with change? For years Basis (a RedQuadrant Company) has been helping public services to 'change the change', to do 'it' differently. You guessed - we use agile to do it differently. How do we do it? Come and find out. Our session is going to walk through a number of cases where we have 'changed the change'. We have delivered savings of millions, dramatically improved social care practice whilst making savings, and engaged staff in re-developing their own mental health services to halve the customer journey time whilst boosting quality.

We intend to demonstrate how progressive prototypes are so much more beneficial to delivering the right thing sooner (which might not have been what they thought they wanted, right?) and how self-organising cultures maximise the use of agile.
We also like to play games so come prepared, you might need to get creative (or lose some clothing!)


Changing the Change: Agile in Public Services

Joe Stead

I've spent a large chunk of my career working on greenfield projects, the promised land. All of the projects faced different issues, and we worked towards coming up with different solutions. 

The promised land wasn't all it's cracked up to be. Recently, I've spent a lot of time working on legacy projects, bringing them into the modern world. Again, these projects aren't perfect and presented a whole variety of different issues. Let's explore the types of projects, and decide which is better: Greenfield, or Legacy.

The Trials and Tribulations of Greenfield vs Legacy Projects

The cost of public services are in constant scrutiny and anyone who's worked on a public sector software project knows there is plenty of room for doing things differently if there is a motivation to do so, saving enormous amounts of money in the process. 

Some of you will remember Martin Sumner speaking at Agile Yorkshire back in January 2015 comparing the NHS Spine 1 project with the Spine 2 project. The former a traditionally procured and run waterfall affair requiring hundreds of outsourced consultants and lots of expensive proprietary hardware and the second a pilot for an agile approach employing a tenth of the resources and taking significant advantage of low cost, open source infrastructure. 

In a non IT context Malcolm Gladwell's much discussed 2006 article in the New Yorker Million-Dollar Murray challenges the accepted approach to dealing with the homeless with a system thinking eye that should be familiar to us in the agile community. 

This month Matt Barnaby will share his thoughts on doing this differently in the public sector in our main speaking slot followed by Agile Yorkshire regular Joe Stead's reflections on working with new and existing product code bases. 

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Karl Scotland

Learning is a key part of both Lean and Agile. Learning about customer needs and how to most effectively meet those needs. But as well as learning how to solve today's problems, we need to be able to solve tomorrow's problems, and next weeks, and next years. We need to learn how to learn. And we want all that learning to be aligned towards the addressing the same critical challenges or opportunities. That requires leadership to create an environment where experimentation is encouraged.

This talk will explore how Strategy Deployment can be used lead lasting learning and introduce some tools and techniques which can help achieve that goal.

Leading Lasting Learning: Becoming a Lean Enterprise with Strategy Deployment

Ian Thomas

Extreme programming kickstarted a lot of what we consider the modern agile movement, but many of its practices often fall by the wayside due to the high discipline required to implement them. 

This talk looks at the "you aren't gonna need it" principle and how engineering teams often find themselves walking the fine line between gold plating and unstructured bloat in their delivery of software. Using real-world examples from recent work, we will look at how YAGNI can help (and hinder) our efforts to deliver the best software for our customers.

Does anyone remember YAGNI?

Over the years Agile Yorkshire has been for fortunate in hosting some of the industries most experienced practitioners and this month is a prime example. Karl Scotland has been sharing his insights and experience through his blog and speaking at conferences for many years. 

He played a fundamental role in contributing and popularising the Kanban body of knowledge in it's early days and continues to do so. Ian Thomas brings his experience as an architect at one of our regions largest technology businesses to reflect on some of Extreme Programming's fundamental principles through real world examples.

Becoming a Lean Enterprise with Strategy Deployment

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One of Agile Yorkshire biggest strengths is hearing real life stories and insights from experienced local practitioners. When these stories are shared they a substantially more valuable because they are told along with the circumstances and context within which they relate. 

Our speakers this month are two excellent example of this. Laurence Wood explores trust between delivery teams and their customers who may often have been used to working with teams delivering in in a traditional project manor with large batches of work and limited or no iteration. 

Believing in iterative product development often needs to be seen before it is believed. Andy Butcher digs into the emotional attachment that can grip teams and trick them into delivering the wrong thing with frustrating outcomes.

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Agile

Yorkshire

About the Agile Yorkshire Community

The Organisers

Royd Brayshay

Past Speakers

Lindsay Baker

Catherine Bonner

Sharon Dale

Lauren Ackroyd

Robin Hackshall

Vernon Richards

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