James Scanlan - Enterprise Architecture VS Agile Delivery

A lack of trust within working groups and organisational teams can have disastrous consequences for many aspects of work that ultimately conspire to produce worse outcomes. Trust is a fluid ever changing thing that is much harder to get than loose. 

Laurence Wood ran an excellent, collaborative session to help discover how trust is formed, how it changes over time and what events or behaviours might reduce trust across teams and organisations.

Laurence Wood - How High Performing Teams Know More About Trust

Everyone involved with software product development can tell you about a project they worked on that they knew was going no where. They could feel the stakeholders' ambivalence or sense the lack of engagement from potential customers. As the team start to feel their work may be wasted, unease starts to build into a sense of foreboding as everyone waits for the inevitable crash.  

So how does that happen? and how can it be avoided? Andy Butcher's pitch for "*The Shit Nightclub Anti-Pattern*" is both funny and insightful as well as providing a cringing memorable metaphor to watch out for. 

Andy Butcher - Knowing When to Stop & The Nightclub Pattern

The NHS is a behemoth organisation by anyone's measure. Not only does it move medical mountains but requires IT solutions that support a scale comparable with any Silicon Valley unicorn. Historically many of these solutions have been procured through traditional contracts and relationships with the large outsourcing organisations we hear about in the media together with the vast sums of tax payers money that have been paid. 

These outsourced solutions we often mediocre in performance and in meeting business needs. This public sector culture of outsourcing often creates many problems through inflexible contracts, prescriptive ways of working and difficult to navigate hierarchies of responsibility. 

To move away from this means shouldering far more leadership responsibility than many contemporary public organisations have been used to. It takes management bravery or what some might call good old traditional leadership. Andrew Meyer and Gary Green talk about the change in operational style that has revolutionised recent NHS Digital IT delivery and in doing so begin to forge a new standard. 

 Andrew Meyer & Gary Green - Create a Dynamic & Innovative NHS

If you think of top performing teams as groups people who deliver high quality solutions over and over again in a time frame and budget that makes sense within their business context without disputes or drama while still enjoying their work and having a fun time you may also wonder if this can every be practically achieved in real life. 

Kev McCabe here talks about some core protocols that can contribute to high functioning behaviour with a delivery team and help keep delivery rate high while still maintaining respect and humane relationships within any team or organisation.

Kev McCabe - The Core Protocols for Shared Vision

Diversity has been talked about a lot over the last few years and is prominent in the news at the moment, we also know the IT sector and particularly software product development organisations are especially guilty of having a lack of diversity and the resultant influence this brings to product development and general team makeup.

The topic is wide reaching, obfuscated by cultural norms and not quick to fix. 

John Le Drew explores some of the issues, points out some personal gotchas and runs an experiment with magicians safe and some confectionery.

John Le Drew - Diversity, Chocolate and Safe Cracking

Change is a big part of the lean / agile culture either in the form of continuous improvement or continually adapting to customer needs or changing market conditions. Because of this we're all agent of change at some level. 

However, anyone who has tried to influence the actions of people around them, from a leadership role or not, will appreciate that resistance to change is alive and well in us all. It may be attractive to regard this as a failing of others, but people do things for a reason and those reasons are often deeply seated and long standing; probably built on past experiences and painful lessons. 

The lessons of our past are not likely to be swept aside easily. Jon Fulton asks us to consider this and question if we, as agents of change can do better and be less frustrated by the reluctance of other to follow our guidance. How can we become more effective as a result.

Jon Fulton - The Agents of Lean Change

Gary McAdam - How the MVP is Misunderstood, Misused & Abused

Andy Butcher - Agile Architecture at Company SkyBet 

Tom Hudson - Big Numbers and the 1Hz CPU

Sally Bridgewater - Agile ADHD: How Scrum Saved my Relationship

Geoff Bowden - The Future According Geoff Bowden

Eva Barabas - User Needs Lead Leadership

Brian Teeman - Web Would be Better if We All Spoke English

Changing the inner workings of the public sector has proven pretty difficult within the IT sector demonstrated by the succession of speakers we have hosted here at Agile Yorkshire. 

Matt Barnaby talks here to explain this isn’t an issue experienced by the IT community exclusively, but frustration is not failure and change is possible.

Matt Barnaby - Changing the Change with Agile in Public Services

Developers generally love the freedom of building greenfield projects. Unencumbered by past decisions and conventions engineers are free to try new things and take blank sheet approach to overall design. 

However they come with their own problems and new applications take a lot of time and effort to settle down and become both stable and loved by users. Legacy projects are far more common and often come as a tangle of code with an overall structure that may be obfuscated and where the hundreds of subtle fixes and micro business rules that are coded present and working are not obvious on casual examination. 

However with patience and discipline Joe Stead explains how they can be even more rewarding to tame.


Joe Stead - The Trials & Tribulations of Greenfield

Agile transformation is a stated goal for many larger organisations, whatever that actually means. But the world continues to turn and the business and technology landscape will always keep changing. 

This necessitates organisations to keep learning and adapting, a changes that is probably even harder to achieve in an institutionalised way. Karl Scotland has been talking about this challenge for many years now both at conferences around the world as well as his own website. 

He visited Agile Yorkshire to talk about some of his ideas and observations.

Karl Scotland - Becoming a Lean Enterprise with Strategy Deployment

The art of identifying what not to do or “the art of maximising the amount of work not done” as the agile manifesto describes it, is one the key secrets agile teams use to get things out of the door regularly. 

Trying to see the future and engineer things that you think may be useful in the future is one of the key risks that creep into projects. Everyone is guilty of this in some way and it requires honesty and discipline to fight against it. 

Ian Thomas lifts the lid on what goes on and what to avoid.


Ian Thomas - Does Anyone Remember YAGNI?

No one wants conflict in a team or organisation but it regularly arises especially during times of change and transformation. 

Understandably different people are invested in different ways within any team and changing the status quo can produce confusion and anger in all kinds of ways that may not have been envisaged. 

Adrian Frost and Ian Franklin bring complementary viewpoints and provide guidance that may help navigate some of these situations. 

Adrian Frost & Ian Franklin - Conflict Doesn't Mean Confrontation

Just because someone has sat through a two day workshop and holds a certificate issued by an agile training organisation doesn’t mean they now hold all the views and values that may help a team deliver in blissful harmony for years to come. 

People come in all shapes and sizes and bring the baggage and experiences from their past and being able to spot a few traits will always help understand your situation. 

Gwen Diagram deconstructs some team personality types and reflects on some recent career adventures that will strike a chord with many and help everyone. 

Gwen Diagram - T-Shaped Causing Strange Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde

Businesses need to judge how best to spend their money so they need to know costs and timelines. Only when software is finished and deployed does it start to save costs or generate revenue so, in general terms,  the longer it takes to create the poorer the investment. 

Forecasting the cost of software, though essential, is not straightforward. Building software requires lots of unpredictable problem solving and a large part of the agile body of knowledge describes tools and techniques to help with this. 

Ian Carroll walks through some of these issues and pragmatic ways to tackle them.

Ian Carroll - How Long & How Much will it Cost?

Scrum is pretty specific about defining the roll of Product Owner but in real life the roll of Product Owner seems to vary quite a lot across different organisations. 

It’s not clear why this roll is so misunderstood but the effectiveness of the Product Owner has a direct influence on the prevailing risks and the flow of produced value. 

John LeDrew discusses how some of these issues surface within teams and provides more food for thought on this issue.

John Le Drew - The Product Owner is an Agile Anti Pattern

Ian Lister provides a brief introduction to the Cynefin framework and how it can be useful as a thinking tool within the domain of software product development. The Cynefin framework can be used to help with decision making and understanding the system we may be working within. 

You aren’t going to walk away from this as a Cynefin expert but hopefully with a little more appreciation and some insights for further investigation.

Ian Lister - Ever Wondered Why the World Works?

Technology speakers have a mixed reputation when it comes to style and impact. 

For many IT professionals communicating abstract concepts is a vital part of their job and being effective as a speaker deserves as much attention as anything else. Developing these skills requires practice but some simple pointers can transform both the preparation and delivery of any technical presentation. 

Tells Stories Not Data is exactly what Ivor Tymchak does in this presentation to emphasise just how important a story is to any topic no matter how technical.

Ivor Tymchak - How to Tell Stories, Not Data

Commercial effectiveness with software product development is all about learning fast through user feedback and avoiding building the wrong thing. 

Anything that helps get something in the hands of a user or customer early can help reduce risk, save money and drastically improve project outcomes. 

Stew Able talks through his early experiences with the Amazon Platform as a Service technology stack and it's potential as an enabling set of tools.

Stewart Abel - Using AWS PaaS for an MVP

Reducing the quantity of work an organisation undertakes before releasing to live and starting something new is a foundation stone of agile effectiveness. 

It's the discipline that keeps work in progress low and risk well managed yet it's one of the things that most organisations struggle with. Culturally management teams may like big headline numbers and engineering teams squirm at the thought of reworking features only recently released. 

Never the less "right sized" work items keep the drama low. However breaking a complex product road map down into tiny increments of releasable value requires practice, creativity and willing collaborators. It can often be the single skill that marks out a predictable delivery team. 

Tony Heaps insights into splitting users stories here could literally move mountains - a tiny piece at a time.


Agile

Yorkshire

James Scanlan - Enterprise Architecture VS Agile Delivery

James Scanlan - Enterprise Architecture VS Agile Delivery

Agile

Yorkshire

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