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Cocoon Projects – Liquid Organizations: anti-fragility beyond design.

During more than 100 years of classic management, hierarchy oriented organizations have shown their limits.

A new generation of enterprises is now moving its first steps towards a brand new way to organize and prosper.
Liquid, collaborative, flat, responsive, adaptive and anti-fragile: these are just buzzwords as long as alibis keep hanging around.

Based on our real experience, we present a workshop to involve audience while experimenting with new ways to set an organization up.

Improving the full value chain

Making products fly involves more than just the development team. So how do we involve, intract and improve with the non software parts of the value chain? Let me walk through lean techniques and thinking that helps drive improvements across organizational borders. I’ll share experiences and examples from real case studies where they have been put to use.

Bio:
Sun Tzu once said the ultimate responsibility of generalship is maneuver into a position of success.
How do we do this in software? This is my quest.
I work as a Lean and Kanban coach, growing people and systems to create great products – while having more fun doing it.
I’m an author of the book ”Kanban and Scrum, making the most of both” and regularly train and coach in Lean, Kanban and TDD.
http://blog.crisp.se/mattiasskarin

Agile adjustments

Examining real world examples of adjusting the agile methodology. Adjusting the overall agile process based on project and client variables

Cross Enterprise Collaboration

Service outsourcing is a business paradigm in which an organization has a part of its business process performed by a service provider. Process views are pivotal to support this way of working. A process view shields secret or irrelevant details from a private business process, thus allowing an organization to reveal only public, relevant parts of its private business process to partner organizations. This presentation introduces a specification framework to support service outsourcing using process views. To enable the construction of process views at various levels of detail, the framework defines several projection relations between process views and the underlying internal processes. To allow consumers and providers of process views to establish an outsourcing relation, the framework defines several matching relations between the respective views that are comprehensive and flexible for service outsourcing

Alex Norta,Tallinn Technology University, Estonia: Alex Norta is currently a research member at the Faculty of Informatics/TTU and was earlier a researcher at the Oulu University Secure-Programming Group (OUSPG ) after having been a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He received his MSc degree (2001) from the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria and his PhD degree (2007) from the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. His PhD thesis was partly financed by the IST project CrossWork, in which he focused on developing the eSourcing concept for dynamic inter-organizational business process collaboration. His research interests include business-process collaboration, workflow management, e-business transactions, service-oriented computing, software architectures and software engineering, ontologies, mashups, social web. At the IEEE EDOC’12-conference, Alex won the best-paper award for his full research paper with the title “Inter-enterprise business transaction management in open service ecosystems”.

Design up front is back!

Working software is an expensive way of getting user feedback when compared with role-play or design prototypes.

I will present practical examples from the domain of participatory and user-centered design in the context of product and service development. These include various kinds of prototypes, role-play, design games, and simulations.

The advantages of these methods include super-fast iterations, committed stakeholders, and ultimately better systems and cheaper IT acquisitions.

Real Options – Introducing Staff Liquidity

The key to making decisions is not how or what or why. The key to making decisions is WHEN to make them. Chris Matts will introduce Real Options, a decision making process based on financial maths and applied psychology. Now we know how to make decisions, Chris will show you how to make the right decision, especially when people don’t want you to.

We introduce staff liquidity, or how to make the most out of your team. It turns out that real options is something you always do when you manage staff liquidity in the right way. You will never think about management in the same way again.

Stay tuned for our biggest ever – 10th anniversary of Agile Saturday on 15th February!

If you have something interesting to talk about, then please let us know heldin.rikk@agile.ee !

Speakers (preliminary):

• Chris Matts (UK)
• Björn Kimminich (DE)
• Anton Keks (EE)
• Hanno Jarvet (EE)
• Alek Kozlov (EE)
• Marko Alas (EE)
• Marko Taippale (FI)
• Ari Tanninen (FI)
• Jacopo Romei (IT)
• Jaan Pullerits (EE)
• Mitchell Rankin (US)
• Tarkvara Kool (EE)
• Heldin Rikk (EE)

How to use  beta testing to widen DoD

Beta testing has been around for long time, but the world around has changed.
We develop software today very differently that we did 5 or 10 years ago.
On this presentation we look on how and if to have Beta testing on modern product developed using Agile methodologies.
I will provide information what Beta testing is and what are the important bits for running it on products running on fast pace.

20 developers, 3 countries, 1 service – a case study

TransferWise is a global foreign payments company that is moving 1M GBP a day. Our dev team went 3 to 20 in the past year, we span 3 locations, experiment a lot and are anxious to get things done. This puts pressure on efficient communication and strong practices.

This talk is a case study of the problems we have been facing and what have been our learnings. You should come if you’ve struggled with distributed teams, nurturing culture and/or fast-growing teams and have a nice chat with similar minds.

We have decided to become agile. What should we do next?

This is a question I hear quite often but it is impossible to pull out
a ToDo list with descriptions of steps that transforms your team into
an agile one. Instead of answer a number of questions arise – who is
this “we”? why it was decided to become agile? what do you know about
agile or what you think you know about agile? how you define “agile”?
It means that before any possible answer to a question what to do next
or advise how to continue we should have common understanding of what
agile is and means.

This session is targeting beginners. We speak about and discuss the
reasons what drives people and teams toward agile methodologies, what
should you think about before making decision about using (or not
using) agile methodology and what are the prerequisites of success
while adopting agile methodology.

What got you here, won’t get you there. Moving from a technical specialist to a leadership role

The reason for your promotion was your good work as a technical specialist. Having the most seniority makes also total sense why you were promoted to managing people. The new role came without a memo, manual or training.

•  What should you keep in mind while making the most in your new role?
•  What should you do differently?
•  How can you help a colleague in this position?- How to develop the necessary skills and competencies?
•  What are the typical problems of technical specialists in managerial roles and how to overcome them?

How we went AGILE in Nigeria?

For the last two and a half years Nortal ICT specialists have been flying between their homeland and Nigeria. One might wonder what are those guys and an Estonian ICT Company doing so far away from home in the middle of Africa.

In fact, Nortal has a team of experienced PFM-experts who are building up the Public Finance Management for Federal Government of Nigeria together with Hewlett Packard. The project has lasted a bit over two years now.

Although we had a ready-made software package (Nortal PFM) that covered most of the customer´s needs we still had to do a lot of customization work in a challenging and totally different environment compared to our home markets.

My presentation is mostly about our experience in Nigeria as well as interesting hints and tips on how to survive as a software engineer (Agile Management, Agile Software Development) in that part of the world.

Kristjan Haavik
Nortal AS
Responsible for Business Development in Africa

How to setup a 100 people IT company in one year

If you were asked in July 2012: “would you be able to recruit 100 IT specialists in Estonia in 1 year?”, what would’ve been your answer? Kühne+Nagel hired first employee to its IT Service center in Tallinn on 1st of August 2012. By the end of August 2013 number of employees reached 103.

Kühne + Nagel is a global logistics provider operating today in more than 100 countries, offering seafreight, airfreight, rail & road as well as contract logistics solutions for the industry segments FMCG, Industrial Goods, High Tech, Automotive, Retail, Oil & Gas and Pharma.

Communication grooming

Highly effective. Qualitative.  Incredibly fast. Transparent. These are the buzzwords that you usually hear when someone tries to sell you a “better” communication method. Instead of only throwing buzzwords towards you, we actually reveal the wisdom behind them.

During our talk we are going to tell you a couple of stories which share the same beginning but due to choices made along the way stories end up in totally different destinations. The stories are from everyday work environment where a bunch of people are coworking while sitting in different rooms. However, which tool creates a basis for communication that allows you to concentrate on your task at hand?  And also prevents from you becoming a call centre lady? In our company, Proekspert, we use Atlassian tools to rule our communication –  JIRA  issue tracker and Confluence wiki.
We award active participants with license packs which include 10 Atlassian Tools, so you can try these out yourself.

Advanced topics in Agile: Implementing Scrum in a project-based company

Some of the main Scrum goals are to be able to prioritize often and have less paperwork done. This contradicts with the project-based software development where project scope and deadlines are pre-defined and signed-off by customer. This session presents how Videobet has implemented Scrum in such an environment.
Agenda

• Agile Enterprise Patterns
• Project definition and how it collides with Scrum/Agile values
• The role of the Product Owner in a project-based environment
• The role of the Scrum Master in a project-based environment
• Scrum of Scrums!? Multiple concurrent projects management
• User stories, point estimation and velocity charts – are they relevant at all?
• In-sprint testers role vs. QA role
• Tools and infrastructure to support Agile transformation
• Q&A

Bio

Ethan Ram is the chief architect of Videobet, the Tallinn division of Playtech, developing one of the most advanced gaming platforms in the gaming market. Among his recent project he has led the Agile transformation of Videobet development and operations groups to work in Scrum. The project started late last year and is now past its climax. Before Videobet Ethan was working as the R&D manager of a web-based gaming startup where he transformed the development group to work in Kanban with Continuous Deployment environment.

Accelerating business growth by improving the Agile delivery of change.

The talk will appeal to delegates who work within an Agile environment, but want to understand more about the bigger picture of a company and how their contribution collectively moves a business forward. It will also be good for delegates who are new to Agile, or those who are thinking of introducing an Agile way of working and what to start off in the best possible shape.
The talk will be given by Clive Smith who is the Group CTO at MYJAR. Clive is experienced in delivering transformation to major financial services companies, such as Deutsche Bank, ING and Gazprom Marketing and Trading. The challenge in place at MYJAR is to lift the bar in Agile capability for this new way of working. It is needed to deliver the systems and process to grow the business by improving the customer experience and creating even more happy customers. Clive will discuss ‘why’ and ‘how’ you go about aligning the people and delivery engine with the vision and strategy of the company. This will then flow into ‘how’ you go about improving all aspects of Agile Project Management over a relatively short period of time to improve efficiency and quality of the deliverables.
MYJAR is a rapidly expanding company who ” responsibly provides small amounts of credit to a UK customer base”.. With a talented pool of enthusiastic and already successful people in Estonia, MYJAR is looking to further develop the company to be a leader in the short term loan market by keeping ‘customer centric’.

Enterprise Agility – do you really want this pain? …Why?

Common sense is not so common – last year I have noticed that agile methodology is becoming a mainstream. Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Cisco, or any other – just name it. All are saying that to be agile is important. Can you point at any of these big player that is still courage enough to say that they are doing waterfall? I haven’t seen these dinosaurs lately. So using the agile approach is a common sense, but is it really so common with these Big players? How they had embraced it? I don’t have much to report here. Last 3 years I’ve been very deeply involved as coach and trainer in Agile transition program at Skype. Global and fairly big organization been transformed from project focused organization to the product organization with 60 at the beginning and later around 140 component-based products, from more than 1,5 year product release cycle to 1 month release cycle. And I have to report that it was a pain… Pain of Birth! In this session you will not learn how to escape the pain of agile birth (if you are pregnant with the idea), but you can learn simple and common sense things that can surprise you unpleasantly if you have never heard about them. We will go through the mistakes we did, but also what helped us to win some (important, Enterprise wide) agile battles and to deliver great products. And we will have Q&A session to cover questions important to you. As a result you will be trained when to breathe and stay relaxed until your organization is really ready and all have to push to deliver proper Enterprise Agile.

Extend HTML, CSS and JS with AngularJS

Slow application reload makes for lagging frontend development. JSF rendering is clunky and no one wants to maintain the code. On the other hand pure HTML/JS/CSS written in a maintainable way is a pipe dream.

We need a MV* (Model View Whatever) that is testable and plays well with others. We filtered TodoMVC MV* frameworks down to two, and put them head to head.

AngularJS prevailed one sprint later. On the way, we ran into some pretty fabulous tooling and created some of our own. I’ll share best practices on how to extend the big three (HTML/CSS/JS) with AngularJS. Take a step towards frontend superheroism and maybe avoid stepping on your cape like we did.

Agile on Mars!

You are an expert in TDD & Pair Programming, hold a Scrum Master certificate and know the Agile Manifesto from heart? Then this talk is probably too basic for you! Everyone else in invited to jump head-first into a journey through space, learning about many core agile methods and concepts on the way, like: Iterations, User Stories, Planning Poker, Test Driven Development, Pair Programming, Collective Code Ownership, Continuous Integration and more! Our journey will end on Mars where we will use SCRUM to conceive, build and continually improve the first Mars Station of mankind! Well, at least sort off..

Level: Beginner

Beyond Value Streams: Experimental Evolution in Action

In their desperate search for a viable business model, Lean Startup entrepreneurs treat “learning” as a true measure of progress, well above the number of features they develop or even the amount of customers they initially acquire.In their path to continuous improvement, skilled A3 thinkers treat “learning” as a primary value too, well above the problems they try to solve.As a change management approach, the Kanban Method creates the conditions for many learning opportunities as well. It specifically encourages to “Improve Collaboratively and Evolve Experimentally”, a practice also fully embraced by what is now known as “Lean Change”.
In this session, Claudio will share stories, workflows and practical thinking tools that illustrate how the act of deliberately capturing and evolving “learning streams” (as opposed to – or rather in addition to – the more conventional value streams) can lead to surprising consequences.