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“Got no Product Owner… What to do? .”

Product Owner is the helmsman of your galley. You can have the best rowing team ever, but if helmsman fell overboard, you will never get to the port! What do…? Story from trenches.

What are the strengths of agile development? How does a Product Owner contribute to those? What if a PO is not performing? Or can not scale? Or is altogether absent?

This is the real world story of our company, where through necessity we were forced to dissect and replicate the functions of the PO through a gamified voting process of direct stakeholders. More details and takeaways inside!

BIO: Filips has been a Scrum master and team lead for longer than is probably healthy.

To secure your spot, go ahead and register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/agile-saturday-xiv-registration-44994750510 

“Automated tests.”

Agile is just a buzzword without technical excellence. Automated tests is the only effective way to assure that you are delivering WORKING software.

BIO: Agile software developer, creator of selenide.org

To secure your spot, go ahead and register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/agile-saturday-xiv-registration-44994750510 

“Visual thinking as a tool for productive conversations, meetings and processes.”

From this hands-on session you will get to know why, how and where to use visual thinking and practices. I will enhance your skills to doodle and give you a courage to use it in your professional life. After that you just fall in love with visual thinking and ask yourself “How did I even live without it before?”

Visual thinking is a tool for everybody who needs masterfully and visually communicate important messages, enhance meetings, project works and the creation of strategies. If you need to provide overview and shared understanding for teams and groups in all sizes, collaborate purposefully, communicate effectively and navigate in complexity then this session is for you!

A good leader must have the ability to create a free and open environment for dialogue where truly meaningful conversations take place. Nowadays we have less and less time for that cos there is so much information around us and problem-solving seems to become more complicated. It is therefore many leaders around the world have started not just to improve their conversation skills but also their visual abilities. Graphic facilitation is the practice of using words and images to create a conceptual map of a conversation. It is both process and product.

It is a great tool for making cooperation, processes and learning visible, to harvest, to see the common understanding and results. Pictures make people talk, share, ask questions, collaborate and, most important, understand and participate. The main emphasis of the session is to encourage the participants to draw and use simpler drawing techniques in professional life. Additionally, we learn to piece the drawings together in strategic contexts, how a picture can support important texts and how to create complete visuals- the templates.

Templates are the most interactive way of using visual facilitation. Templates are something that invites people to collaborate and participate. Can you imagine the situations where you want to do a project or a strategy but it is so complex that your team member just don’t get the whole picture.

Then you take a big paper and fill it with all of the elements with a lot of white space for everyone’s contribution. First- people start to see the overview, second- they can understand the structure, patterns and how things are connected. And third- they can start to fill it with their own ideas. What could be more fun and inclusive!?

BIO: I help people to fulfil their dreams. For that I teach them how to bring structure to their ideas by using simple pictures. One of the great missions in my life is to help people to find the courage to doodle in their professional life. I live in South-Estonia with my family. I am entrepreneur who dreams a lot but always asks how to make the dream come true. I love teaching and using visual thinking cos this tool and mindset helps me the most. I have made some books and have performed in TEDxTartu and many conferences in Estonia.

To secure your spot, go ahead and register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/agile-saturday-xiv-registration-44994750510 

“Scaling agility in organizations – the big, the small and the in-betweeners .”

Can agility scale in organizations, and does size matter? LHV will share their experience in launching an agile startup-like new business venture in the UK in rather unsteady pre-Brexit times.

Last month, LHV launched their new business venture in the UK. As a new generation influencer bank, LHV will start integrating and linking together traditional banking with emerging financial services and fintechs. This requires a large amount of agility and flexibility from the organization and the team, as well seeing and leveraging opportunities in unexpected places and in seemingly less than perfect circumstances. The UK is a rather unpredictable business environment due to obvious Brexit concerns. This can bring about challenges that require adapting to constantly changing conditions and having a personalized approach to your customers.

Starting a new UK venture right before Brexit means swimming upstream when everybody is going with the flow or avoiding Britain altogether. Taking full advantage of the robust growth in the UK fintech sector can only be done with an agile startup mindset as well as business development process that allows rapid adjustments if and when needed. More than anything, launching LHV’s UK business resembles more to launching a startup within an already successful company, than a traditional corporation merely extending their operation across borders. During the session, we’ll explain how we apply agile business modeling in launching and developing our UK business and describe the obvious and less obvious challenges we are facing and overcoming.

Agility is not only for small businesses and startups, it’s a mindset you can take upon in all aspects of your business, teams, and organization as a whole. Agility is scalable, it’s for smaller and bigger companies alike, and for anyone who feels they’re in-between – hustling their way to growth and success. LHV’s UK business demonstrates well how bigger companies can leverage agility not only to grow their already existing business but also launch new ones and explore exciting unknown territories.

BIO: Liisa is the UK Product Manager for LHV, the biggest domestic financial group in Estonia. She has extensive experience in digital marketing and advertising, having held positions in media companies as well as agencies in the past. It is not her first PM role in LHV, she has previously also managed LHV’s integration of internal tools as well as client onboarding. Technology has always been in the center of Liisa’s work and continues to stay close to her heart.

To secure your spot, go ahead and register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/agile-saturday-xiv-registration-44994750510 

“Mob programming.”

“All the brilliant minds working together on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and at the same computer”. How we transformed as a team by working together on everything.

1. What is mob programming. Woody Zuill, co-creator of Mob programming calls it “All the brilliant minds working together on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and at the same computer”. It’s basically a “whole-team” approach to teamwork in software development.

2. Why The team’s technical lead found an article about mob programming and shared it with the rest of the team. The team has always been open to try new things and was already familiar with Scrum and Test Driven Development, so they decided to give it a try. At that time the team consisted of 3 persons, the technical lead himself and two other developers.

3. How we got started The team read up on the guidelines of mob programming, booked a conference room and identified a reasonably short user story. The user story was a new feature, part of the code-base they were already very familiar with. They wrote down a plan on how to implement the new feature and took turns at the keyboard.

4. How mob programming changed the team’s process The team followed their regular process, which had the following steps: Todo, In Progress, Code Review, To Test, Done. When they got to the Code Review step, they noticed they had already been code reviewing the code together from the very beginning. They had also been testing the new feature (both with TDD and manual tests), so the Testing step didn’t make any sense either. So they merged the work, deployed the new feature and moved the user story straight to Done. This allowed them to streamline their process where they now only have 3 states: Todo, In Progress and Done.

5. Strategies for working as a mob The talk will cover various strategies for reducing distractions, increasing focus and dealing with exhaustion from too much uninterrupted focus.

6. Learnings from Mob Programming The team will share practical learnings they made, which any team can learn from, even when not doing Mob Programming. The team was also fortunate enough to grow by 2 developers since starting mob programming, so will share how mob programming allowed new developers to adapt easily and even learn TDD in record time.

7. Manager’s perspective Finally we will add a short insight from the manager perspective, on how mob programming actually made the manager’s life easier, all while giving the team more freedom and autonomy.

BIO: CTO at Vaimo. Background as a Backend Developer. Worked with various teams in Vaimo from Product to Hosting to Internal Tools. Focussed on developing Continuous Delivery capabilities within Vaimo.

To secure your spot, go ahead and register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/agile-saturday-xiv-registration-44994750510 

“How to be an effective Agile change agent.”

You have experience in Agile methodologies, corporate change initiatives and want to take your Agile success to a new level. Either expand it further in IT or involve more of the business. Perhaps even make the whole organisation Agile. How should you go about it in a non-naive way? How can you find some contextually appropriate ways to move your organisation forward? Depending on the nature of your context and environment​,​ different parts of the Agile methodology ​are appropriate​ (but not sufficient)​.

This talk will help you choose ​a ​contextually appropriate approach. We will look at complexity theory to understand how to​ look at systems and environments ​and to act in​ a contextually appropriate way to avoid running fools errands and to pick the battles that can be won with the right tools.

– Do-s and Don’t-s of organisational change

– “Agile wars”: One process to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.

– BizSecDevOps? – Achieving organisational change or “transformations”

– Scaling the “what” before understanding the “why”

– Unintended consequences – Making change stick.

– Leading the unleadable.

– No innovation with Best practice imitation.

BIO: I help organisations improve performance.

To secure your spot, go ahead and register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/agile-saturday-xiv-registration-44994750510 

“What are you prepared to give up? – A story about the agile transformation of ING Netherlands”

ING Netherlands was one of the first corporates in The Netherlands, and one of the first banks in the world, to adopt agile ways of working throughout the entire organisation. The transformation took place 9 months after it was thought of, in big bang style for 2,500 employees at the head office of the bank.

So what happened? Why did it work where previous attempts failed? What did we learn & what are our struggles of today? Most importantly if you want this for your own organisation: what are you prepared to let go?!

Jelmer Koekkoek has been part of the transformation process as an agile coach, and will share the exciting journey of a traditional bank transforming into what became a case study for corporates all around the globe.​

To secure your spot, go ahead and register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/agile-saturday-xiv-registration-44994750510