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Agile Saturday XV – Maksims Yemeljanov (Accenture Latvia)

“General” Track (12:10) – Maksims Yemeljanov  (Accenture Latvia)

With topic:

“What it takes to be a Scrum Master in Baltics and not only with real life examples”

Short introduction about speaker:

I’m a Certified SCRUM Master and have more than 5 years as Scrum Master within multiple international start-ups. My expertise lies in establishing, improving and / or developing Agile practices, and my career of 15 years within operations management at major international companies enables me to add value very quickly within a Scrum Master role.

Topic Abstract:

I’ll plan to go into talking what it the core of the Scrum Master role

Speech will cover following topics:
1. What SCRUM Guide says about the role
2. What are general role expectations from various stakeholders: team. PO, organisation
3. Evolution and comparison of the role in Scaled environment: SAFe, Less, NEXUS, Tribes
4. Common anti patterns: with team, with management, organisation, recruiters
5. Career path: is Agile Coach role actually a next step for Scrum Master or the other way around?
6. Quiz

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Agile Saturday XV – Third keynote speaker !

Hi all!

We would like to introduce you our third keynote speaker of Agile Saturday XV – the event that will happen already in two weeks!

Our third keynote speaker is – Soledad Pinter and her topic will be –  “Heart of Agile”!

And there is short abstract as well:

“During the last 18 years, we have seen how agile has become more complex with frameworks and techniques, leading us to forget that underneath it all there are “simple” values and principles.

The Heart of Agile (by Alistair Cockburn), is a simplified approach to achieve effectiveness in your daily work and life whatever initiative you are part of. With just four words at the heart of agility and teamwork to describe it: Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect, Improve.

This session provides a practical and interactive view on how to use these basic elements from the Heart of Agile as guidelines to advance your practice. Hope that you take away a new approach and perspective to map your daily challenges in those four simple quadrants, along with new tools to probe with your teams.

Soledad is an agile consultant, coach and trainer with more than 20 years of experience and working in agile since 2006. She has given keynotes and orientations on practices and techniques related to the Heart of Agile on several continents, using an informal and interactive presentation style. Soledad is driven by her passion for helping organizations, teams and people to become better at their every day work. “

Soledad Pinter

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Agile Saturday XV – second keynote speaker

Greetings agile people!

Time flies and we are getting closer and closer to our next Agile Saturday XV.

Time to introduce our second keynote speaker!

Our second keynote speaker is Kaimar Karu and he will talk about
“Cynefin and sense-making in the digital world”.

Here is the abstract to get you curious:

Cynefin (meaning ‘habitat’ in Welsh) is a sense-making framework, developed by Dave Snowden, and used for improving situational awareness and helping with decision-making by managers and hands-on professionals in various industries, including IT. The framework differentiates between ordered and unordered systems and introduces five domains (simple, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder) that make it easier to identify the best next steps in any (challenging) situation.
The session introduces the basic concepts in Cynefin and describes its applicability to IT management and DevOps. We will cover the following:
– Supporting organisational change initiatives and transformation programs
– How to recognise your context and choose suitable methods
– How to make decisions in complex environments
– How to avoid ‘one size fits all’ approaches
– How to enable and support innovation
– How to support continual improvement

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Agile Saturday XV – First keynote speaker announced!

Agile Saturday XV is just around the corner. Time to introduce our speakers!

Our first keynote speaker at Agile Saturday XV on March 23rd will be… Vasco Duarte!
Actually, Vasco helped a lot our community and was the keynote speaker at the very first Agile Saturday whooping nine years ago. We are very happy to have Vasco together with us again.

Vasco will talk about that:
Agile Strategy – How to run an Agile business, a case study of 18 months of SAFe portfolio level implementation in the leadership team of a multinational company.

Here is an abstract to get you energised:
Your teams are Agile. You can even deliver software faster, but the business is still suffering? Do the teams claim that other departments are “behind” or “don’t get it”?
When companies start their Agile journey, they usually start from the IT corner, but that is not what Agile is about. The software is only a small part of the value customers get. We must also respond quickly to market changes, remove unnecessary costs, and focus on discovering higher value (higher profit, lower cost, market-centric, user-focused) products and services. The solution: be Agile about how you manage your company.
In this presentation, we walk through a 2-year transformation in a multinational mid-size company, which went from top-down waterfall-like portfolio planning to Agile Portfolio Management, the next wave of Agile.

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Filips Jelisejevs- Also Cloud Latvia

“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 

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Kati Orav- Creativity Catcher

“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 

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Liisa Schneemann- LHV

“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 

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Wilko Nienhaus- Vaimo

“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 

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Hanno Jarvet- Jarvet Consulting

“How to be an effective Agile change agent.”

Hanno JarvetYou 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 

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Eetu Kaivola- Siili Solutions OY (FIN)

“Challenging the Status Quo”

Growth relies on change and the primary driver for change is dissatisfaction with the status quo. What actually motivates you? Do we care enough? These questions are the bases for the train of thought when it comes to developing teams and yourself. There are impediments on this route, of course, and these impediments must be taken care of if we want to go forward.

This is a talk about challenging ways of working and Status Quo on every project and team. I try to point out that every one can and will be better in their daily work and they can turn negative emotions and Status Quo to a positive goal that drives them forward.

BIO: I’m is technology driven agile coach who likes challenges and challenging. Finding new solutions and keeping away from Status Quo are close to my heart. Working closely with Siilis junior consultants and functional programming.

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

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Jelmer Koekkoek- ING Netherlands

“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 

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Ethan Ram – Playtech

Was it Worth It? Measuring the Success of an Agility Project in Business Terms


Transforming a company that is working in “”traditional”” methodologies to “”Agile”” is expensive: management attention, overcoming change resistance, cost of consultants and time spent on re-education and training. Is it worth it? Measuring success in business terms is hard but may be crucial in management buy-in into executing an Agility project.

How will it improve the bottom lines? Can we expect more lines of code to be written by less developers? Can the success of an Agility project be somehow quantified?

This session looks at statistics gathered in my company – R&D, QA, Support, HR and Sales have all contributed their KPI graphs – to try and answer this question. I’ll be presenting some enlightening graphs of before and after a major Agility project that covered many aspects of the company operations. Trying to explain the change both in qualitative AND in quantitative measures. Hopefully, making a clear business case for going Agile.

1. Executive motivations in an Agility project
2. Short overview of the Agile path taken in Videobet/Playtech
3. Looking at statistics gathered in R&D, QA, Support, HR and Sales
4. Making the business case for Agility

Learning Outcome
a. Serve as an example for an executive level Agility project retrospective.
b. Can be used as a tool in management buy-in for a company-wide Agility project.

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.

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Priit Kaasik – FlowHow

Too many ways to improve Scrum? Take them all!

Many teams, from small to large, not familiar with incremental and iterative delivery methods, struggle with getting started, keeping the momentum and focusing at the right things. Right tools and technologies can help!

A brief summary of organisational development tools for improving the implementation of Scrum, complemented with a few real-life use cases, where these tools have been used in different organisations – number of teams involved, characteristics, effects, outcomes etc

BIO: 18 years in the field of international software industry, from small to humongous-sized companies. I have collected a few excellent achievements over the years, combined them with many more how-not-to experiences. During the last five years I have been focused on building tools of organisational development to smoothen the merger of technology and business.

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Jaan Pullerits – CyberCat Creations

Building microservices with Esticade framework

Easiest way to get started with microservices.
How to start using benefits of microservices without worrying about REST APIs, port mapping, configuring endpoints and firewalls or service discovery. We explore the benefits and pitfalls of Esticade framework and show how to achieve scalability, reliability and optimal performance with Esticade (and microservices in general), with minimal time and effort.

BIO: Developer for more than ten years, have been working with many technologies and languages.

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Björn Kimminich – Kuehne + Nagel (AG & Co.) KG

#NoComments /* about the worthlessness of comments in clean code */

What #NoEstimates is for agilists, #NoComments should be for all developers who <3 clean code!

Comments are – at best – a necessary evil” (Uncle Bob, “Clean Code”) – Over the years I gathered quite a collection of examples for bad code comments. The most precious gems among them I would like to share with you. You will listen in on developer monologues and dialogues, try to analyze cryptic bylines, experience different levels of UnCamelCasing(tm) skill and fight your way through a redundant, useless and misleading inline thicket. You will also hear about well-meant tools and plugins that should not even exist if the mantra #NoComments would be valued as it should be.

BIO: Björn Kimminich is working in the area of software development for Kuehne + Nagel for over 8 years where he is now responsible for Global IT Architecture. He is doing Clean Code trainings with Kuehne + Nagel’s globally distributed development staff since 2011. As a side job he lectures software development at the UAS Nordakademie where he teaches Java to engineering students as their first programming language.

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