The next level of agility conference
27th march 2019 in Singapore
Description
Agility is in full swing. According to a recent survey, 72% of organizations have increased their agility over the last five years. After first positive experiences, many companies are now pursuing comprehensive agile transformations to scale agile methods across the entire organization.
As the use of agile methods is increasing, organizations are facing new challenges in the area of processes, structure and culture.
This conference explores the challenges and best practices for scaling agility across the organization in pursuit of an optimal balance between agile and traditional ways of working for the benefit of higher organizational flexibility and responsiveness in dynamic environments. It brings together experts, customers and partners from Europe and Asia to share and discuss experiences in planning, implementing and evolving agile transformations.
The conference will use two streams to explore the topic from different perspectives:
- The Agile Leadership Stream explores the benefits, approaches, challenges and consequences of embarking on an organizational agile transformation journey.
- The Agile Implementation Stream facilitates the sharing of best practices and experiences for implementing agile ways of working on an operational level.
- Participants are invited to choose freely between the sessions of the streams based on their personal preferences.
Who should attend?
Everybody interested in understanding how to plan and implement agile transformation journeys including existing and future executives, leaders, managers, strategic planners, organizational developers, HR practitioners, and project Managers.
Agenda
14:00 - 14:30
14:30 - 15:00
Many organizations have started agile transformation journeys in response to change pressure fromcompetitors and customers or volatile market conditions seeking higher levels of flexibility and scalability. Those journeys are highly individual as they depend on the internal and external situation of an organization. Nevertheless, as the practice matures, first trends, common issues, learnings and best practices start to emerge.
In this introductory session, we will explore the current state of agility from a high-level and market perspective. Using the next level consulting agile maturity model, we will share perspectives on where organizations currently stand in their agility journeys and what they are doing to get to their next level of agility. We will summarize the key challenges and success factors for agile transformations and provide high-level insights into the issues and solutions that are further explored in detail in the other sessions.
Talking Points
- Market overview and current trends in agile transformations
- Agile destinations and journeys
- The next level consulting agile maturity model
- Key challenges & best practices for agile transformations
- Conference Overview
Speaker: Wolfgang Rabl, CEO, next level consulting
Stream 1
15:00-15:45
To stay competitive, it was once enough to optimize tasks, re-engineer processes, rationalize cost and execute projects well. In VUCA times with its higher than ever complexity and dynamics this does not suffice anymore. Higher levels of organizational agility and flexibility are often impossible to achieve with the established organizations. New approaches are required.
Agile approaches challenge established ways of working in many ways. For example, the biggest change relates to the flexibilization of structure and roles through self-organizing teams. This has a profound impact on hierarchies and middle managers who are often resisting agile transformations. Yet, their experiences and capabilities are needed more than ever. Organizations that want to scale agility from projects to the entire organization need to recognize and accept the challenges it poses and manage them pro-actively.
Talking Points
- Understanding complexity and dynamics, its drivers and how to manage it using models like VUCA and Cynefin
- An overview of popular agile approaches to manage complexity and dynamics
- Success factors for agile transformation from the perspective of people, culture, processes, and organization
- Agile leadership challenges, best practices and the changing role of middle managers in an organization
- Case Study: Driving large-scale digital transformation programme in the public sector
Speaker: Wolfgang Rabl,CEO & founder, next level Consulting
Thomas Martin, Managing Director APAC, next level consulting, MBA, PMP
Ida Suod, Senior Consultant, next level consulting, CSM, MPM, BEnvDes
16:00-16:45
In an organization comprised of autonomous, self-organization teams it seems that leaders are not needed anymore. Quite the opposite is true. An agile organization requires organizational framing that ensures that the organization executes consistently and successfully as a whole towards a common purpose on a day-to-day basis.
This requires a different type of leader. Traditional command-and-control managers used to large corner offices, status reports, and politics need to evolve into engaging, hands-one front-line coaches who instil trust and confidence, provide guidance, context, and support to their teams.
Making this leadership transition requires a specific mindset. Not everybody will feel confident with it and might move on. Those who do will have secured their place in a new world of work that provides a vast number of opportunities to learn and grow for everybody.
Talking Points
- Agile leadership challenges
- Agile leadership definition
- Develop appropriate leadership styles for agile
- Team-dynamics and building self-directed groups
- Implementation of a coaching and learning culture
Speaker: Sanjay Mehta, Senior Consultant, BSc
Tan Haw Lin, Senior Consultant, BSc, EE, MBA
16:50 - 17:35
In a causal world where visions, strategies, and plans could be derived and executed reliably culture was always all the rest that could not be described otherwise and was often allowed to evolve without intervention. Yet, there is agreement that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”.
It’s now later in the day and breakfast is over. Strategy is gone, culture remains. This raises the importance of culture for an organization. Leaving it to itself does not suffice anymore. In an agile organization, culture needs to be proactively shaped and managed.
In an agile organization, culture provides the context, framework and guidance to ensure that the organization executes consistently and successfully as a whole rather than dis-integrate into a random conglomerate of un-aligned and possibly even competing teams.
Elements that comprise an agile culture are purpose, mindset, values and principles. They need to be defined and aligned with each other, shared and lived across the entire organization requiring executive buy-in and ownership.
Talking Points
- Definition of agile culture and purpose
- Agile mindset, values and principles
- Defining a culture for your team using the ABC methodology
- Building an agile culture
- Agile leadership case study
Speaker: Merissa Madani, Senior Consultant, Black Belt Six Sigma, CEng, BEng
Gunnar Jaschik, Senior Consultant, MBA, PMP, ICF-Trained Coach
Stream 2
15:00 - 15:45
The agile manifesto was developed in 2001 in response to challenges with managing large and complex software development projects sometimes described as “death-march projects”. Today, it still stands strongly and has laid the foundation for the development of agile project management approaches of which Scrum has emerged as the leading practice. Compared with traditional, often called ‘water-fall’, project management that follows a pre-planned sequential approach from requirements to finished product, agile project management adopts an interactive approach that evolves requirements and product gradually over time based on intensive and continuous interactions of customer and project team using practices like sprints, Kan Ban boards and daily stand-ups.
Yet, agile project management is just another addition to the organizational toolset and does not invalidate the traditional approaches.
Based on Scrum, we will provide you with the understanding about what agile project management is about, where and when to use it and what to watch out for.
Talking Points
- Difference between traditional/waterfall and agile project management
- Scrum overview and toolset
- Roles in Scrum
- Planning in Scrum with use-case
Speaker: Walter Sedlacek, General Manager APAC, next level consulting, MSc, MBA, PMP
16:00 - 16:45
When agility scales from projects to the organization the interfaces between established processes and the new agile ways of working need to be defined. This may not be as simple as changing the processes as many processes are corporate assets that represent proven best practices that should only be changed after careful consideration.
ITIL is a best practice framework and the de-facto standard for service management. Its fourth iteration was released in January 2019. Based on input from the global service management community its design mandate included the integration of agility.
The development of ITIL 4 provides interesting learnings for how agility and traditional process-oriented approaches can be combined to balance old and new ways of working while preserving and optimizing organizational efficiency, effectiveness, and performance. This session by an ITIL 4 reviewer gives an inside account into the challenges, learnings and outcomes from combining agile and traditional approaches.
Talking Points
- Overview of the recently released ITIL 4 update.
- Design challenges for ITIL 4 regarding agility
- Agility in ITIL 4
- Linking business, development, and operations
- Implementation
- Relationship with the agile PRINCE2 project management methodology
Speaker: Gonzague Patinier, Senior Consultant, MSc, ITIL, COBIT, DEVOPS
Sheng Jiang, Senior Consulting, PRINCE 2 certification trainer
16:50 - 17:35
You are Scrum-certified, experimented with agile project management and have successfully completed a couple of pilot projects. You like what you learned and you want more. You are ready to scale-up! Many organizations are at this stage. They have re-structured to cross-functional teams and broken-down functional silos successfully. But they also created team silos that led to inefficiencies in cross-team-cooperation, created inter-team dependencies, more waiting for external input. Time-to-market went up instead of down. How to address this?
From project management we know that the establishment of organizational support structures that own, standardize and drive co-operation, collaboration and execution like PMOs or portfolio management are common best practice. But how do these relate to agility?
In this interactive session we want to create a forum to share experiences about taking agility from projects to the next level. Ask clever questions, identify typical challenges, explore possible solutions, emerging best practices, learnings as well as exchange examples and war stories about scaling agility beyond projects.
Participants are encouraged to take an active role in asking questions, sharing anecdotes, examples, and experiences.
Talking Points
- Identifying obstacles and road blocks for scaling agility
- Implementing governance and support structures
- Designing and managing the implementation process successfully
- Case studies and examples for specific situations
- Live discussion & Q&A
Speaker: Thomas Halliday, Senior Consultant, MBA
17:50 - 18:50
Agility is the trend of the day. Is it there to stay or will it soon go away as so many other management fads? Do you need to act now, can you still wait or even sit it out? Will agility consume everything or will it soon find its well-defined place in the corporate toolset? Will everything become agile or is there still relevance to the old ways of working? Can agile and traditional ways of working be combined and, if so, how?
These questions have relevance to each organization. Depending on their customer demand, competitive pressure, market position and internal configuration some may be more pressing than others.
Regardless whether 100% agile or a hybrid organization is your final destination. At least during the transformation journey both approaches will have to co-exist while keeping everybody productive. Building on the key insights from the previous sessions we will seek answers about how to construct high-performance hybrid organization that combine the best from the worlds of agile innovation and operational best practice.
Please feel encouraged to actively contribute to this session by sharing your questions and insights.
Talking Points
- Key insights from the different sessions
- The future of agility
- Devising hybrid approaches and organizations
- Audience questions
Speaker: Thomas Martin
18:50 - 20:00
Location and Registration
Centre 42, 42 Waterloo St.
Singapore 187951