Events
Wed 14th Nov: David Harper - It's Alright for You....You've Had Cancer! plus Sharon Dale - How might we involve and unleash everyone?
We're back after two months off with two great speakers and two great topics. David Harper reflects on his former role as CIO to give a sneak peek into boardroom IT decision making and Sharon Dale will throw some light onto the Liberation Structures body of knowledge. Plus the venue is back at the Platform office above Leeds train station.
Also its that time of year where we start thinking about our annual Lightning Talks Competition that we have held as our December meetup for a good number of years now. We'll be announcing the CALL FOR SPEAKERS in the next few days, so get your thinking caps on!
An engaging, witty and at times irreverent look at why ‘the Grown-Ups’ in Board Meetings and Steering Groups make the decisions they do. And how they all love Agile – until it requires a big decision! By taking us on his own unique journey from IT Coder to CIO, David shares his own techniques on how to survive in the Boardroom as the ‘IT Guy’ representing Agile projects, and how his own adversity has unlocked a fear he has held since childhood.
For anyone frustrated by the apparent lack of understanding of Agile in the Boardroom or mystified by the Waterfall or Fragile decisions that often come back – this is the session for you!
Bio: David has over 20 years experience of delivering major projects and programmes of change in Financial Services and 30 years IT experience. Most recently he was CIO for a £4bn business, collaborating closely with a number outsourcing partners and suppliers to deliver game changing outcomes. He is a strong advocate of Systems Thinking and has employed ST techniques to significantly reduce the cost of change programmes. David’s exposure to Agile has been through his leadership and mentoring of a number of Agile teams delivering both short term outcomes and multi million pound whole system replacements. Consistently David has been the bridge between the Scrum Teams and the Board Room, making sense of the illogical and managing the unreasonable. His mentees describe him as an “outstanding mentor” with an “engaging and inspiring” style. “He has a calm air but an acute sense of timing when things need to be shaken up or difficult questions asked” was a recent quote from a Programme Sponsor of a major Agile undertaking.
In 2017 David formed HARPER360, a consultancy dedicated to coaching individuals and teams in Project and Change Management, particularly in the IT Domain. HARPER360 can already count a number of bluechip brands within its client base.
Twitter: @harper_360 or website: www.harper360.com
A treasure trove of simple, practical methods to stimulate critical conversations and liberate the full potential of any group, from the frontline to the C- suite.""Cheryl M Scott – Global Programs Senior Advisor, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
What would be made possible if you could unleash the intelligence and creativity of everyone? Liberating Structures are a collection of easy-to-learn facilitation patterns that make this possible. They're field tested, rooted in complexity science and freely shared under a creative commons licence.
In this short session, participants will gain practical hands-on experience of at leas one Structure, and an appreciation of some of the possibilities offered.
Bio: Sharon is an independent consultant based in Leeds, UK. She is most interested in creating the conditions for participation and unleashing talent in your teams. She runs the Liberating Structures practice group in Leeds and is part of the team who run the worldwide virtual user group.
Twitter: @pixlz or website: medium.com/21st-century-mindset
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Wed 8th Aug: Adam Mitchell - We Lost How Much Money? plus Chris Warren - To the Left to the Left, Everything I Test in a Box to the Left...
Software product design and engineering is an area rich in opinions and historic working practice. Also the modern agile methods prescribe many practices which may work for you if followed carefully but can just as easily lead to "cargo cult" activities that deliver no real business benefit. Going back to first principles and understanding some of the economics of software product development and understanding HOW Scrum, Kanban or <insert favourite method here> can deliver more value for the same cost is liberating. It unlocks a new ability to adapt popular practices to any circumstance and ensure the business benefits in the way expected. Adam Mitchell brings his knowledge and experience to this months meetup to explain some of the mysteries of product development economics. Chris Warren will also share his experience of shifting focus to the "left of the board" when building a top performing test strategy.
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Mon 16th July - Tony Heap on Options Engineering and James Sheasby Thomas with QA and Testing - a Retrospective
In a fight (for attention) between Agile Yorkshire and the England World Cup semi final match we expected Agile Yorkshire to come of worst. Obviously the Agile Yorkshire community is full of dedicated and passionate lean / agile practitioners but we figured we should move aside for this "once in a generation" moment and reschedule our meetup from the normal second Wednesday. Hopefully that's OK with most. *** Attention (read carefully) - The Venue for this Month Has Changed *** Tony Heap: Options EngineeringThere are always options. But when making business and IT change, we often forget to consider them, to the detriment of the overall outcome. The reason for this is the way the human mind processes ideas, and dates back to the cognitive revolution around 70,000 years ago.
In this session you will learn:
- How humans have ideas and make decisions
- Why considering options is so powerful, and yet so hard
- How to overcome these difficulties - a structured, yet lightweight, approach that I like so much I decided to give it a name
Bio: Tony Heap is a freelance agile coach / trainer / scrum master / business analyst designer based in Yorkshire. He has worked for all sorts of clients including HMRC, YBS Group, ASDA, Morrisons, NHS, DoH, RWE nPower, Arcadia, BT, BarclayCard and Egg, in some cases partnering with consultancies such as Equal Experts, BJSS and Answer Consulting. In his spare time he likes to share his experiences and ideas on his blog www.its-all-design.com. He is particularly interested in agile approaches and how they apply to business analysis. He is a requirements denier. Twitter: @tonyheapuk Website: www.its-all-design.com
James Sheasby Thomas: QA and Testing - a RetrospectiveThe term 'Quality Assurance' has a controversial reputation within the testing community - quality is subjective, so it cannot be assured, although it can be assessed, analysed, advocated for, questioned or improved. However it's also arguable that 'Testing' does not fully describe what modern testers do and the impact they can have on project success. Could there be a better label for the role that QA/Testing professionals perform in an agile context?
In this talk, James will discuss the limitations of both 'QA' and 'Testing' as labels, as well as previous attempts to define them. He will also explore the many ways that QAs/Testers in agile teams use their time and skills to help ensure project success and meaningful quality, and situations where our role overlaps with others. Attendees will be invited to contribute to the discussion and suggest possible alternative labels to 'QA' and 'Testing'.
Bio: James Sheasby Thomas is currently a Test Analyst for Inviqa, an established technical partner company based in the UK and Germany. His most popular talk is `Accessibility Testing Crash Course', which he presented at TestBash Manchester 2017, Leeds Test Atelier, Leeds Tester Gathering and Liverpool Tester Gathering. Twitter: @RightSaidJames
Venue for JulyWe've lost our space at Platform so we're trying our a new venue. For July Agile Yorkshire will take place on the 1st Floor of what was the White Cloth Gallery behind Leeds train station. The address is given below and there is a picture of the building and front door also.
 1st floor, Aireside House
24-26 Aire Street
Leeds
West Yorkshire
LS1 4HT
Travelling by TrainThe venue is 1 minutes walk when exiting the station at the door next to Wetherspoons
Travelling by CarThere is parking very close by in the station or cheaper parking further down Whitehall Road.
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Wed 13th June: Prototyping Public Services - Dennis Vergne plus Blending Agile Delivery - Glenn Crossley & Austen Bell
The variety and depth of topics covered by speakers is ever expanding. We all know the value and savings made though gaining feedback from users of a system early and often and this month Dennis Vergne shares an approach to system building in the public sector that he's dubbed "whole system prototyping" as a model for doing just that. Plus Austen Bell and Glen Crossley are here to talk about the open source Blended Agile Delivery (BAD) toolkit that has recently emerged from work right here in Leeds.
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Wed 9th May: Simon Cookson - Stakeholder Engagement, Sales Thinking and Should We All Be Product Owners? plus Simeon Smith - Business Analyst, Product Owner or Product Manager?
Building the right thing and having a good outcome from a software project requires all sides to be wilfully collaborating in a creative and enthusiastic fashion. That may seem obvious and easy but the IT industry has a legacy culture to deal with. It's not uncommon for both sides to be evaluated on meeting deadlines and budget constraints but not always on costs saved or revenue generated by the outcome of a software project. Of course measuring outcomes isn't always easy and bringing people together to collaborate meaningfully when they may also have other day to day tasks to get done is a similar challenge. However in the world of software product development it's people working together that often transforms the outcome and this month our two speakers Simon Cookson and Simeon Smith are both drilling into upstream end of the product development pipeline.
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Wed 11th April: Ian Franklin and Ashley Wheat - Making UX work within Agile and Joe Williams - How Our PO Learned to Stop Worrying and Love MVP
Wed 14th March: Laurence Wood on how High Performing Teams Know More About Trust and Andy Butcher on The Shit Nightclub Antipattern
One of Agile Yorkshire biggest strengths is hearing real life stories and insights from experienced local practitioners. When these stories are shared they a substantially more valuable because they are told along with the circumstances and context within which they relate. Our speakers this month are two excellent example of this. Laurence Wood explores trust between delivery teams and their customers who may often have been used to working with teams delivering in in a traditional project manor with large batches of work and limited or no iteration. Believing in iterative product development often needs to be seen before it is believed. Andy Butcher digs into the emotional attachment that can grip teams and trick them into delivering the wrong thing with frustrating outcomes.
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Tues 13th Feb: Andrew Meyer and Gary Green - Attempting to Create a Dynamic, lean and Innovative Organisation plus Kev McCabe - Core Protocols for Shared Vision
The software industry has transformed it's self over the past two decades by finding new ways to work that properly recognised the unpredictable, problem solving nature of much of it's work and at the same time reduce risk and significantly increased the rate of value production. The mantra has been to question the cost of every activity in light of the risks it mitigates or the value it realises. This has led to much innovation within the typical product development pipeline and many smaller businesses have capitalised on this as a significant commercial advantage.
Achieving these changes within a small team can transform performance with little disruption however as the size of an organisation increases so does the resistance to change. There are a lot of hearts and minds to realign, right from the coal face to senior leadership teams and resistance normally exists in one form or another at every level. For any large organisation to truly transform it's self and realise the commercial benefits is a long slow process requiring a lot of leadership and good dose of personal risk taking. This month we're going to hear a couple of experience reports that are definitely worth listening too.
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Andrew Meyer and Gary Green - Attempting to Create a Dynamic, lean and Innovative Organisation - NHS Digital’s Journey into Agile and DevOps Delivery and What Went Not Quite to Plan 
helps doctors, nurses and the health care professionals improve and make care safer.
Tues 16th Jan: John Le Drew - Diversity, Chocolate and Safe Cracking plus Jon Fulton - Agents of Change
 Diversity. It's the topic of the hour. Organisations are all putting 'diversity' and 'equal opportunities' on every job ad. But, for some organisations it still seems to be a struggle. What's the goal? Do we want diverse teams because it's the "right thing to do" or is it "good for our teams and organisations"? Are we hiring minorities to keep up with quotas or our competition? This talk will engage the audience in a frank discussion on what diversity is, why we need it and how we might achieve it.
Bio: John has spent most of the last 2 decades working in the software industry, with a focus on web technologies. After 10 years as a software engineer John moved into consultancy where he quickly learned the value of team dynamics and how most technical challenges are projecting underlying issues with collaboration. So his focus shifted, while still being very involved technically, his first focus is on facilitating a safe, creative, collaborative environment.
Twitter: @antz29 Website: www.wisenoodles.com
These days social media is awash with stories of ‘fake agile’ and ‘dark scrum’. Has Agile failed? What if it was us, as Agile practitioners, who failed our organisations? What is required of us now, as agents of change?
Bio: Jon spent 12 years as a software developer before finally focusing on Agile Delivery in 2012. Since then he has worked with teams to use Agile and Lean techniques in industries such as Fin-tech, Leisure, Online Gambling, Kids TV, Tourism and Government.
Website: @JonFultonUk Website: www.theagileapprentice.co.uk
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Wed 13th December: The Annual Xmas Lightning Talks Competition
 Wed 13th December
Christmas is just around the corner and to celebrate over the last few years we've hosted a Lightning Talks Competition. It's a fun pack festive celebration of community tech. public speaking. If you haven't been before you've definitely missed out on an opportunity to be inspired. We've an amazing line up a speakers and topics, some significant prizes plus plenty of food and fun.
Topics and SpeakersSally Bridgewater - Agile ADHD: How Scrum saved my relationship Gary McAdam - How the MVP is misunderstood, misused and abused, and how to do MVP properly! James Scanlan - Enterprise Architecture versus Agile Delivery: Let them fight Eva Barabas - User Needs Lead Leadership Andy Butcher - Agile Architecture at SkyBet Bernard Jauregui - Agile Smells Tom Hudson - Big Numbers and the 1Hz CPU Geoff Bowden - The Future Brian Teeman - The web would be better if we all spoke english |
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