Events
Wed 11th October: Matt Barnaby - Changing the Change: Agile in Public Services plus Joe Stead - The Trials and Tribulations of Greenfield vs Legacy Projects
The cost of public services are in constant scrutiny and anyone who's worked on a public sector software project knows there is plenty of room for doing things differently if there is a motivation to do so, saving enormous amounts of money in the process. Some of you will remember Martin Sumner speaking at Agile Yorkshire back in January 2015 comparing the NHS Spine 1 project with the Spine 2 project. The former a traditionally procured and run waterfall affair requiring hundreds of outsourced consultants and lots of expensive proprietary hardware and the second a pilot for an agile approach employing a tenth of the resources and taking significant advantage of low cost, open source infrastructure. In a non IT context Malcolm Gladwell's much discussed 2006 article in the New Yorker Million-Dollar Murray challenges the accepted approach to dealing with the homeless with a system thinking eye that should be familiar to us in the agile community. This month Matt Barnaby will share his thoughts on doing this differently in the public sector in our main speaking slot followed by Agile Yorkshire regular Joe Stead's reflections on working with new and existing product code bases.
Matt Barnaby - Changing the Change: Agile in Public Services We intend to demonstrate how progressive prototypes are so much more beneficial to delivering the right thing sooner (which might not have been what they thought they wanted, right?) and how self-organising cultures maximise the use of agile.
We also like to play games so come prepared, you might need to get creative (or lose some clothing!)
Bio: Matt is agile coach specialising in change, improvement, project mobilisation and the delivery of transformation to create organisational efficiency, process and service redesign within public services. Matt has delivered effective agile models with the sole purpose of making things better for people delivering - or indeed receiving - services. His work has brought sustainable change to public services. He started his career as a youth worker, before working with many different public sector clients as an agile coach. These range from 20 local authorities (in the UK and Australia) to the NHS. His work has also seen him delivering projects in other sectors such as transport, finance and central government.
Twitter: matthewbarnaby Website: basis.co.uk
Joe Stead - The Trials and Tribulations of Greenfield vs Legacy Projects Bio: The majority of my career has been dominated by the .NET world, although recently my focus has been on exploring the greater development community. I'm a firm believer of continually learning and trying new things, you never know what else is out there. Recently, I've focused on setting up a user group and developer community in Hull, HullDevs
Twitter: @Joe_Stead Website: joestead.codes
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Mon 18th September: Adrian Frost and Ian Franklin - Conflict Doesn't Have to Mean Confrontation, a co-created event plus Gwen Diagram - How Becoming T-Shaped Can Cause a Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Most software products emerge from teams of people collaborating together, but the quality and style of that collaboration can have a considerable influence on any outcome. Any group of people working together needs time to form but is there a way for individuals or organisations to get better at that? Any improvements would surly make a difference to product development outcomes and therefor be commercially worth while? This month we'll be exploring team interaction with three speakers: Adrian Frost and Ian Franklin from IdeaSmiths and Gwen Diagram, long standing Agile Yorkshire participant and current testing superstar at Sky.
Conflict is an inevitable part of day to life yet many people find it challenging to deal with– it can make us feel uncomfortable, it can affect the performance of our team and it can cause organisations to lose talent. By drawing on the conflicts you face (or fear to face!) Adrian will facilitate a shared learning experience, exploring the challenges, opportunities and creative solutions that conflict can bring. Ian will also add his own deep understanding of people and psychology to help us understand why we do what we do, and how we can change. During the highly interactive session we will learn from each other, we will learn about ourselves and we will learn some new approaches to help us be better equipped to face whatever conflicts we might encounter.
Bio: Adrian Frost is Managing Partner at IdeaSmiths LLP. Adrian’s specialist expertise is in organisational change and coaching. He has nearly 20 years of experience as a Management Consultant, soft skills development practitioner and coach. Adrian was the innovation and creativity Champion for Anglo Dutch steel company Corus and lead Change Agent for a £1.4Bn virtual Shared Services organisation. Since becoming an independent consultant Adrian has been involved in organisational change with a variety of Public Sector, Private Sector and third sector clients – including global law firms, banks, Universities, the NHS, Nigerian CAA etc. Adrian teaches in Sheffield Business School and has spoken at a number of national conferences. He has published work on values based leadership and building a values based culture.
Ian Franklin is a Partner at IdeaSmiths LLP. Ian’s specialist expertise as a Chartered Psychologist is helping organisations engage with employees/users, teams to work better together and leaders to develop. He has over 20 years’ experience in employee engagement, inter-organisational teams (mainly with IT suppliers), and organisational change projects. He worked as an internal consultant in the Public Sector at a senior level on major change and IT projects, he is currently Principle User Researcher with NHS Digital.
Twitter: @IdeaSmithsLLP Website: www.ideasmiths.co.uk
In small teams, it’s common for people to share roles such as Scrum Master / Tester / Dev but in a lot of cases there are conflicting interests. How can a Tester adequately test when as a Scrum Master the highest priority is assisting the team to deliver? This is an experience report from when Gwen was working at a start up with a shared role of Tester, Scrum Master and DevOps and how the role affected her thinking when context switching to different roles. For example, how on more than one occasion, the scepticism of the Tester had to pull the optimism of the Scrum Master back to reality and then how the results of the testing were overshadowed by the need for the team to deliver. The T-shaped person is often looked upon as an incredibly valued member of the team but on becoming T-shaped has the person become a watered down version of their primary role?
Bio: Gwen Diagram is a Tester/DevOps kid and a Scrum Master from Leeds, UK. She's experienced the Ops side of when releases go wrong and the Testing side of when issues make their way up to live. She's also dabbled in the dark arts of Scrum Master and gotten far too involved with databases in the past. She’s currently working at Sky as a Tester and enjoys spending most her day trying to make releases a non event. She's a bit of a conference junkie and can usually be found at Testing, DevOps or Agile conferences or occasionally be found dragging her Developer all over the world building crazy systems in very little time using CI and CD.
Twitter: @gwendiagram
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Wed. 9th Aug: Ian Carroll on How long will it take? How much will it cost? + John Le Drew and The product owner is an agile anti-pattern + Ian Lister with Cynefin A Gentle Introduction
One of the nice things to have witnessed over the last few years is the growing number of people regularly speaking on lean / agile topics across and based in the north of England. With a slight change to our normal format this months gathering is a showcase of talent with three speakers all from our region. Ian Carroll runs Lean Agile Manchester and we've been trying to coax him along for some time, John Le Drew ran an excellent session at Agile Yorkshire on safety a few months and hosts the Agile Path podcast and Ian Lister is making his debut appearance. Hope everyone is having a great summer and see you in a couple of weeks.
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Tue. 11th July: Marcus Robinson and How We Use Value Stream Mapping to Identify Where to Focus to Achieve Maximum Impact and What it Takes to be an Agile Developer with Steve Trapps
We're welcoming Microsoft Evangelist Marcus Robinson talking about value stream mapping for July. Organisations exploring what is actually happening during their product development life cycle isn't easy to spot. If they are the focus is more than likely at the development team level. But, there are often huge lead time gains to be made by looking up and downstream and value stream mapping is an excellent way to do this. Marcus is sharing his experiences doing this with clients. Steve Trapps is also back for July to explore the agile developer skill set and traits. Steve is a past winner of our lightening talks competition and always a popular contributor.
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Wed. 14th June: Managing change in the 21st century: what we know and where we must do better with Mike Burrows. Plus Ivor Tymchak on Tell stories, not data.
Author, regular conference speaker and founder of the Agendashift network Mike Burrows is back this month to talk about the perennial topic of managing change. As many of us know through experience, any kind of change is a hard won victory. This is especially so in larger organisations with numerous conflicting agendas. Mike insight is always fresh and worth listening to. This months support slot is filled by Ivor Tymchak fresh from his TechOff victory at the Leeds International Festival. Ivor has been running speaker workshops with Agile Yorkshire for a couple of years now and is back to tell us how he won, pass on some tips and explain the new round of workshops we're organising to help budding presenters take their stories to the next level at conferences and beyond.
 Which is better: “top down”, with the challenge of overcoming resistance to change, or “bottom up”, perhaps never gathering momentum? Perhaps this is false choice? Could there be a third way, an approach to organisational transformation that is simultaneously respectful, ambitious, and sustainable?
Bio: Mike Burrows is author of Kanban from the Inside and founder of Agendashift, the home of an integrated set of online, workshop-based and coaching tools for a growing community of Lean-Agile transformation practitioners. Prior to these roles, he has been a CTO for a late-stage startup and Executive Director and global development manager for a top tier investment bank. Part I of his new book Agendashift: clean conversations, coherent collaboration, continuous transformation was published May 11th, 2017. Twitter: @asplake Website: blog.agendashift.com
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Tues. May 9th Tony Heap:Story Splitting for Beginners and Experts Alike and Stew Abel: Using AWS PaaS for an MVP
Fresh from the hugely successful one day Crazy Agile Thing conference over Leeds Digital festival week we've two excellent speakers pluck from our own community this month. Tony Heap has always been very popular with his past session being amongst our most watch videos and Stew Able, long time supporter of AY is debuting as a speaker.
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Wednesday April 12th: John Le Drew with Swearing, Nudity and Other Vulnerable Positions plus Chris Cheadle & Sean Craig on Firebreak Tall Tales - A Break From Routine
This month John Le Drew, host of the Agile Path podcast is previewing his talk about safety and it looks great. Also AY regulars Sean Craig and Chris Cheadle will be presenting an experience report on an innovation experiment they ran within the NHS. They'll be sharing their insight warts and all.
 John Le Drew: Swearing, Nudity and Other Vulnerable PositionsOver 3 months John recorded over 60 hours of interviews and spoke to some of the most respected people in the industry to produce an audio documentary that attempts to answer the question “What is safety? And why is it important anyway?”
This highly interactive talk will present the findings and guide and challenge you through a journey to understanding safety.
This talk has grown as John created the new podcast The Agile Path. The first season on this podcast (which will launch in Jan 17) is about safety in teams. John has interviewed world renowned specialists in the field; Christopher Avery, David Marquet, Jerry Weinberg, Esther Derby, Johanna Rothman, Woody Zuill and many more in over 60 hours of audio. This has been a fascinating deep dive learning experience for John and he hopes to explore these insights with the audience.
Bio: John has over 17 years of experience working in software engineering as a system administrator, software engineer, technical lead, technical director, development manager and agile coach. He currently runs the consultancy firm Wise Noodles here he helps organisations solve tough technical problems by untangling their people problems. He is also host of The Agile Path Podcast which creates in-depth audio documentaries on the topics that most affect organisations transitioning to agile ways of working.
Twitter: @antz29 Website: www.agilepath.fm
Towards the end of last year, we decided to remove as many constraints as possible and let our let team at NHS.UK work on what they wanted for 2 weeks. We borrowed the idea, and the name, from GOV.UK but of course they weren't the first and won't be the last. This is our story. What worked, what didn't, what we will do differently next time and why we think you might want to consider one where you work.
Bio: Apart from two years as an International Account Manager for software sales, Chris has been leading project delivery in both the public and private sector since 1996. During the early 2000s Chris developed a passion for improving how organisations work and has strived to combine delivery with effectiveness and efficiency improvements since. Accredited in 2004 for leading the capability maturity improvement in both delivery marques at level 3 by the APMGroup; a world first. In October 2009, he joined the team delivering the www.nhs.uk website and since January 2011 he has been leading the project and programme teams at NHS Choices.
Sean is an experienced leader of software development teams with over 20 years’ experience in technical roles with organisations such as Kellogg’s, IBM, Yorkshire Water, Asda, Department of Health and currently dev manager for NHS.UK at NHS Digital.
An agile and lean advocate and implementer and he’s transformed teams from waterfall to agile in multiple organisations.
Twitter: @chris_cheadle and @seancraiguk
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Tuesday March 14th: Amy Thompson and Velocity: The Golden Snitch of Scrum plus Jon Fulton with Agile Telemetry: Using Data Like a Formula 1 Team
Last month's two engineering based presentations received great feedback but we like to mix things up and this month it's all metrics, data and quantitative decision making. This should be the foundation and focus of any lean / agile leadership team, however this is sometimes not the case. When an organisation uses data well it knows what it's capable of and can match resources to demand, deliver predictably and react in real time to production problems before they escalate. Unfortunately the lagging indicator reports of old are still alive and in common use, accompanied by the familiar lurching from one crisis to the next.
Come along this month, learn from others and don't let that happen.
 Amy Thompson and Velocity: The Golden Snitch of ScrumNo-one seems to talk about velocity anymore. I want to talk about velocity. And Harry Potter a bit. I mean I like Harry Potter, but I like stable velocity a fair bit more. I'm going to talk about why velocity is so important to me, why it should be so important to you, and how its possible achieve predictable delivery when you catch the Golden Snitch of Scrum.
Bio: Amy Thompson is an award winning Scrum Master and Agile Coach who is passionate about Agile practices. Specialising in Scrum and Kanban, her belief in discipline and structure has transformed many teams to high performing success. Having worked in an array of organisations from large enterprises to FinTech startups, there's not much she hasn't seen. Amy firmly believes the key to high performance is a collective mantra of 'setting each other up for success', and educates both teams and senior management on how to do this well.
twitter: @Scrum_Mistress + blog and website
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Tues February 21st - Dr Oliver Shaw: Test Driven Development, the most misused term in software development? and Keith Williams: Dependencies, Injection and Abstraction for Fun and Profit
It's a while since Agile Yorkshire had an entire evening of content that was firmly planted in agile engineering but for February we're back to our roots. We're still building our calendar for 2017 so watch out for new announcements and get in touch if you know someone with a story to tell.
 Dr Oliver Shaw: Test Driven Development, the most misused term in software development?In this talk Oliver describes what "Doing TDD" is and, importantly, what it isn't. He will make the ethos of TDD very clear and show you how to do TDD via a live coding demo. He touches on mocking, the testing pyramid and finishes by doing a fanaticism check with the audience. Bio: Oliver is an associate with Equal Experts. Currently assisting the public sector. Oliver has an interest in creating pragmatic, quality software and getting that into live as soon as possible using DevOps techniques. Specific tech interests include Scala, Docker, CI/CD. Co-Organiser of DevOps North East. twitter: @olly_shaw
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January 10th - Adam Mitchell: Hello... I'm Your Project Manager! plus Kev McCabe: The Agile Fluency Model
 The dichotomy between agile teams and traditional management has plagued my world for the past few years. I look at scenarios you might come up against and how I've tried to deal with them to allow companies to transform into an agile way of delivery.
Bio: Agile coach and triathlete. Spent the last 14yrs working in IT around Leeds/Manchester. Left development behind and moved into helping companies with agile transformation programs.
 Agile is about teams and people, and the success of any project will depend on it team(s). Team fluency is more than the capabilities of the team members. There is also the management structures, relationships, and company culture, as well as the tools, practices and technologies that the team use. Many agile teams have plateaued, while we all know that continuous improvement is a foundation of agile, many teams has stopped making these improvements. They lose the benefits that can be had for themselves and the company. The Agile Fluency Model will help guide a pathway through many of these issues and work with the wider business to incorporate them into the agile process.
Bio: Kev has worked with large corporations in the Finance, Media, E-commerce and Logistics spaces. He’s currently a freelance code smith, coach & trainer; With a passion to improve developers from the ground up in all areas of development. He also has a huge Interest in all things Agile since 2002, mainly XP, but of late Scrum & Kanban having become a Certified Scrum Master in 2012 and Accredited Kanban Practitioner in 2013 and SAFe agilist in 2015.
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