When working with people and organisations, I continually revert to the simplest and most core basics of Scrum, regardless how Scrum has, or has not, been adopted, or the scale of operations. I highlight their purpose and how they serve business agility. I find that it draws on people’s imagination immensely but it also excites people greatly. Over and over I observe how imagination can set an organisation apart. Imagination often distinguishes innovative from lagging organisations. I believe that any organisation can be re.imagined, re.vers.ified, to exploit its intrinsic potential to innovate. Scrum, with is many adaptations possible, provides a safety net. Scrum creates room for action and discovery. I help organisations re.imagine their Scrum to converge their product delivery into a Scrum Studio. Over time divisions dissipate into a structure of product hubs interconnected through purpose and distributed leadership. Creativity and innovation emerge. People, teams and the organisation prosper. I consolidated over a decade of experience, ideas, beliefs and observations of Scrum in re.vers.ify. Re.vers.ify is an act of simplicity, rhythm and focus. I introduce how the deliberate emergence of a Scrum Studio is the current way forward to re.vers.ify.

The ScrumMaster role was created to confront traditional management structures and processes. Described as a servant leader, the ScrumMaster was to socialise the framework of Scrum, inspire collaboration, creativity and engagement, and infuse the organisation with the values of courage, focus, commitment, respect and openness.

Such a role, so different to any traditional management role was a challenge—to the individual, certainly, but more so to the organisation itself. Over time, traditional corporate culture has undermined, crippled and even enslaved the role of ScrumMaster, force fitting it into the old management paradigm. ScrumMasters are now thought of as junior project managers, delivery managers, or even just process taskmasters, responsible for little more than setting up meetings, collecting meaningless metrics and filing status reports.

This talk offers a way out of the corporate quagmire for those who genuinely care about transforming the workplace. Directing the focus back on the spirit of Scrum, and the essence of the role itself, attendees will learn what is needed to rescue Scrum from its enterprise captors, and restore it to its place as an anarchic, free-thinking, confrontational approach to work. At first a lament, but then a song of hope #TrueScrumMaster will remind us all of what really matters.

The name of the "Product Owner" role in Scrum is clear, relevant, and shows the essence of this role. The paradox I see (not only in large organizations) is that Product Owners either do not make a "product" (no direct end users), or do not feel like "the owners" (they can’t decide) or both. However, fun begins with a large scale: problems of decision-making, power, multitude of products and markets, many end users, teams, stakeholders, managers. The situation is getting even more complicated by the cacophony of subsequent PO names such as Proxy PO, Shadow PO, Area PO, System PO, Team PO, Team Owner, Process Owner, Tactical Owner, PM / PO, Business PO, IT PO etc.

In my presentation I will present typical pitfalls I've seen so far in defining the Product Owner role and I will give you some tips on how to avoid them - especially when you scale.

How many times have you been asked for estimates, no matter if you are a Developer, a Scrum Master or a Product Owner? Estimation is a vital part of our work! However, have you ever wondered how much can we trust our estimates? Have you ever wondered when can we honestly say that a Sprint is successful?

In my talk I will present real-life examples. Based on data gathered from Scrum Teams, working in different domains, technologies and having different habits, I will show patterns that surprised me. See where you shall look to check if your Scrum Teams follow the same surprising patterns.

Some Agility Coach called me and asked: “Hey PiMa! I started working in a new company. Could you please send me some “cheap” metrics so I can start assessing the agility level of teams I will be working for?” I responded “why not” and decided to share real-life agility metric and visualization examples I’ve been trying for years to support making wiser and more conscious decisions about improvements. David J. Anderson once said that FAIL should be treated as “First Attempt In Learning”. I totally agree with this statement. In my opinion, while creating a metric, you need to experiment as much as you can. Try to invent new metrics. Try to create a plenty of them. Most of them will most probably be useless. Finding such that can provoke you, your team or top-level management to make a beneficial decision is hard. I will share a lot of real-life success and fail stories.

Estimote has a bold mission to build an operating system for the physical world. No one’s done that before, and our Product Owners have a tough job working with demanding, uncompromising Founders with a laser-focused vision, plus a developer community you can’t bullshit. How to succeed as a PO in this environment? Based on many hours coaching our PO team in one-on-ones, many hours with the CEO and CTO understanding their expectations, plus reflection on times we have failed, this talk will provide unprecedented insight and transparency as to what it takes to succeed in such an environment.

1. Why I always tell prospective Product Owners to think again (they don't really want this job!)
2. Starting with the basics – essential, non-negotiable ingredients of success
3. The secret sauce – what do our most successful POs have in common.

An agile approach can be misinterpreted in many different ways, unfortunately. Most of the visible agile misunderstandings, that I observe, come from using Scrum. The framework is already known but what about using it? In my opinion, it is developing more like organic way - by the People. While this speech I will show my personal learning curve, based on almost 10 years agile journey. I will touch specific areas like process model itself, experiencing difficulties, a meaning of team, facilitating customer, defining a product, experiencing the size of an organisation, looking for humanity and finally covering business expectations. Have I always used agile principles properly? Of course not! Do I fail? Yes, of course! Do I learn still? I hope so :-)

Relations between the Scrum Master and the Product Owner are complicated. They are focused on other parts of the project/product and often have a very different background and leadership approach. It is even more complicated if these people are in Ordering Party - Contractor relationship and it happens in most Software Houses. You will find similar case if they are on different levels in an organizational structure. Moreover they come from different countries and meet mostly using tools like Skype. Two of Scrum Team members are Product Owner and a Scrum Master.

During my presentation I would like to focus on answering below questions:

• Are they really a team? Do they have common goal?
• How Scrum Master should construct feedback to Product Owner?
• How can he help PO to focus on business value without doing a job for him?
• Maybe it is a common institutional reason that hold people back from excellence?
• Have we just identified a serious swept under the rug impediment?
• How they can become allies in the cause of helping the team create great products?

I would like to share the experience from the perspective of the Scrum Masters who is pleased to collaborate with Product Owners. The presentation will contain basic mistakes made by Scrum Masters and Product Owners with the consequences of these errors for team’s performance, project stability or communication. During my lecture I would like to elaborate tools or techniques that clever Agile Coach can use to facilitate relationships with PO.

Did you ever ask yourself what happens to management when you transition your organization to Agile? We did not - we just started. The challenge of transforming a traditional organization towards Scrum does not stop at the team border. It also requires a replacement of the old leadership mindset and corresponding practices with a set of agile ones. Some of these are provided by Management 3.0. Today, five years into the journey, we want to share what helped us to succeed, and which of our ideas failed. This talk will briefly outline the difference between Management 1.0 and Management 3.0, and then take a deep dive into the specifics of our change. Come and join us to hear more about our travels!

Hard time to stick with decisions made on Retrospective? Not sure if your dedication to team’s working agreements is bringing fruits you expected? Suspect that your team is barking up the wrong tree? A life of an agile software development team in not easy. Regardless of method of choice a team needs to fulfill many often contradicting needs still retaining place for self-improvement.

The Talk describes an experiment of combining elements of Evidence Based Management with Four Disciplines of Execution as a way for a development team to track and improve their own habits. It’s meant to address two common issues that hinder team’s self-improvement: lack of consistency and inability to see long term payoffs of current action

The personal mission of Barry is creating a better understanding of the Scrum Master role. This is a role of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand the spirit of Scrum. During the TED talk Barry will share his view on the Scrum Master role and discuss the preferred stances but also the most common misunderstandings.

Letʼs imagine how often you use “Lean” or “Scrum” terminology. Probably almost every day in your office? You have projects, teams, deadlines, sometimes even resources to start working on. But….is it possible to start new non-softwarre startup completely from scratch in Agile and Lean way? No way? Iʼll try to show you thatʼs possible! Based on my experience with JedenSlad, Iʼll try to share my thoughts how to check if there is any market for your idea and how to realise that it is executable. Curious? Come to my presentation!

Everyday I hear Scrum Masters asking what they can do to improve their skills. Despite there is a lot of knowledge available today, they are struggling with getting valuable hints. Since I started my Scrum Master journey years ago I’ve tried plenty of approaches to speed up my growth — with various results. Some things didn’t worked at all, some were just fine, but some exceeded my expectations a lot and accelerated my growth as a Scrum Master exponentially. Many of my decisions put me out of my comfort zone, but from today’s perspective it was definitely worth it. During my talk I will share top things that worked for me and also for Scrum Masters which I support on daily basis as an Agile Coach.

Agile is just a set of rules. Scrum - a minimal framework for creating software. Game development is a growing part of the software development market. Why wouldn’t it be a perfect fit? We know scrum is not a silver bullet. So, are there areas of game development that make scrum rules hard to follow? If so, which ones and why? Or maybe it's just an excuse? Maybe we create the illusion of complexity and chaos around gamedev to make life easier for us? The goal of this talk is to present the challenges and processes of game development companies, share experience on how to implement scrum in gamedev companies and to show common impediments along the way. I think it's important to know about the state of game development business, as more and more companies try agile solutions in their struggles to win players’ hearts.

Let's have a look at agendas of Agile/Scrum conferences. What's on the top? A product, soft skills, teams, coaching, scaling? All of them are vital. It could be confirmed by any experienced Agilist. What's missing?
In the Agile world, the ugly duckling is a software craftsmanship. In the Scrum Guide, the Agile Manifesto, it's barely mentioned. But this is a crucial ingredient to get an increment every Sprint. On the other hand, I use to hear requests for another sophisticated retrospective technique from a legion of Scrum Masters. However many developers complain that before the Scrum era, a testing phase was well-prepared (if finally executed ;-)).
In my talk, I would like to dig into the issue, why it's happeing, revise priorities, highlight why QA is essential and how we all can deal with it.

Novice Scrum Masters are usually strongly focused on scrum practices in the first place. They observe how Scrum works, search for experiences and knowledge shared by others. This is a good first step…to become a leader in the future. Being Scrum Master is only the first step on the path where the main destination is becoming effective leader.
Leadership is about influencing and every Scrum Master might be a leader who can influence other people and inspire positive changes around us. I would like to explain what it means to be a leader, how to become a better leader and how to effectively share agile values and change the world around us. I will show how leadership should work, why it is different from management and what responsibility means.

Did you know that our brain sees words as images? No matter how surprising it may seem, it is true. We think through a single or a series of pictures. Just imagine how compelling and effective you would be if you could communicate with others using images. If you feel intrigued but are thinking you may not be up to it, this workshop is for you.
Gabriela’s mission is to make people aware of the importance of visualisation of ideas and goals. Their power and impact, if turned into images. When people see concepts in the form of a picture, they understand and connect to them instantly. That is the secret behind Visual Thinking and Visual Facilitation.

Gabriela’s goal is to make turning ideas into images as easy as pie. That is why during the workshop you will learn the basics of Visual Facilitation. You will have the opportunity to learn a few essential technics and tricks, as well as get acquainted with some ready-to-use examples.

The newly learnt skills will enable you to put the most important things within scrum into visuals. You will energise and motivate your team. You will get the most out of your input. The process itself will feel natural.

Let's have a close look into the tough situations that are faced by many teams. During the workshop, we will role play several scenarios based on common problems encountered by Scrum Teams. We will deal with fear of change and loosing control at organization level, problems with defining and delivering product value and reluctance for improvement. Together, we will tap to collective intelligence to find potential solutions for situation in which Scrum rules and principles are being broken.

The workshop will be conducted in English.
The number of participants is limited to 20 – first come first served rule applies.

During the workshop “The 8 Stances of a Scrum Master” every participant will experience the potential of the Scrum Master role in a unique way. It’s my personal mission to create a better understanding of the Scrum Master role. Truly practicing with the 8 different stances increases the chance of successful Scrum Mastery. The workshop will be fun, interactive and engaging. You don’t want to miss it!

The workshop will be conducted in English.
The number of participants is limited to 25 – first come first served rule applies.

Workshop Objective: The objective of the workshop is to present the User Story Mapping as a complex tool for building Product Backlog but also defining of how the application works, determining the external and internal dependencies and requirements decomposition. The participants are going to learn how to define priorities, versions (MVP) on the map.

Results: The workshop participants will define the concept of a specific product targeted to the appropriate user group and addressing the needs of that group. They will then build a specific user activity map and tasks that will later translate into Product Backlog. The map can later serve as a means to communicate the Scrum team with the client, as well as to manage requirement changing process and priorities shifting.

The workshop will be conducted in English.
The number of participants is limited to 30 – first come first served rule applies.

During the workshop, we will focus on practical tips & tricks related to contracting agile IT projects. We will discuss contractual clauses that help you to boost cost/time to market of your products as well as optimize a quality of deliverables. We will learn how to avoid negotiation's show stoppers and build a vendor- client partnership by using a fair contract mechanisms. We will also learn on how to implement Scrum framework into the contract including payments model compatible with iterations based models. The workshop is based on practical experiences from the Polish ICT market.

Inspect and adapt are the core pillars of Scrum. It’s easy to say, but more difficult to implement. Many Scrum teams have regular sprint retrospectives, yet they don’t improve or improve very slowly. They establish new actions during each retro, but don’t change their behavior during sprint. Maybe it’s time to change attitude and use different tools to make good things happen. During workshops you will discover what supports change and improvement and why it’s not so easy to change.

Any system change or improvement project that requires an investment of capital, time or other resources must be accepted by senior management before launching. Getting the final approval can sometimes be a serious challenge. Moreover – their real acceptance and commitment are the key factors of Scrum’s success. Scrum ideas (no matter how true and sexy they are) always have to fight against all the “I’m not convinced”, “Maybe you’d only try it in a small team?”, “What the heck is the Scrum?” and other stalling for time excuses. But you have to go through them bravely, if you think Scrum is seriously for you. We will try to give you some ideas about what should you start with and how to cope with inevitable obstacles during this battle.

Where is money in Scrum? Why Developers get excited about it? How new approach can change image of your business outside the company? When a “green light” to an Agile/Scrum personnel ideas shouldn’t be given? What are the main threats of Scrum/Agile transition process? If you are looking for answers and any other scrum – tricky questions, you should join our presentation. Remember, Scrum is simple in theory but hard to implement in practice. If you meet a group of people that think Scrum is easy, then you can be sure that they don’t understand it. We will guide you through the pros and cons of this decision.

Not experienced Scrum teams very often face problem with splitting large User Stories into smaller ones. They want to have smaller User Stories to improve flow in the Sprint, get smoother Burndown chart and decrease possibility of failing the Sprint. Usually first idea is to split them "horizontaly" - by type of work that has to be done. Such mindset causing huge risk of losing business value and creating waterfall way of working. Is there any option to prevent this situation? During short presentation I will show few strategies how to split large User stories into smaller ones with keeping it's business value.

Product Owner's role in scrum seems easy and attractive. A lot of power and responsibility, making decisions and shaping the future, once a sprint writing few user stories and prioritising them. Sounds obvious and very attractive. But when the real work starts, for people in Product Owner’s roles it turns out that's not that piece of cake, it's not a few stories a week and team is also not that cooperative. POs leaders (because eventually, almost everyone has it's own boss, right? ;) start to see or feel the difference in performance among Product Owners, but do not know how to name what is being done right and what needs to be done better, and even more - how to quantify that skills to help Product Owners improve.

In this talk I would like to show you how did I manage to quantify Product Owners workshop, visualize them their strong and weak skills and help them improve their skills based on numbers.

This method may be especially useful when:

• you are at the beginning of rolling out Scrum framework and everyone is learning new paradigm,
• when still in an early phase of scrum rollout,
• when you lead people acting as Product Owners, in a big software development organization, where dozens of them work and when your own observation is not enough.

Did you like Gunther's presentation “Re.Vers.Ify (Re.Imagining Your Organisation)” and want to know more? Here you have an exceptional opportunity to explore the topic even more and ask each question to our Keynote Speaker.

Did you like Tobias's presentation “#TrueScrumMaster” and want to know more? Here you have an exceptional opportunity to explore the topic even more and ask each question to our Keynote Speaker.

More and more companies choose and successfully apply agile management methods. Can HR be agile or is this only a thought experiment? What I’ve observed during my work as the project manager and HR specialist the biggest challenge is the right attitude and self-awareness. Hiring the best, performance management and sustaining motivated employees need the collaboration of both sites. Striving for agile culture we need a new mind-set in the way we work together as organization and by the same token treat HR and the business as one.

Let's have a closer look at how HR professionals can be inspired by being immersed in this environment and use this knowledge to create adaptability, innovation, collaboration, and speed and thereby align with the agile philosophy by building projects around motivated and self-organizing people.

It is a workshop during which a group of attendees will be encouraged to apply Scrum to solve a real life problem from a user perspective. Taking into consideration the four scrum values, namely: commitment, focus, openness and courage they will be challenged to solve problem in a creative manner. The clue of the training is that every idea has a value. Every way that brings us closer to the solution may be the right one. If you are open to different points of views or you are willing to be the person who is, this is a workshop for you.

The workshop will be conducted in English.
The number of participants is limited to 20 – first come first served rule applies

In this talk Riina is going to take us through some of the realism of organizational change and transformation and give us some perspectives on how to support organizational revolution, evolution and strategic change.

There are many holistically thinking people in the agile community, many people who dream about teal, holacracy or sociocracy. That’s a long way from the reality of an organization that locks the doors to the office supply room, because they need to control how many pens are spent. Riina deals with reality, dreams about self-organized organizations with super talented peers, and understands this is not the case in most organizations.

She has no correct answers, but plenty of opinions building on 15 years of organizational development.

It is time to start walking the new executive walk, and it is totally different than in the traditionally managed organizations that you have been raised to manage. The rules of the exec game have changed. From directions to direction. We are going from executive reports to the ivory tower, towards transparently seeing the organization’s successes, dysfunctions and ugly truths, and then to deal with them. Get ready to face the new expectations for executives in Agile organizations. In this talk Riina will slap you on your cheek to wake you up with practical and valuable requests, to help your organization on the way towards agile collaboration.

Most of us end up in the PdM role by being thrown into it like into cold water and told to swim. Some of us drown, most learn to paddle, barely enough to keep their heads above water. But when do you know that you are really acting as a product manager? When do you really know that you are swimming as a PdM?

I've heard many definitions of what it means to be a product manager, almost as many as the different product owner's that I have met, from the person who documents the customer needs, main architect, customer representative, stakeholder liaison to CEO of the product. All in some sense capture parts of a job (even though that might not be the necessarily the PdM's job) that might be required on a product. But do not hit the mark for me on what it means to be a product manager

In my presentation I will look at some of these roles and go into what I think is the job of manager of a product and why maximising business value should always be on your mind.

The business model of a company defines not only it's relations with customers and sales activities but also the way it's software product is designed and the ways of working inside of the company. As a PO I have worked in 4-5 different types of business models and would like to share my experience focusing on the three most common: Business to consumer, Business to Business, Business to Business to consumer. In each I saw different forms of interaction with stakeholders, clients and end users that had an impact on the roadmaps, ways of discovery and team dynamics that seem characteristic for each model.

Motorola Solutions creates products developed by hundreds of people. That’s a really tall ship on the Public Safety market sea. The inertia and the reaction time of such a big ship are long and far exceeding one sprint timeframe. Yet we want to transform the company into an agile organization. Improving agility in a growing company is hard - if you have worked in a successful startup that grew really fast, you know what I am talking about. But improving agility of the company that has already reached a large size and product maturity is even harder.I would like to share with you my observations of what I believe is the key scaling aspect in the attempts to change the course of a large organization in a fast and efficient way. If you find that interesting - or if you simply like sailing - my talk is for you!

The era of robots replacing us on every walk of life, starting with work, is still luckily in front of us. So far, companies are based on humans, with all the consequences of relying on such unpredictable and self-dependent beings. In agile companies, both HR and Scrum Masters teams accompany employees by responding to their needs. On the other hand, they convey expectations of the company, which involves defining requirements on employee competencies and engagement.

Who is then responsible for bringing proper competencies to the team? Who should be involved in keeping team members motivated and support them in "tough times"? Who is to supposed to deal with the ultimate challenge of making company communication clear?I will try to provide answers to these questions based on my experience of combining the perspective of Scrum teams with the one of HR teams.

Have you ever come across organisational issues that haven't been within your Scrum Team’s sphere of influence? What are the limits of Scrum in traditional organisations with strong hierarchies, undisclosed finances or some legacy systems dependencies? Imagine unleashing the potential of Scrum in an environment with no managers and no processes overhead. Just self-organising teams focused on business value. It becomes true in the next level of organisations that is emerging.

I'll present fundamentals of teal organisations, share my experiences from founding a self-managing cooperative providing software services. I’ll explain why teal fits so well with Scrum.

Organizations, especially large enterprises, are built around people and processes. When an organization embraces Scrum, while People and Culture raise their degree of relevance assuming a cornerstone role, Processes need to be adjusted. The way organizations apply decision-making, the way they recognize people performance, and the concept itself of “accountability”, have to change deeply, to ensure that benefits of Scrum are reaped to a very large extent.

The opportunity to start the new IT R&D company might happen once in a lifetime. So we took our chance and started to build from the scratch. That was 2014. Our dream was to build a place when everyone achives extraordinary result with using best new technologies, having friends not managers around, make a lot of fun…. Not longer than after few months since we started, we’ve realized that we extremely need some guidelines to fulfil our dream. Then we started to use Evidence-Based Change framework, widely known as Agility Path. If you want to learn what the framework is and what offers, and by chance, to know the story of OT R&D using it, be welcome on the speech.

Multidirectional business development in LUX MED, diametric change of data scale and digitization of services have forced adaptation of new technologies and our software development methodology.

By working in a multi-tasking environment where changes were affecting multiple business areas and systems, it was necessary to move beyond broad change, completely rebuilding the IT model with the environment. As a result, we have adapted product based model, enriched with adaptive optimization solutions.

I never actually worked in Scrum – got to understand what Agile is at a stage when I could use it in large scale transformation projects as means to make them successful, make people happy to work on them, make me happy to see how they grow themselves into real Agile FREAKS.

Having gone through several years of maturing in Agile transformation at large scale (up to 40+ scrum teams working in parallel), I got into a position when working in agile development factory was a day-to-day job. Thus – change of environment put me into new place – building agile delivery teams for multi-location, multi-cultural, hectic project environment.

I will explain how to setup, help and nurture teams which are spread across the globe, timezones, cultures – and make them successful in Agile, efficient and motivated – based on real exaples, mistakes and small victories I have witnessed and been part of.

The saying that change is the only constant is more true today than ever before. In this crazy and dynamic environment we use Scrum to deliver incremental value to our customers. We are the Agile Practitioners, Scrum Masters and Product Owners. We all work in Agile teams and Agile companies. Or, maybe, it’s not true. Because, you know, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Workshop will explore more deeply a few of the ideas offered in the keynote talk. Exactly which ideas will depend on the requests of the people who attend. This workshop will be driven by your needs and your curiosity. Expect participatory dialog, physical interaction and quiet reflection. My hope is that after this short workshop you'll be inspired by at least one thing, and ready to take some true ScrumMaster action back in your place of work.

The workshop will be conducted in English.
The number of participants is limited to 24 – first come first served rule applies.

Gunther Verheyen, one of our keynote speakers, has been employing Scrum since 2003. Gunther is amazed by the questions people bring to him. He wants to return the favour and give questions back to Scrum practitioners. In a session of 1,5 hours Gunther will interactively explore some aspects of mastery of Scrum with 15 people. There won’t be any PowerPoint. It won’t be a class. Maybe there will not even be answers. Just conversations and sharing.

The session will be conducted in English. Time: 14:10 - 17:10
The number of participants is limited to 15 – first come first served rule applies

How efficient is your software organization? Did you ever wonder how value translates to money? Well, let's use your own approximated data and calculate how much of your organization is really working for the money you're earning. Or is your organization drowned in waste? Let's see!

Yet another successful project and a useless product that nobody likes?

You’re doing your job well, but the outcomes feel wrong?

Product Owner, your job is to optimise value of your product. How can you do that if you don’t know what you’re building or you building the wrong thing?

During my talk I will show you how important it is to define a product, do it consciously and align it with a business strategy.

You have a great opportunity to take advantage of some sponsor packages available for Scrum Days 2017. These are designed to create a real impact for your brand and provide a fantastic return on your marketing investment! Scrum Days will be also an excellent opportunity to meet candidates and to build employer branding and learn how to use Scrum more efficiently.

For more information please contact us at [email protected]