Struggling? Juggling? Drowning? Argh! These experiences of overwhelm can be a common part of a normal day or week in our life. Yes, the world can be an overwhelming place. We might have an emotional experience of being overwhelmed. We can experience the ‘too much on’ of workload - too much to do and not enough time in which to do it. Or we might feel like we’re submerged under an endless pile of information, reports, books and reading. At other times we can just be plain 'drowning in' it from a wicked combination of all three: emotions, workload and information. Overload and overwhelm isn't good for us. Burnout and health issues are waiting. We need to find ways to acknowledge our emotions, manage our workload, and filter all of that information. Our overwhelm CAN be outsmarted. Lynne Cazaly shares some new ways to make sense of overwhelm, new ways to work, and new ways to cope with information. You’ll be all over overwhelm… it won’t be all over you. 

Not only is Lynne one of Australia's leading speakers on new ways of working, she's been involved with our community since our very first event in 2012. Lynne has done breakout sessions, speaker prep workshops and graphic recording at multiple events, but this is the first time we have had her front and centre for a keynote.

Joshua Kerievsky will join us, on-screen from California, to preview his upcoming book, Joy of Agility, which is to be published in 2022. It reflects over two decades of experimenting, learning, unlearning, and reflecting on the nature of agility — including helping Industrial Logic and its global clients become more agile, applying agility to home repairs, health, fitness, parenting and more.

Joy of Agility will feature 6 powerful agile mantras and over 100 unforgettable stories of real people, teams and organizations that made slow and awkward things faster and easier, solved difficult problems by being readily resourceful, and adapted to change with speed and grace. He says that it will be your definitive guide to agility, meant for people in any profession who aspire to be agile.

There will be a chance for Q&A, so bring your questions!

About Joshua

Joshua grew up in New York City, living in affordable housing on the Lower East Side. He sold lemonade in Central Park, mowed lawns, raked leaves, shovelled snow, babysat, co-lead backpacking trips, and used to cat sit for the wife of the first professional black baseball player, Jackie Robinson.

A love for computers and his father's work in “data processing” inspired him to get into software at an early age, studying computer science in Middle School and High School. He went on to study liberal arts at a tiny school named Saint John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

During a year off from college, he began programming professionally for a Wall Street bank, then working for that bank through and after college.

In 1996, he founded Industrial Logic with the vision of sharing the “light and magic” of excellence in software development, and he became an early pioneer of the agile/lean movement in the software industry.

He holds zero certifications, preferring to continue to learn about and improve his craft in other ways. Joshua is the author of Refactoring to Patterns and the instigator of the Modern Agile community.

Mitch will outline the role Indigenising business education plays in creating more ethical, sustainable and just businesses, where the focus is not just about the work of the firm but the opportunities for change and collective outcomes. Mitch will draw on his experience working with Indigenous Business Leaders,  Indigenous thought leaders, and Communities & share ways in which Indigenous ways of doing business can benefit the wider community. 

Mitch is a First Nations Wiradjuri person, privileged grow up on his ancestral Country in southern NSW. He now resides on Wurundjeri territory in the northern suburbs of Naarm(Melb). He's an academic with the Dilin Duwa Centre for Indigenous Business Leadership at the University of Melbourne & Program Director of the award-winning MURRA Indigenous Business Masterclass. Mitch is an avid believer of pragmatic self-determination through collective engagement with economies. He is currently undertaking a Ph.D. at the University of Melbourne which seeks to understand the discursive and performative elements of Indigenous Business Leadership.

Do all career progressions end in management? Should they? Do they have to?

You can sometimes fall into leadership roles by accident, but (with a bit of care and planning) you can help get everyone around you into great continuous improvement habits.

Come on a storytelling journey with me, wrestling with existential questions about what software development & delivery means, what forms management & leadership can take, and ways to build & support community.

I’ll share my experiences in a variety of fields, technologies, and practices - and leave you with some perspectives you can shape your own foundations with.

About Andras
Andras Bubics is a Lead Consultant at DiUS and has worked with a bunch of technologies and stacks including embedded, hardware, and IoT; to VR, mobile, web, and microservices; as well as infra, dev-ops, and CI/CD.

Are your teams configured to support your strategy?

In this session remote:af Founder Andrew Blain will share his insights from developing and executing remote:af Operating Model Design.
Robust and ambitious strategies need Operating Models that compliment them. Traditional Operating Model Design is often practiced outside of the awareness of the affected teams and can lead to catastrophic outcomes for the organization.
The patterns and principles underlying remote:af Operating Model Design are focused on collaboration and drawing a complexity appreciative solution that is fit for context.

About Andrew

Andrew Blain is a founder of remoteaf.co, the world’s first framework for effective remote working, and elabor8.com.au, one of Australia’s leading lean/agile consultancy. As a successful founder, technology leader and company director with expertise in strategy, organisational design, complex facilitation and adaptive leadership, Andrew offers a unique perspective on the future of work.

Ben will share stories about the culture working at Facebook where he has been a User Interface Engineer for 3 years and spent much of this time working in London.
There will be a focus on agile at Facebook and the specifics about the technology used. 
Ben will allow plenty of time for questions!

A little more about Ben Birch...
"In 2017 I packed up my family and move to London to be a UI Engineer at Facebook. We travelled and learnt and it was a wild ride. Before that I was global front end practice lead at Aconex in Melbourne. I have a passion for working at the boundary of design and engineering and improving the relationship between humans and technology".

Engage in a hands-on simulation to draw learnings on fundamental Lean concepts through the use of a coin-flipping game. This exercise will provide participants with an opportunity to reflect on how changing the rules of a given system may or may not result in more value being created.

Binyamin Lawal 
Binyamin is a passionate Agile Delivery Lead who has worked across many industries and organisations including Suncorp, Industrie & Co, Coates Group and Lexicon Digital. Bin thoroughly enjoys leading effective and collaborative teams to deliver great value and customer experience. Bin has a strong focus on product and system growth as well as continuous improvement. He is a true advocate for lean and agile ways of working. Bin is delighted to take you through the ‘coin flipping lean simulation’.

Osvel Garza
Osvel is a well-versed Agile Delivery Lead with over 20 experience in the IT industry. Osvel has worked for many reputable organisations including Australia Post, REA Group, Colonial First Estate and most recently Lexicon Digital. Osvel has extensive experience leading cross-functional teams to solve complex problems. He is extremely passionate about agile ways of working, team dynamics and system improvements. Osvel will be joining Binyamin to take you through the ‘coin flipping lean simulation’.

Understanding the value of partnering and mutuality  is important not only in the designer and product manager relationship, but most relationships in life.

In this session work on best practices in partnership and communication:

• Creating foundations
• Expectations setting - what does a good partnership look like?
  
• Communicating beliefs around your roles and partnership
  
• Understanding your overlap
• Designer role and
  
• Product Manager role
  
• Setting yourselves up for success, together
• Personal development goals
  
• Partnering goals
  
• Communicating goals to your team
  
• Sharing back as a group - best thing you've learnt today
  
• Final recommendations and wrap up
  

About Cath

Cath is a passionate and curious ‘pioneer.’ who leads teams and initiatives to success. Her skills in strategic direction, problem solving, catalysing and brainstorming, are well established with strong industry knowledge, vision and delivery leadership. She helps stakeholders and teams see the big picture, possible pathways and deliver a vision in small bite-sized steps.

Her background is almost two decades in technology. Cath’s primary specialisation is design in digital and software engineering, UX, CX, service and human-centered design, product and service discovery and delivery, along with close to a decade in social research specialising in both commercial and academic roles. She is also an experienced lean and agile practitioner and design thinker.

It’s been 4 years since I began managing MYOB's innovative DevelopHer program and throughout this time there has been some valuable lessons that have helped accelerate a deeper understanding of how to support and grow females in software development. Join me as I share 4 game changing lessons that have contributed to the success of our DevelopHer program. 

Lessons learnt: 
 

• Let go of the “software developer” persona: to make a world of change and live in true diversity we need to be pushing the dial around what it means to be software developer, especially for a women. 
• Raising a developer takes a village, regardless of whether you are female or male: When the community is strong, inclusivity is heightened, when inclusivity is high, we increase the chance that a women will stay in our field. 
• Be mindful of Glue work; often women get tasked with the organising, the administration, the pulling people together, the performance conversations and while you may think that your female colleague will be a "natural" in this, you may be robbing them from gaining growth in the field that they’re interested in and that is, coding. 
• Be aware of the stigma of a female software developer and the burden that it holds.

About Chanh

Chanh is Program Advisor for MYOB's Graduate Program, The Future Makers Academy and Developher Program. 

Technical leadership is the main bottleneck for organisations to grow and perform.

Want to recruit? Want to retain people? Want to reward people in their career goals? Want to make sure the teams are maximising their impact? Whatever it is, we'll draw answers from our beaten and battered wise and experienced tech managers. 

What questions do you want answered?  Come along and join this moderated discussion on the issues that concern managers today. 

About Craig

Craig is a co-founder of LAST Conference. These days, he's less involved in the organisation of the events, concentrating more on Everest Engineering.

Darren will show us how he makes use of data analytics tools to give the Aboriginal people the skills to to govern the collection, ownership and application of data about Indigenous communities, peoples, lands, and resources. This concept of Indigenous Data Sovereignty  promotes the rights of Indigenous nations over data about them, regardless of where it is held and by whom.

Darren is a Badimia man from Yamatji country in the mid-west of Western Australia. He is the Director at Notitia Consulting, a leading data analytics & digital transformation firm that solves real world problems by building conceptual information models that align any analytical output to the right user. This is an extension of commonly used information access models, and they feed this into any of their outputs. 

There are many ways to learn about users. The technique we hear most about is interviews, but there are other ways. Join this fast-paced, highly interactive session to experience three other ways to learn about users (and yes, we'll talk about interviews as well).

Donna is an independent design consultant. With 20-ish years experience, she has expertise across the entire design spectrum – from strategy to delivery and everything in between – and loves all of it. She has designed for a wide range of problems across all kinds of industries, with a particular emphasis on information architecture and complex employee experience problems. Recognised internationally as a leading UX practitioner, Donna is a regular conference speaker and has written five UX-related books. She created UX Australia and ran it for 9 years.

We love getting customer feedback – and there are some times we don’t love getting customer feedback! Dipa Rao will share her experiences of dealing with both solicited AND unsolicited customer feedback. 

She will discuss:

• setting the right expectations for getting feedback
• how to manage responses
• how to prepare for managing everything that comes your way including HiPPOs & distressed customers!

About Dipa

Dipa currently works at Australia Post as Product Experience Manager. Once called the 'Queen of Surveys', a title she relishes and strives to live up to, she's worked as a BA, Iteration Manager and Agile Coach through her career. She got a taste for product management during her consultant days in 2016 and hasn't looked back since. Her previous job saw her sift through tonnes of positive, negative, overwhelming, alarming and in equal measure, hilarious customer feedback where customers sometimes advocated for her sacking. Luckily, she doesn't always act on customer feedback, and neither should you. 

Dipa is passionate about gender and equity, and you will occasionally find her tweeting about it. Alternately you'll find her in a nursery or Bunnings. She is currently a plant collector and a wood-working enthusiast, two hobbies that - oh look! - come together to make a self fulfilling positive loop.

Twitter: @dipanjali

Are you ready to bring your toys to the office? One of the most important skill sets needed by our organisations today is creativity. But are we exercising that muscle as much as we can?

Join Frank Buechele and learn to use the LEGO Serious Play method to build physical models of your ideas and synthesise them with ideas from other participants. Use this method to explore what cards, games, toys and other creative tools are being used - or could be used -  in our organisations. Leave the session with some strategies to introduce more creativity in your workplace through play and gamification

In this session, we’ll take a look at why your transformation keeps failing and why organisations find themselves stumbling at the same hurdles time and time again.

Kim will talk about the responsibilities of leaders, and the direct impact of psychological safety on individual health, as well as why organisations find it so hard to build psychologically safe workplaces, and how we can affect meaningful change.

Kim Spillman is a Delivery Lead and Business Analyst with Midnyte City.  She is a curious, dynamic technologist and leader. She has an unwavering  belief that empowered and psychologically safe teams can change the course of organisations, technologies and communities. Kim has a diverse background, and has been passionately and pragmatically leading teams for many years across organisations and industries.

In an ideal world a product team (engineers, product & design) would be involved in Discovery, Describe, Design, Develop & Deploy (5Ds) efforts to get their product to their customer. But it's not easy to fit it all in. And it's harder in a large organisation.
I'll share what that approach and framework is and how to get started if you're not there today. I've got experience doing team change using this approach. I'll share my experiences of moving teams to better flow for continuous discovery and customer input within their delivery sprints.
You'll walk away with some tips on how to hear from your customer on a more regular basis than you do today, hopefully help you shift from feeling like a feature factory, and feel more empowered to create value for your customers :-)

About Liz

Liz Blink is a Lead Product Manager at Cogent.
Liz needs to chat with other product managers to stay sane! She founded the Product Anonymous community to create an opportunity for Melbourne folk to get together and discuss product management topics and meet others in the industry – or related industries like UX.

A born and bred academic who asks why at every opportunity. Liz has fallen in love with product management because it challenges the individual in the role and the company when they choose the right individual. It is neither a place for complacency or acceptance. It is a place for dreaming the dream and understanding where the day-to-day can take you… and then it is rising above and asking for the dream anyway.

Data mesh, first defined by Zhamak Dehghani, is a powerful new approach to delivering value from data in organisations. Data mesh aims to move beyond traditional centralised data systems to bring data and processing capability to the people who need it and use it.

In this workshop, Ned and David from Thoughtworks, will introduce the core elements of data mesh from a LAST perspective - wastes addressed, building blocks of the mesh that create agility, and techniques to tune the system - followed by Q&A discussion.


Ned Letcher
Ned is a data specialist who has worked across a range of industries as a data scientist, data engineer, and software engineer. He has experience applying supervised and unsupervised machine learning, natural language processing, data visualisation, and dashboarding frameworks to business challenges and opportunities. Ned has used these experiences to develop strategies for making effective use of data and for identifying and framing the business value of data analytics and data science projects. 

David Colls 
David is an innovative technology leader, with over 20 years’ experience leading the strategic and technical delivery of data and AI, digital strategy and change solutions. David combines diverse experience delivering complex technology solutions with his passion for customer outcomes to develop high performing teams capable of solving our clients’ complex problems. 

As a Director of the Data and AI Practice at Thoughtworks, David oversees all facets of developing Data and AI capabilities service offerings. David’s technical background is in developing simulation software for training and manufacturing.

The adoption rate of robots has increased hugely since COVID-19, and industries will continue to adopt and invest in robotic solutions. Robots have been used to help people keep in touch, doctors and hospitals can see patients without layers of PPE; 

Robots are being used to sterilise huge areas at a fraction of the time it would take humans to do so, in hospitals and airports. In Singapore, robots were used to convey information to citizens to keep their distance and to regularly wash their hands. Boring work for humans but robots can do this the whole day.

It is amazing how quickly robots have been adopted recently, whereas previously, there was a more resistance to using them. That excites me for the future! Come along for some insights into where this is going and also see a temi telepresence robot in action.

About Nicci Rossouw

Nicci is a Robotics solution innovator and disrupter, founder and owner of Exaptec. She also hosts the Let's Talk Robotics podcast. She specializes in robotics automation solution design and delivery using a "Robotics as a Service" as a business model. She is a thought leader in the application of Robotics technology and how we as humans interact with robots in a social workplace context, and strongly believes that robotic automation will deliver a profound positive difference to people's lives. 

The pace of change is accelerating, and we are all feeling it.  Whether that be in the context of a company focussed on a single product, or in a large multifaceted organisation, new opportunities and challenges are emerging with increasing frequency.

High performing organisations strike the balance between investing in their current business model to remain competitive and profitable, while actively exploring what their future business should look like. One of these arms should not be significantly stronger than the other - we must create ambidextrous organisations.
The Innovation Portfolio Map from Strategyzer is a powerful tool that enables us to visualise and manage these two sides of the portfolio - the “Explore” arm (looking ahead) and the “Exploit” arm (focused on now).

DiUS has developed an internal system of innovation that leverages the Portfolio Map and we’ll outline how you can continue focusing on the “now” without losing sight of innovating for the “next”.

About Pete Cohen
Pete is Principal Consultant, Delivery Lead and Agile Business Analyst at DiUS Computing in Melbourne. He works with clients ranging from startups to banks, helping them solve strategic business problems using emerging technologies and practices.

Lean branding is a lite, user centric approach to branding perfect for startups and agile environments. Is formulated from the product strategy perspective, includes audience resonance tests and allows room to grow and evolve as the product and industry changes.

In this workshop, Pilar will take us through the lean branding methodology that she has stress tested in startups all over the world.

About Pilar

Pilar is a product and strategy designer, passionate about solving problems, designing great experiences, making technology more human and inventing the future. She has worked in a wide range of design projects across industries and countries for the last 20 years. Before joining Everest as Director of Design, she spent 4 years building innovative startups across Australia and Asia as a part of BCG Digital Ventures.

In business, Data permeates nearly every initiative in a company. As Data practitioners, we know that if we develop the means to use this information, it can be a powerful tool to help makes sense of what we are doing and to understand where we can go next to deliver value for our customers and our companies. By the end of the talk, we hope you’ll see the pervasiveness of data work, why we think data is a language and how agility can manifest through data fluency. Join us for this interactive workshop!  

In this session, we will: -

• Take a light touch look back at Melbourne’s COVID response
• Tease out the data disciplines at play in the response
• See how they apply outside of pandemics by mapping these to back to project roles and activities

Shelvia Loveridge 

 
Mei-Ling Cadle
 

Shelvia and Mei-Ling are both Co-founders and Directors of MAEV&Co.

Together, they bring  decades of data experience to initiatives and projects, from Datawarehousing to Big Data, Reporting to Data Mining, from Viz to Insights and Analytics, feature engineering for Statistical Models through to Machine Learning. They have guided teams to interpret DevOps and CI/CD to DataOps, matured conceptual, logical and physical models, optimised and tuned workloads, journeyed from On-Prem to Cloud, and deployed countless features for decisioning, data science, reporting, analytics and transformation initiatives. 

This session will teach you two simple destress techniques that take very little time AND two ways to embed these tools as daily habits.

Vicki has observed and experienced first-hand the negative effects of demanding, stressful work environments, leading her to explore ways individuals can have greater locus of control of their well-being. This interactive and fun workshop will allow you to explore and experience the two techniques and create an individual plan to embed the new habits.

What you will know by the end of this workshop:

· How neuroplasticity enables you to build new pathways for wellbeing
· A plan to embed two helpful habits to engage your parasympathetic system more frequently (rest and digest)
· How to reduce the exhausting, chronic engagement of the sympathetic system (fight, flight, freeze)
· Techniques you can use to embed these and other positive and helpful habits.

Benefits flowing from this:

• Build neural pathways for a calmer state
• Less stress
• Less rushing
• More calm
• Clearer thinking
• More consistent energy.

About Vicki:

Vicki Young has spent 25+ years in the corporate and not for profit sectors, with expertise in Organisational Change Management. You may already know Vicki from past Spark the Change events, as the Director of Curation. She is the Partner Change Management Practice at Exco Partners and Co-Founded the Melbourne Lean Change Management Meetup in 2015.

Vicki’s focus is on purpose-led, leaner, more collaborative, and supportive ways to engage people in the change journeys of our ever-changing workplaces. Her experience and background in biochemistry and genetics is rounded out by a recently completed an 18-month intensive yoga instructor course in the old traditions, as applied to the modern world for a calm mind, and a mental health first aid course.