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