Open Tech Calendar

About this event

We're striving for Sheffield Devops to be an inclusive event that is open to all. We operate a Code of Conduct and are happy to meet & greet people on arrival. Please drop us a message on Twitter if you have any queries or would just like a chat ahead of the event.

Schedule

18:00: Doors open

18:30 – 19:15: Tom Hoyland - Metaphors, Monitoring and Metrics: How a Platform Team changed the way they communicated to change they way they delivered products and services

19:15: Socialising

Speaker

Tom Hoyland (@thatagile)

With a background in engineering, product development and service transformation, Tom gets under the bonnet of products, teams, and organisations to understand what makes them tick and how they could be better.

Tom is an Expert Agile and DevOps practitioner, Coach and Mentor at Sky Betting & Gaming and That Agile.

Previously Tom has led Agile and Digital Transformations, building teams, growing capabilities and promoting cultures that reduce the lead time to business impact at the UK Home Office and across UK Police Forces.

Talk

Tired of ‘Waterfall’ vs ‘Agile’? Fed up with simplistic plans for complex work? Are you an Agile Coach stuck on the reporting treadmill? In this talk, we’ll show you how a platform team wrapped up concepts from DevOps, complexity, metaphors and Clean Language into a tidy package to change the way they worked - challenging their biases, considering brain chemistry, and finding new opportunities for scaling along the way (no… it’s not SAFe).

In this talk, you’ll see how we took a Platform Team on a journey to change how they understood risk, managed complexity, and overcame their biases when building new products, services and platforms.

You’ll see how the team challenged the language they used to communicate progress and risks, incorporating DevOps concepts to reduce ambiguity, increase transparency, and changed the way decisions were made.

We’ll reveal how we stopped Scrum Masters, Delivery Leads and Agile Coaches from becoming relays for information, by using concepts such as Clean Feedback to reduce the distance between what people thought was happening and what the ground truth was, with a few bots thrown in there for good measure!

You’ll hear about memory, the crucial details we leave on the editing room floor, and how we overcame this with a pinch of technology and team games to re-remember events, counter biases and increase creativity.

Like metaphors? We’ll cover them too - exploring the role they play in how we think about work, what we believe is possible, what might happen next, and how our models of the world constrain the way we work - with some excellent drawings from kids and grown-ups!

And we’ll show you some of the games we played with our teams to counter biases, with concepts such as Red Teaming and Reverse Thinking, increasing creativity and leveraging neurodiversity within our teams - Small patterns scaled up - and not a mention of SAFe in sight!