Check out the highlights from the evening in the video below!

 

Agile in Action was a hugely exciting one for us here at Burns Sheehan as it was our first ever interactive, workshop style event! Hosted at the spacious and trendy offices of London printing house, MOO, we welcomed in over 80 members of London's tech community. Everyone in the room had one shared passion, agile! It was a great evening for all levels of agile enthusiasts to share insights, challenges and successes from their organisations and debate some of the prevalent topics.

 

 

The four workshops were as follows:

Jas Singh, Head of Agile Coaching at MOO – Agile: not a one size fits all approach

Erin Davies, Senior Agile Coach – Creating Cultural Change

Shabbir Naqvi, Delivery Director at Beamly – The pitfalls of agile scaling & what to avoid

Manuele Piastra, Agile Delivery Manager at Babylon Health – Implementing Cultural Change: feedback as a tool for continuous improvement

 

 

Jas focused his workshop on the Agile Umbrella. He went through the areas of MOO that are agile and the areas that aren’t, and the niggly ones in between. He then split his members into groups, asking them to share the same from their companies. We then shared our findings back to the group, taking away action points on how to develop. One of the interesting findings was encouraging the ‘retune and adjust’ principle via retrospectives.

 

 

Erin’s workshop was a ‘lean coffee’, discussing culture and how it can change when companies transform with agile. She asked each team member to write any cultural issues on sticky notes and then went through and discussed each one, sticking them on the board. The topics covered were creating a safe environment, being the change you want to see and leading by example amongst others.

 

 

Shabbir discussed upscaling through an agile lens with his group. The lead takeaway points from his insightful workshop were that when you’re growing your organisation or transitioning to agile whilst also scaling out, the most important aspect for success is that everyone is on board. Every team needs to positively be involved and understand the ‘why’. His workshop posed questions to the team members and encouraged insightful debate surrounding cultural differences and how to get your teams on board.

 

 

Manuele’s workshop was held cabaret style with the group separated into teams, sitting at tables. He had prepared a brilliant worksheet providing further insight into how providing your colleagues with feedback can bring positive cultural change. This is feedback in all aspects: the product; the progress; the team; you, the individual. Teams then outlined fun and engaging ways this feedback can be given and ranked their effectiveness out of 5. This certainly gave his team members some food for thought…

 

 

As we thanked our fantastic agile facilitators for allowing us to pick their brains on these prominent topics, we invited everyone to continue their conversations in The Fence pub over a wine. It was clear at this point what a success the evening had been, sparking interesting debates and bringing such a wide variety of agile enthusiasts including Scrum Masters, Delivery Managers and much more under one roof, as well as further embedding us into the agile world as well! As mentioned by Chris Spranklen (Burns Sheehan’s Managing Director) at the end of the evening, we’re busy planning our event schedule for the rest of 2020 and have a whole host of exciting tech talks lined up. We’re always looking for passionate guest speakers and innovative companies to partner with, so whether you’re a veteran speaker or just want to give it a go, get in touch!

 

 

Keep your eyes peeled for the highlight video coming soon!