Track: 21st Century Culture from Geeks on the Ground

Location:

Day of week:

We all would love an awesome culture at work. And companies are beginning to realize that a great culture can attract, retain and grow the best of the best in the tech world – translating into competitive edge and innovation in the market.

So now geeking out on culture is one of the latest trends in the tech industry. Management, science and tech articles abound. Stories of different modern cultural experiments, failures and amazing successes circulate: from remote working to org hacking in FTSE 100's.

Ok, that’s all well and good, but right here, right now what’s really going on, on the ground? And what’s worth learning about? Who is pushing boundaries, and what could you start doing at work tomorrow?

This track brings together top engineering community practitioners to give cutting edge inspiration combined with good realistic advice. Hailing from a variety of work cultures (from Corporate to Startup) they'll share super cool stuff, good and bad experiences, hard earned wisdom and tried and tested techniques - on how they created change, transformed, or literally just survived and thrived in a 21st century culture.

Track Host:
Katherine Kirk
Agile Coach and Researcher
Katherine Kirk is a solidly experienced independent Agile/Lean Coach and regular international conference speaker. Her primary area of expertise lies in co-discovery and insight facilitation through exploring and combining eastern and tribal philosophy to find practical answers to tough, on-the-ground issues, specifically involving contextually driven edge-cases and the cultural interaction between hierarchical management and Agile/Lean teams. After gaining a first class BSc (Hons) in computing she completed post graduate studies in software engineering at University of Oxford and currently enjoys being an active participant of a community of Lean and Agile practitioners in Europe who explore and challenge the status quo through experimenting and collaborating.
10:35am - 11:25am

by Richard Kasperowski
Author of The Core Protocols: A Guide to Greatness

Open Space
11:50am - 12:40pm

by Chris Young
Agile/Lean Engineering Leader, previously of BBC, YouView, & Base79

by Kate Gray
Building brands / customers / talent at ambitious companies

How often do you come across ‘politics’ in your workplace as a challenge or impedance on your work?

In this talk we will share the methods used in political campaigns and show how they can be applied to the workplace to help you achieve your goals.

We will look at the challenges of influencing the opinions and behaviours of people who are either disengaged or have a vested interest not to change.

We’ll show you how you can assess your situation as you would a political...

1:40pm - 2:30pm

by Glen Ford
CTO @Beamly

Glen is here to warn you: Changing culture is not just adding beanbags, a games room, a snack cupboard and hack days! Everyone wants to build a great company culture, its the latest industry 'thing', its considered the biggest drawcard to attract and maintain talent, but have you really thought about what changing culture will really be like, in the real world?

In this talk Glen warns how Cargo Cults (imitation without understanding) are not only a danger in many facets of our...

2:55pm - 3:45pm

by Rachel Davies
Team Lead at Unruly

Note: This talk replaces a cancellation for "How to copy Spotify in 30min."

Unruly is the leading global platform for social video advertising, we're celebrating our 10th birthday this year. Unruly has grown from a tiny startup to global organisation recently acquired by News. Its secret weapon is passionate people on a mission to #DeliverWow. Anyone who walks in the door of our offices sees our culture at work. Our workspaces are full of personal touches that help...

4:10pm - 5:00pm

by Matt Wynne
Founder @Cucumber

by Steve Tooke
Cucumber and Full Stack Testing

Classic agile development assumes co-location, but the world is quickly becoming decentralised and remote working is becoming more commonplace. We need new practices to help overcome the new problems that remote collaboration brings.

At Cucumber Ltd we have team of experienced XP practitioners building our SaaS product Cucumber Pro. To help us quickly and effectively build a team with a shared understanding of the product goals we chose mob programming. But we’re a distributed team....

5:25pm - 6:15pm

by Katherine Kirk
Agile Coach and Researcher

Any tech is well familiar with the frustration that, in corporate culture, there is often a long chain-of-blame, cascading down from corporates to the average team – hiding behind finance.  At its worst it becomes a black hole where great ideas and initiatives silently dissolve.   But are things starting to change….?  Is change really possible?

In this talk Katherine suggests it might, and explores how she is seeing an effect of the ‘Continuousness-trend’ (continuous...

Tracks

Covering innovative topics

Monday, 7 March

Tuesday, 8 March

Wednesday, 9 March