The dance of balancing the unknown, known and delivery in complex projects

In an ideal world, a single cross functional team can take a business idea or intent and deploy change into production.

However, this situation rarely happens.

Many organisations operate in a hybrid world, many known as ‘wagile’. Organisations acknowledge the benefits of working in an ‘agile’ way, but operating models and maturity of the business often impact this working as effectively as possible. The complexity of environments, technology platforms, dependencies of scale do not fit a single cross functional team.

Whether working waterfall or agile, there is a need to allow ‘time’ for delivery teams to conduct some form of analysis to identify what the business idea or intent is. In waterfall this is known as analysis, design and solution definition. In agile we add customer discovery to the range of activities and call it Discovery. In agile, it allows the cross functional teams, to plan for future increments of work.

With the challenges noted above of the ability of businesses to work in a true, effective agile way of working, the key challenge is the balancing of what 'discovery' may be (future value) with ‘Delivery’ (value within this increment).

The purpose of the session tonight is to explore different ways we could make it work, based on lived experience building technology products in complex environments.

We are delighted to welcome our facilitator for the evening – Terrence Booth
Terry is an experienced leader in transformation in Technology. With a background as a Military Leader, author of a Military History book – he has taken this knowledge on leading teams through banking, publishing, health, energy, Government and Telecommunications. For the last few years – Terry has been involved in leading agile delivery managers as well as developing training programs for them to become future agile delivery leaders.

We are delighted to welcome a new venue and refreshment sponsor - Viva Energy. They 'help Australians reach their destination by refining, importing, and delivering the energy that they need to get there.'