Out-compete and Out-innovate

Continuous Delivery is a revolutionary new concept in business agility, fuelled by ThoughtWorks. It can help large enterprises become as lean, agile and innovative as startups – making it possible to continuously adapt software in line with user feedback, shifts in the market and changes to business strategy.

Continuous Delivery calls on IT and business leaders to break down the silos that segregate Business, Development, Testing and Operations, and create a culture of collaboration and discovery across the entire organisation. It introduces new approaches to design, development, testing, configuration and release management. It requires courageous executive leadership and commitment to change.

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Agenda | Sydney 2nd Feb | Melbourne 7th Feb

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Some of Our Speakers

Jeff Smith, Chief Executive Officer, Suncorp Business Services, Suncorp Jeff Smith is CEO, Suncorp Business Services and is responsible for the Group’s technology, real estate, group procurement and HR services portfolios. He was originally appointed to the role of Group Executive, Business Technology following the Suncorp merger with Promina in 2007. Jeff has 23 years experience in the IT industry, with the last 12 years spent as chief information officer or equivalent for companies in the USA and Australia, including Telstra Corporation, Honeywell, Toyota and Charles Schwab.

Bjarte Bogsnes, VP Performance Management Development, Statoil Bjarte Bogsnes, author of Implementing Beyond Budgeting-Unlocking Performance Potential, joins the list of eminent speakers at ThoughtWorks Live. He is Vice President Performance Management Development at Statoil, Scandinavia's largest company with $80b in revenue. Bjarte's session will reveal concrete alternatives and practical guidance on how to implement the beyond budgeting methodology. The talk will draw from actual cases that he has implemented in large, global companies.

Jim Highsmith, Agile Luminary and Executive Consultant, ThoughtWorks Jim Highsmith is one of the foremost experts in implementing Agile within large complex IT organisations with decades of experience helping clients develop governance, funding, resource planning and measurement methods that allow them to realise the strategic benefits of Agile and Continuous Delivery.

Jez Humble, Principal Consultant, ThoughtWorks Studios Jez researches and consults on effective engineering practices in the field of Agile delivery, with an emphasis on automating the building, testing and deployment of software, release management, and enabling collaboration between people involved in delivery. He is the co-author of Continuous Delivery (Addison Wesley, 2010) which was awarded the Jolt Excellence Award, given to the top software development book of the year.

Chris Murphy, Managing Director - Asia-Pacific, ThoughtWorks Chris is responsible for ThoughtWorks' professional services business in the Asia Pacific region and has more than 15 years technology industry experience. Before joining ThoughtWorks in the UK in 2004, Chris worked as a software developer and as a technology and intellectual property lawyer in Australia and Europe.

Eric Ries, Entrepreneur and author of the popular blog Startup Lessons Learned and “The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses” New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, Eric Ries, is an entrepreneur and author of the popular blog Startup Lessons Learned. He cofounded and served as CTO of IMVU, his third startup. He is a frequent speaker at business events, has advised a number of startups, large companies, and venture capital firms on business and product strategy, and is an entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard Business School. . His Lean Startup methodology has been written about in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, the Huffington Post, and many blogs. He lives in San Francisco.

Jason Furnell, Experience Design Principal, ThoughtWorks With 15 years proven experience in the implementation of business strategy through design, Jason is expert in bridging the gap between the business, marketing & technology teams. Leading an Agile Design process that drives technology solutions towards rich and useful customer experiences, he prides himself on delivering application designs that effortlessly shoulder the weight of functional complexity in simple and engaging ways.

Kate Linton, Experience Design Principal, ThoughtWorks As a designer with over 20 years experience in visual communications and interaction design, Kate has successfully lead creative teams in the delivery of online websites and applications. Her market experience includes financial services, retail, public sector and not-for-profit. She takes a user-centered approach to her work with a focus on user research, requirements gathering, interaction design, information architecture, user testing and interface design. She has designed and delivered successful online brands such as ASIC's award-winning 'MoneySmart' website and the Business Victoria website.

Evan Bottcher, Continuous Delivery Practice Lead - Asia-Pacific, ThoughtWorks Evan Bottcher has been a software developer for more than 15 years, engaged in the design and implementation of large-scale enterprise applications and websites. His experience crosses multiple industries including financial services, insurance, publishing, digital media, telecommunications, and education. In recent years Evan has become increasingly obsessed with solving the problems that lie in the 'last mile' of solution delivery - continuous integration, automated testing and deployment, and production feedback loops.

Darren Smith, Market Lead for Technology - Asia-Pacific, ThoughtWorks Darren Smith is Market Lead of Technology (QLD and NSW) for ThoughtWorks Australia, where he spends much of his time advising clients on technology strategy, enterprise architecture and software delivery practices. His 17 years of experience in the IT industry has been spent working in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia and has required practical knowledge and implementation skills across development, support, project management and architecture. His current passion is in helping organisations to realize ways in which to better align business and technology objectives without compromising quality or efficiency.

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About the Sessions

Beyond Budgeting - A New Management Model for New Business Realities: The Statoil Implementation Journey

Bjarte Bogsnes, VP - Performance Management Development, Statoil

Traditional management doesn’t work in today’s business realities, where companies operate in business environments more volatile and uncertain than ever and where motivating and engaging knowledge workers is key for survival and performance. There are serious and systemic problems with traditional management practices which require us to challenge accepted truth and review the entire management model. This session provides concrete alternatives and practical guidance on how to implement the beyond budgeting principles, drawing on actual cases in which the author has implemented beyond budgeting in large, global companies. It describes the need for a more flexible but also a more integrated performance management process across Strategy, Finance and Human Resources, and presents the many benefits that can be realized by embarking on a beyond budgeting journey. This session was extremely well received at the "ThoughtWorks Live: Continuous Delivery" event held in London in April 2011.

Adaptive Leadership: Accelerating Enterprise Agility

Jim Highsmith, Agile Luminary and Executive Consultant, ThoughtWorks

“Eight in ten CEOs expect their environment to grow significantly more complex, and fewer than half believe they know how to deal with it successfully,” says a recent IBM study of complexity in business. MIT Sloan School of management reports that agile organisations generate 30% higher earnings per share. The complexity problem and the agility solution are enterprise issues that go beyond agile software development to enterprise agility.

Leading agile enterprises requires understanding agility from a strategic business perspective and how practices like continuous design and delivery and a mindset of sustainable agility combine to create highly responsive and value-driven IT organisations.

Adaptive leadership is two dimensional: Being Agile and Doing Agile. This presentation will explore those activities that an agile leader or executive must “do,” starting with four key levers for change: “Do Less,” “Speed-to-Value,” “Quality,” and “Engage/Inspire.” Next the focus will be on how to “Be” agile by—being adaptive, being riders of paradox, exploring, and adopting a facilitative leadership style. This session will explore how Adaptive leadership is critical to transforming IT organisations.

Enterprises can be as lean as startups

Eric Ries, Author of New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller “The Lean Startup” | Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School

Most new products and businesses fail. But most of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach to business that's being adopted around the world by both startups and enterprises. It is changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, the Lean Startup approach relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, and a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress, and learn what customers really want.

Continuous Design & Continuous Delivery

Jason Furnell, Experience Design Principal, ThoughtWorks
Kate Linton, Experience Design Principal, ThoughtWorks

Continuous Design represents a holistic and evolutionary approach to reducing the disconnects between business strategy at one end of the pipeline, and software delivery at the other. Reducing the cycle time between concept to production code is key to leveraging the considerable business benefits that technical Continuous Delivery promises.

We argue that Design Thinking methods and Collaborative Design Facilitation are essential ingredients in the glue that turns disparate multi-disciplinary teams into cohesive high performing units, providing a common language and clear rallying point across the organisation at all levels.

We will present a framework for discussing organisational design maturity and present case studies demonstrating the impact that a design-led approach has had at Australia’s No.1 real estate site (www.realestate.com.au).

Implementing Continuous Delivery

Evan Bottcher, Continuous Delivery Practice Lead - Asia-Pacific, ThoughtWorks
Darren Smith, Market Lead for Technology - Asia-Pacific, ThoughtWorks

As a growing number of companies look to continuous delivery for faster time to market or to help scale their practices to meet the potential of the cloud, we find that many of them encounter both organisational and technical obstacles that slow their progress. For others, the promise of a single software platform for continuous delivery is alluring but never rewarding.

In this talk we provide recommendations for implementing continuous delivery in an enterprise. We will present a number of organisational and technical approaches that have worked well and some that have not worked well for our customers both here and abroad.

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