Lighter, faster, more human

Who It's For

Leaders, board members and service heads in councils, the NHS, housing, police, fire and charities across Wales and England.

Overview

This full-day Immerse covers agile and new ways of working from roots to practice. It begins with agile's history, mindset and methods: Cynefin, Scrum, Lean, Kanban and safe-to-fail experiments. It then turns to leading agile organisations, from Bungay's three gaps and Team Topologies to scaling frameworks, the Spotify model, Beyond Budgeting and OKRs. Self-management and agile in public services follow, including the Service Standard for Wales and Universal Credit. The day closes with the changing shape of work: hybrid evidence and the Trip.com trial, flexible working law, the four-day week, focused collaboration, AI, and cases from HealthCare.gov to a district council, Bromford and Hafod.

Aims

This Immerse aims to develop leaders who understand agile accurately and apply it with judgement, design teams, funding and governance that let learning and accountability pull together, and shape fair, evidence-based ways of working, including hybrid, flexible and AI-enabled work, that serve the public well.

In summary, you will be able to:

1. 1Diagnose the work in your service and choose delivery and governance approaches that fit its uncertainty.
2. 2Design teams, decision rights and working arrangements that are stable, fair and able to learn.
3. 3Lead change in how work is done, from agile methods to AI, with evidence and public accountability in view.

What you'll develop

By the end of this Immerse, you will be able to:

1. 1Judge where a piece of your own work sits on the spectrum from predictive to adaptive delivery, based on how much uncertainty it contains.
2. 2Identify common failures in public service Scrum, such as a status report stand-up or a Product Owner without authority, and judge what leaders must change.
3. 3Write a testable hypothesis with a belief, a change, a signal and an exit, and use assumption mapping to choose the riskiest assumption to test first.
4. 4Use Team Topologies, cognitive load and the inverse Conway manoeuvre to design or review teams around the service you want users to experience.
5. 5Plan board assurance that moves from checking the plan towards testing value, using outcome roadmaps and a quarterly review to continue, change or stop work.
6. 6Plan a hybrid arrangement for your team that starts from the work, uses a team working agreement and anchor days, and builds in parity and fairness for frontline roles.
7. 7Plan a fair trial of shorter working time that redesigns the work and measures service outcomes, workforce, wellbeing and cost against a baseline.
8. 8Apply the five layers of agile leadership and the four instructions to diagnose the work, design the system, trust the people and keep learning in your own service.