Stuart Mann
Agile Coach at Vitality Group
Johannesburg, South Africa
Stuart Mann is a reformed waterfall guy who is now a passionate Agile Coach. He is a father (two girls), husband (one wife) and a trainee feminist. In his spare time, Stuart is a compulsive marathon runner having run over 240 marathons and ultra marathons. He is a prodigious writer with a popular blog, monthly column in South Africa’s largest running publication (Modern Athlete) and a regular contributor of athletics articles to News24.com. Stuart’s lifetime ambition is to secure a beer sponsor.
Area of Expertise
Topics
From Sprint Goals to Quarterly Objectives: The Secret Sauce & Superglue in Business Agility
Sprint goals are the secret sauce to get teams working as true teams rather than as a group of individuals. But when you are building large complex solutions with a complicated interconnected network of teams, how do you get a team of teams to align around a common mission?
Quarterly objectives are the superglue that keeps multiple teams working together to achieve business value in an agile manner. This talk will use real-life examples to illustrate good and bad objectives, provide practical examples about how to utilize objectives to connect teams of teams together around a common mission and how to connect the technology teams to business stakeholders to help achieve business agility.
Back to the Feature – A practical guide to iterative analysis
It’s time to dust off the DeLorean and go Back to the Feature!
The agile manifesto tells us to value “working software over comprehensive documentation” but how can we practically apply this value without sacrificing quality and rigour? How can we ensure that our requirement providers and analysts connect with our coders and testers to deliver fast, reliable value? How do you solve the analysis conundrum and eliminate the “documentation handoff” that plagues many teams?
This talk will help you take the “anal” out of analysis! We’ll cover how teams can use feature hypotheses to write just the right amount of documentation, methods to split features into the smallest possible chunk of value for iterative analysis, how to get fast feedback on outcomes and how an innovation day can change the paradigm and move you to documentation-less development.
The talk is jam-packed with practical examples from the presenter’s experience managing agile transformations and uses storytelling, analogy and a few references to the Back to the Future movie trilogy thrown in along the way to illustrate all points.
How I Gamified my Kids’ Physical & Mental Health (so that I could spend more quality time with them)
A practical application of the agile value: “individuals and interactions over processes and tools.”
Seeing the effect that Covid-induced inertia was having on his kids’ mental and physical health, this is the real-life tale of a devious dad harnessing the power of behavioural science and the love of ice-cream to get his kids physically active – to achieve the ultimate objective of spending more quality time with his daughters.
Using Scrum to explain Scrum
A "choose your own adventure" talk using the scrum sprint format, combined with simple analogies and examples, to explain the purpose of the agile teams roles, the "why" of the scrum ceremonies and what it means to "be agile" and various other topics.
Outcomes - The Forgotten Test Case (aka Harry Potter & the Quest for True Business Value)
Humans are terrible at using experience, intuition & expert opinion to predict benefits – but we don’t realise it! Organisations that track outcomes find that just 1 in 3 features result in a benefit. This is a talk (practical examples included) covering how to apply an experimental approach to feature development to ensure you realise business value.
It's not a sprint, it's a jog (how marathon running helps guide your agile transformation)
A fresh and humorous point-by-point (or should that be step-by-step) look at the how marathon running can help guide agile transformations. The session provides insights drawing from the presenter's practical experience on the road (whilst running over 200 marathons all around the world) that will help inspire and guide you through your own agile ultra marathon.
Everything's Relative (a fresh look at agile estimation)
A fresh and fun look at agile estimation covering the "why" of estimation, how our brains work when estimating, how risk influences size and how to ensure that estimation adds value. The workshop includes many practical exercises and examples that attendees can take back to their teams.
Back to the Feature (Parts 1 to n)
A practical session on writing, splitting and building features to ensure that they deliver business value. Plenty of fun, easily accessible exercises will give you new skills to take back to your teams after the conference.
Agile Leaders - Got your back or holding you back?
What is the role of the agile leader? A simple, practical demonstration about how to be great agile leader.
Regional Scrum Gathering® Cape Town 2022 Sessionize Event
Regional Scrum Gathering® Cape Town 2021 Sessionize Event
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