Bevan Williams
Enterprise Agile Coach & Trainer
Cape Town, South Africa
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Bevan has been working in, and with, agile teams since 2009 and is currently an Enterprise Agile Coach at Old Mutual. He has worked as a Software Engineer, Scrum Master, Development Manager and Head of Mobile before shifting to full-time Agile Coaching in 2018. He is passionate about coaching, enabling and leading people to do their best work, focussing on personal, career and organizational growth.
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Express Teaming: Bite-sized Activities for High-Impact Team Building
Starting as a new Scrum Master is daunting. A new role, a new team. Your team is initially accommodating and cordial, but cracks soon appear. Underhanded comments, rolled eyes, and low attendance start emerging. Your request for an off-site team building gets rejected. Your team ignores your attempt at formalising your working agreements or team charter. Sound familiar?
But here's the thing: Every challenge is an opportunity in disguise. How can you cultivate a remarkable team when you're pressed for time? How do you garner support for a full-fledged team-building workshop? How can you move beyond the basics of icebreakers and unearth the true potential of your team's effectiveness?
In this workshop, you will experience short and powerful team-building activities. We'll explore not only what makes a team, but what makes a great team! And we don't stop there. You will have the opportunity to practice and build your confidence in facilitating activities to build connections in your teams.
Using the lens of Patrick Lencioni's renowned 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, we will cover:
* Trust
* Conflict
* Commitment
* Accountability
* Team Objectives / Results
Join us to uncover strategies for overcoming common challenges in your team and striving for high performance by adding activities to your facilitation toolbox that are quick, easy.. and very impactful!
Letting Go: The Effective Scrum Master’s Secret Weapon
Events set up in Calendar? Check. Jira tasks updated? Check. Full team attending daily scrum? Check? Weekly report for stakeholders? Check. Powerpoint presentation for Demo set up? Check. Minutes for recorded meetings typed out and distributed? Check. High-performing team? ...
Have you been swamped as a Scrum Master, caught in the web of daily tasks and administrative duties?
You are not alone! Many of us have found ourselves in the same situation where our eagerness to help add value and serve our teams has pigeonholed us as team secretaries and administrators rather than enablers of high performance.
This interactive talk invites you to reflect on what you wish to release and why Letting Go is one of the most crucial skills you need to master as a Scrum Master. Join this session to uncover the transformative power of letting go. Understand its profound importance and leave armed with five actionable ways to elevate your role, foster genuine agility, and truly serve your team.
Beyond 'Failing Fast': Mastering the Art of Failing Well in Agile
While the agile world often preaches the mantra of "failing fast", how often do we truly embrace the concept of "failing well"? Every failure isn't just an end but can be a powerful beginning – if only we understand its nuances and leverage it. For Agile coaches and Scrum Masters, comprehending the different shades of failure is key to creating a psychologically safe environment where constructive failure is identified, accepted, and learned from.
In this session, we'll journey through the diverse categories of failure, understand their implications, and empower you with practical tools to design effective experiments. Crafting good experiments isn't about avoiding failure but harnessing it. It's time to evolve from merely failing fast to failing well.
Being agile without Agile!
How do you transform a company into being agile? What is the difference between being agile and doing Agile? Should it be agile with upper case A or lower case a?
After seeing the same anti-patterns in companies over and over again in our job as Agile Coaches, we put together this interactive talk where we’ll share our experience from years of consulting and our current journey of trying to make one of SA’s largest companies agile!
Come join us as we explore the anti-patterns of only doing Agile and how we have changed our approach to focus on the behavior aspect of being agile. You will leave with a list of things that you can apply immediately to help your company be more agile!
Say It Like You Mean It. Finding your voice, in the crowd and on the stage.
You’re sitting in a meeting listening intently. A brilliant thought emerges and you want to share it. You’re stuck. The words are gone. The group conversation shifts away and you slink back into your chair in silence.
You’re sitting in a conference session and intrigued by what the speaker is saying. You’re enjoying every minute and soaking up all the words. It’s powerful. Yet, you can’t help but think that you too have the ability to create this space.
Has this happened to you? Do you want to grow your ability to speak up in person? Do you have the desire to have your voice heard? What could be possible if you spoke up?
Speaking in front of others has become an essential skill for connecting in agile teams. Come join this workshop to learn about the myths of public speaking, practical techniques to elevate your voice, and how speaking at events can help your career.
How to interview for, and assess “Agile” skills
It’s 9 am on a Thursday morning. You take a sip of your coffee and click “Connect” to join your company’s virtual quarterly update. There’s noise and colour and energy and tons of acronyms being thrown around. Leadership has decided that Agile is a key strategic differentiator. Brace yourself! We’re going agile! After the event, all job profiles and adverts suddenly have “Agile” under the required skills.
What are "Agile" skills? How do we assess them? And how do we bring these into an inclusive interview process? This interactive workshop will explore the answer to these questions and equip you to answer them using practical tools.
Building Resilience Through Change
We've all dealt with an immense amount of change forced upon us over the last few years. The more we look at our history, the more we acknowledge that this seems to be part of the human experience. Surviving is a core part of that experience, and it's this resilience that I'd like to explore together.
This workshop will be a collective sharing of knowledge on how to become more resilient. We'll build a collection of tools, tips, and thoughts to share with the rest of the conference. I'll also share some research into resilience and some additional tips on how to coach for resilience too.
Your Brain is Sabotaging Your Ability to Give Good Feedback!
Providing honest and straight-forward feedback is one of the most powerful skills a Scrum Master, Mentor or Coach can use. Effective feedback can allow the other person to reflect on the impact of their behaviour, and make real changes in their lives.
So why is it so difficult to get these skills right? The answer to this question lies in the ways our brains make decisions about the world around us. Before we can make useful observations to provide effective feedback, it's important that we understand what may be going on within ourselves first.
Come join me in this interactive talk as we explore the neuroscience of the predictive brain, understand how this can influence our feedback, and learn what you can do about it.
Inclusive Teams Start with Empathy
With the proliferation of Agile thinking in companies, many of us are aware of the increased drive to understanding our end-user or customer. Many practices encourage empathy as an exercise or artefact like User Stories, User Story Mapping, and Behaviour Driven Development.
However, how often do we deliberately try to have empathy with our colleagues and team members? When dealing with monumental change, what can empathy do to help our teams survive?
The only way to create an inclusive environment in which diverse teams thrive requires this empathy.
This talk will be about the value of empathy in teams. Filled with research, anecdotes, and experiences, you'll leave with practical steps on how you too can bring more real empathy into your teams.
Bevan Williams
Enterprise Agile Coach & Trainer
Cape Town, South Africa
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