Christopher May
Global Agile & DevOps Coaching CoP Lead - Avanade Deutschland GmbH
Berlin, Germany
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Christopher has been working in project management for the last 25+ years and in agile coaching for the past 10 years. His passion is transformation; in the past he helped his clients as a consultant in digital and agile transformations. His view is always product and people centric. He loves agility, and teaches agility and project management as well as design-thinking for the past 8 years.
He loves to share his knowledge, teach others and engage with audiences.
He takes on new and interesting challenges and goes a step beyond.
Besides his professional passion in Transformation / consultancy, he is also very passionate about stand-up comedy, which he started 2 years ago, and he is very active in the German and international stand up scene in Berlin.
Area of Expertise
Topics
AI & Agility: The Dynamic Duo for Disruption
This presentation, 'AI & Agility: The Dynamic Duo for Disruption,' explores the powerful synergy between Artificial Intelligence and organizational agility, presenting them as the indispensable partnership for navigating today's rapidly changing business landscape. We'll delve into how AI accelerates market shifts and demands a new level of responsiveness, evolving traditional agile practices into 'Hyper-Agility.' The session will demonstrate how AI acts as a catalyst for agility through intelligent insights, automation of mundane tasks, and accelerated experimentation. We'll also address critical challenges such as managing uncertainty and ensuring ethical AI, emphasizing the crucial role of human-AI collaboration. Through practical strategies and compelling examples, attendees will discover how to harness this 'dynamic duo' to proactively embrace disruption, foster continuous innovation, and secure a competitive edge in the age of AI.
Navigating the Next Normal: AI's Compass for Agile Action and Resilient Growth
In today's hyper-volatile landscape, reactive agility is no longer sufficient. This talk introduces "Predictive Agility," a paradigm shift where Artificial Intelligence provides the crucial foresight needed to anticipate future trends, risks, and opportunities. We will explore how AI-powered analytics, from machine learning to simulation, enables organizations to move beyond merely responding to events to proactively shaping their future. Attendees will learn practical ways to integrate AI insights into agile planning, foster a culture of anticipation, and ultimately build truly resilient organizations that not only withstand disruption but thrive amidst uncertainty.
Mission (Im-)possible: Building an agile organization within the Automotive Industry
Agility works! It can be applied to any type of organization or work.
But you have to embrace the rules, change the mindset, breathe agility, and welcome change to bend and change the rules
(⇒ Shu Ha Ri)
This talk will cover the success story of how an infrastructure organization implemented agile working and processes in a 500+ people organization.
This talk will tell you how to implement change and move the organization through a wild transformation journey with just a lean agile transformation team of 8 people.
This talk will tell a success story relying on Mindset, Framework, Tooling, values, and Change and show why every part of the equation is equally important for success.
The recipe for Success for such a transformation journey is
-empiricism( 3 pillars)
-ShuHaRi
-Values
-Management buy-in
-Trust
-Willingness for change
-Teamwork
-Tooling
This talk will give you insight into some of these success factors and how they can help anyone’s journey.
We will cover a practical example driven by theoretical approaches and experimentation. This Implementation demonstrates, that agile ideas and concepts work and likely lead to acceptance and success.
AI & Agility: The Dynamic Duo for Disruption
This presentation, 'AI & Agility: The Dynamic Duo for Disruption,' explores the powerful synergy between Artificial Intelligence and organizational agility, presenting them as the indispensable partnership for navigating today's rapidly changing business landscape. We'll delve into how AI accelerates market shifts and demands a new level of responsiveness, evolving traditional agile practices into 'Hyper-Agility.' The session will demonstrate how AI acts as a catalyst for agility through intelligent insights, automation of mundane tasks, and accelerated experimentation. We'll also address critical challenges such as managing uncertainty and ensuring ethical AI, emphasizing the crucial role of human-AI collaboration. Through practical strategies and compelling examples, attendees will discover how to harness this 'dynamic duo' to proactively embrace disruption, foster continuous innovation, and secure a competitive edge in the age of AI.
Enable Happiness
We live in an ever-changing world. Distances become shorter; opportunities grow. For employers, the world is changing towards an employee's market. To get the best talent and GenZ employees you have to change.
If you want to succeed as an employer in today’s market with the evolving requirements of a new generation of employees, you must embrace change as well. Transformation is necessary. To cope with this new reality, companies need to enable happiness. This talk will dive into the topic of enabling happiness.
You must switch perspectives and take the stance and point of view of the current and future employees, so we understand their needs. With that we need to adapt and transform to get settled for the future. In this talk you will look at not only the needs of the employees but also companies and examples of companies that took that brave step towards a future that enables happiness.
In this talk you will learn to identify the needs of the next generations of employees to future-prove your business. You will learn to not only talk the talk, you will also to take action to embrace change. You will learn to understand the needs of your workforce and lose the fear of change.
Free your mind and the rest will follow - Delete your Backlog
In many agile teams, the backlog is a central tool for organizing tasks and features. However, over time, backlogs become overloaded and a big topic dump, losing their primary function: to help teams focus and continuously prioritize value-creating work. This talk proposes a radical new approach: "Delete your Backlog."
The concept of "Delete your Backlog" challenges teams to rethink the need to continuously maintain a massive backlog and instead focus on the most valuable tasks. Overfilled backlogs create psychological burdens, reduce efficiency, and often contain outdated or irrelevant tasks that no longer generate value. Instead, the approach advocates for radical prioritization and frequent feedback cycles.
This Talk will explain why drastically reducing a backlog can be beneficial so that architectural approaches like emergent architecture can bloom and support team agility. By reducing waste teams can react more quickly to changes and better meet customers' immediate needs.
Finally, the presentation offers practical tips for implementation: how can teams effectively clean up their backlogs? What tools and methods help improve backlog management? By focusing on value and continuous feedback, agile teams can boost efficiency and achieve better long-term outcomes.
Move Fast but Don't Break Society: Integrating Responsible AI into Agile Delivery
Agile methodology and artificial intelligence are currently on a collision course. "Ship early and iterate" is an important part of Agile, but "safety, fairness, and veracity" is an important part of AI. This creates a problem called "Ethical Debt." Like technical debt, ethical debt builds up without anyone noticing, and it can lead to reputational bankruptcy or regulatory fines under laws like the EU AI Act (up to 7% of global turnover).
This session gives you a practical, expert-level plan for bringing these two sides together. We will break down the idea of Ethical Debt by looking at real-life examples from Amazon and iTutorGroup to show how negligence can cost you money. Next, we'll talk about solutions and show how to "refactor" Agile ceremonies and artifacts for the age of AI. People who come will learn how to:
Put "Fairness Acceptance Criteria" in user stories so that ethics can be tested.
During sprint planning, hold "Consequence Scanning" workshops to find risks early.
Use open-source tools like Fairlearn and MLflow to automate fairness checks and build a "compliance-as-code" pipeline for "CI/CD for Ethics."
At the end of the talk, there is a detailed "Definition of Done" for AI that makes sure that speed doesn't hurt society. Come with us to learn how to go fast without breaking things.
DevFest @ Bletchley Park 2025 Sessionize Event
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