Vanessa Martens
Agile Transformation Wizard ;)
Johannesburg, South Africa
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I'm passionate about creating meaningful work environment where people and businesses thrive. I manage Business Agile, , an Agile coaching & training company. In the last 7 years I've been involved in launching Agile at scale in clients such as BMW, Vodacom, Absa and numerous other companies. I've trained over 800 people and consulted on Agile and change initiatives on a SAP implementation, an Online Banking Channel and numerous Retail Apps.
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Participatory Budgeting Workshop. How would you spend South Africa's budget?
In this workshop we will teach you how to run a participatory budgeting session in your business. Most organizations generate more good ideas than they can fund, resulting in a portfolio prioritization challenge. Participants from different business areas, technology, digital and projects use Participatory Budgeting to collaboratively agree priorities aligned to strategy and create joint ownership. You have the power to change South Africa through participatory budgeting! Each table will be given a list of possible initiatives (e.g. Education, Policing, Social Grants, Public Servants salary increase, infrastructure, electricity, water, basic services, access to data and technology, brown envelop money;)) they will use the Participatory Budgeting approach to agree how the money gets spent.
How to make the Change Sticky ... 4 lessons from an Agile Coach
1. Don't ignore the past – don’t assume the answer, be with the team, and understand them. Get the t-shirt because the team gave you a t-shirt as you are one of them. You can’t teach people to have a great Daily Stand Up if they don’t know how their success, increase and career will progress in the new role.
2. Be of Service and Share – Winning Others Over by helping them see what is in for them and giving the information they need when they need it. Be of service and get invited to the right meetings because they know you can help.
3. Remember the Why – Understand what your client/ boss is trying to achieve and help them get there. Our teams and businesses need us because we help them succeed in a way they couldn’t on their own. They value our Agile knowledge and experience.
4. Be okay with failure and learning – it’s not about me, it’s about the people and company we are working with. Sometimes we will succeed and sometimes we will fail. If we fail we must learn and get better next time and keep learning. My clients are my best teachers.
Does Leadership Matter? How can you work with every leader from Ghandi to Genghis Khan.
What impact does a leader really have on your Agile Culture, way of work, team engagement, motivation and delivery. In this talk I will explore the idea that leadership support is neccessary but we can create self sustaining environments beyond the leader. I will use 2 Agile Transformation case studies with 2 very different leaders and explore the pros and cons of the Autocratic Leader vs the Democratic Leader. Finally I will map leadership styles and how we can enable every type of leader and coach them.
Solving Cape Town's traffic problem with a Design Sprint!
Launching a design sprint in your team and business can be intimidating. Especially, if you have never done it before. So let’s get some first-hand experience.
Most of us will have heard of a “design sprint” and perhaps even read the book “Sprint” by Jake Knapp who invented the design sprint at Google… but how many of us have actually run a design sprint in out teams and businesses?
We love the idea of involving our consumers early in the design process to build products that are customer centric. We are passionate about not building too much too soon with no feedback from customers so we don’t waste time and money.
We will walk the group though an actual design sprint over the period of 90min. We will use the problem of traffic in Cape Town – a complex problem which lends itself to Design thinking – as the simulation to learn how to run a Design Sprint.
The key steps in a design sprint will be followed:
1. Understanding the problem: we will present data on the traffic problem and the users
2. Ideation and sketching
3. Decision making
4. Prototype building and
5. User testing and feedback
Culture eats Agile for Breakfast: BMW Case Study
In 2019, BMW set out to build its first end-to-end online sales platform—starting in South Africa but ultimately becoming the global standard. With 75 people across 9 teams in 3 countries, we launched a game-changing platform in just months—right before COVID-19 made online car sales a necessity. But the biggest challenge wasn’t tech—it was culture.
For six months, the team was stuck in silos, unable to gain traction. The problem? Traditional hierarchy killed collaboration. The solution? A radical shift in ways of working. By aligning leadership, structuring around value streams, and fostering a culture of true collaboration, we unlocked agility at scale.
This talk will reveal the three essential steps to driving real Business Agility—beyond frameworks and theory. No fluff, just hard-earned lessons from transforming a legacy enterprise under high stakes. If you’re battling silos, resistance, and culture clashes in your agile transformation, this session will show you how to break through and deliver.
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