Wayne Hetherington
Agile Coach (and a bunch of stuff)
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Wayne Hetherington is an experienced Agile professional who believes that work should be fun as well as productive. Drawing on a wide variety of experience, he is able to help individuals, teams, and entire organizations to see measurable improvements in their efforts. He has a background in software development and has worked with startups to enterprise organizations, in healthcare, media, retail, government, transportation, and financial sectors and has noticed that common patterns emerge which can be leveraged to our advantage. He will use coaching and mentoring techniques to help you explore options and choose paths to make your work great!
7 critical problems that lock up your delivery promise
Every organization aims to deliver value effectively, yet repeatedly faces barriers preventing it from realizing its strategic objectives. In our experience guiding numerous organizations through complex transformations, we've identified seven recurring problems with strategic portfolio management that consistently undermine delivery success: inefficient structures, lost focus, lack of flow, too much work in progress, benefit blindness, invisible progress and cost of delivery.
In this practical workshop, we will examine each problem, providing real-world examples of its impact on delivery and sharing actionable strategies to address them holistically. Participants will leave equipped with a clear understanding of how to identify and overcome these critical challenges, enhancing their organization's agility, strategic alignment, and overall capability to deliver on promises.
Counterintuitive but Right: What Makes Agile Teams at the Mayo Clinic Different?
We have always heard that “long living teams” are the cornerstone of successful agility, but what if there was another way? What if dynamic teams actually served the needs of the customer better? Recent experience as a patient of the Mayo Clinic provides an eye-opening perspective on the power of dynamic teams. What can we learn from how these highly skilled medical experts organize around patient care? Participate in this interactive session to find out how you can do it too.
Learning Objectives:
● Describe how Mayo Clinic's patient-centric approach leads to the formation of dynamic, specialized, multi-disciplinary, cross-functional teams.
● Analyze the differences between stable agile teams and Mayo's dynamic teams, and evaluate when each model is most effective.
● Proposes strategies for applying principles of dynamic teaming to improve responsiveness and customer-centricity in their own organizations
🚨 "The #1 Coaching Mistake That’s Making Your Best People Quit—And How to Fix It!" 🚨
Helping people within an organization is a complex and challenging endeavor. Doing it effectively requires practice and a deep understanding of systems thinking. Despite the best intentions, agile coaches and change leaders often make mistakes that hinder transformation efforts and drive valuable employees to leave. How can we prevent this?
This session explores a systems-thinking approach to avoid critical coaching failures that lead to frustration and attrition. Participants will learn practical tools to recognize and prevent missteps in early coaching interactions. Additionally, we will introduce an AI-based analysis tool that provides real-time feedback on coaching conversations, enabling immediate improvement.
Uncertainty and Your Brain Handling Risk in an Agile Environment
Everything we do carries some amount of risk, from getting out of bed in the morning to skydiving. Even writing software is risky! How do we handle those risks? Are common approaches to risk management still applicable in the Agile world?
If you've ever struggled with how to handle risk on an Agile program then come join us to see why our brains make us react in a mostly risk averse way, what we can do about it, and how Agile specifically addresses many aspects of software risk. Also, we will look at how an Agile program can live in harmony with enterprise risk departments.
We’ll have fun along the way. We’ll play some games, we’ll see how cognitive biases often mess us up, we’ll find out why people play the lottery, and how you can avoid gambling with your software projects.
Transform Your Team’s Productivity: The Power of 15-Minute Daily Learning
What if dedicating just 15 minutes a day to continuous learning and incremental improvement could unlock a 25% increase in your software team’s productivity over a single year? In this session, we explore how capturing 30 extra seconds of productive time each day—through refined processes, micro-learning, and seamless communication—adds up to significant gains.
Instead of cramming development initiatives into sporadic, time-consuming blocks, discover how consistent, bite-sized efforts create a compounding effect that accelerates growth. You’ll gain proven strategies for integrating daily learning opportunities into your team’s routine, fostering a culture of continual progress and adaptability. Join us to see how small, sustainable investments in your team’s development can fuel transformative results.
Getting Unstuck - Starting and Stopping your Brain
You’ve been leading your team for a while now and you’ve noticed that planning meetings always go overtime, we can never seem to agree on an estimate, design discussions always go down a technical rabbit hole, and the requirements are always too sparse.
On the other hand, the week before a release feels like a giant rush, there’s always unfinished work that bumps to the next sprint, and the customer is still complaining about not having their product yet. What is going on? Where are all these issues coming from?
It could be that your team has trouble starting, and trouble stopping. For all leaders who have struggled to unlock their teams, join this session to learn about the cognitive biases that prevent us from starting, and stopping - with some fun along the way.
“Transforming? Up to 30% of Your People Will Leave Unless…”
Many organizations report that some of their best people wind up leaving within a short period of launching a firm-wide agile transformation. Why?
An agile coach who is hired to help transition an organization into agile ways of working may cause as much harm as they do good. When valuable employees leave an organization such as this, it represents a failure in systems entry.
This session shows the value in taking a systems thinking approach to transformation and case studies that demonstrate the problem. The speakers present an effective way to help coaches recognize and prevent the problem. They also show an AI-based analysis tool that can provide coaches with real, immediate feedback of their coaching along with suggested improvements.
Agile & Beyond 2023 Sessionize Event
Agile Tour Montreal
Getting Unstuck - Starting and Stopping Your Brain
Agile Tour Montreal
Agile Reports for the PM Brain
Toronto Agile Community Conference
Uncertainty and Your Brain - Handling Risk in an Agile Environment
Agile 2019 - Agile Alliance
Agile Reports for the PM Brain
Gatineau Ottawa Agile Tour (GOAT)
Agile Reports for the PM Brain
Gatineau Ottawa Agile Tour (GOAT)
Your Brain on Estimates
Toronto Agile Community Conference
Your Brain on Estimates
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