Public Speaking Portfolio

Make learning a priority in your work place and in your profession!
Help employees and managers towards becoming a learning organization!

Agile organizations benefit from cross-functional teams where various necessary skills that are needed to deliver a solution is contained within the same team. On the other hand, managers of such teams are not necessarily cross-functional! A team that is composed of people with product, design, user experience, programming, testing, deployment skills might have a line manager with a specific background, for example programming. In this case, the manager can most likely be a good coach and support the programmers in their professional growth. But what about the other roles in the team? How realistic it is to expect a line manager who has never been a software tester before to support a software tester's professional growth?

The way we approach this challenge in SimCorp is by forming a dedicated "learning area". A learning area, has its own budget and focus on a unique competency. Inspired by the Product Owner role in Scrum, a Learning Owner role is responsible for the learning backlog and benefits from subject matter experts and inputs/requests from the whole organization.

In this session, you will hear about the formation and evolution of the software testing learning area of SimCorp for the very first time. You will see the whole picture with a community of practice, learning guild and a learning architect. You will also hear firsthand experience on how the learning area operates and adds value to the organization.

How do agile teams align with corporate strategy, plan future resources, and support individual career growth? Martin Lohmann and Ender Yükseł have a proposal. For our last podcast in 2022, we are excited to share an idea for a Development Manager that Ender and Martin experienced at SimCorp. Ender, Martin, and Bill Raymond share stories related to the development manager role, including:
✅ Typical management challenges within Scrum teams
✅ The role of the Scrum Master
✅ The role of the Development Manager
✅ How the Scrum Master and Development Manager support team success
✅ Strategies to improve Scrum team success

The way we work has been changing at an incredible pace. When some members of the same team are dialing in remotely from different time zones while others are sitting together in a conference room, flexibility is the name of the game. On top of that, a new generation is joining the workforce who want more freedom in what they do at work and when they do it. Put it all together and you get an environment in which leaders have to adapt fast to find new ways to improve the flow of information and get everyone rowing in the same direction. Ender Yüksel, PhD, our next Tech Leaders Hub guest, is a Director, Development Manager at SimCorp. He’s an experienced leader and manager with lots of actionable advice to share for anyone who wants to structure their teams better, make work flow more effectively, and keep employees from all generations happy and productive. We’ve discussed:
✅ Why the career ladder has become more of a career jungle, especially for the new generation
✅ How working with Gen Z is different and how tech leaders should adapt to it
✅ How to create effective teamwork when working with distributed teams in a hybrid work environment
✅ How individual contributors can achieve higher ranks in an organization without becoming managers

You are passionate about software development, or product management, or leadership, or user experience, or documentation, or organization, or something else. Regardless of your role, you care about being agile. Here you are, preparing for your next career move, being invited for a job interview. You would very much like to know how agile your prospective employer is. In this session, we explore what questions to ask, what clues to look out for, and how to interpret the responses you receive.

In this presentation, we take an intersectional approach to examine existing practices in our organization through a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) lens. We will introduce our context—Product Development (PD) at SimCorp to explore and understand how agile ways of working promote both intersectionality and DEI. Our approach combines insights from practitioners in both PD and Human Resources to understand and promote existing best practices within business processes. Specifically, we examine equity in recruitment, diversity in team composition, and inclusion in ways of working. We finalize our presentation by opening up for participant discussion on how our current realities will impact DEI and the future of agile.

In this lecture, I am walking the audience through an agile transformation of a major investment management technology company, SimCorp. The journey of SimCorp can be considered as one of the most successful large scale agile transformations in Scandinavia. Starting with the needs and the desires, I talk about the approach and share the insights from the trenches. Beyond a simple reorganization and new processes, this story includes tangible points such as avoiding simple title changes, removing roadblocks such as individual bonuses, filling the wholes in the popular approaches with innovation solutions such as a people and organization focused role and a learning organization to support it, structural changes to avoid silos, and even descaling in order to improve agility.

We are in a new era of talent spotting, where the importance of experience and education is shifting towards potential: the ability to adapt and grow into increasingly complex roles and environments. Do you have the potential to learn new skills? Are you able to deal with uncertainty and constant change? Can you use emotions and logic in a way to communicate and connect? In this talk I will blend the relatively new approaches to hiring with the practices from the other side of the table.

Recruiting for an agile team and ensuring a decent onboarding for the new recruit, are not trivial activities in a world, where turnover statistics indicate that professionals change jobs more often than before. As agile teams strive for continuous improvement, we wanted to share our experience on how teams can also improve recruitment and onboarding areas, which will definitely have an impact on their success and happiness. Our message is, recruitment and onboarding are too important to be left solely to managers and human resources. Agile teams can get the most value by being more active in both recruitment and onboarding.

Development Manager is an agile leadership role in SimCorp focused on growing people. The Development Manager is not part of the day-to-day execution; instead the Development Manager’s focus is on long-term individual and team development over short and medium-term gains. However, for the role to be successful constructive collaboration with other agile roles is paramount. Especially the interaction with the Scrum Masters is a potential hotspot. With the Scrum Master being responsible for not only team process, but also team climate, the interaction between the two roles has both the potential for futile power struggling as well as for releasing the synergies of two complementing roles pulling in the same direction. We have seen both types of outcomes, and in this report, we will share our success and failures regarding Development Manager and Scrum Master collaboration in a SAFe-organization.

Psychology is considered a new science with most advances happening in the last 150 years, and for comparison computer science "is" a new science that began to be established as a distinct discipline in 1950s. Having a minimum viable psychology knowledge will help you a lot especially if you are a part of an agile team that has a shared purpose and accountability. Join this session to hear about cognitive bias, false dichotomy, Dunning-Kruger effect, impostor syndrome, psychological safety, archetypes, and more.

These days many large companies are experiencing various types of transformations (from waterfall to agile, from agile to scaled-agile, from a CMMI-world to a light-weight governed world, from a PMO organization to something else, and so on) in their IT and/or software development organizations. All these transformation efforts need to be supported by continuous learning tenets. As a popular example, agile transformation needs a culture change that fosters continuous learning. As another yet concrete example, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) that is fully or partly embraced in large/global companies such as Cisco, HP, Lego, Intel, Nordea, Philips, SimCorp outlines certain initiatives such as Communities of Practice, and advises the ScrumXP teams to try Team Inside-Outs and Book&Coffee Breaks.

In this talk, we will visit 20 tangible continuous learning initiatives that can be applied to agile teams. All these methods are used with three different teams on a scaled agile (SAFe) setting, during the last year, hence you will also get information from the trenches on how such initiatives are perceived. My intention is, after this talk you will be able to try something new with your teams that would hopefully cause a good change.

This talk may seem to target agile coaches, scrum masters, development managers, etc. who can influence their teams and lead by example. In reality, any software development professional can benefit from the numerous ways of continuous learning and contaminate their teams with the new good habits.