Speaking

Your audience will enjoy interacting with a passionate, dynamic speaker who gives them a lot to think about.

Popular talks include:

Being Agile: Having the Mind-Set that Delivers
(beginner & practicing)

Are you excited about adopting Agile? Have you realized the promised benefits: happy customers, quality product, reliable delivery teams, and faster releases? If your honest answer is “some,” “inconsistently,” or “we did at first,” then you’re not alone. Most organizations experience disappointments due to Agile implementations that are mechanical, rigid, or driven by tools and so-called “best practices.”

Agile is first and foremost a mindset that should permeate your actions. Without the mindset, the practices don’t matter. In this talk, Gil Broza will guide you through an exploration of the values, beliefs, and principles that define Agile thinking. You’ll learn how to choose the Agile methods, processes, and practices that fit your needs and context. By understanding what makes Agile work, you’ll be able to support mindful implementation and the necessary culture change.

“Excellent topic and well presented. Great interaction with the audience!”

“Great content that was delivered well. There was a lot here I will take back to my teams.”

“Very thorough, super organized, good message and points.”

The Human Side of Agile Management
(beginner & practicing)

For best results from Agile, you need a solid team. If you manage, lead, or facilitate an Agile team, you’ve probably seen that process alone doesn’t translate to great results – and that having a cross-functional group of 7 +/- 2 “resources” doesn’t either. Come to this interactive presentation by the author of “The Human Side of Agile” to discover what makes great Agile teams tick. Get a view, free of hype and cynicism, of how people in your position – Agile managers and leads – contribute to their teams’ success (or hold them back). And receive practical tips and develop insights into three key skills you need for supporting your team’s journey to greatness: communication, coaching, and facilitation.

“I loved the presentation. I promise not to use the word ‘resources’ in respect to people from this point on!”

“Loved everything about it! Good, practical tools and information, excellent delivery, good sense of humour.”

“I can count on one hand the number of presenters I have seen who were confident, professional, comfortable, and left me wanting more. Gil Broza, you inspired me. I really liked how you illustrated a facilitation technique. Many takeaways from this presentation.” — Tony Chung

Individuals and Interactions: Ten Lessons from Putting People Before Process
(keynote)

For decades, most technology businesses have considered standardized processes to be a key ingredient to their success. Other enterprises made a different assumption: that cultivating their staff and growing teams, who would own their processes, was a better enabler of success. Agile, which has been in substantial use for the last 15 years, is an example of such a mind-set. Truly valuing individuals and interactions over processes and tools is challenging, yet many organizations have made it work. Along the way, they’ve discovered necessary conditions for sustaining people-first environments, as well as a host of surprising benefits that carry over to all forms of knowledge work. In this talk, author and veteran mentor Gil Broza will share the top 10 lessons of putting people before process, learned from real-world Agile implementations.

“Great to see Agile through people and not process as too many presentations do.”

“Very good and entertaining presentation — useful ideas on what works and what may not work.”

“A true pleasure to listen to your talk… your emphasis on the human aspects of Agile is so important.”

(beginner & practicing)

Are your product owners and ScrumMasters empowered, yet they still run decisions by an authority? At standups, do team members use expressions such as “on my plate” and “my part’s done”? Are they dedicated, motivated, and busy, but not concerned when half the sprint’s work isn’t finished?

These questions expose attitudes that don’t destroy Agility, but do hurt a team’s outcomes. The trouble is, these attitudes are so familiar, standard, and seemingly common-sense, that a team may be unaware of having them. Gil Broza, author of “The Agile Mind-set,” shares in this talk the top 10 attitudes to shake loose – and what to replace them with.

“I thought your presentation was clear, concise and valuable.”

“No boring moments. Provides ideas I can apply today.”

“Great talk. It resonated with many of the people who attended, and this is exactly what we want: to get more people become aware of how agility can make their business life better.”

The 7 Drivers of Technical Agility: What You Must Do for Effective Long-Term Value Delivery
(practicing)

Your team is agile. They develop features in decreasing order of value and risk, and demo them regularly. They absorb requirement changes. Team members feel free to work all around the codebase. This seems okay, but you have doubts…

• Does the team forgo design or use mini-Waterfalls to meet the demo deadline?
• Do developers want to go back and clean the code or its design, but rarely have any time for that?
• Are some estimates for easy-looking features surprisingly high?

If so, your team — however bright and dedicated — is producing legacy code, and doing so in quick iterations. Their technical Agility doesn’t align with their business and process Agility. And if the product has any significant lifespan, progress will slow down predictably over time, jeopardizing schedule commitments and future development.

If you manage or lead in such a situation, this is a risk and a liability you must manage. In the session, you’ll discover the 7 drivers of Technical Agility, their implications to you, and how to put them in place.

“Among the two best talks in this entire conference.”

“Great rapport with the audience.”