Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and talk to their former leader Jeff Smith, EVP and COO at World Fuel Services and former CEO of Suncorp Business Services:

• Australian Agile journey took him from Telstra, to a small startup and then to Suncorp, and later IBM and World Fuel Services
• Scale of thought is more important than scale of people
• The Suncorp Agile Academy was born out of the fact that learning matters, but the idea was for other companies to create content that could be shared in the Agile community which did not happen
• Suncorp Building Quality In program
• It all comes down to great people and working through problem
• It’s hard for companies to build great leaders that are interested in building great teams
• Jeff Smith keynote “Leading an Agile Company“
• Availability is not a skillset
• Thinking from a team point of view is important – at World Fuel for example, the MTR dropped 80% due to this approach
• Don’t waste time on people who don’t want to follow what you want to do
• Most companies surround themselves with the companies being disrupted, not the disruptors – need to work with people and companies who want to change the game
• You learn a lot from being around better people
• For ANZ, the key to their Agile journey has been that CEO Shayne Elliott was willing to spend time outside the organisation and learn
• You need to be structured to support end to end cross functional teams formed around the work – the structure of the team matters
• The next disruption is the physical versus virtual world, in particular what happens to things like networking appliances
• It’s easy when something is new to find ways to shut it down, its harder to keep it going

TheAgileRevolution-166 (33 minutes)