Over the last 20 years Agile has moved from the Shop floor to the Boardroom. It is no longer seen to be an IT Solution but now considered to be an essential business strategy in the Information Age. However many Leaders still struggle with keeping the lights on, dealing with daily operational issues and transforming their business. The Boston Consulting Group says “Transformation isn’t an option – it’s a business imperative”. Richard Young says “Agile Leadership allows you to anticipate and adapt to unpredictable circumstances or environments in ways that will benefit yourself and others. While not everyone can exhibit the same levels of leadership agility, agile leaders are undoubtedly more effective leaders. Agile people excel at absorbing information from their experience and using it to navigate an unfamiliar situation. Agility is considered to help counteract Ambiguity. Being Agile you will: ‘Be prepared to adapt and shift course rapidly’ and ‘Reverse potential threats into opportunities’.
Day 1 is all about leadership and what leaders can do to transform their organisations. Our speakers will inspire, provoke your thinking and give you insights on how you can start or optimise your approach to transformation.

Technology, Innovation and adoption of new practices and mindsets such as DevOps is driving massive changes across many industries and markets. We will also cover many topics from Artificial Intelligence, Nanotechnology, Drones, Machine learning, Cyber Security, Robotics, Fibre Optics, Chat bots, Blockchain and a range of exponential technologies used by Uber, Google, AirBnB, Netflix, Waze and more more innovative organisations. The Big question for many leaders and managers is how can you leverage these exponential technologies for your business? Where can it be applied? What Products or Services will benefit most from adopting these new technological innovations? What we have discovered across many innovative organisations is the open source mindset and adoption of DevOps practises which is driving successful transformation initiatives.
According to DevOps.com “DevOps isn’t just about working faster, more effectively, and at a lower cost. A big part DevOps is also about driving business innovation. DevOps correctly applied is known to cut costs and reduce downtime, but as this Rackspace 2014 survey found, DevOps is also, across many organizations, increasing sales as well as employee and customer engagement. DevOps is also enabling organizations to deploy more capabilities more quickly. As the most recent Puppet Labs DevOps report contends, DevOps organizations are deploying updates 30 times more rapidity and with fewer failures. And they’re recovering 168 times faster from failures and have 60 times fewer failures due to code changes. “What we are seeing is the quality and speed has definitely increased. So people are producing changes that are of higher quality and changes that require fewer rollbacks,” said Nigel Kersten, CIO at Puppet Labs. in this interview with Ericka Chickowski.
If DevOps is going to positively drive business transformation, all of the associated efforts – collaboration, communication, automation, continuous delivery –  have to be orchestrated toward the right goals, in the right ways, with the right people and processes in place. It’s about helping business and technology leaders to manage their enterprises through times of change in technologies and markets. (Credit: DevOps.com)
The 2018 Agile in Africa Conference wants to focus Day 2 on Technology and how organisations can become exponential, become better, faster and create more value.

You have now heard about various Agile practices such as Scrum, Lean, Kanban, XP and perhaps you are now thinking….how do I get started? Where do I start? Can we apply to this to Sales & Marketing, Operations, Finance, HR, IT and other business Departments? What can we start implementing from tomorrow? Who do we need to help us start our transition from a traditional business model to a more Agile business model? Are there Agile coaches in Ghana or West Africa who can help us?
Many people have found that a successful Agile development process has the potential to transform a traditional project management organization from slow, mammoth releases which take months or sometimes years to quick iterative release cycle from four weeks or less. Once an organization has a firm grip on Agile basics, moving from a yearly release cycle to a weekly build – release cycle is not unusual. It is possible to deliver value more rapidly to your employees and customers.
Making 50 quick releases instead of one big one has several advantages. The development team is able to release value faster by getting important features and services in early releases. They’re also able to change directions quickly when the requirements turn out to be wrong or misunderstood, rather than working for a year toward the wrong goals. While these advantages are important, they’re not easy to realize.
Many leaders and project managers struggle with the basics of the Agile as they move from an established traditional development and management process such as waterfall, PMP, PMI, Prince 2, MSP, TQM toward using more Agile methods. If you have questions, you’re not alone. Day 3 will address your questions and help you get started. You will leave with the Akaditi Agile Tool kit.