 Cool. All righty. All righty. Deliver your game. Good day, everyone. It's great to be here. I hope you're all excited here for day one, Drupal Fest. That's what I like to call it. Let's get started. So, let me introduce you to the under seven lorikeets. Can anyone guess what game the lorikeets play? Any chance? Soccer? Basketball. I like it. No, actually, soccer. Well done. We'll get some prizes at the end. That's right. So, actually, they play mini-ruse soccer. So, they play a modified version of the game, obviously made for sort of six to nine-year-olds so they can learn the basics of the game. But can anyone tell me the rules of mini-ruse soccer? Obviously, the basics. Oh, you've got one here. What was that? No hands. You've obviously got to use your feet and someone else. You can use your head. You just can't use your arms, all right? So, the basics of the game got to score goals. But just like most of you, if I actually told you to break down all the rules of the game, you might have a little trouble. So, but that's my role. So, I'm the coach of the under seven lorikeets and I've been coaching them for the last six years. And my role is to teach them, obviously, the rules of the games, to, you know, work on their passing, their heading, kicking, et cetera, but also to make sure they have fun. And so, but you might be starting wondering, like, you know, how's this connected to the discussion today? But funny enough, it's no different to my roles and engagement lead running some large digital transformation projects into government. I work with Core Delta Digital and we work with large clients, mainly in the federal government space in Canberra, to deliver really complex digital transformation projects. Where often the rules of the game are unknown. So, it's my job, firstly, to understand the rules, to teach the rules of the game to my team and to get them working cohesively. So, I love being involved in kid sport, particularly because I get to hang out with my son, Declan, he's the one, he's the most enthusiastic one up there in the red boots. But it teaches, obviously teaches a lot about myself, but it also teaches us a lot about managing and motivating people, which is my area of expertise. So, today, the lorikeets are going to guide us through. As believe it or not, there's a lot they can teach us. A little bit about me. So, you already know that I'm head coach of the under seven lorikeets. Obviously, I work with Core Delta Digital. And my background actually spans communication, marketing, advertising space. So, I've delivered everything from large scale sort of global campaigns, national campaigns. And I've worked across the private, public and the not-for-profit sector over the years. All the way through with some sort of, you know, there's always been a connection with digital. And I've been recently with Core Delta Digital for just on 20 months, which is pretty cool. So, I don't prefer to be an agile expert or project manager, but I've delivered some pretty complex things during my career. And so, I hope to share some of those insights with you today. So, let's get into it. So, the delivery game. What is the delivery game? I thought we'll tackle this from a delivery management point of view, but if there's anyone here who's obviously not from that point of view, hopefully there's some people who don't understand the game as well, but to win at any game, first you need to understand the game. So, let's have a look at it. So, for me, the delivery game is all about the players, the people. And just like the Laura Keats, every one of them is special. They all have a little quirks. Some are shy. Some just can't sit still. And some of them are just too good for their own boots. So, who's in your team? Are they ready to play? Laura Keats, we have about seven to last the season. There's four in the field and there's three on the bench at any one time. And it means that we can sort of cover for the whole season. And the season runs through about your standard sort of digital website project, six to sort of nine months. And so, but one of the key things that it's important is to understand, not only understand who's playing, but that everyone has a role. So, let's take a look at the roles on any team and the team that you might be looking at. So, first, there's you. Once that works, there's you, the delivery lead or on a project. Then there's your team. So, you might be designers, developers, content experts. Again, depending on who's there. There's your product owner. Some sort of, you probably link into a project board or executive. And then there's also the competition that you're going to be up against throughout the project. So, that for us normally on a large sort of digital project, that's pretty much the makeup. And so, we're going to just break these groups down to see how they all interrelate. One of the things that I like to do, sort of often we think of our users when we do a deep dive on their challenges, their pain points and the things that they, you know, I suppose we're looking at the services that they're trying to consume. But I like to look at it as well as the delivery point of view. So, what are their objectives? Where do they interact with each other? And what are their frustrations and challenges that's going to be coming ahead? Because the cohesion of the team as a delivery point of view is probably the key thing that you want to, you know, that's primary or primary responsibility. So, let's look at you as a delivery lead. So, you've got your team wrangler, the organizer, the problem solver and the coach. You're also the shoulder to cry on. You'll also be probably where the finger points if things aren't going to plan. So, it's really important. You've got a positive outlook and then you're ready to go to bring the team together. You've also got your team. So, looking at your team, let's have a look and make sure, have you got enough players? Have you got the right players? Is everyone available? When we work obviously from an agency into a client, we're often working on multiple projects. So, a lot of the work we do is sort of jumping teams, jumping people or resources between projects and making sure we've got enough resources to deliver what we need for the clients. But, likewise, if you're a large department or depending on where you are, a large organization, again, you're going to have multiple projects. So, you're going to make sure you've got the right team, but actually they're going to be available. You also need to sort of understand how you're going to connect with them. I'm a product owner and I've got a little warning here. Make sure your product owner is actually a person. And if they're not, you need to turn around and start having a conversation now. And what I mean by that from recent projects, particularly in government where sort of decision making is quite complex, it's not necessarily done by individuals, it's done by the system. That's why boards and et cetera are set up. Recent large scale project we were just working on, we had a project board as the product owner. And what that meant is just stifled decisions. And we got to a point essentially where I think we're up to our 27th revision of the visual design. We couldn't get a sign off. So we ended up sitting down with the CIO at that point and just said, this is not working. And we were able to convince them to basically shuffle the product owner out, which was essentially the senior executive on the board. And decisions were able to be made by that person. The board became more informed of the decisions rather than making the decisions. So if this is not the case on particularly large projects, make sure you have those conversations now because it will come up. And then you've got the executive. So again, looking at it from their lens, they're the key sponsors of the project, but they're looking at the whole organization. They're looking at your project in isolation. They're looking at multiple things across the organization. So you've got to understand their viewpoint as well. And also understand how they want to be engaged throughout the process. Some executive, you don't want to sign off the IA, for example. And that's always fun. And on most projects, they also want to sign off, you know, where's the homepage designed, for example. And it's like, so there's a lot of education that needs to happen there. But again, understanding that is really key. For me, this is a lot, when we work with our clients, there's a lot of trying to understand these that help sort of the product owner that we're working with in the organization actually understand this so we can actually help to smooth decisions as we go through the project. All right, well let's have a look at the competition. You're going to be up against in the project. I like to look at it. Now there's going to be players that are going to come on and off here. But here are some of the big, the sort of the key competitors are going to be up against. So let's look at resources, making sure you've got the right resources, I mentioned it before. Then there's a little thing called time, making sure you've got enough time to deliver all the things you need. Sometimes you might need to buy some time, sub some time on and off. You've got the change that is going to, is going to happen across the organization. You've got a little friends called stakeholders. Those are those parents that sometimes are a bit intense on the sideline. Also want to put their boots on and come and play. So they want to watch. There's budget. There's expectations. Expectations every time. That's one of the biggest challenges of any delivery is managing your expectations. Not only of your team, your boss, but also those clients. Every time you promise to do something, if you don't do it, expectations is going to start scoring some goals. It's going to stop you from scoring yours. And the last one is motivation. Here's the last line of defence. One of the key things is keeping the motivation up. Not only of yourself. The team and trying to push through, to make sure your clients have the energy to keep going on most sort of digital projects. They're complex. They're hard and they're long. So keeping the enthusiasm up is really good. So yeah, there's lots more that's probably going to come up, come against you. But thinking like this just helps to sort of frame what you're going to be up against and also sets you up, your project up for success. So now we've sort of understand the players. Let's understand the game. So just like the lorikeets, understanding the game is a big part of, you know, the start of any season. But we like to frame or I like to frame any sort of start of any project by trying to understand the problem. And it's really important that you actually get a clear consensus of the problems that you're trying to solve with the project across all those stakeholders from the product owner, the executive and your team. So we're all working to the same thing. But this is a quote we often use. Again, the emphasis is on if you define the problem first, it's going to be much easier solving it along the way. The way we frame a lot of discovery phases, it doesn't matter if we have whatever stage we come into the project. It's really simple. This could be a matter of a two week process or a one week process, but it could also be as long as a three month engagement if you're just doing a discovery piece. Really important. This can be done in a workshop, for example. You know, you obviously need to do an audit of the current state. You need to define the vision for the future. And you also need to then prioritize and build a roadmap for where you're going to be or how you're going to get there. And that should inform whatever strategy. So we use this, we're doing an internet project at the moment for a private client in Canberra. We had a workshop that framed here. We did this in about two hours. We didn't really get to the defining the vision. So we'll do that. So this can be done over two workshops if you need, but it can also be a lengthy research piece as well. And remember, it's obviously throughout this process that it's a people game. So we always try and find ways to bring people together. That's why we do oranges at halftime with the kids. Otherwise they're off running around. And just like our team, we do things like come to Drupal South and go to Mona yesterday and have too much rosé as well, which was always fun. But we always try and do some social events. We actually do CrossFit during the week. We're just trying to find ways to connect on the people level. And you can do this with your clients as well. I think that's really important to make sure that you're sort of ready for the journey ahead. So... All right, let's look at number three. So goal setting on any project is really key. But it's not always about winning. And so for the Laura Keats, a good example. So under six, I think it's even until next year. So we don't actually count goals, even though they run around with it. They tell me how many goals I scored every game. So for me, I try and reset their goals onto passing and other things that we can focus on so that it gets them working together as a team. Because if you've ever seen little mini-leagues... or mini-roof soccer, everyone... you know, there's just a swarm of bees following the ball around the field. So I try and get them to spread out and pass and we really try and celebrate that, particularly for the parents as well. So I've got a little video here, which I thought I'd share, which was a bit of a proud moment for me when the team basically... So there's the four players on the field and they basically passed... we're able to pass it... each of them were able to pass it, which is cool. There's no audio, so... but... there's little Dylan, he passes it to Ante. He passes it out the wing. I think that's little Jake. And then I'm pretty sure... that's Lance, who misses the goal, but it was pretty cool anyway. So you get the gist. So it's like not celebrating the goal, but celebrating the other monuments and sometimes it's a matter of doing that. So when we look at from an organisational point of view or how your project fits in... and I suppose I'm referencing here larger sort of bigger digital transformation projects, they're... at a broader level, you know, you've got the organisational goals, you've got the project goals that sit in here. So if you take a government website as well, it's usually quite a large project on the scale of the sort of department. It could be a 12-month project, but it's also going to fit because majority of the services are delivered through the website in some way. It becomes a high priority project across there. So if we ladder them up, what we're really trying to do is make the connection between organisational goals, the project goals, you get your milestone goals, and then that's broken down into the sprints. But at every layer here, your organisational goals is pretty much where you're sitting. Your project goals is very much where your product owner is going to be sitting. And then milestone goals with your product owner and the delivery lead, plus your team, and your team is really going to sit at that sprint goals. But connecting that story is really your job. And so it's really important that you have each of those perspectives in mind because when you're talking to an executive, you need to be able to have that conversation at this level. Your product owner is going to be concerned about decisions throughout the projects. So it's, again, a good perspective to keep in mind. Favorite quote of mine is exactly this. Every human interaction is a chance to engage and motivate. And I see that throughout a project. It's the little things you do, particularly at the team level, getting out of your seat rather than sending an email sometimes, picking up the phone and actually calling a client rather than sending another email. It's actually, I always make a big effort to do that. And particularly if you look at, say, a project and we look at a sprint cycle in our agency with most of the clients we're working with, we work obviously in an agile way using scrum. We use it working two-week sprints, which can be sometimes challenging working into government. But all I see is the touch points that we've got to interact with the clients. Obviously, your planning meeting, you've got your daily stand-ups, you've got your backlog grooming meeting with a product owner or sometimes that becomes a different type of meeting, but you've got your reviewer and retro. I think what agile gives you is a framework to ask lots of touch points to make sure that everyone's on track and to make sure you've got the right resources to deliver the sprint goals that you've set out. So we've got understanding of the players. We've got a kind of perspective on your project goals, but the favourite question I get asked at the start of any season is what field are we playing on? There's always one parent at the start of the season who gets lost, and so the start of the season for the Laura Keats but also for a project is always the messiest. So you've got to make sure everyone has the right tools and is ready to go. They have context of the project, they don't want time to turn up and they're ready to go for the first meeting. You'll have all of your team turning up to the first meeting ready to go, shin pads on, socks up, shirt tucked in ready to kick the first ball. That's little decks there. So let's go through some of the things that you might think about for just getting ready for that kickoff. I think the first is really the key of getting your project started off on the right foot. A lot of this stuff we actually do, because again we're working into a client, we do this in the background but this sort of prepares us so that we're all on the same page when we hit that first client meeting. Obviously make sure you set up the tools it's not rocket science, but making sure everyone has access. You'd be amazed about how many projects start and things aren't set up, folders aren't where they need to be, people don't have the right access to the tools they're going to be using through the project. Confirm the scope, make sure the team, the budget and the scope and the timings are all really clear. Oftentimes the contract will tell you one thing and then as soon as you go with the client to get things started things are starting to shuffle the minister wants the website launched next month, so it's like cool, let's do that. Again, you're going to be ready for that because you're going to be ready to have that conversation but the first reaction from the team is going to be how are we going to do that? It's like we don't have the resources, we don't have the time. It's like quite an attorney Robbins there and then the last one is to organize a kickoff meeting with the team and the product owner. One of the things we do again because we're working in we actually do an internal kickoff and you'll be surprised amount of agencies or teams that don't do this and that's really just to get everyone on the same page go through the scope, make sure everyone's really clear on their roles and what's expected of them through the project that's where people can obviously give them a chance to raise any concerns and might say I'm actually already overloaded, some of my team are here today, we're always working on multiple projects and so particularly our development team are often stretched across many projects as I'm sure so it's again good chance for you to understand what you're coming up against but some of the things you want to cover off in that kickoff meeting is obviously you want to bring the players together, you want to understand the context you want to confirm the project and this is some of these things you would want to go over with a product owner or the client but it's no different if you're working internally to a sort of an area and making sure that you actually define what success looks like and agree on the scope and timings and this sort of kickoff meeting can also happen, these questions can also be asked with all layers of business even the executive having an understanding of what this is may actually give you the insights to get things started so once you have all that, obviously you're ready to play so you're ready to play but what's the game plan every Friday night before Saturday morning's game and after I've at least had one beer I sit down and try and map out what we're going to do for the next, for the morning's game so I spent about 10-15 minutes to just map out some of the drills we're going to do with kids because if I rock up 8.30 in the morning with no plans, I end up having balls everywhere and kids jumping all over me which is fun but obviously doesn't get things started so at Core Delta we use a we use an agile approach to design thinking and human-centered design principles to sort of, to map into the various stages this to Discovery Alpha Beta Live which I'm sure most of you will be familiar with this can, you know, this this approach can span anything from a three month project all the way through to 12 months to longer the Discovery piece which I mentioned before can be done as short as two weeks but it also can be quite a lengthy one depending on the size of the project this also aligns for us, because again we work a lot of times with federal government clients we align it to the DTA standard if you haven't, I'm sure many of you are familiar with it but it's a good resource, it's got lots of great info on there and a lot of times our clients are actually leaning on us to tell them how to meet the standard that they're working to so again, it's good to have some tools it also helps to guide conversations with the executive we don't know how to do this and so these sort of things again help with that decision making process along the way the other thing every project needs and just because you're using agile it doesn't mean you don't need a roadmap really key that you have a roadmap, again you've got all these stakeholders to manage here's an example of one we did recently for the ACMA.gov.au which is recently launched again, this is a very level roadmap but I suppose the emphasis is making sure you've got a plan my dad always used to say if you failed a plan, you plan to fail and that's pretty much here you wouldn't climb a mountain without a map so make sure that you've got one and this just allows you to keep one step ahead of the team and that's really the point there so you've got the players, you understand the goals, you've got your methodology and you're ready to go but you also need to be ready for weather because on most large scale projects things can get a little frosty just like the 8.30 starts on Saturday mornings with lorikeets, in Canberra it gets about, can be down to like minus five so the kids by the time they're out there it could be zero so again it's making sure that they've got their beanies and they're ready to go sometimes the parents is texting and saying is the game still on, it's like the game is always on unless I tell you so rock up but the kids love it, it doesn't really matter the weather as long as they're motivated and they know the goal then they'll rock up with a smile on their face ready to go so I wanted to share just to sort of as we're going through I just wanted to share some good examples on the recent project that we just launched the ACMA.gov.au it's on the latest GovCBS platform and where a few things went wrong this was a large sort of 12 to 14 month project we managed the alpha beta and live part of the project and I was responsible for obviously all the design team so we went through a full UX we had our development team and we also did the content transformation as well so we had essentially two contracts running so we had the design and dev and then we also had the content which sort of overlapped and helped us get us to live but one of the things that went wrong and I mentioned around the product this was the project where we actually went through 27 different variations of the visual design a process that was supposed to take four weeks ended up taking 13 weeks and actually delayed delivery of the launch in the end by a couple of months and it was only when we did multiple workshops there wasn't too many things we didn't try we did mood boards we met with different stakeholders we got clarity on the brief we went back at various stages we presented but every time we went to the board things just went pear shaped and we couldn't get consensus and one of the things we learnt, well A we didn't have a clear product owner so we at the time there was no CIO which was probably part of the challenge so there wasn't a clear decision making path in the organisation to get this done the chair was never available the authority runs their sort of head of the organisation was the chair and she wasn't engaged through the process so at the time she would sit in the board room she wanted a change so we would only be seeing this every two to the board meetings at the time were two months every two weeks so in the end we sat down with the CIO, the new CIO we mapped a new process and we were able to get him to be and then inform the board and so we were able to find a different way to get around the decisions but it really called on all our relationships we built across the organisation to be able to have that sort of confident conversation with the organisation and in the end obviously we got the website launched it just launched end of October which was pretty cool and it's all going fairly well at the moment so a couple of lessons learned on that one and I'm supposed to wrap things up so for me relationships are key the game is all about the players so as a delivery lead or delivery manager understanding of the dynamics of the people that are happening across any project is really key being realistic I think it's all about managing expectations and making sure that each moment that you're talking to someone and you're trying to commit to something that you can actually do what you say staying constant contact flag concerns early and be honest but probably the heart of it is really communicate, communicate, communicate that's really the key and so after all that you should hopefully there's some insights in there that can help you set your project up for success but importantly as well you got to make sure you celebrate the win so at the end of every season we always do a sausage sizzle or something to get the team together so I encourage you to have a think about how you're going to celebrate or mark the occasion with your team it could be as simple as a morning tea or a coffee but make sure you're bringing the team together so I thought I'd close, there's no audio on this next video but it was a good example one of the kids was they scored a goal and they put it in for the Mini Roo's soccer player of the month cute little video so I'll play that and then we can get some questions Hey everyone, it's Tommy you're here from the Central Coast Mariners I've just been given the nominations for the Aldi Mini Roo Player of the Month for June and it's with great pleasure that I announced that Liam from Belmore Football Club is the winner for June so from everybody here at the Central Coast Mariners a big congratulations to you and look forward to hopefully seeing you in the Mariners kit in the future Cheers!