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Sometimes great questions are all we need to ignite the modernisation of the People function. This is what’s happened at Experian’s Talent and Leadership team.

We have the honour to present our guest, Sarah Bullock, Agile Delivery Lead – Talent and Learning at Experian. Experian is an American–Irish multinational data analytics and consumer credit reporting company. Experian collects and aggregates information on over 1 billion people and businesses.

Sarah will share with us the inspiring story of an evolutionary journey of increasing Agile maturity across the T&L team. Experian’s T&L team has been on their Agile journey for almost a year!

We’ll also follow the personal learning journey of Sarah, going from being an “agile sceptic” to leading Agile transformation across the T&L team.

HR Services have gone through massive digitalization and harmonization programs. Are we also developing better user experience?

How can we build a continuous development culture into HR services teams, so our HR products are updated and value delivery is improved? Join us for this free 1-hour virtual meetup where Monica Murer will be interviewed by Riina Hellström, Founder of Agile HR Community around modernizing and streamlining HR Services.

Come meet our newest Agile HR Trainer, Monica Murer for a discussion around bringing LEAN and Agile alive in HR Services. As a LEAN black belt practitioner Monica has valuable experience in LEAN development of value streams, people processes, tools and workflows. Through the agile heartbeat she incorporates the user experience and human centricity.

Monica’s current day job is Head of People Operations EMEA & APAC at Uber, and she has held senior HR leader Global Services Director positions at Honeywell and Siemens and as a side gig, she is now supporting Agile HR Community’s customers, too! What HR Services will we be discussing: Context: What are the trends with HR Services now? What is the difference between LEAN in HR and Agile in HR? Practical examples of using LEAN in HR Services Practical examples of how to adopt and use Agile in HR Services. We’re of course mentioning large themes such as the use of analytics, AI, robotization etc. but focusing more on hands on discussion of how you can bring LEAN and agile alive in the design and delivery of excellent HR services to your employees.

In a conversational meetup Juleah will be joining our founder, Riina Hellström, to share her team’s journey to adopt a fully Agile development model. The team members are professionally trained Agile HR Certified Practitioners and have been practicing Agility for a year, modifying a valuable and suitable Agile approach to designing and developing their learning, talent management and employee experience solutions.

Themes we will be discussing:

• The story of the L&OD team – successes, learnings and insights from a one-year agile journey.
• How Agility brings value to global learning and employee engagement solutions.
• Sharing reflections on how Juleah’s team works with Agile organizational development with a global, diverse and fast-based employee population.
• Netflix L&OD’s agile model – how did the team tweak Agility to fit the purpose?
• Practical tips and recommendations, warnings and fails.
• Agile HR Community organises Agile HR case study meetups for peer learning purposes.

You are warmly welcome to join us to learn about practical examples of Agile HR, to expand your case example library and to be inspired by a company like Netflix sharing their journey!

While Agile started in the software space, it has now spread to many areas of the business.

Despite decades of application of Agile in the IT and software, there’s one Agile role that continuously is misunderstood, misrepresented or not mandated enough – the Scrum Master.

When many business and support function teams start adopting Agile ways of working, an Agile coach or a Scrum Master will be invaluable for a team that is only using Agile the first time.

The Scrum Master role has not existed in the traditional hierarchical organization at all. Thus, it is difficult to understand what this facilitative and coaching role really delivers.

In this meetup we’re going to share both recommendations and theory from our 10+ years of supporting the success and improvement of Agile teams both in software and outside.

Join Steven Robinson and Riina Hellström to dive deeper into the following themes:

• Why on earth would be need a Scrum Master and what are they actually DOING?
• Benefits and traits of great Scrum Masters
• How does the role of the Scrum Master differ in software and non-IT/non-software such as business teams, – HR teams, product development teams or supply chain Agile teams?
• Do’s and don’ts of a Scrum Master
• Successes and fails from our journeys as Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters.
• Special HR perspective – Scrum Mastering in HR

learn how the People team at Threads styling went through the intriguing journey to design modern pay and rewarding practices, including building great user experience and communications around the new practice!

We’re thrilled of what the people team can help the business with after this redesign:

• Affordable benchmarking on salaries, following an incremental release cycle.
• As much transparency to employees as possible
• Clear career journeys and position descriptions, with roles visually available to compare.
• Career conversations delivered by the people team – coaching team members on how they develop horizontally or vertically.
• Career pathways launching incrementally – department by department, with the review and refresh built in.

I’m glad to be able to share our learnings and hope to inspire other SME’s, and why not corporations, to have the courage to challenge the status quo, redefining even our core, traditional processes together!

In this meetup, let’s explore how an Agile approach to introducing & evolving HR technology can accelerate everything from decision-making to deployment, and how it can really help bridge (& close) the gap between HR & employees by bringing them on a co-creation journey!

Lea is an Agile HR Certified Practitioner and a Senior Consultant with Virtual Resource, primarily focusing on the Talent Tech space and optimisation of technology to support key Talent strategic objectives. She has a varied background across different areas of HR and has had experience with running Agile-first projects within large scale HR organisations. Can talk for hours about Workday, Scrum, baking & DIY!

We haven’t had the pleasure of working with such dedicated and passionate Agile HR professionals in a long while, and we’re just thrilled to be able to invite them in for a meetup!

We know of very few large HR teams that have introduced professional level portfolio management practises and structures, and we are excited to explore how ANZ is taking care of this. Everyone, please meet the panellists from ANZ, who have been diligently building a scaled Agile HR operating model across multiple international HR teams for some years now!

• Jeffrey Entrop – Agile Coach, New Ways of Working, Talent & Culture.
• Haley Cronin – Enterprise Agile Coach.
• Michelle Nebbs – Agile Portfolio Lead HR.

Together with our esteemed guests, we’re going to dive into discussions around:

• What does it really look like in practice when transforming HR teams on scale to follow the Agile values, mindset, and practises?
• Some key ingredients that will help you succeed when embarking on the journey of scaling Agile in HR
• The importance of senior level prioritisation and portfolio management
• Visualising how ANZ has set up its operating model (cadence, mandates, forums, decisions)

We are over-the-roof excited about this meetup! Netflix really doesn’t need an introduction. Their products and services are entertaining us globally, expanding from series, to movies, to gaming. The company is in rapid international growth, in evolution from being a US based Unicorn with the LA-based headquarters, towards global expansion, onboarding new companies, countries and cultures. The expectations on the Talent, Culture and People professionals in this environment are nothing less than intense. The organisation and the HR team is in continuous change.

Our guest Jenilee Deal stepped into the role of Director of Strategic Initiatives (SI), Talent at Netflix in early 2021 and recognized that Agile capabilities will bring a lot of value to the fast paced environment. The Talent teams already were very self-organised and engaged, and Jenilee saw that professional level Agile practices could elevate the teams’ collaboration and value delivery. Later in the year, Jenilee also started leading the L&OD (interim).

Netflix Strategic Initiatives, and L&OD teams have now built professional Agile capabilities in the teams, and are now applying the practices and skills across their work.

We’re honoured and thrilled to have Jenilee with us, sharing reflections from their journey and what role Agile is playing in the successes of the teams.

We’re going to discuss reflections on:

• How Agile practices (with a capital A, as in structure, practices, principles and values) fits an already super-agile company with the fast-paced, self-organised, highly talented and engaged individuals and teams, who have the means and the freedom to innovated.
• Insights about the rigor Agile brings to customer focus, collaboration, communication and planning.
• The importance of tailoring and agreeing in the team about the Agile approach, instead of trying to fit everyone to a certain Agile mode.

Thales Talent Acquisition team participated in the Agile HR Certified Practitioner training in 2019. As a result of the training the whole team decided to embark in a full transformation of how they organised their team, their work and how their accountabilities were set. See how they changed from individual contributors to agile cross functional delivery teams with the ability to innovate and offer new products and services to their customers.

Over 70% performance increase in 9 months’ time

The results of this Agile change are extraordinary. The team could validate an increase in performance of over 70% within the next 9 months, measured by story points and throughput of TA work. This way of working has been engaging and energising for the team, and surely recognised by the business, too!

We couldn’t be prouder to offer a platform for our community to learn about one of the most amazing Agile HR team transformations – The Thales Talent Acquisition team’s Agile journey.

We will cover:

• The importance of a capability build – getting everyone on the same page about Agile HR
• The first 90 days & early gains – starting the change with an inclusive, engaging and enabling experimentation
• Data to influence change – using evidence of workload, effort and capacity to drive decisions
• Delivering value faster by stopping the work – the power of reflection & retrospectives
• Unleashing the team – how do the team feel about working in this way and the difference it has made
• Beyond imagination – current results and the ripple effect caused by our success

This is something you don’t want to miss! We believe this case study will inspire and energise Agile HR beginners, but especially strengthen the decisiveness to build a discipline around Agile for Agile HR certified practitioners who are leading change in their own organisations.

People operations have finally reached a point in time and technological maturity, where it we have possibilities and the means to start generating insights and support decision making with real time data and evidence regarding our people’s needs, feedback, behaviour and performance. Building a truly human centric organization and people first culture requires us to know what our people appreciate and how we can generate and develop their work experience. HR or people operations is there to help people do a good job.

The trending discussions about fancy people analytics, AI-powered automated processes and robotics within the HR function is really cool. But how can “normal” companies, without the means, tech or rocket-scientist skills start applying evidence based approaches and using basic people analytics to gather information and derive insights from the data?

Finally we in Agile HR Community get the possibility to GEEK OUT around people analytics with our enthusiastic and experienced guest, Michal Proch, HR Systems Expert.

Together with Michal we’re covering three people analytics themes in a conversation, including tips, tricks and opinions from our personal experience applying the tech and methods in HR and organizational development.

LEGO is among the most well-known brands globally – who doesn’t love to lose themselves in building and creating with the amazing blocks and bits? The Global HR at LEGO is currently on their journey of redesigning their HR services and practices, supported by a new HR/IS system implementation project. This is a massive project where global harmonisation needs to be balanced with local legislative needs. There are multiple stakeholders and requirements towards the new, common people processes differ from country to country. On top of this, LEGO HR Innovation is set to redesign and innovate, simplify, and bring user experience into the people practices on a totally new level than before!

In this Meetup, we’re joined by Thomas Moeller Lybaek, HR Process Innovation Director at LEGO HR Global. Thomas is working with the facilitation of the requirements, building the overall HR portfolio of redesigned HR practices. Thomas works with questioning the existing status quo in HR and facilitating innovative, simplified solutions across the whole HR strategy and portfolio.

The ways of adopting agile are different, but while HR professionals have learned about Agile and started adopting agile practices and the mindset into their everyday work, we can start maturing the Agile operative model and scaling agility across the people team. The fundamental approach is to improve the model continuously, iterate with feedback, amplify what works and dampen what doesn’t. And of course, pivot when needed.

The answer is, there is no correct answer. We have to figure out where and how to evolve the model ourselves.

Together with Jelle Jacquet, former Squad Lead Agile Coaching & HR Transformation and Deputy CPO as of September 1st, 2021, at Orange Belgium, Agile HR Community’s founder Riina Hellström will dive into the exciting theme of How to mature the Agile models and approach after the first steps are taken.

The HR team at Orange Belgium just completed their first year in an agile set-up and is more ready than ever to bring the benefits and lessons learned of ‘Agile for HR’ into ‘HR for agile’ and accompany our business leaders in their transformation.

We will cover:

• Outline the beginning of the Agile transformation – when do we know that we’re ready for “the next step”.
• What kind of blockers and dependencies start arising when transforming into Agile?
• Maturing the Agile HR model – ideas, recommendations and reflection on how to scale, improve, deepen and grow the Agile capabilities and collaboration across and beyond the HR teams.
• Collaboration and communication towards the business from an Agile HR team – insights and recommendations

We will hear the stories from Lockheed Martins Agile HR Certified Practitioners, who have started their journey a year ago. What do you need to start? What works and what doesn’t? We’ll cover different models of bringing agile alive in the HR work. What’s specific about Lockheed Martin is that it is a highly regulatory environment, where Agile HR can be brought alive, too! There are no excuses for saying “agile does not work in a compliance or regulatory environment”.

Join Sommer Terry, Jon McDonald, Lisa Richards and Jeff Mallory together with Agile HR Community’s founder Riina Hellström to learn about the beginning of Agile HR transformations.

We will cover:

• What does it feel like starting with Agile in the HR team? What’s different?
• What kind of reactions do we see from people who do not know what Agile means (or believe they know, but really don’t)
• Where to start – stories, reflections, tips and recommendations
• Agile in a highly regulatory environment – findings and reflections
• Lightning talk “5 ways to start your Agile HR journey easily” – by Riina Hellström