Experts from the IT world and from other branches will share their experiences, life and business lessons. They all share one thing – they love to experiment. The keynote lecture at QED 2018 will be given by Tina Lee Odinsky-Zec, Director of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center at Zagreb School of Economics and Management. She will share the experience and knowledge that she has gained working in education and social development. We are also proud to present a lecture by David Brakoniecki of BP3 who will talk about using techniques from Decision Management for implementing experiments in business. Last, but not least, Gregory Keegan, experienced agile coach at agile42, will in his lecture Transition through a Culture of Experimentation share his experience in working with companies that had to implement some general organizational changes.

Other speakers include Piotr Muszyński, former Vice President of Management Board in charge of Operations at Orange Polska, Suzanne Crumb, IBM Application Discovery GSI Sales Lead, Peter Janežič, Head of Department of Partnerships and Bancassurance at Sberbank Slovenia, Jan Vilstrup, partner at Danish SMT Data, as well as many other local and international experts.

The value of experimenting has long been known, but too often forgotten. Experiment help with development; it’s hard to learn without them. Some of them will end in success, while others are destined to end in a mistake, but one thing is sure – both is better than stagnation. A good experiment is never accidental – it’s an intervention that has been planned, done, evaluated and implemented. The experiment in business will be observed in the context of strategy, sales, development, teamwork, process, tools and much more.

Join us in Zadar and experiment with us! The participation fee is still low—hereby we invite everyone to apply by filling in this online form. All details regarding the program, registration and speakers are available on the conference’s website.

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Wings for Life World Run takes place in Zadar on the first day of the conference May 6, 2018.

Participants who sign up to participate at the QED 2018 conference until March 23, 2018 have the chance to win a free registration fee for the run (please put in comment section on the registration form “Registration for Wings for Life World Run”).

Colleagues from CROZ invite you to join their team and to jointly achieve the best possible result! 

Global Race Wings for Life World Run begins at 01:00 p.m. local time on a few dozen locations around the world. More information are available here. Link for registration can be found here.

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QED 2017 in a nutshell

Topic: Harmony

Number of participants: > 200

Keynote: Richard Sheridan, the author of the book Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love

The best lecture: A roundtable with perspective teenagers shining on all fronts despite the system surrounding them.

The greatest experiment: Artistic workshop with business lessons by Tihomir Cirkvenčić.

Continuous improvement or “And even when everything is OK, it can be better”

Judging by the feedback we receive from our participants, the conference level is always excellent. The level is high, but we do not want to stagnate, and we want to see constant progress – from the objective and the subjective perspective, both of us and our participants.

After 11 years it is clear that a lot of things are easier to do than at the beginning. But where to find the room for improvement? How to escape stagnation?

Everything that could ever go wrong, in the past 11 years, we have experienced it. I hope I will not bite my tongue. We know how to manage the risks. We know how to reduce ourselves to the stress of the organization. What is “in time” moves from year to year backward. We will not order the gifts two weeks before or call the world-star lecturers who have fulfilled schedules one year in advance, only six months before the conference. We know how to choose quality lecturers, but we still struggle with the strategy how to gather them all at QED and get the best out of them. We know when to start working on the program, and we know how to react when the lecturer cancels the arrival two days before the conference when all materials are printed out. To have a standard way of doing things is great. That also means we have created a comfort zone around ourselves where it is pleasing to be because organizing a conference for 200 people is not an easy job. We can push the conference to the end of the world, but there is no creativity in the comfort zone. If we work in the same old way, we cannot expect to get different results.

Outside the comfort zone is the learning zone. How to speed up learning? We have learned that too. The answer is a retrospective.

Moving forward with retrospective

For two years now, thirty of us CROZ employees gathered at QED, as soon as the conference is over and the guests leave, allocate an hour to talk about how was at the conference, what was good, what could be better and what this means for the next year. The results are invaluable! There are a few things that life means (foreign guests stated they need a conference program booklet in English), to big things (the participants commented that the lecture X was hard), but also questions (opening has similar concept for two years – are we becoming boring or is it OK to repeat it?).

The second part of the review is the conference participants’ answers to the questionnaire, where we always find a lot of useful information. Ratings of the lectures and other parts of the program often confirm our assumptions from a retrospective, but sometimes they surprise us.

When we have all this, then the logical question is…

How to move forward and how to do better?

The assumption is that we have learned from the mistakes we have noticed on the last retrospective of the conference. Here we come to what I consider to be a key moment in the development of the conference – if we learned from mistakes, it means that without them we would not have learned something! Mistakes are great!

The mind of the perfectionist and the manager will immediately say: “My dears, can you please not make mistakes?”. Our experience shows that without mistakes we are stagnating. We create artificial harmony where everything is “OK”, but there is no growth. That is why we do experiments.

Experiments help us in development, and without them, we learn harder. Some of the experiments will result in success, some of them will turn out to be a mistake. Both are better than stagnation in the comfort zone. We experiment with a program, menu, entertainment, guests, lecturers and types of activities. One of the experiments that failed last year is called “Presentation karaoke”. Five people participated, and only two were not from CROZ. An experiment that was conducted two years before called “An interview with a guest who has no connection with IT at the conference opening” proved to be very successful, and we repeated it last year.

The value of a true experiment against the principle of “Let’s do something new, so it is not the same every year” is that the experiment is not a coincidence – that is an intervention that is designed to bring value to the conference, evaluated and implemented in a positive evaluation case. This Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle is also known to all agile software developers (does the other club exist? ), and with the meaning and the steps, it is not far from the method of scientific experimentation.

QED 2018 – Experiment

The previous paragraphs are the reason why we, looking at ourselves and inspired by our lecturers, selected the experiment as the topic of this year’s QED Conference. The term experiment in the business segment can be observed in the context of strategy, sales, development, teamwork, processes, tools, and much more. In the pre-conference period, we will certainly experiment more than usual. Judging by our meetings (we started in September), the experimentation will not bypass the conference itself. See you on May 6, 2018 in Zadar!

The post What connects Nikola Tesla, Professor Baltazar, and CROZ? Preparations for QED 2018 are in progress! appeared first on QED.

Last year’s keynote speaker, Richard Sheridan, the CEO of the company Menlo Innovations and the author of the book Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love, revealed how he managed to build a team culture based on the business value – joy: ‘’There was a time in my life, in which I didn’t know what do to. I was working, and the job was never done. I fell out of love with my own profession and found myself in total chaos. That’s when I realized it’s time for change. I realized that the company’s structure should be simple, measurable and visible, and that the focus should be on human relations. So, we began experimenting. Our teams work in pairs, on a single computer, we have an open office, daily stand-up meetings, headphones are strictly forbidden in the workplace, chatting as well, and our employees are free to bring their children with them to the office. Can you even imagine all of this in your organization?“

Phaedra Boinodiris, the IBM leader for serious gaming and gamification, revealed to the participants how to solve complex problems through computer games concept. Many experts, such as Joachim Gucker and Thorsten Gressling from company ARS Computer und Consulting, and Tihomir Cirkvenčić from IBM, showed through practical examples how they achieved harmony inside their organizations.

Marin Trošelj from STEMI and his roundtable guests, students Marta Paladin, Magda Topić and Fran Zekan showed that synergy is needed to achieve harmony. Despite numerous problems in educational institutions, which bring down the passion and love for discovering and creating, they managed to keep their passion thanks to the teachers and mentors who have been selflessly dedicating their free time. Older generations should invest in young people, and young people should use this knowledge in the best possible way to make the society and the world in which we live in a better place.

Besides the main topic of the conference, special attention was drawn to lectures on current IT industry topics, such as PSD2 directive, Blockchain, DevOps and the cloud.

The best way to introduce changes and improvements is to test or experiment. A ready-to-use model that can be implemented into the organization, and which will turn chaos into order will hardly ever exist. Nevertheless, QED 2017 Conference has shown the participants numerous ways to achieve that. You should try to experiment! So will CROZ, because that is the topic of this year’s QED Conference which will be held in May 2018.

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