Benjamin Huser-Berta

I’m Benjamin (but you can call me Benji). I’m a Software Engineer and a professional Scrum Master.

In my work as a developer as well as an Agile Coach, I’ve experienced how teams are struggling. Being forced to spend time in meetings that are not bringing any value just because the process demands it. Not having time to support each other because the amount of work is overwhelming. Those are just a few things that make people lose their motivation and work dull and frustrating.

I believe work can be creative and fun. I believe we can reduce those wasteful activities and create an environment where you can focus on delivering value instead of simply being busy. And I believe that you and your team can move in this direction as well, independent of your current environment and processes.

The Plan Was a Lie (and Everyone Knew)

Every quarter, teams produce beautiful Gantt charts. Status dashboards stay green. PI Plannings end with confident commitments. Then reality shows up, and the plan quietly falls apart. The worst part isn't that the plan was wrong. It's that most people in the room already knew it would be.

We have all probably been that person at some point. The one who sat in the planning session, looked at the dates, felt something was off, and still gave a 3 in the confidence vote. Because ""I don't think this is realistic"" isn't something you say when the room has already committed.

This talk is about why that keeps happening. We'll walk through the cognitive traps that turn planning into theater (planning fallacy, optimism bias, base rate neglect, narrative fallacy), not as academic concepts, but as the things we've watched play out in real rooms with real teams.

Then we'll show what we did instead: stopped hand-painting Gantt charts and let forecasts build them, stopped trusting watermelon status reports and started acting on real signals, stopped treating PI Planning as a commitment ceremony and started reprioritising continuously.

The anchor is a delivery team that more than halved its 85th-percentile cycle time inside an enterprise programme that didn't change around them. They found a way to work differently inside a system that stayed the same. That's the story we want to tell, because most of us don't get to transform the whole organisation. We get a pocket of air and need to make the most of it. And one team is a good starting point to build trust within the organization that a different way might work.

Benji will do the workshop together with Peter Zylka-Greger.