Micro Habits & Sovereignty in Practice

Two very different, complementary topics for our June evening. One on the small, everyday habits that make teams actually collaborate. The other on how a platform and a cultural movement transformed IT in the public sector.

Here's what's planned for the evening:
17:30 - 18:00 - Arrival and first drinks
18:00 - 18:45 - Micro Habits for better Teamwork by Dr. Denniz Dönmez
18:45 - 19:30 - From DevOps to Digital Sovereignty: How a Movement Became a Platform by Syrian Hadad
19:30 - 20:30 - Networking, Open Space & More drinks*

Micro Habits for better Teamwork
Great teamwork is like solving a puzzle, and not like playing poker, it's not about playing against each other, but rather achieving real collaboration. Micro Habits are psychological hacks that create big results in teams. Micro Habits for Better Teamwork span seven behavioral domains, such as taking responsibility, creating psychological safety, and testing our assumptions. Each provides concrete, small, actionable behaviors that lead to major improvements in collaboration.
This talk presents practical, everyday tools based on real-world experience that can be applied immediately to make teamwork easier and more effective, without lengthy coaching programs or complex team-development processes. With Micro Habits, teams unlock their full potential step by step.

Dr. Denniz Dönmez
Scientific agilist and co-creator of Micro Habits for better Teamwork. 15 years experience leading teams and consulting market leaders with a background and PhD in agile methods.

From DevOps to Digital Sovereignty: How a Movement Became a Platform
IT in the public sector is anything but simple: long-established landscapes, strict regulatory requirements, complex processes, and often more than 500 business applications that must be operated reliably.
For a long time, this meant ordering individual servers, databases, DNS entries, firewall rules, and storage, then assembling everything manually. Every application was unique. Pets instead of cattle.
This talk tells the story of how the DevOps idea took hold in exactly this environment — first as a cultural movement, and later as a concrete operating and architectural model. Step by step, individual infrastructure evolved into a platform, manual work into automation, and isolated solutions into standardization.
The result: the Aargau Cloud Platform and a dedicated platform engineering team. In an environment shaped by legacy systems, federal structures, and long lifecycle expectations, platform thinking becomes the foundation for digital sovereignty: maintaining control, reducing dependencies, and still staying innovative — without simply handing everything over to others.

Syrian Hadad
Syrian Hadad is a CTO and long-standing technology and platform leader in the public sector. Among other achievements, he built the Aargau Cloud Platform and helped establish DevOps, cloud, and architecture topics strategically within the organization. Together with the IT organization of the Canton of Aargau, he won the 2023 Digital Economy Award (Digital Excellence) for the consistent transformation toward platforms, cloud-native technologies, and modern governance.

Many thanks to our sponsors:

• Catering Sponsor: DevOpsDays Zürich https://www.devopsdays.ch/
• Location Sponsor: Digicomp https://www.digicomp.ch/

* contact us min. 3 days prior to the event if you prefer a vegan option.