We represent the Agile Center of Excellence at our Organization and are chartered to drive the change management initiative to imbibe Agile adoption across the enterprise.

We plan to share our experience on the Organization Change Management initiative that we took up to drive Agility across the organization.  Our journey towards the derived vision and strategy to increase Agility in the system to thereby achieve:

• Nimble simplified processes.
• Ability to respond faster to change.
• And most critical: delivering increased customer value.

This is a continuous improvement journey and we initiated:

• Structured multilevel communications of CHANGE to the teams.
• Learning + Unlearning:  Structured Training and Development plans (Behavioral and Technical).
• Bringing in Gamification as a tool to get millennial team members to learn quicker.
• Approach to move from “Pyramid” to “Hour Glass” structure to align with the flat team structure.
• Pilot: Career Development Framework Aligned to Agile structure and roles.
• Bringing in change of G&O to align with Agile delivery
• Enabling Talent Fulfilment to align to the Agile roles and structure
• Pilot: Performance change management- Holistic approach to drive appropriate behavior
• Brining in systemic changes to ease Agile adoption

Way back in 2008, when I started working in Agile, there was enough material available on Scrum and. However when it came to distributed aspect of it, people were still struggling with it. Based on working for years in this fashion, I realised that communication, trust, transparency and innovation are the core fundamental values towards successful distributed Agile implementation.

In other words, as most of the problems were caused by softer aspects of skills (misunderstanding, miscommunication, non-availability of people, mistrust etc), humanizing the distributed team experience looked like the key for successful distributed Agile implementation.

Based on working with distributed teams over the years, we discovered some distributed Agile patterns. Some of them got blogged from time to time. Those already available in form of blogs are as follows:

• Distributed Pair Programming
• Local Retrospective
• Agile way of documentation
• One Team Multiple Projects
• The nut/bolt pattern for distributed Scrum development
• Chain-Link Pattern
• Virtual One Room

The session is to share the these patterns and more (when to go for distributed Agile and when not etc)

Welcome to the crazy world of Dev-Ops, where the tales span the spectrum from gruesome, grizzly to the heavenly and flowery bliss!

The silo’d structures, the agonizing buy v/s build debates, the departmental handoffs, tooling and of course the cultural barriers, which all add fuel to the story unfolding in our brave new dev-ops world. But sometimes there are silver linings and the heavens part way for the shining stars to reveal their true glory.

Join our session to listen to the tales of our (not so) successful dev-ops, and learn the lessons from our experiences.

Why organizations are adapting towards agile? Is it to get most out of their resources or is it about doing the right thing?

Traditional mind set of achieving high productivity and using resources efficiently does not change easily, even when organization moves to agile they remain more and more worried about the team velocity. When I meet agile practicing companies or I attend event on agile I find that most of

the focus is on delivering product backlog efficiently. We see lot of talks on how to make team more self-organizing so that they can do the things faster.  Even after moving to scrum or agile we keep ignoring the warning

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be
done at all.”  —Peter F. Drucker

When most of the organization starts with agile they takes it as an engineering process, and most of the team focuses too much on velocity, while to get maximum out of agile we need to look at Enterprise Agility, we need to look at an organization’s entire value stream—from idea to implementation, from concept to consumption.

My talk would be focusing on need of organization agility and will introduce one of the monitoring tool “Life Cycle Profitability “which can help organizations in getting answers of questions like :

• Should we delay the release by one month to fix the defects ?
• Should we reduce the cycle time by adding one more team?
• Should we delay the release to add functionality?
• Should we delay the project by one month to get more innovative ?

Life Cycle Profitability is based on principle “Take an economic view” introduced in book:The Principles of Product Development Flow , Donald G. Reinertsen . In my talk I will be showing how we can convert proxy variables like cycle time , velocity , technical debts  into Life Cycle Profit.

I presented part of this concept in one of the conference and got good response, but I will create fresh presentation for this talk, since this time I will put more focus on expanding the model to calculate the Life Cycle Profit.

Guess there's a Slim Shady in all of us…but the real slim shady - Product Owner role - today is mostly ignored and misunderstood across most organizations. This talk highlights the confusion and the need for recognizing the product owner role as a ‘first-class’ citizen across the industry.

 The session will help you take a closer look at your current product owner team, and compare with an ideal product owner role, and in the end suggest possible ways to align your product organization better. If you are already a product owner or managing a team of product owners, you need to join this conversation and pick and/or suggest some of your own remedies.

Leaders today are looking at “self organizing” agile teams to WIN ALL the battles on Auto-Pilot. Nice try is all I can say !!

...though some teams surely do succeed (lucky guys?).  But most teams are not so lucky, and get constrained by the organizational systems, processes, boundaries, and need an outside-in perspective or a divine eye to kick start their next improvement journey. Sometimes a leader takes on this divine role to guide them on this journey.

This talk aims to provide the leaders a toolbox for using Lean conversations, to spark their next team improvement journey, by designing improvement kata’s, while slowly inching the team forward towards nirvana !! Divine Bliss !! .... So if you are a leader looking at learning and implementing the simple techniques of guiding the team on a self improvement cycle, leading to true self organizing team, join us.