The case in point is a journey of Agile transformation when the organization was looking to manage releases through shorter iteration cycles. As the journey began, the organization had to leapfrog into 3x growth in terms of both people and business needs due to a round of substantial investor funding.

The agile transformation started with just 6 teams in the organization and due to the nature of the team structure, the 3-member PMO team did not have the luxury for pilot projects and had to simultaniously roll out at one go across the 6+ component teams.

In a span of 6 months, the number of teams grew to 12+ and the number of releases more than doubled. Also, 80% of the releases cut across more than 3 teams and the challenge was to keep the process pretty lean. PMO team worked closely with key stakeholders from Product, Engineering, Architecture and Operations to forumate and roll-out a simple 3 step process that aided the teams to deliver releases better than before. Here is when the organization leaped from project to portfolio of releases cutting across 10+ themes.

Similar to what is quoted in the "Scaled Agile Framework" which the PMO tripped on much later in the process, there were organization wide prioritization done based on the product strategy, infrastructure and technology needs which eventually got translated into multiple programs within the organization, cutting across various teams. A concept of 3-in-a-box (PM, Architect and Engineering Owner) was formulated to bring in the required vigor in to the planning and execution process.The 3 in the box was further extended to Dev +QA + Ops who worked as a team to deliver the various stories across the contributing stacks.

The challenges across value-driven prioritization from 100+ releases across the portfolio, release planning with engineering and product, the execution framework and scalability in engineering infrastructure commensurate with the agile processes, working with operations teams and all the way till adoption was seamlessly scaled using the initial framework that was set for just 15 releases.

The presentation details how agile helped and is helping the product and technology teams in delivering better results than before. This would also detail the necessary Agile and operational metrics across the project teams, the program and the portfolio levels that aid the mid and senior management to take informed decisions. As always, this would not cover the IP and actual data of the organization but provide a clear framework to substantiate the process.

Are you an Agile Practitioner? Or are you responsible for Agile transformation?

Organizations that have begun their Agile journey welcome the guidance of an experienced Agile Coach. But external guidance cannot continue indefinitely as the only way to scale Agile.

If you are in an Agile team, are you prepared to take on the coaching role for other teams once your Agile Coach moves on?

If you are a manager, are you looking at grooming in-house coaches to scale and self-sustain transformation?

The transitioning of practitioners into coaches can be key to your Agile journey. Individuals get to build on their potential, while the organization becomes more self-reliant.

This session explores my personal journey from practitioner to coach. It should help you too in taking that first jump into the role of a coach. I will share real-world examples of dealing with on-the-fly situations, and of preparing upfront where possible. I will recommend resources, and mention handy techniques that should be in a coach's toolkit. The session essentially provides a kick-start for first-time coaches.

At times we have great product ideas but the biggest barrier to entry lies in answering few questions such as:

- How do I define and validate Problem hypothesis, Solution hypothesis and Underlying assumptions?

- How do I quickly setup a platform for people to register their interest?

- What will keep the potential customers engaged, excited until the first release (or beta) is out?

- How do I get feedback from the early adopters?

- And eventually when I have answers to some of these questions, how do I make a decision to persevere or pivot?

If you've faced a challenge while answering any of these questions while building/validating your product idea, this session is for you. We'll look at tools and techniques to validate the product hypothesis early-on without spending months or fortunes. We'll also look at a case study to highlight how some of these tools, techniques helped us validate our product idea.

There is a common concern by management that Agile doesn’t make a difference to the product quality. How do we release a product of world class quality?

 Problem is two folded:

1. 'Definition of Done' is not created with Quality in mind, nor is it measured against the quality set at the beginning of the project.
2. Quality Goals and subsequent adherence ensures quality is met and not just meeting 'Definition of Done' (DOD) criteria. For example DOD may be met, but quality may still be poor if not managed appropriately. How – lets discuss this through the session.

 Once the quality goals are defined for a project, Definition of Done should align with these quality goals.

At McAfee, we have released world class quality products through Agile Methodology and Quality Best Practices together. One exceptional method we practice is by defining and tracking "Effective Quality Goals" for each sprint, and at every release.

By driving agile projects through quality goals, we have products with ZERO defects deferred / logged by customers, 90+% code covered through automated test, 70% defects found early through development practices. This magic was not in just one project, but close to a dozen projects in the last 3-4 quarters.

In this presentation, we will explain about how we changed the paradigm in the last 2 years and released world class quality products in a short span of time.

Many product companies struggle with a big challenge: how to identify a Minimal Viable Product that will let them quickly validate their product hypothesis?

Teams that share the product vision and agree on priorities for features are able to move faster and more effectively.

During this workshop, we’ll take a hypothetical product and coach you on how to effectively come up with an evolutionary roadmap for your product.

This 90 mins workshop teaches you how to collaborate on the vision of the product and create a Product Backlog, a User Story map and a pragmatic Release Plan.

This is a sample proposal to demonstrate how your proposal can look on this submission system.

As more and more organizations are transitioning to agile, it’s inevitable that Agile testing is not just a concept any more. It is also not just about placing a tester in every team. What is so radically different now? How to be successful at agile testing? How to be an effective cross-functional team that embeds and honors all specialties including testing?

In this presentation, I am going to share my teams’ success with Agile testing and how we incorporated these 3 aspects – people, process and tools/techniques. This talk will benefit any members in an organization who has a stake in the product quality. It is also highly beneficial for those agile testers (from aspiring to veteran) to understand the 3 main aspects as it relates to testing and why we need to embrace- not just one, not two, but all these 3 aspects to be successful in Agile testing. 

Battlefield Agility® is a quest to make our deliveries better, more collaborative, faster and effective. It relies on age old principle from the Army to provide a holistic view of the problem landscape which a project team needs to solve and be able to succeed in this, through small collaborative groups working in coordination to achieve the bigger goals.

Battlefield Agility® derives from the Agile manifesto and principles and adds to it the key ingredient of individual wisdom to create a plan for a team which will help it succeed in successful deliveries . This is a goal based approach to increase MVP and ROI.

The purpose of this method is to make team members more focused about their work, equal distribution of work in the team and increase productivity.

Battlefield Agility enumerates the mechanisms of planning, better field view to all team members, ease of multitasking, reduce task switching.

Key benefits of Battlefield Agility® 

• A focused approach to software development as development proceeds through small battles to be won
• Reduced multitasking and better efficiency of team members
• Faster deliveries as the work is divided to right sized battles to be won
• Parallel efforts by team members ensure the time to market is significantly lesser
• Less process overhead as the collaboration is real time and more time is spent on the ground than on meetings
• Small teams ensure close camaraderie and collaboration among team member
• The team can even work on disparate work areas ( if required) in order to make best us of their expertise

Humans are creatures of habit and agile is really challenging that part of our existence everyday. I have seen many teams thinking they now get agile and they take what they learned and just practice it everyday without really reflecting on where they are at or the fact that they are not really moving forward. So in order to say your teams and organisation are really becoming more and more agile everyday you need some metrix to measure against.

The collection of the metrix are 2 fold:

1. Metrix are tracked through the agile project management tools teams use. We have defined the below set of metrix to interrogate our data to tell us how we doing.
2. Some of the metrixs are done by getting feedback from teams and clients through surveys.

Some of the metrix include:

1. Measurement of quality
2. Measuring customer satisfaction
3. Measuring team happiness
4. Measuring continuous improvement in process and technical practices
5. Measuring time to market
6. Measuring ROI
7. Measuring productivity
8. Measuring overall project progress
9. Measuring change and improvement

An introductory session on SAFe's way of building agility at an enterprise scale. It is very hard to find an organization with teams who aren't practicing agile, but knitting them together into a program with appropriate cohesion, visibility and governance continued to be traumatic. Join me in understanding how SAFe can help us come out of this trauma.