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.

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.

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 important issue that has plagued the Indian sub-continent is that of education and more importantly primary education. Since past few months, my weekends are usually occupied in teaching English classes to underprivileged children from 5^th grade at a government primary school. As an Agile coach and a practitioner I was drawn towards unifying the concepts of Agile to help increase the quality of education.

As a teacher, I was given a set of high level goal by the school administrator that needs to be accomplished every quarter. My goals for the first quarter were :

• > Kids should be able to identify basic words
• > Form short sentences.
• > Converse reasonably in English

I started with the traditional chalk and blackboard style of teaching focusing on the spellings, grammar, sentences, reading and so on. In initial few sessions, I quickly realized that it took too long for the kids to understand and so was not yielding the desired results. Some of the problems were like

• > Too much focus on semantics and grammar
• > Kids not opening up in the class room
• > Only able to read words but not talk or frame sentences

This is where I had to reflect and consider course correction in my style of teaching and Agile came to my rescue. This is a talk which highlights how Agile techniques were applied in teaching kids effectively.

Despite being a CMMI Level 5 company, in the early 2000 business exigencies prompted Wipro to look towards a sustainable continuous improvement drive.  Wipro started it Lean-Agile transformation initiative way back in 2004-05. In the initial days, the euphoria of a new subject helped in the adoption. The evangelists came from the ranks and their success stories helped us in broadbasing the initiative. In the past decade or so the organization has grown 5 fold – not to mention the increase in the complexity of operations. The early adopters and evangelists too were not in a position to take ahead the journey. They often took up different roles either within the organization or externally. Knowledge became tribal in nature without there being a continuous cycle for continuous improvement. 

This is a live case study of how the organization took ahead the transformation initiative and breathed fresh life into it, in an environment which was much more challenging. We built a cadence of Continuous Improvement by

1. Adopting a SuHaRi model of Inform-Perform-Transform  
2. Aligning the roles and responsibilities to aid Continuous Improvement
3. Building a rewards and recognition programme for increased participation
4. Involving Senior leadership to drive the cultural change by aligning policies and principles
5. Measuring engagement and effectiveness – not only in terms of measurable metrics, but also in terms of intangible benefits

What does productivity mean to the team? What does sponsor want from a team? What happens to Leads and Managers? A ROLE PLAY by JP and Naveen

The topic assumes that the organization is medium or large sized (about 2K+ employees) and has recently migrated or is in the process of transitioning to Agile methodologies. Further, stakeholders are aligned to the idea and they are wholly in understanding of what and why they want to go (gone) Agile.

Do you see a scenario in the corridor where a Manager is talking to another Manager – “What happens to us in future? Where do we go? Are we required in this organization? Agile is killing us.”

Do you see Leads (by designation) saying to his Manager “Hey my career was set to take off – I was to become a Senior Lead, and a Manager in 4 years. Agile has made me an average team member and stalled my growth.”

What about a team member to another saying “Man, there is no point in increasing the velocity – that becomes a bench mark for us and we need to sprint at that pace for the rest of our lives! I also had lot of time for myself in chunks when other functional group was slogging and I could read a book, attend a training, catch-up with my friends, blah, blah, blah. Let us add substantial buffer in estimates to have a comfortable life and commit on minimal ideal hours. Let us rock as a team!!!!”

Or a Manager talking to HR “I’m unable to hit the bell curve as an entire team is involved in successful delivery of the project” and HR saying “Sorry, but you are violating global HR policy by not doing so – there ought to be a superior performer and a poor performer.”

You may hear a team member saying “I was headed to becoming a super DBA and now you are asking me to pick testing tasks, web development task, etc. If I don’t spend 100% of my time in my domain, I will be termed as jack of all trades and master of none. This is not aligning with my career development plans.”

A VP saying to another “Not sure if Agile has increased our productivity, how do I know it is productive? I understand teams are empowered and self-organizing, but are they self-productive? And what is this fuss about Managers’ not happy with “no-role”. Nothing should change for them.”

A workshop where JP and Naveen play various characters to address these challenges in an Indian office context. Welcome to an enthralling way of presenting the core human challenges in Agile adoption and implementation.