Customer collaboration is essential to every Agile business. To create and collaborate to keep a customer is the purpose of an organisation. But still lots of companies try to make bad profits, i.e. profits earned at the expense of customer relationships. The Net Promoter System (NPS) is a renowned open-source system which addresses and measures customer collaboration. And did you know that you not only can use it to get feedback on your products and services, but also on your employees and your personal performance?

NPS is a perfect fit for Agile companies - and those who want to be. Most of the companies I worked with (Agile coaching, training, consulting) had not heard about it, and far less were actually using it. This really surprises me, since NPS integrates like a charm with Agile, e.g. within product development via Scrum.

In this session I'll explain the basics of NPS, i.e. promoters and detractors, satisfied and delighted customers, bad profits (how to deal with bad feedback?) and good profits, and why and how to measure these. Several stories from companies like Apple Retail, Zappos, Southwest Airlines, and others will help to make my point. I’ll further show why NPS is a very good fit with Agile regarding products, employees, and personal performance. Dos and Don’ts regarding NPS (also from personal experience) will close this session. Related to the Don'ts, I also cover some of the negative critiques out there.

In the software world we have been looking for “The Methodology” to solve our software development sorrows for quite a while. We started with Waterfall, then Spiral, Evo, RUP and, more recently with XP, Scrum, Kanban, DAD, SAFe (there are many others, but, their impact, so far, has been limited).

In this tutorial, I'll show why this search for the holy grail is bound to fail--each methodology has strenghts and weaknesses that make it suitable only in some contexts--and I'll describe a different approach based on patterns and pattern languages, that teams can use to create their own methodologies to suit their specific needs, which, in my experience, has a higher chance of success. 

The approach is based on the observation that all the practices used in all modern methodologies--e.g., user stories, use cases, team self organization, TDD, unit testing, acceptance testing, continuous integration, iterative and incremental development, etc.--come from the same set. Different methodologies just mix and match them differently. All those practices can (and many have already been) described as patterns whose relationships with each other form a set of pattern languages.

"Release Early, Release Often" is a proven mantra and many companies have taken this one step further by releasing products to real users with every commit a.k.a Continuous Deployment (CD).

Over the years, I've built many web/infrastructure products, where we've effectively practiced CD. However at Edventure Labs, when we started building iPad games, we realized there was no easy was to practice CD, esp. given the fact that Apple review takes a few days.

Our main question was: As mobile app developers, how should we architect/design our apps for CD?

We were a young startup, learning new behavior about our users (kids aged 5-8) everyday. We could not afford any delay in releasing latest, greatest features to our users. To solve this problem, I believe we've built an innovative solution to enable any mobile app developer to achieve CD.

If you are building real products, which have platform/3rd-party dependencies and you want to practice CD, this session is for you.

Fixed price (and fixed scope) projects dominate the offshore industry. These projects have offshore/onsite teams. They often have large team size (over 100s of people in one team).

Agile thinking uses team velocity/ throughput and uses that to project an end date (Kanban system) or how much scope can be accomplished in a given time duration (number of sprints in SCRUM). They assume a stable team. However, this is not applicable for projects. They experience resource and productivity ramp-up issues. Often, resources keep changing as new projects come in. Projects do not have past velocity or throughput data. Extrapolating historical data from other similar projects, though possible, is inaccurate for multiple reasons.

This talk is based on our experience of working with such project teams. They want to adopt agile methods. We show how they can adopt the Kanban Method and yet do: A) Initial Capacity Planning B) Assess the impact of scope creep to the project end date.

The session assumes a basic understanding of the Kanban method.

Let your hands be the search engine for your brain! LEGO® Serious Play® is a powerful thinking, communicating and problem solving technique that can help you and your team do serious work through structured play activities using a popular and playful 3D modeling toy. Through a facilitated process of building models that, storytelling and reflection, every person at the table is engaged and actively participating in the discussion, whether the topic is individual aspirations, team relationships, developing a new product or solving a wicked organizational problem. Everyone builds and everyone tells their story – all participants have equal opportunity to put their own points of view on the table, unlocking new perspectives and exposing the answers that are already in the room.  LEGO Serious Play has been used successfully for team-building and problem solving in a variety of organizations, from NASA to RBC to academic settings and public utilities.  

This presentation provides a hands-on introduction to LEGO Serious Play, so that you can experience firsthand how using LEGO to do real work unleashes creativity and enables meaningful conversations in a very short time. We will explore how to use this playful technique to collaboratively elicit information about user requirements and strategic design issues using the open source User Requirements with Lego methodology developed by a team at the University of Lugano, Switzerland.  This approach is particularly suited to Agile teams that want to get team members and stakeholders sharing their different perspectives on common goals in an open and light-weight manner.

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.

A lot has been said about Kanban and how these can be implemented in Software development, but the learning remains superficial till we go deep down to its roots to understand the core underlying practices and principles and why/how these practices evolved over a period of time. Infact the roots of most of the Agile methods can be traced back to Lean/Toyota Production Systems, a set of practices and techniques used by Toyota to build great set of cars with limited amount of resources. Even though building software is much different than building a car, there are many lessons and practices that can be learnt and applied nonetheless.

In this interactive and visual talk, we'll take a virtual trip to Japan and learn some of the best practices/concepts that originated at Toyota for building "world-class" cars and see how each of these can be applied to software development. Learning about the roots of Lean should help the attendees in sowing the seeds of Lean improvement in their organizations and would help in building better software and improving the efficiency of the software delivery lifecycle.

Feedback is perhaps the most important aspect of the overall agile lifecycle. If the feedback is too wide and shallow, it won't give enough actionable feedback. If it is too narrow and deep, it might fail to register feedback outside its focus area. So, how does one go about designing feedbacks that enable agile learning. We call them agile feedbacks.

In this brief session, we will share an experience from designing agile feedbacks for agile trainings and workshops. The objective was to get most critical feedback in shortest amount of time to enable quick action planning. We created feedback that took a maximum of 5 minutes and enabled the most important learning in both, focussed as well as open-ended manner that allowed us to focus on the most critical items. We employed elements of Design Thinking and Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation (RITE) to improve the process and quality of feedback themselves. We will also be touching up these concepts and how effective they were.

[24]7 Customer, Inc started out in customer service space from Bangalore in 2000. Today, it is a sucessful mid-size company in voice-based customer support that also creates IP and products in big data and predictive analytics for some of the biggest names in business, and is a a high-growth company headquartered out of US. The growth in product R&D happened both organically as well as from acquisitions across multiple geos. While the initial / startup stage processes had been extremely successful in building the company's strong foundation, it was felt that the next stage of growth might not be a linear extrapolation of the past successes. Recognizing this futuristic need, it initially embraced agile software development methods in Q1 of 2013 to improve responsiveness, predictability and time to market in the product development organization. In Q2 of 2013, it embarked upon an ambitious company-wide program. The charter was to establish an end-to-end execution framework to make the entire operations efficient and effective - right from marketing and pre-sales to delivery, deployment, operations and ongoing optimization. 

In this session,

• We will analyze challanges involved in scaling-up agile adoption outside the software team across the entire organization.
• Specifically, we will also discuss how we addressed some of those unique challanges that are associated with growth and scale, and
• What does it take to achieve true end-to-end agility. 

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.

One of the most rewarding change opportunities for organization to create awesome workplaces exists by being innovative at the management level. Forget step-by-step explanations of management practices (you can’t copy culture!); the key to address the management level - i.e. to foster innovations at this level - is by inspirations. In order to get an awesome workplace, you have to see awesome workplaces. There are plenty of ways to inspire people, but this opportunity is often wasted during the introduction of Scrum and Kanban methods, or never reflected upon afterwards.

In this session, I will show you several aspects of awesome workplaces. A constantly growing container for inspiring management are the Agile Management Innovations (AMI). AMIs are practices for management which lead to democracy, fairness, decentralisation, dialogue, and lot of other positive effects. These effects lead to awesome workplaces, where people are truly motivated. The idea behind inspiration is to foster creativity and innovation through a changed environment. Management practices can't be just applied; 50% of management practices depend upon the organisation's culture. That's why we call them AMInnovations.

If you experiment with AMIs, you'll get from status quo to awesome (that is of course only when you're status quo is not already awesomeness).

I’ll introduce the concept of AMI as well as plenty of real world examples. The goal is to inspire you twofold: I will inspire you in this session to experiment with AMIs, and AMIs will inspire the people within your organisation to achieve a better workplace.

There is nothing ‘Agile’ in the current distributed Agile project management systems, which is focused towards passively capturing and providing information to teams, they are traditionally designed for people who have no choice but to use, which are ‘transaction oriented than ‘relationship oriented’ this is really ‘anti Agile’.

This discussion / talk is inspired by Geoffrey Moore concept of systems of engagement . This discussion / talk is intended to

a)      Provoke thought on how to bring ‘Agile’ values and principle in transitioning from current Agile project management system designed around discrete pieces of information ("records") to systems which are more decentralized, & relationship oriented which embraces social behavior of a team.

b)    Talk also brings out following uniqueness of Systems of engagement and how can we achieve it in distributed Agile context

Agile has always challenged people with the question on how much to design upfront! It doesn't end there, it even flows in the day-to-day work of the developers & the associated Engineering Practises. We do understand the need to have a scalable design, rigid code quality checks - but who is eventually driving these? How are the architects coping with the changing dynamics of development methodolgoy? Are we really driving those practises in reality or are they finding place in management slides only?

This session is an attempt to project how the practise of architecture is getting mis quoted/mis understood in most of the ongoign Agile projects & what has been the root cause behind them.

We also try to come to an agreement as what should be the ideal approach towards setting up an Agile Architecture.

Have you been thorough the process of outsourcing your Agile project to an offshore service provider? If yes - you must have wondered how you should be measuring the progress & success of the work that is getting carried out by your service provider. But what could be the measuring criteria? How do you know if you are heading the right direction or not?

In this session we look in to the aspects of identifying how one may successfully measure the state of an ongoing delivery model & based on it, how we refine/improve the outcome.

Backdrop:

Over the last 10 years while working in onsite-offshore model, what I have personally come across is the fact - whenever we work on Agile, we do come across one magic phrase every now & then - "I have also worked on Agile". Yes, we all have! :) Agile is simple & there is no rocket science in doing so while delivering across onsite & offshore. We all know the drill i.e. set up some time zone overlaps, establish virtual communication channels, identify some Proxy POs, have some kind of "all hands" infrequently & we should be good. Isn't it?

We all know these (at least we all claim so)! But then why is it that some of the projects do better than the rest & some even fail? Why is this that we don't realize that if you offshore your work in Kolkata, you deal with a different cultural barrier than if you offshore the work at Bangalore (or vice versa)? Did we ever consider that it is upon us - the so called Agilists - to bring up the Agile knowhow to our clients (& many a times - learn from clients as well)? These are the simple - yet mostly unnoticed elements - which play a crucial role in deciding how a project succeeds in Agile offshoring & we should be able to take them in to consideration.

More often we jump in to the Agile bandwagon - bit prematurely. And mostly as we try to do so, we fall flat (well, there are exceptions of course) & jump to an off-shoring organization. The good news is, by doing so - we may have just taken the second (i.e. after deciding to go Agile) right step i.e. if we don't have the expertise in house, bringing in the talent from outside makes most sense. But we need to keep in mind; unless we ourselves are not having an open mind to embrace the changes, we are most likely to fail despite all our good intentions.

Basis of this talk:

I am working on Agile onsite-offshore model for last 10+ years (with total 15+ years in the service industry). Over these years, have dealt with numerous small (2-3 teams - all co-located) to large scale (75+ teams, spread across multiple geographical boundaries) Agile engagements & have worked as consultant to several projects. Offshoring is a big challenge - not only to our clients, but also to ourselves - as we often fight the situation, where customer is either too rigid on Agile expectations or too much bent towards traditional PM style. Bringing the right mix is always the tough ask - that is where the success of the project depends.

A project can face varied challenges through its life, foreseen and otherwise - runaway scope, high defect volumes, depressed velocity, and many more. Addressing many of these first requires recognition of the problem and then action from one or more sets of project stakeholders. Telling the story with simple visuals can be a very powerful way to articulate a challenge (the what), the potential root causes (the why) and the options available to fix it (the now-what). Teams typically already track a lot of data related to throughput, quality, scope and cost. Creative use of this data combined with simple, hand-crafted visuals can be much more effective than hundreds of bullet points. In this hands-on workshop, you get to exercise your visual thinking and visual communication skills. We introduce some simple visual thinking techniques like Look-See-Imagine-Show, and then let you apply them in a project simulation, so that you can practice hand-rolling simple visuals that speak volumes (no fancy tools needed!).

Forecasting has always been a subject of interest to all project management teams. Team have used multiple methods (from detailed MS Project scheduling to Earned Value Management) to try and estimate when a project will finish. People spend a lot of effort to come with one precise hard date knowing fully well how their past predictions have failed, how their assumptions have been invalidated, etc.

If one were to discuss further with a Project Manager, they will understand that there is a level of confidence that a Project Manager associates with this date.  Perhaps, he is very confident (90% - it is rarely 100%)! It could be even as low as 60-70% depending on the number of issues and risks in the project. In other words, an end date is always associated with a probability, which we in our management talk and presentations, ignore or fail to highlight. In reality, a Project Manager would like to say - I am 70% confident that can deliver this scope of work within the next 3 months but 90% confident that I can deliver this in the next 4 months.

Kanban systems predict the future by extrapolating current throughput on the present backlog. Most Kanban tools use the CFD for the same. This gives you the gap between the rate at which you need to finish your work versus the rate at which you are finishing work at present. Like MS Project, it also gives one date when this backlog will finish, assuming current throughput.

Fact is that future is not definitive! Project risks change, requirements change, team resources change... the list goes on! So, just like this inadequate for traditional tools, it is inadequate to limit ourselves to this analysis in the Kanban Method also.

This session, using Kanban Tool, will demonstrate:

1. The use of probabilistic theory to have a confidence % associated with a particular delivery date
2. Once you know the gap between the current throughtput and the desired throughput, what resourcing changes can be done to bridge this gap. While it is understood that resourcing is not the only option to bridge the gap, it is perhaps the most commonly used method. 

This approach has been vetted by David Anderson and has been presented in the LSSC 2013 conference by one of my colleagues.

Company culture, or its DNA, is one of the most important factors to determing if a company succeeds.  Many companies claim to have great company culture.  But what does this mean, how can you know if your company has a great culture, and how can you go about improving the culture?  This talk will explore what great companies have in common, and share experiences I have had in helping to develop engineering culture during my career.    

Will also explore how Agile principles help to foster creating the best possible culture for your organization.

Design Thinking is an approach to solving Design/Wicked problems by understanding users’ needs and developing insights to solve those needs. It helps to address the right questions and to create the “Right products”.

Design Thinking is an iterative innovative approach. It is not meant as a replacement for the organization’s standard development approaches; rather Design Thinking works inside of agile projects, offering frameworks for collaboration and innovation.

Design Thinking ultimately helps you to address the right question and to create the right solution for it. It Means creating innovative "Right Product" by combining diverse people, creative space and an iterative approach.

Agile projects success (or failure) depends on two key points in an offshore setuo i.e. Trust and Commitment. Lack of either can cause serious trouble in agile projects as they say "You can't solve people problems with policies". So a lack of Trust on each other (Customer and Supplier) leads to rigid, complicated, lengthy SLA driven contracts and both side fight over it by taking oath of 'the contract'. Trust comes from knowing each other well and it takes some serious commitment to build trust. Committment from Customer should be is to treat its supplier more as partner or equal stakeholder in the project and invest in making a strong, trustworthy relationship early in the project to build a long lasting bond. Also, equally from a supplier committment is to understand its Customer challenge and help them to achieve their business goals. A committed supplier will invest in its people to produce a best quality product for its Customer and be transparent with their (and customer) organisation culture and its challenges and openly discuss how to overcome those. A bond based on Trust and Commitment goes a long way and bring a very healthy environment for people working in that environment.