How do you effectively scale skill-based, quality training across your organization?

Over the years, I've experimented with different ideas/models to scaling skill-based training across an organization. In the last 4 years, I've pretty much settled down on the following model. Its very useful when mentoring teams on skills like Test-Drive-Development (TDD), Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), Product Discovery, Writing User Stories, Evolutionary Design, Design Patterns, Problem Solving, etc. I've successfully implemented this model at some very prominent fortune 500 enterprises.

The goal of this workshop is to explore what other successful models organized have used to scale skill-based training in their organization.

Introducing the Kanban method through a 3-layered value system - a familiar core that stimulates and drives change, a middle layer that is about direction and alignment, and a protective outer layer of discipline and working agreements.

This humane, values-centric model aligns Kanban with the concept of the Learning Organisation and suggests ways to seek resonances with other methods. It has some practical benefits too: it can help us engage more effectively with the organisation as it currently is; it encourages us to self-reflect on our effectiveness as agents of change; it provides a convenient framework for the capture of stories.

Traditional models of management and corporate governance are failing to keep up with the needs of the modern economy. Change, both technological and cultural, is occurring at faster rates than ever before. In this climate, modern enterprises will live or die on their ability to adapt. This is where Agile, and Agile Business Management, come in. Agile is change; changing how you think, changing how you work and changing the way you interact. This is important whether you are a software developer or a CEO.

In this presentation, Evan will provide engaging and enlightening case studies of Agile beyond IT; from lean startups to large enterprises. These will be reinforced with practical approaches for the leadership of teams, divisions and businesses. 

Taking the successful concepts and methods from the Agile movement and Evan's new book, Agile Business Management is a framework for the day-to-day management of organisations regardless of industry, size or location. We will discuss processes, techniques, and case studies for the 4 key domains from Agile Business Management;

1. You, the Agile Manager - What makes a good manager and how do their responsibilities change?
2. Integrated Customer Engagement - Collaboration and communication techniques to build trust and deliver Customer needs efficiently, with minimal waste, and to everyone's satisfaction.
3. The Structure of an Agile Organisation - Efficient, transparent and collaborative techniques to manage empowered staff.
4. Work, the Agile Way - Managing all types of business functions, from software, HR, finance to legal, by using Just-In-Time planning and Incremental or Continuous Delivery processes.

Ultimately, the goal of this presentation is to make you think about your role as a leader. 

Retrospectives are the one of the most integral components of any agile methodology.  In scrum a retrospective is typically done after each sprint. This process is simple if team is small or only one team is working on a product. The problem starts increasing exponentially when many teams work on a single product. All the teams have ideas to improve the process and production.  One team may have an entire opposite idea of another. How to bridge this gap?

Last project executed across different teams (onsite & offshore) and different departments was not a great success. How to learn from the past failures and apply it to future projects?

In this discussion, I will be talking about some the points which can be easily followed in such scenarios. 

Why did we did this?

Normally in a scrum environment we have a single team with Product Owner; they do the retrospectives within team. Team identifies the issues and work on them. Many team falls into this category. It is pretty simple

Let’s complicate this further.

• A big product with 10 scrum team
• Each Team has different PO

Apart from these main stake holders there are many others who are interested in the success of this application

• Sales team
• Documentation team
• UI design team
• Architecture and performance team

In such a scenario, a retrospective at team level will be effective only at granular level. But it leaves a gap in few areas; it helps to bring all the teams together for one big retrospective

• Apply the improvements made at each team level to the whole program
• A team's retro action item against the process followed by another team can be discussed at a higher level to find an optimal solution
• Sometimes two team's retrospective action items may be contradictory. This gathering may point a third solution
• Sr Product owners and manager will get all the teams together. A common focus and improvement plan can be shared across teams.
•  All team gets to know about the key concerns at the program level and with other teams.
• Ultimately it gave a feeling of one big family.

My experience

Last large retro organized in our group was a big success. The sales team & architecture team had many ley lessons to take back from this meeting.  Many issues were bought out which could have been solved with better co-ordination across team.  Concrete action plans were made by team for the subsequent release.  Some of the key findings were shared across other program teams also.

Scrum, XP, Kanban and related methods have been proven to provide step changes in productivity and quality for software teams. However, these methods do not have the native constructs necessary to scale to the enterprise. What the industry desperately needs is a solution that moves from a set of simplistic, disparate, development-centric methods, to a scalable, unified approach that addresses the complex constructs and additional stakeholders in the organization—and enables realization of enterprise-class product or service initiatives via aligned and cooperative solution development.

The term "cross functional team" has been made popular by the Agile movement. In cross functional team, we put people with different roles to work together for a common goal/purpose.

I have seen this worked really well in many agile teams. People are no longer on silo and everyone have better understanding what each other's role is and consequently, what each other do. This leads to better self organising within the team.

However, I strongly believe we can take this concept to the new level. The concept of cross functional team should be extended to not just the team but also to the individuals within the team. Scott Ambler wrote an essay on "Generalising Specialist". The term T-shaped developer was introduced by Mary and Tom Poppendieck in her famous book "Lean Software Development". By nature, people don't like to get out of their comfort zone, hence the tendency to keep working in area that they are familiar with. When leaders can create an environment where everyone is encouraged to learn, grow and make mistakes, amazing things can happen.

In my experience leading teams, I have witnessed many transformations that enabled individuals to go beyond their traditional role, such as a manual QA assuming Scrum Master role, a BA doing deployment, a developer doing QA for a story, etc. Not only this enablement help develop the individuals to widen their horizon and skillset, it also helped the productivity of the team through better collaboration. When a team reach this stage, we no longer have problems such as "The QA has nothing to do because there are no stories to test", "The developers have nothing to do because the cannot keep up", "The deployment took longer than expected because the Ops person was not aware of the special configuration".

Other talks and games will teach you how to run a successful Agile project. Only this one will teach you how to ruin an Agile project*. In this game we will break every Agile rule, disregard the manifesto and ignore common sense in the singular pursuit of failure (and fun).

Each of you will be part of an Agile team with a dis-engaged Customer and micro-managing boss. Being Agile, there will be daily stand-ups, planning sessions, retrospectives, and kanban boards but nothing will go as you expect.

* More importantly, this activity will teach you "how" Agile projects can fail and the reason behind many common Agile practices.

Many organizations struggle with transforming from the old style teams consisting of members with specialized silos of skills into Agile teams consisting of generalized specialists.  This results in sub-optimal Agile adoptions in Agile/Scrum environments, which is where most organizations transforming to Agile are advised to start.

We will start with a look into the real role of QA in the organization, and where they truly add value in the production of quality code to allow the business to move forward. Piggybacking on the role of QA, we will then speak to exactly what QA needs to do to add value to the software development process, and how they integrate in the DevOps model that is a contemporary solution to an age old issue.  And, finally, we will speak to some uncomfortable truths, and draw conclusions into the skills that Agile Testers must be expected to master to allow the organization to pivot successfully into a truly Agile development group.

‘One bad apple soils the barrel’ is a very true saying even in an Agile environment. Not identifying and managing poor behavior and performance can completely undermine any Agile transformation effort.

How can Leaders, both within and external to Agile teams, set higher standards of accountability and hold people to it? Is self organization, peer pressure and the wisdom of the crowd enough to handle the wiles of organisational psychopaths?

The fact remains that most teams will have a few difficult personalities and underperforming members.

Agile is seen in many senior management circles as a softer, less accountable, way of working. Is that true?

This talk will delve into how the human psyche works, drawing on latest studies in neuro and psycho analysis, combined with Harvard studies, to outline the best ways to define, identify and deal with ‘bad apples’ in an Agile environment while honouring the values and principles of Agile

As Agile coaches, several times when we talk to the Sr. Management in a company to taking agile to a bigger level and adopt it across their business units a common response we get is "I have seen agile working for our project teams. I am also in midst of an agile transformation where we are applying it in large programs. But how do I know the transformation is helping me achieve my goals at an organizational level. Our organization typically tracks executives on finance, people & delivery parameters. In an agile context, how do I ensure that I am on track with the executive-level dashboard (finance, people and delivery)?" As part of this session, we plan to share our experience of how "Balance Score Card" technique was implemented at one of the financial services company following agile. By using concept of balance score card we were able to map the agile goals with the IT organization goals and ensure that the agile methods were giving the desired results.

So, you just got out of your CSM class, overflowing with your newfound Scrum knowledge and renewed faith in software development practices. You're ecstatic to share your new view of the world and show how Agile can benefit your organization, and you can't wait to get started. But, in your first Agile project, you meet resistance, opposition, and worst of all, modified Scrum practices. What's a ScrumMaster to do?

Don't lose hope! You're definitely not the first ScrumMaster to meet these barriers, and you're not alone. I've encountered these situations in projects and have some tips to make the transition to Scrum easier on the team, the leadership, and you. Learn to overcome these problems in this interactive workshop and you become a better ScrumMaster and will help lead the team to the high performance you know they're capable of!

Why are some leaders socially adept while others show lack of maturity? Why some teams are high performing teams and others just are not? Ever wonder why people behave the way they behave? I did too.  As a coach, my quest to help teams collaborate better (and organizations create great culture) took me through an extraordinary journey through the maze of gamification, motivation, psychology, coaching, system thinking, organizational development and group process, and interpersonal neurobiology. Through this journey, I discovered why Lean/Agile principles are brain-friendly and how they help teams and organizations. In this session I share some of the insights that I have gained applying some of these principles coaching teams and organizations. You will also learn how you can share these concepts with other and gave teams and organizations a “language” to have crucial conversations, thereby increasing the system’s (team/organization) self-awareness.

A traditional software development project entails specifics around elements in or out of scope, tied up to deliverables, all ensconced within specified estimates and timelines, subjected to legal clauses for everything from acceptance to indemnities. For Agile contracts, the boundaries of legal intervention must stand; merely due to the marriage of parties when a project is executed; the definitions of boundaries must be established be it scope, budget or timeline and all standard deliverables from a traditional project stands; yet, the execution is as diverse as chalk and cheese.

What are the key criteria to be aware of when we define Agile contracts; as in typical agile projects, should the client be involved in mutually drafting the contract? How much legal intervention can we allow? What happens to deliverables and expenses when delays occur and scope boundaries are reduced? Can blame be apportioned to an extent that each party will have to indemnify themselves?

An Agile contract needs to reflect the nature of the engagement; no template contract with standard clauses can be coaxed upon a true agile project. In line with the Agile principles and values and targeted to the agile manifesto; Agile contracts should be just that – Agile!

Project management as we know is a science that is evolving and maturing. Agile provides the next step of advancement in this arena. The topic will discuss how Agile practices have now reached a level of maturity and can be an agent of organizational transformation. These practices can now be applied to other fields and the same benefits can be reaped as we experienced in Software Development.

There are two ways to learn. From books and trainers; and by experiencing life. Life is a great teacher.

We are always pressed for time; that is a reality. But we can’t do anything till we have enough time; that is a myth. Because we can.

For learning skills and acquiring knowledge we need time. We can beg borrow or steal. Beg & borrow doesn’t work. Learn interesting ways to steal time.

Once we take care of time for skills & knowledge, we are ready to handle learning by experiencing. That doesn’t need extra time; if we know how. Through discussions and exercises, master innovative ways like maneuvering attention, watching exceptions and seeking interactions.

Being at conferences is fine, but we need something while at work where we belong. Use a few simple yet powerful tips to keep learning.

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

“Fixed price, fixed deliverables, and fixed schedule” contracts are just about the worst way to write contracts involving software, yet they are the most popular – so what are some techniques to use to fix that?

Organizations that perform professional services for software development or develop software on a work for hire basis are usually engaged bound by extensive contracts.  These contracts are typically characterized as “fixed price, fixed deliverables, and fixed schedule.”  These, of course, are the vertices of the “Iron Triangle of Software Development” and foreshadow a poor outcome due to issues that make the requirements gathering and project estimation phases that precede contract negotiation so prone to error.

Given this, the question becomes one of “how can I engage clients in a way that allows us each to achieve our goals?”  If Agile and Lean methods are the status quo for good development practices, how can I write contracts for development services that embrace this mindset and let each side achieve it’s goals better?  This lecture and roundtable explores the many facets of this question and provides the attendee answers that they can use going forward.

Have you wondered what life is like as a product owner ? What kind of decisions are they faced with ? What puzzles them ?

 This 90 minute hands-on workshop is aimed at simulating product development in an uncertain environment. You will work in a team with other participants to shape roadmap for a product in a familiar domain. Each participant will be given a 

The  workshop is also being run at Innovation Games Summit in Amsterdam in September 2013 (http://www.igsummit.net/prashant-gandhi.html) . It has also been successfully delivered at a number of blue chip clients in the UK for an introduction to product management and lean startup concepts.

Have you ever thought why scrum works? That too from NeuroScience perspective?
We all acknowledge and understand that we have moved beyond and past machine age or service era and are living in what is called “Knowledge Era”. Focus of current times is shifting from behaviours to values. From people to brain. Yet, we know very little about people or brain or its working.
Through this talk, I will attempt to link hard neuroscience to scrum and its practices to see why it works or does not work. Also we would look at practices required beyond scrum to create an environment where scrum can flourish. Or even exists!