We are from Large Indian IT Services organisation where most of the projects follow traditional/waterfall ways of working and the mindset of the senior management is also used to this way of working for all project types (Application Maintenance, Minor Enhancement, Bug Fixing and L3 Analysis space), while these methods have their own shortfalls and projects suffer because of the methodology, many leaders still believe that by following tradtional process their problems would be solved. Through this experience report, we would like to share how Visualisation and Agile Practices rescued the waterfall project from depleting Customer Confidence and Quality of Service Delivery.

The Project team of 9 members distributed at onsite and offshore was involved in maintenance / enhancement type of work for a large Investment Bank with several new features being implemented as change requests. Team’s responsibility starts from Analysis to Deployment into Production for the work comes in ad-hoc manner. The issues and challenges by project teams were

• Longer duration to complete the change requests and ensuring an on-time delivery
• Low Customer Satisfaction and Quality of Deliverable.
• Proactively manage application issues despite higher experience of team.
• Low employee morale
• Lack of senior management participation and constant fire fighting with the customer.

Project team focused on 3 areas

Business/Client IT team

• Prioritize the change requests by highest business/end user value (Input Cadence)

• ‘Drive’ the development efforts to incrementally deliver

Teams

• Focused on speed in delivering change request by eliminating waste

• Focused on enhancing knowledge sharing by Collaboration using Visualisation Boards and daily stand up meeting

• Focus to Deliver right at First Time

Management

• Focus on the value stream (cycle time)

• ‘Drive’ Continuous Improvement (Kaizen)

• Manage impediments , making blockers visible

Within 3 months of time after team started adopting the Visualisation and Agile practices the teams and senior management could see the improvement in the areas of 

1. Increase in Balance Score Card scores from 4 to 6.5 and many areas scored 7.0/7.0
2. Productivity improvement by 25%

A practical guide to setting up a new agile project team. Based on years of agile delivery and coaching experience for projects in a number of distributed and offshore models, for teams sized from 10 to 200 people, and spread across 4 continents, and 8+ locations. Some areas that will be touched on:

• People - how to organize distributed teams, cultural factors to consider, ways to build trust, and how to avoid timezone burnout.
• Process - how to communicate effectively, plan collaboratively, setup distributed practices (standups, retros, pairing, etc), effectively divide work on a common codebase, maintain visibility, and track progress.
• Tools - (tips provided as a handout) which hardware and software tools should you absolutely invest in to help overcome communication,  visibility and collaboration challenges

The challenges in distributed agile can be seen under three broad categories viz., a) Communication and Coordination, b) Time Zone Differences and c) Issues related to People, Culture and Leadership Style. Successful teams consciously adhere to certain principles and it is their principle-centered approach that helps them face such challenges and deliver the best.

Steven Covey wrote: "Principles always have natural consequences attached to them. There are positive consequences when we live in harmony with the principles. There are negative consequences when we ignore them. But because these principles apply to everyone, whether or not they are aware, this limitation is universal. And the more we know of correct principles, the greater is our personal freedom to act wisely." This is true in all situations of life and it includes application of agile methods in geographically distributed teams too.

This session is to present the ten principles and elaborate 3-4 principles learned through experience in working with project teams and interactions with industry experts, and applied for more than a decade. These ten principles are above and beyond agile manifesto and agile principles. These are related to areas such as context-specific methodology, tools for productivity improvement, infrastructure for communication and coordination, knowledge management, focus on quality, inclusion, collaborative governance, automation, technical debt management, iteration progression and ensuring early success.

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.

Pesentation deck is now available at http://www.slideshare.net/Managewell/what-next-31791295

Modern management methods are still based on the then seminal work by Henri Fayol some 200 years back, followed by Frederick Taylor's work some 100 years back! Sadly, those models were predominantly based on industrial work, and don't really work that well in knowledge industry and today's sociological dynamics at workplace. Classical Agile methods codify several people practices that allow for a self-organizing team to evolve, but doesn't offer a lot of guidance on how to develop and groom leadership for agile organizations beyond a software team. Management 3.0 takes this issue further and develops it into a separate discipline altogether. On similar lines, Holacracy seeks to create social technology for purposeful organizations, though not specially targeting software organizations. So, the issue of leadership still continues to be unresolved and rather left to pave its way on its own. Unfortunately, when we want to achieve true end-to-end agility, it is not enough for software teams to be charging at top speeds but leadership not evenly matched to support them well in their endeavors. We clearly have a problem at hand...

In this talk, we will study how the role of leadership has evolved and what does it look like for agile organizations at present. Many agile methods take an extreme view that limit leadership to team-level collective ownership of leadership. However, that might not be enough because of various reasons. In any non-trivial organization, whether a software organizations or any modern business employing software for business advantage, the reality is that organization units beyond a plain-vanilla software teams do exist. So, how does one go about grooming their top talent for playing an effective part in this process?

Finally, we will also try to take a shot at some of evolving paradigms. For example, all these management thoughts are still based on the kind of outdated premise that an organization is based on 'boundaries' of operations. However, already we see that model being broken down, and the future teams look more like boundaryless entities bound with nothing but a unifying purpose that brings a bunch of volunteers together for a period of time. If our success increasing depends on such teams being able to effectively self-manage themselves, what role does leadership have to play in it, and are we getting ready for it? 

One of the quickest ways to achieve greater buy-in, clearer communication and higher levels of engagement with team members, stakeholders, sponsors and business units is to get "visual agility". Using cards, stories, post it notes, visual charts, maps, models, metaphors - and most of all, some hand crafted "drawn-in-the-moment" visuals learn some engaging ways to facilitate with visuals in an Agile world. 

Many people speak about 'making work visible' - showing progress, visualising solutions, scoping out possibilities - having visual agility gives you the skills to step into any role at a moment's notice and help bring clarity to the problem, quicker. This can apply to individual thinking and brainstorming, or group situations when you're presenting your idea or you're working with the group to create a solution. 

Lynne Cazaly is a communications specialist and master facilitator. Lynne provides clarity to project complexity through workshops, training and visual strategy. Lynne trains, facilitates, speaks and coaches on visual facilitation, visual thinking and other engaging tools for project people, to help boost buy-in, collaboration and engagement.

Lynne Cazaly is the author of the book 'Visual Mojo - how to capture thinking, convey information and collaborate using visuals'. 

http://www.lynnecazaly.com.au/visual-mojo-the-book-lynne-caz/

Included in this session is 30 icons to use straight away which Lynne calls 'Quick Pics'.

Lynne recently ran the session again in New Zealand at an Agile Wellington Meetup - read their comments here

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.

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. 

If I say, culture is important to adopting Agile, most people will just agree without even thinking too much about it.  But what is meant by "culture"?  Why is it important?

Culture is not typical behaviour; it is not what we say we value (but don't actually do).  Culture is our basic assumptions of how things work.  Culture is the logic we use to think through and respond to any particular situation.

If you imagine a pyramid, Agile practice and any other visible behaviour is on the top, stated or written Agile values and principles are in the middle, fundamental assumptions (aka culture) is at the base.

My session is intended to expose people to the base of that pyramid.

If culture is assumptions, then to understand Agile culture, we need to understand the basic assumptions of Agile.  To do this, I have created an approach called "Think Like an Agilist" that both exposes how we think through an "Agile situation" and allows us to deliberately practice "Agile culture".

The general idea is that I won't just talk about Agile culture and values, what I'll call "culture theatre", but rather expose people, who nominally consider themselves part of the Agile culture, to their underlying thought processes and assumptions, given a relatively difficult scenario.  Those thought processes and assumptions are the essence of culture (reference Edgar H. Schein).  What is interesting is noting when the thought processes and assumptions are different which indicates that there is a different culture at play.  What I've noticed is that this difference is common between novice vs expert Agilists.

Note that it isn't even about analyzing vs doing it mechanically but more about exposing what assumptions are being used to respond.

NOTE: I will be updating the attached slides as when I created them, I was framing it more as "doctrine" rather than "culture", defined as fundamental assumptions"

Executing add-on Application Development (AD) projects end to end is quite challenging. More so, if the same is executed under risk-reward model. According to an IBM study, only 40% of projects meet schedule, budget and quality goals. 20 to 25 percent don’t provide ROI and up to 50 percent require material rework. 

With competitive pricing and cut throat competition eroding margins and denting market share, cost of delivery reduction with best in class quality has become an imperative for any service company in the IT outsourcing space.

This case study shares the experience of an AD project (team size 40) in the Insurance domain completed over a period of 9 months (including warranty phase), with a geographic spread across 4 different locations. The team had end to end responsibility right from requirements gathering to System Integration Testing. The add-on functionality developed was rolled out to 5 states spanning 2 different releases. The team leveraged LEAN Six Sigma techniques (DSM, OA, Visual Controls, Mistake Proofing) for culture building, effective change management, early feedback, rework reduction through effective in-process defect reduction and doing things right the first time, resulting in increased customer goodwill, reward payments, enhanced business and high employee satisfaction. The project was flawlessly executed under the risk reward model with best in class quality, maintainability and scalability within the specified schedule.

It is not a question of if a team is going to have a conflict; it is a question of when. Equipping them to deal with conflict is more than creating agreements or having a good facilitator. We look at a conflict model that focuses on dynamics of conflict by understanding- 1. Cognitive skills:self-awareness about triggers, hot spots, emotions,behaviors. 2. Emotional skills:reading emotions, body language, balancing emotions, using curiosity 3. Behavioral skills:understanding others’ perspectives and needs, avoiding 8 destructive behaviors, embracing 8 constructive behavior. In an organizational setting, it is important to understand the source (culture, interdependence, incompatibility, personality, power, etc.) and types of conflict (cognitive vs. affective). Creating awareness about conflict processes, retaliatory cycles and building a conflict profile can empower teams engage in constructive disagreements. 

This is an exploratory talk, based, first, on some recent insights from cognitive science, behavioural economics (which have enriched Agile folklore already) and then on, some interesting twists from culture based research in sociology and psychology. While the former will be useful in understanding the common pitfalls encountered in a scaled Agile implementation, the latter, maybe useful in understanding the unexpected twists when doing scaled agile in a distributed/off-shore environment that have different cultural norms.

While the anti-patterns and anti-paths are common across the world, the solution to these does differ. The assumptions behind what leads to a motivated, self-organizing, self-directing team will determine how to bring about a nuanced mindset to Agility, and understanding that what works in the West may not work in India (and other similar higher Power-Distance-Index countries).

While sharing my experiences in a large scale Agile transformation and working with different cultures, I hope to bring out some subtle variations that could be useful in coaching and working with and transforming Agile teams in an offshore engagement.

Are you developing new functionalities into branches? Have you ever experienced the pain of merging the changes into trunk? The so called "merge hell" is one of the first and probably the most important smell that tells you've been abusing of your source control manager branching capabilities and, most likely, hurting your productivity and your code quality as well. In order to move towards a continuous delivery approach, the practice of trunk based development suggests ways to avoid this type of issues among others like inconsistent feature sets, code that stays in an undeployable state for a long time, regressions introduced by semantic differences that arise during those joyful merging sessions, integration surprises with the other features, and the like. Even if you are not a developer on your team you will benefit from the examples and techniques presented.

How did one of Australia's leading financial services organisation become the biggest Agile transformation story in the Southern hemisphere and what did we learn?

The Suncorp Group leads in general insurance, banking, life insurance, superannuation and investment brands within Australia and New Zealand. The Group has 16,000 employees and relationships with nine million customers. It is a Top 20 ASX listed company with over $93 billion in assets.

In 2007, we embarked on our Agile journey of cultural change. In this talk we will cover the strategy taken, the roadblocks we came across, the mistakes we made and the achievements along the way.

You will learn how to tackle an Agile transformation, what to do and what NOT to do, where to start and what to expect and most of all what impact it will have, both negative and positive.

Today Suncorp are seen as market leaders in Agile and are known globally for the Agile Academy http://www.agileacademy.com.au/agile/ which was designed for both staff and also the external market.

The role of the Agile PMO, how to get infrastructure to work Agile, what about all those legal challenges, the cultural differences and the resistance to change? These are some of the learning we will share.

There were challenges and successes and in this honest Aussie presentation will share with you both the highs and the lows.

We are developing medical imaging and workflow software in an agile way with development teams distributed to several countries. One of the major challenges is how to set up and communicate within the Product Owner team. There we have to deal with the distribution, e.g., have the Product Owner either onsite with her peers or with her Scrum team, travelling, or with proxy. We need people who are good in two different fields of knowledge: medical and software development. As a third issues, the environment of the customers may be different in different countries.

We have ramped up local Product Owners in different countries, have found local collaboration customers, and have developed a set of communication channels and workshops how to synchronize Product Owners in the team, share a common vision and backlog with their Scrum teams, and collaborate with customers locally and globally.

On Agile projects we estimate user stories in order to allow team to

1. 1. Track velocity
2. 2. Decide scope for the Iteration
3. 3. Help Prioritize stories
4. 4. Help Release planning

But most of the time we faced issues with estimation. It takes lot of time in estimating user stories, managers tend to relate estimate to number of days it will take to complete the story, in some teams estimate is equal to deadline. Most of the teams which use story points to estimate the work face these issues. This results in lack of confidence on development team when stories are taking more time to complete.

Here I am going to talk about better alternative for both the suppliers of software products (financially and ethically) and their customers (internal and external). This alternative is being used in real companies delivering to real customers with great effect where team uses count of stories completed in an Iteration as measure of progress. Will talk about how this alternative can be used to track velocity, prioritize stories, planning Iteration and for release planning.

I will share some exmples from my past projects where team did not use story points/velocty but used count of stories completed in Iteration to measure progress and also as best indicator of future performance.

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.

We all know it takes a group of skilled engineers and developers to deliver any successful product. But what if they are all located in various geos, have different competencies / focus areas (hardware, software), on top of it - they are given a stringent deadline to deliver? In my session I'd like to share how Intel adopted the Scaled Agile framework and a homegrown "Managed Personal Accountability" (MPA) model to deliver the first tablet solution successfully. 

It took a combination of good Agile planning and execution (Scrum of Scrums), an integrated ALM Toolset, along with performance management metrics of MPA to deliver this project successfully.

Agile methodologies are gaining wider acceptance in Software Development and Testing due to its inherent values like Accelerate Time to Market, Eliminate Waste and flexible to adapt changes quickly. Agile practices emphasis on effective communication, collaboration and customer involvement for addressing the challenges in developing the product in dynamic business environment due to fast changing requirements. The co-location of project teams and high customer interaction throughout the project helps in achieving effective communication, team and customer collaboration.

 In an outsourced or offshore Software development, teams are geographically distributed to develop products in a collaborative and cost-effective manner by better utilization of global talents. Adopting agile methodologies helps in better ROI by developing quality products as per changing market needs in short span. Adopting Agile in global software development shall pose few challenges due to wider geographical distance, time zone differences, and cultural aspects and so on.

This paper presents 3Cs – Communication, Collaboration and Customer Involvement as Critical Success Factors that need to be considered while implementing Agile for Global Software Development. It also details proven practices to address the challenges due to distributed agile software development. This paper is based on Author’s experience in executing Outsourced Product Development engagements using Distributed Agile Methodologies for co-creating Telecom products

Couple of years ago our business unit engaged a vendor in India  to do some software development for us.  Since we are agile scrum based organization, we are seeking a vendor who has exposure to agile. We identified and signed up with a vendor to start the process. It was a ride filled lot of excitement and challenges. Finally we are able to land safely.