On Agile teams, collaboration is the way of life. Our leaders want their team members to work closely with each other, have shared goals and even think as one entity. Why? Because we believe that collaboration leads to happier, more productive teams that can build innovative products/services.

It's strange that companies use the word collaboration very tightly with innovation. Collaboration is based on consensus building, which rarely leads to visionary or revolutionary products/services. Innovative/disruptive concepts require people to independently test out divergent ideas without getting caught up in collaborative boardroom meetings.

In this presentation, Naresh Jain explores the scary, unspoken side of collaboration and explains in what context, collaboration can be extremely important; and when it can get in the way or be a total waste of time.

About the company

Philips is a healthcare multinational company that focuses on building complete health care products and solutions for emerging markets, in addition to developing solutions and products for global markets, across the three sectors Healthcare, Lighting and Lifestyle. Using the expertise of its nearly 2000 engineers in Bangalore and aligning the marketing and sales teams the campus is responsible for creating and rolling out a complete set of products that include a whole host of solutions for global customers. It also contributes to global solutions in critical health care component development for connected consumer devices and renewable energy.

Executive Summary

Beginning of 2014, an external survey brought out the issues wrt time to market and code quality. Taking the survey results positively, the Leadership embarked on an Agile/SAFe journey with pilot projects. The results were amazing and with the currently learning from the pilots, the organization is running 25+ deployments within. The journey has started and Agile release trains are delivering periodic value to our customers at defined frequencies.

Background Objective/Challenge

Product quality, consistent & predictive delivery and quicker time to market are the key challenges the organization is trying to address today. Continuous Innovation is constrained due to the above issues and hence there is need to find a new way of product development which can meet the dynamic business needs, foster people engagement and deliver meaningful products to the world.

Target

ScaledAgile has been used as a framework for product development across the organization global. The whole organization is undergoing a transformation from waterfall way of working to the SAFe agile way of working and roadmap is till 2019.

Agile Initiative

The Framework used for the transformation can be summarized into 4 major steps

1. Develop products in the Agile way with focus on Basic Agile practices (Scrum)
2. Establish Product Ownership with focus on Enabling Scaling aspects (SAFe practices)
3. Establish a release pipeline with continuous integration (supported by Automation)
4. Adopt a DevOps Culture with focus on Continuous delivery (to production environment)

This includes a comprehensive diagnosis of the various business processes, agile practices and behavior, engineering practices, delivery maturity and recommendations for the transition. A coaching and tooling plan is also an outcome of the diagnostics.

 Measurable Impact

• Predictable Releases to customers (hitting the market with features every three months with features and business criticial bugs with less than 2 weeks with all the regulatory compliance)
• Capitalization
• Feature planned vs Feature delivered per program increment > 80%lose
• Defect reduction co t 45%
• Team velocity – Baseline vs actual.
• Very high sense of ownership and high levels of engagement

Transformation team Profile

Global team

• Agile Capability program manager -1 FTE
• Agile Deployment Program Management – 1 FTE
• Communication expert – 1 FTE (Today we are 0/1)
• Coordination - 1 FTE
• Enterprise Agile Coaches – 16 (Today we are 9 /16)

Enterprise Agile Transformation initiatives are BIG. Change at this scale of thousands is tough. 

The Leaders and Executives involved in these initiatives are going through their own personal transformation. Change at this scale of one is equally tough. 

Siraj Sirajuddin (SPCT) has worked with hundreds of executives leading enterprise agile transformation initiatives. These are their stories of personal growth and individuation. We will hear how transformation at a personal level is the leverage for transformation at a collective level. We will also learn of unique methods that activate personal transformation for leaders who are ready to step into their leader persona but are unable to get that from traditional leadership training and coaching methods.

We need good agile managers, if we hope to sustain rapid adaptation and innovation. Agile managers deliver coherent chunks of value, rapidly adapt to changing circumstances, and experiment with new approaches. Because they depend on their teams to support their own agile needs, they demand agility from their teams.

Management talent is rare, and agile management talent even rarer. Gallup has surveyed thousands of managers, finding that low-talent managers, unfortunately a majority, create dysfunctional teams, build unsupported products and produce little sustained value. So developing high-talent agile managers matters.

Agile managers adopt five agile base patterns for themselves: they measure economic progress, proactively experiment to improve, limit work-in-process by time and cost, radiate collective responsibility, and collaboratively solve systemic problems. It turns out these patterns have analogues in high-talent (non-agile) manager talents. That’s a relief, because we can focus agile manager development on extending the talents good managers already have.

In this workshop, we'll explore agile manager characteristics, and management dysfunctions. We'll create approaches to move good general managers to good agile managers. We'll explore strategies for dealing with mediocre managers, whether they are peers or superiors. And we'll learning how to improve our own management agility.

This talk comes from well-documented experience. I have held management roles from Team Lead through VP Engineering and CEO. At Citrix, Skype, Amway and other large companies, I used agile to help manage a 24-member user-experience department, three different agile coach teams and a 50-member data science department. Much of this work has been described in conference papers and detailed blog posts.

In May 2015, I got involved in coaching a products organization in improving their agile practices. This was a unique coaching experience for me because of some interesting experiments that I did:

• I focused on coaching and literally zero consulting. 
• My coaching stance was only limited to showing them the way, initially training them on the essence of agility, and later on to simply shine light on areas that needed their attention, and if needed, share ideas from the industry.
• I spent just 1day every month with the teams to only focus on my coaching sessions, and a few hours during that time to review the progress.
• The teams and the leadership would decide on what they wanted to do, and how much they wanted to change.

In ~6 months that I coached them, I found that the team has matured to a very high level of self-organization. They changed their process, their key roles and responsibilities, and self-organized into a very high-performing teams (which was corroborated not just from the high-energy levels of their teams but also the project metrics).

I call this model Minimum Viable Coaching, and it was helpful in demonstrating how a coaching could be made extremely effective if there is a client who is willing to trust its team in their ability to self-change, with minimal guidance (more of direction than really support) from an external coach. It also requires a coach to think in terms of minimum self-interests (read commercial interests) but focus on what will make the client successful in the long run.

In this experience report, I will share my approach and experiences, and offer some ideas on how the coaching can be elevated to a true coaching where the enterprise becomes self-organizing on their own.

Context:

Bangalore City Management wants to build another Smart City and have a challenge to release on time, frequently, with high quality. In a similar project in the past, they tried few methods (guess them), and nothing worked. Now, they are going to execute the same project using SAFe.

Movie Synopsis

A smart city with basic necessities like residential area, School, Hospital, Power Plant, Police Station, Fire Station, Super Market, Museum etc, incrementally. Each of these will be built by a specialized team and will be integrated often, to build the overall city. More importantly the incremental built spaces need to payoff for next increment as early as possible.

Roles in Offer:

Multiple High-Delivery Scrum Teams developing the city in parallel, Smart Scrum Masters, Visionary Product Owners, Chief Product Owner, Thinking Release Train Engineer, System Team, Release Team are all going to be part of it

Cast:

Everyone attending the session will cast a role, and you get to choose the role you want

Key Learning of this roleplay

Key learnings of this roleplay are

• Integration of city components
• Architectural runway of city throughout the journey
• Portfolio backlog converted into program backlog, team and sprint backlog
• Devops, Release and other teams to contribute
• WSJF and cost of delay

Duration: 2 hours

# Participants: 75-200