The CIO invited me into his office and closed the door. Before he took me for a tour of his operation, he had a few stories to share. Important stories. Last year’s project was a disaster. Late, lots of quality issues, in short, a failure in every dimension. His boss, the CEO, had just presented him with a very personal ultimatum: deliver the next project by April 4th, "or else". 

"Or else what," I asked?

His team was burned out and scared. They were a hard-working and dedicated group, but fear and demoralization had set in and he didn't know what to do next. That’s why he wanted to talk to me, he had heard things about my company, things that seemed too good to be true, but he had to hear them firsthand. He wanted hope, inspiration, and a practical way to get there.

I told him about my own journey from joy to fear to disillusionment back to joy. It was simple, but, of course, simple isn’t easy. I wasn’t sure he and his organization were ready; "manufactured fear" is a powerful drug.

In this talk, I will share with you what I shared with him. I will explore what an intentionally joyful culture must choose as its focus. I will discuss what joy looks like, feels like, how it is organized. Along the way, you will be confronted by paradoxical approaches of how workplace noise increases productivity, how two people at one computer outperforms hero-based organizations 10-to-1, how rigor and discipline emanate from a shared-belief system, how transparency conquers fear, how all of the disciplines you study including agile, lean, and six sigma when done well are really about building human relationships at the intersections of business and technology, between project management and software development, between development and design and how quality can be a natural result of a team built on trust. This is not a theoretical talk, but rather a talk built from well over a decade of experience of leading a team focused on “the business value of joy”. There will be lots of room for discussion with the audience. The audience will begin to understand why thousands of people make the journey to Ann Arbor, Michigan every year to see The Menlo Software Factory firsthand, and why so many more are reading about it in Joy, Inc. – How We Built A Workplace People Love.

Hike is a new kind of a messaging app that is changing the way people connect with one another and simplifying the way they interact with content and services on mobile. At 100 million users exchanging 40 billion messages/month (Jan’16), and growing each day, Hike is working at a scale that no other Indian internet company today is. The key to Hike’s hyper growth has been its ability to continuously re-organize itself and build a self-learning culture, something they continue to evolve and better everyday. Driving autonomy, alignment to Hike’s mission, imbibing the internal culture and values, were all fundamental to this continuous change. Hear Kavin Bharti Mittal, Founder and CEO, Hike Messenger share his story on how he is building a self-learning organization and the role Agile plays in it.

Do you want to harness the deeper power of games – the power to drive long-term engagement? Are you ready to look beyond the silver bullets & Skinner boxes – and learn to think like a game designer? In this talk, you’ll learn the foundations of Game Thinking - brought to life with front-line stories from eBay, Ultima Online, The Sims, Rock Band, Covet Fashion, Happify, Lumosity and Slack. You’ll come away with a smarter approach to innovative product design - and practical, actionable design tips you can use right away to turbo-charge your path towards product/market fit. 

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.

An agile enterprise increases value through effective execution and delivery in a timely and reactive manner. Such organizations do this by streamlining the flow of information, ideas, decision making, and work throughout the overall business process all the while improving the quality of the process and business outcomes.   This talk describes, step-by-step, how to evolve from today’s vision of agile software development to a truly disciplined agile enterprise. It argues for the need for a more disciplined approach to agile delivery that provides a solid foundation from which to scale. It then explores what it means to scale disciplined agile strategies tactically at the project/product level and strategically across your IT organization as a whole. Your disciplined agile IT strategy, along with a lean business strategy, are key enablers of a full-fledged disciplined agile enterprise. 

DevOps and Continuous Delivery represent a new paradigm for IT service delivery that promises higher quality and stability as well as faster time-to-market. However deploying this new paradigm requires changes to both organizational culture and architecture. In this talk, Jez will present the architectural principles and patterns that enable continuous delivery at internet scale, and discuss how to incrementally evolve existing systems in order to deploy them.

Sure, we have all thought that continuous delivery is important in software delivery... now we have data to back it up. Dr. Nicole Forsgren will present new research that shows the central role that CD plays in Agile and DevOps, the key processes that contribute to it, and how it can not only impact your IT teams and company success, but how it can also make your work feel better. This extends her prior research showing why investments in IT are now impacting teams and organizations, how we got here, and what’s next. The presentation includes the data to help you prove your case (to management or even yourself) about why CD and DevOps are essential to winning, as well as great stories and examples to really bring these concepts to life. Nicole invites all DevOps practitioners to build their teams up so they can lead high performing organizations, and think about what they can do to affect change beyond their teams and their organizations.

 Hypothesis testing is core to the build-measure-learn cycle, but it's so easy to get wrong. 

The brilliance of early Agile methods was their non-conformity. They rejected conventional wisdom about how software should be created and substituted a new reality: one where collaboration, adaptation, and continuous improvement were more important than rigid processes and plans. At first, many people rejected these innovations, but Agile stood the test of time. Now it's won the day.

When people talk about scaling Agile, they forget those insurrectionary roots. They focus on what's palatable to the "enterprise:" how to make Agile safe, non-threatening, and acceptable--how to make it more conventional and conformist. In doing so, they risk losing the innovations that make Agile work so well.

What if we stopped worrying about what's safe and acceptable? What if we went back to those innovative roots? What would Agile look like if we scaled beyond the enterprise?

Come find out.

New competitive threats often require organizations to build increasingly complex, interconnected and sophisticated software and systems, faster, better and cheaper. Most organizations are not equipped to meet this new challenge! Meanwhile small, nimble competitors, like Airbnb and Uber are taking a big bite on the profits of the giants. 

So what’s the answer? What have we learned in the past decade from our adventures in agile and our attempts at scaling? What does the future hold?

In this talk, Richard Knaster, Principal Consultant and SAFe Fellow, discusses a more scalable and modular lean-agile approach that enables even the largest enterprises to compete with smaller and nimbler competitors that are disrupting companies in all industries. Richard is a Principal Contributor to the Scaled Agile Framework and previously worked at IBM where his roles included Chief Agile Methodologist. World Wide Agile Practice Manager and various product management roles in the Rational Brand.

Do you find your work exciting and fulfilling? Is your team rewarded for finding better ways to work? While many organizations have adopted Agile approaches at a project level, few have effectively aligned their HR processes with Agile values, or made finding better ways of working a truly rewarding and exciting proposition for their teams. With a new generation of employees who are interested equally in purpose as in profit, it is imperative that we revisit schemes like the 360⁰ annual review, and recognize not only their limitations, but also the damage they cause to individual morale and team productivity.

Join Sanjiv to explore the subject of creating a holistic performance management system that not only adheres to Agile principles, but actively promotes individual drive and team innovation. Learn how delink merit pay from feedback, the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation; and how to create a “flow state” on your agile teams to enhance performance and spark innovation.

Scrum is now 21 years old and has become the most popular Agile framework in our industry with +90% of Agile projects saying they are using Scrum. Scrum has become the de-facto team based development approach. Even the next generation of Agile methods such as DAD and SAFe still encourage teams to use Scrum. But has Scrum fulfilled it potential? What is next for Scrum?

In this talk Dave West, former Forrester Analyst and now product owner at Scrum.org describes the challenges that Scrum has not addressed and what the future of Scrum looks like as it helps individuals, teams and teams of teams deliver software just a little bit better and improve the practice of software development. In this talk Dave will introduce 3 new initiatives for Scrum in the areas of assessment, scaling with Nexus and expanding what done means with DevOps and Evidence Based Measurement. 

Continuous Delivery is a amazing practice when compared to slower release cycles. But it shouldn't be the end goal. Continuous Deployment, safe automatic deployment of frequent small commits, is the next step. To get to a fully automatic release process the way that your team writes and releases features will need to fundamentally change. The tools, learnings and techniques presented will be widely applicable regardless of how far along adopting continuous practices you are.

Nope, this session has nothing to do with user-stories. Rather, it's about everyday, "did I tell you about ...", stories - the kind you find in jokes, cartoons, novels and conversation - and how to use them to implement Agile in a non-threatening, yet surprisingly sticky way. You'll learn a little theory, you'll have a laugh, and you'll learn (at least) one story which will, one day, save your butt.

The success of Agile development with relatively small teams, has got software enterprises looking at using Agile for their enterprise size teams. This scale up of the agile development was first comprehensively addressed as Scaling Agile For enterprise or SAFe. Recently, scrum camp tried to address this as Scrum at Scale. Both of these approaches provide a decent framework for integrating product backlog with release train.

However the key aspect of scaling agile is transformation of the teams. This transformation has multiple aspects - team size, team re-composition, retraining and most importantly team attitude.

So while the enterprise team is retrained into scalable framework, the journey of the team to be transformed to Agile as an attitude must be addressed. In Transform Team to Agile (TEA), while we provide an enterprise scalable agile framework, we bring out team transformation framework! This talk captures experiences from transformation from waterfall thinking to Agility.

It also brings out that it is not agile that needs to be scaled for enterprise, but it is really the enterprise that needs to be transformed to be agile!

Absolutely Not.. however, how often you have seen people claim they don't know what they are doing because they work in "an agile team" or that they don't need PMs anymore as there is no planning? In this session, the speaker talks about his personal experiences of how to effectively plan in Agile teams, highlighting key insights into what are commonalities and differences of agile planning and execution in a startup vs those in large enterprises.

With the start-up scenario growing and becoming pervasive in India, entrepreneurs are bubbling with new ideas, believing their idea to be the next billion-dollar one. Today, it feels as though everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. This is very heartening for a young country like India where, by 2020, 64% of our population will be of working age, highlighting the urgency for future employment creation.

The biggest challenge facing global start-ups is the high rate of failure. According to Harvard Business Review, over 80% of global start-ups fail in the first 18 months, and in India this figure is close to an alarming 90%. It appears that when signs of trouble arise, many founders struggle to "save" the business, largely due to poor decision-making by the leader, and a lack of guidance from a skilled expert. The same is also the case with new product launches in bigger corporates, though its gets buried into their giant service revenue wins.

How can such mistakes be avoided? Can there be any method to this prevent this madness? Are there any ways to make the business "failure proof", if such a thing exists at all? 

In this talk, Rajeev will be talking about typical mistakes that most of the startups commit and how it can be avoided by using Lean Startup concepts and tools. Such mistakes range from the flaws in Assumptions, Execution methodology to premature scaling and will propose ways to avoid these mistakes. 

You can't manage what you can't measure. - W. Edwards Deming

Most startups or organizations live by the above quote and start measuring loads of metrics and digging through pile of data to get meaningful insights. So much so that you waste the most precious resource i.e. "time" in implementing tons of tracking and data analysis and all it gives is a false feeling that things are in control and you know what you are building. More than tracking metrics or measuring output, the more important part is "What to measure" and "When to measure".

While Lean Startup concepts help you structure your progress & identify the riskiest parts of your business and then learn/ adapt to it,  Lean Analytics is used to measure that progress, helping you to ask the most important questions and get clear answers quickly.

In this presentation, we would look at a few ways to figure out what "must" be measured and "how", depending upon your business model and stage of growth.