Large Insurance enterprises find difficult to renew and find new ways to transform their customer experience, improve operational process and find new business models. As an experiment they engaged an insure-tech startup to lead their digital transformation journey.. This case study is about a point of view, approaches, challenges and cultural surprises that we faced during this journey..

The more we share more we learn!!

Ever feel like the market moves faster than your marketing team? Or, wonder how flexible your finance (& leadership!) teams would really be if self-direction glitched and blew $1M? Organizations introduce Agile believing it will lead in part to greater responsiveness and resiliency. Yet, why do so many fail to achieve those outcomes?

It isn’t just that they’re structured and operated by default along hierarchical lines rather than by design for iterative work. Achieving the full benefits of Agile comes from shifting the culture and mindset of a whole organization, sometimes as radically as encouraging it to “Make New Mistakes.” This very philosophy was a driver in the fastest division in HP’s history to reach $1B, a hardware division that was focused on manufacturing operations, with razor thin margins, and markets that changed 3x faster than the development lead time.

Through a series of short stories and exercises, attendees will explore 5 practices from that business which led to roaring success. We’ll probe their parallels in Lean / Agile practice. With each one, you’ll briefly self-inspect the state of your own organization, as well as create a backlog you can use to adapt in your “real world” beyond the conference.

Do you have, or want, a vision that takes you beyond high performing teams, to a high performing, resilient business? Come hear how you can help your organization shift from mechanics that “do” Agile, and walk away with a feel for what’s possible when not just development, but a whole organization surfs the flow of “being” Agile.

For transformations to be successful, typical Component teams are giving way to self managing, cross functional teams, organized by customer value (Feature Teams)!

These Self-managing teams are the basis of Scrum, where the team has the authority to design, plan, and execute their task and to monitor and manage their work process and progress. The team rather than a (project) manager—has the responsibility of deciding how to work.

But Self-managing teams do not just happen by chance. Instead they need the right environment. The organization is responsible for supporting the team development by creating the conditions needed for the teams to succeed and the real empowerment starts when the teams are 'self designed' from the beginning - which means that team members choose their teams to work!

This workshop will showcase to the participants HOW they can form 'self designed' teams, and experience the joys of 'self organization'.

As part of organizational digital transformation journeys, CIOs are moving from hierarchical models to 'self organizing' Feature teams, in order deliver efficient and effective IT, but still need to retain the deeper functional expertise. Hence the growing importance of building and sustaining "Communities of Practices" (CoPs), as the traditional functional silos are broken down, with the transformation themes.

But if you are a Change Agent responsible for the Transformation, you understand how challenging it is to nurture, and especially "sustain" these CoPs.

So join my session, as I will share my experiences in nurturing and especially "sustaining" enterprise wide Communities of Practice (CoPs), while you recognize the key success and failure patterns in your own journey. In this session, you will learn techniques, tips and strategies that you can apply immediately, and in the end will walk away with practical advice on building "long lived" communities.

Session name - Outcome based agile coaching

We all want to become good agile coach. But what does that mean? How do you get better outcome from your agile coaching sessions? In this session, participants will experience how to improve outcome of your coaching session. Some areas we will focus in this session are output Vs outcome, why, what, how of coaching, how to make coaching outcome etc.

This will be a hands on workshop with very minimal guidance from facilitator. Participants will have experiential learning through the activities to understand how to align agile coaching to deliver maximum impact on business outcome.

1) What was problem?
Longer release cycle time, ever increasing code base, tightly coupled
functionalities of application making difficult to implement change, complex
organisation structure.
2) How we have approach towards problem: -
A) People transformation: - New organisational design where people are
responsible for making and running small set of Microservices. The services are
defined based on bounded context by levering Domain Driven Design.

B) Process transformation: -In order to identify the organisational process bottle
neck, End to end value stream mapping done and Improvements themes such as
change management, release management etc has been implemented.
C)Technological transformation: - New technologies, tools and practices adopted
that has helped in achieving engineering excellence by Automation,
Autonomation ,CICD, Infra as a code, cloud only infra , Microservices and API
led economy etc.

3) Our Approach towards Microservices :-
1. API led connectivity: - Composiblity of different system is the key for
Microservices experience and we can achieve the composiblity of
different system by leveraging API led connectivity approach. In this
approach, we will have system API, process API, and experience API.
System API takes cares of system of record underpinning the service,
process API takes care of business process underpinning the service and
Experience API is responsible for experience of consumer of services.
2. Elements of API design:- In our API design we have used domain
model , architectural standards , API catalogue ( experience , process ,
system) to identify development details, stub details , deployment
details, RAML specification ,data mapping ,back end system
specification and integration specification.

4) Client –Server Monolith application to Microservices application: -
1. Strangler pattern of Microservices: - In client –server monolith
application to Microservices application journey, we have used the
strangler pattern of Microservices. As we can see from architectural
diagram that we have put the dispatcher (API gateway, reverser proxy)
in front of monolith and directed our clients to it. The dispatcher also
acts as an API gateway and provides utility such as Authentication and
authorisation, logging and Auditing. The dispatcher is just a proxy to
endpoints exposed by monolith. We have refectored each domain into
Microservices and deployed them into Microservices platform.
2. Swagger: - We have used swagger to define, generate and Document
API’s.
3. Caching as a service: - We have implemented cashing as service and we
have cached the static data of system API, experience API, and process
API. Cashing helps in improving the user experience.
4. Configuration of the API security context: - Our API Gateway exposes
API to consumers and protects services using the policy enforcement:
security policies.
5. Engineering excellence in Microservices landscape - We have achieved
engineering excellence by practicing CICD, Infra as code, automation
etc in Microservices landscape.
6. Other API design consideration: - a) Asynchronous event based
communication using the network for loose coupling between services.
b) Circuit breakers for isolating the failure of services c) Consumer
driven contract as way of service consumption.

5) When not to go for Microservices.

This topic is not meant to demean the profession of Product Ownership and doesn't mean that the Product Owner is not essential so killing them would solve the problem; rather it highlights the amount of dependencies a development team may end up building around the Product Owner that may end up killing the credibility and value chain driven by product ownership.

Keeping aside the fact that organisations today recruit Scrum Masters and Product Owners as designations instead of scrum roles, the role of product ownership has been misunderstood as a one person job, which kills the entire purpose of being a Product Owner - voice of the customer to maximise ROI. PO doesn't own the product alone and definitely doesn't own the implementation details. Enough said, this scrum role needs a deeper understanding. Then again, who performs this role in XP or Kanban or SAFe or a no framework setup?

In this session, I execute 3 iterations to highlight the team's dysfunctions, and apply practices a team can perform so a Product Owner can function much better and improve the credibility of this role. It's pretty quick and enlightenting; all hands-on, no PPT.

The Key challenge organisations are facing today is having to deal with the exponential rate of change which is happening in the external environment. The extent and pace of change is so disruptive that no organisation, regardless of age or size can take their competitive advantage or even their survival for granted.

The main reason why organisations are struggling to change is that they are modeled as mechanistic or close-ended systems. On the contrary, all natural socio-economic systems essentially which are living systems have dealt with change very effectively since eternity.

This talk is about infusing life into organisations. The speaker will highlight the key characteristics of living systems which enable them to deal with change effectively and also suggest actionable guidelines that will help leaders/influencers to bring their organisations to life. This approach will enable organisations to not only survive but thrive on change.

Over the years, with all our experience and skills, one thing has remained constant - we just can't seem to hit out deadlines! Why is this the case?

I deep dive to help explain why this would continue to be the case, unless we learn to ask the right questions and then change the way to execute to deliver to the expected deeadline. I explain how Lean thinking gives us a solid mathematical basis to understand how Cycle Time forecasting works and what we need to do improve our probability of success - not based on subjective assessment but based on actual Cycle Time distribution data.

Contract and Agile ? Doesn’t really sound correct, right ?

However, there is no escape from contracts in the service industry where we deliver projects for clients. In this context, the intent of this talk is to describe the limitations of traditional contracts and how contracts for Agile projects need to be different from the traditional contracts.

Overall the talk will emphasize on the key principles of Agile contracting and what are the points that need to be considered when penning down contracts in Agile projects.