The digitalization calls for rapid organizational flexibility and adaptability. This has an impact on all dimensions of a company: its strategy, structure, and the processes. Agile will help implementing some of this flexibility and adaptability yet mainly in terms of processes. Thus, the digital transformation needs companies to change beyond Agile. Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, and Sociocracy provide the missing links for a company to fully embrace digitalization. The combination of these concepts enables a company not only to survive but also to thrive (digital) disruptions.

You have tried Scrum, Kanban, XP, Crystal and other even less known frameworks and methods that claim to help you to become Agile. You have applied them pure, you have tried to tweak them, and even you have made some homemade cocktails out of them. So yet you still can't say your company is Agile. Your Cxx-s are willing to change the company, and themselves. Your employees on all levels genuinely want to step into the Agile journey. Yet there is nearly no progress toward a real organizational agility.

What is the secret? Why is it so hard? Why there are so many crashes on this way in our industry? Why most of the companies will still fail to become Agile, and yours will most probably too.

I'm going to answer all these questions during this talk. We will figure out what aspects of a large-scale agile transformation have a mission-critical impact and how they influence each other. Where to put your efforts? How to cut corners? And moreover, how to survive on this journey.

In this age of a variety of cloud-based-services for virtual Mobile Test Labs, building a real-(mobile)-device lab for Test Automation is NOT a common thing – it is difficult, high maintenance, expensive! Yet, I had to do it!

Attend this talk to understand the Why, What and How I built my own MAD-LAB (Mobile Automation Devices LAB). The discussion will include –

• Understanding the context,
• Why no cloud-based solution worked for me,
• The automation strategy for Android / iOS / Web platform,
• The tech-stack (cucumber-jvm / Appium), and,
• The core implementation to build your own MAD-LAB! (already open-sourced)
• How this results in Continuous Delivery (CD)

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.

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.

Every organization aspire for faster time to market, release of features on demand, reducing the time between concept to cash and better quality of products. Agile has been a popular choice to achieve this objective. While agile was becoming a streamline approach, software industry saw the advent of DevOps. By adopting DevOps practices, organizations were trying to bridge the gap that existed between different groups within the organization, such as business, delivery, QA, Operations, Infra, etc. In spite of adopting agile practices, organizations were not fast enough to respond to changes. And one of the major reasons was the misalignment of purpose and processes withing these groups, hence while features were dev ready but it would still take the same amount of time to release to market as it was before. That's where organizations found the missing piece in DevOps in the entire delivery process.

Everyone started hoping on it without realizing the complexity involved in its adoption. It is now a big buzzword in the industry. DevOps involves bringing changes not just in the delivery but also in the operations. with greenfield projects its a bit easier than doing it with legacy systems because greenfield projects have the opportunity to start from scratch which legacy systems lack.

The purpose of this proposed talk is to share experience of devops implementation on such legacy systems which are complex and not just on its own but a web of multiple systems working together. How scaling devops practices becomes a necessity when working with enterprise applications.

The benefits of a high performing team are endless. They are autonomous, empowered, responsible and effective.

At Atlassian, we've pioneered the Team Playbook, which is our way of scaling teams by getting smarter, not bigger, and driving a culture of continual improvement. Utilised by hundreds of teams within Atlassian, we've made our secret sauce not so secret. Don't come to this session for a lesson on theory...come to this session to hear the philosophies and principles of the Team Playbook from Peter Scobie, Program Manager/Team Doctor. You'll leave this session invigorated, engaged and ready to take action.

Agile transformations are no child's play. There is inertia, restlessness, impatience and the constant desire to run away. Traits that anyone who has been a parent to little kids has encountered, and learnt in their own way how to handle.

This session looks at parallels between parenting and trying to influence teams through an agile transformation. We look at some of the things that successful parents do that can be done by leaders trying to take their teams through a transformation.

Because if teams sometimes behave like children, the leader needs to be a parent too!

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.

Introduction

Culture eats strategy for breakfast, said Peter Drucker. We all agree to that. If our organisational culture is not building up to our goals, we will never reach them. The main question is, how can you create an organisational and team culture that contributes to your goals, to productivity and success? The key for change is to form the right habits, within our agile teams. Like exercising regularly and losing weight you can develop habits for being healthy, happy, more productive and successful at work. Therefore it is important to understand the human nature and its potential for transformation. In this workshop participants get all the insights and best practices to develop habits for an happy and fulfilling (work)life and organisational culture.

T-shirt sizing. Fruit Sizing. Planning pokers. You might be familiar with any or all of these estimation (relative sizing) techniques. Story points based estimations (along with velocity mapping) is touted as a predictable method to plan for software delivery. Teams are expected to get a good sense of the effort needed to deliver a piece of work by comparing estimates with references of similarly complex work they have delivered in the past.

The accuracy of point based estimates fares more or less in the same range as sheer gut feel. So, the natural inclination for software teams is to try and make it more accurate than gut feel. Thereby, we obsess with breaking functionality into smaller byte sized stories. We freak out when there is "scope creep". We debate endlessly about ideal days vs. person days. We fuss over the specific visual representation for the burn-up or burn-down.

Does it matter anymore how many days the team spent chipping hard at a feature that added no value to the business? Have we made agile teams into mini waterfall teams by focussing on the wrong metrics? Can product companies afford this?

Process heaviness in product companies can cost a lot. We need to find better ways to invest in success metrics. We need to change the conversation from productivity to value add.

My talk intends to challenge prevalent estimation practices and contest their validity in product companies. I will also introduce ideas around capturing relevant business metrics and sizing stories using business value.

I will focus on a possible transition of organizations who are introducing the agile way of working. Starting with a traditional project setup using permanent PMO (portfolio level) and a temporary PMO (project level). What will happen if the keep the team together as an agile team. What does that mean for the project manager. I will continue my story by adding an agile team. Coordination between the teams can be managed by a scrum of scrum. Still no need for a project organization with a project manager and a project board and no need for a temporary PMO. I add more teams and the coordination asks for a project manager. What dos this mean for a PMO? We can continue and institutionalize the coordination by using frameworks like Nexus, [email protected], SAFe et cetera and has an Integration Manager, a Roadmap Manager or a Release Train Engineer and Product managers and Product Owners. I will add some new to be created teams (aks for a Project Manager to organise) et cetera. I will end with an overview and positioning of different agile frameworks and the role of the permanent PMO (focus portfolio management and Center of Excellence) in an agile world.

Purpose of the session is to discuss about Agile implementation approach and acceptance

There are many measurement tools for Agile Teams Productivity and Adaptability to Agile. I am introducing a totally different measure for Agile teams. It is called the Agile Culture Index. It is a score for the team for the Agile Culture they build and follow. It is more of being Agile than doing Agile. It is more about the bonding in the team, openness in team, trust in team, readiness for facing any challenges as a team etc. It is more about people part of it than the practices or process, rightly aligned with Agile Manifesto value “Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools”

The objective of this measure is to understand the Agile Culture adaption and Agile Mindset of the team and help for continuous improvement.

In the management theory, we have always study about "conflict Management"

We have also learnt the techniques of conflict resolution.

But is it necessary to resolve conflict? In today's world, its important to live with conflicts. In fact inviting conflicts in a team is a way to innovate.

If you don't have conflicts in your team, worry about it.

So rather than worrying about resolving the conflicts, learn to handle them.

I would like to take an analogy of comparing the Scrum Framework with a human body. The human body consists of cells, tissues, organs and the human body system relies on collaboration and coordination of all the parts of the human being in self-organization way to keep the body healthy and functioning. Similarly in scrum framework, the roles, events, artifacts and rules together work like a human body to keep the scrum sustain and work for not only to it but to everyone.

Human body cells employ iterative and incremental approach. They divide and multiply. That allows the body to grow and to replace damaged or worn cells. Similarly, in iterative and incremental manner, Scrum helps to build more valuable products over a period of time.

Empiricism is like the sensory experience which helps in the formation of ideas and making decisions. Also the introspection at regular intervals and taking corrective actions to improve as an individual is similar to the empiricism. Three pillars for the individual’s existence are Body, Mind, and Spirit. Balancing is the key to create an extraordinary life.

Similarly, Transparency, Inspection and Adaptation are the three pillars to sustain the Scrum framework. Also the principles of shared visual work space, self-organization and empirical process which make a scrum team successful.

Similarly i will be providing a view on all the scrum essentials analogy

Business agility is all about getting results out in an agile pace. Self organized teams would seem like an answer here.

An honest look into why self organization is a buzz word now. Why is it so important, why are companies shifting gears now. Is something terribly wrong with the normal top-down organizations?

Takeaways:

1. An answer to an important question - Do you need this shift?
2. The bare necessities to get you started towards self organization
3. How you should kill the boss in you
4. From coding to finalizing a new office space

Agile transformation used to be a buzz word , six or seven years back in IT with only selected, elite groups doing it. But with agile explosion, having a daily scrum meeting has become common place with least expected groups like executive C-suite doing agile. How is this possible? This is mainly due to wide variety of options available in agile and obvious benefit from getting faster feedback.

Take any team with a pain point, you can offer options like Scrum, KANBAN, Lean- agile, Scaled agile, DevOps, Scrum ban and lot more.

How it helps your organization? For an organization to be truly agile, all functions need to be agile, not only your software development teams.