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.

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.

Everyone is creative. Creativity exists in each one of us. It is there to experience in our day to day life, right from how we want to buy vegetables, commute to office to how we can solve that complex customer issue. The quest for finding solutions to our everyday problems stimulates the innovator in us. And there are innumerable examples of this.

Who, What, Why, How are such powerful words that if thought sensitively, we are able to create products/services/processes that can exceed consumer expectations. Delivering an ecstatic experience is a matter of answering these questions, being more creative and sensitive to user behavior. Nobody wants to create a bad experience. If we are failing to deliver a wow experience, then the problem lies with the process or approach taken to understand customer behavior, his/her surrounding, socio/economic fabric, etc. An approach that involves empathy with the user, acknowledgment of the problem and working collaboratively and iteratively backed by technology through the entire process works wonders in designing and developing fit for purpose products/services/processes. New opportunity area or solution to existing problems are the main drivers for innovations. Digital disruption or software driven business mindset is one of the best examples of this.

This case study is about such experience. The case study will cover approach adopted for creating product and the stages involved in designing the product, implementing value generating cycle, encouraging diverse thinking and convergent decision making.

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.

With every product we ship, we learn what we wished we’d known: what customers *really* wanted. What if you could gain those insights before beginning development? What if you could “unit test” a product idea? Or at a bigger level, what if you could “system test” your business idea/plan?

Engineering teams are experiencing productivity gains of 30-300% when applying Agile and Lean practices and methods. These same Agile and Lean principles can be applied beyond engineering, to the business itself. Using a lightweight yet powerful tool, assumptions behind a business plan can be tested and iterated almost on-the-fly. With a hands-on exercise, attendees will learn how to build a map of any business ecosystem, and how to use it to check and iterate solution viability. Come experience the application of Agile to Business so you and your team can focus on your richest opportunities over chasing your competitor’s taillights.

Digital transformation is the key for most enterprises and what better than Agile as a methodology for execution of any Digital Transformation program.

However, it is seen predominantly that an overdose of doing more and more of Agile rather than incorporating the Crux of Agile and BEING AGILE is the pattern. More often than not this leads to “Agile did not work for us” phenomena.

Through this talk I will take the participants through some common Agile Antipatterns and how to watch out for these especially in the Digital Transformation journey.