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.

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.

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.