Agile Principle # 12 defines that at regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly. From Scrum to Kanban and other agile frameworks, this is accomplished through retrospectives and continuous improvement processes. The key to being a successful agile practitioner is to identify areas of improvement and then experiment ways of improving it. But it doesn't stop there; positive improvements ultimately become success stories for other teams and motivates them to experiment with newer ideas which eventually leads to innovation. A negative outcome isn't bad either since it adds to the experience of situations where ideas may not apply. Thus the key to this process lies in being a child, an explorer, and inculcate an experimentation mindset. The SLICE framework addresses this in the following way:

• S hare: Share an area of improvement
• L earn: Explore the area for ways of improvement
• I mplement: Search & apply the learning to identify the success factors
• C ollateral: Publish blogs, white papers, presentations, etc. as observations of the implementation
• E xpansion: Grow, Seed, and Split in order to explore new venues for success

In this talk, I create an environment that inculcates an experimentation mindset and utilise the SLICE framework to drive the exploration.

Many companies in today's VUCA world are planning to bring enterprise agility. While many frameworks are available in market, what is missing is the mindset, culture and organizational design that is needed to bring enterprise agility. It also demands coordination across entire value chain and various business process that are part of, or impact the software development life cycle. This session will focus on larger context of enterprise agility and what is needed to bring life to agile enterprises.

Every organisation hopes / expects / demands high performance from their employees and teams. It's not very long ago when most effective organisations in the world had a ritual called yearly goal - setting. Many organisations still continue with this where the HR cascades a set of goals set by the organisation's leaders for their employees. This is usually followed by a quarterly to yearly review cycle which with most organisations are linked with incentives. In general terms, there ain't any flaw with this system; goal setting is an efficient way to continuously improve oneself. However, the execution of this process may be flawed and may lead to unoptimized results.

With the advent of business agility, this focus shifted towards continuously learning & improving organisations. This meant that faster feedback was highly recommended for performance improvement and the idea of year-long goal setting seemed a talk of the yesteryears. Many organisations embraced this change by completely abolishing the yearly goal setting practice and instead relying on mentor relationships for an individual's performance improvement. This did improve relationships at the same time hindered transparency since the organisation goals were no longer directly accessed by every employee.

When seen from the perspective of game theory, it's evident that optimum results are obtained when employees achieve goals which are highly beneficial to them at the same time aligned with the organisation's goals. With the former approach explained above, it's pretty clear that the employees in the first case were aware of the organisation's goals, even if the goals were not aligned with their personal goals. Whereas in the latter case, the lack of transparency meant that the individual's goals were highly focused and may not be in-line with the organisation's objectives.

This is where Performance Kaizen aligns these two systems with a flavour of Management 3.0 in order to create an optimum setup where high performing individuals, teams, and organisations can thrive. In this session, we present a case study of this implementation at Springer Nature along with our results and learnings; followed by a brief hands-on exercise for the attendees.

One of the key reasons for embracing agility is faster feedback which helps improve the perceived quality of a software product. And every team is focused towards delivering quality, no one wakes up in the morning with an idea to introduce defects, we naturally ideate to solve problems. Unknowingly though, dysfunctions always creep in and identifying a dysfunction is extremely difficult especially when you are a part of the dysfunction.

In this 45 min talk, I discuss about the importance of quality and how it's no longer negotiable even if Project Management principles tell us otherwise. I share stories from my past experience, and from organisations ranging from GM to Mumbai Dabbawalas that have embraced the "Quality is not Negotiable" principle and seen the difference.

I present the context of defect severity and how these may create an illusion of quality; how accountability of a single person (e.g.: Product Owner) may result in a "Lack of Commitment" dysfunction; and how cost is not really proportional to quality especially when it comes to delivering virtual products and services related to it.

I end the talk with practices that help build in quality and in the interest of an interactive session, many of these scenarios turn out to be debates since the context may differ; these debates are always good ways to solve problems (moving away from "Fear of Conflict").

This talk is based on my article titled The Entropic Future of Software Quality