42% of start-up failures are attributed to one reason - "They developed something that is not a need". Over the last few decades many organizations have spent billions in digital transformation. However, few years back Forrester estimated that $900 billion worth of spend in digital transformation will miss the mark. Be it startups or organizations that transform digitally, they both find their digital journey tough. In the user centric world, digital transformations are still plagued with traditional mindset. If we see from hindsight, these organizations could never ascertain value of their solution upfront from an end user angle. We need a value foresight to deal with this existential challenge and there is no crystal ball to predict it. So, the questions CIOs ask is – Can Value be defined and how can it be engineered into the solution? If value can be engineered in, can every team member be an innovator? Anything that is definable can be qualified, improved upon and dealt upfront.

This talk will help define value and provide a set of aspects on how successful products in the industry have engineered value upfront. Talk will also draw experiences of digital transformation initiatives where the research from successful products have been implemented – CODEX, a project management platform that transforms the governance of engagements for customers & OnTheGo, mobile intranet in the hands of employees for their daily needs

In a nutshell, this talk will drive home the point of value engineering every aspect of the product for best in class user experience and adoption.

Which are those top 10 that come to our minds when it comes to Agile? Google, Amazon, Apple, Thoughtworks and of course many others to name. But how many of those companies are software services?

Lets take the new age digital platforms in India, rapidly delivering and adapting to change - flipkart, OYO, ekart, swigy ,OLA, paytm, zomato - what's common with them when it comes to developing their platforms? They have their own shops with their own teams working together to deliver their solutions. They own, decide and claim their value chain to customer. They may have outsourced some of their pieces to other service providers. But the core value chain is developed and owned by the primary owner. So, why aren't there many service companies coming out as thought leaders in Agile practices, but rather end up as followers? How many of them are really doing agile?

According to the State of Software Development Report, 2018, close to 80% of the participants used agile methods ( 58% being SCRUM). However, ask them what their challenges are? They are still capacity management,Priorotising development, time management, unrealistic expectations, estimation, lack of clearly defined deliverables, lack of well defined success criteria.. They survey had 15% from IT services and 39% from Software /technology areas. These problems existed years back as well. Should we be worried?

So, is agile really helping or are slipping into these common terms used nowadays like faux-agile, dark scrum etc?

Agile practices drive teams to embrace agility and provide value incrementally. However to do this, there is an ecosystem that has to be brought, nurtured and sustained.

But too many variables galore in a software services sector: From variable nature of customers who want to control everything, dependencies between multiple vendors, fast changing technologies and their wide range, customer maturity, skill matches needed for the technology range and many more.

Teams, in spate of these variables, quite often can tend to slip into into a ceremonial agile ; leaving them confused about how agile benefits in reality. We call it as the “Miragile syndrome”( an agile mirage ).

This talk discusses and examines cases on how teams can be affected by syndrome and what are cures in place.

Creating an allocation approach is difficult in environments of increasing uncertainty and growing scale. In an organisational context, there's a tendency to default to SAFE's Lean Portfolio Management as a 'lean' response. Having managed Investment Planning in a corporate context for several years, there's an opportunity to integrate lighter, less formalised methods to categorise, prioritise & manage portfolio worktypes. Outputs versus desired outcomes should guide decision-making around planning approach.

The desired outcomes are the place to start - the basis of decision-making is a bias to value.

Components of Lean Portfolio Management such as value streams, Quarterly Investment Review (QIR) & Quarterly Business Review (QBR) can be used with more standardised portfolio planning processes.

This talk will discuss experiences in continuously reviewing progress in transforming portfolios of work to enable Organisational Agility via continuous planning.