Say the word “Innovation” and it invokes different reactions – Some find it exciting whereas other find it management gimmick and buzz word. In this era of digital transformation, innovation has become even more important with companies expecting to bring in innovation culture to their teams. With agile bringing in culture of rapid deliveries, continuous feedback, teams often face the dichotomy of being innovative and delivering what is asked by the product management at the same time. In such situation only focusing on delivering what is needed often wins with innovation taking a back seat. In large enterprises, often innovation is left to a small focused group which further delineates the larger agile delivery teams which may have differentiated solutions that could translate to next big idea for the company. This talk explores some practical tips and techniques on what can be done to address such challenges and help organization to stay ahead.

This experience report shares how ‘Skill the Gap’, a not-for-profit organization, is building the leaders of tomorrow using Agility and thus making sure the next generation have great places to work.

We are doing this by upskilling ‘first job seekers’ from schools and universities in the core individual, team and leadership skills needed for Agility. This is done globally at scale and at no cost to the participants.

What do these ‘new collar’ workers need in terms of skills that they are not getting today and how do they get them at no additional cost? We help bridge ‘the gap’ between what schools and universities deliver and what businesses need.

57% of worldwide leaders say that it’s the soft skills that are more important than core competencies in this dynamic digital world. So, what are these skills and how do we plan to upskill 1 million first-job-seekers in the first 2 years of operations?

“Team working is an individual skill” and training, coaching and equipping the next generation with these key skills before they enter the work place will enable them to be successful from day one and go on to be great leaders.

We don’t stop there…we also place them at our sponsor organizations, thus giving them the opportunity, they need to shine. The sponsors enable us to give the students these skills at no financial cost.

We will share our initial experiences and feedback, the 4 pillars of our curriculum and the 40 micro modules of magic.

We use ‘training from the back of the room’ techniques, volunteers in 4 continents and a unique curriculum, to embed the learning and couple it with mentoring and coaching to deliver a unique learning experience that is scalable and is being currently rolled out in 6 cities from Miami to Melbourne.

Check out www.skillthegap.org for more details.

Business agility requires thinking beyond making internal practices agile.

While agility at team and multi team levels are reasonably well known, making a larger enterprise – whether it is a business unit or a full business agile, requires one to think beyond the normal team and organizational boundaries.

One of the most quoted example has been the success of the iPod, which created the iTunes model for flexible licensing.

There are other, more recent examples as well, from some of the unicorns.

This session will share how two organizations – one in manufacturing and another in media tech space – approached business agility from this perspective.

As Digital is penetrating and disrupting every function of enterprise starting from HR, Finance, Supply Chain, including software engineering and development life cycle methodologies with the advent of DevOps, Digital tools like machine learning, AI and cloud technologies. The traditional SQA function is increasingly becoming irrelevant in the current context and the ask now from the SQA function is to be more real-time, high leverage of machine learning and artificial intelligence in SQA function to cater the speed, scale and flexibility demanded by the new age enterprises.

To address the above problem we have implemented a novel, first in the industry an SQA digital assistant powered by machine learning, AI and NLP technology. This intelligent SQA digital assistant caters all critical functions of the SQA in the digital IT enterprise. The major features of the tool include the following.

• Project facilitation activities
• Inspection and Auditing
• Real time project dashboard publishing
• Proactive early warning indicator on project risks and issues.

The presentation intends to demonstrate the live case study of the SQA digital assistant system developed with real time live examples illustrating the benefits of ML/AI/NLP in redesigning the SQA role in action for the new age digital enterprises.

Now a days Business Agility is trending more and more, and we hear a lot about it especially in Agile Transformation. Business Agility is a complex topic as it is to apply Agile Values and Principles outside IT.

This session will help in spreading a sense of awareness of increasing collaborative culture while applying Agile Values and Principles and how it is different than the Agile we know.

In the beginning of the session there will be a small exercise to get a sense of applying Agile in a personal life.

In our Agile transformation process, my team and I tracked sprint confidence every day for 2 sprints. This data allowed us to identify personal attitudes toward the sprint goal and the level of confidence different team members had in the full completion of the sprint. The result was a very interesting insight that sparked an honest conversation and acknowledgment that something was different in the way each of us interpreted the sprint goals, something that we had to clear out among ourselves before it became a bigger problem.