Stakeholder engagement is critical in agile projects. Agile project managers, business analysts, product owners, Scrum masters as well as agile teams must plan their approach to collaborate well with stakeholders and build productive working relationships.

While there are many tools and techniques to perform stakeholder analysis, we need to analyse the mindset of our stakeholders – a deeper level of analysis – to understand how they might view various situations, and how we can best respond to them.

We must also be willing to look within ourselves to understand how our behaviour, words and actions may be perceived to identify how to build rapport while avoiding conflict and misunderstanding. This is where mindfulness is needed.

This workshop will explore the ‘Stakeholder Engagement Canvas’, a new tool that helps us perform a more thoughtful and insightful level of stakeholder analysis. The canvas allows us to examine the stakeholder’s needs and attitudes in depth to enable us to better plan and monitor the engagement process, along with how we can be more mindful working with them. Kathy will present how to use this canvas to cultivate effective stakeholder engagement.

Moving to predominately remote ways of working has increased the challenges we face in reaching shared understandings of complex problems. And we need to be able to see the big picture together in order to really work effectively towards a common goal, especially when working as distributed teams. It’s hard enough to get people on the same page when we’re sitting together in the same room — achieving this when we are limited to communicating through online collaboration tools can be exhausting.

But even when we are not together, we can make use of simple visualization techniques to help share what we know and to better appreciate others points of view. And we don't need fancy tools to do this – a marker, a piece of paper, and a webcam are sufficient to allow us to harness the power of visualization to improve understanding. In this interactive session, you’ll experience a simple exercise that you can use to help any group use visualization, mental models, and systems thinking to increase comprehension of complex interactions, even when working remotely. Please bring a sheet of paper and a marker — this will be hands-on!

During the current lockdown, I happened to watch the 2019 movie "The Lion King" . This movie was an eye opener to me and what I learnt in those 120 minutes truly amazed me. The movie has all the learnings & Trappings of What  Servant Leadership is all about.

In the proposed talk, I try to bring this learning to all of you. This talk delves into the reason why Servant Leadership is the need of the hour in this crisis time. I draw inferences & inspiration from the movie "The Lion King" to drive home the relevance of Servant Leadership in our work life.

Mindset and Culture change is at the core of agile and DevOps adoption. While we all know it’s importance, there is no single approach or process to make this change happen.

We have embarked on a mindset transformation Journey at our workplace.

In my session I will cover pragmatic approach of bringing in mindset and culture change. An approach which we are adopting in our workplace and seeing the change resulting in multifold benefits. You will learn Echo system of Mindset, Culture and Behaviors and leave the session with multiple ideas and an insights on how to make cultural and mindset shift in your organization.