In speaking about better ways of thinking and problem-solving, Linda has introduced Jonathan Haidt's model for the brain. He proposes that the rational, conscious mind is like the rider of an elephant (the emotional, unconscious mind) who directs the animal to follow a path. In Fearless Change, the pattern Easier Path recommends making life easier to encourage reluctant individuals to adopt a new idea. Linda suggests that in conversations with others who see the world differently, we "talk to the elephant" instead of the "rider." That is, don't use logic or facts, but appeal to the emotional brain of the listener as well as making the path more attractive. There is always the question: What's the best way to talk to the elephant? This presentation will provide some answers. Linda will present the best elephant-speak and outline suggestions for providing an Easier Path.

Business Agility is the ability to deliver value to customers quickly, sustainably, predictably and with high quality. Improving business agility requires identifying what is of the greatest value, having a value management office to allocate funds for these items, a way of organizing people so they can effectively collaborate, and a method of working on these items efficiently. While there are a lot of moving pieces, proper attention to the value stream enables all parts of an organization to align around improving both the way an organization’s clients work as well as how they add value to it.

Attending to how both customers and the development organization can work more effectively is the heart of value stream management. It brings together three disciplines. First, Theory of Constraints to identify the constraints in the system. Then the theories of flow are used to reduce the delays in the workflow which create rework and waste. These two integrate with Lean-Thinking which focuses on creating an environment within which people can work together effectively.

This session provides an overview of why value streams are so critical and how to improve them.

If you have witnessed enough Agile transformations, you have probably experienced a plateau in the journey; or worse, you have experienced “the great dip”.

Agile Transformations frequently start with a lot of fanfare, see a fast-paced adoption laced with early successes, and then settle into a plateau where we experience little to no improvement OR begin a slow, painful slide into a trough where behaviors start regressing to old ways.

What keeps us stuck on the plateau of change? What might drag us into this great dip?

There are the usual suspects – management has found the next shiny object, coaches and transformation agents only know how to help us get this far, all the easy stuff is done, the frozen middle (management) never really unthawed and so on.

People with a lot of experience in helping with transformations will know to watch out for these and would have developed ways to navigate these obstacles – we know what they look like and we have developed a reliable range of responses to them.

What really blindsides us are the watermelons! Stuff that looks green on the outside but is a dangerous shade of red on the inside. Surprising traits that are superficially positive but can real drag a transformation effort down.

Through this talk I will draw upon my experience of over a decade in Transformation roles to share what these Watermelons are, telltale signs that these are lurking in your system  and ideas to tackle them.

Face-to-face discussion around a sketching space has been considered as most effective communication strategy. This kind of set up requires members to be in the same room together. Co-located Agile teams rely on intensive member to member communication, both within the team and with the customer. This allows them to deviate from deliverable driven process—like writing detailed requirement document—usually associated with plan driven approach. Informal discussions within the room, in breakout areas, and other shared physical spaces radiate the information thus contributing towards teams collective understanding without having the need formal communications. While every organization will have its own business reasons for setting distributed Agile teams, distribution demand formal ways of conducting the communication lacking which contribute to knowledge gaps among members. Advancements in communication strategies has helped distributed teams to maintain the communication but it has still left a gap in the form of "Presence disparity".

Face-to-face discussion around a sketching space has been considered as most effective communication strategy. This kind of set up requires members to be in the same room together. Co-located Agile teams rely on intensive member to member communication, both within the team and with the customer. This allows them to deviate from deliverable driven process—like writing detailed requirement document—usually associated with plan driven approach. Informal discussions within the room, in breakout areas, and other shared physical spaces radiate the information thus contributing towards teams collective understanding without having the need formal communications. While every organization will have its own business reasons for setting distributed Agile teams, distribution demand formal ways of conducting the communication lacking which contribute to knowledge gaps among members. Advancements in communication strategies has helped distributed teams to maintain the communication but it has still left a gap in the form of "Presence disparity".

In this suggested talk, we share our experience around exploration of Extended Reality (XR) as new communication strategy and its deployment within distributed Agile teams to reduce presence disparity gap, challenges faced & lessons learnt.

This case study proposes an Agile framework for adoption of new technologies in an existing team. Considering the present scenario, everyday new technologies are being introduced in the market to increase quality, efficiency, and speed. If the organization does not adopt new technologies, it will become obsolete in the market in comparison to its competitors and will soon run out of business. However, the challenge is to upskill the existing team or replace the entire team and to do all of this in very short durations. Replacing a team is not always feasible due to investment, moral ethics as well as due to the existing domain knowledge possessed by them. So how do we help a current team upskill as well as continue to deliver their current commitments, along with implementing their new skills in new requirements.  Failing in the adoption could be a huge impact on investment infrastructure as well as team morale, not to mention sprint failure towards customer delivery. Thus, failing was not an option for us. In this case study, we will come to know how we were not able to use agile practices in the current form. We will learn how we found out a way to hit the balance between learning and day to day work but also to identify the best way forward with high success rate.  As you participate in this case study discussion, you will come to know how we handled the challenges, what worked for us in terms of agility, team moral and at the same time meet business commitments.

In our situation, we had to adopt block chain technologies to start delivering new solutions as per client expectations in decentralized finance. The current team had knowledge in programming as well as possessed profound domain insight. The main challenge in the adoption was the vastness of the blockchain technology as well as the complex intricacies of creating an application using it. And to compound to the difficulty, we had to create a learning path from scratch for the team. All this was supposed to be achieved without effecting the current deliverables which were already in the pipeline.

We turned towards Agile methodology and ended up creating a technology adoption framework using Scrum and Kanban principles. You will come to know that it is technology agnostic and can be used for adopting any of the technologies. We started with a minimum version of the framework aimed towards ramping up the team with the new technology. As we started our journey, we kept on enhancing the framework using the experiences accumulated in implementing the previous draft version. We made sure that the team is motivated enough with the help of awards, incentives, learning opportunities and senior management appreciations. During the presentation, you will come to know that we were not only able to ramp up the team as well as we create a deliverable product, all within the stipulated time frame. We further got brownie point by promoting design thinking as well as intrapreneurship principles within our team. We will talk about this entire case study, the framework we developed, the success criteria and the sense of accomplishment which the entire team felt.