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.

Organisms small and large learn by building a model of the world around them then testing that model against what they see and adjusting accordingly. We'll call this a learning loop. We identify three era in computing based on the nature of this loop and the kind of feedback learning that they support.

Agile doesn’t just need a reboot, it needs a rethink. The word isn’t a noun, a management fad, a manifesto or even a framework. One may be agile and never sprint, conduct a standup meeting or be part of a release train. The dread that many experience from commercial agile approaches is unfortunate and unnecessary.

Agile is an adjective: an agile surgeon, dancer, athlete, team, etc. Being agile is joyful and is applicable to all living beings. So how do we tap into that joy?

In this new talk, based on my forthcoming book, Joy of Agility, you will learn the definition of agile, six essential mantras for becoming agile, and several of my favourite stories that illustrate agility. You will leave this talk with a clear understanding of what it means to be agile and how to move towards the joy that flows from genuine agility.

Aadhaar is the world’s largest biometric identity programme covering about 16 percent of the world’s population. It also holds immense potential in improving public service deliveries and fostering digital and financial inclusion.

As India's digital identity program,aadhaar has successfully covered more than 1.25 billion people. It is also one of India’s best case studies of scale. In addition to core digital identity systems, India's open digital infrastructure, collectively known as India Stack, also includes electronic payment, digital signature, digital locker, and data empowerment as its core layers.

Pramod Varma, who is the Chief Architect of Aadhaar and India Stack layers will be sharing his experience of building these country scale systems.

In the last five years, Jio has become the top player in a bunch of verticals from telecom to eCommerce. Many people wonder how Jio could strategise and execute so quickly? If you are wondering the same, come to this fireside chat with Anish and Kiran, to take a deeper look at Jio's culture, leadership style, how Jio operates at such massive scale.

As software teams start to grow, some common struggles appear:

• Team members feel like projects go on and on, with no end in sight.
• Product managers can’t find time to think strategically about the product.
• Founders ask themselves: “Why can’t we get features out the door like we used to in the early days?”

We saw these challenges first-hand at Basecamp as we grew from four people to over fifty.

In this talk, Ryan will share how the Basecamp team operates and talk about his new book that will help us Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters.

Welcome Address and Agile India Conf Overview. Here you will get al the important details you need about the conference. So don't miss it.

The word transformation has become an overused and cliché term in business today.  Few companies undergo any dramatic change in such efforts, and most don't change at all.  So what is going wrong?  Join Ray Arell as we explore the flaws in the current approach to transformation efforts.  Then together, we will examine ways to rebalance those efforts to more force on key catalysts that enable your teams and business to evolve continuously - helping your company prosper and grow.  

Embibe is geared towards offering personalized improvement to every student in India through tailor made journeys powered by millions of variables and content elements encompassing 345 exams and 60,000 odd concepts. 1.5 million questions from 1500 books, 49,000 3D models and thousands of videos make this personalization possible. ~200 million hours of time spent and 2 billion questions attempted power the personalization algorithms with 100% observability implemented for every user interaction. 

At the heart of this lie 20 Octopi - each with 9 brains and 3 hearts - a core team driving execution - frugally at impossible speeds. This is our story.

Closing talk and thank you note!

COVID-19 has accelerated the digital transformation of research and health sciences. The use of genomic information in particular has triggered some of this change, as the unprecedented data volumes requires Big Data and Cloud computing technology. This talk outlines CSIRO developed software solutions, which use the latest in cloud architecture, machine learning and distribution channels to support a wide range of digital health applications; from disease gene detection, to personalized gene therapy, and from pathogen diagnostics to biosecurity applications. Specifically, we developed novel bioinformatics approaches to track viral evolution that has led to the first study on vaccine efficacy for the different COVID-19 virus strains. We also developed a novel machine learning framework capable of processing trillion of genomic datapoints to detect disease genes. The talk concludes by looking into the future of how clinical ontologies (FHIR) in combination with health-specific cloud deployment mechanisms disrupt health care as we know it.

Today, top performing agile teams exist in organizations worldwide. However, in many of these same organizations, those very same teams are hamstrung by legacy bureaucratic management - the remnants of a waterfall “license raj.”  Issues with delivery across multiple silios, non-value adding process red tape, and antiquated PMOs persist.  So, we continue to struggle with reaping the full benefits of agile methods, and fall short of business agility.

True end-to-end, business agility requires a bimodal approach: continued care and feeding of agile teams done in parallel with a systematic middle-management transformation away from the license raj. The Agile Value Management Office (VMO) is rapidly gaining traction as the preferred way to accomplish this through:

• A team of teams organizational construct and approach for light-touch governance
• Adaptive planning and experimentation with small-batch Minimal Marketable Products (MMPs) for end-to-end flow 
• Up-front and continuous integration of legal, audit and other business-critical functions for true risk management

Join Sanjiv Augustine to explore how these have liberated managers, unshackled agile teams and resulted in positive customer outcomes. Through key case studies, we’ll see how these have also ensured critical management, oversight, and governance. 

Want an easy tool to help you start building the best team of your life?

That’s exactly what the Team Transformation Canvas is: a practical worksheet to help you and your teammates discover the best in each other and put it into action.

For attendees, the canvas facilitates individual self-awareness of their current emotional state and their desired personal outcomes. They develop a deepened understanding of what drives their behaviors and actions. By identifying and owning these intrinsic motivations, participants align their future actions with their most inherent needs—creating their own unique pathway to professional and personal self-actualization. Finally, the canvas facilitates deep emotional and supportive connections with each other—the building blocks of a high-performance team.

The canvas can be used as a solitary contemplative exercise for self-improvement, or as a tool for bootstrapping a team toward intentional greatness.

Attendees leave with actionable next steps to improve themselves and their teams. And they’ll know how to use the canvas with their own teams, to help other individuals and teams gain deeper insight into themselves, so they can pursue their greatness.

For those familiar with the Core Protocols, the canvas facilitates a super-fast individual and team boot-up. 

To prepare yourself for this session, get your own electronic copy of the canvas at https://kasperowski.com/your-remote-team-actually-can-be-awesome/#team-transformation-canvas.

Recent stories of Agile application in the regulated medical industry show how first principles (from Agile, from Lean, and from systems thinking) led to solutions that served the individual company exquisitely well, and were compliant with regulatory needs (whether in Europe, the U.S., or elsewhere in the world).

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What is the hardest part of applying Agile methods to Medical development?

Brian and I were asked this question in connection with our new book “Agile Methods for Safety-Critical Systems: Case Studies of Medical Product Companies”. I give two answers to that question…
 
There are “twin” hardest problems - first the misconception that Agile must be taking unacceptable shortcuts to be so effective. Second, once they’ve decided that’s not the case there is a strong misconception that Agile can be ‘installed’ by tick-box actions like buying a tool or a methodology. That second misconception is what our new book addresses, and will be the topic of our talk at Agile India 2021.

We wrote the book to help more people see positive, creative, successful implementations of Agile principles in the demanding environment of medical device development. Why successes and not failures? Attractors are stronger than repellers. People naturally want to emulate what they see working well for others, especially when those others are in similar roles to their own. 
 
But emulate is not the same as “copy” especially where complexity is involved. “In complexity you don’t copy an outcome, you replicate the starting conditions.” said Dave Snowden in a recent blog post https://www.cognitive-edge.com/siphonophorae-not-hybrid-2-of-2/   This point needs some explanation - and that is what our new book attempts to do. People in our case studies worked from their understanding of the key principles underlying Agile, Lean and systems thinking to take a fresh look at their situation. By starting from first principles and their own deep knowledge of their products, people, and markets they achieved results any consultant would be proud to match.
 
Did you know that if your software is designed and built without using a Quality Management System correctly, then the regulators can refuse to give permission to market it? That happened to one company and they ended up having an Agile company re-develop their software.
 
Did you know that your SOPs (standard operating procedures) should not be overly prescriptive. If they are they impede the flexibility that your Agile teams need. There is a sweet spot that you can achieve using BDD!
 
Did you know that an Agile company can move into doing medical device work without first getting certifications such as IEC62304 and ISO13485? It’s true. Simply by having a well-disciplined Agile Quality Management System, they attracted contracts to develop software for large medical device companies.
 
Want to know more? Come to our session!

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.

Agile was born in the house of software development. As it grew and matured, it was welcomed everywhere. Adopting Agile outside technology teams goes much deeper than imitating rituals like stand-up meetings and retrospectives. For example, as the world keeps changing ever faster, the agile principle of adapting to change over following a plan becomes essential to success. Similarly, the original agile principle of aiming for working software over comprehensive documentation can be understood more broadly as aiming for outcomes and impact over activities and output. This talk describes a domain-neutral set of agile approaches for obtaining better and faster outcomes in complex or unpredictable contexts.

The automotive industry is becoming more softwarized. Users expect their infotainment experiences to be on par with their mobile experiences, and building such connected experiences has become a top priority for auto and software organizations.

But what is infotainment, and what can qualify as a functioning and high-performing infotainment experience? Perhaps even more importantly, what activities and practices can teams employ to create quality, personalized infotainment experiences?

Configuration bugs, not code bugs, are the most common cause I've seen of really bad outages. -- Dan Luu in Reading postmortems.

Most companies test and stage their code changes through multiple environments, before taking it to the production environment. But what about your config changes? 

Add CaC (Config as Code) in your toolkit and see how it can help avoid a large set of hard-to-find production bugs. In this session, I would share my experience about

• the problems (introduced because of treating configs as text)
• how CaC addresses those challenges
• a short demo using Dhall - the configuration language (a CaC tool)

Resilience and Reliability, alongside Observability and Security, are hot topics as DevOps adoption matures and teams become aware of the advantages of shortening even more feedback loops by shifting more of these sociotechnical challenges left.

In this talk Russ Miles will share how he helps high performing organisations develop a culture of reliability, some of the pitfalls and common mistakes that can be made, and how to build your own roadmap towards developing key reliability and resilience capabilities in your own team and organisation.

Drawing from practices and tools such as Chaos Engineering and Site Reliability Engineering, Russ will share how you can collaborate, observe, explore, fix, verify and continuously learn and improve your complex system's reliability. In creating this technical and social mix a Culture of Reliability and Resilience emerges and Russ will then show how this leads to your organisation being better prepared to anticipate, adapt, respond and learn from inevitable production surprises.

Business success is directly proportional to the customer value you deliver through your solutions (product, service, process). Yet, very few organisations accurately measure customer value throughout the creation process because of a limited understanding of how customers derive value, flawed metrics &/or lack of a holistic view of the customer. Start by determining how customers define success - why they choose you over competitive solutions. Work those metrics into your organisations' operating mechanisms, share them widely throughout your organisation. All while being extra careful to not let 'vanity metrics' creep in i.e. those metrics that make the organisation feel good about the solution but not valuable to the customer.