Organization's culture is the sum of belief and behaviors of all employees. It is built on values and drives Organizational effectiveness through Competitive advantage. The visible part of cultural iceberg drives us to think what we see and believe in our Organization constitutes the culture. There is also big portion of cultural iceberg that is not visible to the employees that drives the hard reality.

Culture is a soft concept and like strategy it cannot be copied. Is there a way to measure culture? If not, then how do we say whether particular culture is good or bad? As an individual how often do we change our behavior to adapt to a new situation? If changing one’s behavior is tough, then how difficult is to change behavior of big Organization?

Come join me to visualize and understand a world of culture delivered to you in a capsule. You would not only multiply your knowledge but will go home with resonating thoughts that would drive you to do more of cultural transformation at work place!!

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.

Micro Abstract: A single demo is worth a 100 meetings

Abstract:
Dojo Delivery Agility is an abstract (non prescriptive ) Agile product development framework built to augment the Dojo way of working across teams. Built on the concept of hyper sprints, Dojo Delivery Agility enables teams to build “E-shaped” skills to unlock the next level of productivity and predictability. Dojo Delivery Agility as a process framework is crafted on the fundamentals of SCRUM, XP, and Agile Dojo.

Agile Dojo is well known coaching strategy but this talk is about our experiences with respect to our experiments with Dojo as a product development framework across different domains. Our experiences include mostly learning from failures and successes and hence the session would be driven by case studies. We will also be discussing our studies on teams that adopted Dojo as a way of working which showcased substantial improvement in predictability, productivity, and technical agility. We will also touch upon how Dojo acted as a constructive constrain to triggers change for good. Last but not the least we will also discuss our SENSI program which helped us scale our Dojo Delivery Agility capability of practitioners

SHE QC is an effective technique to structure your never-ending grooming meetings. The SHE QC style of grooming is an effective style for complex stories especially when we need different viewpoints to be considered. One can use the technique to structure their 3 Amigo discussion to elaborate and define scenarios. It is a highly structured & time-boxed grooming technique used by advanced engineering teams to learn, define what needs to develop and remove any second-degree ignorance - “I don’t know I don’t know something”. The technique enables teams to groom stories in a more continuous manner and ideal for teams operating in a hyper sprint mode.

When we speak of Scrum framework, the 3-3-5 structure is imbibed in our memories. The 3 roles, 3 Artifacts and 5 events are known to all. When we talk of processes, learnings, improvements, most of the teams confine themselves within the limits of 3-3-5. How many of us realize Product Backlog Refinement lays the foundation of the Release/Sprint planning. Do teams really give the right importance to PBR, or do they feel it distracts them from the their current sprint work? How can PBR be more effective and help teams plan better, be more predictable, help in being more productive, and encourage the teams to take calculated risks when needed - these are few of the things we would discuss during the session.

We conducted with more than 40+ Scrum Masters across the globe in one of the organizations I was associated with, to collect the challenges w.r.t PBR. During this session, we will discuss those practical challenges, and tried and tested recommendations.

Most of the time creating a roadmap is painful work for product owners. Our stakeholders want clarity on what features product will deliver and at what dates? There is less focus on what is customer need and what is a vision of the product?
This workshop will engage each participant and they will work together to understand how to focus on outcomes rather output in developing a product roadmap and how to set a clear direction.

Real life case study on analytics f story points and help identify the process inefficiencies to identify improvement areas.

1. Relationship of velocity and sprint
2. Relationship of story points with working days
3. Spotting anomalies in the above relationships to define corrective plan
4. Mapping the velocity trends against organisational SDLC process to identify potential bottlenecks.
5. Creating the corrective plan based on the insights gathers above.

Continuous learning and improvement is an integral part of agile journey for any team. Having retrospective sessions after every sprint or release is a very good way to focus team's attention on identifying

What went well?

What can be improved?

What did we learn?

What are the challenges?

Even though it's a very powerful way for a team to identify areas of improvement, it can quickly become a mundane and pointless exercise if it is not focused towards a goal.

End goal can be anything depending on current and future state of the team. But it is important to track that goal using appropriate metrics.

In this talk I am going to share my experience of working with an agile team that was struggling to maintain a sustainable pace.

Team used to do monthly retrospective meetings to identify bottlenecks and areas of improvement, but that used to quickly turn into a blame game.

How introducing a simple metric of tracking cycle time changed the game for this team and helped drive other improvements like building awareness of sustainable flow, reduce wait time in the flow and improve backlog grooming process.

I'll also demonstrate use of GROW coaching model for team retrospective and how it helped in identifying problems within the team.

In this session, I am going to describe some of the popular used scaling frameworks. Most of the teams start with Scrum as foundation and go up the scaling way.
One needs to assess lot many factors to effectively adopt agile scaling at larger level. Need to see the existing culture and values of the organization and then see which fits the best.
Start with minimum viable and see how it goes, don’t hurry into bombarding the teams and leadership with all the jargon of agile world.

The session will be about comparing different scaling frameworks in terms of
- Philosophy they are based on (foundation)
- How they structure all the team and the team size
- Roles description
- Events and Process they suggest scaling at enterprise level
- how do they align at various levels?
- How do they handle integration?
- Their USP – How are they different from each other
- Knowledge and certification path
- And last how do I decide which framework to use in my organization

At the end of my talk the conclusion might be one framework, or combination of many frameworks which suits the Organization in question.

Scaling and transformation: Return on Experience

How to keep the dynamism of your business and respond quickly to changing business contexts? How to do a sustainable change? Agility at Zalando help us to keep scaling our product vision, our platform vision, the scope of our business, and the extent to which we deliver value, impact, and satisfaction to our customers. Let’s share our successful and unsuccessful practices.

Topics

Agile at scale, Agility at team and organization level (scaling and transformation)

Goal

A better understanding about what needs to happen so that your organisation never slow down innovation and good delivery.

Is my scrum master promotes Agile or only promoting Scrum Events?

What all are the expectations from a Scrum master

What should a scrum master do to enable best of the process to make teams more efficient?

What support do a Scrum Master required from the leadership?

How can scrum master facilitate to achieve outcome

Its 18+ years since the Agile Manifesto was written. Over a period of time many different flavors of Agile have come and become popular. However the manifesto never changed and it is at the core of all the different frameworks.

While all of us try and keep ourselves as close to the manifesto as possible in terms of the philosophy, the ground reality is different. The practical challenges faced by teams and organizations on a day-to-day basis, makes many teams customize their ways of working to suit the needs of their organizations and clients.

In my session, I plan to brings these challenges to the surface and how some parts of the manifesto needs to be re-worded as a consequence.

The idea behind the talk is to elicit the experiences of the audience and share my own experience

Synopsis

Topic: Measure what matters

Reference: Book by John Doerr (Board of director Google)

Part 1

Problem statement: “Teams today are feature factories with little regard for whether the feature actually solve business problems.” Marty Cagan (Silicon valley product group)

• Agile as delivery mechanism over delivering outcome
• Few areas driving agility over end to end agility
• Output over Outcome focused mindset

Part 2

Possible solution: OKR’s (Objective and key results)

Good idea with great execution is how we create magic.

Ideas are easy, execution is everything

• What are OKR’s
• Benefits of OKR’s
• How Google uses it
• Sample OKR’s

Part 3

Experiential learning: Engagement increases through these processes, learning accelerates and retention improves. Improved Attitudes toward Learning – The personal nature of experiential learning engages the students' emotions as well as enhancing their knowledge and skills.

• Write Objectives related to your personal life
• Write measurable key results
• Time box them and reflect back

Time needed: 60 to 90 minutes (Preferable 90 minutes, however could be done in 60 if time does not permit)

Logistics: Projector for content sharing

Expected outcomes:

• Better understanding of OKR’s
• How to continuously improve by measuring what matters
• Increasing focus on outcomes over just delivering features

Be part of the professional Journey of Sam, who joined the corporate 15 years ago as a young Graduate with much enthusiasm. What happened when his path crossed the new era of Agile - a new way of working? The story will unfold on 10th Aug in Discuss Agile Day Delhi 2019.

This is going to be an open ended forum and is part of my study & research on Holistic Transformation of professionals for success of Agile Transformation. Stay tuned with Shweta Jaiswal.