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.

We all know ‘Smoking is injurious to health’ but in this session we are going to discuss about ‘How SMOKING is injurious to teams’ health’ and how Scrum Master can help the team in quitting 'SMOKING'.

• Are you satisfied with mediocre or above par performance? No?
• Do you need the best out of everyone? Yes?
• Have you ever realized about the bad practices that crept in. Yes or No?

We have brainstormed with more than 30 Scrum teams and collated the SMOKING patterns. So, in this session we are going to discuss in detail about tried and tested recommendations to trash those SMOKING patterns with which we can increase efficiency and also break the monotony in Scrum events.

Today, everyone’s talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how it’s going to change the way we conduct business, and live our lives, forever.

In fact, it’s shaping up to be the single biggest technology revolution the world has ever seen. It’s a completely new factor of production, capable of driving business growth by augmenting natural human expertise, taking automation to new places, and diffusing innovation throughout society.

A new cohort of AI-first businesses is flowing into the market. As many as three-quarters of executives say that some kind of AI will be actively implemented in their organization within three years. It’s happening because AI technologies are finally hitting the mainstream.

The rapid pace of change puts a new onus on product owners. Do you understand what AI is, what it can do, and the ethical questions it raises? Have you truly grasped the game-changing implications for your business, your industry – and for the society you live in?

This talk is here to help answer some of these questions and more.

Disclaimer: This talk proposal has been published for information and illustrative purposes only and is not intended to serve as advice of any nature whatsoever. The information contained and the references made in this talk proposal is in good faith and neither Accenture nor any its directors, agents or employees give any warranty of accuracy (whether expressed or implied), nor accepts any liability as a result of reliance upon the content including (but not limited) information, advice, statement or opinion contained in this talk proposal. This talk proposal ­­­­­­also contains certain information available in public domain, created and maintained by private and public organizations. Accenture does not control or guarantee the accuracy, relevance, timelines or completeness of such information. Accenture does not warrant or solicit any kind of act or omission based on this talk proposal. The talk proposal is the property of Accenture and its affiliates and Accenture be the holder of the copyright or any intellectual property over the Whitepaper. No part of this talk proposal may be reproduced in any manner without the written permission of Accenture. Opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice.

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.

User Story writing is an essential part in delivering value in each iteration and also to maintain the cadence. It might seem simple, but splitting large user stories is not easy. The user story has to be of the right size that fits the iteration duration, the speed of the team to build and test and what is considered valuable by client/customer. The large user stories (epics) need to be split in such a way that would incrementally provide user value through the development cadence. This also enables to get quick feedback before the entire feature is released.

Breaking of a feature into smaller stories is like turning boulders into sand , which means it takes more than one single stroke to paint all the smaller stories. There are many good techniques in splitting and dicing the features or epics into smaller user stories.

This workshop focuses on the below techniques of user story splitting:

• SPIDR
• Hyper fine story splitting or Zero/One/Many

This workshop will consist of two case studies for the attendees so as to get hands-on experience in splitting user stories efficiently by using the above techniques.

Agile is gaining high popularity in the IT world, almost every organization has either adopted or planning to adopt agile based models. Implementing Agile for Non-IT organizations is a greater challenge and requires a different approach of implementation. This presentation introduces a concept - "Tentative Agility" which can be used for such organisations. The approach mentioned in the presentation has been established based on execution of the concept in a similar context with huge success.

When is the right time to scale Scrum teams has always remained a big question for organisations. It has always been observed that organisations tend to start thinking of scaling scrum even when the projects can be delivered by simply following the basics of Scrum. My talk would focus on when & how to scale scrum and using which scaling framework to be used for the same.

Responsiveness is new reality. Transparency and visibility are new must have for leaders. Exploration and adaption of new technologies is new norm. How do we build such a responsive organization?

Three elements to build responsive organization-

• Adaptive leadership
• Value driven portfolio
• Organization design

Five steps for meaningful digital transformation

• Focus on outcomes that matter
• Clear measure of success and data driven decision making
• Evolutionary architecture and lean change approach
• Building autonomous teams
• Adaptive leadership and learning culture

Target outcomes

• Build learning org
• Ability to attract and retain talent
• Maximize the value
• Steering mechanism for reacting to change

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.

- There are only 2 types of Businesses around - ones that have been disrupted, and the ones that don't know they have been disrupted

- Technology is considered as the driving force behind disruption

- Businesses respond in different ways to cope up with disruption

- How Customer behaviour is changing at a fast pace

- The crucial role of Customer in Disruption

- How Technology and Customer drive the future state of Businesses

- Agility required in Businesses to use Disruption to their advantage

- Real Case Studies on how some businesses dealt with Disruption - success and failure stories

Discover the keys to truly embrace Agile values and uncover the power of gaining clarity around what really matters. In this session, you’ll learn how to create more alignment in your organization and apply Personal Agility as a leadership framework to guide your teams toward reaching a state of higher performance.

Focusing on people over process through this simple framework will allow you to uncover better ways to identify obstacles, visualize what’s important, and focus on what really matters as individuals and as an organization.

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.

A story of my 9 year Journey when asked to become a Scrum Master however the way i think,acted,reacted & dealt with situations was not appropriate to ScrumValues until I decided that I HAD TO LET IT GO which really started from reading this book called ‘How I raised myself from failure to success”

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.

Most of the IT projects which are executed in agile methodology, are always having the problem of "User stories getting spilled over to next sprint", in other words "Commitment is not met" in the sprint. Main reason for this is identified as "Activities which has dependent tasks are backloaded to the latter part of the sprint, e.g. QA work is always backloaded in the sprint due to delay of Grooming, Code development, Developer testing, etc.
This can be managed by having agreed ceremonies, gates in the sprint execution. Ceremonies ensure activities are completed during agreed dates and gates ensure exit and entry criteria are met.

Most people struggle with real-life scenarios that seem to make Agile look un-realistic and blame other people or processes for the failures.

I'll go through some of these most common scenarios - talking about what we do wrong and how we can overcome such challenges using SCRUM values.

To help my case - I will be taking 3 case studies that cover some frequently encountered scenarios and take a deep dive on how we can better respond to such situations and events.