Individuals, their interactions and communication are highly valued in Agile.

These values frequently find application in the form of big visible charts or information radiators.

Yet, in a lot of large, traditional organizations who have started their journey in Agile, the public display of information, uniformly accessible to all, is unsettling.

Through a “scary” analysis of the impact of the lack of transparency, I aim to build a really strong case for more transparency at the workplace.

Change is tough! Big changes are tougher!

As people initiating change as well as people experiencing change, there are some attitudes and stances that will help us ride the wave of change rather than falter and drown.

Some of these, amongst others, that have helped us immensely in our experiences are The Principle of Heliotropism and Ubuntu!

We would love to share our experiences so other can learn from our failures, successes and more.

Expect a lot of anecdotes!

Most of the agile framework focus on delivery part and provide little guidance on project initiation part. This leaves many questions unanswered and leads to lack of solid foundation to lay the bricks of agility. For examples, we need to ponder on - What are right questions to ask when we are in very first meeting with the sponsor? How to guide the sponsor through a process of converting high level business idea into a vision and go about chartering exercise? How to effectively conduct project initiation workshop and start with a discovery exercise that sets the scene for a project and produces an initial backlog? These are some of the concerns that I would like to address in my session.

Without this solid foundation there is huge risk of we running into problems later on, causing rework and delays. Also, we could end up building the wrong product and realize it quite late. I have learnt this hard way when my initial basic scrum experiments ran into problems and like to share my learning and experiences. I am not suggesting to move away from basic agile frameworks & principles like scrum, xp, lean/kanban but adding more tools / practices to it which are truly in line with values & principles of agile.

I will use many real life examples and analogies to explain some of the best practices which have worked well for me in pre-project / initiation stage.
A previous version of similar presentation was delivered in Discuss Agile Delhi2016 & in Agile NCR 2016 conferences and was very well received. It will be new for Hyderabad based agile community and I will add more based on further experience gained in past 2+ years.