The Agile Manifesto begins with a declaration that there are better ways of developing things that were found by "doing it and help others do it". Later on, many experts decided that the better ways required "being agile": having the right mindset, a compatible culture, and scaling appropriately were the pathways to creating value.

Is this the best way to lead people to learn better ways of creating value? The answer to that question goes deeper than learning a slew of frameworks and methods offered through training courses.

India is the great fertile ground for agility on Earth. By drawing on the strengths of its own civilization, owning its own future, and mastering the fundamentals, India can help the world improve through agility on a global basis. This talk will bring us back to the Agile Manifesto and reveal how learning through making opens access to deeper levels of being, which in turn push and move our capacity to create vast amounts of value for all.

Throughout this talk will be a challenge to attendees to identify something to make in their world, and to use that to transform how they learn and teach and influence others to do the same.

Are you interested in learning how development team members can change their working style to be agile? Are you looking to learn how to improve developer engagement? Do you want to watch the benefits of agile technical practices in action? If yes, this hands-on demo is for you.

This interactive demo is designed as a role-play by the facilitators and the members of the audience. The facilitators will engage in a dramatized demo of common technical agility practices, sometimes involving the audience, so that the audience can themselves see their benefits in action.

Join this demo for living through the phases of attaining technical agility.

The talk, ‘Agile for All – Transformation Journey of a Telco', shall cover the Agile Transformation journey in a Telecommunication Operator with 500+ employees. It shall explain why transformation was important in achieving the best ROI, identifying the 'Fit for Purpose', and achieving Happy Customers and Happy Employees. The talk focuses on the real time experiences, stating what challenges were faced during the transformation, how they were mitigated, how the transformation was structured and what worked and what not.

The talk is designed with real time experiences in the telecom industry, and co- relates the practices into an Agile framework.

The core and largest component in Scrum framework is the development team. Development team converts the product backlog to a product increment on sprint by sprint basis. Many teams are more focused on quick delivery rather than quality delivery and as a result increases the technical debt without understanding the future impact on sprint works and product quality. Agile engineering practices can help to sort out the issue but teams are not practicing or following agile engineering practices as they are worried about the reduced deliveries and management support on decreased efficiencies. In this talk, i am going to focus on how its a good choice to start slow and pick up the pace as we move from sprint to sprint to ensure top quality work and reduced technical debt for the product with the help of agile engineering practices. It will also focus on organization point of view to accommodate and support teams for such practices.

Through this session, I will discuss

• The challenges faced during the agile implementation in some of the big projects from various industries
• What steps we took to overcome these challenges
• How some of the solution worked and some didn't yield the results as expected
• Key Takeaways

This session will provide practical tips and experiences lived in real transformation projects

• Persona Affinity - a technique to create and compare persona characteristics and task that quickly generates many stories.
• Story Gallery - a dedicated space with story cards for very large backlogs,which allows fast gathering of questions and comments on the potential size, complexity, prioritization, and feasibility of hundreds of stories.
• Fibonacci Affinity Popcorn - a space where teams can size, value and evaluate hundreds of stories within minutes.

The focus of this session is demo of Test Driven development using SQL.

SQL is selected as a medium to demo as it is understood by many in the developer community.

Not many in Database development use TDD, this talk provides an easy method to start doing it.

Now a days , we need to effectively respond to new normal things as the technologies and shared economy are continuously changing this world. So Organisations must be responsive and agile to broaden revenue streams and eco systems. Agility is a business imperative not just a technical one. The agile movement has the potential to be the strategic to business, particularly those whose overall strategy focuses on responsiveness over efficiency. In this circumstances, we need adaptive leadership to drive the agile/lean transformation for the organisations for improving their responsiveness to the flow of opportunities that arrive everyday on their door steps. Adaptive leadership is about learning, adapting, collaboration and disruptive thinking. Adaptive leaders with disruptive thinking can see the same information others do, but they interpret it differently and always looking for big wins..

Research says that happy and motivated team members leads to success in business. It is pertinent to create a culture of right mindset for every individual to learn, provide open feedback and help cultivate one's and other's ability to grow and succeed.

Carol Dweck through her research has introduced us to Fixed and Growth mindset.

This workshop will provide practical tips, experiences and suggestions on how to develop a growth mindset and apply it in our workplace as well as in our daily life. It will be an interactive session involving brainstorming, situational activities and video presentations.

There is a proverb in Bangla "দশে মিলে করি কাজ হারি জিতি নাহি লাজ" which means "Two heads are better than one". I believe in teamwork where failure is appreciable but success is inevitable.

I had the experience to start work with a new team and project. The journey was started with the Tuckman's Stages where Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. And I am also responsible for effective output with AGILE practices where my organization doesn’t have any AGILE culture or practices. Being an AGILE practitioner and a certified SCRUM Master, my first challenge was to ensure the AGILE mindset among team member and start SCRUM practices.

I am going to share my own journey to build a team where AGILE practices are doing by the team itself.

This talk-presentation is focused on Product Management - a 360-degree view of its initiative, vision and measurement.

What are the simple ways we can contribute to driving business, key objectives and outcome-outflow based results?

What are the key drivers for a business and what we should measure? Yes, you heard it correctly - Evidence-Based Management plays a vital role in identifying and measure each step.

Demystify Psychology of what you Measure for the business $$$$$$$$ !!

Acceptance criteria and Definition of Done are two most important part of a high performing Agile/Scrum teams. But many of us do not practice this and as a result we struggle a lot during our agile & scrum implementation or adoption in our organization and projects. If we do not have a solid DoD or fail to define our acceptance criteria’s, we are going to struggle sprint by sprint and also will not get the core essence of agile, the Quality deliverables. This workshop is designed for the whole scrum team so that they can collaborate and learn how to prepare the Definition of done and what technique should they apply and measure the effectiveness of the DoD in the team. Also the workshop will give them a solid understanding of defining acceptance criteria for backlog items and how to ensure its well-articulated and understood by everyone including the development team.

This is going to be a 90 minutes’ hands on workshop where participants will be doing the activities with the guidance of me and we will jointly evaluate the outcomes of the workshop. It will be a fun workshop with lots of learning and rewards. The whole session will be inspired by TBR (training from back of the room) format with interactive and engaging learning.

Kill Agility by focusing on…

Current sprint AND IGNORE Long Term Product Vision

Productivity metrics like Velocity, Burndown charts AND IGNORE Quality - Working Software

Individuals AND IGNORE Team

Following Agile Processes AND IGNORE Being Agile

Independent or Management dependent Teams AND IGNORE Self Organized Teams

We all know that the world is changing through the elegant shift in the protocols, NWoW and NWoD (new way of working and delivery), how we meet, plan, run the workshop and conference that relates to each other. The Lean-Agile Practitioners will contribute together, Think Beyond murmuring, and they will Experiment and Explore, Together to make their outcomes interactive, collaborative using various LS based approach as well as IAF. The workshop will assist in engaging everyone to build an outcome for facilitation techniques and visual learning . The workshop will also assist participants to know about the elements of an engagement, how we can enhance the wallow visibility, how a brain connects when it sees a visual learning facilitation. an approach which can be used with any stakeholder, either software and/or non-software organisations that assist people to think beyond and make better outcomes with Collaboration.

In Agile ways of delivering software products we often hear people talking about adopting 'Best' practices to improve their delivery.

If you try looking for BEST practices definition in Wiki you get -

A best practice is a method or technique that has been generally accepted as superior to any alternatives because it produces results that are superior to those achieved by other means or because it has become a standard way of doing things, e.g., a standard way of complying with legal or ethical requirements.

In my view, Best Practice must surely be able to demonstrate a superior outcome achieved because of the way the thing has been done.

Do we have BEST practices in Agile ?

As per Cynefin framework - Agile practices fall under 'Complex' domain category.

In the complex domain, we find the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect and the results are unpredictable. Here, we need to create safe to fail experiments and not attempt to create fail safe design. We cannot solve complex problems with best or good practices alone.

In this domain we get emergent order and practice that is often unique.

Emergent practice, behavior or order results and the approach is to:-

PROBE — SENSE — RESPOND

Probe - Experimental input

Sense - Failures or successes

Respond - Decide what to do

When BEST practices can be applied for Simple problems why should we do the same for problems where there is a demand of exploration/innovation ideas to arrive at a solution - that is where majority of our Projects/Product implementations fall under :)

Just because “Company A” had success with a particular initiative doesn’t mean that “Company B” can plug-and-play the same process and predict the same result.

• BEST practices forces one to stay in 'Fixed' mindset
• BEST practices forces to minimize experimentation
• BEST practices are always Static as they are applicable for specific issue/cause

Working in Agile ways is always about exploration (experimenting) and making course correction (inspect & adapt). Agile is not silver bullet, approach that works for one organization/team may not work for other and at the same time Agile is not a recipe of success either !!

By nature Agile is about working towards flexibility, improvisation and continuous learning & exploration culture. None of the teams/organizations can stay in successful path when they run behind 'BEST' practices. The moment they stick to Best/Good practices teams lose the focus of staying in Continuous learning/improvement journey.

Agile Practices/processes that work for one team/organization/program may not work well for another. So Scrum Masters/Agile Coaches/Management/teams should always look to learn from their mistakes and assess before taking next steps.

Can we think of using System Thinking combined with Lean/Agile principles for Operation/Support Teams ?

Agree, the most common thought is to use the Kanban approach. But will only Kanban approach can solve the problems for teams which are very much into executing ITIL practices for ages ?

In organizations having significant operations in the area of Application Maintenance/BAU Agile implementation is not easy (forget about scaling in the first place).

Considering the nature of work when compared to the product development space where the focus is on knowledge work significant changes required in cultivating Agile mindset (there is no text book/standard approach).

Here in our organization we have tried and experimented on using Kanban (along with combination of Lean/System Thinking approaches) to create an agile organization that focus on automation, value driven delivery that efficiently support growth and enable to accelerate innovation.

In this talk, you will understand how we have used System Thinking approach and lean thinking to achieve the above mentioned goals.

Identification of bottlenecks through visualization and value stream mapping has helped in working towards waste elimination there by creating smoother flow in the system.

Once the team is in a position to visualize the workflows they are enabled to focus on out-of-the-box thinking and work towards building innovative ideas to improve lead time of the end-to-end processes.

Sufficient collaboration opportunities between business and teams would help to deliver the value there by establishing the agile mindset.

Topic : Isn't agile project management an oxymoron?

Theme : Smart

This talk is about , How organizations are getting smart ==> Smarter in Agile Journey. I will focus on real time example.
E.g. Previously we had old traditional Phone , now we have Smart Phones etc.

I would like to bring some acronyms from the agile world which reveals a lot of implicit meaning to the practitioners. For instance SCRUM - Self Committed Resource Unified Model, as the name indicates. The ideas is to reveal all the aspects of the agile and scrum in acronyms fashion so that everyone can understand the concept easily and may be helpful in implementing the same.

At a first look, human behavior appears as an inexplicable mess. Why do we behave irrationally? Why is it so hard to change? What is happiness and why does it seem to escape us?

The Control Heuristic approach offers a new perspective to answer these questions and provides a guiding light to shed the darkness of the subconscious resistances that prevent us to behave like the man or woman we want to be.

The DevOps concept came to agile world like a storm and captured the attention of agile practitioners. But what we failed to understand the mindset of DevOps and created a role out of it with separate teams and designations. As a result the true essence of DevOps is missing inside the team and we have two silos within the team called "Devs" and "Ops", where there is no mindset of collaboration is present. Many of the big organizations are moving from DevOps practices to SRE to clarify the roles and responsibilities of a team member in agile environment. SRE endeavors to bridge the gap between the operations team and development team. Where the development team may focus on fast production, the operations team may focus on measures to prevent production blowing-up. SRE comes in to harmonize the two different views. As the expert says "SREs are Software Engineers who specialize in reliability. SREs apply the principles of computer science and engineering to the design and development of computer systems: generally, large distributed ones."

In this talk i want to focus on the pitfalls of current DevOps practices we are having and how to move with SRE to create a solid team for high performance products.