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ScrumMaster who take their role seriously are beset with difficulties. As a process Owner and problem solver, the issues are many and systemic fixes needed. So what can/should they do? As with many other competencies, problem solving needs practice. Here we confront a fictitious case-study (based on two real projects) with help from India's first Scrum coach. As he takes you through the thicket of a complex situation (aren't all real situations complex, and not just "complicated"?) you will get a series of in-depth example SM situations. Further a moderated discussion on how to handle them. Some will be your own. This will be different from a Certified Advanced ScrumMaster class, this doesn't have much coaching content, but a strong problem solving slant.

NOTE: Case study here is of a "cummulative" type, which allows drawing wider lessons based on familiar common experience. The situation is meant to illustrate common (and one or two not so common) problems and their treatment.

Many organizations are introducing agile transformation programs or maturing their existing programs. However overall business outcome of the transformation journey is not substantially high. While there could be many reasons for this, one of the major reason is focus on transformation of one small unit in entire organization - called product development. This session will help the attendees to understand what is business agility and how to rethink your enterprise agile transformation strategy for greater business outcomes.

One of the most widely used Scrum anti-patterns is the infamous Sprint Zero. This iteration is used by many teams across the globe as a period for homework activities before kicking off a project. Activities may typically include backlog refinement with the product owner, setting up development environments, reading deployment pipelines, applying logging frameworks, etc.

It has been mentioned multiple times by the innovators of the Scrum Guide that it shouldn't take more than a day to begin a project, alas as the Scrum Guide mentions, Scrum is simple to understand, difficult to master; and the difficulty increases exponentially as we scale. So here's a workshop to master a one-day project kick-off using an extension of the white elephant exercise which I like to call - the Grand White Elephant for scaled teams.

While most of the agile teams struggle to have "ownership" from their team members, how can we establish Entrepreneur mindset and how will it really benefit the teams is the real question.

This session is to explain what Entrepreneur mindset is and how it can help Agile teams

Every organisation hopes / expects / demands high performance from their employees and teams. It's not very long ago when most effective organisations in the world had a ritual called yearly goal - setting. Many organisations still continue with this where the HR cascades a set of goals set by the organisation's leaders for their employees. This is usually followed by a quarterly to yearly review cycle which with most organisations are linked with incentives. In general terms, there ain't any flaw with this system; goal setting is an efficient way to continuously improve oneself. However, the execution of this process may be flawed and may lead to unoptimized results.

With the advent of business agility, this focus shifted towards continuously learning & improving organisations. This meant that faster feedback was highly recommended for performance improvement and the idea of year-long goal setting seemed a talk of the yesteryears. Many organisations embraced this change by completely abolishing the yearly goal setting practice and instead relying on mentor relationships for an individual's performance improvement. This did improve relationships at the same time hindered transparency since the organisation goals were no longer directly accessed by every employee.

When seen from the perspective of game theory, it's evident that optimum results are obtained when employees achieve goals which are highly beneficial to them at the same time aligned with the organisation's goals. With the former approach explained above, it's pretty clear that the employees in the first case were aware of the organisation's goals, even if the goals were not aligned with their personal goals. Whereas in the latter case, the lack of transparency meant that the individual's goals were highly focused and may not be in-line with the organisation's objectives.

This is where Performance Kaizen aligns these two systems with a flavour of Management 3.0 in order to create an optimum setup where high performing individuals, teams, and organisations can thrive. In this session, we present a case study of this implementation at Springer Nature along with our results and learnings; followed by a brief hands-on exercise for the attendees.

Background

A variety of branching strategies exist in the delivery universe as of date. Having worked with multiple of these, in my personal experience, I have explored the pains and gains that each of these strategies have to offer. While there are certain situations or delivery patterns that might make a certain strategy a better fit, in my experience, Trunk Based development usually is the most sane way of writing, maintaining and delivering production code.

Approach

Trunk Based development is a source-control branching model where developers push code ( of all possible features that are in development ) on to a single remote branch, referred to as the trunk. Developers at all costs try and resist the urge to create other long-lived development branches. This is important because developers, including myself, are mostly lazy. So if there is something that can ease their lives off today, they would rather do that knowing that they are up for a hard day in the future. This is mostly the paradigm of not developing on the trunk. Branching by features makes it easy for development teams in the shorter run. However a developer is well aware that he is going to stay up late in office the moment his project manager says that the code he has written on the trunk has to be released. What follows is merge hells, integration nightmares, bugs, angry developers and divorces.

Findings

In my career, I have worked with a bunch of branching strategies up and until now. While it is indeed easier in the shorter run to create feature or team-specific branches, it is almost always a painful and tedious job to bring things back into the master in order to release. Also in my opinion, other branching strategies defeat the entire purpose of Continuous integration since not ALL the code that is being written is being tested in unison.

We are in business of building software with the people, by the people and for the people.

We need to build expertise to know people, understand people (Consumer behavior).

How? We as an agile coach, what skills we should have to acquire such level of mastery through which we can be effective in change management.

Coaching, is meant to help “healthy” clients, but instead of helping them solve problems, coaching focuses on helping persons utilize their abilities more effectively than they have previously.

In my journey of Agile coach role for last 7 years I have read most of the materials related to Psychology. If we read more about Psychology the resultant outcome is enormous. It is advantage for self-development and developing others also.

I have been coaching from last 7 years, I have coached more than 200+ team members, I have interacted with more than 400 + agile coaches, and I have taken more 100 + hrs. of Agile training. All these experience inspiring me that more and more we are maturing, we are becoming a Psychologist. We are becoming life coach where team members comes to us and share their challenges, personal challenges, they are trusting us. Most of the time various psychological techniques helping coaches to connect with the team members at much deeper level.
I will be happy to share various models and techniques which is working for me and they are proven and should be work for anyone. We will talk more about positive psychology and its effect on team coaching.

Scrum is a practical framework to build products, provided you identified in advance what to build. However, even after a successful product discovery phase, you may struggle to make the right thing in the right way if your product backlog is not up to the job. Garbage in, garbage out — as the saying goes.

Managing the product backlog is a full-time and continuous evolution. In this session, we will share Simple techniques that can help change what can be an overwhelming, time-consuming process to an interactive, iterative process that effectively engages team members, customers, and stakeholders. It is essential, therefore, to learn solid techniques to help you build, prioritize, and maintain your product backlog.

The org culture mantra is usually considered a silicon valley mumbo jumbo. Although many companies and teams rant about culture, very few in my opinion take it seriously. In this talk I would like to discuss the importance of Org culture and how it makes or breaks businesses and teams. I will lay out some key pointers that will help the influencers in the audience make decisions about their org or team culture. The talk will be in the context of culture in tech companies.

Agile isn't just for software, it's for your thing, whatever that is. In my keynote talk, Agile for Everything, I introduced six fundamental patterns that comprise Agility. They apply not just to software, but to virtually any situation where rapid adaptation can improve success.

In this workshop, I'll teach and coach you to apply those six principles to your thing. "Your thing" might be marketing, UX design, software, finance, hardware, business development, product management, your company, your family, your career, a classroom, your education, your kids' education, an art project, or building a house. Or it might be something else.

You gain two ways attending this workshop: First, you will get coaching help in achieving "your thing," whatever that is. Second, you will gain an intuitive, visceral understanding of agility—its strengths and limitations, its nuances and quirks. That understanding will help you rapidly assess agile opportunities and dangers, and will help you teach and coach in more fruitful ways.

Agile Transformation Journeys are difficult, long and uncertain. They need patience, perseverance, conviction, commitment and an unwavering focus on outcomes. It is therefore not surprising that as of now there are few known instances of successful Agile Transformation. For organization which are intending to commence a Transformation and also those who are doing it, the lessons learned from successful and not so successful transformations should prove highly valuable.

The speaker will showcase 2 contrasting case studies, one a failure and the other a success in agile transformation, to bring out the key variables that determine success or failure in Agile Transformation. The speaker will offer practical recommendations on enablers for successful Agile Transformation.