Working in a Offshore R&D Captive always is challenging considering the "Factory" mindset of development team. Lack of domain knowledge and the user often elevate problems as the acceptability of the solutions provided is hampered and this causes a lot of rework.

I and my colleagues (initially just 2 of us) tried to explore this problem and bring in a more "Product" centric mindset by helping projects in User Experience and Design thinking aspects. Business, Technology and Design being the key constituents of a successful enterprise, we decided to strengthen the Design aspects as we were doing fine in the other two.

We explored this area using online webinars, professional training and certifications and a lot of hands on activities which helped us apply these techniques to transform the way in which we now approach our development.Integration with Agile principles have brought in various Operational benefits for us. Although this is just a start to a long journey of Ux , We (now a group of 8 colleagues) are proud to say that we are in the right direction to institutionalize Ux not only in our business unit but also trying to collaborate with other groups within the company.

"Institutionalization of Ux within the organization is a phrase coming from Eric Schaffer (Human Factors International) who also has a book with this this name, is the transformation of an organization by bringing in the user centric aspects in the product development process.

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.

"Religion is omnipresent. It cannot be dispelled. If you try to dispel a religion, you will 'be' the religion." True enough for Agile methodologies. Since the advent of Agile, software development teams have been reeling in the power of quicker deliveries and self-organized teams, blissfully unware that scientific research has been employing these principles for centuries, already knowing and acknowledging the significance of this omnipresent religion.

Genomics is a highly sophisticated cutting-edge science for human health. Interestingly, it is at the intersection of Health and technology where speed, innovation, trial and error are core to the development of out of the box solutions.

Through this session, I will touch upon interesting case studies in Genomics, where Agile principles have contributed to accelerate the pace of breakthroughs in Personalized medicine.

I will elaborate on how “Scientific research” in Genomics embraces Rapid prototyping for assays, develops usable bits of code (bioinformatics scripts) iteratively and strives to continuously experiment to arrive at MVP for complex human diseases.

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

Emotional intelligence (EQ/EI) by definition is the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one's emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically. Emotional intelligence is the key to both personal and professional growth.

The world is highly competitive and lot of importance is attached to being highly intellect in order to succeed in professional and student life. But researchers have shown that our success at work or in life depends on Emotional Intelligence 80% and only 20% of intellect.

Studies have shown that people with high EQ perform better at work place, they have strong leadership skills, and are better at mental health. These are the qualities every project manager, execs of organization, individuals aspire for. Intellectual Intelligence on its own is not sufficient to be successful at work or in life.

EQ is often an ignored angle when focusing on building self organizing teams. It is unimaginable how amazing results can be acheived if people focus on EQ. In this session, we will look at why EQ matters in building high performing teams.

With a broader view of agility, agile methods can help you successfully tackle any tough challenge. That includes advancing your own career, promoting a healthy family, as well as marketing, HR, finance, recruiting, and, of course, software. This workshop-based class will teach you the most critical patterns of agile, and help you apply them to any challenging problem you face. It turns out when people around you are agile, it boosts your ability to be agile as well. You'll get to exercise a few coaching skills that can help you teach others to use these techniques.

When you coach agile in large companies, like I do, you can start with software. But if you don't leave the software cocoon, your agile efforts will stall and might even die. Maladaptive managers dominate most organizations. They don’t know how or why they should adapt, much less teach rapid adaptation to their employees. Many agile scaling frameworks, like SAFE and LeSS, focus solely on software. They don’t do much for the overall agility of a company, because marketing, legal, HR, sales, business development, finance, operations, manufacturing, etc. limit the real agility of most software departments.

I have been a serial entrepreneur, with some success. In 2008 I became Director of Agile Coaching in Citrix. As a former CEO, I knew our agile group had to leave the cocoon of software, because I could see marketing, legal and finance slowing software development down. But once I started working outside software, the Agile Manifesto, with its emphasis on software, hindered more than helped. I stopped using it. At Citrix, I taught marketing, operations, designers, finance, HR personnel, and managers to learn and adapt more rapidly. I started teaching and coaching other companies. I watched them gain market share and reduce costs. Their employees became happier and felt more fulfilled.

A few years ago, I started a project to find and promote a universal definition of agility. I used affinity analysis to combine elements of Agile Manifesto, Scrum, Lean Startup, Lean Manufacturing, XP, Theory of Constraints, and even Getting Things Done. The agile community has been borrowing concepts from these other fields since the beginning, and I thought they must share some common principles. It turns out they do. I didn’t stop with that, but studied management, psychology, sociology, and chaos theory to explain why those principles drove success.

The result is six powerful fundamental patterns I call “Agile for Everything.” You can apply them to software, of course. Scrum and Lean Startup emerge as obvious frameworks for software development and market development, respectively. We also gain insight into things we should add to Scrum and Lean Startup.

Because they are so fundamental, you can talk about the Agile for Everything patterns with executives, and they can quickly understand how they apply to whole departments and organizations, and can implement the patterns immediately. You can also apply them to your personal life, building your career, more opportunities for your kids, and more happiness overall.

One of the dilemmas faced by Agile coaches is how to transform Agile teams and business leaders, who traditionally have been following a “Command & Control” style, to a “Servant Leadership” style. This is an onerous task and there is a lot of excess baggage which has been accumulated over the years, which needs to be shed with the help of a coach.

Many times coaches are frustrated by unsuccessful attempts to bring about this change and they tend to apply authoritarian coaching practices. This might bring in quick results however it defeats the very practices we as coaches preach.

Shouldn’t a coach practice what is being preached or is it that radical changes come always with a command and force?

The authors have done intensive research in the area and have trialed several aspects which will be covered in the session for building High Performing Teams.

The authors have built hundreds of teams that are goal oriented, which deliver outcomes and which are very high in morale.

In today's competitive world every organization wants to be high performing to outperform the competition and deliver optimum value to its customer.The building block for high performing organizations is great people and great teams.In this session we will share techniques to build high performing people, teams and hence the organizations.The authors will share experience with hundreds of teams from global organizations.

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.

Objective of teams in agile is to deliver business value, under the guidance from the Product Owner. While what teams do is supposed to revolve around Business Value, do we know what it means?

This session, with practical contexts emanating from the presenter's professional experience will delve into defining / formulating business value, what it means in differing contexts, markets & industries. For instance, How would it look for a Fintech start-up or a Financial institution in B2B or a company building Core banking product.

Intent is not to prescribe or provide a singular definition of Business Value but to discuss and deliberate on the different dimensions and considerations. Often beyond cost of delay or Return on investment.

The Key challenge enterprises are facing today is having to deal with the exponential rate of change which is happening in the external environment. The extent and pace of change is so disruptive that no enterprise, regardless of age or size, can take their competitive advantage or even their survival for granted.

The primary reason why enterprises are struggling to change is that they are modeled as mechanistic or close-ended systems. On the contrary, all natural socio-economic systems essentially which are living systems have dealt with change very effectively since eternity.

This talk is about infusing life into enterprises. The speaker will highlight the key characteristics of living systems which enable them to deal with change effectively and also suggest actionable guidelines that will help leaders to bring their organisations to life.

Almost all products in this world are not entirely tested only because -

• They can not wait for exhaustive tests to happen
• They do not know how to get the 100 exhaustive test suits.

Combinatorial Array is the new breakthrough in the Testing Algorithm. It reduces your test suit by 10 times or more. This Presentation will take you deep in to what Orthogonal Array based Testing is , its limitations, the solutions by CT.

This is one way you can make your testing Agile and also makes your test coverage 100%

First Part -

It is a success story of my own where in I applied lot of different values, lernings, principles of Agile, Design Thinking, Lean startup, Kaizen etc to make sure I improve everyday as a person, as a trainer, as a coach. I evolved as a coach/consultant.

Also, how I use agility in personal life everyday.

Second Part -

Implementing Agility for one of my client in capital market domain. Helping them be agile in their day to day capital market business. I will share how we started this discussion, what we have done, challenges, successes etc.

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 is not limited to our office or project work. This talk is on a small experiment we performed while we were helping my sister Dr. Dipti to plan, set up her Clinic. Starting with working on the rented space interiors to the Inauguration ceremony and pre and post marketing.

With not much planning, Dipti jumped into execution looking at the numbers of days in a hand, which was 3 weeks then. Beginning with execution, 'A Classic mistake' and a sure 'Recipe to Failure' as we would term in the IT world. At the end of week 1, things were all over places and needless to say she was in a soup as she had invested good enough already and was working on a tight budget.

Week 2 -Day 1, I was back in town from a Business trip, she tensed not able to sleep and me jet lagged, we started chatting, I could sense the feeling of misery in her voice and thought to myself why not try something new; after all, given the situation she was in there was nothing to lose. Thus it all began, an experiment of bring Agile concepts to set up 'Manas Ayurved' - Counseling and psychotherapy Clinic.

We started with identifying high level themes like Interior decoration, Branding, Inauguration ceremony etc. Below each theme were identified the tasks which on completion would mark the task complete. Eg : For Branding as a theme the tasks were Getting quotations from graphic designers, Finalizing a designer, Designing a logo, Designing Branding material (Brochure, leaflets, visiting cards, etc), Printing the branded material and Stationery, Deciding on Modes of advertisement, etc

Post all the tasks were identified, we assumed that we have only half the time of the original duration, i.e. we had 2 weeks for inauguration but we assumed it to be just one week. Now considering we just have one week in hand we only picked the bare minimum required to make a decent inauguration successful.

Post identifying the bare minimum required, we created a countdown timeline from day 14 to day 1, with day 0 being the inauguration day, this time considering the original 2 weeks in hand.

On this time all the bare minimum tasks were posted with the most important tasks starting day 14 in a decreasing priority towards day 1. The tasks which were ‘Nice to Have’ were accommodated in week 2 only after the bare minimum tasks in week 1 were over. This was to ensure we have the basic necessities in place before the delighters and even if we are not able to complete the last few days tasks we can still have a successful inauguration as we have all the required things in place

Later the tasks were assigned to individuals and all of us met everyday post dinner to discuss the progress and impediments and strike of the completed tasks. A physical wall not only helped all of us to get an idea of what was remaining but it also gave us confidence and motivation to look at the remaining work and try and stick to the schedule.

The inauguration is next week and this experiment is still work in progress, but it was a fun way to implement something in a planned way along with tracking it daily. The idea was such a hit among my family members that we now have a Kanban board in our Dining room which has a ‘To Do’, ‘In Progress’ and ‘Completed’ column with all our upcoming tasks like - charging inverter battery, Pest Control, Monthly grocery shopping, etc mentioned on this it. We have brought agile to our day to day lives… Would you like to try it too?

What & Why:

Core4 Team helps in having right governance for Agile teams. A concept of “Core 4” team is a way of improving predictability and managing dependencies and risks of critical programs. This typically evolves when the key stakeholders are working in tandem, building informal relations, trusting and backing each other. The reason of documenting this is to share how this model works so that teams/programs can evaluate if something like this can help their program become more predictable.

How:

Core4 embodies a team of a PO, an SM, a Dev Manager and an Architect. These 4 roles represent the different functions primarily involved in delivering a feature. If we have a group with representation from these functions that acts as a bridge between these functions – communications, decisions, risk mitigations can happen faster. There will be lesser conflicts and more empowered and engaged teams. The most important value that needs to be shared across the Core4 stakeholders is trust. Once trust is established this group can act as a dynamo to move the project ahead.

Story mapping is eliciting information about a solution and visually displaying a backlog in context. Story maps can help the team determine if the solution is a viable solution, decide on an MVP and identify dependencies, risks, assumptions, unknowns and blockers

This session would cover

• Output Versus Outcome
• Story Map: What is it and Why Use it
• Story Map Preparation
• Exercise
• 6 Parts to a Story Map Creation
• Summary and Example
• Now and Later

Behaviour Driven Development is a collaboration practice exists under agile umberalla for a while. It is a way of writing requirements which can be automatically turned into a code. Originated from Domain Driven Design [Business & Software speaks same language]. BDD that uses conversations around concrete examples and requirements, expressed in an executable form, to deliver higher value software more effectively. It is an extension of popular TDD but using simpler methods While every BDD team is different, and mature teams adapt and refine their process to suit their specific needs and context, the steps outlined here give an idea of the general approach followed by many of these teams. Matured way of eliminating waste by minimizing handshakes. Behavior-Driven Development is a great way to get your team working well on many levels, not just the obvious in terms of backlog refinement but also in pushing it to communicate regularly.

A typical mature BDD process is made up of a cycle five key activities:

Discover

Define

Formalise

Automate

Deliver