This session is a process to hold tough conversations. This is an effective process and I have done this at the IAF Asia Conference at Kuala Lumpur in September 2019. It's based on Marshal Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication, one of the best frameworks for communication & stakeholder relationship related issues.

When we face a challenge what we often see is the 85% things which we might not have control over and end up feeling helpless. Being in a VUCA(Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) world we face situations like these quite frequently both in professional and personal life. Imagine if you are in one such situation yet you get good results, how great it would be? Because there are still a few things which we call the 15% solution to a problem which we fail to see as its like our shadow and best seen by others.

15% solution is similar to moving a few rocks to change the course of a river. This activity is exactly about moving a few rocks to find great solutions to the challenges we are facing NOW, just thinking about what is the best you can do without more resources, authority or permissions, by just doing the things in your control

In this session we would explore 15% solution along with Troika

What keeps a business ticking? Customer value.

• Do you know that 75% of consumers are willing to pay more if they love the product?
• Have you realized that around 60% of features in a product are rarely or never used.

With this, it is evident that users do not buy or use all that you build and they pay more if they love it. Hence it is important to plan, prioritize and produce as per customer value. But what makes a product lovable and how to win customers?

In this session, I am going to discuss in detail about the new techniques i.e. "PLS DO SIR" which I have implemented with 10+ Scrum teams, how to make a product lovable, how asking the right questions helped us in uncovering issues, how to build undaunted teams and when to engage customers.

You can deliver great "VALUE" to your customer if you can take care of the above.

What is leadership Agility?

This workshop will introduce a promising framework for leaders to increase Self-awareness in them and help them connect the "Why" and "How" part. Over the years,

I have learned that the future is already here and that your organization’s survival is based on several critical factors—including its ability to be agile — one of the essential drivers to achieve this through leadership agility.

Learning objective:

-Introduce four areas that a Leader should all focus on.

-Use Ken Wilber’s integral model as an anchor point.

-Use “I\Its” quadrants

-Relate I/its Quadrant as the Future Focus of Leadership

- Increase self-awareness on what quadrant we are residing.

Discussion:

-Agile Leaders need to keep the balance to focus on all four areas

-Too much focus on the right two quadrants (and none on the left) leads to disengagement and mechanical agile implementations

-Too much emphasis on the left two-quadrant (and none on the right) leads to a lack of results and ambiguity

What's Unique?

I would extend this Wilber Model with a few practices that would help leaders to move from Impasse to Insights

This workshop is 100% activity-oriented and will enhance awareness level in Leaders.

A powerful tool help leaders to balance "I" vs "We" quadrant. Connect the "Vision" and "People" in an Enterprise.

Let's get onto a journey

From "No" /"Yes, but" to "Yes, and"!

Improv is the act of working together to build something new from a bunch of quickly generated ideas, disposing quickly that don’t work and building on the things that do along the way. The more an improv team works together, the more they trust each other, and the better they know each other’s’ strengths and how to use them. Isn’t it Agile Teams also all about?

Make other people look good. This will make you look better, too. Let's experience this through fun games!

Scrum practices establish visibility, remove impediments, and promote collaboration at the team level. Standup meetings, physical task boards, and focus on clearing impediments are well known practices to keep a team focused on the work, and establish a sense of flow towards frequent, tangible, and sustainable results.

What about working at a large scale , when tens, hundreds, or thousands of teams are involved? How can a large organization exploit the same core practices when there is highly interdependent work, and when there may be hundreds of people involved? How the can practices create the same level of accountability for executive leadership as they do for teams?

The Scrum @ Scale Framework offers a powerful set of practices for networks of teams to surface and act on impediments, and create hyper-productivity throughout the organization. From the team level to the Executive Action Team, an enterprise can learn to "eat" it's own impediments, and use them to nourish improvement and performance at a scale no one could have conceived of before.

This workshop will introduce valuable, proven Scrum @ Scale practices for large programs. Among the topics that will be discussed are:

• How can the basic Scrum Master principles and practices be applied to large programs and enterprises?: The Scrum @ Scale Scrum Master Cycle

• The Scrum of Scrums Impediment Board: Visible impediments, dependencies and milestones at an enterprise

• The Scaled Daily Scrum: Lightweight activities to promote visibility, clear impediments and collaboration across the program

• What does it look like when it’s working?: Optimize delivery time, increase quality, and establish improvement across the organization.

Although management experts have recommended to eliminate employee performance appraisals for over 40 years, they are a fact of life for many who work in traditional enterprises. For Scrum Masters and others that still have to live with them, this talk will help you learn how to use Scrum itself to prepare you to outperform any performance review, and to be able to deliver a stellar performance review in real time at any moment!

The craft of Agile Coaching fundamentally requires deep, insightful, meaningful communication. In everyday execution, this typically involves a coach and the coachees having a conversation, or dialog. However, there are other ways that an Agile Coach and their coachees can connect – nonverbal communication.

Explore the different aspects of nonverbal communication in the domain of the Agile Coach! This workshop overviews nonverbal communication in Agile Coaching and provides a starting point for developing this critical skill.

One of the prime goals of successful Agile transformation is delivering small chunk of value that has big chunk of returns. Every organization has many features in their To-Do list, but how can we identify that small chunk of value from a plethora of customer needs? What is that one primary skill needed which helps individuals at all levels to build the culture of Agility? If we observe closely, simple questions like "What is the benefit from developing this feature?" will enable us with more insights and surfaces right value for development. It is clearly evident that Asking questions comes before Agility and it is the first step to Agility!

With small steps, incrementally, we can improve Team's Asking skills and this presentation highlights the importance of "Asking". This presentation also lays its foundation on a survey, which I conducted recently. The results of the survey clearly show that teams, which did more asking, have witnessed effective value delivery more often. In the process, the presentation also introduces two new measures called "Team asking quotient" and "Value delivery quotient" which are calculated by assessing 7 important areas that determine the overall asking maturity of a team.

Agility requires experimenting continuously in order to Inspect & Adapt continuously and to Learn continuously. So, it's not just failing fast, but learning fast. In this workshop, which is based on the concept of 'Probes' from BOSSA nova, we will learn what learning fast means for every individual and the organization as a whole.

By definition, Probes are small, safe-to-fail experiments based on hypotheses derived from reflection via per-learning on the current situation as well as on theory. This is such a great tool not just for Agility enablers but for anyone who wants to bring in change. They can design their own safe-to-fail experiments considering all aspects, and not just but also get validation from peers, users and approvers of the experiment.

We will learn to define experiments that you can use in your company for bringing agility. This will allow you to create an environment for continuous innovations, an environment where everyone is enrolled which will further create a win-win for everyone.

I am Zahid Hasan, an Agile practitioner from Bangladesh working for ICT segment for last 14 years. I like to discuss about Agile governance & governance supported Agile practices which helps to increase the effectiveness of agile team. it will cover the importance & principles of Agile governance, its manifestos, life cycle, milestones etc.

Also, cover the steps to govern agile team & Agile framework. Hope to describe widely the agile governance practices with examples; and the key challenges to govern agile team. There will be a hands-on to define and measure metrics for agile governed team by using Goal Question Metrics (GQM).

As an agilist, you all heard about the organizational transformation, leadership agility, etc. Also, you might be a change agent working as part of this adoption.

Many people refer or point out to the Organization reinvented book as a reference as part of the agile adoption journey.

Here is a true story of a small NGO, from the very southern part of India, in existence for the past 15+ years and serving humanity by doing a grassroots level change. They have shown the meaning of empowerment, self-managing and self-organizing in an absolutely different way.

I want to talk about this group (though they have never heard of the agile movement, though the founder had a background of Software development).

Psychological safety has become an integral part of an organization these days. Amy Edmondson, professor at Harvard Business School, first identified the concept of psychological safety in work teams in 1999. Since then, she has observed how companies with a trusting workplace perform better.

Through the workshop, we will be promoting the same culture that Amy has promoted.

It is going to be a hands-on exercise with the help of Lego and it will give participants

- A perspective to have innovative thinking

- A thought process to overcome conflicts

- A way to build self-motivated teams and

- An aim to encourage experimentation

This style is also known as kinesthetic learning that helps teams to be fearless. It not only encourages active listening but also promotes a Speak Up culture to create a safe environment.

According to neuroscience - human Mind Power system consists of easily learned techniques that help you focus and direct your thoughts, and the first technique you’ll learn is visualization.

‘Visualization is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Visualization through visual imagery has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and concrete ideas since the dawn of humanity.’ Using visualization techniques in any gathering help to inspire creativity, focus and shared vision.

During our day to day working environment - especially in Agile WoW (irrespective of the frameworks we use) we have lot of opportunities to plan, strategize, brainstorm, innovate and generate ideas. These will always be incomplete without the application of Visualization techniques. Visualization techniques can be successfully applied to identify common goals, understand customer expectations, collaborate with individuals (multiple teams), and identify areas for continuous improvement.

Many a times, key events in our workplace are conducted in vaccum where people feel they are not engaged or disconnected or feel there is no value out of these. We can turn the table around completely by giving the dimension of Visualization using Visual Metaphors.

Agile methods have provided a framework for improving innovation, but there has been a missing piece - Visual metaphors (influenced by Innovation Games ideas) offer ideas, tools & practices to aid the innovation process at its most critical point - product management, particularly visioning & roadmaps identification. Key to innovation is creating collaborative, interactive, visually-oriented, fun, business-driven-environment for people.

In this interactive workshop participants would be experiencing some of the popular & widely used Visual Metaphors that can assist in their Agile journey through which they can experience the power of these tools to generate better visibility, collaboration opportunities, sense making and continuous improvement opportunities.

Where can it be applied?
• Business Review Meetings
• As a tool for prioritization
• Planning, Backlog refinement and Retrospective meetings
It is time for some ‘hands-on’ and ‘minds-on’ to know more about innovation through visualization.

If you are interested in increasing utilisation of the team, this talk may not be for you.

However if you are interested in increasing the effectiveness of the team, make Scrum events very engaging and fun, want to move towards cross-skilling and remove dependencies on any team-member, or - improve knowledge sharing or minimise time taken to perform for a new team member, this talk is for you.

During this talk we'll try to find the answer to the following questions:

* Why should multiple people work on one task? Isn't it unreasonable?

* Why should we even care for collaborative way of working?

* What are the problems in solo programming and how does collaborative programming techniques fix them?

We all know that #Facilitation is a key buzz word. A difference in understanding facilitation begins with an awareness of the difference between facilitating and leading. It has been said that leadership is something you do to a group, while facilitation is something you do with a group.

Facilitator assist group[s] as they work together toward achieving group goals, and in most instances do not interject their own personal opinions or agenda. By expressing their opinions to the group, facilitators risk discouraging others with differing opinions from speaking.

They remain alert to group dynamics and encourage challenging reflection while maintaining respect and safety within the group. Although facilitators may help guide a discussion, they also recognize and foster the groups' own ability to lead itself. Thus unlike authoritative leaders, good facilitators relinquish control to the group and promote open, democratic dialogue among group members.

In our workplace - at some point of time, we have all experienced the elephant in the room—a situation probably no one wants to discuss/admit openly or obvious truths that are unaddressed.

When these issues are not addressed, it can create uneasiness, not trustworthy environment there by leading psychologically not safe workplace. More importantly a toxic work culture settles in that can wreak havoc throughout the organization thus limiting the ability as a team to grow and create a learning and innovative organisation.

In this session (more of engaged workshop) , we will be using Liberating structures for people to share their experiences and learn from others, while also providing them a safe environment to discuss the elephant in the room (their version) they might have experienced in their workplace.

By the end of session participants may probably come up with some ideas to address and tame their elephant.

The Indian subcontinent has not seen many successful Agile Transformations. In this report we share how a group of 30 Lean Agile Practitioners and thought leaders from industry came together to better understand why Agile Transformations have not achieved or sustained the results in India that we hoped for. This special report was shepherded by Agile Alliance (under Rebecca Wirfs-Brock), with the intention of bringing out key challenges and success factors for any attempted or possible Agile Transformation in Indian IT and Software Development Centers.

At gatherings all around India, the talk is about different tools, techniques and agile experiences. But many of the experiences are either not from India or only partially achieved here. Agile experiences in India invariably fall short of full-fledged organization-scale self-sustaining irreversible transformations. Most are about rather short-term limited-scale team-level externally-supported “agile adoptions” or about lower-order internal efficiency gains such as faster builds, or higher code coverage, lower tech debt, or quicker deployments. No doubt these accomplishments are important from a product development standpoint, i.e. “building the product right”, as well as a product management standpoint, i.e., “building the right product”.

However, in most cases, any objective assessment or quantitative demonstration of improved agility in terms of market-facing metrics (such as revenue impact, percentage of market share, number of paying customers, etc.) is conspicuously absent! Roles in functions such as product management or user-experience design have only begun to spring up in last few years. So the matter of fact is not many have seen real Agile Transformation in India, and those who have seen it, recognize that scaling it across the organization and sustaining it over a reasonable period of time is a wider and chronic problem.

On paper, it all looked familiar and appeared highly successful. However, given that most organizations were either IT outsourcing operations working per or alongside a client’s given process (often in a tight contract lest there be legal disputes around delivery not matching the specs or project plans), or the so-called GICs (the Global In-house Centers, i.e. the in-house delivery arm for MNCs typically headquartered overseas) working on derivative versions (as opposed to “1.0” problems) or smaller-scale problems (compared to their headquarters) or on “lights on” work, or the Startups that were predominantly in early phases of acquiring or post-product/market fit; it often stood out that the landscape looked very different from the US / West Europe (where the work flowed from, for the most part).

So, to bring out the real state of Agile in India in the open, we (Deepti Jain and Tathagat Varma) called for a Summit—a “Change Agents Summit,” to create an authentic account of the situation.

Lessons Learned from Collective Experience:
1) Agile Transformation in India is a far fetched dream
2) Headquarters of these IDCs need to truly invest (and have intentions) to bring true agility
3) There is so much power in the people if they come forward authentically, and so it's important to create a social movement that bring out a real report on Agility and Agile Transformation in India.
4) One such gathering is not enough, but a recurring approach is needed. Hence we have set an yearly gathering called Change Agents Summit, which is also India's first Flip Conference that focuses on

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

Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland founders of Scrum mentions that Scrum is a framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining complex products through (as mentioned in Scrum guide).

In my experience when people who are newly introduced to Scrum they always had challenges in having better understanding of Scrum which is most of the time due to in-adequate training, support or guidance received during their transition path.

Most of the times I found that people are engaged and carry better understanding when new concepts are taught/explained/experienced through 'fun' & interactive learning.

Through this simulation activity we will cover below aspects through interactive,fun, engaged & collaboration based exercise

• Sprint
• Timebox
• Business value in product delivery
• Sprint Goal
• Definition of Done
• Product Vision
• Scrum Events
• Scrum Values (Openness, Courage, Respect, Focus, Commitment)
• Sprint Backlog
• Empiricism

The activity consists of 3-4 rounds (all of equal duration) where team would be going through the journey of product development & execution in Sprint fashion.