Lean Mindset is a destination. This is the basic first myth. The journey constitutes lots of changes internal and external to oneself to reach the promised "mindset". While it is easy to tell leaders and practitioners the path.. as coaches do we know the subtle things of focus that can take us to this state. In my presentation, I would like to share a few important aspects on how we can help organizations to learn the path towards the Lean agile mindset. Some key areas that I would like to address are

1) How to transfer the vision to the employees ?

2) How to focus on the successful patterns?

3) How to have faith and commitment in one's decisions?

4) Measuring outcomes vs measuring deliverables

5) The five stages of learning wisdom as described in our Vedas 8.5 thousands years back

6) How to coach Teams on Empathy?

7) How leaders must vision their organisations?

8) What is success and how leaders must differentiate between being Successful and Victorious?

For all the eight areas, I plan to give you real time stories .

The Indian Armed forces is regarded as the highly and most disciplined organization in India. The Indian Army lives agility by the second. Unexpected attacks, encounters and sudden change in the operating environments are the norm of the day. In spite of such anxious moments, they give us the maximum business value. The motivations are always high and they are already to deliver in the most perilous environments.

If you look a little deep into the working challenges, I see no difference between complex systems development and the Army operations. Dealing with uncertainty, complexity, preparing for failures, rehearsing of failures, testing in Prod systems are some concepts in IT world, while the same challenges are relevant in the Army world.

My talk would be around some principles and learning in the army that can be used in the IT corporate world in building organizations to deal with dynamic market changes in short doing and living agile. Some interesting aspects that I would like to have share are dealing with motivation and dealing with constant changes. I will also share real time examples how Leaders exhibit the Decentralize decision making that has led to remarkable success and also some aspects of how soldiers take risks and try out new things that lead to remarkable success.

There is a big need to understand the most efficient way to reduce cycle time in today's world when we are developing complex systems. One of the myth in the IT industry is to optimize certain process in the larger picture to reduce the cycle time. The objective of this session is to help the audience understand the Little's Laws which states that Efficient way of reducing Cycle time is by reducing Queue Length and not just focusing on increasing the processing rate or operational efficiency.

Often organizations transform into agile but fail to deliver Business Agility. I would like to talk about a few mindset changes required for Leaders in order to build true Agile organizations and I would like to use the most disciplined organization in India as a case study , "The Indian Armed forces". An organization that is distributed across cultures and geography , yet very disciplined and lives the real agility every moment. What lessons can the corporate leaders learn in order to build such true agile organizations.

This talk will present you with the real time challenges and ideas to deal with them in a healthy way with SAFe framework.

• Challenges the organization needs to deal when they deal with Enterprise transformation.
• How Leaders and Agile Coaches play an influencing and critical role in enabling the organization in scaling agile practices
• How the leadership teams can make or break the deal
• How the 5 critical challenges are addressed with Lean practices embedded in the SAFe framework.
• Some tips to make it happen.

Agile Coaching concept is relatively new to us, but coaching has been a part of our culture since 2000 years. This session is a attempt to open those hidden treasures and enhance our true coaching culture. This is an attempt to see and learn from those stories told to us by our parents, grandparents to help us understand Agile coaching and create a great future to self.

Have you ever looked at children play? Did you ever think about the state they are in? It is a state of commitment, pleasure, concentration, focus, creativity and totally stress free. When looking at teams, we seek many of the same virtues, so the ‘why’ and ‘how’ and ‘what’ of playing is very relevant in the era of self-organizing, short cycled, multidisciplinary teams. This talk takes you into the realm of behavioural biology, and explains about play, the brain, the sympathetic and para-sympathetic system to explain and inspire how to help create an environment where leadership is everywhere, work and play are no longer opposites, and stress is diverted before it has the chance to kick in.

This talk will present you with the real time challenges and ideas to deal with them in a healthy way with SAFe framework.

• Challenges the organization needs to deal when they deal with Enterprise transformation.
• How Leaders and Agile Coaches play an influencing and critical role in enabling the organization in scaling agile practices
• How the leadership teams can make or break the deal
• How the 5 critical challenges are addressed with Lean practices embedded in the SAFe framework.
• Some tips to make it happen.

About the company

Philips is a healthcare multinational company that focuses on building complete health care products and solutions for emerging markets, in addition to developing solutions and products for global markets, across the three sectors Healthcare, Lighting and Lifestyle. Using the expertise of its nearly 2000 engineers in Bangalore and aligning the marketing and sales teams the campus is responsible for creating and rolling out a complete set of products that include a whole host of solutions for global customers. It also contributes to global solutions in critical health care component development for connected consumer devices and renewable energy.

Executive Summary

Beginning of 2014, an external survey brought out the issues wrt time to market and code quality. Taking the survey results positively, the Leadership embarked on an Agile/SAFe journey with pilot projects. The results were amazing and with the currently learning from the pilots, the organization is running 25+ deployments within. The journey has started and Agile release trains are delivering periodic value to our customers at defined frequencies.

Background Objective/Challenge

Product quality, consistent & predictive delivery and quicker time to market are the key challenges the organization is trying to address today. Continuous Innovation is constrained due to the above issues and hence there is need to find a new way of product development which can meet the dynamic business needs, foster people engagement and deliver meaningful products to the world.

Target

ScaledAgile has been used as a framework for product development across the organization global. The whole organization is undergoing a transformation from waterfall way of working to the SAFe agile way of working and roadmap is till 2019.

Agile Initiative

The Framework used for the transformation can be summarized into 4 major steps

1. Develop products in the Agile way with focus on Basic Agile practices (Scrum)
2. Establish Product Ownership with focus on Enabling Scaling aspects (SAFe practices)
3. Establish a release pipeline with continuous integration (supported by Automation)
4. Adopt a DevOps Culture with focus on Continuous delivery (to production environment)

This includes a comprehensive diagnosis of the various business processes, agile practices and behavior, engineering practices, delivery maturity and recommendations for the transition. A coaching and tooling plan is also an outcome of the diagnostics.

 Measurable Impact

• Predictable Releases to customers (hitting the market with features every three months with features and business criticial bugs with less than 2 weeks with all the regulatory compliance)
• Capitalization
• Feature planned vs Feature delivered per program increment > 80%lose
• Defect reduction co t 45%
• Team velocity – Baseline vs actual.
• Very high sense of ownership and high levels of engagement

Transformation team Profile

Global team

• Agile Capability program manager -1 FTE
• Agile Deployment Program Management – 1 FTE
• Communication expert – 1 FTE (Today we are 0/1)
• Coordination - 1 FTE
• Enterprise Agile Coaches – 16 (Today we are 9 /16)

There is a world of difference between the management principles in the era of the Industrial revolution to the current world of information revolution. We need to acknowledge the increasing gap between the way employees are being managed at work, and the way they want to be managed. Many surveys have been done in this area, ending in headlines like “6 out of 10 employees are miserable” and “74 percent of staff not engaged at work.” Dig into these surveys and you’ll see the quality of leadership on top of the list of complaints. The poor state of leadership and management skills in organizations is being driven by a broad range of factors, including but not limited to

The changed nature of work - More of skill and innovation

The increasing education of employees - Continuous improvement and learning needs

The needs of later generations - The more sofisticated needs of the system

The pace of change - The quick pace of changes

In the current “rat race”, the management focusses on higher productivity and higher ROI, but they lack the capacity to “motivate” their employees that can take them to the next level of thinking. The "leaders" do not understand the subtle difference between teaching, mentoring and coaching. They use these words interchangeably without realizing that coaching teams can help them to increase the productivity, morale and create great employees resulting in more successful products.

A new coaching model is required to enable continous improvement with quick feedback cycles that fosters adaptability and innovation.

Two relevant quotes which I can relate to this issue are

"It is people who build organizations and not organizations who make people" - unknown

"Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship" - Benjamin Franklin