Say the word “Innovation” and it invokes different reactions – Some find it exciting whereas other find it management gimmick and buzz word. In this era of digital transformation, innovation has become even more important with companies expecting to bring in innovation culture to their teams. With agile bringing in culture of rapid deliveries, continuous feedback, teams often face the dichotomy of being innovative and delivering what is asked by the product management at the same time. In such situation only focusing on delivering what is needed often wins with innovation taking a back seat. In large enterprises, often innovation is left to a small focused group which further delineates the larger agile delivery teams which may have differentiated solutions that could translate to next big idea for the company. This talk explores some practical tips and techniques on what can be done to address such challenges and help organization to stay ahead.

Background: 

• One of the world’s largest legal product & services provider.
• Development and global rollout of online legal research product for law firms to efficiently provide online research and analytical capabilities.
• Several hundred million dollar product revenue
• 400 Team size.
• Product Development and subsequent enhancement and support.
• Stringent Timelines
• Most of the team new to agile
• 4 Timezones

Key Challenges on "people" front:

1. Scale up the team to use agile in short time frame
2. Engage and motivate the team 
3. Be a true vendor partner with the customer

Industry analysts predict rapid adoption of gamification. By 2014, more than 70% of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application, according to Gartner, Inc. In this presentation, we would be focusing on how gamification helped us adddress the above challenges.  Concept of “gamification” was used to drive the team to embrace agile and improve employee engagement and motivation. This helped further boost the quality and increase the overall customer satisfaction across sprints and releases.

Background: 

• One of the world’s largest legal product & services provider.
• Development and global rollout of online legal research product for law firms to efficiently provide online research and analytical capabilities.
• Several hundred million dollar product revenue
• 400 Team size.
• Product Development and subsequent enhancement and support.
• Stringent Timelines
• Most of the team new to agile
• 4 Timezones

Key Challenges on "people" front:

1. Scale up the team to use agile in short time frame
2. Engage and motivate the team 
3. Be a true vendor partner with the customer

Industry analysts predict rapid adoption of gamification. By 2014, more than 70% of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application, according to Gartner, Inc. In this presentation, we would be focusing on how gamification helped us adddress the above challenges.  Concept of “gamification” was used to drive the team to embrace agile and improve employee engagement and motivation. This helped further boost the quality and increase the overall customer satisfaction across sprints and releases.

An important issue that has plagued the Indian sub-continent is that of education and more importantly primary education. Since past few months, my weekends are usually occupied in teaching English classes to underprivileged children from 5^th grade at a government primary school. As an Agile coach and a practitioner I was drawn towards unifying the concepts of Agile to help increase the quality of education.

As a teacher, I was given a set of high level goal by the school administrator that needs to be accomplished every quarter. My goals for the first quarter were :

• > Kids should be able to identify basic words
• > Form short sentences.
• > Converse reasonably in English

I started with the traditional chalk and blackboard style of teaching focusing on the spellings, grammar, sentences, reading and so on. In initial few sessions, I quickly realized that it took too long for the kids to understand and so was not yielding the desired results. Some of the problems were like

• > Too much focus on semantics and grammar
• > Kids not opening up in the class room
• > Only able to read words but not talk or frame sentences

This is where I had to reflect and consider course correction in my style of teaching and Agile came to my rescue. This is a talk which highlights how Agile techniques were applied in teaching kids effectively.

As Agile coaches, several times when we talk to the Sr. Management in a company to taking agile to a bigger level and adopt it across their business units a common response we get is "I have seen agile working for our project teams. I am also in midst of an agile transformation where we are applying it in large programs. But how do I know the transformation is helping me achieve my goals at an organizational level. Our organization typically tracks executives on finance, people & delivery parameters. In an agile context, how do I ensure that I am on track with the executive-level dashboard (finance, people and delivery)?" As part of this session, we plan to share our experience of how "Balance Score Card" technique was implemented at one of the financial services company following agile. By using concept of balance score card we were able to map the agile goals with the IT organization goals and ensure that the agile methods were giving the desired results.