“I feel the need – the need for speed.” 

The words of Tom Cruise as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun in 1986 rang true for fighter pilots and race car drivers back then. In 2021, the words stand true for the software product development world, where organizations feel the need to go many times faster than they operate today. Delivering software quickly, reliably, and safely is at the heart of technology transformation and organizational performance.

Since the beginning of 2021, am researching and consulting on achieving a strategic objective i.e. As an org how can we go faster by 2X. This statement is heard differently at different levels in the organization. For leadership, it is essentially about faster speed to market. i.e. faster GTM. For mid- management, this translates to improved productivity on ground and for scrum teams/squads it simply means improved Cycle time / Lead Time to change / velocity.​ Challenges increase manifold for highly regulated fintech world. But excellence is possible -  for those that execute on key capabilities see the benefits.

In this session, will share about the role played by an integrated approach of adoption of Agile, product thinking and fine engineering practices by leveraging Google’s DORA, SRE.  Data Driven BizDevSecOps. We lead with measurement and establish a culture of continuous improvement where on-ground teams continuously progress towards achieve their ‘North-star’ aligned with organization’s strategic objective.  

Gartner predicts that by 2023, the number of active citizen developers at large enterprises will be at least four times the number of professional developers. - Gartner

A spectrum of citizen developer roles is emerging. These new roles may not replace traditional software developers, but they can enhance your software delivery strategy by giving your business people the tools they need to innovate on their own. – Forrester

According to leading global research and advisory firm Forrester, in the U.S. alone there will be a deficit of 500,000 software developers by 2024 . There is a big movement happening towards creating “Citizen Software Development”.

In this talk, we would like to walk you through few tenets of CSD being defined and how we are building the Culture in our Organisation 

The statement “Honing Technical Practices To Realise Sustainable Agility” by  Venkat Subramaniam (Agile India 2013) made us to explore more on this topic of Culture which any Change Agents should Influence, Venkat describes “Habits form Culture”, but how as Change Agents we intend to introduce Habits which could be Sustainable, was a bigger topic among our Coaching Community and Change Agents within our Organisation. We realised that One of the ways would be “Intervention at Right Time with Right Way”. 

As Change Agents, we can co-create the change initiatives only by understanding of "Perspective of Change" by letting the people know that we care for them and for the organisation with larger social responsibility, but many time we are lack of tools, techniques, soft skills to learn new skills and miserably fail to implement Successful Change Initiatives which would encourage culture of Innovation.

We all very well understand that Culture and Resistance to change are big barriers to influence a change and Innovation. Since both these aspects are inevitable, building new Habits is the need of the hour. Running Experiments is the only way to bring new habits and Timing the Experiments which will bring change in the way we do things. 

As agile coaches we need to be aware of many techniques to Influence Change and Resistance, to harness that human reaction to the benefit of all involved in the change process. One of the techniques we as Change Agents leverage is “Cultural Hacking” approach. This simple technique provides lot of Insights (Understanding the problem space i.e. what the problem is, what is the problem of the problem; who benefits from change), idea of how to co-create and influence the work culture and people and how to create Sustainable habits.

We are from Large Indian IT Services organisation where most of the projects follow traditional/waterfall ways of working and the mindset of the senior management is also used to this way of working for all project types (Application Maintenance, Minor Enhancement, Bug Fixing and L3 Analysis space), while these methods have their own shortfalls and projects suffer because of the methodology, many leaders still believe that by following tradtional process their problems would be solved. Through this experience report, we would like to share how Visualisation and Agile Practices rescued the waterfall project from depleting Customer Confidence and Quality of Service Delivery.

The Project team of 9 members distributed at onsite and offshore was involved in maintenance / enhancement type of work for a large Investment Bank with several new features being implemented as change requests. Team’s responsibility starts from Analysis to Deployment into Production for the work comes in ad-hoc manner. The issues and challenges by project teams were

• Longer duration to complete the change requests and ensuring an on-time delivery
• Low Customer Satisfaction and Quality of Deliverable.
• Proactively manage application issues despite higher experience of team.
• Low employee morale
• Lack of senior management participation and constant fire fighting with the customer.

Project team focused on 3 areas

Business/Client IT team

• Prioritize the change requests by highest business/end user value (Input Cadence)

• ‘Drive’ the development efforts to incrementally deliver

Teams

• Focused on speed in delivering change request by eliminating waste

• Focused on enhancing knowledge sharing by Collaboration using Visualisation Boards and daily stand up meeting

• Focus to Deliver right at First Time

Management

• Focus on the value stream (cycle time)

• ‘Drive’ Continuous Improvement (Kaizen)

• Manage impediments , making blockers visible

Within 3 months of time after team started adopting the Visualisation and Agile practices the teams and senior management could see the improvement in the areas of 

1. Increase in Balance Score Card scores from 4 to 6.5 and many areas scored 7.0/7.0
2. Productivity improvement by 25%