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.

Today’s business world is shifting swiftly and the organization needs to exhibit different styles of leadership to sustain
in this turbulent period. Leadership in large organizations is more complex as it has built-in legacy which will not
allow it to mobilize the decision making fast enough for business survival. The business environment has become
increasingly unstable, and uncertain, in just the past decade or so.Leaders need to think differently to transform the
complete ecosystem with his/her team members aligning with the external ecospace. In today’s organization, most
of the employees are not engaged (Gallup employee engagement survey 2015); when employees are disengaged
it means quite simply that companies are receiving only a fraction of the creativity and productivity of their workforce.
Leaders need to ensure company’s ability can increase so that it can surpass competition and drive growth in new
distinct situations by learning and adapting when tackling unforeseen circumstances, predicaments, complex
problems and crisis. Today’s leaders are operating in the complex domain which necessitates out of the box thinking
and innovative solutions to solve everyday problems.

This talk will highlight

a) how the proposed new leadership model will ensure enterprise agility,

b) how adaptive leadership team plan to transform operation excellence and bring agility across the layers,

c) how leadership introduces and ensures sustaining of the new cultural transformation with innovation,

d) how building adaptive project management to increase response ability,

e) How to influence emergence and achieve enterprise agility?

In today’s VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) world, every organization has to reorient itself on account of the changing business landscape. Due to the changing market context, new threats may be introduced and the old operating model will not enable the organization to act rapidly. Organization must explore
opportunities to minimize waste, reduce handovers, improve transparency, reduce bureaucracy, and empower people. In order for the organization to still maintain its relevance in the market, it has to optimize its operating models and restructure itself by introducing new frameworks, tools, processes and roles and responsibilities. Team
members have to redefine themselves in all the departments ranging from software development, project management, HR, Finance across the entire value stream till the CXO office.

In order manage the volatility in the market place the organization has to place emphasis on business and organizational agility.

This talk has been developed based on live experience and real time implementation which is proven at the workplace, specifically for large enterprises in the Information Technology domain.

Note: This paper got : Annual Editor’s Choice Award program for top papers and articles(2017 Editor’s Choice Award),PM World Journal. Congratulations! Your paper “Increasing Business Agility through Organizational Restructuring and Transformation”, published in the September 2017 edition, was selected for the award.

http://pmworldjournal.net/article/welcome-december-2017-pmwj/

This session will be a sharing from real time case study. Extraction from one of my popular linked in blog. As an agile coach how can we ensure success comes to us? Today's world business dynamics changes every now and then. Organization wants wonders to be done by the agile coaches. Every legacy large enterprise wants agile coach to clean up the whole system in shortest period of time! 

Most of the time if coaches are not a calculating risk taker they get into trouble though we call all these events as a learning but we can ourselves design for failure if we do not assess ourselves properly.

I will be speaking about several blind spots and my resolution to these issues. Which has worked for me.

I have attached all my linked in posts related to these theme.

This is one of my thought concluded after interaction with many enterprise coach Colleagues and I myself convince about this concepts which is working with me.

This talk will present to all about various cases where already enterprise coaches are applying various psychological theories and application of the same during coaching.

When we talk about Mindset it is all about our mind. If we coach do not understand deeper meaning of mind how we can stimulus diversified cultural people for mindset change.

Gil Broza aptly points out, an agile mindset combines values, beliefs, and principles that in turn guide how processes and practices are implemented. When we start dealing with people's value, belief and principles, you are getting into the world of psychology. May not be first of coaching but after 10 years of coaching for sure you will touch upon some of the psychological concepts and application of these concepts.

I will be taking you through these concepts which worked for me.

Various context where we need to apply psychological theory

What are the innumerable theories we have which can be apply during coaching.

A case study where I have achieved major success by applying some of these theories

 I have added few of my linked in posts to support this theme.

As a enterprise coach we all need to go beyond team coaching to enterprise transformation process to bring end to end agility into the organization.Coaches are connected with various business lines while coaching.They can visualize and help organization to break the organizational silos.

To be effective, the action taken must alter the interrelationship of the parts or silos. Unless one alters the relationship between or among the parts, there is little hope for effective change.

Using the principles of systems thinking offer coaches to new ways of seeing and of interpreting what we see.

As an enterprise agile coach how we can apply systems thinking at our work context a journey with me.

Sharing my learning and observations with deploying systems thinking for scaling agility into the organization.

I have all my linked in post related to this theme.

As a enterprise coach we all need to go beyond team coaching to enterprise transformation process to bring end to end agility into the organization.Coaches are connected with various business lines while coaching.They can visualize and help organization to break the organizational silos.

To be effective, the action taken must alter the interrelationship of the parts or silos. Unless one alters the relationship between or among the parts, there is little hope for effective change.

Using the principles of systems thinking offer coaches to new ways of seeing and of interpreting what we see.

As an enterprise agile coach how we can apply systems thinking at our work context a journey with me.

Sharing my learning and observations with deploying systems thinking for scaling agility into the organization.

Today’s business world is shifting swiftly and the organization needs to exhibit different styles of leadership to sustain
in this turbulent period. Leadership in large organizations is more complex as it has built-in legacy which will not
allow it to mobilize the decision making fast enough for business survival. The business environment has become
increasingly unstable, and uncertain, in just the past decade or so.Leaders need to think differently to transform the
complete ecosystem with his/her team members aligning with the external ecospace. In today’s organization, most
of the employees are not engaged (Gallup employee engagement survey 2015); when employees are disengaged
it means quite simply that companies are receiving only a fraction of the creativity and productivity of their workforce.
Leaders need to ensure company’s ability can increase so that it can surpass competition and drive growth in new
distinct situations by learning and adapting when tackling unforeseen circumstances, predicaments, complex
problems and crisis. Today’s leaders are operating in the complex domain which necessitates out of the box thinking
and innovative solutions to solve everyday problems.

This talk will highlight

a) how the proposed new leadership model will ensure enterprise agility,

b) how adaptive leadership team plan to transform operation excellence and bring agility across the layers,

c) how leadership introduces and ensures sustaining of the new cultural transformation with innovation,

d) how building adaptive project management to increase response ability,

e) How to influence emergence and achieve enterprise agility?

In today’s organization resource are regulated due to cost pressure. Everyone is working smart to best utilize the resources. Building right product which bring success is a huge challenge. Every organization exploring best mechanism to build best solution which customer embrace. Challenges are very high to satisfy the need of the diverse customers. Various process and mechanism has to deploy to ensure organization is building right solution with right speed to reach the customer before competitors. Problem with product developments are to say few examples - delivering too little, too late, Building more than we need, Building low priority items, Building right thing wrong, Poor quality of software, wrong resources, Identifying function need late in project etc.

My presentation is based on my case study I have written. Let me tell my story how we are building solutions for the customer e.g Oil and Gas, Marine , Mining,Cement industries in Agile way

Today’s Organization need rapid development and delivery of the product to satisfy the customer need and capture the market share. Organization aims at shorter lead times to gain a first-move advantage and to fulfill the current needs of the customer.

To increase the chances of a successful product, organizations must become value driven; that is, they must deliver products and services to the consumers they value the most, and they must provide those deliverables when their consumers want them.

Plan driven approach has its own place in the industry but Value driven is more meaningful and appropriate most of the circumstance where high requirement volatility.

It need mindset change from Plan driven methodology to Value driven delivery approach, it is a cultural change, complete thought process change.

Plan driven approach comes with heavy weight process which slows down the speed of execution.

Speed is require for survival and as well value which customer is asking for.

Mostly when customers start interacting with products they love, good things can happen.

World is changing rapidly so plan driven does not provide value most of the time to customer. In Information technology projects changes are rapid so plan driven is not sustainable for organization. Value driven is based on customer need, market need and more adaptable, agile in nature, where success rate is very high. Organizational transformation is a multiple dimensional improvement, this paper will demonstrate the why and how part and need for a shift in underlying culture changes. Some of the information not supposed to disclose so information shared as very generic way.

We are doing several initiative in our corporate research lab in Finland, Switzerlan, India and USA for last couple of years especially in Industrial Automation software product development .I have written several papers from our research finding,  I have shared few as a link,

As we know Lean is as much philosophy as it is approach and Agle method based on 4 value and 12 principles.The basic idea is to increase or enhance customer value while reducing waste.The agile approach implements the Lean basic concepts in software development and emphasizes the customer satisfaction and the continuous improvement of the development process . The agile approach attempts to deliver working software continuously, which enables checking by demonstrations whether the customer needs are fulfilled. The overall goal of Lean development,instead, is to reach a smooth, continuous flow of production with a minimumwaste and maximum flexibility in the process

In this session I would like to share a case study on Lean - agile(a Hybrid) approach, how we have reduced the cycle time goal, improve the product quality in Industrial Automation software product development arena

• how we have deployed Lean-Agile hybrid model.
• How we have used Lean thinking which emphasizes value-adding production.
• How we have optimizing the whole with sustainability and speed.
• How we have developed Value Generation process( Value Strem Mapping)
• Flat team structure and learning
• Waste reduction drive
• Cultural transformation in lean deployment
• Visual management for contineous production flow

 I have written one paper for QAI STC 2014 conference , and I am presenting the same paper on 4th December

Employee engagement has become a top business priority for every organization. In this rapid cycle economy, business leaders know that having a high-performing workforce is essential for growth and survival. They recognize that a highly engaged workforce can increase innovation, productivity, and bottom-line performance while reducing costs related to hiring and retention in highly competitive talent markets.

Team engagement is key to excellent project execution especially in agile project. After all, stakeholder disengagement is a major reason for productivity loss across function and industries. No wonder, enterprises are willing to know more about some practice which can helpful in better engagement, sharing and collaboration and also how it could add to high-value interactions with customers, employees and partners.

Gamification helps to increase the engagement in fun way. Gartner predicts that more than 70% of the world’s largest 2,000 companies are expected to have deployed at least one gamified application by year-end 2014.

This cases study will share the approach team has taken and the improvement team has realized through Gamification. Some of the information have been changed and the original name and figured has been modified. This paper will answer below questions

How can we the get the buy - in from team members?

How can we create more participation?

How can we increase engagement through mechanism like gamification?

How can we achieve targeted business goal with full participation from all members?

I have added the link about my paper which will publish in PM World Journal November edition.I have added the slide share which I have presented at my Office.

Acquisition of an agile mindset first requires awareness of the cognitive patterns of the old ways of thinking, such as the common belief that big up-front requirements are the correct way to approach delivering product. Agile approach starts with mindset change which is really hard to do. Most organizations, moving to an agile culture is a significant change management activity. Changing a culture is hard. People underestimate the difficulties of a culture change within their organization. Most of the managers expect quick solution and expect some miracle will happen to transform a team or an organization.

Trust and ownership play very vital role. Today’s incredibly fast-paced and competitive markets, how do we deliver products and services that delight? By unleashing the talent of every person in the organization and focusing them on shared ideas that generate meaningful business value and by trusting them. Increase ownership is also one of the key. Why do I want to do certain tasks? What are the motivation? Self-actualization

 Traditionally Project execution was driven based on the complete plan. Monitoring and control that plan so that time line can be maintained. Expertise and maturity was used to forward think as much as possible. Predict all the possible risk, issue, may appear and mitigation plan against them. System were built through plan by thinking all the possible change support. Everything were ensured with a heavy weight process to assure the success.

Today a shift of thinking is require in entire execution cycle chain. For rapid solution development and market release speed of execution is mandatory requirement.

For rapid action we need US Navy Seal type soldiers. Mindset like those soldiers , training like them.

Large organization has to change the way of project execution, it start with mindset change, cultural change, DNA change else deliverable will be slow.

How few simple steps like individual member’s accountability, collective ownership, team orientation, backup behavior, mutual trust changes team culture.

In this talk I would to like share my experience as an Agile coach about cultural transformation which helped mindset change date driven to value driven culture and improved agility. I will share the roadblock we have faced in this journey.

Large organizations over a period of time usually become a fat because of complex process and slow in decision making process and so lost agility. Agile adoption brings many transformation processes into any organization. The way team response to the changes from recruitment to delivery, all team members has to pass through the transformation process to get the output. Every individual involve in the execution process has to transform for the agility process. Especially in distributed agile team impact is more towards the organizational structure and behavior.Geo political influences and resistance for effective agile deployment and impact on execution speed is very high in distributed team. Sales, marketing, executive strategist all are part of transformation process. Traditional model of business execution is not effective any more.

All these demands organizational DNA changes for survivable.

Traditional thinking cuase of lot disruption in agile deployment process.

In this case study I will share real life story of an Agile project in Engineering organization like ABB which we have started working as a tranformation project for operational excellence from 2009 and how transformation process helped project and connected system in the organization to improve the situation.

Agile manifesto for software development put lot of stress on Individuals and interactions.

Important of customer collaboration for solution development.

Responding to change where the process challenges to all members to come out from their comfort zone.

If team has rotten apple in the basket! How can teams identify the issue and change the DNA of the rotten apple. 

What are the various symptoms which indicate team to take special care to stop team members becoming rot?

Team does not have generalist; most of them are specialist then how to create a best agile team?

We cannot hire, we cannot fire but we have to maintain the execution speed, than how should we perform and transform? Do team have cow boy performer? if yes what is the impact of outcome for agile team building?

Distributed agile with different geographical location with cultural resistance and work assignment issues.

How can Organization improve the situation? We always never get world class team, so how to transform?

Challenges comes when convincing customer to participate in agile process is an expensive process.Feedback loop is disconnected.

Tradional models are process centric and Agile is more people centric, Leadership style was more command and control and in Agile it is more on collaboration, in traditional model it was more specialist and Agile we have more generelist , self driven , self organized team. People factor is more critical in agile process.

In this talk I will share my experience with people factor and how various steps improved the situation.

Agile software process helping organization to speed of delivery(Execution Speed) with right solution but how about quality and creativity?

my Business managers says - "We need to come up with a product in shorter cycle time?time to market has to reduce "

Some group has decided that many features simply must appear in the next cycle, even though they are conflicting or there is a real resource problem, be it human or machine.Strong personalities are pushing for everything right now, and there seems to be no way around having to deliver it even though these requirements were just delivered and the true scope is not known.

This situation are common and freqent in the organization.
Team members are working on sprint after sprint and producing work product.How much time team is focusing for refactoring about the product and its quality.

With distributed agile team, developers are scattered geographically, separate location and test team are from India ,how to resolve quality problem? with the "follow sun" concept in development process for faster to market the product how to resolve quality issue? how much time team is able to spend on creative and innovative solution when who team focusing is on speed of execution?