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

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.

This year at XP2018 I had an opportunity to meet Kent Beck and talk to him about his latest realisation and Work In Focus - 3X, The Product Development Triathlon and it’s 3 phases - Explore, Expand and Extract.

Ok wait, what did we just talked? Phases?? Are we waterfalling in our thoughts?

Are we talking to same Kent who proposed XP which killed the whole ‘Elaborated Planning and Phases’ family of Waterfall regime and then TDD that just buried alive the ‘Testing Phase’ and made entire world re-think about the testing approach? What’s wrong with him? Why is he now supporting Waterfall? Or should we worry that Agile is Dead is Dead is Dead??

In this session I will talk you through Kent’s discovery and realisations when he was working with Facebook. How things that he felt he offered to world and which helped world create new success, suddenly appeared missing here at Facebook, and then how he discovered what is working for Facebook and help them staying at the top of world Social Media Market.

Once upon a time, when Agile was still finding it’s feet and Traditional Management with waterfall was norm, there was a Manager for every team. Everybody wanted to be managers because they had power and were paid better. There were two ways to this role – 1) Be really good with your work -which means you be the best engineer, or 2) Be really a smart executor and get things done. Either case wasn’t a fair scenario. If a good engineer became manager, he hated his new job because he really wanted to be an engineer and didn’t like dealing with people. And if a smart executor got to be Manager, he struggled to command respect of his team as he struggled with technical knowledge and team’s questions. Corporate politics, Bell Curve and evil competition become part of DNA and hence with ask of performance, the designed path was set to create failures, frustrations and politics.

As a response to this and much more, Agile Revolution happened and and POOF! The managers were gone!

• So what happened to Managers?
• Will there be no such role in future?
• Can Organisations really be functional, be on track without Managers?
• Is industry ready to let go of all the knowledge that Managers have gathered generations of people management and corporate dynamics?

This workshop intends to explore the same. During this hands-on workshop, we will understand the role that’s needed for Agile Organisations and how Agile Managers, or whatever name we want to give to this new needed role, will offer to our previous role- Manager. In this workshop we will explore the characteristics of traditional Managers, and design a new role based on the need of an Agile Organisation. And for doing that we will first discover the need of an Agile Organisation. So in this 1 hour action pack workshop, we will be able to create a case for existing role of Manager and how it can be best utilised for an Agile Organisation.

What do you enjoy most with your coffee talk friend, that friend with whom you can be yourself, seek help and express ideas? Does anyone even need an answer to understand the feeling?

That’s what team, in fact every Organizational role, expects from a ScrumMaster. ScrumMaster is a Servant Leader and not just another manager role from fancy Agile/Scrum jargon. Now a regular mindset is to operate out of authority associated with a certain role. ScrumMasters generally come across saying things like: My team doesn't turn up for ceremonies on time. My team doesn't listen to me, but argues on Scrum framework. It's difficult to make my team follow Scrum framework. How to motivate my team, they don't see value in me. On the surface of it, other Coaches and ScrumMasters will say you as ScrumMaster don't know how to do your job, OR explain your team about Scrum Framework, OR may be you don't know the framework yourself. NO!! That's not the point. All that is fine, you need to know that and I am sure you know 70% of that and you can always scale-up your knowledge on that. But what you don't know is that you still haven't become your team's Servant Leader. How do you become one? 

In this talk I am not going to talk about what and why of role ‘ScrumMaster’, we already know that. But I want to shed some light on the most ignored part – How. What human aspect makes a ScrumMaster a friend, philosopher and guide? Can anyone who is a CSM, or SAFe SM or Scrum.org SM can be one such ScrumMaster? In short, I want to talk about qualities that make you a ScrumMaster material. For a ScrumMaster to be able to facilitate anything, be it process, cross-functional team, motivation or conflict resolution, it is really important to be able to connect with his team members and enroll them in his vision and mission of creating a dream team. He should be able to create a space of trust where individuals feel safe to share.