In my experience when people who are newly introduced to Scrum they always had challenges in having better understanding of Scrum which is most of the time due to in-adequate training, support or guidance received during their transition path.

Most of the times I found that people are engaged and carry better understanding when new concepts are taught/explained/experienced through 'fun' & interactive learning.

Through this simulation activity we will cover below aspects through interactive,fun, engaged & collaboration based exercise

• Sprint
• Timebox
• Business value in product delivery
• Sprint Goal
• Definition of Done
• Product Vision
• Scrum Events
• Scrum Values (Openness, Courage, Respect, Focus, Commitment)
• Sprint Backlog
• Empiricism

The activity consists of 3-4 rounds (all of equal duration) where team would be going through the journey of product development & execution in Sprint fashion.

According to neuroscience - human Mind Power system consists of easily learned techniques that help you focus and direct your thoughts, and the first technique you’ll learn is visualization.

‘Visualization is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Visualization through visual imagery has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and concrete ideas since the dawn of humanity.’ Using visualization techniques in any gathering help to inspire creativity, focus and shared vision.

During our day to day working environment - especially in Agile WoW (irrespective of the frameworks we use) we have lot of opportunities to plan, strategize, brainstorm, innovate and generate ideas. These will always be incomplete without the application of Visualization techniques. Visualization techniques can be successfully applied to identify common goals, understand customer expectations, collaborate with individuals (multiple teams), and identify areas for continuous improvement.

Many a times, key events in our workplace are conducted in vaccum where people feel they are not engaged or disconnected or feel there is no value out of these. We can turn the table around completely by giving the dimension of Visualization using Visual Metaphors.

Agile methods have provided a framework for improving innovation, but there has been a missing piece - Visual metaphors (influenced by Innovation Games ideas) offer ideas, tools & practices to aid the innovation process at its most critical point - product management, particularly visioning & roadmaps identification. Key to innovation is creating collaborative, interactive, visually-oriented, fun, business-driven-environment for people.

In this interactive workshop participants would be experiencing some of the popular & widely used Visual Metaphors that can assist in their Agile journey through which they can experience the power of these tools to generate better visibility, collaboration opportunities, sense making and continuous improvement opportunities.

Where can it be applied?
• Business Review Meetings
• As a tool for prioritization
• Planning, Backlog refinement and Retrospective meetings
It is time for some ‘hands-on’ and ‘minds-on’ to know more about innovation through visualization.

According to neuroscience - human Mind Power system consists of easily learned techniques that help you focus and direct your thoughts, and the first technique you’ll learn is visualization.

‘Visualization is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Visualization through visual imagery has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and concrete ideas since the dawn of humanity.’ Using visualization techniques in any gathering help to inspire creativity, focus and shared vision.

During our day to day working environment - especially in Agile WoW (irrespective of the frameworks we use) we have lot of opportunities to plan, strategize, brainstorm, innovate and generate ideas. These will always be incomplete without the application of Visualization techniques. Visualization techniques can be successfully applied to identify common goals, understand customer expectations, collaborate with individuals (multiple teams), and identify areas for continuous improvement.

Many a times, key events in our workplace are conducted in vaccum where people feel they are not engaged or disconnected or feel there is no value out of these. We can turn the table around completely by giving the dimension of Visualization using Visual Metaphors.

Agile methods have provided a framework for improving innovation, but there has been a missing piece - Visual metaphors (influenced by Innovation Games ideas) offer ideas, tools & practices to aid the innovation process at its most critical point - product management, particularly visioning & roadmaps identification. Key to innovation is creating collaborative, interactive, visually-oriented, fun, business-driven-environment for people.

In this interactive workshop participants would be experiencing some of the popular & widely used Visual Metaphors that can assist in their Agile journey through which they can experience the power of these tools to generate better visibility, collaboration opportunities, sense making and continuous improvement opportunities.

Where can it be applied?
• Business Review Meetings
• As a tool for prioritization
• Planning, Backlog refinement and Retrospective meetings
It is time for some ‘hands-on’ and ‘minds-on’ to know more about innovation through visualization.

In our workplace - at some point of time, we have all experienced the elephant in the room—a situation probably no one wants to discuss/admit openly or obvious truths that are unaddressed.

When these issues are not addressed, it can create uneasiness, not trustworthy environment there by leading psychologically not safe workplace. More importantly a toxic work culture settles in that can wreak havoc throughout the organization thus limiting the ability as a team to grow and create a learning and innovative organisation.

In this session (more of engaged workshop) , we will be using Liberating structures for people to share their experiences and learn from others, while also providing them a safe environment to discuss the elephant in the room (their version) they might have experienced in their workplace.

By the end of session participants may probably come up with some ideas to address and tame their elephant.

Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland founders of Scrum mentions that Scrum is a framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining complex products through (as mentioned in Scrum guide).

In my experience when people who are newly introduced to Scrum they always had challenges in having better understanding of Scrum which is most of the time due to in-adequate training, support or guidance received during their transition path.

Most of the times I found that people are engaged and carry better understanding when new concepts are taught/explained/experienced through 'fun' & interactive learning.

Through this simulation activity we will cover below aspects through interactive,fun, engaged & collaboration based exercise

• Sprint
• Timebox
• Business value in product delivery
• Sprint Goal
• Definition of Done
• Product Vision
• Scrum Events
• Scrum Values (Openness, Courage, Respect, Focus, Commitment)
• Sprint Backlog
• Empiricism

The activity consists of 3-4 rounds (all of equal duration) where team would be going through the journey of product development & execution in Sprint fashion.

In Agile ways of delivering software products we often hear people talking about adopting 'Best' practices to improve their delivery. Common buzz in the industry is that look for BEST practices in Agile ways of working we should look for BEST practices.

If you try looking for BEST practices definition in Wiki you get -

A best practice is a method or technique that has been generally accepted as superior to any alternatives because it produces results that are superior to those achieved by other means or because it has become a standard way of doing things, e.g., a standard way of complying with legal or ethical requirements.

In my view, Best Practice must surely be able to demonstrate a superior outcome achieved because of the way the thing has been done.

If “Company A” had success with a particular initiative then should the same approach be followed for “Company B” to attain the same result ?

And most importantly do we really need to look for Agile BEST practices ?

Can we think of using System Thinking combined with Lean/Agile principles for Operation/Support Teams ?

Agree, the most common thought is to use the Kanban approach. But will only Kanban approach can solve the problems for teams which are very much into executing ITIL practices for ages ?

In organizations having significant operations in the area of Application Maintenance/BAU Agile implementation is not easy (forget about scaling in the first place).

Considering the nature of work when compared to the product development space where the focus is on knowledge work significant changes required in cultivating Agile mindset (there is no text book/standard approach).

Here in our organization we have tried and experimented on using Kanban (along with combination of Lean/System Thinking approaches) to create an agile organization that focus on automation, value driven delivery that efficiently support growth and enable to accelerate innovation.

In this talk, you will understand how we have used System Thinking approach and lean thinking to achieve the above mentioned goals.

Identification of bottlenecks through visualization and value stream mapping has helped in working towards waste elimination there by creating smoother flow in the system.

Once the team is in a position to visualize the workflows they are enabled to focus on out-of-the-box thinking and work towards building innovative ideas to improve lead time of the end-to-end processes.

Sufficient collaboration opportunities between business and teams would help to deliver the value there by establishing the agile mindset.

At a first look, human behavior appears as an inexplicable mess. Why do we behave irrationally? Why is it so hard to change? What is happiness and why does it seem to escape us?

The Control Heuristic approach offers a new perspective to answer these questions and provides a guiding light to shed the darkness of the subconscious resistances that prevent us to behave like the man or woman we want to be.

In Agile ways of delivering software products we often hear people talking about adopting 'Best' practices to improve their delivery.

If you try looking for BEST practices definition in Wiki you get -

A best practice is a method or technique that has been generally accepted as superior to any alternatives because it produces results that are superior to those achieved by other means or because it has become a standard way of doing things, e.g., a standard way of complying with legal or ethical requirements.

In my view, Best Practice must surely be able to demonstrate a superior outcome achieved because of the way the thing has been done.

Do we have BEST practices in Agile ?

As per Cynefin framework - Agile practices fall under 'Complex' domain category.

In the complex domain, we find the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect and the results are unpredictable. Here, we need to create safe to fail experiments and not attempt to create fail safe design. We cannot solve complex problems with best or good practices alone.

In this domain we get emergent order and practice that is often unique.

Emergent practice, behavior or order results and the approach is to:-

PROBE — SENSE — RESPOND

Probe - Experimental input

Sense - Failures or successes

Respond - Decide what to do

When BEST practices can be applied for Simple problems why should we do the same for problems where there is a demand of exploration/innovation ideas to arrive at a solution - that is where majority of our Projects/Product implementations fall under :)

Just because “Company A” had success with a particular initiative doesn’t mean that “Company B” can plug-and-play the same process and predict the same result.

• BEST practices forces one to stay in 'Fixed' mindset
• BEST practices forces to minimize experimentation
• BEST practices are always Static as they are applicable for specific issue/cause

Working in Agile ways is always about exploration (experimenting) and making course correction (inspect & adapt). Agile is not silver bullet, approach that works for one organization/team may not work for other and at the same time Agile is not a recipe of success either !!

By nature Agile is about working towards flexibility, improvisation and continuous learning & exploration culture. None of the teams/organizations can stay in successful path when they run behind 'BEST' practices. The moment they stick to Best/Good practices teams lose the focus of staying in Continuous learning/improvement journey.

Agile Practices/processes that work for one team/organization/program may not work well for another. So Scrum Masters/Agile Coaches/Management/teams should always look to learn from their mistakes and assess before taking next steps.