Bringing innovative and breakthrough ideas to market doesn't have to slow down due to multiple geographies and scale of product development. In fact that's an added reason to be agile, test the product-market-fit early and reduce risk. 
 
How can organizations benefit from being Agile at Scale For Innovation and Growth? 
 
What are the wastes in the traditional organizational structure at scale? and What does it take to build customer value delivering feature teams?
 
We'll dissect a case-study, Kamlesh Ravlani - the presenter, was involved with and learn how Google brought one of their innovative idea rapidly to market that involved multiple partners and teams in multiple geographies.

Most large scale organizations are designed on the overarching theme of local efficiency and local optimization. Local optimization focus can be seen at all levels and areas in such organizations right from hiring, approach to funding new initiatives, the way people are promoted to higher ranks, etc. Effects of such behavior is visible through organizational silos, hand-offs of partly finished work products among groups of SMEs, single function roles (such as Analyst, QA, etc.), everyone being busy, and communication barriers and distance from real user/customer challenges.

In this workshop, we'll focus on the Software Product Development area of the organizations, identify local optimization, expose the underlying lean wastes and list approaches to optimize the whole system and improve organizational agility.

Kamlesh Ravlani will help attendees see the prevailing local optimization by dissecting planning, analysis and design, and programming areas and will facilitate activities where the participants expose the underlying lean wastes.

Equipped with the knowledge of prevailing lean wastes and resulting local optimization, attendees will learn couple of approaches based on Systems Thinking that solely focus on customer value and remove lean wastes resulting in System Optimization. Attendees will also learn that System optimization also triggers and necessitates re-designing the organization to move away from local optimization in the benefit of the whole system optimization and allowing the organization to be more responsive and agile.

PS: As a reference, Kamlesh Ravlani will bring additional reference material and books for attendees to become aware and later refer to - if interested to learn further on this topic.

Organizations are frequently embarking on large scale product development initiatives involving hundreds, sometimes thousands of team members. Scale brings in additional complexity, non-linear behavior and risk making top-down and plan driven approaches ineffective and useless.

In this session Kamlesh Ravlani will discuss a case study of developing a product with multiple teams spread in two sites implementing Large-Scale Scrum (Less) elements.

Large-Scale Scrum is Scrum applied to many teams working on one product. LeSS is well balanced between empirical process control and defined elements to work with 2 to 8 teams. LeSS enables scaling the value delivery by descaling the organizational structure and optimizing the whole system.

We'll discuss, how did the teams organize their work and accelerate value delivery? How did leaders contribute value? Which experiments worked and which ones didn't?

PS: Interested participants are encouraged to visit https://less.works/less/framework/index.html and familiarize themselves with the LeSS Framework before the session. We will not cover the LeSS Introduction in this session, rather we'll directly jump in to the case study.

Organizations invest energy, effort and real dollars to stay in trend. Here's one of the trend: Agile is no longer a buzz word, Scaling Agile is. Terms like Enterprise Agile, Scaled Agile, SAFe, LESS, DAD, Agility Path are conveniently thrown around in meetings and speeches as organizations line up to get on the bandwagon of 'Scaling Agile'. Scaling Agile - from the team and product level to the organizational level has it's own benefits and challenges. Is scaling Agile right for you? Are you ready for it? If you've been thinking of scaling, you might be in luck. In this session, we will discuss grounds up approach of how to analyze and evaluate if an organization (or a business unit) is ready for scaling Agile. You'll create your own set of evaluation criteria specific to your organization's situation and learn steps your organization can take to be more prepared for scaling Agile and reap organization-wide benefits. The focus will remain on your context and not on promoting any particular scaling framework.

        "Scaling. Its about the context not the process." - Jeff Sutherland

PS: This will be a no slides, hands-on workshop. Be prepared to actively participate throughout the session.

Gallup’s latest Global Employee Engagement survey show that only 13% employees are fully engaged and rest are either not engaged or actively dis-engaged. Traditional Managers and leaders who command a position within organization, usually exercise a  bit of authority, power, as well as resources (rewards, bonuses, recognition, etc) towards engaging people. Leadership experts and executive coaches take a route that usually involves, motivating and inspiring people, building trust, uniting everyone in the organization towards common mission, values, and goals. These work great however, need a lot of time, effort and resources.

Agile Coaches on the other hand, are in different situation altogether. Most of the Agile coaches usually command no power and authority within the organization. Yet, they aspire and commit to missions such as creating highly collaborative, self-organizing and high performing teams, developing learning organizations, helping people change behaviors etc. Think about a team that simply won’t speak up, people who would always show up late to meetings, people who prefer to work from closed door offices, team members who prefer they can do anything but contribute on the team, architects who do not share the architecture details with anyone except the leaders. Oh Boy!! there are many such behaviors that hinder teams and organizations from becoming truly Agile.

In this session, I will share six simple, easy to implement strategies and associated instances how I discovered these strategies that I've found very powerful in my experience. Agile coaches and anyone with no power and authority can apply any of these strategies to boost employee engagement, neutralize the environment from Whilte Elephants and promote collaboration. The session will be interactive and will involve simple yet really fun activity. Get ready to cheer and make some noise!!