As organizations commence their journey towards better business agility one of the key factors that determines the success of such an initiative is whether there is strong and meaningful ongoing coaching of teams and leadership.

To accomplish that, it is critical that organizations realize early-on that continuous improvement and success can be enabled, encouraged, and assisted by a robust agile coaching team, one that can help them transcend the mundane and help achieve extraordinary results.

At IHS Markit we have created a highly effective, empowered, and deeply impactful agile coaching team that works across silos to enable the organization to take firm and confident steps towards better business agility.

We have seen undeniably great results that are clear and measurable with this approach, and wish to share the story of this extraordinary team and their phenomenal contributions towards successfully initiating and advancing business agility across the organization.

India and the ability of Indian teams has matured significantly. Many organizations have not adapted to the pace of growth or aspirations of their people, as was the case for IHS Markit. We will share our journey, which we call Updraft – an initiative founded on support, trust and autonomy which has enabled us to truly recognize the huge potential of highly intelligent and motivated individuals. It has guided us to make changes to team structures, intent-based local leadership, local facilities, hiring, Agile mindset, local office culture and much more.

The outcome is delivering sustainable, long-term change, building a strong culture and creating growth for our colleagues; all while building great products and capitalizing on the growth in value that India has to offer.

In this talk you will learn about the 3 simple ingredients that have made Updraft successful for us and something that could work for you.

In the current work environment agility is one of the most important and critical leadership skills. Leaders need to be agile in order to have the ability to anticipate change and take action amid rapidly shifting conditions.

 Involvement of Leadership in Agility is Key.This session is for leaders, aspiring leaders, Scrum Masters and any agile team members who want to coach leaders. In this talk I'll be sharing my experience relating to how I started working with leaders to garner their support to transform their teams towards being agile teams. It is about how I coached those leaders, the challenges I faced, and the successful outcomes that were achieved in this interesting journey.

Knowing challenges and taking them over is what we preach. In reality making it happen is a true success. Agility as a practice when implemented speaks about the thresholds, we debate and blame the stake holders of the process but in reality, we are failing to deliver the essence of agility to the bottom level.  If it is just forcing on to the stake holder we call to practice, we can say we are an agile environment but is it how it is supposed to be?

When asked this question time and again, what we truly understand is we are not considering the integral value agile can offer when the bottom level leaders are the true agilist. Are we really not considering this to happen? How do we work to make this happen? Are frameworks built to fit or should we tailor them for the right fitment?

Making leaders believe that they are not shepherds but leaders of teams they work with, is essence of implementing agility all across the environment. Pragmatism is essential at every level of interaction when we decide to implement agility. If the Scrum Master is the one who has to do it, he should be giving more thought on how to make Agility a reality than keeping it to the documented success stories.