Context:

Bangalore City Management wants to build another Smart City and have a challenge to release on time, frequently, with high quality. In a similar project in the past, they tried few methods (guess them), and nothing worked. Now, they are going to execute the same project using SAFe.

Movie Synopsis

A smart city with basic necessities like residential area, School, Hospital, Power Plant, Police Station, Fire Station, Super Market, Museum etc, incrementally. Each of these will be built by a specialized team and will be integrated often, to build the overall city. More importantly the incremental built spaces need to payoff for next increment as early as possible.

Roles in Offer:

Multiple High-Delivery Scrum Teams developing the city in parallel, Smart Scrum Masters, Visionary Product Owners, Chief Product Owner, Thinking Release Train Engineer, System Team, Release Team are all going to be part of it

Cast:

Everyone attending the session will cast a role, and you get to choose the role you want

Key Learning of this roleplay

Key learnings of this roleplay are

• Integration of city components
• Architectural runway of city throughout the journey
• Portfolio backlog converted into program backlog, team and sprint backlog
• Devops, Release and other teams to contribute
• WSJF and cost of delay

Duration: 2 hours

# Participants: 75-200

While Agile adoption and practice is a complex model for mid/large sized Product companies to implement, we see a need for some sort of framework that can help drive it.

Why do you need to be Agile? Where do you start, when do you start, and also how do you start? These are questions that reside in most of us during early stages of adoption. Here is a 9-Step breakdown that will help companies and teams adopt multiple Agile methodologies in different situations and scenarios. Maturing it from a ‘Persona Perspective’ framework helps the ‘decision-maker’ have a case for investment, further evaluate if it works, and improve it all through!!

The discussion and idea is just my proposal that should help a team or an organization and is need not be the only way to implement Agile in an organization. Further detailing into these phases can form an overall Mindmap structure that is open to adopting from an organization and people standpoint.

This is an extremly simple topic with a very complex answer. I have spent last 3 years experimenting and working with lot of people to understand what happens to the so called Manager role in Agile world. With a self organizing, empowered team, does Manager still have a role? Do you shelve these senior people who drove all your deliverables in the past for your company? Do you just let go the technical expertize these people bring along?

The research information around the experiment and results will be shared and am very positive that this will help lot of organizations move forward with great benefits. We will see how certain gaps that are created with introduction of Agile can be solved through these senior professionals. At the same time teams don't need to compromize or business doesn't need to compromize on new found agility by adopting any of the Agile practices.

The very next discussion that I will touch base as part of this presentation is the role of Project Leads. Many Leads resist movement to Agile because they feel their growth will now be stagnated. Is this true? It is again an interesting data set captured by talking to Leads in waterfall world and understanding what they really aspire for.

Looking forward to sharing my insights with real implementation and resulting data that I'm sure each of you will benefit from.

What does productivity mean to the team? What does sponsor want from a team? What happens to Leads and Managers? A ROLE PLAY by JP and Naveen

The topic assumes that the organization is medium or large sized (about 2K+ employees) and has recently migrated or is in the process of transitioning to Agile methodologies. Further, stakeholders are aligned to the idea and they are wholly in understanding of what and why they want to go (gone) Agile.

Do you see a scenario in the corridor where a Manager is talking to another Manager – “What happens to us in future? Where do we go? Are we required in this organization? Agile is killing us.”

Do you see Leads (by designation) saying to his Manager “Hey my career was set to take off – I was to become a Senior Lead, and a Manager in 4 years. Agile has made me an average team member and stalled my growth.”

What about a team member to another saying “Man, there is no point in increasing the velocity – that becomes a bench mark for us and we need to sprint at that pace for the rest of our lives! I also had lot of time for myself in chunks when other functional group was slogging and I could read a book, attend a training, catch-up with my friends, blah, blah, blah. Let us add substantial buffer in estimates to have a comfortable life and commit on minimal ideal hours. Let us rock as a team!!!!”

Or a Manager talking to HR “I’m unable to hit the bell curve as an entire team is involved in successful delivery of the project” and HR saying “Sorry, but you are violating global HR policy by not doing so – there ought to be a superior performer and a poor performer.”

You may hear a team member saying “I was headed to becoming a super DBA and now you are asking me to pick testing tasks, web development task, etc. If I don’t spend 100% of my time in my domain, I will be termed as jack of all trades and master of none. This is not aligning with my career development plans.”

A VP saying to another “Not sure if Agile has increased our productivity, how do I know it is productive? I understand teams are empowered and self-organizing, but are they self-productive? And what is this fuss about Managers’ not happy with “no-role”. Nothing should change for them.”

A workshop where JP and Naveen play various characters to address these challenges in an Indian office context. Welcome to an enthralling way of presenting the core human challenges in Agile adoption and implementation.