We are living in an unprecedented time. Volatality in the stock market, record-high unemployment, unimaginable impact on small & large businesses, a complete shift to remote teams… the list is endless.

Leaders might feel helpless and without tools to deal with these seismic shifts. In this talk, I present a practical point of view that asks the leaders to be bold. It is not just about surviving the crisis but thriving. 

In 2009, after the 2008 financial crisis, EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) of resilient companies had risen by 10% while industry peers lost 15%.

• Do you want your organization to be one of those resilient companies?
• What are some of the concrete steps that you as a leader can take today to emerge stronger and better from the current COVID-19 crisis?
• How can you adapt to these seismic shifts happening in the market?
• How can your organization emerge stronger and better from this unprecedented situation?

The answer lies in creating an agile organization that can adapt seamlessly to the current as well as any future crises that may arise. Though agile principles have always been valuable they are even more pertinent in challenging times such as these.

In this talk, I discuss the principles and a practical approach that leaders can use to create a thriving organization.

Large companies (Banks, Insurance, and Telecom) in our community have been on their Agile Transformation journey over the past 4 to 5 years, implementing Agile in various pockets of the organization. Leaders have made significant investments of time and money on this journey and are now facing the challenge of articulating tangible benefits of the transformation and would like to measure the efficacy of the transformation.

Basically, they are asking Is Agile Working?

While there is no one simple answer to this seemingly innocuous question, we have from our experience working with these different clients devised a process that has helped us with answering this question.

In this session, we would like to share the three step process which we hope will help you.

• Firstly, we start with identifying the personas in the organization who are asking the question. And in our experience, we have identified (at least) four major personas that work for this scenario.
• Secondly, we identify the business objectives and outcomes that these personas want to achieve. This involves multiple workshops and sessions with these personas to identify their objectives and outcomes.
• Finally, we introduce a 3 * 3 matrix based on the organization lens (personas) and the maturity of Agile capabilities in the organization

The three step process identified above has proven to work irrespective of the industry it is being used in and provides a comprehensive and structured way to answer the important questions that an organization faces during the transformation. This process and the accompanying tool provided enable executives to make data backed decisions on the areas to focus on next in the transformation.