Teams and organizations have been struggling to align the mindset of people with the values and principles that are advocated by the Lean-Agile community. This challenge has been mainstream in the Lean-Agile community for close to a decade. Yet, success has been hard to come by.

One of the critical success factors is to understand your people who make the team or the organization - the purpose of why they are part of the organization! An understanding of this and then deriving an approach that aligns to that purpose will have far better receptivity and acceptance by the team.

In this talk, we discuss a two pronged approach that we have taken in our own organization. First, a macro approach that helps understand your people, their purpose of why they are with the organization, how they view the organization's ability to match to their purpose. All stated purposes may not be aligned to the organization's thought process. This approach helps you to recognize which of these purposes are underserved or overserved by the organization, which of them the organization would like to encourage or discourage and create an actionable strategy accordingly. We have used this approach in our organization for some time and we will share the outcome from our approach.

The second approach helps understand the every individual is unique. They have a unique orientation(s). We explore well-published research by Prof Derr of BYU and how it can be used in aligning the organization's mindset with its people mindset.

As a result of this two pronged approach, there is a far greater alignment in the mindset that the organization wants to promote and the alignment of its people. This alignment significantly increases the probability of people and teams understanding and accepting the principles and values that the organization is espousing. Their is a greater self-driven interest in what the organization is trying to drive to.

Over the years, with all our experience and skills, one thing has remained constant - we just can't seem to hit out deadlines! Why is this the case?

I deep dive to help explain why this would continue to be the case, unless we learn to ask the right questions and then change the way to execute to deliver to the expected deeadline. I explain how Lean thinking gives us a solid mathematical basis to understand how Cycle Time forecasting works and what we need to do improve our probability of success - not based on subjective assessment but based on actual Cycle Time distribution data.

We have been advocating agile and lean thinking for the last 20 odd years. However, our own personal productivity and effectiveness has been bogged down in a world of maze. Despite technology development and advancements. we have failed to make our own lives simple.

I have been a practitioner of Personal Kanban and GTD techniques for many years. In this workshop, I teach people the principles behind these, how these can be combined and then let people actually experience it. I take them through a step-by-step process of how this can be done and get attendees started on this amazingly powerful approach to boost your personal productivity and execute with a free mind.

Most Lean/Agile team have had limited success in establishing a culture of Continuous Improvement. Retrospectives are done but in most cases they are done without a goal, a vision. Toyota Kata, as codified by Mike Rother, is an approach to put an culture of Continuous Improvement in a team/organization.

I will share how using Personal Kanban, I have significantly improved my own ability to execute better. I will explain the key principles behind it, how to make a start and how to sustain it.

This was the Keynote session at Agile Noida 2014.

This talk will share how we are executing a 140+ man year fixed price, timebound project using Agile principle, in a distributed environment, with customer and Digite team members collaborating. 

The project is using planning principles from SCRUM and is being executed using the Kanban way. We will talk about how we went about planning this project, how we executed this project on a daily basis and how we would track and report progress to senior management.

Forecasting has always been a subject of interest to all project management teams. Team have used multiple methods (from detailed MS Project scheduling to Earned Value Management) to try and estimate when a project will finish. People spend a lot of effort to come with one precise hard date knowing fully well how their past predictions have failed, how their assumptions have been invalidated, etc.

If one were to discuss further with a Project Manager, they will understand that there is a level of confidence that a Project Manager associates with this date.  Perhaps, he is very confident (90% - it is rarely 100%)! It could be even as low as 60-70% depending on the number of issues and risks in the project. In other words, an end date is always associated with a probability, which we in our management talk and presentations, ignore or fail to highlight. In reality, a Project Manager would like to say - I am 70% confident that can deliver this scope of work within the next 3 months but 90% confident that I can deliver this in the next 4 months.

Kanban systems predict the future by extrapolating current throughput on the present backlog. Most Kanban tools use the CFD for the same. This gives you the gap between the rate at which you need to finish your work versus the rate at which you are finishing work at present. Like MS Project, it also gives one date when this backlog will finish, assuming current throughput.

Fact is that future is not definitive! Project risks change, requirements change, team resources change... the list goes on! So, just like this inadequate for traditional tools, it is inadequate to limit ourselves to this analysis in the Kanban Method also.

This session, using Kanban Tool, will demonstrate:

1. The use of probabilistic theory to have a confidence % associated with a particular delivery date
2. Once you know the gap between the current throughtput and the desired throughput, what resourcing changes can be done to bridge this gap. While it is understood that resourcing is not the only option to bridge the gap, it is perhaps the most commonly used method. 

This approach has been vetted by David Anderson and has been presented in the LSSC 2013 conference by one of my colleagues.

Fixed price (and fixed scope) projects dominate the offshore industry. These projects have offshore/onsite teams. They often have large team size (over 100s of people in one team).

Agile thinking uses team velocity/ throughput and uses that to project an end date (Kanban system) or how much scope can be accomplished in a given time duration (number of sprints in SCRUM). They assume a stable team. However, this is not applicable for projects. They experience resource and productivity ramp-up issues. Often, resources keep changing as new projects come in. Projects do not have past velocity or throughput data. Extrapolating historical data from other similar projects, though possible, is inaccurate for multiple reasons.

This talk is based on our experience of working with such project teams. They want to adopt agile methods. We show how they can adopt the Kanban Method and yet do: A) Initial Capacity Planning B) Assess the impact of scope creep to the project end date.

The session assumes a basic understanding of the Kanban method.