Large transformation programs are the need of the hour given the massive amount of digital transformations that are undertaken by organizations. Be it moving away from on-premises systems to cloud or building data lakes or analytics programs or transforming business processes through an industry standard SaaS solution, it often turns out to be a multi-year, multi-vendor program with enormous amounts of dependencies.

Agility is being able to respond to change quickly. As Andy Hunt says, one test that can tell whether one is agile or not is their ability to adapt quickly to a significant change in technology, business or market conditions. Small iterations, fast feedback, incremental development, faster time to market are typical hallmarks of any agile program.

Then is agility in large transformation programs an oxymoron if those two look poles apart? How can one bring agility in large programs where the value delivery is at the end of a long program timeline, or where the word ‘change’ is often frowned upon.

This talk brings to you challenges and lessons learnt from bringing in agility in transformation programs such as ERP implementation, cloud transformation, consolidation or migration efforts. The talk will discuss examples of where these efforts worked or failed, why those were used, how it was implemented and its benefits and influence on bringing agility in large programs.

Let us together discover what is the art of possible or whether it's really an oxymoron.

“How we operate matters more than how we organize” says the latest industry report from the joshbersin company. The Operating models indeed have a huge impact on the value organizations deliver. The time-tested operating models with robust processes, hierarchy, and optimization focus may bring stability, however those may not be flexible to adapt to the rapidly changing business environment. Modern agile operating models center around products, customer experience and value. Those help organizations to innovate and gain a competitive advantage eventually leading to a learning and collaborative culture that fosters an agile mindset.

 Through our experience and research of being a part of “Agile Operating Model Neighborhood” at Tata Consultancy Services, we would like to present the levers of an organization’s operating model that shape the thinking to bring agility. We would discuss how organizations produce outstanding outcomes such as product launch time reduction from a year to 3 months, revenue growth of 15%, operating profit growth 22% and so on.

We would like to take you through three important levers such as flexibility in organization structure design, minimizing dependencies to maximize flow and centering their models around purpose (as described in TCS’ Growth and Transformation framework Business 4.0). For each of these levers, we would discuss examples of organizations where it worked or failed, why this lever was used, how it was implemented and its benefits and influence on nurturing an agile mindset.

The scrum guide says that "A scrum team is self-managing, meaning they internally decide who does what, when, and how." One of the most important responsibilities of a scrum master (or a coach or even a leader) towards a scrum team is coaching them in self-management. Self-managed teams are empowered to inspect the way they work and outcomes achieved and adapt themselves to be better. These teams are autonomous in several aspects of managing themselves. Autonomy is also an important pillar of intrinsic motivation as per Daniel Pink’s book “Drive”

As part of coaching agile teams, we experimented with establishing various dimensions of autonomy within a team based on work done by various thought leaders. It helped the teams to understand where they stand on various aspects of autonomy, what can be taken up as an improvement backlog as well as what help do they need from the environment or ecosystem.

This session lays down these important dimensions along with the format of the workshop for teams and a toolkit that will help the teams to understand autonomy details, identify where they are and what they can do to be more autonomous.

The session will help agile team coaches, scrum masters or leaders to discuss team autonomy in an interactive way with their teams and identify improvement areas.

"It’s all about 'the mindset'. The mindset needs to change." Sounds familiar? I am sure all of us involved in changing or transforming the way of working to bring agility have heard this when we work with teams, managers, business or leadership.

Agile way of working brings in transformation in the way of working and sows the seed for continuous improvement being better than what we are. Literature such as the agile manifesto, scrum, lean talk about the values and behaviors we need to embrace. People however find it easier to start with learning the practices, techniques and the new language rather than focusing on the new values or mindset to embrace. This surely takes them a bit forward, however to bring in and sustain the change, it’s the mindset that matters. Changing the mindset is probably the most difficult thing, but without it, its very easy to get caught up in mechanics of practices or just following those namesake. Its often the responsibility of the coaches, scrum masters and change leaders to bring in this change.

In this session, I plan to speak about agile mindset that matters to ensure we bring in agility in our way of working and achieve the right outcomes. I would like propose a new model designed by me from my experience in practicing and coaching agile methods to approach the mindset change for people involved in software development. The model presents concepts that are most important to be inculcated by everyone involved for e.g. Empiricism, Transparency, Continuous Improvement, People centricity and Collaboration as well as that matter for specific roles such as Team, Business and Leadership. I would discuss on how each of the concepts in the model helps to bring in agile mindset as well as means to bring it in our teams or stakeholders.

I would pick up three concepts as an example from the model and elaborate on why this concept is important to build the agile mindset that matters, how to understand whether this concept is embraced by the concerned people, and how to identify dysfunctions with the specific concept. I would also share means that can be experimented with the concerned people to inculcate the specific concept. The means would be illustrated through activities with the audience to immerse them into the way.

As enterprises begin their journey on DevOps maturity, its an uphill task to get the teams immersed in the new way of working. While the team has to continue producing value in their current agile teams, they need to gear up as well as envision the future. The Learning seems to be never enough with the new concepts, practices, tools and practices come into play. DevOps concepts demand a new way of thinking, a new culture to be embraced. The teams need to learn, experiment and apply concepts on their current legacy applications without affecting their deliverables, its nothing short of changing the tyre while the car is running. The problem complicates when the team size is larger, very typical in any enterprise, its like responding to hundred voices in one heart.

This is a story of one such journey of learning, sharing, experimenting to reinvent the application development team with DevOps on the mind. We would talk about how we defined our learning journey, empowered the teams through digital and in person training, used hackathons to experiment and learn, gamified learning by bringing teams together to talk and galvanized existing legacy applications. We would illustrate our mechanisms through activities with the audience to immerse them into the way.

The core tenets of DevOps are to look at bottlenecks and remove those to achieve faster release frequency and improved quality. When looking at areas causing bottlenecks, Security and Acceptance Testing soon come across as constraints needing attention. Then debate starts if security needs of competitive business environment is actually slowing down the DevOps effectiveness? Can both go hand in hand or needs to be treated separately? Same with acceptance testing. Is it possible to have a thorough acceptance testing while still delivering at a faster cadence? The objective of this session is to examine these aspects carefully and see if we can have best of both the worlds. So while DevOps receives the support and participation of security for accelerating releases, how can security and acceptance can take advantage of DevOps to support a more efficient secure program and create a "Trust and Verify" mindset insisted by Gartner.

Being agile enables the software development groups in Enterprises to deliver high value and high quality software with speed. However legacy applications along with the overall Enterprise landscape pose their own challenges that are outside of the scrum framework to solve.

Multiple small scrum teams though working on separate applications need to be cohesive with a big picture. As a portfolio lead, who owns multiple applications and teams related to a portfolio within an Enterprise is a Chicken in scrum terminology. The expectation from the role is that of leader, scrum master as well as an Architect providing technical and functional oversight to the teams within the portfolio. This session is about a retrospective of our work life as a Portfolio Lead who takes care of multiple scrum teams, and applications. We would like to speak about the top 3 challenges faced such as Scaling Production Support / Knowledge Retention for applications delivered through Scrum, Impact of Organizational Transformation initiatives on the scrum teams, People challenges in scrum teams and Multiple Stakeholder Expectations / Conflict Management through real life examples of our work. We would retrospect what we did, and discuss and debate what worked well, and what did not.

Enterprises are complex, and so are the development groups within those. Being agile definitely enables the software development groups to deliver high value and high quality software with speed for even within an Enterprise.

However legacy applications along with the overall Enterprise landscape pose its own challenges that are outside of the scrum framework to solve. Multiple Small scrum teams though working on separate applications need to be cohesive with a big picture. As a portfolio lead, who owns multiple applications and teams related to a portfolio within an Enterprise is a Chicken in scrum terminology. The expectation from the role is that of leader, scrum master as well as an Architect providing technical and functional oversight to the teams within the portfolio. The idea is to be a leader and not a manager in the true spirit of scrum.

This session is about a retrospective of my work life as a Portfolio Lead who takes care of multiple scrum teams, and applications. I would like to speak about the top 3 challenges faced such as Scaling Production Support / Knowledge Retention for applications delivered through Scrum, Impact of Organizational Transformation initiatives on the scrum teams, and Multiple Stakeholder Expectations / Conflict Management through real life examples of my work. I would retrospect what I did, and discuss and debate what worked well, and what did not during this journey of mine.

The constant quest in one’s mind to find Nirvana, of excelling the way we work, is never ending. Starting to do scrum is only the beginning of 'Being agile'. 'Being agile' attributes to constantly re-inventing and improving the way we develop software.

We would like to present a case study of a development group that has adopted agile, and not shied away from trying newer things to keep scrum adoption true to the spirit of agile. We would discuss seven most powerful initiatives we practised over last 6 years to keep our developers and business excited about being agile and maximizing business value delivered. These initiatives defined the way we constantly evolved, got the new joinees of this group into the culture of agility and ensured that we are relevant to the need of hour.

This talk would comprise of motives behind thinking about these initiatives, vision, road map as well as the way we executed them by engaging our whole development group. We would also like to highlight challenges we faced, and the benefits we derived out of these initiatives.

In the age of continuous deployments, where Googles and Facebooks of the world push newer features every now and then, without any down time to millions of users! Enterprises and Users of internal IT systems within Enterprise are still stuck with old time consuming processes that take ages to churn out new features to business. Why can’t Enterprises have this fun!

This is a story of an Enterprise that adopted and got mature in its Agile Adoption. The sponsors could see value every sprint, but it took time to translate this value to end users. Drive to sustain agility as well as getting things out to end users quickly needed to take a great momentum.

Experimenting with DevOps came as a natural extension to this Agile-Scrum adoption. We would like to talk about the how the idea of DevOps implementation in this Enterprise originated, the various challenges met at the initial stages, carving the road map and our journey. We would highlight the benefits that we reap out of this effort as well as share best practices from what we have learnt.