Today Industry across various organizations is on a journey towards multiple transformation initiatives with the core aspect of bringing Business Agility to their existing construct. As they embark on the journey of transformation initiatives unfortunately each initiative operates in siloes due to reasons across limited Perspective, Partial Collaboration and Inefficient Execution approach.

The Organization Culture and hence the Mindset restricts their thoughts towards being able to transform across areas of Overall Strategy, Customer Experience, Products (& Services), People, Organization and Technology. What is the intrinsic motivation behind driving towards this huge initiative and the desire to adopting to change.

Through this session we intend to share the characteristics of a business transformation and the mindset change required to work towards the various transformation initiatives which potentially cuts across;

1. Agile Transformation :

• Ingrain the concept of “think small” – thinking away from monolithic and breaking smaller towards microservices adoption

2. Business Process Re-engineering

• Incubate “Build and own concept” with federated business objectives focused towards business process improvement and outcome based approach

3. Engineering Transformation

• Achieve Predictability ingrained while building system – Anticipate the system of failure
• Reliability Incubate – Resilient and Fault tolerant system
• Quality – Defect reduction across life cycle using Automation

4. Workforce Transformation

• Cadre building focused towards Engineering skills
• Utilizing the concept of “Core” and “innersourced” team to leverage Critical skills across the board.

5. Technology transformation - Open Source and Cloud Adoption etc

• Time to market by creating pipeline in matter of minutes
• Pattern Implementation (Immutable Infrastructure, Blue-green deployment, Canary release)
• Executable across multiple platforms and Teams. Infrastructure(Cloud) Agnostic

6. Improving Operational Efficiency.

• Cost Effective - Effective utilization of development and operational teams
• Being able to groom stories into buckets allowing to distribute across "Core" and "Innersourced" teams hence allowing flexibility of operating model,
• Speed – Improving processes and playbook adoption

Enterprises and their individual feature teams are in a rush to build DevOps Pipelines with all the right reasons.

While central teams are provisioning tools to be consumed at Enterprise level, individual feature teams are focusing heavily on building pipelines instead of building and enhancing business priorities.

This results in "duplicate pipelines” solving the same problem of automation for build, test, package, infra, deploy and release using the given toolsets. - This results into duplication of efforts and redundancy.

We intend to share our approach to build a pipeline enabled to for polygot programming languages and consumption patterns supporting various areas including.

• A single click to deploy the complete pipeline infrastructure and app pipeline
• Support multiple cloud deployment (AWS, Azure, etc…)
• Adoption of open source tools
• Clustered or non-clustered infrastructure deployments

We will also emphasize on the implementation experience of the advanced Engineering practices in the area of immutable infrastructure, Chaos Engineering, blue-green/canary deployment.

We represent the Agile Center of Excellence at our Organization and are chartered to drive the change management initiative to imbibe Agile adoption across the enterprise.

We plan to share our experience on the Organization Change Management initiative that we took up to drive Agility across the organization.  Our journey towards the derived vision and strategy to increase Agility in the system to thereby achieve:

• Nimble simplified processes.
• Ability to respond faster to change.
• And most critical: delivering increased customer value.

This is a continuous improvement journey and we initiated:

• Structured multilevel communications of CHANGE to the teams.
• Learning + Unlearning:  Structured Training and Development plans (Behavioral and Technical).
• Bringing in Gamification as a tool to get millennial team members to learn quicker.
• Approach to move from “Pyramid” to “Hour Glass” structure to align with the flat team structure.
• Pilot: Career Development Framework Aligned to Agile structure and roles.
• Bringing in change of G&O to align with Agile delivery
• Enabling Talent Fulfilment to align to the Agile roles and structure
• Pilot: Performance change management- Holistic approach to drive appropriate behavior
• Brining in systemic changes to ease Agile adoption

We represent the Agile Center of Excellence at our organization and are chartered to drive the change management initiative to imbibe Agile adoption across the enterprise.

We realized that while the external Scrum Master Certification trainings or our internal certification training would help ingrain the knowledge of a Scrum Master; However we found it extremely crucial that there needs to be some mechanism to ensure the candidates should understand the on ground situations/challenges and various behavioral scenarios that they would face wherein they need to take certain decision accordingly.

We used the gamification concept to capture our past experiences in various engagements wherein we had encountered multiple situations/challenges faced by the Scrum Masters.  This would help the newly onboarded trained Scrum Master to improve upon their decision making thought process. The concept would also have a scoring mechanism which would give them chance to improve upon their existing competency.

The gamification would focus on:

1. Problem solving in the given situation
2. Facilitation skills
3. Process Concepts
4. Stakeholder relationship
5. Building high performance teams
6. Building Early warning system

We represent the Agile Center of Excellence at our organization and are chartered to drive the change management initiative to imbibe Agile adoption across the enterprise.

As part of this initiative we have partnered with various customers on the large Agile transformation journey. As part of this journey scaling across distributed team becomes one of the most critical factors for the success of this transformation.

We plan to share our experience on how critical it is for such transformation to get the perspective of outsourced teams and imbibing their need as part of the overall roadmap.

This brings into picture the critical role that is played by the set of offshore Agile Transformation Office which will drive the change charter at offshore in alignment with the overall transformation roadmap:

• Aligning Agile Maturity :

Align with the client organization on definition and implementation plan for Agile Maturity Framework, Transformation roadmap, Governance and Change Management of the offshore teams across various partners

• Competency Enablement:

Ensuring common competency enablement for distributed teams and senior leadership across various partners to drive common Agility charter.

• Agile Transformation Change Agent:

Realignment of internal People, Processes and technology to support the transformation

• Continuous Improvement and Sustainability of Agile Maturity:

Ingrain the sustainability model across teams for the achieved Agile Maturity and continuously improve upon that.

Based on above charter we would like to share following challenges faced by the Offshore Coaches and the approaches taken by them to identify the enablers to resolve the same:

• Team Landscape: Multiple types of geographically separated teams (Onshore Centric, Offshore Centric, Near shore and Equally Distributed) and the associated challenges.

• Release based coaching approach to improve the maturity of 130+ scrum teams across 5 LOBs and 20+ Release Trains, continuously improve and sustain the same.

• Alignment to industry renowned scaling framework and the initial hurdles to implement it across location to derive the end business goal. Challenges around collaboration and infrastructure enablement across platform centric teams to enable them into Value Stream based approach.

• Common Coaching Methodology across the geographical distributed teams to ensure the uniformity of Agile execution and associated challenges i.e.  Pair Coaching 

• Behavioral Coaching i.e. One team coaching for the entire set of team across locations

• Coaching focused on the DevOps

We represent the Agile Center of Excellence at our Organization and are chartered to drive the change management initiative to imbibe Agile adoption across the enterprise.

We plan to share our experience on the Organization Change Management initiative that we took up to drive Agility across the organization.  Our journey towards the derived vision and strategy to increase Agility in the system to thereby achieve:

• Nimble simplified processes.
• Ability to respond faster to change.
• And most critical: delivering increased customer value.

This is a continuous improvement journey and we initiated:

• Structured multilevel communications of CHANGE to the teams.
• Learning + Unlearning:  Structured Training and Development plans (Behavioral and Technical).
• Bringing in Gamification as a tool to get millennial team members to learn quicker.
• Approach to move from “Pyramid” to “Hour Glass” structure to align with the flat team structure.
• Pilot: Career Development Framework Aligned to Agile structure and roles.
  • Bringing in change of G&O to align with Agile delivery
  • Enabling Talent Fulfilment to align to the Agile roles and structure
• Pilot: Performance change management- Holistic approach to drive appropriate behavior
• Brining in systemic changes to ease Agile adoption

Through this paper I intend to share experiences of an IT outsourcing vendor by partnering with its customer in its Agile transformation journey to achieve following:

• Increased focus on the end to end business process rather than platform specific development.
• Transformation of the delivery structure to increase transparency, improve business alignment, time to market and efficiency.
• Realignment of the program to focus on business goals spanning across horizontal teams rather than limiting the focus on horizontal platforms.
• Uncovering the dependencies early across platforms to minimize them and achieve highly focused vertical teams. I intend to share the changes that the vendor partner underwent to achieve above.

In the rush to be a proud owner of a large independent penthouse apartment in a huge housing society I did not realize (or did not want to) the actual reason behind this good bargain!

I ended up being party to the following list (product backlog) of pain areas (or business needs) of the society members:

• 1.Need of Generator backup to cater to the frequent power cuts at least for the common areas and lifts (I had bought my condominium on the top floor and could realize the pain!) – Must have and High Cost
• 2.Modernization of the ageing lifts across 18 buildings (thanks to the substandard quality lifts which I realized when I started staying there L ) – Must have due to high risk however huge Cost
• 3.Need for the CCTV Camera – Must have considering the frequent untoward incidents
• 4.Seepage and septic tank upgrade
• 5.Pavements, speed breakers
• 6. And the list goes on….

This resulted into the society being least valued in that area and no ROI for the members who had invested in the society.

The society committee members were clueless on where to start (prioritizing with business value) with the given evolving budget and how to manage the timeline.

 Through this report, I intend to share how I utilized following Agile practices to overcome the challenges faced by the society members for its refurbishment and converted the society into one of the most sought out society over the period of few milestones (releases)!

• 1.Prioritization(MoSCoW) of the backlog by agreeing up urgent need of the society in the given budget
• 2.Continuous planning and re-prioritization of product backlog
• 3.Outcome(Value) based agreement with various vendors
• 4.Managing discipline in the acceptance criteria and retrospection (i.e. PWD lift inspection and approval for lifts functioning with the given municipality specifications and taking learning to replicate the same for future enhancements)
• 5.Delivering end to end(INVEST) in the production in short releases ( i.e. one lift modernization end to end and commissioning of Diesel Genset end to end through incremental approach)

In the era of highly competitive environment it has become critical for business to monitor the emerging trends and closely collaborate with IT through continuous feedback mechanism.

While pursuing to adopt modern execution approach like Agile which brings in the best of industry lightweight processes and engineering practices, IT companies have stepped up their efforts towards achieving Agility and this has resulted into new and evolving roles in the teams.

Through this paper we touch upon: As the organization gears up towards Agility to achieve the desired business objective, it becomes important to align with the evolving roles and the related responsibilities. The success also depends on how effectively we can seamlessly transform the existing roles (most of the time very hierarchical) with the new roles.