Transformation has become the buzz word of the times with it spreading over various manifestations like agile, devops, business agility, organizations transformation etc. At the same time most transformation initiatives are driven in a global organizational and team environment.

In a global environment, we look at scaling and standardization quite frequently. Organizations train everyone alike with same content, same philosophy, same tools, and standards yet we struggle in producing exceptional/uniform results that are sustainable. We see teams falling back to their old ways of working leaving a question on the transformation itself.

Transformation is often seen as a series of changes in the way we work, the process rules, the way we are structured and several other things. However none of the changes mentioned above guarantees a transformation that is sustainable in delivering business value.

In this talk, we explore

• The possible areas to look at why often we fail in sustainable transformation
• Even after a transformation exercise, why do organizations have to still deal with areas of accountability, commitment and ownership and delivery at cadence.
• What really matters in a transformation exercise, are we focusing on the right things?
• Essential ingredients for a sustainable transformation

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Many of us including leaders get confused when it comes to "role of leaders" in developing technical agility across the teams of an organization. When we delve deeper, we often find that leaders do not think they have a role in it and consequently they even don't develop technological savvy which is a critical leadership competency that has emerged globally. It has a deep connection with enabling technical agility in the teams.

In this 45 mins talk, I'll define a leadership competency called "Developing technological savvy" and explain its deep relationship with developing technical agility at team and organizational level.

I'd then be sharing my experience as a Leader as well as a Coach, how I develop my own technological savvy regularly and how I help leaders develop theirs.

Finally, I would share a few myths and enablers to increase awareness in leaders on how & why they should develop technical agility of their teams across the organization to get real benefits of "agile ways of working".

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When we face a challenge what we often see is the 85% things which we might not have control over and end up feeling helpless. Being in a VUCA(Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) world we face situations like these quite frequently both in professional and personal life. Imagine if you are in one such situation yet you get good results, how great it would be? Because there are still a few things which we call the 15% solution to a problem which we fail to see as its like our shadow and best seen by others.

15% solution is similar to moving a few rocks to change the course of a river. This activity is exactly about moving a few rocks to find great solutions to the challenges we are facing NOW, just thinking about what is the best you can do without more resources, authority or permissions, by just doing the things in your control

In this session we would explore 15% solution along with Troika

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In this topic, I will share my own journey to be an agile coach. and I will not talk more about agile or Scrum, but will introduce you some skills to survive in this new era (mobile internet).

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I am Zahid Hasan, an Agile practitioner from Bangladesh working for ICT segment for last 14 years. I like to discuss about Agile governance & governance supported Agile practices which helps to increase the effectiveness of agile team. it will cover the importance & principles of Agile governance, its manifestos, life cycle, milestones etc.

Also, cover the steps to govern agile team & Agile framework. Hope to describe widely the agile governance practices with examples; and the key challenges to govern agile team. There will be a hands-on to define and measure metrics for agile governed team by using Goal Question Metrics (GQM).

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“What does a great employee experience look like from end to end?”

The customer experience is about the customer's perception of everything that happens when he or she interacts with our service.

The bitter reality is that most organizations are just focused on customer experience, ignoring their employees who should be at the center of this. This creates a disengaged employee base within an organization.

Similar to the customer experience, the employee experience is the employee’s perception of everything that happens when he or she interacts with our company. Seeing the world through the eyes of our employees is a first prerequisite to improving or designing a great employee experience - and creating a higher level of employee engagement.

Done well, design thinking for employee experience will promote a virtuous cycle, generating higher levels of employee satisfaction, greater engagement, and higher productivity for the company. And generating the higher level of employee engagement is a critical aspect of agile leadership.

Are you, as an agile leader, providing your employees with the most engaging experience to actively participate and improve how the entire organization moves toward agility?

P.S.: A study by employee engagement measurement platform CultureAmp shows a strong correlation between employee engagement scores and Glassdoor ratings (CultureAmp, 2019). If we compare the Glassdoor ratings of mature agile organizations to overall Glassdoor ratings, we see statistically significant and measurably increased ratings.

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'Coaching' as an Intervention
. Enabling an environment to leverage Coaching as a methodology to empower Organizations
. A live demo of a typical coaching session to get an appreciation of the
power of Coaching

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The craft of Agile Coaching fundamentally requires deep, insightful, meaningful communication. In everyday execution, this typically involves a coach and the coachees having a conversation, or dialog. However, there are other ways that an Agile Coach and their coachees can connect – nonverbal communication.

Explore the different aspects of nonverbal communication in the domain of the Agile Coach! This workshop overviews nonverbal communication in Agile Coaching and provides a starting point for developing this critical skill.

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Scrum practices establish visibility, remove impediments, and promote collaboration at the team level. Standup meetings, physical task boards, and focus on clearing impediments are well known practices to keep a team focused on the work, and establish a sense of flow towards frequent, tangible, and sustainable results.

What about working at a large scale , when tens, hundreds, or thousands of teams are involved? How can a large organization exploit the same core practices when there is highly interdependent work, and when there may be hundreds of people involved? How the can practices create the same level of accountability for executive leadership as they do for teams?

The Scrum @ Scale Framework offers a powerful set of practices for networks of teams to surface and act on impediments, and create hyper-productivity throughout the organization. From the team level to the Executive Action Team, an enterprise can learn to "eat" it's own impediments, and use them to nourish improvement and performance at a scale no one could have conceived of before.

This workshop will introduce valuable, proven Scrum @ Scale practices for large programs. Among the topics that will be discussed are:

• How can the basic Scrum Master principles and practices be applied to large programs and enterprises?: The Scrum @ Scale Scrum Master Cycle

• The Scrum of Scrums Impediment Board: Visible impediments, dependencies and milestones at an enterprise

• The Scaled Daily Scrum: Lightweight activities to promote visibility, clear impediments and collaboration across the program

• What does it look like when it’s working?: Optimize delivery time, increase quality, and establish improvement across the organization.

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What is leadership Agility?

This workshop will introduce a promising framework for leaders to increase Self-awareness in them and help them connect the "Why" and "How" part. Over the years,

I have learned that the future is already here and that your organization’s survival is based on several critical factors—including its ability to be agile — one of the essential drivers to achieve this through leadership agility.

Learning objective:

-Introduce four areas that a Leader should all focus on.

-Use Ken Wilber’s integral model as an anchor point.

-Use “I\Its” quadrants

-Relate I/its Quadrant as the Future Focus of Leadership

- Increase self-awareness on what quadrant we are residing.

Discussion:

-Agile Leaders need to keep the balance to focus on all four areas

-Too much focus on the right two quadrants (and none on the left) leads to disengagement and mechanical agile implementations

-Too much emphasis on the left two-quadrant (and none on the right) leads to a lack of results and ambiguity

What's Unique?

I would extend this Wilber Model with a few practices that would help leaders to move from Impasse to Insights

This workshop is 100% activity-oriented and will enhance awareness level in Leaders.

A powerful tool help leaders to balance "I" vs "We" quadrant. Connect the "Vision" and "People" in an Enterprise.

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Psychological safety has become an integral part of an organization these days. Amy Edmondson, professor at Harvard Business School, first identified the concept of psychological safety in work teams in 1999. Since then, she has observed how companies with a trusting workplace perform better.

Through the workshop, we will be promoting the same culture that Amy has promoted.

It is going to be a hands-on exercise with the help of Lego and it will give participants

- A perspective to have innovative thinking

- A thought process to overcome conflicts

- A way to build self-motivated teams and

- An aim to encourage experimentation

This style is also known as kinesthetic learning that helps teams to be fearless. It not only encourages active listening but also promotes a Speak Up culture to create a safe environment.

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This session is a process to hold tough conversations. This is an effective process and I have done this at the IAF Asia Conference at Kuala Lumpur in September 2019. It's based on Marshal Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication, one of the best frameworks for communication & stakeholder relationship related issues.

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For Measuring Business Agile Transformation, we need to look at different aspects of the organization to keep agility.

In this talk we will cover 6 facets of measurements - Why, what and how these have helped us to create good measurement system and how those were evolved in Agile manner to release more features to it.

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Introduction, understanding and implementation of brand-new agile ways of working to deliver IT / software products requires a strategic thought process for an organization’s leadership. Leadership (to establish strategic intrapreneurship within) is something which can convey and support the complete ownership, responsibility and accountability for an organization’s strategic enterprise agile transformation. Proposed presentation offers a distinctive perspective for tomorrow’s agile leaders considering their roles and responsibilities, where they will surely get a chance to deepen their self-understanding using DISC Dimensions and Experimentation Mindset in terms of agile ways of working. This presentation has a potential to help them to become a thorough intrapreneur, to grow and succeed while delivering the best possible expected outcomes which is always a need for their challenging roles. It not only helps organization’s leadership to develop and deliver agile products but also acts as a remarkable instrument for overall associate retention.

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The worldwide cost of attrition and low engagement is upwards of USD 600 billion every year! Surveys by ADP and others have shown that employee engagement levels in India stand at approximately 22% as of 2018. This means as much as 78% of the workforce is not engaged. Think about the tremendous impact we as agile practitioners can make in our organizations, if we increase engagement levels. Even a slight increase in team engagement can result not only in cost savings for the company but also increased performance and greater happiness levels among team members. In fact, happiness levels within the team has been found to directly impact performance and velocity.

In this interactive talk we will explore current engagement levels, review the latest research on metrics that influence employee engagement, understand the tremendous and far-reaching benefits of creating a fun, engaging workplace (drawn from research by Amy Edmondson and others) and brainstorm ideas to increase engagement in our teams and our organizations at large.

Through inclusive facilitation approaches like 1-2-4-all, 25/10 crowdsourcing, gallery walk and others we will collectively generate ideas for increasing engagement in our teams.

By the end of this session you'll have concrete ideas to carry back to your teams and start implementing all while having a lot of fun!

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As coaches, our focus on any Agile transformation is limited to measuring IT Output (e.g. Velocity, Defects, Lead Time, Cycle Time etc.)

However the real value from Agility an organization can reap benefits are whether Agile has really harvested Business Outcomes or not. In my talk, I will talk about how to move from a focus on IT Output to Business Outcomes

In my talk, I will talk about how to move focus from IT Output to Business Outcomes.

Few important areas, I cover include :

• What is a Business Outcome?
• How Business Outcome contributes to Value Realization?
• Who formulates Business Outcomes?
• How an Agile Coach facilitate the achievement of Business Outcome
• Traceability between IT Output- Business Outcome - Value Realization
• Business Outcomes with examples (NPS, Release frequency etc.)

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Micro Abstract: A single demo is worth a 100 meetings

Abstract:
Dojo Delivery Agility is an abstract (non prescriptive ) Agile product development framework built to augment the Dojo way of working across teams. Built on the concept of hyper sprints, Dojo Delivery Agility enables teams to build “E-shaped” skills to unlock the next level of productivity and predictability. Dojo Delivery Agility as a process framework is crafted on the fundamentals of SCRUM, XP, and Agile Dojo.

Agile Dojo is well known coaching strategy but this talk is about our experiences with respect to our experiments with Dojo as a product development framework across different domains. Our experiences include mostly learning from failures and successes and hence the session would be driven by case studies. We will also be discussing our studies on teams that adopted Dojo as a way of working which showcased substantial improvement in predictability, productivity, and technical agility. We will also touch upon how Dojo acted as a constructive constrain to triggers change for good. Last but not the least we will also discuss our SENSI program which helped us scale our Dojo Delivery Agility capability of practitioners

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For many years now, agile practices have been the bedrock for repeatable software development and delivery. The rapid advent of cloud, IoT, AI & ML and the likes are presenting a new set of challenges where Innovation is rapid, evolutionary and continuous. In the light of continuous innovation becoming a norm, not having a sustainable, automated and repeatable software development and delivery street is a perfect recipe for disaster.

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As an agilist, you all heard about the organizational transformation, leadership agility, etc. Also, you might be a change agent working as part of this adoption.

Many people refer or point out to the Organization reinvented book as a reference as part of the agile adoption journey.

Here is a true story of a small NGO, from the very southern part of India, in existence for the past 15+ years and serving humanity by doing a grassroots level change. They have shown the meaning of empowerment, self-managing and self-organizing in an absolutely different way.

I want to talk about this group (though they have never heard of the agile movement, though the founder had a background of Software development).

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One of the prime goals of successful Agile transformation is delivering small chunk of value that has big chunk of returns. Every organization has many features in their To-Do list, but how can we identify that small chunk of value from a plethora of customer needs? What is that one primary skill needed which helps individuals at all levels to build the culture of Agility? If we observe closely, simple questions like "What is the benefit from developing this feature?" will enable us with more insights and surfaces right value for development. It is clearly evident that Asking questions comes before Agility and it is the first step to Agility!

With small steps, incrementally, we can improve Team's Asking skills and this presentation highlights the importance of "Asking". This presentation also lays its foundation on a survey, which I conducted recently. The results of the survey clearly show that teams, which did more asking, have witnessed effective value delivery more often. In the process, the presentation also introduces two new measures called "Team asking quotient" and "Value delivery quotient" which are calculated by assessing 7 important areas that determine the overall asking maturity of a team.

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Agility requires experimenting continuously in order to Inspect & Adapt continuously and to Learn continuously. So, it's not just failing fast, but learning fast. In this workshop, which is based on the concept of 'Probes' from BOSSA nova, we will learn what learning fast means for every individual and the organization as a whole.

By definition, Probes are small, safe-to-fail experiments based on hypotheses derived from reflection via per-learning on the current situation as well as on theory. This is such a great tool not just for Agility enablers but for anyone who wants to bring in change. They can design their own safe-to-fail experiments considering all aspects, and not just but also get validation from peers, users and approvers of the experiment.

We will learn to define experiments that you can use in your company for bringing agility. This will allow you to create an environment for continuous innovations, an environment where everyone is enrolled which will further create a win-win for everyone.

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Product backlog is a living artifact.. it grows, it changes, and it smells. The health of the backlog is crucial for the health of the Scrum team. Its hygiene can be sensed from how it smells. Oh wait! Do you know how to smell the backlog? Let's discover at this talk

This talk will highlight the different types of potential problems that can be found in the product backlog. Such issues remain largely invisible but their presence has an impact on the product delivery of the Agile teams. Most often, this may result in UNDONE software every sprint. Deteriorating quality can be attributed to the backlog smells. Myself and Ritesh Mehrotra will uncover different backlog smells, consequences and how to address them.

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Have you ever thought of refactoring your code? If yes, when was the last time you decided to refactor?

Did you give up because it was a legacy code?

This talk will explore the strategies and techniques to overcome the challenges or blockers faced during the refactoring of legacy code. These would be driven through an activity and practical tips based on our experience.

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A common understanding about different Agile methodology is that those are implacable only in software project. But I want to share my experience, how a failed IT infrastructure project became a successful one after following Agile way where internal & external stakeholders and team members are not aware of Agile properly.

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In Scrum we ask the Development Team to be self organized. We ask the team to manage the Sprint and make all decisions necessary to decide how to build a working potentially releasable product increment each Sprint. This is a challenge for many teams. It could be that the team members are not used to self organization and does not know exactly how to achieve it. It can be that the organization itself does not allow the development team to fully self organize.

In this presenttaion Arne Åhlander will describe building blocks to use to achieve self organiztion in any team. The presentation will be practically applicable and based upon the latest research and experience in the field of self organization.

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Smart People Release Product To Get Ahead

while product management has various aspect that needs to be well understood by every product owner, unfortunately most of the product owners don't have exposure or understanding in product thinking as organization is mostly focused on delivering the items in the product backlog with little scope for product owners to perform the true product management activities. This is hands-on activity that makes participants understand on how product gets released, how is product release different from sprints, connect the product life cycle and BCG Matrix states.

Release strategies : Time based releases & Scope based releases

Product life cycle states: introduction, growth, maturity & decline states

BCG matrix : "' ? ", Star, cash cow, dog states in product management.

The activity makes the participants think with different strategies to enable agility in business, product.

Join this session to learn how smart people release their product to get ahead of competition.

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1. I understand DevOps and XP theoretically but haven't done anything hands-on. I would like to experience how it is like in practice.
2. I know how to write code but I want to learn how to craft software with excellence.
3. I do not know how to fit the testing in 2 week sprint cycle.
4. My product has unmanageable number of bugs and I have been given the task of managing the quality. I need some practical advice on this.

If you relate to any of the above situations, this half-day workshop is for you. In this workshop, we will take you through hands-on learning of XP and DevOps practices.

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Let's get onto a journey

From "No" /"Yes, but" to "Yes, and"!

Improv is the act of working together to build something new from a bunch of quickly generated ideas, disposing quickly that don’t work and building on the things that do along the way. The more an improv team works together, the more they trust each other, and the better they know each other’s’ strengths and how to use them. Isn’t it Agile Teams also all about?

Make other people look good. This will make you look better, too. Let's experience this through fun games!

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According to Gartner, the ERP software market has surpassed $35 billion+ and is ever-growing. Packaged solutions or ERP systems as we know it, have been the front runners of IT solutions adoption across organizations involving complex organization structure with complex solution requirements. Take any service-based industry and we can see that on an average around 30% of the revenue would be from packaged solution space. To remain ahead of the competition, all service-based industries should focus equally on these packaged solution/ ERP based projects. It is a known fact that today's digitized world is ever demanding, and the story is not different in the ERP space as well. There is a huge demand for faster time to market, improve product/ solution quality, etc.

So, what can be done to meet this demand of customers? Definitely, the approach to solution delivery needs to be changed. Will moving to an agile way of delivery help? Yes, it should as the agile values and principles focus on delivering these values. But still, there have been so many instances of packaged solutions failing at agile. The reason is simple, we are DOING AGILE rather than BEING AGILE?

Addressing this challenge, we have experimented and adopted an innovative practice that would be beneficial not only for customers but also for the agile team. We call this way of working as DOJO.

DOJO as a practice talks about approaches that would help in bringing in efficiency and thus improving agile maturity.

This session would focus on the following key topics:

1. A brief on what is DOJO
2. How can you enable DOJO in a packaged solution?
3. What are the challenges that the packaged solution team can face while following DOJO?
4. How to overcome these challenges?
5. Benefits seen in projects.

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What keeps a business ticking? Customer value.

• Do you know that 75% of consumers are willing to pay more if they love the product?
• Have you realized that around 60% of features in a product are rarely or never used.

With this, it is evident that users do not buy or use all that you build and they pay more if they love it. Hence it is important to plan, prioritize and produce as per customer value. But what makes a product lovable and how to win customers?

In this session, I am going to discuss in detail about the new techniques i.e. "PLS DO SIR" which I have implemented with 10+ Scrum teams, how to make a product lovable, how asking the right questions helped us in uncovering issues, how to build undaunted teams and when to engage customers.

You can deliver great "VALUE" to your customer if you can take care of the above.

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In an Agile world,we are being asked to move faster—reducing the length of time to delivery while still continuing to improve the quality. At the same time, we are faced with increased pressure to reduce testing costs. The main aim of Shifting left is ‘Early Defect Detection to Defect Prevention’.

Bugs are cheaper when caught young. Being a testing professional during start of my career where i have seen the agile transformation from ground zero. I have experienced all what a tester can face usually in start of a agile way of working.

Most difficult phase is shift from defect identification or detection mode towards a more collaborative approach of defect prevention.

Why a tester was no more quality police and he/she is not the sole responsible person for quality but it was whole team. Development teams need to focus on quality from the beginning, instead of waiting for errors & bugs to be discovered late in the game.

These learning and many more in my early career helped me when I started coaching agile teams for delivering better quality product. In recent time where I am leading a transformation , one of the major ask was to break the boundaries and silos between development and system testing teams. This topic is close to my heart because i have practiced , performed and tried to perfect time and again.

I want to share How “Shift-Left” Testing Can Help Your Product Quality? What it means to testing community, with vastly different skill sets, are getting involved in the testing process. More specifically, it means that development teams are being incorporated into the testing cycle earlier than ever before.

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Although management experts have recommended to eliminate employee performance appraisals for over 40 years, they are a fact of life for many who work in traditional enterprises. For Scrum Masters and others that still have to live with them, this talk will help you learn how to use Scrum itself to prepare you to outperform any performance review, and to be able to deliver a stellar performance review in real time at any moment!

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