Agenda

Agenda:

 

For a downloadable version of agenda, please click here: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_gdUjze6gYYbVRnVFNFcmFnbnc/edit?usp=sharing

Keynotes:

Let’s Help Melly (Changing Work Into Life)

Jurgen Appelo, Author “Management 3.0″, Co-founder, Agile and Lean network Europe

Many people in the world don’t really like their jobs. And most organizations are not healthy. They are badly prepared for increasing complexity and changing environments. Most managers know that organizations are complex systems. But few understand what that means for the way organizations should be managed. Complexity thinking suggests that we should seek a diversity of conflicting perspectives. It explains that organizations need experimentation, not just adaptation. And it says that most innovation happens by stealing and tweaking existing ideas to fit a new context. Ultimately, what organizations need is a “management workout”. A number of simple practices that make employees happy and the organization healthy, and which satisfy the rules of complexity thinking.

Succeeding with Scrum: It’s ALL about the people!

Bob Hartman,CSC,CST, President, AgileforAll, Member of BoD, Scrum Alliance

Is it possible to be doing everything Scrum says to do, and still fail horribly? Unfortunately, the answer is yes, and teams do it every day. Concentrating on doing Scrum well often means paying attention to all the meetings and artifacts while also making sure the roles all do their jobs. It seems to be all about doing things and this is where organizations get off track. Success with Scrum means understanding people. People do the work, not robots. Scrum requires understanding human nature and allowing people to do their best work in a meaningful way. This session draws from Bob’s experience as a Certified Scrum Coach and Certified Scrum Trainer to help attendees better appreciate and understand the people side of Scrum.

Enterprise Agility: The start line tricks for a perfect finish

Madhur Kathuria, CSC, Director, Xebia Agile Consulting and Transformation, Chairperson, ISEC

When starting with their Agile adoption, most organizations struggle with questions which can make or mar their chances of achieving their business goals through use of agile practices.This session draws on experiences from various consulting assignments to provide vital answers, clues , warning signs and success mantras to organizational looking to adopt to agility in a more effective way

Tracks:

Scrum Star-Trek:

To Be SNIPer

Daniel Teng, CSC, Senior Agile Coach, Odd-e

If you give kids broccoli and tell them it is good for their health. Most likely, you will still get a no. The reason is quite simple, little kids don’t care about being healthy. This broccoli principles applies to agile adoption as well. Simply telling and pushing new ideas and practices don’t help very much because It is about changing people’s mindset and way of thinking. Push and enforcement will always get resistance.
The more push we have, the more resistance we will have as coach or change agent. To make it even worse, each individual, team and organization are so different, the culture is different, the business situation is different, the technology is different. Those are perfect excuses for not to change. One key factor for successful and sustainable adoption is to lit the desire to learn and improve, from individual, to team, to organization level. Rather than being pushed a lot of ideas, team will come for help and guidance, to pull idea from coach then apply in their context.

Having been engaged in transition projects for years, I experienced had some mistakes as well as some successes. When reflecting on such cases, I discovered several key success factors, which leads to a SNIPer coaching principle. SNIPer is the acronym of Small wins, No big term, Intervention based and Pain point focused.

In this session, I will I will explain how come the SNIPer principle. By telling stories, I will share how this principle improves effectiveness of in my coaching.

“Why Scrum Works? -A Neuroscience Perspective On Scrum”

Tushar Somaiya, Agile Coach, Founder, ShuHaRi Agile

Have you ever thought why scrum works? That too from NeuroScience perspective?
We all acknowledge and understand that we have moved beyond and past machine age or service era and are living in what is called “Knowledge Era”. Focus of current times is shifting from behaviours to values. From people to brain. Yet, we know very little about people or brain or its working.
Through this talk, I will attempt to link hard neuroscience to scrum and its practices to see why it works or does not work. Also we would look at practices required beyond scrum to create an environment where scrum can flourish. Or even exists!

Building Agile Organizations

Zuzuana Sochova, Agile Coach and Trainer & Eduard Kunce, VP-Software Engineering, CA Technologies, Czech Republic

There are many talks about implementation of Agile, Scrum and Kanban, about being successful with all the development practices, but very few sources are talking about Agile organization. How to build it, and what it really is.
Building an Agile organization is not just about using Scrum or Kanban in development teams and prioritizing functionality based on business value and fast customer feedback. There is something more, applicable to the whole organization level. Surprisingly using just few frameworks the organization could be transformed into agile company despite of current organization structure, power structures and company culture. Even the small companies are often struggling when it comes to the expression of Agile organization. And for huge enterprises it’s often even impossible to imagine how shall the company change. Does it mean we don’t need any managers? How shall we structure our teams and departments? Shall we change the org chart to matrix or the other way around? How shall we organize ourselves? We can’t afford any chaos, so how about keep all the agile just in out
IT? Those and similar questions are often come up.
Based on our experiences with Agile transformations in both small companies and large enterprises we come to conclusion that Agile culture grows on top of the ability to build good teams. And as this competence is widely underestimated and rarely used on daily basis in the companies, we have developed the Tulming framework which extends the fundamentals of team theories, combines them with Agile principles and values and adopts them to create together an Agile mindset in the organization.
At the end of this talk, you will not only understand the Tulming framework, but you also get an implementation strategy that you can start immediately applying in your organization.

Value, Quality and Innovation

Dr.  Masa Maeda, Kanban Guru,  CEO and Founder, ValueInnova LLC

Value, Quality and Innovation are terms used quite often in the Agile community. Do we really know what they mean
and their implications? Furthermore, their meaning has matured over time. In this talk I will bring understanding and
awareness over all three and the high importance of using them as beacons to design, create and deliver the right
products

“Know your team’s Gremlin to Remove Self-sabotaging behaviour”

Dinesh Sharma, Agile Coach, Director, Agile Gurukul

A gremlin, in coaching terms is a habit that stops people/team/organization from achieving their goals in business or
life. A gremlin is an internal habit or a feeling that seems to run on its own accord-something that rises up and then
stops one from taking action on, or completing one’s objectives. However, gremlin thinking doesn’t have to win out.
When you confront a gremlin and question its validity, you gain the wisdom and learn the lessons needed to bypass it.
Lets learn how to visualize & confront a gremlin to unlock the potential one can achieve in their life, team and
organization

“The Joys of Designing Agile Solutions for New-Age Problems”

Tathagat Varma ,Head of Business Operations, Strategic Programs and Outsourced Product Development, Yahoo!

Agile methods, and scrum in particular, help organize the work by prioritizing items could be done and delivered in a small timebox. While its simplicity and effectiveness is based on timeless experiences that make it an effectives approach for a certain class of problems where a product backlog exists in some shape or form, and there is some basis (scientific, data-driven or otherwise) for the product owner to prioritize features, it doesn’t really offer any clear guidance for a newer class of problems where, for example, there is the work is so radically new that there might not be a product backlog. For that matter, there might not even be a market, a customer or a product to begin with. Think of you specifying and designing ‘something’ when no such product ever existed – not just in the minds of customer but
even in the dreams of its designers! How can one have a ‘product owner’ or a product backlog when there is even no source of such information. All we have is a loose set of ‘ideas’ which might or not work. Distilling such innovative ideas in a product or a sprint backlog might be too premature. We clearly need a different approach than a thoroughbred Scrum.
In the last few years, the work on Customer Development and Lean Startup by Steve Blank and Eric Ries has led to putting a framework in place for solving such class of “VUCA = Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous” problems in a more systematic and result-oriented manner. These have greatly helped startups and entrepreneurs where failure rates tend to be extremely high traditionally.
In this workshop, we will experience to joys of creating a product starting with Design Thinking and apply principles of Customer Development and Lean Startup and explore the nuances of designing agile solutions for such new-age problems

Scrum From The Trenches:

“Know your MVP”

Unnat Gupta, Shree Damani-Thoughtworks

MVP is defined as : “that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.”It doesn’t say a thing about the product being valuable to the customers or market segment.
MVP is minimum viable product *NOT* minimally marketable feature set / first release! MVPs are the experiments we learned from on the way to our first release of the software. To us the core of the difference between “Minimally Viable Product” and “Minimally Marketable Product” is in the
purpose. An MVP’s purpose is to learn, an MMP’s purpose is to serve. Understand the problem vs address the problem.

“It’s the culture, Stupid! – Why Scrum is more than a few ceremonies & artifacts”

Manoj Vadakkan, Agile Coach and Trainer

Many organizations are attracted to Scrum because of its apparent simplicity and its potential to deliver results faster.
However, most don’t realize that there are cultural changes which are also required in order for Scrum to be
successful. Manoj postulates that Scrum as a movement will fail if we do not bring the cultural aspects to the forefront.
One way to bring the necessary culture to the organization is to bring the forgotten Scrum Values to the forefront.
Attendees will participate in a dynamic discussion about the importance of the cultural aspects that are required for
Scrum to flourish within an organization

“Splitting User Stories”

Chris Sims, Agile Coach, CST, Founder, Agile Learning Labs

Chris will demonstrates the 4 techniques that he uses to split user stories, and he has yet to run across a user story that would not yield to at
least one of these approaches.
This session is all hands-on with participants writing and splitting stories in small groups throughout the session. For
each of the four techniques, He will model the technique and then give participants time to try in in their small groups. Then
we debrief and share examples from the small groups. Together, we work through stories that the small groups have
trouble with.

“Behavioral Traits Of Agile Team.”

Nancy Sharma, Senior Consultant, Xebia

We talk of Agile Methodologies as the sane way of developing quality software. But is the team equipped to work in an
Agile environment? By equipped, I do not mean white boards, TV screens, good microphones, backlogs etc but the
other important aspect of making happy and successful Agile Teams – MINDSET. One of the most critical attribute to a
team’s success yet the least talked about.
The behavioral traits are required at every role in an Agile team – Developer, QA, Scrum Master.
How skillful your team may be technically, they are still bound to fail if they are not behaviorally equipped. These issues
may sound trivial, but at times these are the sole reason for an agile team failing in a set up. And since we always
assume these to be prevalent in an individual, we are less vocal about it.
In my presentation, I draw the attention to the various important characteristics which each one of us should posses. I
would start by citing my experience in two different Agile Teams. What are the different behavioral anti patterns that
can also exist in our teams. From there on I shall talk about the ways in which we can improve upon them to have an
energetic, motivated and happy Agile Team!

Scrum Accomplished:

“The Agile Mindset – the key for lasting and successful Agile implementations”