Do more of what makes you happy!!!

This may sound a little outdated but I designed this workshop during COVID times to engage stakeholders better by using User Stories more efficiently. The idea of the workshop is to help people move away from the notion that User Stories are merely a As a .. I want .. so that writing template to a full fledged way of engaging with every stakeholder involved during a product's lifecycle. The topics covered include myth busters around user stories, 3 amigos, specs by examples, BDD, ATDD, Zero defect policies, etc. More details: https://confengine.com/conferences/agile-india-2023/proposal/17992 Conference Link: https://2023.agileindia.org

Talk delivered at AgilityToday Gurugram 2023 Un conference

Today, there is no dispute that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) should be a business priority. Significant results call out its impact on employee engagement, experience, connection, trust, performance and enabling inclusive organizational culture.  From its inception, Thoughtworks' approach to DEI has been fundamental to our values, culture, vision, community and business strategy. We understood early on that the true value of DEI can only be realized if it’s integrated within all aspects of the business, across functions and specifically within teams.  Thoughtworks has been an early adopter of agile software development and Extreme Programming (XP). As leaders in this space and an organization whose very foundation is built on the pillars of DEI, Thoughtworks has benefitted from years of following a unified approach of integrating Agility, XP and DEI principles into our software teams, thus bringing the best of these together.  In this talk we will share our learnings, success stories and perspectives of integrating DEI with an organisations Business Agility journey and why this is much needed in the changing landscape of our businesses today.  More details: https://confengine.com/conferences/agile-india-2023/proposal/18010 Conference Link: https://2023.agileindia.org

Day 1: Engineering Effectiveness - Nilesh Kulkarni & Vishal Prasad

Ameya and Vishal Prasad @VishalPrasadIN talk about the #Agile #bashing that has evidently increased all around social media and in the tech + non-tech industries. Agile #manifesto is now 20 years old and this conversation captures Vishal's opinions, who has coached over 80 professionals and certified them to be good Agile practitioners. While there still are new people opening up to Agile, what does one do when such conflicting opinions are thrown strongly on various threads? Listen to this podcast and let us know how has your experience with Agile has been and if you really think Agile is dead. Key takeaways: 01:15 - Vishal advises people to stop coaching Agility 04:30 - Generic training becomes irrelevant without contextual implementation & practice 09:00 - Accept the fact that every team may do Agile differently, without breaking principles 12:30 - Acknowledge the need for change and manage its execution 14:30 - Process is the means to the outcome, not the outcome itself 16:00 - Stories & use cases 19:00 - Recognize your antipatterns 21:30 - Dealing with 3 common metrics - effort, cost, time 24:00 - Predictability, visibility may be overrated, but still necessary in most cases 29:00 - Run Agile by first principles if you deviate from recommendations 31:00 - #DEI improves business agility 35:00 - Agile community - what can we do better? 38:00 - Think of certifications as covenants, a pledge to do the right thing 41:00 - Is deploying a CSM an antipattern in itself? 46:00 - Non negotiable facets for an agile team - Purpose, TDD, 49:00 - Be a good citizen, do what is right - quality cannot be compromised 50:00 - Content creators must share their story, what has worked, what did they do to become successful - go beyond sharing the struggles and pitfalls 51:00 - Vishal's SLICE acronym (Select, Learn, Implement, Collaterals, Expand) 53:00 - Innovation comes from change, even if it is 'working' 56:00 - Some admiration for Bajaj and Tata automotive excellence 58:00 - The road ahead - especially if you are new to Agile 59:00 - Be Agile, try it out for yourself 1:00:00 - A good retrospective starts with introspection

The story goes ... During the Agile Coach Camp at Agile India 2019, we had an interesting discussion driven by Woody Zuill around the concept of Organisational Inertia. This has been a topic of research since the early 80s with the newest research in 2000s as well. The research basically revolves around two aspects: An organisation's incapability to keep up with major shifts The resistance towards change These don't necessarily stop change from happening but considerably slows down the shift. With organisations struggling to survive in a VUCA world, Organisational Inertia becomes one of the critical factors for consideration. Enter, an Agile Coach! Our industries have heavily invested in them in the recent past and continue to do so in order to help them survive in this VUCA world. Shane Hastie addresses this as the Golden Age of Agile Coaching in which coaches can help the poor souls navigate themselves during a period of turmoil. I respect that. But my evil mind links the concepts of Organisational Inertia and the Golden Age of Agile Coaching differently; so during the Agile Coach Camp, I asked folks to run a Thought Experiment which I also mentioned in my talk during Agile India 2019. The hypothesis is: "We can deploy Agile Coaches in organisations and hopefully the organisations will overcome their inertia in 10 years to provide a better work experience to their employees. Contrarily, if Agile Coaches cease to exist, organisations may crumble under their inertia in 5 years and the ones left will be great places to work" ... from a Behavioural Economics standpoint, the second option seems better. Being a SLICE fundamentalist, I decided to run this hypothesis and began my experiment on 3rd June 2019, the day after I finished my last batch of ICAgile's Agile Coaching training. At the time of submitting this proposal, it hasn't been very long since I started the experiment, and it hasn't been easy to deliberately take a step back from coaching interventions. The observations have been interesting (if not amazing) so far and this is my experience report that I wish to share during Agile India 2020. My plan is to run a set of experiments until 31st December 2019 and then decide my way ahead. I mention below the observations so far that I wish to share in my talk but there may be other experiments that I'll share if provided a platform at Agile India 2020. More details: https://confengine.com/agile-india-2020/proposal/11929 Conference Link: https://2020.agileindia.org

This video is the presentation from ThoughtWorks Converge 2020 Conference held at Pune on 7th August 2020. The talk covers the landscape of possible goals in the new normal (post COVID) for Businesses, Products, and People. The original live streaming can be found here: https://youtu.be/SCi0dIgvd-4

#SafetyCheck #Retrospective #AgileBestPractices Thank you for tuning into Agile Beyond boundary. Today's Two-minute Gyaan is about #SafetyCheck during the #Retrospectives A Safety Check is a poll that many teams conduct before their retrospective to Check the presence of a safe environment. It is a good way to check if the team is 1. Open to share and 2. Have the right frame of mind to provide feedback If everyone feels safe, then we are okay to proceed but what if everyone does not feel safe? The first intuitive response would be to- postpone this meeting in order to fix the Safety issues first this, however, will be an Antipattern! A retrospective is a place where people discuss • #people • #relationships • #processes and • #tools so, there's no good reason to #postpone this meeting to mend the relationships when this is exactly where it's supposed to happen. There are a few things to be considered to build a safe #environment : If the environment isn’t safe, then – Our regular #retrospective #patterns may not work so one should not hesitate to conduct retrospectives. Which resembles 1. A #group #therapy #session: Many at times people are just upset because they want to be heard. 2. No external attendees: Retrospectives are very sacred to a team, so one must ensure that the attendees are not external like a sponsor or a manager who's responsible for #appraisals or #performance. It is best to leave the team alone, in order to identify their own improvements 3. Maintain Regularity: Retrospectives must be done regularly. This creates a mental state where people accept that a. This is a time to come together and b. #Improve A good frequency is a month or less One should #timebox the retrospective, but you should still have long enough time in order to have heartfelt conversations. These #practices can help create a safe environment. The role of a #skilled #facilitator Also, one must not ignore the role of a skilled facilitator during retrospectives. They can be #internal or #external to a team as long as they are neutral. Many a time Safety Check may be skipped, if the facilitator has/had regular connects with the team members, for example - a #scrum #master. They may choose to still have the Safety Check if the team members asked for it in order to provide transparency or in order to decide a suitable method for conducting the meeting.