Top 10 Takeaways from AGILE GURUGRAM 2016 Conference

A fresh wave of revolution is sweeping across the industry with rapid changes in technology, the way of working and competition. On the other hand, organizations are facing challenges to sustain and innovate in this competitive environment. To hit the competition, learning organizations are becoming the norm for continuous improvement and knowledge enhancement in the industry.

Agile Network India is a platform to foster a vast global network of Agile Practitioners, to learn and share knowledge from thought leaders and pioneers of the industry. Promoting high-value learning and Knowledge Sharing.

AGILE GURUGRAM (formerly known as “AGILE GURGAON”) a Flagship Agile conference is one of the initiatives which was launched in 2016.

2016 version, featured 5 Keynotes by Jurgen Appelo, Mike Burrows, Sudipta Lahiri & Priyank Pathak. Sessions were themed on System Thinking & Design, Enterprise Agility, Lean Startup, Technical stake in Scaling Agile & Cultural Transformation.

Expert panel answering queries and sharing their experience

My Top 10 takeaways from this conference listed for you.

  1. Manage the system, not the people: People need to understand and realize their own purpose. Socialize with a smile and engage in fun activities, achieve collaboration and aim for a goal. Set up a system for people to experience new things and let them run their own experiments. Happy workers do more and achieve more.
  2. Continuous Improvement has no end: Continuous improvements should be made as daily routine for everyone! Things are changing, changing rapidly where not only people but organizations also need to continuously improve to adapt the Change. Continuous improvement has been the essential ingredient of success at Toyota process system. Toyota’s success guides us to improve delivery capability on a sustained basis.
  3. Driving Organizational Maturity via Evolutionary Change: Practice-based implementation, value-based implementation, start with a need and purpose attaching improvement opportunities. Purpose is multidimensional inside same company based on their roles and responsibilities i.e. Business purpose, Customer purpose, people purpose but all needs to be aligned to Common purpose I.e the Organizational Goal.
  4. Build an effective team guided by a purpose:  Difference between Teams vs Groups. Learning with fun activity what is teamwork, being a team member, building a team. Understanding the characteristics of effective team, two-way communication, shared leadership, effective decision making, encouraging support and trust, sharing the common identity, constructive conflict resolution, cooperation and collaboration forming the building blocks.
  5. Learning visual management in a fun way: FeatureBan, a fun simulation game helped to understand and learn visual management in a simple way. Incrementally learning how and why to implement WIP limits, metrics.
  6. A reflective approach towards designing large scale software: Emergent architecture, understanding the problem with respect to design debt in Large-Scale software systems. Change Vector Tracking a technique to model a change and make informed decision on architecture refactoring.
  7. Case study, Continuous Agile testing: The Testing Manifesto, transition to automation – challenges, defining right metric, Measure-Review-Improve, building the best system, team responsibility for quality, build quality meter. Defect prevention is the key.
  8. Enterprise Agile transformation: Coaching, enabling to improve and deliver customer value. It’s a journey to create products that customer love. Helping individuals in self-transformation. Using logical brain, to motivate and use the elephant strength and move in a direction that makes sense to our business is a successful change pattern.
  9. Servant Leadership into the future:  Value-based delivery, value-based change, value-based leadership. Servant first, then leader. A model for sustaining organizations and their leadership into the future, help others to be successful, find autonomy & meaning. Help develop servant leadership in others.
  10. Rules for Creative Workers: Execution forces to discover the details, running experiments, inventing accidently. Learning happens during experimentation not much in making mistakes or following the best practice. 7 Rules are to Find many ideas, Generate many ideas, Make connections, Seek Diversion, Execute your Ideas, Appreciate mistakes, Learn from the failure. Embrace networks and gameplay, keeping many options open.

Companies from various domains including Finance, Banking, Insurance, Pharmaceutical, Healthcare, Governance, Education, Aviation, IT Services, Startup and others participated in the 2016 event and a large number (150+) of people from various profiles like CIO, CEO, CXO, Sr. Vice President, Director, Management Consultant, Certified Scrum Trainer, Accredited Kanban Trainer, Certified SAFe Trainers, PM, DevOps & ALM Consultant, IT Delivery Manager, and Software Craftsman from almost all disciplines participated in the last edition of conference.

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AGILE GURUGRAM 2017” conference brought to you by Agile Network India community.