Agile Gurugram 2017 conference is organized by Agile Network India and sponsored by Innovation Roots, GoEventz, SwiftKanban from Digite, and Scrum Alliance. The conference was a 2-day event held on May 26-27th, 2017 at Leela Ambience hotel, Gurugram, NCR region. Every year, this conference is organized with an aim to create a knowledge-sharing platform and a network of industry renowned thought leaders and pioneers in Agile.
The 2017 edition of Agile Gurugram conference was a great event with an overwhelming response from the audience and speakers. The conference is a wonderful opportunity for anyone to meet and greet some of the world famous thought leaders and Agile enthusiasts, who contributed for this national conference and made it a great event.
The conference kick-started with the Opening Keynote session delivered by Dave Snowden, Founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Cognitive Edge, and the audience got fascinated and excited with his talk on ‘Agile, Agility and Complexity’ and the concepts in the essence of Cynefin Complexity framework. The two days of conference was hooked up with number of other Keynote sessions by Prof. P.B Sharma, Academician and Vice Chancellor of Amity University, Rajiv Sodhi, Senior Corporate Vice President- Robotics and Automation at HCL Technologies, and Sudipta Lahiri, Sr. VP- Products at Digité, and a lot of fun-filled Gaming Activities and team-building exercises.
All the sessions were enticing and themed around “Business and Enterprise Agility”, “System and Design Thinking”, “Lean Product Development and Start-up”, and “Cultural, Leadership and Change”, “Technical Stake in Agility”.
A Glimpse of the event and the Top 10 Key Takeaways from Agile Gurugram 2017 Conference
1.Complexity theory and its applications: Dave Snowden in his Opening Keynote session on “Agile, Agility and Complexity” said that, “We need to have more holistic way of thinking towards Life Cycle management of startups, continuity in business, and should also consider the types of cultures and practices that fits in different contexts.” He also spoke about how to apply the Complexity theory, and how to apply complexity theory to Agile methods. Dave also explained several aspects of complexity based design thinking along with methods and tips on how to apply them to scale Agile for business, and customers and markets.
2. Impact of Automation on IT industry and Future: Automation and Robotics have revolutionized the IT industry across the globe and created a huge impact in all walks of life. “From autonomous self-driven cars to bricklaying robots which may impact masons, to surgical robots which may impact surgeons, it is significantly expected to change the way we work in as soon as the next five years. Many jobs in their current form will become obsolete and many new jobs will be created,” said Rajiv Sodhi in his Keynote session on the topic ‘Impact of Autonomics on IT Industry and How it can Prepare Itself for Future’.
3. Why is DevOps important? – DevOps has been gaining traction across all software teams across the organization. Tools deployment around CI and CD and Culture integration between Development and Operations teams are the two most specific areas where DevOps is focused on. “We need to do a lot of things beyond just a tool deployment in order to enable what we expect from an Agile DevOps Sales environment,” said Sudipta Lahiri in his Keynote on topics ‘DevOps > CI + CD.
4. Flexibility is building more options and you can become Smarter and more disruptive: We think we are flexible. But actually, we are really fixed in our thinking. We think what we know and what we learn is so great. So, we think we don’t need to Analyse. We must be able to see what we know is not good enough. Gautam Mahajan says, “I think flexible management thinking, and truly flexible systems and flexible acceptance can create better Agile Systems and better value,” in his session on the topic ‘Agile is a Flexible Mindset’.
He also spoke about Value- What is Value? How to become valuable and create Value for your Company? Value means More sustainability, More happy People, Happy Employees, and More Benefits. Better retention of your product. For a better value, you need to change and willing to accept the changes. If you are not going to come out of rigid mindset if you are not willing to change and adapt other things coming on your way. You will not be able to effectively design your work. Be flexible all the time and things keep changing and the roots of innovation will be seeded in no time.
5. Enterprise Agility, ROI and Customer Experience: In the present day’s situations, we are not challenged with the availability of technology. We are overwhelmed with use of technology in abundance in every aspect of day-to-day life. The challenge is to gain a competitive advantage over rest of the other competencies in the market, yield efficient results and gain positive responses from customers. In this journey to gain Enterprise Agility, ROI and Customer Satisfaction; Efficient business process, Technology Agility, and Team collaboration are the three principles to vouch for, said Harsha Vardhan in his session on Enterprise Agility – It’s all about ROI and Customer Experience.
6. Leadership in real and Leadership in Indian Mythology: There is a lot of variation in Indian Leadership style and Western style of leadership. The stories which we have heard from our young age reflects a lot more than we have seen. “Hence one of the other most important lessons is to learn the power of observation and analyzing facts,” says Anand Murthy in his session on the topic ‘Growing Indian Leadership with insights from Indian Mythology’.
7. Learn to say ‘NO’: Are you effective at your work? Dov Tsal in his session on topic ‘Agile Thru Mindfulness’ says that “We could be more effective at work when we start saying NO to unimportant work and concentrating on the one that matters. We can even be a lot more productive at work if we avoid unnecessary discussions and arguments.
8. The lean-agile way of Performance Management: the way wIn another session, Thriveni Shetty, Consultant at INNOVATION ROOTS, “If we use Lean-Agile ways of working in a team, it helps to align the organizational goals to individual goals, and use significant parameters to evaluate the team’s performance. Through this, we can overcome the challenges in teamwork and reach the goals, ” in her session on topic “Lean-Agile Performance Management in Action”.
9. Cultural changes, and Agile Failures: Over the time, the Agile adoption rate has increased rapidly. One question that still remains unanswered is, Are the teams working in the same Agile feeling? or are they facing same issues which they experienced in traditional systems? According to a report, Culture is the biggest cause of failures in Agile projects. The better way could be. “Instead of changing the culture as an ideology to achieve profit, learn to embrace Agile at a deeper emotional level, embrace the open mindset, change in attitudes, and value customer’s feedback,” said Srinath Chandrasekaran in his session on ‘Are we providing a culture for Agile to thrive ?’. Even Gerald Cadden says that ‘To survive in this ever-changing market conditions, we must respond to the changes quickly”, “ And, the key to survival is Business Agility,” said Gerald Cadden in his session on the topic “Survival is a matter of change… change requires Business Agility!”
10. Measure Team’s Agility and Performance Management: “As organizations are moving towards Agility, but in most of the cases there seem to be very less tangible results. This raises a need to measure individuals agility, as well. And, How do we do it?, ” says Prashant M.J, Consultant at INNOVATION ROOTS in his session on topic “Team’s Agility Assessment”, and he also gave some valuable tips on how to constantly measure team’s performance and how to evaluate the characteristics of high performing teams.
Come Join us, to experience more such insightful Agile practices and innovative ideas at the official third edition of the conference: Agile Gurugram 2018! Brought to life once again, by the Agile Network India community.