Agile Network India hosted its premier conference – Agile Gurugram 2018 on 23-24 March at Hotel Radisson, Gurugram. The agenda of conference was based on themes of #Agility, #DevOps and #Startupas with a gathering of wide range of Agile experts, industry leaders, and entrepreneurs & founders, sharing their insights and experiences.
Agile Gurugram 2018 featured Karl Scotland, Swami Shantatmananda Ji, Sudipta Lahiri and Siraj Sirajuddin as Keynote along with may prominent speakers of the Agile Community. The conference opened up with Keynote by Karl Scotland (Founder, Karl Scotland Ltd.) on ‘Leading, Lasting, Learning’ on 23rd March 2018 and hooked up the audience on exploring how learning is key part of both Lean and Agile. Panel Discussion being the highlight of two-day event helped participants learn and ask about ‘State of Business Agility’, ‘Building Successful Startup’, and ‘Future of Agile’.
The participants conferenced stack full of new ideas, strategies and insights to be taken back in future implementations. Here are 10 most important takeaways from the Agile Gurugram 2018 Conference;
1.Learning is Key to be Agile: Karl Scotland kick-started the conference with his keynote on significance of learning for being Lean and Agile. He discussed about learning customer needs and how to meet those needs effectively. He also spoke about not just solving today’s problem, but also solving future problems, and that’s where learning plays a key role. Karl described the need to ‘learn how to learn’ and suggested Strategic Deployment to lead lasting learning.
2.Why value stream analysis is important? : Many a times value streams are not the focus of Agile teams. They tend to build a simple task board to visualise value streams that hides more than what it reveals. Sudipta Lahiri in his Keynote emphasized on value stream visualisation as absolute first-step to get insights into processes. Adding to it, he says that value stream analysis prevents from being misled by system metrics.
3.Determine success or failure of Agile transformation : The result of Agile transformation is not certain. Sunil Mundra, in his session discussed 2 contrasting case studies, and brought out key variables to determine success or failure in Agile transformation.
4.Increased Productivity and Sustainable Development : Every organization look for effective ways to increase productivity and sustainable development. How to achieve the same is a challenge. Harpreet Singh shared innovative insights on DoD, time-boxing, task slack, WIP, task switching, pair programming, osmotic communication, disciplined delivery and value stream mapping has been shared to increase productivity by managing time effectively. Participants also explored how to utilize Parkinson’s law for sustainable development.
5.How to build CI/CD pipeline? : The conference featured hands-on workshop by Vinay Krishana on building CI/CD pipeline where participants explored the process using some tools such as Git, Maven, Jenkins, Java, jUnit, Cucumber, Docker etc. It helped participants to to learn the usage of source control and concept of trunk based development.
6.Characteristics of a true Leader : Swami Shantatmananda has given a keynote talk on ‘how to be a true leader?’. He spoke about being selfless to influence people to improve and grow with some great examples of Swami Vivekananda and his leadership.
7.How to know if value is delivered? : Delivering value is one of the significant business goals. How to determine if value is delivered or not? Mosesraj R’s session on ‘Value Engineer your Products’ provided insights on ascertain value upfront, get clues from past success and failures to build value and methods to build product value. Once we ascertain value upfront, it’s delivery can be determined.
8.Challenges to build a Startup : Entrepreneur and founder’s panel featured Narinder Kamra, Rahul Dewan, Vikas Garg, Saket Bansal, Noopur Pathak, Hariprakash Agrawal, and Thenny Mejia. The panel discussed and enlightened the participants with various challenges to build a startup such as need of investments, recruitment of right talent, and risk taking appetite.
9.Failure is not an Option : Karl Scotland, in his enlightening closing keynote explained how failure is not an option but a necessity. He insisted on making failure a friend, not a foe. In our attempts to avoid failure, we get afraid of taking risks with fear of being blamed and punished. We don’t realize that failure brings new informations to learn from and grow further.
10.What’s lies in Future for Agile? : Agile Expert’s panel brought out insights on much discussed topic – ‘Future of Agile’. It featured Priyank DK Pathak, Karl Scotland, Rashmi Guharoy, Sunil Mundra, Meetu Arora, Rishi Chaddha and Vandana Sinha.
Agile Network India is back with fourth iteration of Agile Gurugram conference on 18-19 Jan 2019 at National Capital Region, Gurugram. This year’s conference features Patrick Steyaert, Mike Burrows and Jeff Lopez-Stuit as Keynote Speakers. Log on to www.agilegurugram.com and book your seats for 2-day full pack conference.