Software AG at Agile India 2014

On January 2013 I had the great experience of sharing in Israel some of what we learned at Software AG during our ongoing road to Lean and Agile, and I know of a couple of other colleagues who presented at other conferences.

Last week, Bangalore hosted the Agile India 2014 conference. Four days packed with speakers from all over India, and many international speakers. This time, my colleague Harish Krishnaswamy was presenting a very different perspective of our story. You can find the slides here, or read the full experience report which is packed with information and inspiring data of the significant impact of the transformation. I recommend to people interested in large scale transformations - read the report. Harish did a great job collecting information and interviewing many people in different roles regarding the journey. I'm sure people of Software AG would find it interesting to read a story they played a role in from a different, more holistic perspective.

An impressive amount of four more Software AG employees gave lightning talks: Amit Deshpande, Heartin Jacob, Chandan Ravishankar and Ramya Gopalakrishnan.

Amit spoke of Scrumban, a combination of Scrum and Kanban which can be used in those circumstances where you have a mix of feature development and technical debt/customer issues. In particular customer issues or unplanned events that could be disruptive to the planned work in a sprint.

Heartin blogged on the topic of his talk: what success means in Agile and how Agile helps us to be successful, highlighting the strong bond linking technical and organizational success with the personal success of individual contributors. 

Chandan asked why are you following Agile? The key point is that following the practices becomes an empty shell without being a part of the transition, caring and having personal engagement with the work you do (aligned with Heartin's theme). Another is the point that agile practices are designed to keep you honest about what you can deliver on a sustainable pace, and encourage you to aim higher based on the current reality and your history.

Ramya talked of using WIP limits to reduce Context Switching, sharing the specific context and behaviors the team adopted to deal with complexity, reduce stress and maximize learning and collaboration. I'm not sure how common it is to do an exercise with the audience demonstrating context switching in a five minute lightning talk and still have time to say something - wow!

Such evidence strengthens my belief that the transformation we're going through at Software AG runs deep - many individuals align with it and contribute well beyond their job description for the success of the organization, for technical excellence and in support of their own growth.

Sharpen the Saw

Last week I had the opportunity to meet face to face with a group of colleagues from around the world, after a period of working together as a virtual team. I had the privilege to share some ideas I learned in the past few years. During my preparation I noticed some interesting overlaps and touch-points between these ideas. Here is a sketch these relationships between ideas, using Stephen Covey's 7 Habits wheel diagram as an underlying structure, while other books, concepts and disciplines as elaborate and enrich certain parts of it.

Covey's 7 Habits, and Friends

Here is the textual version:

1. Be Proactive

The first habit is all about learning to choose your reactions overcoming automatic patterns of behaviors based on emotional triggers. I think Christopher Avery did a great job modeling our typical emotional transitions when we deal with problems with his "Responsibility Process". 

2. Begin with the End in Mind

Covey's most morbid habit urges us to explicitly craft our own personal mission statement. We have one life, make it count. Well, having one life is sometimes used to justify some questionable actions (YOLO), but lets say the message is - make your life matter, don't waste it watching TV. Memento Mori rather than Carpe Diem.

Having read "Drive" by Dan Pink, it seems there's a virtuous cycle at play - tuning to a purpose in what you do, kindles your intrinsic motivation, making you more engaged and therefore likely to succeed.

3. Put First Things First

Covey's quadrants, categorizing tasks on dimensions of importance and urgency have been a corner-stone to any time management system. Notable in that area:

• Getting Things Done / David Allen
• Personal Kanban / Jim Benson & Tonianne DeMaria Barry
• The Pomodoro Technique  (ok, not so much about quadrants, but about time management...)

4. Think Win-Win + 5. Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood

Both relate to NonViolent Communication: seeking first to understand is all about emphatic listening, while thinking win-win could be thought of as aimed to address the needs of both parties assuming abundance rather than regard realty as a zero-sum-game (in which for me to win you'll just have to lose).

6. Synergize

A Hyper-Performing Team is a whole, being more that the sum-of-its-parts. To boost your team coaching skills, here are quite a few good sources of inspiration:

• Teamwork is an Individual Skill / Christopher Avery
• Collaboration Explained / Jean Tabaka
• The Core Protocols / Jim & Michele McCarthy
• The Human Side of Agile / Gil Broza
• Coaching Agile Teams / Lyssa Adkins

7. Sharpen the Saw 

This diagram and blog post is a result and a part of an ongoing, continuous search for new ideas and deeper understanding.




I suppose this may be over simplistic, and based only on some of the things I personally encountered so far. How would you improve it? What are you missing here?

Update: I started A post series introducing Covey's 7 Habits.