Speakers

Dave Snowden

‪Dave is a Knowledge Management Consultant and Researcher, known for the development of Cynefin Framework. He has authored several articles and book chapters on the Cynefin Framework, the development of narrative as a research method, and the role of complexity in sense-making. His work is international in nature and covers government and industry looking at complex issues relating to strategy, organisational decision making and decision making.

His paper with Boone on Leadership was the cover article for the Harvard Business Review in November 2007 and also won the Academy of Management award for the best practitioner paper in the same year. He has previously won a special award from the Academy for originality in his work on knowledge management. He is a popular and passionate keynote speaker on a range of subjects, and is well known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style.

Opening Keynote: Agile, agility and complexity

Dave, in this session (the creator or the Cynefin framework ) will provide an overview of complexity theory and the application the framework to Agile methods. He will take an ecological perspective on life cycle management of startup and continuity business as well as looking at the types of culture and practice necessary in different contexts. The session will include new developments in understanding unarticulated needs in pre-Scrum techniques within Agile. Finally aspects of new work on complexity based design thinking will be covered along with methods and approaches to scaling Agile practice to business use and also customers and markets.

Closing Keynote: Identify potential pathways for Agile as a movement.

Prof.P B Sharma

Prof. Sharma is a man of vision and firm commitment and resolve to nurture academic and professional excellence in originations and Institutions to which he has associated himself during his 37 years long professional career. He brings with him combined wisdom of an IIT professor, an institution builder and Director of premier institutions such as DCE and maturity to excel a university of technology of which he was the founder and Vice-Chancellor. He is an IT savvy technical education administrator having knowledge and vision of building world class institutions. Prof Sharma is currently the Vice-Chancellor of Amity University.

He has offered consultancy to a number of reputed industries and organizations which include GTRE Bangalore and world renowned, Rolls Royce of UK. He has guided 14 Ph.D scholars and has undertaken a number of major R&D Projects sponsored by the Government and Private Agencies.

Topic: Accelerating Innovations and Startups in the Age of Disruptive Technologies

Rajiv Sodhi

Rajiv Sodhi is a Senior Corporate Vice President, responsible for the Robotics and Automation initiative across all lines of business at HCL Technologies. With over 34 years of cumulative experience in IT, Rajiv has held major roles and led large engagements across the globe.

Over his 18-year tenure in HCL Technologies, he has been Chief Productivity and Competitiveness Officer, responsible for transforming and globalizing the workforce and workplace; Chief Customer Officer and Global Head of Delivery for Consumer, Manufacturing, Healthcare, and Public Services Industry Verticals and Enterprise Transformation Services; Global Head of Operations; Head of Advanced Technology Center; Head of Offshore Delivery for HCL James Martin and Company; Head of Sales and Marketing for offshore projects worldwide; and member of the Mergers and Acquisitions team. He was also in charge of providing Business and IT consulting for global MNCs.

Topic: Impact of Autonomics on IT Industry and How it can Prepare Itself for Future

Automation and Robotics is a buzz word that is now expected to impact the lives of all people across the globe in all walks of life. From autonomous self-driven cars which may impact drivers, to brick laying 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 get created. The talk will focus on impact on software industry.

The IT industry evolved when computers started to be used for automating business activities and replaced accountants maintaining company records, Human Resource departments automating personnel records, Sales record being supported by analytics, and many more where companies became integrated enterprises where one could work from any global location, anytime and get instantaneous information about business to enable decision making and becoming more efficient and customer focused. While all these transformations happened the departments continue to function and the work profile of people and productivity changed significantly.

The talk is focused on how the IT industry will need to transform itself to continue to stay in business and continue to remain competitive. The talk is based on personal views of the speaker and his experience of 36 years in the industry having seen several such transformations

Sudipta Lahiri

Sudipta (Sudi) has been in the IT industry for over 18 years working with leading services providers like Wipro, HCL Technologies and i2 and is responsible for Digité’s product development. Prior to joining Digité, Sudi was handling the offshore services organization for i2. At i2, he was responsible for its Americas delivery organization. He was also responsible for Retail, Logistics and Technology Infrastructure practices. Sudi also led the QMG initiative for the i2 India services organization. Before i2, Sudi spent 10 years with HCL Technologies. At HCLT, he played multiple roles – from services delivery to leading sales teams. Sudi was responsible for HCLT America’s Insurance vertical.

Sudi started his career at Wipro where he worked for 5 years in different roles across geographies. Sudi holds a Master’s degree from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras.

Topic: DevOps > CI + CD

DevOps has been gaining traction across all software teams across organization. Most teams focus on two specific areas: a) Tools deployment around CI and CD b) Culture integration between Development and Operations teams.

In this talk, we will revisit, in brief, some of the reasons for DevOps. We will discuss some of the Critical Success Factors and detail some specific approaches that should be a part of any team’s DevOps strategy. We will discuss testing and branching strategies, including handling databases, CI and Infrastructure strategies. We will highlight anti-patterns in each of these areas so that teams may consciously take steps that will drive them away from the DevOps objectives.

Ajay Kabra

Ajay has been involved in driving and implementing and transformations of organizations using Agile ,Quality and Process Improvement initiatives. He is the Senior Director – Agile Transformation Coach at Xebia with over 28+ years of extensive industry experience. He has been coaching various organizations, implementing and transforming their current legacy practices into new agile approaches, including SAFe, Kanban and others. Providing high end consulting and training for implementation of Agile Practices. He is a regular speaker at various industry forums and is invited to various organizations to speak and express his views on the current trends and happenings in the industry. Ajay is also a regular blogger and writes blogs on off-topics related to Agile, but always on the softer side of Agile. His blogs are published on Scrum Alliance websites.

Topic: Technical Agility with DevOps: A new dimension to Faster Delivery, Customer Satisfaction

IT in many organizations is far from being a strategic, well-oiled discipline that directly delivers business value. Many challenges exist that hamper business operations, growth, and success. In many organizations, IT is more of a bottleneck than a strategic enabler or differentiator. In times in which software is eating the world, it is a necessity to improve the overall quality of the IT capability. These days, software is still delivered late, with many errors, released only a few times per year, and costs and processes are far from being Lean and mean. There is no option to sit still and do nothing about this.

If organizations want to survive the blistering pace with which competitors enter their market, They need to deliver new services/products as existing products become obsolete. Therefore, they need to deal with these typical challenges. The business demands faster and continuous delivery. However, it is not easy due to various challenges that occur due to contracting goals of the various teams, especially the Development and the Operations teams, involved in the software development and delivery. The job of the Development team is to build software, apply changes to incorporate new features, and fulfill the internal as well as the external requirements. On the other hand, the Operations team focuses on stability, reliability, and performance of the systems maintained by them. The two competing and contradicting goals of the two teams result in a wall of confusion.

There are many symptoms and causes that enhance the wall of confusion to a point that a truly concerted effort is required to bring it down. The focus of this talk would be to encompass a series of ideas, concepts, and concrete actions that focus on removing these symptoms and causes.

Anand Murthy Raj

Anand, is a leader with a vision to bring in great difference and excellence in the organization there by multiplying business/value to achieve greater heights. 20 years of experience in the IT industry through which he brings in strong management background and versatile experience in Agile Coaching. He is first professional to be nominated for the SPCT program in Asia SPC 4.0, SA, PMI-ACP, CSP, CSM, and PSM-I certified Agile Coach. He received the Agile Coach of the year 2016 organized by UNICOM and received best presentation award in Agile NCR conference in Dec 2016

Currently working as an Enterprise Agile Coach and transforming Philips Inc into SAFe. A strong advocate of Agile and has helped implement Agile for various customers. Experience in Agile transformation, coaching and building high performing Agile teams.

Topic: Growing Indian Leadership with insights from Indian Mythology

The Indian belief and the Western belief system are so different that Indian leaders are caught in a catch 20-20 situation. Peter Senge in his book “The fifth Discipline says that India and China have to work and relate to their culture and cannot follow the western culture by default”.

Anand will use the learnings from Devdutt Pattnaik and relate them to help the leadership to understand what real leadership is. How to move focus from systems and focus on People, focusing on growing the organization’s/people’s inner strength over tools and processes. Ability to see the right things in a different lens, how Leaders must see the organization relating to system thinking. Leadership styles depicted in Vishnu’s “Dashavatara”, the mistakes done in Metrics and Measurement, seduction into incorrect decision making, secret of Learning leaders, loving chaos and crisis management.

The stories we have heard from a young age reflect 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.

Deepak Chopra

Deepak Chopra is the Vice President of Lean Digital Transformation Team. He has 17+ years of experience in innovating business processes that drive profitability and growth. He is currently heading the team of Digital Master Black Belts, Black belts, IT process and RPA experts.He is also multi speciality leader – design thinking expert, Six sigma master black belt, Agile (scrum) trainer and coach, CMMI high maturity expert (Maturity Level 5), ITIL V3, ISO (Lead Auditor for ISO 27k, ISO 20k), Innovation and Analytics expert, and EFQM/RNBQA expert.In his earlier stints, he has successfully led global organisations in key areas like development, testing, product management, SEPG and business excellence roles in varying capacities including senior management at Orange. He has also been a consummate management and process excellence consultant to many Fortune 500 organisations like Cadbury Schweppes, Accenture, Ericsson, Emirates, Capgemini, Panasonic, Unitedhealth Group, Sun Life Financials, Prudential, Great Eastern Life, etc.

Topic: All sprint teams are guilty unless proven innocent

From its inception scrum was designed with several key DNA elements that are very different from its counterparts in approaches like waterfall. The Agile manifesto and principles that were laid down, have echoed these DNA views stalwartly on how Agile scrum projects need to be executed. However somewhere between disruptive business scenarios, legacy mindsets and unaccommodating business constraints; all sprints being executed today are guilty of violating one or more Agile expectations. This talk is aimed at sharing perspectives and industry best practices on how despite violations, Agile teams can truly prove their innocence in each sprint for business success effectively by balancing the impact of violations.

Deepak Gururaja

Deepak is a spirited coach, with more than a decade's experience in Agility. He is an Agile Consultant for SolutionsIQ, which is a premier Agile Transformation Service Provider in India. In the past, he was with various organizations including Infosys, Dell, Symphony Services, Sungard, etc. He has worked across breadth of domains like Banking, Education, Server hardware and software, ERP solutions, etc. He is a proponent of "Teach by Experience". Deepak is an advocate of the thought that, transformation happens only when an individual goes through an experience that challenges his or her belief system. Over the past few years, as a herald of Gamification, Deepak has been passionately developing games and activities, that question status quo of organizations, and help them transform businesses from the traditional way of working to synchronous, goal-oriented methods. Currently, Deepak is involved in the transformation of one of the largest Financial Institutions of the US.

Topic: Blame it on Culture

From the State of Agile Survey 2016 (Version One), it is evident that the biggest reason for failure of Agile transformation is the culture of the organization. But, wait. What really is Culture? All Agile Coaches today, talk about Culture being the central pivot of transformation. However,

  1. How do we define culture?
  2. What attributes the culture of an organization?
  3. Why should we be bothered about the Culture of an organization?
  4. Can we really change the culture of the organization?
  5. Can I quantify, what we call "Culture"?
  6. Most Agile transformations today, are equated to a mere framework implementation. Is this effective and sustainable?

Join Deepak, as we discuss these questions and arrive at a concrete takeaway, which will help you very dearly, in your transformation journey

Dov Tsal

Dov, is an avid agilist, who started his professional journey as a software-developer and 'manager'. The Agile movement met his frustration ten years ago, in time to become a scrum-master, a product owner and an Agile-coach. The more he worked, the more he felt transformation should focus on mindset and the will to change, hence Dov currently works closely with HR departments in addition to IT, and helps tailor specific solutions rather than apply a one-process-fits-all approach.

In his life-journey he has passed thru Israel, Paris, New-York, Thailand, and of course India. Since he finds mindfulness can greatly contribute to a change-mindset, I am delighted to share this in the land of Lord Ganesha - the lord of all Agilists.

Session #1 Topic: Agile thru Mindfulness

To be truly Agile, one has to be present, to react to the moment.

  • Do you understand how a team forms an opinion or makes a decision?
  • Do you understand how you make one?

In this session, you will examine how a human mind and a group's mind work, and how to understand them by being present.

Through astonishing videos covering neuroscience and hoard-behaviour, Dov invites you to a unique journey to lose and re-discover the meaning of an identity and gain new insights of how decisions are made and by whom.

Session #2 Topic: Dr NO: learn how to say NO, and why it will change your life. (plus: be always right!)

How effective are you at your work? how much more could you be if you could say No to what is less important and focus on what matters? and if you could reduce (or even avoid) arguments?

In this session we will learn two life-skills

  • Be effective by saying NO: After we will understand the importance of saying no, we will learn and practice how to say No effectively and with no guilt or effort.
  • Always be right: How many conflicts could be avoided if you could always be right? and if you could show others in a simple way where they are wrong? well, being always right is possible! join me to find out how!

Gautam Mahajan

Gautam Mahajan, internationally acclaimed expert in Value creation, strategy, general management and globalization is President of Customer Value Foundation. He is also Founder Editor of the Journal of Creating Value, He is Chairing the First Global Conference on Creating Value in 2018.

His books are Value Creation; Total Customer Value Management; and Customer Value Investment

Featured international speaker. Clients included GE Capital, State Farm Insurance, Wisconsin Energies, Sun Australia, Tatas, Godrej, ITC etc. Mr. Mahajan worked in the US for 17 years with Continental Group, (then a Fortune 50 company) He is one of the inventors of the PET petaloid bottle and noise control kits. He has 18 US patents

Mr. Mahajan is past Global President of the Indo-American Chamber of Commerce. He was Chairman, PlastIndia Committee, Vice President All India Plastics Manufacturers Association, Trustee Plastics Institute of America. He was a member of the US India think tank.. Among his honors is a Fellowship from Harvard Business School and Illinois Institute of Technology. He also has 18 US patents. He was honored by the Illinois Institute of Technology with its Distinguished Alumni award. He delivered the first Distinguished Engineering lecture at Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago in May, 2012.

Topic: Agile is a Flexible Mind-set

This talk is about agile and flexible management. It is my belief that none of these can be successful unless you have a flexible mindset, and then your flexible systems and management can create Value. Flexibility is a very important management trait, but managers tend to look at agile and flexible systems or processes. They almost never think about their own or their managerial flexibility, agility or mindset.

Gerald Cadden

Gerald is an experienced business and IT professional, focused on Agile adoption for teams and at scale. He has worked with many small, medium, and large organizations doing business process re-engineering and organizational transformations. His background in business analysis, development and consulting lets him keep pragmatic view for guiding organizations through the complexities of large transformations.

Topic: Survival is a matter of change... change requires Business Agility!

In today's dynamic business environment being able to adapt and respond quickly to fast changing market conditions is key to survival. The phenomenon of market digitization represents one of the greatest challenges to the survival of businesses.

Advancing mobile and internet based technologies, coupled with an evolving population for which that technology is the life blood of their day-to-day existence, are forcing businesses to compete in ways they have not had to in the past. To survive, these businesses are having to change how they interact with their customers, develop and deliver their product and services, and how they operate to support products / services once in production. A key capability to that survival is Business Agility. But, exactly what is Business Agility?

In this discussion, we will explore:

  1. Ignoring the market evidence at your peril!
  2. Why are we not able to keep pace with change?
  3. What is Business Agility?
  4. Realizing Business Agility

Harsha Vardhan

Harsha, in his current role is responsible for Digital Development and Analytics. He is an Agile evangelist, helped in building product development organizations and successfully implemented scaled Agile in distributed team, having 17+ years of IT experience in Application/Product development. In the past, Harsha worked with Tata Consultancy Services Ltd and Ford Technologies with diversified culture team in North America, Latin America, Ireland and The Philippines.

Topic: Enterprise Agility - It’s all about ROI and Customer Experience

The convergence of digital technology themes such as Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud, IoT etc. have made it possible for enterprise to use technology creatively. Possibly, for the first time in the history, enterprises are challenged not by the lack of technology, but by its overwhelming abundance. The critical imperatives of organization are to stay ahead of competition in a manner that yields efficiency through the value chain from back-office to customer engagement.

Business and IT are collaborating to bring organization agility i.e. time to market. This journey is all about bringing delighted customer and ROI to enterprise.

In this session, you will deep dive into 3 core principles of enterprise agility, as listed below

  • Business Agility I.e. Efficiencies within business processes
  • Technology Agility and Business /IT collaboration
  • Customer Experience

Hemant Gurav

Hemant is a Trainer, Coach, Mentor and has been consulting to companies for nurturing and developing skills required for agile software development practices and methodologies based on the core Agile and Lean Values and principles.

He has a successful track record of leading major Technology, building high performing team and leading agile transformations at large scale in IT industry backed by more than eighteen years of experience working in IT industry. Possess strong global experience in setting up teams to work in different Agile methodology at Program and Portfolio level, targeted to deliver highest value to customer.

Topic: Targeted Regression testing in Large Scale Agile Environment

Completing testing as planned is always challenging either in old traditional waterfall methodology or in Agile Methodology. In any case testing always gets less time than initial allocation. Regression testing will always get compromised. In enterprise class products compromising on regression testing will lead to a bigger risk and impact.

Importance of regression testing has increased however it has becomes more challenging to finish in Agile methodology. Understanding and adopting targeted regression approach will help in such time crunch situation. In this talk we will look at what is targeted regression and how to fit it in large scale agile environment.

Jisha Sharma

Jisha is one of the pioneers and leaders in McKinsey Technology and Digital function. She has over 14 years of experience in diagnosing, solving customer problems, creating and delivering highly flexible solutions across a wide variety of functions and technologies. Creator and guardian of world-class customer experiences that delight the customers further continually raise the bar on functionality, flow, consistency, usability and above all simplicity. She is qualified in understanding and solutioning the toughest problems and then creating the right solutions for it through business process change and technology. A change agent contributing to digital transformations. An Agile Practitioner for the past few years with extensive experience in product management and delivery. She also has rich experience in building and leading global teams (~300 team members), and converting the smaller teams in issues to high performing teams.She mentors and coaches product managers and also an International speaker on Agile topics, product ownership, user experience and how to build high performing teams.

Topic: Please solve the right problem!

As published in one of the Harvard Business Review in early 2017, in surveys of 106 C-suite executives who represented 91 private and public-sector companies in 17 countries, it was found that a full 85% strongly agreed or agreed that their organizations were bad at problem diagnosis, and 87% strongly agreed or agreed that this flaw carried significant costs.

It is critically important to focus on the problem diagnosis and prioritization before solving it. People apply simpler problem-diagnosis frameworks, such as root cause analysis and the related 5 Whys questioning technique but that gives us a good start but we often need more details. In next 45 minutes she will take you through some frameworks, tools and templates that can help you diagnose the real problem, move away from symptoms and then solve it through business and/or digital solution.

Khaarthigha Subramanian

Khaarthigha carry 11+ years of experience, performed varied roles in multiple industries including capital marketing – Depository Receipts, Corporate Actions, Retail, E-Commerce, Healthcare and exposure to Telecom, Supply Chain Financing. She has led Programs and Projects engaging with clients from global markets including US, Europe – Italy, UK, Belgium, Japan and India.

She has been doing program management, successfully handling multi-million euro projects in planning, executing and delivery. Played crucial role to establish a strong partnership with Clients & manage client relationship, Stakeholder management. Establish & Manage clear purpose of work, objective and commercial statement with the Clients with commercial stewardship/ Agile enablement and coaching in Project planning and execution.

Prashanth Madhavan

Prashanth, has 11+ years of IT / Business consulting experience across various sectors that include Travel and Retail. He has been a Product Manager in charge of product strategy, sales, marketing and research. Involved in Enterprise Program Management overseeing several streams and responsible for business value reporting.

Working as an Agile Coach with teams following XP / Scrum practices, also adept with SAFe. He is responsible for team transitions / ramp-ups. Mentoring new team members and facilitating the team on practices. Adept at agile project lifecycle management and scaled agile projects across distributed teams

Topic: Craft your story

Today, Most of the solutions presented to client stakeholders lack a proper articulation of the challenge, solution and benefits. This is predominantly because it tends to be exhaustive and is expected to close a transaction rather than begin a relationship. This has turned the initial engagement phase into a laborious and legal process rather than a more engaging and brainstorming engagement.

Storyboarding is a simple technique to turn a transactional exercise into an engaging one - with the ability to connect to multiple stakeholders and highlight business outcomes during the engagement - in a more sticky way.

Key Takeaways from this talk

  • Objective of using storyboard
  • How to connect to stakeholders and present sticky solutions
  • How to demonstrate value of solution very early
  • To have a better-start will help ensure that we do the best start in our pursuits"

Markarand Purohit

Makarand is passionate about enabling individuals, teams and organizations in pursuit of purpose driven value delivery. He is fascinated by the transformational exchanges that occur between people involved in discovery and delivery.

Over the past 11 years he has been facilitating teams in building solutions for education, retail, financial, automotive and IT infrastructure. With the experience ranging from being the first employee of a startup to being a process consultant for a 140 year old enterprise, he understands and appreciates the power of context. He works with teams to steer them towards a contextual process that is capable of delivering sustainable client and shareholder value and associate/employee opportunities. He draws from his experience employing management disciplines, Business methodologies, frameworks and innovation tools like Systems thinking, Lean thinking, Scrum, Kanban and Design thinking. He believes learning is a continuous process and sharing makes it worthwhile

Topic: Travelogue: An Engineer to a Design thinker

Design thinking is a buzz word these days. But not many know that it has been around since 1980s with the same name. It’s noted as a human centered approach to innovation. There are success stories available in abundance for organizations embracing it for their products/solutions. The human centered aspect appealed to us and we embarked on an experiment to try out this approach for process innovation.

The journey has been fascinating. This session is going to be about the story of an Engineer on this journey. We have many fascinating discoveries from this journey. We also discovered that this approach to process innovation is deeply satisfying the intrinsic motivational needs autonomy, mastery and purpose for everyone on the journey. Come join our protagonist on this voyage!

Meetu Singh

Quality/IT Professional with 17+ years of experience in IT delivery excellence organization. Currently working as General Manager Business Excellence IT. Experience includes, agile scrum, Kanban implementation as agile coach, scrum master, participation in RFP, Estimation & sizing, Customer interaction. Lead organization in achieving certifications like CMM, CMMi, TMMi, ISO 9001, ISO 27001, PCMM, ISAE 3402 (Sox Compliance), PCI-DSS, Governance, Risk & Compliance.

Meetu is a certified in CSP, CSM, Leading SAFe & is on her path to become SAFe Program Consultant(SPC4). Leading implementation of an Agile-Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban in line with client specific agile model for major accounts including development, maintenance support & testing services. An effective leader and communicator with strong interpersonal, leadership, analytical and relationship management skills. Team Management including re-sourcing / outsourcing, recruitment, training, development & performance management/ talent retention.

Topic: Agile Adoption Journey in Travel domain

Agile (Scrum) found to be successful in captive units or product development companies where all stakeholders are equally involved and have access to all decisions. However in IT Services industry where client's feedback, contract, KPIs, SLAs, efficiency, value adds are always important to sustain or grow the company revenue, we have faced challenges in adopting agile. We have taken customized & Created agile delivery model where best practices of Scrum, Kanban & SAFe has been incorporated and at the same time Agile values & behaviors are sustained. Session focus on what is needed to balance the agile manifesto values , both at left side & right side in services industry. She has also share challenges faced by her organizations while moving towards agile transformation journey.

Sessions concludes with glimpse of Agile delivery model evolved in their transformation Journey

Mohit Jain

Mohit has close to 17 years of experience in Agile Coaching (Scrum, Kanban), Delivery Management, Product & Application Development and has successfully led transformation of two organisations from traditional to Agile ways of working.Mohit also holds the distinction of mentoring and coaching more than 6 product teams (500+ members) across US and India towards Agile Adoption (Scrum and SAFe)

Topic: Agile Analytics and Visualizations

This session will focus on how BI platforms can be leveraged for Agile Analytics and making advanced analysis of project data simpler and promoting fact-based decision making. This session will also show how BI's context aware visualisations help identify issues, outliers, anomalies and trends which are otherwise not possible in traditional spreadsheets.

Nirbhay Gandhi

Nirbhay Gandhi is a seasoned Agile Transformation Coach and Trainer. He brings unique, extensive and field-based experience to the area of implementing Lean and Agile at scale. Throughout his career, he has helped several organizations with Agile adoption at various levels, and has worked in multicultural and highly distributed environments including North America, South America, Europe, and Asia. He has helped organizations achieve higher productivity and quality through the adoption of scalable, Agile methods and best practices.

Nirbhay is also a part of the prestigious US Military, where he has been serving in the US Army as a Combat Engineer since March 2016.

Topic: Agile Relationship Status - It's Complicated!

Agile has been around for over 15 years and about two-thirds of organizations today primarily use Agile methods for software and product development. Yet, there are serious challenges and impediments when it comes to Agile adoption in many organizations. Why is that? Haven’t we seen enough success stories already? Haven’t we been a part of some of those success stories? And yet here we are, when asked how we feel about Agile, the response is and an uneasy smile and a quip, Agile is complicated!

This workshop is intended to help the audience develop a better understanding of where and how Agile does or does not work, what the real challenges are, and who ultimately has the power to un-complicate the Agile adoption. This workshop will help the audience with some crucial best practices that the leaders in their organizations can adopt to capitalize on Agile’s potential and how they themselves can become effective change agents and increase the chances of overall success.

Prashant M J

Prashant, with 15+ years of experience has been working with leading IT service providers. He is an Agile practitioner, and leading the software development team in agile transformation, helping them to deliver results that align with overall business objectives. He is leading the agile transformation of the organization, designing and running training courses, coaching individuals and project teams and mentoring agile practitioners/coaches. He has worked with professional coaches, technical coaches and Agile/Lean coaches to help gain clarity about their organization so they can better manage work and people. He is also playing important role in Agile Newtwork India community organizing meetups, webinars & conferences. He is organizing Agile Gurugram and Lean Kanban India conferences.

Topic: Team's Agility Assessment

Organizations are moving towards Agility, as Teams, as Individuals. The challeange is, agility is not tangilble but we need to measure. The Big question -How are we going to measure? Your ultimate measure of your project's success depends on how you constantly improve and adapt to new situations in different context.

In this one hour session he will discuss on what is Agility, Characteristics of high performing team, team's perspective on agility and Evaluate real time scenarios to assess team's Agility. This session will give a clarity on Why, How, What, When the team needs to be assessed.

Ritu Mehta

She is an Outstanding Management Professional, expertise in diversified areas like quality assurance, project management, team management, coaching/mentoring & training. She is a highly competent development manager, always looking for ways to improve Others through her leadership abilities, initiatives and effective communication. She with her extensive experience in Agile adoption, has been managing product teams and releases, ensuring to meet tight deadlines.

Topic: How we combined Design Thinking and Agile Practices

Innovation is no longer just about new technology. It is about new models of organization. Design is no longer just about form anymore but is a method of thinking that can let one see different aspects. And the cutting edge ideas are e not about speed and performance but about collaboration, Interaction and knowing your clients better and better.

Key topics that would be cove:

  • Design at Scale
  • Design Thinking Principles
  • Emphasizing Agile
  • How we applied Design thinking principle in Agile development

Saikat Das

Saikat is a Enterprise Agile Coach with Cognizant Technology Solutions and have in depth experience in Agile Transformation Space doing Agile Program Deliveries, Coaching, Pre-Sales and Consulting for last 16 years. Saikat has consulted for multiple Global Fortune companies like Dell, Tesco, Intel to help Teams and Organization achieve excellence in Enterprise Agility and deploy a culture of experimentation and learning. He coaches/transforms teams and organizations to deliver valuable, high-quality products integrating Agile best practices and streamlining processes that increase revenue, lowers costs, and create business value. Saikat it passionate about sharing his varied experiences and thoughts in Agile conferences across India. He believes firmly in “ Agility arrives when people collaborate and do what they are want to do for continuous improvement”

Topic: Modern Enterprise Agility Pattern

While Agile Principles revolve around customer involvement, continuous feedback loops and result orientation, only applying the process, methodologies and techniques to individual Agile Development teams is not sufficient to deliver the overall purpose of Agility. Agility needs to be present throughout the entire value stream, from customer to external suppliers, from operational teams to strategic decision makers, and from idea to production. The session will talk about his experience in Modern Agile Patterns and how they enable fundamental attributes of Agile framework.

  • Continuously sense changes in the environment and responding accordingly - (Fit for future)
  • Using a hypothesis driven approach to continuously test and retest new products and processes (Fit for Enterprise)
  • Adapting, and integrating new ideas and solutions into business strategy and processes. (Fit for Life Cycle)
  • Quickly reallocating resources in response to the environment without losing momentum (Fit for Integration)

Saket Bansal

Saket Bansal, is into business of increasing employability of professionals . He does this by helping professionals to learn , practice and demonstrate skills needed in today's economy.

Topic: Why We Need Coaching Skills

Many of us work as leaders in our organizations, some of us might be leading 3 to 4 and people others might be leading 300 to 400 people. In today’s world the command and control approach of leading people is not effective. Four years ago as Program Manager, approach for leading people was dominated by providing solution and giving them clear direction. It was a self realization when new organisation was setup, how in effective the command and control approach for the new venture.

In this session Saket will share how shifting towards coaching helped him in creating team which is capable of solving their own problems. The session also includes insights from his experiments and observations done in large enterprise team environment, so it is not only his experience but also aggregation of study, observations and experience.

Srinath Chandrashekaran

Srinath with 18 years of experience in IT, has been working in the Agile area for almost 9 years. Prior to this he was in project delivery in various roles like Developer, Team Lead, System Analyst, Project Manager etc. He says, he entered the Agile world by accident rather than choice but in the past few years has come to strongly believe that Agile is definitely one of the best ways to ensure that projects are successful in the current business scenario.

He has presented his thoughts in various forums like Agile Goa, Agile Bengaluru, Agile NOIDA, Agile India etc. He has also written some articles on Scrum Alliance. He enjoy working with teams and also working on problems that need a solution from an Agile perspective. He is currently working as an Agile Coach in hCentive.

Topic: Are we providing a culture for Agile to thrive ?

While Agile as a methodology has moved into mainstream and there is a much higher adoption rate, are the teams working in Agile feeling any changes in their day-today working or do they still see the same issues which they were experiencing in the traditional methodologies?

Most survey’s today still say that one of the biggest cause for failure of Agile projects is “Culture”. So the question is what is it that everyone is missing to adopt? Or is it something which we know we will never be able to imbibe?

In this talk, Srinath would like to share his experience that he has gathered while coaching teams across a mix of Product and IT services background across diverse domain, technologies and geographies

Thriveni Shetty

Thriveni Shetty is leading the HR Practice at INNOVATION ROOTS. She has overall 7+ years of experience in field of HR. At INNOVATION ROOTS, she keeps the work environment hale and healthy. She is also responsible for implementing & streamlining the HR Process, including Talent Management, Learning and Development, Compensation and Employee Relations.

She is working on improving her skills on Agile and Aspires to learn the implementation of Agile principles in HR.

Topic: Lean Agile Performance Management in Action

This session explains how the performance management can be evaluated in a Lean - Agile way of working. How the Organisational goals are aligned to individual goals and what are the parameters to evaluate the performance as an individual, as a team, and Organisation as a whole

This is an experience sharing session, how we implemented and what are the challenges we are facing and how are we overcoming it.

Ambience Island, National Highway 8, Gurugram - 122 002