what really is my secret sauce ?

In the quest to deliver business value quicker, enterprise agile transformations are common and growing, leaving the organization CXO's confused and struggling in the myriad universe of agile process and tools. They hear Scrum, Lean, XP, Kanban, DSDM, FDD, and are asking their team which ones should I choose ? Based on my experiences with enterprise wide transformations, I would love to share as to what really is my secret sauce?

The answer is not a simple YES only Scrum works ! and NO XP does not work !

Instead the real story is about a new breed of agilistas, who are mixing the various ingredients and bringing an integration of the various methodologies to deliver the promise of faster turnarounds and keeping the CXO's smiling. The amazing process landscape map by Mark Kennaley, as referred by Carson Holmes, summarizes this beautifully below and points to the SDLC3.0 wave approaching and becoming the new world order till we get to the next evolution.

SDLC 3.0
Courtsey: Fourth Medium Consulting

As the agile community evolves, the real adoption levels of these varied methodologies will always remain a hot topic...but now you know my secret sauce! But I would really love to hear your comments on which methodologies are actually converging in your organization? Is it Scrum and Kanban ? or Lean and XP practices with AMDD ? Tell me about your secret sauce in the comments now.

Product Manager - version 2.0 @ Scrum India Dec 2011

The Scrum India Dec 2011 NCR meetup at Xebia, offered me a perfect opportunity to rant about my expectations from today's Product Managers in the agile world today, as we go about our daily (product development) chores. This post was takeoff from my earlier post sometime back on bringing the business dashboard closer to the workforce on the ground and linking the agile world with the overall business objectives. Feel free to comment on my digs and leave your feedback in the comments.

Ofcourse my presentation was in the Pecha Kucha style (my first one) and think i did ok :-),but you can watch my presentation video recording at the WizIQ channel.

Overall it was interesting to hear Amit Somani (MakeMyTrip) and their struggles to get the product managers, with some controversial points by Rajat Bhalla (Vinsol). You can watch all the video recordings at the WizIQ channel (video recording sponsors).

Product Manager - version 2.0 

Product Manager - version 2.0

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Agile Balanced Scorecard at Agile Tour India 2011, Pune

As part of the Scrum Alliance, Agile Tour India, Pune conducted a track on Agile Enterprise and my session on "Balanced Scorecard for the Agile Enterprise" was selected. The session focused on how Balanced Scorecard has traditionally been used across multiple industries for managing the organization performance towards the achievement of it's strategic goals. This session introduced key performance indicators for a Balanced Scorecard in an Agile context, which could lead to similar strategic focus and organizational alignment and how to capture the typical agile metrics in the overall Balanced scorecard for software projects. The session was extremely well received by the enthusiastic audience of 100+ attendees, comprising CXO's, senior managers and development community.

Agile Balanced Scorecard -Agile Tour 2011 Pune

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7 Steps to winning Agile wars

Sharing my presentation at the Agile NCR 2011, talking about the 7 step framework for introducing bottoms up agility in your organization. Watch out for details in my next blog posts.

How did you win your wars ? leave a comment...

Asheesh Mehdiratta Agile NCR 2011

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Speaking at Agile NCR 2011

Delighted as I will be speaking in the Agile NCR 2011 conference, Delhi...you can catch my talk on 25th Feb 2011 (4:00PM)....http://agilencr.org/pages/agenda

I will be speaking - 7 steps to winning Agile wars ...

any thoughts on this? Shoot me an email and I will try my best to answer in my talk. wish me luck !

Tribal maintaineance or Sprint Retrospectives : just another tribal ceremony?

Do you think that your sprint retrospective transitions the team to their cause ? or is it just another tribal ceremony?

The authors of Tribal Leadership talk about people forming tribes, which range from stages 1 to stage 5 (most evolved at stage 5). The tribal leaders in Stage 4/5 perform regular "tribal maintaineance". But do you know that this tribal maintaineance ritual matches the sprint retrospectives feedback loop (which agile teams perform after every sprint)?

Stage 4/5 tribal leaders, who regularly perform these "tribal maintaineance" or "oil changes" (as the authors speak), ask these BIG questions -
1. what's working well ?
2. what's not working ?
3. what can we do to make the things that aren't working, work ?

This indeed sounds familiar to the Agile Sprint Retrospective questions -
1. What worked well last Sprint that we should continue doing?
2. What didn’t work well last Sprint that we should stop doing?
3. What should we start doing?

But what's the difference in these stage 4/5 tribes and agile sprint retrospectives ? Do agile sprint retrospectives miss anything?

I think that the major difference in these tribes vs the sprint team answering these similar questions, is that the tribe is indirectly answering more key questions - " what's our cause ?" and "what are we proud of ?".

This tribal maintaineance activity provides the tribe a deeper understanding of their shared values. Once a tribe understands these shared values, the tribe members are united and therefore transition to a "we are great" tribe !! (stage 4), from a "I am great" (stage 3) !!

Thus this stage 4 melts all individual boundaries and the tribe members work collectively towards their noble cause. Surely Avatar's on Pandora were a united tribe with a noble and heroic cause !!

But what about your sprint teams ? do they see their cause from a sprint retrospective or is it just another tribal ceremony?

Agile 2010 conference registration

Agile 2010 dates are now announced by Agile Software Community of India (ASCI), happening in Mumbai(16/17th Jan) and Bengaluru(22/23rd Jan). Here are the links for Bengaluru and Mumbai registrations. I am registering my seat now....