Agile India 2012: Slowing down to Speed up: Encouraging sustainable pace in teams

Agile India 2012: Slowing down to Speed up: Encouraging sustainable pace in teams

Find the final presentation here.

Here is the description:

We would like solutions delivered fast without compromising quality, user experience, implicit requirements and non-functional aspects such as scalability and performance. This would have been easier, if we had all the time in the universe. Doing this in a sustainable manner becomes a huge challenge for teams as there are multiple competing forces at play and because software development is very complex.
Coaches & Practitioners, participate in this workshop and leave with thoughts that will help your teams adopt and practice sustainable pace, and delight your customers over and over again.

Process/Mechanics

Introduction to the topic, understanding participant expectations - 10 minutes
Achieving sustainable pace - 20 minutes
Workshop briefing and topic selection - 10 minutes : Participants will propose and select topics for deeper discussions Workshop - 30 minutes : Goldtaking (The “Goldtaking” format was introduced by Jan-Erik Sandberg and Lars Skaar at Agile2008 and is a variation of the open space format)
Workshop debrief and discussion - 20 minutes

Learning outcomes

In a highly competitive world, delighting customers is no longer optional. Steve Denning, in his book “The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management”), mentions that the goal of an organization is “Customer Delight”, as opposed to making money for its shareholders. Going by this goal in mind, we will examine how we can use Agile as a means to make our teams and organizations successful.

During this workshop, we will explore:

• Sustainable pace - Importance and challenges:
• How does it result in customer delight?
• How agile values are challenged without sustainable pace?
• What prevents us in delivering at a sustainable pace? (such as competitive surroundings, culture, organization structure, conflicting priorities, old habits, antiquated tools, technical debt)
• How can we coach teams towards sustainable pace?:
• Self realization
• Importance of contextual information
• Understanding and responding to Force fields
• Challenging status quo: Stakeholder alignment and participation
• Building your team into Agile craftsmen, and not Agile mechanics
• Using Data as a vehicle for change
• Inspecting and adapting
• Continued engagement