I recently attended the Agility2020 conference at Gurugram. Here are a few of my key takeaways from the sessions I attended. My conference video will also be available shortly.

1. Agility 2020 Key Takeaways
Mar 2020

2. Agility 2020 01 Mar Agenda
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3. Achieving Business Agility – Ray Arell
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• Software is everybody’s business whether you are a banking company or an automobile company.
• If companies do not adopt to this new direction digital disruption is most likely to put them out of business.
• Blockbuster made most of their revenue from the rewind back fee on cassette's.
• Blockbuster was aware that Netflix was building a video streaming platform and were cash rich at that point. However they
didn’t move in that direction.
• By the time they realized that video streaming had become big they were flat broke and hence they went out of business.
• Disney has now moved into the video streaming business in the last 1 year and is already a big name.
• Business Agility is about how agility should not be limited to just the development teams.
• Finance also needs to be Agile. Slowly all support functions need to start moving in the Agile direction.
Intel started OKR’s in the 1960’s which was adopted by Google in 1999

4. Integrate Quick & Easy Visualizations into Your work: Bikablo Thought sketching enhances
communication & increases collaboration - Jill Greenbaum
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• Rather than having text use easy visualizations to denote things.
• Be mindful of the cultural notions of people and the context of the situation when you try to come up with visualizations.
• This takes practice and time but can be done by anyone.
• UZMO – to draw a lightbulb which can indicate ideas… First draw a O. Then a small u under the O touching the O. Draw a Z
across the u. Now draw a M inside the O connected to the U
• Use a different color while drawing shadow as can be seen in the blue in the images. Assume that the sun is on the top left-
hand side while drawing these shadows.
• 1-2 colors at max to be used. Avoid making the visualization with too many colors.

5. This is how you measure it.
• Identify what is the parameter that you want to change -> Weight
• What is the current value -> 80
• What is the target value -> 60
• At what point will you identify if any change of direction is
required ( Constraint) -> 70
Impact Mapping – Charu Arora
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Values Unit of
Measure
Weight KG
Current 80
Constraint 70
Target 60

6. #Mindful Agile – Applying Mindfulness in Agile Teams – Kathy Berkidge
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• Being mindful is about actually being aware (Typically it is only 47% of the day is when you are aware of where you are. Rest of the time we are thinking about the
past or the future)
• How can we be mindful ?
- Listening without any judgement or perception
- Paying deliberate attention to what is being said
- Being open and present
• How can we practice it?
- Informal practice
• Just breathe
• Clear your mind
- Recall & focus
- Formal Practice
• Meditation
• Being Agile or Doing Agile?
- Agile mindset
- Following Agile Values & Principles
- The only person who can be mindful is YOU.

7. #Mindful Agile – Applying Mindfulness in Agile Teams – Kathy Berkidge
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• Agile Principle 1 – Individuals and Interactions over processes and tools.
- Team cohesion & relationships
- Communication & Collaboration
- Resilience & Well Being
- Emotional Intelligence
• Agile Principle 2 – Working Software over comprehensive documentation.
- Focus on value & quality
- Mental clarity, creativity & idea generation
- Sense of meaning & satisfaction of work

8. #Mindful Agile – Applying Mindfulness in Agile Teams – Kathy Berkidge
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• Agile Principle 3 – Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Deep empathy
- Continuous learning & discovery
- Unbiased objective insight generation
- Focus on delight
• Agile Principle 4 – Responding to change over following a plan
- Acceptance
- Flexibility & adaptation
- Openness & Willingness
- Inclusive decision making

9. Hacking Agility with Games– Ellen Grove
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• Game #1
- First the room was divided into groups of 5-6
- The she showed a book
- Asked each individual to guess the number of pages in the book.
- Checked with people on who had selected what range (100-200, 200 -300, 300 – 400, 400 – 500, 500 +)
- Then she asked each group to come up with an average. Checked the average across the groups
- Further checked the average across all the teams
- Average came to be 350. Actual number of pages in the book was 352.
- Learning is that we need to take the collective learnings of the group to unlock the maximum potential.

10. Hacking Agility with Games– Ellen Grove
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• Game #2
- First the room was divided into groups of 5-6
- Each table was asked to get organized into groups of 2. 1 Product Owner, 1 developer – incase 3 people are there then 1 PO and 2 developers
- Three sets of groups where identified.
- First Set – PO and Developer sit back to back. They can have conversations but cannot look at each other.
- Second Set – PO and developer can look at each other but PO was not allowed to show the sheet to them. PO can give instructions and feedback
- Third set of people can do whatever they want and however they want..
- She then handed over a Origami of a jumping frog and then each of the teams to create as many jumping frogs as possible for a timebox.
- After the timebox she asked each of the teams to come up with how many frogs were created.
- First group had none, second group had some kind whereas the third group had achieved the purpose.
- Learning is that when teams collaborate and work towards a shared purpose the outcome is met.
- The last thing she made each group to do was to identify how they would take it back to their organization.
- We identified that the third game was a good game to be run in a PO training and we would share it back with Vrishali and Subroto since they are the
current trainers for PO.
- Also links for games were shared as can be seen in the attached image

11. Patterns and practices for evolvability – the key aspect for Technical Agility – Leena S N
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• Branch By Abstraction
• Anti Corruption Layer – Similar to branch by extraction – This comes from the Domain Driven Design Book..
• Strangler Pattern

12. Patterns and practices for evolvability – the key aspect for Technical Agility – Leena S N
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• Patterns for Database
- Database Refactoring Book by Pramod Sadalke
- Refactoring
- CI
- Feature Toggles
• Release Toggles
• Deploy! = Release
• Avoid Rollback hells
• Experimental Toggles 9Short Lived Toggles)
• A/B/n Testing
• Canary Release
• Ops Toggles
• Designing for failure
• Manage Circuit breakers
- Take small reversible steps
- Build safety nets
• Github upgraded Rails from 3.1 to 5.1 over 1.5 years
• eBay uses Sacrifiicial architecture (Strangler Pattern)

13. The art of building a powerful self organizing team – Arshiya Sultana
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• Self organization is human nature
• Right from the time of birth we organize ourselves
• Good Video by System Innovation on Self Organization

14. Is it possible to build start up culture in large legacy organizations – Padma Satyamurthy
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• Large organizations are like huge ships.
• Small boats can be maneuvered very easily as compared to a huge ships
• This is because there is a fear of change because large organizations have reached where they are because of what they have done till
date
• But in the current world if we continue to do what we have been doing till now we will only reach where we are and not where we want to be
• Hence there is a need to bring in the startup culture in big organizations.
• This can be done by
- Start from where you are.
- Identify the current state.
- Identify what is the future state that you want to achieve
- Come up with action items and milestones for the future state
- Start implementing those actions
- Celebrate the small successes as well. Don’t wait to celebrate the big success.

15. Thank You!