Story of how we transformed our company from financial stagnation to one of rapid growth and even greater growth BHAGs using Agile principles of client engagement and Agile contracting. This talk was delivered by Rahul Dewan at the www.agilencr.org (2013).

1. MY AGILE STORY
How we transformed our company
Rahul Dewan
www.srijan.in
Phone: +91 (0124) 421 0160
Mobile: +91 98102 00322
E-mail:business@srijan.in

2. Our Culture
• Team oriented
• Take on challenges
• Work very hard
• Nimble, Responsive, Responsible
• Less processes (chaos + processes)
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3. Looking Back – Challenges
• Short-term projects
• Fixed Cost
• Incorrect estimations (nearly always)
• Tail of the projects always dragged (endlessly)
• Each time we bore the brunt (of such cost over-runs)
• Change requests were “difficult to capture”, “scope” and estimate
• Fingers pointing all over (sales -- developers)
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4. Looking Back – Challenges
• Financial constraints led to staffing developers on new projects
(before completing one at hand – endless project tail!)
• One-person-team staffed on a project, was not unusual
• Low developer morale
• Low leadership morale
• Poor financial health (after a lot of hard-work for years)
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5. Looking Back : NASSCOM
#Emergeout 2011
• Heard a speaker from the NASSCOM mentoring program
- “Infosys knows its revenues 2 years ahead”
- “I got out of projects; looked for clients offering long-term
contracts”
• How could i get long-term contracts for Srijan?
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6. Looking back : Agile workshop
• Heard about a SCRUM Master certification program; negotiated
coaching for Srijan
• Opened us up to “Agile contracting”, “staffing dedicated teams”
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7. Looking back : Agilecon India
2012
• Slot to speak about “distributed startups”
• An opportunity to interact with Agile coaches
• “Hungry for answers! Agile-Contracting – how does that work?
How do i get engage clients in not-fixed-cost”
• “Break the project into an induction phase, development
phase, and handover phase” - came repeated responses
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8. Looking back : Moving Forward
• Convinced
• Now i needed a few clients who would agree to my new found
philosophy for project success
• Had to “manage the stress” of finding alternate clients – and
calming nerves internally
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9. Serendipity – “Happy co-
incidences”
• Just 3 months earlier we had acquired a big client – who truly
believed in “Agile”
• With this “financial cushion” to negotiate we refused fixed-cost
clients, and “hugged” the more open clients
• Converted a fixed-cost-mindset client to an Agile-multiple-
contracts client
- they loved our “integrity” and “honesty” in sharing why it
would be lose-lose deal otherwise
- We “hugged” them (more cushion!)
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10. What was changing?
• Staffing “teams” to deliver working software every 2 weeks
• Internal demos, client demos
• Retrospectives – feedback sessions among the team for self-
improvement and project-improvement
• Billing with every delivered Sprint
• Cash-flows and financial health was looking up
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11. What was changing?
• Dev team was focussed on one-project-at-a-time
• Software quality automatically improved; better code
documentation
• Long-term project bookings, enabled “hiring” good people (and
waiting for the right hires)
• Higher employee-engagement; satisfaction
• Happier workplace
• Engaged (and smarter) clients
• Re-orienting roles – for the first time we were defining role and
design our company (Organisation Design) with clarity
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12. 12

13. 2 week Agile Template
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14. What to expect during this
change?
• A willingness to let go off clients (fixed-cost)
• Building new vocabulary -- “Sorry (in 2 days with 2-page RFP) we
can't say what your product will cost!”
• “Being Agile” -- loads of internal coaching, arguments
• Managing the leadership folks (I lost a partner!)
• Managing employee concerns
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15. What to expect during this
change?
• Participate in loads of events, meetups
• Find clients who can offer a “financial cushion” during the
transformation process
• Find an Agile Coach; engage long-term
• Be patient! Stay focussed!
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16. MY AGILE STORY
@rahuldewan ; @srijan
Join “Our Agile Journey” -- Meetup.com
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