Agile Chennai 2023 | Agile story with new age leadership and empiricism - Sheba John

www.agilechennai.com
Agile story with New Age leadership behaviours &
empiricism
By
Sheba Annie John

EMBRACE CHANGE
2

“Empiricism is at the heart of agility”
3
Transparency
Inspection
Adaptation
All know what is going
on
Ok to change tactical
direction
Continuously check the
work

Challenges in sustainable business delivery
4
Decision
Latency
Communication
overhead
Cultural
differences
Unsynchronized
priorities
Dependency
management
Stakeholder
engagement
Market
competition

Process
Oriented
Leadership
Cop to Coach
The need to transform to New Age Leadership Style…
People
Oriented
Leadership
• Eroding leadership style
• Top down decision making
• Avoid transparency, command and
control, micro-management
• One-size fits all approach
• Enduring / Emerging leadership style,
with trust and integrity
• Decentralized decision making with more
autonomy
• Clear vision, focus on performance,
customer centric, risk takers
• Is purpose driven, nurtures passion, data-
driven decisions, demonstrate
authenticity, empathy and humility
M
I
N
D
S
E
T
5

Sustainable performance with virtual teams
Shared vision
Innovation
Outcome
Focused
Competency
development
One Team
Mindset
 Culture and Mindset
transformation
 Psychological safety
 Informal connects
 Shared purpose
 IKIGAI Philosophy
 Transparency
through tools
 Focus on outcomes, not output
 People oriented leadership style
 Autonomy
 Skill gap matrix
 Functional, Technical,
Behavioral enablement
 Innovation Opportunities
 Promote creativity
 Continuous Improvements
6

…. Leading to Desired Outcomes & Success Measures
New Age Leadership
Behavior
Trust and Credibility
Influence techniques
Sustainable
Performance
Inclusive Virtual
Collaboration
Productivity
Attrition
Team Happiness Index
Business
value delivery
Business OKR’s
Customer Satisfaction
NPS
Cost reduction
“ It is the ability to bring the best in others that makes you a leader. “ - Sadguru
7

8
Let’s move on to the Agile story…

Fixed Bid program
with tight timeline
of 12 months
Waterfall Model
proposal, but
execution in Agile as
per customer request
250+ members –
geographically
dispersed due to
niche skills availability
Combination of third party
product vendors, multiple
service lines and client
stakeholders
Project execution
mode change into
Product engineering
A Fortune 500 Insurance company providing protection to 50+ million people through its subsidiaries in U.S. and Japan.
Development of a market leading Digital platform and Portal ecosystem for D2C and strengthen agent channels.
Greenfield end to end product engineering program in Insurance.
Cutting edge tools and
technology expectations
9

The phases and challenges...
Onboarding
Coaching & enablement
Execution
Reporting & Tracking
Team engagement
Geographically dispersed teams, with varied niche
skillset
Varied level of processes and tools knowledge
Fixed bid project with stringent timeline of one year,
to be executed in Agile mode
Diverse report views catering to multiple
stakeholders
Managing high engagement levels for 250+ members
across virtual pods around the globe
10

How we sailed through…
11

Onboarding
Geographically dispersed teams, with varied niche skillset like Product Specialists, UX
Designers, Domain Specialists, Engineers, Digital Architects, DevOps architects, Cyber
Security Analysts, Quality Engineers, and so on.
 Product council with product owners and designers
 Program council for program level governance consisting of IT, client and vendors
 Well defined pod operating model covering all teams and roles
 Introduced new roles from scaled agile to address breadth of the program
 Experienced scrum masters from specialist groups
SOLUTION
CHALLENGE
12

Coaching & Enablement
Varied level of processes and tools knowledge of the team members, lack of role clarity
 Process based, role based, tool based enablement sessions virtually
 Robust agile playbook as ready reckoner
 Paired resident and travelling agile coaches
 Formulation of agile ways of working through workshops
 Customized value stream based backlog structuring in ALM tool
SOLUTION
CHALLENGE
13

Execution
Greenfield project with high tower dependencies and geographically dispersed pods; Fixed
bid project with stringent timeline of one year, to be executed in Agile mode with sprint based
milestones
 Collaborative agile model with geographically distributed virtual pods
 Tightly coupled governance structure between client , IT and product vendors
 Empowered autonomous teams owning end to end delivery
 Design led and cloud based, with best in class engineering practices
 Roles and responsibilities matrix definition
 Structured, time bound and outcome driven events during established overlap hours
SOLUTION
CHALLENGE
14

Team structure
15

Events cadence matrix and Overlap hours - sample
16

Reporting & Tracking
8+ tracks with multiple pods within each track, along with varied service lines, vendors, senior
leadership and customer stakeholders, with each group requiring unique views, made
reporting and tracking cumbersome
 Jira as the single source of truth across tracks and geographies
 Customized workflow to drive communication and transparency
 Confluence wiki as the collaboration platform and knowledge repository
 Multi-level automated real time dashboards from Jira with 360 degree view
 Cross tower dependency mapping from Jira using macros
 Strong change management process via Jira workflows
SOLUTION
CHALLENGE
17

Transparency through tool – Jira Backlog structure
BA Sprint
Dev Sprint
Ready for Delivery
Closed
Ready for
Development
Final Customer
Review
18

Built-in quality gates – Customized Jira Workflow
19

Well-defined DoR and DoD for consistency and quality
Functional Area Criteria Additional Information Evidences
Business Analysis Requirements are completed
Feature description to be added
Epic to be linked
BA Sprints to be assigned
L0, L1, L2 value streams to be filled
L2 Work Points to be updated
Wiki link to be added
- Acceptance Criteria (at least 2 or 3 to start with)
- Assumptions
- Out of Scope
- Dependencies identified
- Non Functional requirements (If any)
- Risks and Issues(If Any)
- Wireframes (if applicable)
- Field definitions (if applicable)
- Mandatory fields (in red) are to be present in the JIRA
Feature
- Review tasks for Development, QA, BA and Customer
are created and their status is Passed, Approved or
Closed.
Business Analysis
- Validation criteria are created / Adding detailed
acceptance criteria based on which test cases would be
created
- Splitting of Feature's might be required if the size of
Feature is more than a sprint - exceptions need to be
discussed with Lead PO's
More acceptance criteria to be added from the initial
one
All the below would be must have if applicable :
- Assumptions
- Out of Scope
- Dependencies identified
- Non Functional requirements (If any)
- Risks and Issues(If Any)
- Wireframes (if applicable)
- Field definitions (if applicable)
- Validation criteria are created in Wiki and linked with
the New Feature.
- Post this state only few addition or modification should
be done to the Feature
- If required, update the L2 workpoints
Product Council
Program Board view check
Program Backlog Health check of all tracks
Dependency identification and callout
Getting commitment for all respective tracks for a
milestone
Progress check on how we are moving towards the
commitment
-Review Program Board and n, n+1 sprint plan
-Ensure most of the dependent stories are aligned in
the same sprint
- Dependencies across the sprint should also be tracked
-High level Feature description and work point
estimation to be updated
- Alignment to SOW milestones for value stream
completion
- Bring into consideration EIS milestones wherever
applicable
- Call out the risks that we see from the program
progress or backlog burn up/down standpoint
Program Board continuously updated
BA and Dev Sprint numbers assigned to all New features
in the program board
Development Coding is completed
- All user story scenarios covered
- All exceptional cases covered
- Code compiled
- Code is merged to the Central source code
repository
The code is in the Source control tool: Jira tickets
should have references to the
appropriate commits on the source control tab
This must be done against Oracle DB or MSSQL
as defined in the project.
"NF Development" subtask in Jira (can be part of
integration tests)
In the Jira tickets there should be a references to
the appropriate commits on the source control
tab
Unit tests are written. Sonar, unit test coverage is above the threshold
All java logic must be tested. In Unit tests
mock can be used for DTO, Enitites, DAO. Thresholds for projects are defined on [DevProc] Sonar
DAO technically is untestable due unit test must
not use IO operations. DAO must be covered
by integration testsonly.
Development
Sonar violations are analyzed locally The number of critical and blocker violations
should be decreased up to 0
Development
Manual test cases are executed by developer and
passed
Developers execute the limited number of test
cases which is called Critical Development Test
Cases.
Critical DEV TCs Execution task in Jira is closed
Development Code review is completed Code review is performed Code review task in Jira is passed and closed
Architecture Design documents are updated
Delivery management Release notes are provided
Delivery management New Feature is in Closed status
Delivery management All Jira tickets related to appropriate New Feature
are in either Resolved or Closed status
Delivery management
The backlog item is considered to be ready
for delivery
The New Feature is closed in Jira, all subtasks are
closed in Jira
Development
Database schema migration scripts implemented
and tested
Development
Unit tests and integration tests are created and
passed
In Sprint Testing Test design is completed
Test Design to be done as per the acceptance
scenarios in the New Features
Functional test cases have been written and peer-
reviewed
Test design tasks in Jira are closed, Test cases
in Jira are linked to New Feature
In Sprint Testing Functional automated tests passed
Mostly these are the test for other parts of
system's functionality which are run to make sure
that they are not affected mistakenly.
Automated test report
In Sprint Testing
Manual test cases are executed and passed or
conditionally passed (if minor defects are not
fixed)
100% Functional tests have been executed, and
passed
Test case status in Jira is passed, manual test
execution tasks are closed
In Sprint Testing Test automation is planned
Tasks for test automation are created in Jira and
linked to the New Feature
In Sprint Testing No Major+ active defects exist 100% of critical/high defects are closed, Medium
and Low defects are tracked
Defect status in JIRA
Integration Testing
Integration test cases have been written and peer-
reviewed
Test design tasks in Jira are closed, Test cases
in Jira are linked to New Feature
Integration Testing
100% Integration tests have been executed and >
90% passed
100% of critical/high defects are closed, Medium
and Low defects are tracked
Defect status in JIRA
DoR DoD Dev
DoD QA
20

Effective Change Management process through Jira
PO
21

Jira Dashboards for Inspect & Adapt
Development
Total WP's
planned -
program
Cumulative
(UP to S7)
Current Sprint
(S8) week 1
S9 S10 Completion % Dev Readiness- Current Sprint
Progress
Status (as of
S8 W1)
Planned 175 83 111 297
Actual 175 16
WIP 67
Dev Ready 54
Planned 433 182 308 312
Actual 374 0
WIP 182
Dev Ready 158
Planned 1058 227 95 0
Actual 1055 13
WIP 213
Dev Ready 223
Planned 368 68 124 37
Actual 335 0
WIP 68
Dev Ready 44
Planned 622 103 53 0
Actual 622 0
WIP 94
Dev Ready NA
Planned 2655 661 690 647
Actuals 2561 29
WIP 623
Dev Ready 479
96%
Overall 6683 72% 43%
21%
Integrations 100% 65%
896
Portals 86% 87% 25%
Platform 100% 99% 49%
2124
2162
SmartComm 91% 65% 56%
System Team 100% NA 69%
597
903
22

Collaboration with Confluence - samples
23

Jira add on’s for leadership support
• Allows you to plan and track
work strategically across multiple teams
and projects.
• Helps to plan based on capacity, track
dependencies, manage competing
priorities, and explore alternative
scenarios with a single source of truth on
the current and future health of your
initiatives.
• Connects team to strategic objectives
• Supports complex environments of large
enterprises
• Get everyone on the same page to
determine scope, roadmaps and
dependencies across teams and
portfolios.
• Plan and manage all your tasks in a
single workspace.
• Tailor it to your specific needs and track
your undertakings at any granularity
level.
• Collect and aggregate data from many
different levels, track progress, and
compose consistent reports.
24

Team engagement and continuous improvements
Managing high engagement and motivation levels for 250+ team members across pods
throughout the journey, especially in challenging situations
 Happiness survey to get the pulse of the pods, and improvements
 Senior leadership connects / townhalls, providing communication on organizational updates,
client updates, and Q&A sessions.
 Structured rewarding mechanism sprint wise, with peers and leaders given chance to nominate
team members , building an appreciating culture.
 Team building activities, motivation mailers like inspirational sparks, WoW nuggets, fantastic
Friday fun events etc. video based and interactive
 Periodic maturity assessments and diagnostic checks for continuous improvements
SOLUTION
CHALLENGE
25

Team engagement - snapshot
ONE TEAM mindset with continuous engagement activities and shared goal
 Virtual coffee connects on video with team building activities and
interactions (informal)
 ‘Funtastic Friday’ riddles / puzzles
 Inspirational Spark mailers – moral through stories
 WoW nuggets – knowledge nuggets on new ways of working
26

Stepping stones to success
One Team Mindset
Optimal throughput
Streamlined
impediment resolution
Proactive risk
mitigation
Quality Delivery
“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines , practiced everyday” – Jim Rohn
Learning culture
Transparency Inspection Adaptation
 Proper team on-boarding
 Right working model identification
 Defined Cadence for Collaboration
 Product Mindset and Healthy Backlog
 Well Defined KPI driven Governance Model
 Diligent tool usage for transparency
 Culture of empowerment
 Engineering Practices Adoption
 Continuous Feedback and Improvements
27

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