Agile Network India -Pune Title:Leveraging small teams to scale agility by Abhinav Roy Date: Oct2023 Hosted by:Josh

1. Leveraging
Small Teams to
Scale Agility
Abhinav Roy

2. Agenda
Goal of Agile
Adoption
First Three
Months
Challenges
Initial
Approach
Maturing
the Process
Sustenance
Phase
Measuring
Success
Learnings Q&A

3. Goal of Agile Adoption
Align the engineering
teams with business
objectives
1
Improve our time to
market
2
Increase the value of
the customer
experience
3

4. First Three Months
Understand
Understand the technology
environment
• Assessing the current situation
• Closer stakeholder involvement in
defining value, focus and priorities
• Reduced work in progress to
increase delivery frequency
including a definition of ready and
a definition of done
Build
Build the team foundations
• Build multi-disciplined teams that
focus on both - business and
technical domains
Implement
Implement the right tools and
processes
• Bringing about the start of the
digital, Agile, technology and
culture transformation

5. Challenges
Communication silos between ‘developers’ and ‘quality engineers’
Gap between product management teams and engineering teams
To fit Agile experiences into their existing environment
Scrum team members changed at each iteration as people moved between teams
Initial struggle to understand what their team capacity level
Not letting go of the traditional ‘command and control’ approach

6. Initial Approach
Plan and conduct necessary Agile trainings
Allow teams and people to fail fast to help accelerate the teams’ maturity level
Set up smaller teams requires the team members to extend trust to others and empowers
individual interaction
Develop an Onboarding Plan for the teams
Create an Agile contract that works for your teams and clients

7. Initial Approach (continued)
Create a DevOps Scrum team to focus on CI/Automated testing and automation
of various manual processes
Gather retrospective feedback - people were spending a lot of their time
resolving infrastructure, pipeline, test automation, and similar issues
Shift in engineering mindset to focus on automation and automation testing
Introduce an Improvement Plan

8. Maturing the Process
Build a good steady pace
Empower individuals to take
over
Focus on the Product team
to help them capture the
right requirements and
deliver the right things
Mature the process to self-
organising teams

9. Sustenance Phase
Continually work
collaboratively to improve
the capability
Make sure month on month
looks better
Make sure people start
recognising how Agile is
helping improve customer
delivery
Constantly learn and
experiment with new Agile
and Lean strategies

10. Measuring
Success
• Customer centricity - 30 % increase in
customer satisfaction by creating teams with
end-to-end customer focus
• Operational performance - 25 % improvement
in selected processes by removing hand overs
and driving continuous improvement
• Speed - 5-10x increase in speed in driving
change and decision making through
simplified operating model
• Employee engagement - 40 % increase in
employee engagement by ensuring people
have autonomy and purpose
• Efficiency - 25 % efficiency gains through
fewer hand overs, reduced overhead, and
strict focus

11. Learnings
Creating smaller teams
supports the transition
from a group of individual
contributors to a self-
managing team
Small teams scale well
and mature faster
Cultural change within
organization takes time
and requires “buy in”
from all stakeholders
To have clear role
definitions during Scrum
implementation
Focus on continuous
improvement

12. Q&A

13. Thank You
Abhinav