 Other presenters are doing pretty well, right? Okay, so let's get started. My name is Ebin. I work as an agile coach in a bank called Society General. So today's topic is transformation versus adoption. Yeah, the topic contains three major parts. One is about differentiating between adoption and transformation. And the second part is about understanding the culture, culture of a company, culture of a team, how that is related to your transformation. Last, maybe the least, is what we did with respect to the culture. So the idea is to not present what we did completely, how our journey, what are the challenges we face. Instead, I would like to give you or generate some curiosity out of you, where you can probably go back and then think about the culture which you have in your company, in your project, and how can you tweak your way of doing things a little different so that it will work, right? Okay, so this is something which I found. So people get a lot of idea about different framework. Just before in the lightning talk, our friend was talking about we choose framework because it's trendy, geeky, it's fancy, right? So many companies do transformation thinking that, okay, this is the way market is going. So we need to do agile. So they don't have a real need. They don't know what they really want. So they just catch on to the train and then say we start doing things, right? So of course there are use out of lot of different frameworks, but don't get obsessed with one framework which probably you're thinking about solving all your problems. You may have to take different parts from each framework and then start making it work. You should basically understand how things happen in your company. If something works outside doesn't mean that it's going to work as it is in your company, right? So when we try to differentiate bit by bit in adoption and transformation, anybody here have some idea about transformation and adoption? Anybody want to differentiate between transformation and option? It's moving to a state where as adoption, you retain some of what is already there, taking some new stuff as well. There is transformation between that you are abandoning whatever you are currently having and moving to a totally new stuff. Transformation for me is more like a journey where adoption is more like a profit. We have some insight about transformation and adoption. We know that it's not same, right? But many people use it interchangeably, right? We do agile transformation, we do agile adoption and we are agile, right? We see that. So one definition which I have found is probably, no, not definition, one analogy is learning to make a decent coffee is adoption, but becoming a barista is kind of transformation. One more, adoption will change what you do, but transformation will change you. The way you think, we talk about mindset, right? We say, if you don't have agile mindset, nothing will sustain. We tried enough, probably it's happening in your place also. I have been a coach for last six years. I never seen anywhere you have 100% agile mindset. So we go, we do adoption in companies. We get out, we'll see that things will be falling apart after some time. It's because we didn't really transform our mind. So many people talk about transforming, adopting, but nobody really care much about the mindset. Everybody want to talk about, yeah, we started doing stand-up meeting, we do retrospection, we do that, we do this, et cetera, et cetera. And we say, we call it, call ourselves as agile. Even in our company, we have a certificate given to the team which start practicing agile, which is called, you are successfully completed the agile transformation, so you get a star and they can paste it on their whiteboard and enjoy. But after three months, you go back to them, they have the star there. That's all. Especially in India, the main habit of middle managers are kind of shifting people because they're in agile, they don't have much job. They have access, come as to who's going to take care of the team, he's going to enable, he's a servant leader, all that fine. So what should I do? I'll find innovative ways of shuffling people. We keep shuffling people. So where do you get that unity? By the time they start collaborating, when they start forming a common mindset, we start shuffling them. Again, they have to go through the pattern again. So what to do? So first we have to admit that, yeah, we have a problem. If you think you don't have a problem, it's okay. But if you think, yes, we have a problem related to our agile because even earlier Sudeep was giving a talk here and he was telling that waterfall project also can adapt agile. Of course, there are a lot of things which we can take it, take to any projects for that matter, waterfall or V model, any cycle. What we can do is probably can say individual interaction is applicable everywhere. It doesn't matter whether you have to be agile. You can be collaborative. You can be transparent. So what happens is, this has a direct connection with the culture, the culture of the company. If you don't manage the culture of the company, it starts managing you. So this is what we have realized that when you say there is a culture difference with the culture of the project or culture of the company is not really agile, friendly, what happens is you go do a transformation or rather you go and teach them some tools, technique except why you exit. The culture will come, start managing them and come back to the square one. So I have job anyway. You go transform the team one year, next year anyway you have to go transform them again because they come back. So agile coaches can survive for some time. You agree? There are a lot of people who did a lot of study about this culture and influence on, so I am not talking about culture between two different countries. Don't mistake that. Culture of the company I am talking about. Culture of the project. Each company, each project have a different culture. It's hard to believe but it's a truth. So how do we find out? Let's look at that. So these are the culture which is being used as one of the model. So there is a book called Agile Survival Guide by Michael Sahota. So probably you can refer to that. It's a free book. You can go to InfoQ and search for it. You will get a lot of details. So this model is called Snyder model. So this is talking about companies which is people oriented and completely company oriented and some reality oriented and possibility oriented. So in this plot you will see majorly the culture is collaboration, control, competence and cultivation. If your culture is completely controlled you do any kind or you try any kind of transformation probably it will come back because your culture is different. So you are not trying to, if you don't change the culture it's little difficult. So for example nowadays if you look at a lot of famous agile coaches for example Craig Larmann. I used to work with Craig Larmann. Nowadays he don't work with teams. He says no point working with the teams. Rather let me work with the organization structure. If the organization is control freak then probably whatever you do down that small bubble, the development team doesn't matter. They try to be transparent. Somebody use a hammer. No. Some people will say something. Agile we bought agile. We paid money to a coach. He came and did something. You got agile. Yeah that's fine. But don't question me. Don't challenge me. This is the way things work here. So if you want to understand the culture of your company or your project ask a simple question. How do we do things around here? How do you succeed? Is it that the two weeks just before the release you go and tell everybody that nothing doing don't go home. Make it work. Or that you say okay probably we have potential problem. We are going to sleep the deadline. So shall we sit together and identify what are the challenges? Let's communicate to the customer. We can do in multiple ways. The one which you do probably will define your culture. And your culture is not probably going to stick on to one single quadrant. It probably you know you may have two prominent cultures. Right? So what do you think? Which are the culture which is conducive for agile? For Scrum basically. Collaboration? Only collaboration? Cultivation and collaboration. Agree? Okay. What about control? You know we have answers for everything right? There are some framework which we do more control. Not Scrum. What is it? Your method? Kanban? Okay. So we probably have to debate. And about competence? What do we do? To build the competence? No? Okay. Probably we will go to the next slide. So as you mentioned this is I am trying to upload the agile manifesto in this quadrant. So you see that cultivation and collaboration is the more most apt thing for Scrum which is spanning across here. And if you go if you try to do a transformation in your team in your project you identify the culture and if the culture is varying between collaboration and cultivation then you don't need to worry about it. You start practicing agile it should sustain normally. Right? But if you have a control environment and if you start introducing Scrum there it's not very easy. You are going to face a lot of challenges lot of resistance eventually you don't know what the outcome is going to be. Yeah? When we talk about competence nowadays I think many people are talking about continuous delivery software craftsmanship. Yes? So when we talk about competence there are the the fifth potential item in the manifesto that is the software craftsmanship over crafts coming into the picture where we do lot of XP practices we do TDD, BDD we do clean code pair programming continuous integration flexible architecture just in time release yes? We get into any team so practically what we can do is so if so basically an agile coach in my perspective when I go to a project when I want to say I meet people to just do some kind of transformation or adopt agile the first question will be whether you really want a transformation or adoption or rather you can ask what is your real problem what do you want to do? Why do you want to do it? Ask our friend, ask our friend what is the fancy word now? Or if you really have a problem which you want to solve your customer is really waiting to get releases every now and then couple of times a day once in a week, once in a month there are projects which I worked we transformed the team or rather we introduced the concepts, the agile ideas to a project and they produce results in every iteration or features in every iteration and the customer is not ready to take it for them it is a big pain in every iteration they won't release it only in 6 months and they don't want to come every now and then and talk to the people and then give feedback they say no no we are not interested we have some business to do here so we really have to ask that question to the change agent what do you really want what do you really want to want to do so there was a conference lot of people coming in talking about agile agile is the great thing many things many people think that you know agile is a silver bullet right and even I was just talking to Sudipta also about this last 2 years when we had the conferences we were trying to kind of market agile we will say that yeah agile is the thing which we should go forward but traditional waterfall approach is designed for you know constructing bridges not for this kind of industry where we do empirical things we can't estimate things we don't know it so dynamic changing every day now we here many people talking about you have to be very conscious about the culture you don't have to be 100% agile you have to partially agile you take a couple of concepts and then you create your own framework of course that's what everybody do so far I haven't seen not even a single team who is 100% agile I haven't probably I'm looking at wrong places I work with 5 different companies so the main question for me is why go and then preach about a practice or a framework at a look back and see what are the improvements probably I can bring in and who is going to get benefit out of it who have the system thinking who think the system as a whole is it that the new project manager want to prove himself and introduce some changes the way do we do things and they say okay this is a trendy word let's do it yeah and you if you are interested you can actually refer to the book and you will get lot of questions which probably will help you to identify what is the purpose so when you say okay whatever we said you agree with me to go back how do you do things you understand your culture fine what do we do about it so you can frame kind of assessment where you can ask some single simple question so you understand the company culture number one again the company culture may not be equal to the culture of the project it can be very so you understand that and then if possible if you are flexible enough if you are agile enough to form your framework within this limitation probably you can make it better I am not guaranteeing that it is going to be a success but it is obviously going to be better when you have a controlled environment and when you apply scrum there it is very difficult to empower people it is not a notion which they know so what we did in our company what we did was it was a big change when I joined the company we started a center called agile center in one of the floors we have lot of agile coaches sitting we just go and coach scrum so whatever your problem we have one hammer since we have the hammer every problem is a nail for us ok do scrum you are going to be better irrespective of what you do you do maintenance you do project you do something else no no no problem scrum proved and we have lot of graft scrum is working 76 percent scrum is 76 percent successful or rather agile is 76 percent successful and waterfall is 26 percent successful so yeah obviously you should do it later we realize that many things are not falling in place when we have a coffee discussion with the team members because everywhere we go when we go and do training when we talk to people because it is the idea from the management nobody opposes everybody listen when you have a coffee discussion when you meet people in the lift they will really tell you no come on I have been you came and said agile is going to solve a problem yeah it created more problems because manager saying whatever you are doing you do it your reports you create the measurement metrics you do it and you start doing this also you have a new board you have a burn down chart right and you have lot of funny new KPIs coming into place velocity story point so far it is very difficult to explain story point to people say it is a unit less number come on story point one story point is equal to 0.75 days they calculate that way what can we do and people are questioned your velocity is supposed to ask for the agile notion your productivity should improve by 5% every iteration that is expectation people are suffering so that is probably a control question on the other side if you are in a collaborative or cultivating environment probably you can even map companies with that do you know any company who does collaboration friendly with people employees some company name the company your company wow what is your company name software company should work for you control anybody yeah can you name the company even my company pretty controlled because they have lot of security stuff right so no shame Kanban works for us so it is okay and then we talk about craftsmanship the competence probably I can say thought works they are pretty good in XP they teach people XP even we had some people to teach us XP right and cultivation easy yes okay yeah lot of people agree yes okay so you can try to relate or you go and ask your people you just show the diagram and say hey how do you rate our project in this where do we fall in right so people will give you lot of interesting use so what we did was this is roughly the way we mapped with the processes so the scrum when I say agile scrum so scrum works for these environments when we see that even though our company is kind of controlled environment but some projects are kind of pretty open collaborative so we start introducing scrum for them and for controlled controlled by control I mean yeah by control I mean you have to keep the wip limit you have to control the outcome so and you have to follow it pretty strictly you can't allow people to probably you know pull anything and start doing things rather we need to we want to work on the higher priority item in a you know more controlled environment so we introduce scan band there and probably here more on craftsmanship practices where we will probably craftsmanship go with both right it's an engineering practices and we started introducing continuous delivery now so it's a long way right so this is how we changed our way of looking at things and now we see that people are little more happy not that they are jumping but when we see them in lift they say okay it was good that you introduce now scrum band instead of scrum which is giving us more perspective about what the product owner does at least they will know that they are not doing a good job right for each column we introduce you know definition of done or acceptance criteria whatever so that you know people are start thinking about okay so I have to complete this to move it here so we are getting a better visibility and depending on the culture so if the culture start supporting you then there is better chance for you to succeed right yes yes very well yeah so probably if you look at services company the customer culture may be the prominent culture for the team right even the company culture may not influence much but the project culture will change according to the company culture the client culture yeah of course any more questions no no this is one of the factors one of the factors so probably I can't think of all the possible factors but this is one of the factors which we thought pretty evident easy to understand which may be creating a big impact for example I had a project manager I had to deal with the project manager he never worked on an agile environment he was kind of waiting to become a manager so that he can control people he can dictate things etc so unless you transform him no point introducing scrum in the team because whatever you do he'll come back and stand up he's a chicken he comes to the stand up meeting and say why don't you pick up that so it's going to be difficult at times if you are a coach working with the team and if he comes and does every day start giving him feedback probably you'll end up having a debate in front of people so and when people see that whatever you have preached he's been violated by the manager then they lose trust in you right yeah we most of our people we hardly have any we have distributed even though it's difficult to cut the entire perspective but with respect to all these parameters there will be a lot more difference right basically so you are talking about the culture the culture of you know the culture mindset changes with respect to the language barriers because I in my previous company I used to work with distributed environment and it was really difficult for us to get anything done because any process we wanted to follow any metrics we wanted to collect any ownership we wanted to take for the action items and the retrospectives and stuff like that it used to be always 50 percent the data used to be 50 percent the but they were not in the technology even though there was a mindset from the organization management to ensure that it was very difficult for us to even introduce something as simple as code reviews yeah unique that probably you know I don't have a single answer what normally happens is as he asked the client will have a culture so that will be coming to the project team so the team will form a culture which is going to be uniform even though you work across two different countries you will form a culture with respect to this four line four quadrant and then that will be your project culture so you can work around that not looking at individual culture of your company or individual culture of your location any more questions how we have fine fine I am around thank you