 Welcome everyone has joined today. Today's session is named three ways to your operating model can cultivate an agile mindset by Ashashree and Arun Prasad Sethu. Go ahead. The floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you, Sri Krishna. And hello everyone. Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning. Thank you for making time to attend our session. And Arun and I are very excited to be here and share our learnings and our perspectives on the topic that we have for the day, which is three ways your operating model can cultivate an agile mindset. A very quick introduction. So my name is Yashashree Barve. I am working as an agile coach and a transformation consultant at data consultancy services in the software and professional services unit. I love to write blog. I love to travel and I have also authored a book called agile mindset magic stories from the trenches which is available on Amazon. We have with us my colleague Arun Prasad Sethu. He is from, he is working as an agile coach and unit agile leader, and he's from travel transport and hospitality unit, North America geography from data consultancy services. And both of us are also a part of a very small niche construct within, within TCS, which is, which we call as agile operating model neighborhood. And we have been investing for last couple of years time outside of our day job in learning more and researching on operating models, especially agile operating models. This is also coming a lot from learnings from study of some really good mature organizations as well as some not so mature organizations to see you know what is working what is not working and what kind of operating model constructs are the ones that are really useful for us to follow. So today we are bringing to you what we believe are ways to cultivate agile mindset by changing certain things into your operating model. Over to you Arun. Sure. Thank you. Yes. Hello everyone. My name is Arun Prasad. So let's first, you know, come to a common understanding in terms of what we mean by operating model. So operating model is, you know, the way in which an organization is run everything that it does right from sensing an opportunity to the steps that it takes to execute the policies that are defined the frameworks enablers their approach towards people, their approach towards decision making. Right. So everything that is that is involved in an organization in a day to day operations is referred as operating model in this context. Right. So that's the level setting in terms of what operating model means for this session. Now, let's understand why we wanted to actually go for an operating model transformation. What is the need? Why is there a push now? We are not spoken about it earlier, but why suddenly if you look at the last few years that have been out of stock for an operating model transformation. Let's understand the need for it. So in the digital era, we are in the middle of a turning point in the digital era where the interaction between the enterprise and consumer is driven through digital devices across sectors. So be it banking or retail or, you know, travel insurance, everything, whatever you take, the interactions are primarily driven through digital channels. So that means the ecosystem has changed. There is a fundamental change in the way how the interaction happens between the enterprise and the consumer. So what used to be more of a human to human interaction probably years ago where people go to a bank, go to a person and then, you know, get their job done. But today it's driven primarily between a human to machine where, you know, I log into a website or I open up a mobile banking app and then I do the transaction. So the shift has happened, right? The shift has happened, you know, gradually over the years. And hence, you know, it is important for enterprises to really look at the current operating models and see what they can do basically to stay relevant. To respond to market changes, to grow and sustain by leveraging the ecosystem. So that's at a high level in terms of why there is a need for operating model transformation. Now, once we are convinced that there is a need for an operating model transformation, the next thing will be, okay, what in it we have to change, right? Is there an approach? Is there an, what is it all about? So there are a few things. One is the ways of working, you know, the way in which an organization works. The way in which how, you know, it executes their deliveries or brings solutions to the table. That is going to be the core of it, right? Having an agile mindset. The second layer or, you know, the middle layer will be about the context in which the operating model transformation needs to happen. Is it from an IT perspective or a product perspective or completely from an enterprise point of view, right? So that's the second aspect of it. And the third aspect of it is the frameworks and enablers that we are going to bring for this transformation. Now, this is not the three things that we want to talk about. This is just to give an idea of an operating model, operating model transformation and how to approach it. Now, let's go and look into what those three methods are by which we can actually bring in an agile mindset with an operating model structure. So the first element in that is a flexible organization structure, right? So traditionally, if you look at organizations have evolved over a period of time and what has actually happened is there is a structure built in the organization. The traditional structure is the organization. Now, this traditional structure has got some characteristics, having a command and control mode of working. And then decisions will be made at the central level and most of the times people might not participate in the decision making processes. And the teams, there will be a constant micromanagement or there will be continuous need to manage the team effectively throughout to get the deliverables out or to build the solutions. And multiple things, right? The aspect towards learning. So there is a structured approach, traditional approach towards it. But whereas in a flexible structure, what we mean by flexible structure is where there is empowerment, there is no autonomy. The decisions are at least decentralized to an extent, right? Which are local to the teams, which are specific for them in their nature, decentralizing those decisions. And the collaborate mindset instead of having a controlled mindset where people operate in a very controlled environment, getting into a collaborative mindset, right? That's going to be one of the key aspects of your flexible structure. In addition to that, there are few other stuff like that approach towards learning. Is it going to be a need-based learning or is it going to be a continuous learning approach? And how they are looking at success, failure criteria, are they having a mindset to do things differently? And then it's okay to fail, right? It's okay to fail. So how are they having those type of mindsets, right? That's what we mean by a flexible structure. Now, I'll hand it over to Yesh. She will be helping us to talk or explain how some of the organizations have adopted some structures which made them really flexible. Over to Yesh. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Arun. Thank you for setting the context happily. And we indeed have observed that bringing in flexibility into organization structure goes a long way in setting the agile mindset and bringing in the required agility in the way the organizations operate. So we thought we will take a couple of examples and try to explain what we mean by flexible organization structure to you. So charity begins at home, right? So let's take an example from our own home, our second home rather, which is nothing but data consultancy services. So PCS is the largest IT organization in India. And globally it has around 600,000, more than 600,000 people who are working globally, right? And at least the IT services unit, which is probably the bread and butter in the largest unit that we have in PCS, that is very, very customer centric and it's very natural, right? Because it is a services unit. So the way the whole organization is structured is it is grouped as per domains that the customers operate in vertical units. So which is basically retail, banking, travel and transportation or, you know, software and professional services and so on. Within each of these units, we have customer engagements that are working very, very closely with the customers to deliver value. And this structure works very beautifully when it comes to the core thing that we are doing, which is basically nothing but value delivery to the customers. And it helps in keeping the customer satisfaction high. So the structure that we have, it works beautifully there. Now, there is another part to it, right? Like, because we are structured in units, anything that has to pass across units, let's say there is a customer ask that needs some information or some problem solving or some references, which is across units, then the unit structure becomes a barrier. Now, we wanted to find out, you know, what could probably be like when I say we, it is basically the agile network that we have within PCS, wanted to find an experiment, whether we can bring any solutions to it in terms of bringing in any adaptive networks. So what we actually did is we created small niche constructs and we called it neighborhoods. We called it agile knowledge neighborhoods. And these are the constructs that are of people who are passionate about a particular area, right? Agile ways of working in itself is a very, very broad area. So we created 14 different such structures that focused on specific aspects within the agile operating structures to focus on certain aspects to do research and to develop next gen, next practices to help customers or respond to any queries that come in and so on. So these constructs are basically very, very small units. So like for example, Arun is from travel transport and hospitality. I am from software and professional services. We also have three more people, Radhika, who is from manufacturing and animation Robin, who are from utilities who are all of us are basically working together outside of our day job into the agile operating model neighborhood. And we are working and we are trying to further the cause of evolving the pieces point of views or helping the customers, helping customers transform their operating models and so on. So this structure actually and this is working very, it's working beautiful. It was an experiment and it has really turned out to be pretty well so far. And what it has helped is it has actually helped us foster collaborative mindset across units, try and see what is needed, try and inspect and adapt and accordingly modify and form new neighborhoods or dismantle existing neighborhoods that are not needed and so on. So it's a very close to heart and a good example of bringing in flexibility though we already have some kind of a structure that is adding value to the customers. I also wanted to take another example, again something that I have been working with a customer organization very closely. Now this customer organization basically has adopted the Spotify, oops, sorry about that, Spotify as the scaling framework. And of course that means that they have structured themselves in terms of tribes and squads and chapters and guilds. Now this is really helping them because they have a very good focus in terms of how they are doing value delivery to their customers and grouping together similar functionality squads helps them to create those synergies. After taking that transformation journey in a few months and few years they realized that they had too many tribes and it was very difficult to create a synergy among tribes. So they kind of inspected that and they adapted and they evolved to a new structure in which they introduced a new construct called domains. So several multiple tribes are coming together only when there are synergies among those tribes and they are a part of a domain and several, so the IT organization now basically has several domains. This is helping to make the tribes autonomous and have the decentralized decision making that Arun was referring to to help the tribes to get faster decisions and get more autonomous in terms of the way they are structured. But I wanted to call out, apart from that domain structure, I wanted to call out something that is outstanding that this organization has done which is basically the chapters. So as you may have heard in Spotify chapters are basically like small family of people who have similar skills. So like for example in a tribe we may have a Java chapter, a data chapter, a cloud chapter and agile chapter and so on, product management chapter and so on. So when we started this journey we also formed chapters which were specific to a particular tribe and it was considered to be a way to develop the craft. When people are in squads and cross functional teams basically they develop a lot of breadth because I also try to understand like as an agile coach I will also try to understand something about product management. I will understand something about testing, development and so on. However, as an individual, as a professional I want to focus more on my craft and develop my competency which is what will happen in the chapter. So we had these chapters at a tribe level and that really was helping. However, we hit a barrier and the barrier is because as is the case for any global organization there were people who were distributed across locations for these chapters and then it conflicted with their squared priorities and it created some kind of a barrier and that is where we evolved into creating regional chapters and that really, that was really helpful. The chapters are really thriving with this whole concept of regional chapters where in the chapters are able to set their own OKRs, meet in person, develop a rapport with each other, really share and learn from each other and build a really thriving community. And they are able to focus on the depth of their knowledge and they are able to actually contribute to the learning culture and continuous learning culture I would say of the organization. So these definitely are helping in terms of creating that culture of learning, creating the collaboration culture so it is on top of the existing structures that we have. Just humble in this continuous delivery book says you know if it hurts then do it more often do it so much so many times that it actually doesn't hurt anymore right that that's the philosophy being behind the continuous delivery continuous integration constructs. And that is also that is also true I think in terms of you know evolution of the or bringing in flexibility in the organization structures and I saw a couple of examples you know one where there were structures built so that it allowed people to thrive and not simply limit making it a boundary less organization and there were structures built that helped teams to teams to master their craft. There were inspection and adaptation where people actually tried to keep the structures nimble and flexible and kept you know changing those. So the key is to evolve the structures every three to five years or even maybe even continuously for that matter, so that we are always ready to change and we don't worry when we get hit by a pandemic and you know we have no idea what to do. This is probably you know one of the keys to staying relevant to the market needs. In fact, we have a quick question for you. We want to we would like to know from you hear from you, which flexible constructs in your operating model have helped you to bring agility. So, multiple ways and Arun please help to put the mental link in the chat Arun can you please put that. You can either go to mental.com and use the code that is given three seven five zero three three six eight, or you could simply use the link that is given here or if you don't like mental then you can simply put your responses on the chat. So looking forward to hear from you on which are the flexible constructs in your operating model that have helped you. Any other constructs. Value streams. Interesting. Communities of practice. Sure. Yes. Yes. Excellent. Yeah. Communities of practice is definitely so I think Shri Krishna was asking us if we are a part of center of excellence in TCS and we are Agilist side beat in the Agil world for a long time don't believe in center of excellence we don't believe in best practices that have to be followed but we are more promoter of next practices and understanding good practices from people. So, so, yes, so it is more of communities of practice than the community and center of excellence is for for Agil teams but yeah. Yeah, thank you very much. Thank you for sharing. And it's it's heartening to hear that you know you are you are also finding value in chapters and value streams and we are going to touch upon value streams later Arun has a lot of experience in in building value streams for his his project so he's definitely going to talk about that. All right, so with that, let us move on to the second section of our talk which is basically about minimizing dependencies and maximize flow and thank you for whoever gave value stream as an example because that sets the right tone for our next section. So over to you Arun. Thank you. Thanks for that. So I think you gave us a lot of you know real examples from our experiences that's good to know. So the second aspect or the second method is how do we minimize dependencies and maximize flow. So what is the dependency a dependency is something you know which hinders the flow of value to the customer, which hinders, you know, which slows down the delivery of products to the customer. Let's now look at you know what this really means and why I know there is a dependency or how the flow is getting impacted in the current structures. So if you take any enterprise, there will be multiple functions, marketing, the research, you know, innovation strategy, finance, you know, and then shaping and building the product from, you know, from business and it and much more right. So all these functions are created for a special purpose, and those functions excel in their particular area of expertise. And over a period of time what has happened is these functions have been, you know, further aerobics into structures. And there are different levels of hierarchies within these structures. You know you have a chief marketing officer, then you have a chief finance officer, then you have a chief product officer, technology officer, and IT delivery operations multiple structures exists in your enterprise. And this is how, you know, all these structures will be there. And over a period of time, the boundaries have become so, you know, strong and the flow of information between these functions or departments often gets routed through the hierarchy. So if people from one function wanted to interact with the other function, then a lot of times what happens is, you know, they have to go to the hierarchy. Assume that those blue dots, whatever you see on the screen, they are all, you know, different teams that have to come together for delivering a particular product or a solution to the customer. And what happens is majority of the times, you know, the information goes back and forth between these functions. And a lot of hierarchies is involved in it, which makes, you know, the time to take a decision or which makes a time to build solutions are actually getting increased because of this hierarchy. Now, you will see that, you know, we spoke about structures, flexible and traditional structures or something similar here, but the idea is about the flow of information, the flow of value in this particular item. So what some of our customers have done is, you know, they kind of re-imagined and they did few items. One is they eliminated the waste in the entire processes and they kind of have something called as boneless structures. And they empowered as teams to be more self-organized and, you know, bringing in lean thinking and mindset into it. There are few techniques which, you know, we have seen from our experience. So the first one is, as one of you mentioned in the previous question, value streams, right? So organizing teams around value streams. There will be multiple, you know, multiple value streams which will be there in an enterprise. And it's important to carve out all those value streams separately and then come back and, you know, form a structure around it. One of our travel customers was actually doing it and that is something which, you know, SAFE prescribes value stream as a method, right? And we have worked with the customer in transforming them into a value stream organization and that's a case to be available in the scaled agile website itself. Now similar to value stream, there are other methods. Product centric organization is a method where, you know, organize teams around products, right? Many of the equipment manufacturers, telecom equipment manufacturers fall into this category and, you know, it becomes very easy whenever there is going to be a material acquisition or if they wanted to carve out a separate product and then, you know, make some changes or sell it off. So it gives them the flexibility in terms of, you know, aligning in terms of products. Apple is a great example where, you know, they have their structures completely, you know, aligned across multiple products. And similarly, you know, we have something called as customer journey, where in, you know, organizing teams or organizing, you know, deliverables across customer touch points. If I want to take an example from the airline industry, right? Let's say as a flyer, as a traveler, we touch base with the airline in multiple channels. So in the initial stage, you know, through a booking, we try to work with them, you know, from their dot coms or from their mobile apps to make a booking. And then when we go to the airport, you know, right, we get, you know, we go through the process of, you know, checking in and then your baggage drop and things like that. And once you get on the flight, you will be, you know, experiencing your, you know, your miscellaneous services, you'll be trying to avail some services, be it a Wi-Fi or things like that. And finally, when you, you know, when you go out of the airport, then you again go and claim your bags or you go into your transit. So these are different touch points through which a consumer interacts with the enterprise. And finally, once you finish your travel, then you claim your loyalty points. So there are various, you know, journey or touch points which a customer takes in the entire process. And, you know, aligning on those customer journeys is also another way of maximizing flow by minimizing dependencies. And finally, you know, we have something which is evolving off late on the product-based structures where, you know, the self-sufficient teams or self-organized teams comes together and then they work in close collaboration. They work in very close collaboration to deliver, you know, the value of product. So that's how, you know, many of our customers adopt into any of these models. I'm sure you may have some more examples in terms of what models, you know, your customers are actually doing. These are some of our learnings, some of our experiences from whatever we saw from many of our customers. So now, let's understand from you, you know, again, a big question in terms of what operating model does your organization or your customer follow. I'll again post that main key link here. Just give me a second. You can actually go in and then type your responses for that. Or if you want, you can type it from your chat as well. There you go. Okay, so product-centric, right, and we still have someone on the project-based model. Value stream is there. Anything else? All right, thank you. Thank you for the insights. You know, product-centric seems to be most used, right, followed by value stream and then other models. Thank you. Thank you, Arun. Thank you for taking us through the maximizing flow. All right, so that brings us to the third way that we wanted to talk about, which is basically purpose-driven. And I would say that, you know, for any of you who were a part of the first keynote that we had today, if you were there, then I think my job is very easy to talk about purpose-driven. I remember Rajneesh mentioned that, you know, if the organizations have massive transformation purpose, then it really helps the teams to be beyond their usual contribution and, you know, things like that. I think it is so important to have some purpose and build the way our structures are, or our operating models are around those structures. And that we have seen really working in an amazing way in a lot of organizations that we studied. Let's see some examples. I'm a fan of this book of, I don't know why it starts automatically. Anyways, so I'm a fan of this book by Daniel Pink, which is called as Drive and the surprising truth about what motivates us. And I am a firm believer in these three motivators that we have. And we did touch upon autonomy and mastery a little bit in our prior sections. But here we wanted to focus more on purpose. So purpose is working towards something worthwhile, you know, working towards something which is really contributing to the larger cause. And when people understand what it is, I think it is definitely something which is worth working for, right? So, yeah, we will look at how even the business models have been built around purpose, but coming back to the ground reality of the teams that we work with, right? What are the various ways in which we can weave in into the operating model so that people are aware of the purpose? I loved the fact that when Rajneesh said, right, that even in the reward letters or the bonus letters that their organization sends out, they mentioned the purpose, you know, below saying thank you for contributing to the cause of touching 1 million patients' lives, right? It really makes people feel special and they can relate to the purpose of the higher purpose that they are working for. There are certain ways that we have observed which really worked very well. One of that is objectives and key results. So objectives and key results is something that has been made popular by Google and its Silicon Valley cousins. Sorry about that. Google and its Silicon Valley cousins and it is being adopted by a lot of mature organizations as we see today. OKS is being leveraged. I don't know why it is going. I'm sorry about that. OKS is being really leveraged a lot in a lot of these organizations to ensure that there is a focus on outcomes and there is a focus on outcomes and there is a focus on ensuring that even at the team level, they understand how to create the objectives that they are working upon and not just work upon only the tasks and the stories that they are supposed to work. So in one organization that we have, they had OKRs embraced, incorporated as part of their whole operating model. So the organization defined OKRs which were referred and the tribes got inspired from that and the tribes defined their own OKRs. And the way the whole OKRs really help is when the teams tie their objectives to what the tribe wants to achieve and tribe ties it to what the organization wants to achieve, everybody in the organization understands why they are doing what they are doing and that is very, very powerful. We also did a massive initiative within TCS to focus on business outcomes and I really was very happy when Jeff talked about outcome oriented product planning and the focus on the business outcome and what is it, what is the value that we are trying to achieve, not just what we are doing. And that actually helps to keep the razor sharp focus on what really matters and what matters most. These business outcomes are not really just idea outcomes, like for example, you know, are we, what is our say-do ratio or what is our velocity, but something that is relating to the value that we are trying to bring to our customers. Like for example, with our product, how many invoices, I mean just a hypothetical example, how many invoices is the operations person able to process every day or how many people are actually visiting, for example, the passport say, what is the customer footfall that the product is allowing the customer to fulfill. Amazing business outcomes, so gives that razor sharp focus. And the third thing that we wanted to talk about here was strategic themes. So a lot of our customers who have embraced safe, they follow this concept of strategic themes. And as you may have heard or even if you might not have heard about strategic themes, but the whole idea is at an organizational level, there will be strategic themes, which will cascade down and help to prioritize to the epic level, the features level and the story or the tasks level that the teams are doing. So everybody within the organization will be understanding what are the strategic themes that they are contributing to, which is like really a beautiful way of ensuring that everybody understands the purpose. We also wanted to talk a little bit about business models that are driven by purpose and this is in line with what we had heard in the morning about organizations themselves having a business model which is around purpose. For example, vitality is no longer just a medical insurer, but it is also an orchestrator of wellness. For example, diamond shipyards, they are repositioned themselves as a maritime solutions provider and not just a shipbuilder. Thompson Uton's no longer just an information services company, but they are purpose led, trust based answer company. Also total energies, not just producing and selling fuels, but they want to be responsible energy major, affordable, reliable, clean power. So these are basically the, this is the purpose that the organizations have thought for themselves, and that is what they are basically organizing their business model and their operating model around that purpose. That really helps to define and create a great transformation blueprint, transformation journeys blueprint for those organizations. I just wanted to take a very quick example of vitality and what we mean by having the business model around the purpose. We consider, in TCS we consider vitality as opposed to child of the whole purpose driven leveraging ecosystem kind of an example. So vitality, it's nothing but an insurance company, right? So it's touch points typically with the customers would be to sell insurance and then later the touch point will be for the claims processing. Now it reimagined itself its business model as well as operating model to have to become a wellness orchestrator. Now what does this mean? It means that they gone, got into a continuous engagement with their policy holders, and they try to incentivize the protective or the preventive measures. Now what does that mean? It means that if their policy holders were basically taking into some fitness regime, taking into some healthy lifestyle things, then they would be rewarded generously. And the rewards could be redeemed at various curated partner, partner points, partner systems. Like for example, if I am a regular runner, I would get a good discount at, you know, let's say some health food store, or I may get a gym membership discount and so on. And that really helped it, it helped them to achieve outstanding outcomes like business, it was a win-win because vitality could reduce their cost. And the customers could actually, you know, be well, you know, not fall sick as we were talking about in the morning. So this was an amazing outcome that, you know, for the consumers as well as for the customer organization that they brought in. Now coming to, you know, we wanted to very quickly talk about a business 4.0 framework that actually weaves in a lot of these concepts that we talked about. So one definitely is, you know, being purpose driven, that we just spoke about being adaptable, be flexible, and also being resilient, which is very critical, something that we learned through the COVID times, right? Business 4.0 framework actually helps organizations to sail through the new normal. And there are four pillars, agile, intelligence, cloud and automation, these are the technical pinners, pillars on which the framework is based. And there are four behaviors, which is consider mass personalization or the segment of one, create exponential value, not just incremental and things like that. Leverage ecosystems, right, like the example that we saw from vitality and no embracing risk, not being risk-averse, trying new things, experimenting new things and bring disruption, right? So we just wanted to touch upon nothing, nothing detailed and we will be happy to discuss if you have any specific questions around the business 4.0. But yes, these, this is a framework that is helping a lot of our customer organizations to thrive in these new normal times. All right, so that brings us to the closure of this talk and the whole idea of being flexible, maximizing flow and ensuring that we are building around purpose is what is helping the organizations to bring in mindset of collaboration, bringing in mindset of value delivery, inspecting and adapting, continuous improvement, continuous learning. So one of these agility concepts and also bringing in its own agility into the mix. So we thank you very much for being here and listening patiently to our talk and also responding to our questions in between and happy to take any questions. I think there was a question which I think has was answered probably, maybe I think one of you guys answered it probably. I'd like to thank Yash Sree and Arun for a very enlightening session. This is one thing we keep hearing about all agile mindset transformations, but then doing it in an organization with the scale of TCS, I think that has its own challenges. And it looks like you guys have really, you know, as you say, gone through the paces to get it through and so that shows up in the in the talk as well. And I'm sure everyone has benefited from it. Thanks a lot. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity. I hope everyone had a good lesson from the session. Thank you.