 Thank you for being here and with the other programs or the sessions going on and so we do appreciate the fact that you are here spending your time with us and we want to make sure it is completely worth your time and any questions you have welcome to ask us. The other thing I would also mention is that after the session we are available for questions and after that also if you want to connect with us on LinkedIn you are welcome to do that send us email whatever you prefer we would love to hear from you and share more of our experience and insights given the limited time we possibly can't cover the whole aspect of our journey but we try to cover the key aspects but related important aspects we would love to discuss with you offline as well we enjoyed that kind of collaboration so no problem at all discussing whatever we have to offer and to share with you. So the discussion today the conversation today we are going to have is on the idea of business agility and there are many different perspectives many definitions many ideas about what it is today we are going to discuss from more of an internal aspect which is from our coaching organizations point of view from inside the company and that's an insider look at how this thing actually works how this thing actually works so what are you going to what are you going to try and do my cell phone is where the mic up sorry technical problems always demo mode you try to demo something of a customer no features work right it's the usual thing so anyway this journey we're going to discuss is about how we grown as a coaching organization from pretty much one person or two people to a decent number of people and the impact we've had on the larger organization over time so the topic is the key to sustaining through business agility and one of the keys to that aspect is a robust coaching organization many companies don't invest as much or the under invest or they don't invest at all in coaches the value of coaches is realized only after a lot of damage has been done and luckily we realized early on the value and the importance of having good coaches and we invested in it pretty well and so the results are what you going to see today not that we have accomplished anything great but comparatively where we were to where we are now it's much better so over time our journey is just even more promising and we hope that you will begin better things so we'll start with just an introductions about me and then my colleague Lakshman will introduce himself and the company as well so that's me and those are my our three dogs we love our dogs so I want the pictures everywhere little bit about me so my current title is head of Academy and Agile Practice at I just market so Academy is a learning and development platform that we are trying to create in our company and this is something that will touch all of our employees close to 16,000 people right so my goal I just took over this role a couple of weeks ago and so my vision is to make sure everybody is a teacher everybody's a learner right teaching each other sustainably growing our learning organization I also have the second work stream which I'm responsible for which I have been responsible for for the past five and a half years is the Agile Practice area and that's something I'm very passionate about and I've been researching a lot working on this area for a while by background I'm an engineer software engineer and I still code I still enjoy coding something fun for me also I'm for my different hats coach trainer mentor for people I serve a global team of servant leaders which is people that are both agile coaches as well as now the new stream of learning and development organization type of people as well so my idea is to envision and strategies on how do you grow and mature a company how do you grow in agile in agile fashion business practices processes how do you grow people to be the best I can be my ultimate goal is to make things better right things should be better today than they were yesterday things to always get better and so how do we instill this idea this mindset of continuous improvement that's our focus and my personal beliefs are animal welfare animal rights and animal liberation and I enjoy photography nonfiction books I can't read to develop myself my knowledge as well principle agile coach for Bangalore location along with the Bangalore I take care of India teams agile initiatives 14 years experience and in agile journey I've been working from past four to five years those are my kids and I came from software background and predominantly I work with Bangalore Center my main responsibilities are working with teams individuals transformation coaching mentorship and my hobbies are parenting after kids I don't have anything to make hobbying so parenting is one of my important hobby from there I'd like to share our agenda as Shesh mentioned we'd like to make more interesting the rest of 30 minutes here is our agenda we're going to talk about IHS market already we got some questions who I just market what they do will try to share what is exactly I just market and then we're going to talk about our interesting agile transformation journey how we started what kind of challenges and then the important point we are going to talk about how we are accelerating and sustaining our business agility we've been doing it and we're going to share how we did it how we ever going to do it next as you know the success stories and we are going to share some of the key challenges which we have experienced in our journey about I just market yeah I just market is headquarters in London we are data information company founded in 1959 the main business areas information science and data we saw to 50,000 customers across the globe right in 2016 we met with the company called market so now we are I just market so the goal is to match with the company is to create a data powerhouse right that's all mainly about IHS and who we saw we saw maritime defense financial services energy ultimately we try to provide data to the companies to take critical decisions in their day-to-day activities that's about IHS thank you Lakshman there's a couple of things I would like for you to remember if you can please the first thing I want you to remember and for most of you most of us numbers are sometimes easy to remember especially money so if you remember this number the second thing I want you to remember is this definition right so just so we have a common understanding of what is business agility from our point of view at least so we know the context of what we're discussing so first it's the ability of anything for the step business and I think I guess in this case is business agility so it's business to respond to changes as fast as rapidly as possible but it's actually better to create then to be swept away by it or be a part of it if you are able to create change evoke change make change happen you're the reader rather than be a follower the second thing is a change can be of two types internal external internal could be people living the company key execs living the company internal politics internal warfare those empire building and those sort of things external things are things like politics outside warfare outside and key market shaping things like technology have changed or people have customer preferences have changed there's disruption going on this all external changes but the key aspect of business agility is to do all of this without losing momentum or vision these are the two key things if you lose momentum people get bored or people lose faith if you lose vision people lose trust so both momentum and vision have to be preserved while you're pivoting and and doing whatever changes you got to make which makes it really really challenging right this is why when people use the word agility it's used very loosely and with just a lot of lightness to it in reality it's a really dense and a very heavy and a serious matter right so we have treated with the respect that it deserves so agility is not something we talked about lightly so very important and very critical part of how businesses survive and thrive as well yeah it's time for you like to have a quick survey with all of you first question how many of you have the next one how many of you have don't have strong coaching organization so I'll go back to the first question so what we need to create a strong coaching organization would like to hear your thoughts to serve the purpose thank you for sharing your thoughts as well so at this point we want to kind of start off on how we started our journey and this was back in kind of 2013 little bit maybe before 2013 but primarily around 2013 time is when we started focusing on how do we actually make this a proper agile organization so this was a legacy IHS back then merger was in 2016 as I mentioned so until then it was just purely IHS so about 1200 R&D colleagues our focus was R&D software development those kind of people but we had challenges as we began example we had a mix of AUP and waterfall waterfall is fragile I jealous waterfall what do we want to call it we also had a PMO that was in place and so there was some processes and those sort of things that could have been that was actually a challenge we continue to have this challenge which is multiple siloed business lines most businesses have this problem right the silos that exist we also have them and we had them we will probably continue to have them as well global presence considering we were about 78,000 people back then about 10-11,000 global teams are just a fact of reality just that those exist you can't do anything about it and so those dispersed teams cause a lot of lot of problems sometimes right you have disconnect time zone problems communication issues cultural problems and so on so forth so we had those have those and probably will continue to have those also because we are a larger organization we were we are now than we were just even two years ago right we are close to 16,000 people from 11,000 back then and these are the eternal things mindset and cultural issues are another source of challenges that will give an encounter constantly there's always the top layer that wants things done the bottom layer that absolutely would love to do that and then you have this middle layer right that's always a source of resistance the source of usually much of the misery and malaise in most companies so that's one of the issues that we also had this cultural issues about change what entrenched beliefs and how things should be done and why things should not be this way every organization each individual has it the company is just a group of individuals right so if individuals have it the company has it so we encounter those sort of things also I'm not saying these things have disappeared these things the first one gone away second one we're working on breaking third one reality can't do much about it fourth one we are actively working on so we have control over certain things we don't have control over certain other things the key is know the difference and do the right thing about what we have control over make sure we improve it what we don't have control over figure out a way to get control like those sort of things I think this is where a lot of our challenges were and the initial outcome when we start the legacy I just transformation we call it phase one or the initial aspect was the pre-merger with market and we started seeing some good strong success and the curiosity was for us from at least for me and some of the coaches in my company what is the reason for the success that we are saying right so we started sending out questionnaires to people like we know we sent out service to people what makes you happy is the process working for you what are you missing what are you what are you liking what are you not liking you need more training you need more coaching what's making successful so we send out these quarterly surveys we sent out this quarterly surveys to people and started getting feedback from them so we started noticing a good positive trend in the way people were looking at the process they were much happier in many many ways the second thing was increase in quality quality of products went up there were better techniques to do prioritization backlog roaming those sort of things and so people started focusing more on the product itself more customer focused and the third thing was a sense of teamness which was not present before it was just everybody has some expertise they were expected to contribute in that area but as a natural team as feature teams everybody has something at stake and they all had to rely on each other so we had this sense of teamness emerge slowly over time that was a strong bonding experience for a lot of people when you do daily stand-ups every day when we talk to each other you're forced to talk to each other every day at least for 15 minutes or when you sit as a group and do iteration planning or release planning or any of these exercises we're actually talking to each other as human beings too right not just as stakeholders or whatever those interactions prove pretty valuable over time I think that led to a sense of we are all in this together we are all doing this together that helped a lot and one of the key aspects actually which is not very well represented is the idea of this healthy tension between business and PD&D right or R&D business folks want everything done two days ago right R&D says well take us 10 more years to get it done so have this really weird tension between business and R&D what we started seeing though is the level of engagement with business started going up because of all these sessions all these agile practices we are putting in place they started to connect more with us okay what do customers really want not what I want what do customers really want and so customer centeredness started taking root to some extent and the skill levels of product owners and product managers started going up that resulted in more engaged teams as a result we started seeing more and more engagement over time that being said I'm not seeing this problem has been solved yet in there are silos as I mentioned some sellers are more successful than others and the reasons for it will we can get into offline as well but have to discuss those with you thank you I'd like to share some of the factors which we really helping the first one is leadership support we always talk about leadership support but in IHS market to get the success definitely we are getting and we got some great leadership support which starts from CTO and and CEO and CPU that is chief people officer so there is a great leadership support to do our agile initiatives and the continuous clear messaging about agile in our journey it's been almost six years with the message and momentum is continued next always we need to start things with the teams we have after our first phase we have some teams were really enthusiastic to start their journey without strong teams we can't get our agile outcomes and having this first phase of transformation teams mindset changed from practices to agile culture we always say doing and being we are not ready to use that but still the mindset definitely changed everybody started thinking that they wanted to change something to achieve community this is one of the key factor for our success when we start our journey we started our community of practices it can be teams it can be SharePoint hotels internal communities these communities are really helping us to continue the momentum and help people when they get challenges on their transformation journey and the last one is always important we wanted to show the difference between leadership support and leadership involvement if you look at here that's leadership involvement we have a mid-level leadership teams are involving in our agile journey they wanted to you know make dirty their hands as part of the transformation it's not that giving instructions changed from command and control to the collaborative leadership they are part of our transformation so that they can understand the real challenges which really help us to get the outcome yeah we want to highlight the challenges in the journey still the challenges are there and some of the challenges are existed and some of the challenges are going to be our continuous journey so we don't want to dot our challenges because challenges definitely give an opportunity for agile coaching team your mindset we would like to give some different definition on mindset from our organization when we say mindset everybody talks about agility but as a team the culture is not coming along with the team members when we talk to individuals definitely everybody try to implement agility but as a team we were seeing a challenges that's what one of the mindset challenges part of the teams silos yes as shesh mentioned we were trying to fix some of the challenges but still there are silos within development teams within business teams business and development especially dev and ITs every department line of business works as an individual organization everybody has their own expectations goals which are not meeting to the organization goals scaling we have 16,000 colleagues and scaling is always challenge right but what we are doing we are creating the self-sustaining team self-reliance teams to scale our agile mindset to rest of the organization that's what our journey we are going to talk about some numbers how much we scale and what is our future plan to scale entire organization yeah as usual funding and budgeting we as the agile team agile coaching team in IHS definitely we do have some budget and funding issues to travel to different locations since ours is a small team and we need to cross across organization the scaling of 16,000 people we need to travel and funding is one of the biggest challenge for us to transform agility into the organization yeah this is important team we always talk about agile is always co-located teams but in reality the challenge is this is disperse teams remote teams and you know co-located remote teams being in India we have teams in different locations every team has their own agile objectives so always this is a big challenge for us to get them everyone into common mindset so continue on with phase 2 and what was phase 2 what in phase 2 look like as I mentioned we had the pre IHS market merger and then the post IHS market merger phase so this is phase 2 we'll kind of talk about and see what happens here so as we gained momentum and we started seeing that things were taking root we want to continue that and somehow exponentially increase it if possible to maintain that momentum we realized we needed agile coaches and we need agile coaches to actually make it happen so to do that we had to build a team so what was the purpose what did we hope to achieve right the first thing was we wanted to make sure the culture of agility was preserved everywhere so to make sure that the coaches are able to in in fact others with this idea that hey this is a real thing this will give you real benefits the second thing we talked about this a few times as mindset this is hugely important and you'll see as repeating this because if you don't have this practices mean nothing right those are just rituals they mean nothing if that's right attitude then practices are not as important you'll get the job done right but this is the core and critical aspect which is why we keep emphasizing it if you are facing this problem in your organization that you're bringing in people coaches qualified people and you're still having trouble getting momentum going getting traction in your in your journey more than likely it's a problem of mindset or just politics or those sort of things like that cultural issues so we have to focus a little bit there more than anything else not necessarily on practices and the third thing is we realized people needed access to high quality content training coaching and so we as a team started working on good content so whether it's training product owners or training agile fundamentals training scrum masters training leaders be as a team of coaches started working on content how do we deliver the best possible information in the best possible way that's absorbing that's that's interesting but also very impactful to how they understand agile so how did we go about creating this agile organization our primary thing was we are very selective in how we interview people and how we get people into the organization and this is a very very important aspect a lot of companies try to just fill some position with somebody in the hopes that you know maybe the budget won't get taken away if they don't feel right then these pressures on on budget but we were patient about it we said if you don't get the right person we won't fill that spot as an example I had a position opening Aberdeen for like nine months nine months it was open I couldn't fill it we just closed it rather than fill it with somebody we could have dealt with we just decided close it it's no point right so we have sometimes those kind of challenges we can't source good people so we're very selective in who we hire so interview process is extremely extremely rigid and it's very I want to say difficult challenging maybe one way to put it we send out an exam for people to take and after the objecting the test we look at the results and then if you like what we see then we get the person in for a phone interview we work through the results with them on the phone if you like them there then we get them on site so it's not out of 50 people was 100 resumes maybe we got for one position we had one on-site interview right so it's very challenging to get in we want to make sure we attract only the absolute best people who really mean what they want to go to which is our today intent on making this change happen are they serious about agile do they really personify the aspect of agility so it's kind of difficult to find this kind of people so we can't just fill anybody right in that position so which is why it's very difficult so as the one of the things we wanted to make sure was first of all it's in source which is making sure that we're not hiring temporary people contractors consultants it's got to be people with skin in the game they have to be part of the company full-time employees no options no excuses no exceptions 100% part of the company that's our goal right second thing is to build a community that was one of the aspects aims and objectives of the coaches it was to create a community right that was a necessary aspect of it all the coaches have to have their own community and while training this or we are also focused in the ROI how do we know these coaches will actually give us the benefit this is hugely important most people ignore it oh they'll just come in daily stand-ups do some training that's not where you get your value from right value derives from their ability to influence you to make the right choices present you multiple options so you can pick the right one to coach you and to help you help guide you to the right path right that's where value comes from so we need to make sure we have the right ROI for it what benefits to do we derive other than just somebody coming in and running our rituals and ceremonies for us it's got to be much beyond that right and finally we had to be entirely self-sufficient which means every coach on our team is expected to come up with high quality content for their own training and then because a group together we look at the content every provide feedback and we get you know improvements done but every coach is expected to also submit proposals to conferences last year for example out of five people who submitted proposals for got through to major conferences including agile Alliance where was it in San Diego I think last year and and three other people got into mile high agile and agile gaming conference so we have those kind of people who are completely committed and very very high quality very competent people it's not easy finding those people by the way and they're not cheap either right a pretty expensive people but they're worth it worth every single cent right so as a team we also wanted to have a vision you can't just put a bunch of people together and say okay now do this stuff they may do it but they won't do it well you need a purpose you need a common purpose and the common purpose comes from a vision statement so I charged the team with coming up with a vision statement develop a vision statement that you that you feel best represents the purpose behind the work that you do so here's the statement we came up with as a team right so point was not just agility but a culture of agility a culture that permeates the entire organization not just one or two silos or aspects we achieve that culture of agility through coaching which is a primary weapon every coach has is coaching right that's a main arm main ammo then through mentoring people long-term work development of people the mentoring training people of course is one key aspect you can't ignore that and one of the key aspects was communities of practice so I started this committee of practice in July 2013 when I first started taking part in the transformation is still going strong it's gonna be six years now still going strong we still meet every month we still have great conversations we meet on teams and share point and other sources still have great discussions right we continue that momentum even now but the key to doing all that is ultimately you want customer value it's okay to do all this but if you produce something nobody wants what's the point ultimately it must deliver superior high quality customer value that customers can buy into and and be thankful to us for and we have long-term partnership with them having the great vision now I'm going to talk about some numbers right we always want to see members because without data people can think it's an opinion right so I know everybody is expecting to see the number so I got an offer right again as I mentioned this is agile coaching transformation team 2000 is the number as of today we have coached trying transformed 2000 people in these subject areas one is agile culture and mindset second one is scrum framework which is most popular everybody wants to try with the scrum maybe people can customize based on their needs but our main focus is starts with the famous framework next product ownership with the business people and the fourth one is which we start recently that's called ok ours objectives and key reasons I know most of them know about this which is so popular nowadays in the market about objective setting system it's not a performance system but object to setting system we strongly believe that strong okay our systems are very important to to get the agility into the teams because the good objectives will drive people to change their mindset the next two we are creating self-sufficient team self-reliance teams with help of coaching strong scrum masters and product ownership if you look at IHS market coaching model we wanted to build internal scrum masters internal product owners in each and every team being a product based company we want to create these powerful roles within the teams we call it as aspiring scrum masters and agile product owners the last one is important if you want to continue the momentum if you want to continue our journey the community of practices are very important along with the community of practices change agents having 16,000 colleagues in the organization we as a coaching team six people scaling is always challenge so what we are doing and what we did we create community of practices local guilds chapters to create changes change agents today if you look at our change agent number 560 people are part of our communities who are really helping us to drive our initiatives they're acting as a change agents they're sharing some of our responsibilities they're helping us to continue the momentum within the organization thank you Lakshman so this might give you some context on where we are today we talked about the initial journey and some challenges but where are we today right what are we doing right now one of the things an interesting thing is we are starting to work with sales which is interesting right when you think of sales you don't think agile you think fixed things you know fixed ways of doing things be at the golf club at 3 p.m. those sort of things but sales we are actually starting to work with our sales folks to inject the idea of agile in sales that's that is a concept called agile selling agile sales so I'm kind of partnering with some of the VPs in different geographies to start this idea of agile sales and so there's some reasoning behind it the response has been very positive but it's a very new initiative it's brand new and so it takes some time to get traction but there's a lot of promise a lot of potential in this area so that's one thing we are focusing on the second thing is our partnering continuing to partner with business folks in most organizations product management seems to be source of a lot of the misery not of their own making it's just that they have emerged from a pool of SMEs right or somebody who are business analysts a lot of them are not classically trained in business they don't really understand the fundamentals of business the many of them are just like I said been product experts who have kind of gotten promoted because there's nobody else to do the job so you don't find classically trained product ones and product managers which is part of the problem and so that's what you're trying to fix by partnering with them working with them coaching them training them with better techniques better tools better mindset better better application of their ideas and that's where we are starting to see significant traction especially you know with the merger of the market we are starting to see different parts of the the market wing come together and say yeah this is great how do we do this stuff so we sing more more engagement there we also are working with HR very closely I was in Singapore Malaysia last year and I was working with HR folks on their own voting and off-voting processes so the way they have structured it was kind of waterfallish but having worked with them we are introducing lean concepts value stream mapping those sort of things and in a very very short time these are exceptionally you know intelligent people they understood the point of it and our chief people officer is a huge believer in agile and lean and so he's fully behind it that helped also to get some momentum between behind that and as a result our HR folks are now actually talking agile language you know what's the strength you know how do we do this how do we bring this thing down what is what should a roadmap look like so this is pretty unexpected you know in any company forget one the size of you know what we have 16,000 people but our HR organization is getting increasingly focused on being more agile which is a really really gratifying thing to see it makes you really feel proud of the work you've done our bread and butter happens to be continues to be R&D people that produce software that's our key thing and that still continues to be a focus because if we acquire a company for example then that becomes part of our ecosystem so we have to focus on them as well ultimately we are a product organization we must focus on the technical aspects as well like DevOps and those sort of things and customer care is another area underappreciated undervalued under understood okay and just people don't get customer care they think well these people are the forefront of getting calls from customers who are not happy you can pick up the phone talk to a happy customer it's easy to do that but to pick up the phone and talk to an unhappy customer that's not easy right but the critical insights usually come from unhappy customers so what we started doing is working closely with our customer care folks and bringing them into the agile ecosystem and so every month we have two calls with our customer care our product owners with our dev folks together and our leadership to understand what are the most recent challenges what can we do to help this this and this as a result we've seen strong engagement from product owners also this is another way we are boosting boosting agility across the company the next few things are even more interesting these are more recent developments as we continue to do this the primary thing is Academy which I just mentioned took over a couple of weeks ago the platform is of learning and development coaching learning training each other that's one of the angles we are we are trying to we're trying to get through to building upon that are two things two key components one is called great teams great teams is a great concept which is how do you create high-performing teams that is an internal program we developed and as part of Academy we are rolling it out in fact I just delivered this training yesterday to our Bangalore folks and I'm off to Delhi next week to do the same thing there as well so this is one thing we're trying to introduce to the people how do you create high-performing teams second thing is okay ours as Lakshman mentioned earlier alignment and transparency are absolutely critical in getting anything done if you don't have alignment or transparency you're gonna have a problem so okay ours ensures that that's another way to boost your business maturity so we have also act as okay our coaches for the organization we taken upon that responsibility even though it wasn't formally given to us we felt there was a gap so we took it right that's another way another thing we are working on as well I hope this is going to be another interesting slide I'm not sure how many are you doing coaching job but we strongly believe and feel that coaching is thankless job most of the time at least I have experience in my journey in my five years of journey right but considering those things in itch's market what we did we give thanks back to the coaching organization not only do the thanks we need to empower coaching organization first to continue our journey glad I'm part of that coaching organization so what we do to empower a coaching organization roles and responsibilities right we call it as a core responsibilities when we had any coach they'll have their core responsibilities but the good part is the core responsibilities are written by coaches within our organization they have written they themselves what are their core responsibilities to achieve the business agility we have strong core responsibilities starting from associate scrum masters to enterprise coaches and the next is career path custom career path is very important thing if you start journey in itch's market your role will not be end only by coach definitely that's an empowerment so our career path is which is equivalent to leadership roles if you take any coach their career path which is equivalent to role and they got an opportunity to work with leadership teams and they'll be part of the decision making any project roadmaps it's not just end with the coach I've seen most of the times coaches are mainly focused on coaching and transforming but in our organization coaches are part of decision making and they're part of the leadership team thank you Lakshman couple success stories we want to share we have 10 more minutes so we'll try to cover it a little bit quicker first thing what was the number we showed on the screen do you remember 1.5 million right yeah nice so everybody remembers money so that money that amount is the amount we saved our company by keeping everything internal that's over a very short period of time and it's a it's obviously increasing the savings are increasing that's just a raw number that looks at the training we haven't even looked at the benefits of the coaching aspect we've done the resultant value of not even counted that that's much much many many times over so one of the things we did was there's a group in market border Colorado we had 440 people needed to be transformed we made it an internal effort rather than having them go to an outside agency we i deputed somebody on my team to go and spend six months with the team and that one person on my team transformed 440 people now they look at things like agile contracts which was something nobody had even thought of before right so agile contracts and those sort of things are now taking root in in that area second thing we used our deployment of products that used to be cycle of 1.5 years to two years we brought it down to three months that's the second big victory we had in terms of speeding up the process of releasing products and in one case we used DevOps to reduce cycle time of delivery from almost a week to three hours right so these are the real examples of how we were able to do some of these things I mentioned about HR which we already heard we won't talk about the election yeah we'd like to spend some time about one of the transformation model which we created in Bangalore which I'm heading so we name it as updraft so I'd like to tell a small story in a minute so before we start updraft we were following agile we were following retrospectives we are following all the ceremonies we were able to release but something was missing which everybody thinks so what we identified the teamness right so we understood if you want to start our agile journey first we need to create teams which are really having a great mindset I hope most of the times we miss that important part and we try to transform we try to coach or train people so I'll just quickly go through basically our main motive of creating updraft is transform teams from augmentation mode to autonomous we always talk about autonomous but which we try to create in our teams that's a simple difference and I'm happy to say this is not a rocket science everybody can do it only thing is we put some efforts to create a team which can start their agile journey if you look at this was our team structure the business requirement product management product capabilities which were in part of global and if you look at our Bangalore teams India colleagues in Bangalore teams most of the times we used to have development folks and SQF folks they used to get requirements in a task mode and when we do interview with the teams they're not having a clear picture of business requirements they used to try to get the tasks and finish to send it that was the biggest part we focused and then we we try to create a strong local leadership in every team so that they can take care of building a great teams that's our second phase and ultimately the aim of this model is to create a updraft team what is updraft team updraft the meaning of updraft is updraft is a dread of air and add some fuel or current or fire to the teams to come to the next level where you are expecting if you look at this is the ideal updraft team model and we want product owners crumb masters local leadership has to be in same location updraft is not outsourcing program to take job from somewhere but wherever the team is there wherever the team you call as a agile team create strong roles in a co-located team there are three pillars to create updraft teams yeah anybody can create a team but the fuel of this updraft team is the first one is the model team whatever the model we have created every team has to follow that model to start their journey and the second one the important one strong as a local leadership we don't want command control we want strong as a local leadership to follow the model which we have created and finally the third one important one which always we expect to get it the global leadership support for us it's a global leadership support for others it can be executive leadership support we need support from top to execute what we have drafted as a team model so these are the three pillars which are helping us to create great teams if you look at our journey in our portfolio we have almost transformed to six to seven teams in this model we're getting a good results thank you Lakshman in summary right almost exactly perfectly on time actually so in summary some of the takeaways I want to share with you are a few key things one if you are looking to really share your acts of radio business agility there are many many factors involved in it the specific aspect we're looking at today is as I mentioned from an internal point of view from a coaching organization's point of view it's well worth your time to invest the time the effort and the money to create a strong organization but there are a few things you must keep in mind number one it must be well supported it has to have strong level support it has to be independent autonomous you can't have it reporting to the people that make the key decisions on how the steam will operate right you want them kind of separate from that you want them to be totally impartial they must be strongly competent your interview processes must be very rigid very difficult to get through you must find the right people and so they it should be rewarding for them to get through it can't be simple for them to get through right you want to make sure you find the right people and sometimes finding the right people is not easy so invest that time develop a test plan make sure that you find the right people by administering good tests high quality tests right they must be charged with a clear purpose if they don't have a clear vision on what they need to accomplish it's not going anywhere right make sure they charge with a clear purpose this is hugely important this is what binds them together to do bigger things than what any one of them could do right finally they must be completely autonomous right now we are entirely autonomous there's nobody from any organization that can tell us what to do how to do it we figure our own path we know what to do and how we decide amongst our team what the right thing to do is and we test it if it works great if it doesn't work let's revise it right so these four things I think are absolutely valuable so you can think of think of them as guidelines to create your own specific organization or with that we'd like to stop and and ask have any questions like to yes yes yes yes we had good question connecting question we have one product we have teams in four locations within India we have three locations so for India what we did we created local leadership in banglore at least you can coverage but other location global locations we have we do have people it is there but we are building team leads as a leadership role right it's all happening internally no no we are not that kb excellent point but it depends some teams we are always trying to give opportunity for the existing members existing members but if you don't get a right skill set on leadership definitely we have to go for hire it depends on the team dynamics yeah yeah it is absolutely yeah that's a fantastic question and and true we are actually working on our interview processes to strengthen those aspects also i'm actually actively working with multiple silos that we have to ensure our individual processes are more consistent now and we are focused heavily on the agile aspect in fact many people we've rejected because their responses were so command control type we knew they were not just good fit at all so to answer the question yes it's not just agile coaches it's a good beginning but across the organization also we emphasize heavily this mindset that we require of them and that's growing cross great question thank you and to add to that point recently we started involving scrum masters agile coaches in interview panel also right yeah it's not it's a mandate but wherever required and the final round these coaches are going and you know checking their mindset whether they'll fit into the organization a question there sir so okay ours is one way to look at how the team accomplishes something right so it's a great question so two aspects of that one is that performance management traditionally has been broken people usually look at as individual what have you done what have you done what has the team done though right so okay ours is a way to extract the best performance out of a team because you've given them a common cause a common purpose to to work on but in that you cannot forget the individual component either right there are some people who pull their weight some people that don't so that requires coaching so okay ours is great it's a great way to look at the team measurement but individually you have to still have to coach people who are under performers and to do that we look we look at 12 or 15 different factors initiative leadership creativity innovation risk-taking competency skills how do you grow yourself how do you learn how do you develop yourself what's your level of maturity a thousand different things right they all go into so performance management right now is two ways one okay ours as a team second individual contribution to that initiative yes very very frequent every quarter every quarter we have reviews about for everybody and actually we are my personal belief is that we should move from quarterly to continuous performance every single day let's look at what's good or what's not good sorry go ahead you do it so number one i mentioned the autonomous aspect autonomy is a key aspect because our organization is independent of all of those pressures we can make decisions that usually you cannot we can challenge our leaders directly and tell them what's broken but traditionally you couldn't do that for example let's say you're a coach sir and you report into the person that hired you and they are running a team of people that does software development it's hard for you to question them because they are your boss so we traditionally choose not to have that and we try to keep our people independent even if i get pressure that pressure is not going to go to my team i push back right away my team is always protected from that they can make whatever choices they want whatever they feel is right whatever they feel is the appropriate thing to do nobody questions them that guarantees us the independence that's what you want to add yeah so a couple of points so one is definitely leadership support they're leadership support which when they're working with them they need to pull in the band of how teams we work they expect things from the top and the second one is we are a neutral organization we are unaware so when they have a conflict this coaching organization is helping them to sort out those things so that you know it's a journey that creates some trust between the teams and coaching organizations we have in our portfolio we have 9 to 10 people leaders but good that i've been invited for most of them so we maintain our credibility we go with our roles and responsibilities we always pick our boundaries we try to help whenever we sorry go ahead great question right so a few things one is 360 degree review which is we will talk to the stakeholders so let's say somebody on my team is coaching somebody on your team or they are actually scrum masters for your team coach for your team i would come to you and ask you how are things going what are your feelings about this are you feeling comfortable with this person is it working out for you what are the improvements you you've seen as a result of this person's you know involvement then of course it's not a one-sided story right i'll go to my coach and ask him or her what benefits have you seen with this team what improvements have you made to this team also what improvements do you want to make to this team but are not happening because of pushback so it's both ways and so i'll give you some examples in one case we reported a defect density drop quite a bit of drop in defect density there was a direct attribution to the coach helping them focus on the right things to do uh reduction in whip work in progress which is the biggest enemy of getting things done is your high whip right the more work you have in progress the less you get done so that's one thing we coach people on reduce it third coaching product owners to take more effective decisions and to introduce the idea of value in their stories give it value points just random just like story points are made up make up value points what do you think is why is it higher value than this right that forces people to make the right decisions yes yeah and that's exactly how we don't treat them the same right some some coaches work in particularly challenging teams their level is totally different and so we judge them differently there are some teams that some people that work in established teams there the problem is the status quo status quo is the biggest enemy next to whip status quo is the biggest enemy they're always happy to rest on their laurels yeah we've done this we can coast for a few months that months turned into years and decades right so that's the other thing how much are you challenging the status quo what what have you made them question about things that they're working on so it's the effectiveness that they've introduced the process effectiveness the the technology effectiveness and the product owners effectiveness which is the most critical aspect right if you have effective product owners you actually get effective products there's always subject to everything you know i would like to add two more points here one is we as a coaches we have our own okr right each quarter we'll have our own okr which is aligning that if i'm working one line of business with the business leaders and i take the priority we'll write our own okr that's one of the quantity matters and as the team what we do we conduct topics across the earth to get the out even though if you're working as one team your team might not open with you directly as a master but the anonymous service are really helping us to know the most of the times people their retrospectives are not working in their service so that's one of the objective for us to improve as a coaching organization sorry sir question yes yes yeah this goes to the wiffle concept wiffle miss what's in it for me right to to a large extent humans are selfish much as many much as people may say oh i value working in this organization or i love this organization they really love themselves so what's in it for me is the main concept they have to understand is here's the benefit you will derive by doing this here's your personal objective that you will gain by doing this and if you resist there's a pretty good chance that you will not succeed in this new environment we want you to succeed in this new environment we'll help you here are the tools and techniques and here's the framework we want to offer you we'll train you we'll coach you and mentor you whatever you need to succeed we'll do it for you but here's the benefit you will get by doing this so character and stick approach is the worst approach ever nobody responds to that well and those may work for physical tasks they don't work for cognitive tasks and this work is all cognitive tasks so this has to be all carrots there cannot be any sticks there if you produce sticks you'll get the opposite result in the counter counter product so we produce we only display character type approaches here's what you benefit here's how you gain it's all about gain it's all about improving it's all about growth i'm not going to say this is going to work for everybody many people don't really respond either way but a good majority of people see through that if they see others succeeding that impacts them hey this person can do it i can do it too right so it's it's a little bit of a viral thing it's also motivating them to do the right thing so it's it's a combination of things and learning is never fully done you can never unlearn something fully it's not possible uh but it's about forgetting it to some extent and a similar challenge in our graph framework it's 36 months program right we we did not expect to change people in one month still we are kind of people but to understand their challenges are they really getting capacity to learn something because they are busy with their daily tasks so what we are implementing we have given some good capacity for them to learn these concepts and practice that's the reason the leadership support we have kills by we can kill and if you look at the capacity also the development capacity can go to four to five hours depending on the project the rest of capacity is available for them to explore things we can't expect people every time you can't expect people to go home and read a go to sleep right it should be part of the team so we trust people started giving time but there are some different people you know I think I'm covered in the but yeah I'm happy to cover again which I love it always so like others we started and always good I mean I'm happy to call it as a doing part but still mindset issues right so again we don't want to blame the teams we went to the roots and understand HL might work very well if you have self-sufficient like-minded all those people in a team but we went to the rules basically if you look at some of the teams are not even teams because they're completely dispersed and they don't know where the business so what we understood first let's create a prerequisite model which really helps team to start their agenda right that's not a simple model leadership involvement leaders has to come and now they have to do assessment and all those things then we decided let's create one model to cater people needs right there is a lot of pre-work when you start your agile journey enough to hiring a local people and creating opportunities locally first create a standard teams where they can pick the agile value we want a team that's what we started great question I so one of the things I want to answer to that question is we recognize that our offshore people India Bangalore wasn't used well the supremely talented intelligent people but we're not making the best use of them at the time we had a VP of sdms andy james and he and I had this conversation about you know what are some things that we could do so I wrote up a little framework type thing and then we had a conversation with some of the key people both globally and in India about what are your challenges what are you come so we had them all do a presentation to us and in the presentation the root problem came out to be disconnects between product management and development well the location time difference cultures and all that so we identified these are the core problems then my boss and I and he and I we I'm based out of Houston so he and I flew down to to Bangalore spend some time with the teams understood what was really going on what we would do out of that emerged his vision which is called up draft that was the core idea we had yet and that's what we've been leaning down from now on yeah that does help okay thank you