 Good afternoon, everyone. How was lunch? How was lunch? Good? Yeah. So we'll get going. I know we are almost on the hour, two o'clock. So my name is Ashish Mehdi Raka. Quick introduction. So I've been in the industry for quite some time, almost two decades. Been doing agile for more than 10, 12 years now. But I still am learning every day. And I'm here to share some of my learning with you guys. And so feel free to help me along my journey, right? So the topic for today that we are presenting here is the agile balance workout. So anybody who's familiar with the balance workout, a quick show of hands. One, two, three, four. Great, guys. Okay. So I think you guys can help me along with whatever it's your experience along that journey, right? And I look forward to any feedback that you have maybe in the presentation, of course, in presentation. All right. Let's get going. So how many of you are working in companies which are now doing agile? You're in the conference here, right? All right. So I assume what you're going to raise your hand, right? Okay. But as we're doing agile in your organization, do you think the whole business itself is becoming agile or are you struggling in some running into some barriers? Are there anything stopping that journey? Anybody? Yes? Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Give us some insight if you can. So I work with GE. Yeah. GE is a very large company. Yeah. And over the years, whatever process we have, they have all been built to be with lots of muscles, lots of flesh, everything. And leaning it to become agile is not at all an easy job. Yeah. So you have so many things to work out as a structure, titles and everything all around. So beat process, beat the way people are organized, there are multiple challenges at all levels. Yeah. So a simple thing like putting together a cross-functional team the way agile requires is a challenge. Yeah. It's a challenge. Perfect. Any other example anybody else wants to highlight in it? So let's get going. I just wanted to set the expectations here. Before I begin, just a quick disclaimer from my side. So all these opinions are mine. So please don't relate back to anything to my employer. Right. So all of us are in an enterprise, right? All of you are working for an organization. So how many of you know what's the vision, mission and the strategy for your organization? Right. So this is practically what most of the organizations are. As a big enterprise you will find and the gentleman just said one of the big organizations. You will definitely have all these things, mission, vision, goals, values, right? And then you have all these strategies to go along with it, right? But the idea is, within that organization, how much of that strategy or that vision or mission is being translated when you actually come down to the ground level, right? So that's the question we are going to answer and ask ourselves in this session today. The CEO says in his big board meeting and in front of the shareholders and in front of the employee townhouse, right? How many of you are in a townhouse, right? Right? Practically everybody, right? So you say, hey, what's our strategy? And it lays down this big four bullet points with a lot of fancy graphic and the color coming in, right? And he says, guys, this is our strategy. We've got to beat this competitor and we've got to increase our revenue by 20% this year and maybe 60% next year. So that's our strategy. For that, what do we need to do? And he lays down a list of things, right? But then you again ask yourself the same question. Does the guy who's writing that piece of code is he listening even in the townhouse? Or is he just, how many of you have seen that? What's the latest WhatsApp message coming in, right? So how's that translating down to that level? And so the question is, when the CEO says, I wanted to go north, right? I want it to go this way, right? We have to beat this competitor. We have to make sure we wipe out this competitor or in other cases, we just want to say I want to protect my current product line and grow my profit margins, right? So that's what the CEO language is, right? But if the guy who's writing that Java code or the DartNet code is he listening even on that? So you're having those barriers and those gaps in that business peak versus the technology speak, right? And that's what you want to look for and bring forward. And that's what we say. So do you know, as a CEO, hey, I laid out this strategy, but what is actually happening? Are we going to achieve that milestone that I laid out in my strategy in the next three months, in the next six months and the next one year? Are we going to meet that or not? So you really don't know, right? So just to give you some statistics. So the strategy to execution, 90% of strategies fail and this is a research done by Dr. Quater. And the reason for that, 95% failure is because of failed execution. It is not that the strategy is wrong, but just that the execution itself was either missing or incorrect or the whole translation of the strategy itself didn't percolate down. So the communication gap is so strong that you never know where you're running. You're running in circles, you're going right, you're going left and you'll always be wondering at the top level whether it's a CEO I'm saying or even at your program levels or even at a big project you'll have maybe multiple hierarchies. You really don't know what's happening on the ground and that's where we say you want to measure and the balance store cut comes in. So I'm just laying out a little foundation here where you say how can I translate from a strategy down to the ground level? And therefore you'll have a strategy map typically like in the center you can see which would translate the whole overall strategy to four different dimensions and each of these dimensions have within them an equal weight. You can then divide the strategy for let's say a financial measurement. You may say I want to grow my revenue by 20% as simple as that. For customers I say I want to acquire new customers at the rate of 20% growth rate or 30% growth rate from my current baseline. In terms of my internal business process I say I want to be able to build this new I want to build thought leadership in this new technology. I want to be able to reduce my capability or the cycle time that I have in my new product pipeline delivery. So all that comes under your business processes and in terms of the learning again you are asking the question again what can I deliver with my current team today? I know but what's the future? Can I meet the future? The competition? The changes coming in the market? So those are the questions you are asking and translating around this balance code. And each one of these will come from the overall strategy. And you say here are my objectives this is my measurements and these are the initiatives I am going to take. So that's how you will break it down and those initiatives will then percolate down to the ground. But then again the question is we just said we are all here for this agile conference. And the balance code card still holds good. So are you still going with the old balance code card? Possibly yes. But do you need to incorporate some new elements? The word has changed. We are following a certain methodology earlier now we are following this methodology. There are certain parameters which are changing the way we work is changing the challenges we have are changing every day. So you still need to then ask yourself this question again what is going to happen next. So everything is changing. Anybody who disagrees not even a single guy. So everything is changing every day. The speed at which we get the information is changing. And the amount and the velocity of information is changing. Everything around it. So how many music fans here? You guys play with the equalizer any time? Graphic equalizer. So what does it allow you to do? If you can help me along what does an equalizer allow you to do? Anybody? Adjust the Enhancers. Enhancers are signals. So either you can boost it up right. So this is what we are saying here that we have a device which can really change and give you the result that you want exactly right. So I can change this graphic equalizer setting and I will get the frequency signal changing accordingly right. So the idea is now we have this capability with not just the balance code card but I can now change my ground level actions based on this new agile balance code card. So that's what we are saying here. Keep the existing balance code card but you can always go and modify it or append to it or extend it whatever you want to call it and use additional capabilities which we are now in this new model of agility. It's business agility right. It's going to change to the competition to the needs of the business right to protect and nurture your strategy right. So that's what we are saying here. So the four dimensions I will be talking about is the business values and I think you have heard Venkat talk a lot about business value early on right. So that's what you are caring for all the time as one of the dimensions right. The other thing we are looking at is the end user. Not at the cost of the end user right. So you really want the end user orientation to come down to your teams to every engineer in your team and then the operational excellence which is all about how quickly you deliver with do you have too much waste in your system and that's where we talk about the operational excellence right. And finally the future orientation which is linked back to the learning world right and the learning is how do you orient yourself with your capabilities right. So we will quickly take a quick dive in each one of those. So one of the key parameters you can always measure and this is true for any company whether it's product company or your services how many releases you are making for either for yourself or for your clients right. So you can always add this metric in your agile balance guys did I make just one release and I know there are companies there are still companies who take 18 months to make a release. So you can always say how many releases I am making in this year or if you have more releases you can say a quarter level ease. How many features per release. So that's a simple metric to measure right. All of you have product managers or clients who are giving a requirement in terms of features we are all coming from that feature driven development or the FRD right. So there are a lot of specifications like we are talking about 100 page design how many have seen like 300 page even 500 page featured documents right. I have seen those. So the idea is you have a feature is still existing in the world even in this new model that we still have a feature we take it down into stories but you can always go into the features right. The features are always there for you to look at. Of course the product backlog and I say product in this case at a higher level and say from a broad if I have a portfolio of products I can look at my portfolio burn down either right. So you can say within my portfolio I may have multiple product lines and this product line may have a certain burn down itself right. So that is a key metric to measure in your orientation for the business value. Technical there. So you don't want to hide the survey in some closet. We all know anybody who says I don't have technical debt or my code is as good as it can be I don't have any bugs in that and I don't want to rewrite it right. So we all know that it exists right. So either you can shy away from it or we open about it and honest and tell business guys we have this debt in our technology world we have to take care of it if we don't take care in the short term we'll be bitten in the long term right. So that's a key thing you can always focus on and highlight and have that conversation with the business. Last item there are many more but this is just a quick summary here so product flexibility I'll just take the questions let me just finish this. So the product flexibility is about how you can have let's say I have I cater to multiple segments right I have the enterprise segment high premium I have a mid-market segment which is your let's say folks who don't have much money and have little product transaction based product line right. So how flexible is your product can you meet those challenges in terms of your delivery capability so that again is your business value to be overall as a matter right sir. I just wanted to check you know aren't like these metrics major releases per quarter and features for release also part of the traditional scorecard or are they more like just you know part of the agile scorecard. So I didn't we are not saying that these are not part of the traditional scorecard right what we are saying is that the product back long burned down so those are new things right and you can always design your scorecard up to you so every of my business has a different level of metric that they want to catch okay. Alright. We'll move on to the user orientation. So net promoter score is another key metric which you will always look at. Net promoter score is looking at what is the if you buy this product from me how loyal or how how much loyalty I have to my product and will you recommend my product to another person right. So it's as complex as that. So you will always get that feedback from your VOCs course I'm sure you all have support organizations to find out what is my net NPSS Another simple question to ask is how many calls do I get in terms of my support right it's as simple as that. So you all will have some support lines right a support team who is working on the product line in terms of the maintaining and sustaining the product line so you can always ask how many service calls are in that the whole question is to ask is what is the trend not just that number is it trending down and that is where you are at saying my scorecard is improving right that is the key thing to ask. Again this cycle time for the service so if I pick up the phone today and I say guys I have a problem with this product can you fix it for me. Now the whole cycle it takes for you to deliver let it run through your product manager down to the team who then fix it it goes to the testing whatever you do back as a patch to be delivered what is that cycle time right for that service call right so that is one of the other key metrics you will always want to look at in terms of the user orientation customer survey response that's another one in terms of just the fact that customer responding you sent out surveys to let's say 1 lakh customers but maybe just couple of 100 responded back that itself is an indication for you that how engage your customers are but if you get a good response that definitely means something for you so those are just some leading indicators for you to look at when you talk about user orientation and of course this is a standard one from a traditional scorecard you will definitely look at some of those things like how many defects you escaped into production as simple as that and if you want to introduce these stages if you have those alpha, beta stages in your product release life cycle you can always capture those also we come to operational excellence so this is about how you as a unit or a business deliver things how quickly you deliver things what is the amount of waste you have in your cycle and this will capture some of these items you can always drill it down to number of features if you have those metrics if you are capturing those metrics so per release versus per developer if you want to go to that level you could always look at how many projects were completed within a certain duration which was planned earlier so I just put number here plus minus 2 sprints and that is an indication but you can always flex it based on your organization let's say past history or your capability where you want to run field issue resolution again so how quickly you are resolving the issues which were reported from the field and I've just given some indication of 30 days right so that's like within 30 days how many issues you were able to get back to the customers right this is coming from your internal teams who are doing those continuous integration continuous deployment and continuous testing which is happening throughout your STLC cycle right you will capture the test passing how much percentage of it is passing how many bills are passing and you can build those shortcuts across the project across your portfolio and even across your organization and of course this is the last but the most important one the cycle time the cycle time is all about the end to end delivery and you can always spot the opportunities which are there for you to remove that waste so I could be having waste if I just hand off my stuff so I don't know if you have a big integration test team or verification and validation test team right and you hand off the stuff at the end and they do the whole thing which will take let's say 3 months for them to merge and consolidate right so is that a waste what is the value for the customer in that sense right so you have to ask those tough questions internally and say what is our cycle time and can we reduce all that that's all about the operational excellence future orientation so this is about your learnings for your team right and many companies do this engagement scores just like you do it for your customers outside you do engagement scores internally you talk to your employees and say guys what's working are we doing good the policies that we have the reward structure the compensation structure and all those things the whole package that we offer you not just from the monetary but from the work environment the culture that you have in the company and that translates into your engagement score it's a key metric for you to make sure that you're ready for your future that your teams are ready right another important thing is the competency so I think Venkat did talk about the cost of language right the cost of changing the language so if you are working in Java today and I ask you to work in .NET tomorrow cost is extremely high right but you need to be ready for the future today I remember 10 years back they were probably like 50 maybe 100 but then today you will have thousands of languages every day every week we will have a new language coming up right so are you ready to work is your team ready do you have the competency to work in that right and not just languages I'm just giving an example it could be any tool anything else in the ability to talk to the global audience from communication skills perspective training us and that's a key metric which may already be measured again in a current scorecard possibly but you really want to put it right up front in this kind of a scorecard also because you really want to invest in your people all the time the other thing is about the cross functional team right so I'm sure some of you must have a DBA group separate and we heard the architect the power point architect right we heard that so you will have the architecture group separate you will have some performance testing group separate and a security group separate right so can you make a cross functional team where each one of these guys are available for delivering that value business value during that sprint or iteration right so those are the things you want to look for if you can create those teams and then you can simply go and measure them and say I'm improving my scorecard okay so that's the overall quick summary of the scorecard but I just wanted to add some more and you can always go back and say guys I can use it in whichever way I want we just had an initial conversation about the number of roles you have right how many titles you have right do you have 4 layer hierarchy or 40 layer hierarchy right as simple as that and if your top management or senior management is aware of it and are they even striving to look at that those are the questions to ask right how many roles so we have seen some companies whose HR policy documents are this big I'm sure some folks in this room would also agree how many policy documents you have right anybody who say they have HR policy of 2 pages excellent I would like to know the name of your company sir mock me okay great so that's what we are all aiming for here when I say that the number of roles you have which means that you try to build trust in your employees you trust your employees and you're not saying guys here's a rule book for you for every step that you take in the office is a simple indication for you to look at and say how is it contributing to my scorecard time to value anybody want to help me on that time to value so it's value when the customer sees the value that's what it means right so I can always go ahead and say guys here's I've released my software and let me go to a release party in my team right but did the customer install the software and use it at that point in time no right most probably no unless it's a hosted application but most of the time you will find there will be a gap between the actual deployment of the software right you will have some folks the services group or somebody who will go and deploy the software even then the customer may not use it right you may just let it be only when he starts to use it is what you're saying is your time to value so can you shorten that whole time right not just from a time to release time to deployment but the time to value so that's a key question to ask yourself okay and in your groups another metric could be in terms of we all work with all the third party components we have suppliers not in the traditional manufacturing sense but we use third party libraries we have we work with some vendors who create these third party components right so how many partnerships are you making and if that is a key metric from a strategy point of view that we need to expand or maybe lower our cost by having strategic partnerships so that could be translated down to how many partnerships you have and then the quality of those partnerships customer driven innovation so in this new model we have this great flexibility of talking to customers right so whether we talk it every two weeks or you have some other form of communication whether it's a council, customer council or you work through your beta programs so there are different avenues which probably were not there in the earlier model now you have this customer on site who is ready to talk to the team the customer mindset has changed right so simple thing how can you collaborate with the customer to create new things which the customer really wants and again you want to know the domain you already know the language there is all the technology side of the world right but can you work out the problem that the customer is facing but he is not really told you even that he is facing can you go to that level right so those are the things you want to look at and say how many such innovations can it drive through my organization and make it part of the scorecard so I think I will probably pretty much done with the overall team any questions till now so I will give you some examples and again this is let's say a company which is in a growth phase right and they are looking at I want to grow my market share right so what do you guys think I will ask you guys to give me some examples here help me along anybody for increasing my business value how can you increase business value if I want to increase my market share that's my strategic goal more customers get more customers be more productive right be more productive we are talking about business value that would probably be one of the other scorecards yeah the operational side of the world more revenue so that's a goal what will you measure in terms of one of the metrics customer satisfaction yeah anybody else a better defect free product defect free product yeah so I would so we are talking about the business value scorecard for now and that would fall in one of the quality parameters that how the quality is good or bad for the customer yeah different verticals different verticals different verticals be first in the markets be the first in the market yeah definitely so that's how you are delivering business value so all of those are correct I have just put down some of the thoughts again that you want how many features or releases that you are adding to the product that's where you are saying it is about the business value side of the world I think user orientation and I think some of you covered those points again but anybody wants to add anything else on the this part of the world user orientation is looking at the end user user experience that's a key thing I think as we are evolving and getting to know more things with the customer and collaborating more in this new model yeah definitely yeah anybody from this side a net promoter score is a basic example for that we will tell you whether they recommend your product to the other guy or not I have just put another one which is your response percentage as simple as that right and these are just examples you can fill in your own operational excellence I think you did mention the productivity side of the world quality measurements quality measurements quality measurements yeah anybody else yeah reducing the overhead reducing the overheads yeah basically removing the waste right yeah so I have added features for developer so that is extremely valid but just keep in mind the strategy is to increase market share so that's where we are focusing on and market share we are saying will increase when you delight the customers right you will be able to give them new features it's like Hyundai is coming out with new car models every third month let's say right and so you are hooked on to Hyundai either to upgrade or to see what's coming next I'm just giving a hypothetical example here right so it's about drawing your market share all the time that's the overall strategy and how you are translating that into the metrics that you want to capture in the scorecard the last one on the future orientation yeah cross functional things yeah definitely yeah innovation customer driven yeah trainings yeah definitely right on the money there building new competencies and these are again my limited example I'm giving you here the idea is if you look at this whole thing you can see why is talking about the market share right and now you can divide it into these quarter and say guys this is what we are aiming for and start to assign those scores based on your current baseline current competency and say in the next few quarters this is what we are aiming for okay so that's how you can start building your scorecards and turning around your teams to focus on those priorities okay like I said half the time the problem is with the execution of the strategy right so now when you have a clear goal and if I may ask so if you have your performance of phrases I'm sure everybody does right so half the time the question to ask to be which is not clear is what are my goals right I never knew my goals right my boss never told me my goals and it will happen to me all the time right so now you have a clear indication of the goals that your boss is asking and his boss is asking right we just link straight to the overall strategy for the organization okay we'll take one last example so this is about the stability so you don't want to grow the market share you want the existing product to run smoothly okay so that's let's say your CEO has given the strategy here what do you guys think fill in the metrics who wants to do yes sir this side what will come in business value anything anything that comes to mind okay basically you are looking at burning down the technical data that's the key thing right you want let's say you had major performance issues coming from the field the product is not stable I use it it just crashes and you are getting hundreds and hundreds of service calls every day you're getting escalations every day right has it happened to anybody right I'm sure it must have right you get escalations how do you kill them you definitely go back to the team and ask guys what's the problem and they say guys we have this huge mountain of technical debt just because the last please was rushed we had to make this quick hack and that has resulted in this escalation and it has impacted thousands of customers so you really want to burn down that technical debt and that's one of your score card and that ties to the CEO's agenda of stable stability right so you can see we are speaking two languages now right you are speaking the CEO's agenda which is talking about the stability program right and here we are saying we are going to fix the technical debt right and that is adding to the overall business value flexibility again so I may want to introduce flexibility in my product for a certain category of customers I may say these features are high performance features and introduce let's say some caveats in the lower performing features for other segment of customers so can I do that with my product if not I want to go in that direction probably correct few examples for you to take user orientation so again anybody for this cycle time yeah user orientation what's the user going to say feedback right service calls as simple as that so is my trend declining for service calls or not maybe last month I had thousands of service calls per day and this month I am getting only 10 service calls per day so that's probably my goal also which was back to the earlier baseline and service calls cycle time that's what you guys said so that's exactly right that you want to measure how much time it is taking for me to get those stability fixes out in the field correct I think this one came up operational excellence so I put up field issue resolution right cycle time and waste right everybody on board with this because you are asking the stability of the product in this case right you are trying to say I want the resolution numbers to go down the cycle time and the waste to be removed and finally future orientation yeah anyone cross functional teams maybe you have a scenario where your development is all good but your deployment is failing right your deployment teams are probably missing some things and maybe because just the configuration is not communicated properly correct so you will definitely want those teams to collaborate together and have a common outcome which is the stability of the product cross functional teams okay nothing that pretty much is up what I have so I would encourage you guys to go and look at your organizations look at your challenges look at your strategy right maybe you want to go back and ask or maybe not ask if you are already the CEO here or you want to read up what your CEO has said in the last downhole as a strategy right and then see can you build a scorecard from that strategy or have the CEO given you some directions and there are some strategic programs which are already running based on that strategy right and what are the key metrics that you have and then translate it down to your team right as to guys why we are doing this is because it is linked to this strategy of higher growth or a stable product right we want our customer calls to go down so that our MPS scores go up and we make more margins right that is why your work is important so that you can reduce the technical depth which is pretty high right now so you can frame that conversation now using those scorecards right if you are a manager managing a portfolio of programs you can use these scorecards then to manage and say this portfolio or this program is going in the right direction as per the strategic alignment right so the key thing is also how aligned you are to the strategy like I think when Fitbit mentioned I can always work in the latest features of Java just because I want to but is it aligning to the overall strategy of the company right if the strategy is to go and fix those defects right now which are impacting the stability so you can always build those metrics and transfer it down to the overall level and ultimately improve the execution which is the key number one indicator of why strategy is there so hopefully you guys can bring it the 95% of failure of the strategy right and reduce that percentage using these scorecards I think I will rest it here and any questions I can take yeah Ashish the question that I wanted to ask is this balance scorecard seems to give a perspective of an enterprise under four different dimensions is there an example of a company in the software world which is using this to drive either their growth phase or the maturity phase that you have come across and what are the challenges that they encountered when they looked to adopt this kind of metrics yeah so these are my thoughts yeah so I have not been able to interact with any organization who has actually gone in this direction okay so but there are of course the current balance scorecard programs they will include some of these metrics but what I am saying today is that we want to include some of these metrics which are coming from our day to day practices that we have to do on our versions from the changes happening around due to the agile model of working that we are having and to work around these barriers that you are facing now we in the industry are facing versus where it is the hierarchy or the roles we need to include these metrics in that scorecard it is like enriching those scorecards which are existing and bring this additional insight into them right so that you can make a better information you are passionate the product flexibility is like if I have a product and I have it is a let's say a very high end product today cater only to the enterprise segment and it requires let's say 10 service guys to go and install it and it takes a 3 month or a 6 month cycle to just to go and make it go live let's assume that is a scenario can I make it flexible in the sense that can I break it down where it can be consumed by let's say a lower segment of the market let's say can I make it from an enterprise deployed software on site to a hosted solution which is a transaction based okay the core guts of the software remain the same right but I can scale it up or down based on the needs of the customers that's what I meant by flexibility so if you have that flexibility then you can provide more business value right so the business can now go out and sell this product and this as a service now right so rather than just selling it as a infrastructure or as a complete shrink wrap product I can start using it as a service and derive more revenue okay so it's contributing to my revenue percentage I can grow my revenue so that could be product overall strategy so as an engineering team you may want to look at how much flexibility I have today if not how can I make it flexible any last question alright guys I am for your time I will be around if you want to catch me again thank you very much