 So, that's the topic that we are going to do. My name is Tathagat and this conversation we are also having under the AGs of the Agile Leadership Network that chapter we have for Bangalore. I just want to take a minute and just talk about the Agile Leadership Network also which was basically started in Massachusetts in 2005 as Agile Product Leadership Network and the founders include Jim Highsmith, David Anderson, Mike Cohen, Christopher Ivory, Todd Little, Paulina Pickston, Doug DeCarlo, Donna and Laville and what Agile Leadership Network is really about is dedicated to the evolution of leaders at all levels striving to transform teams, organizations and enterprises by applying Agile Leadership Principles and Values. A couple of us here volunteer for the ALN Bangalore chapter which is a completely non-commercial community driven activity basically and I have actually I have Prasad here and I have Gopal here as well if they can just raise the hand. So, Jata is a part of that as well. What we do is basically we try to have see such conversations with the leadership and try and understand more about that. So, this is one of the events and we are also happy to have two of the sponsors here from from Digite and from NIIT as a part of this panel. So, with that I would like to just set the context here because sometimes we say that the large companies say that Agile you know what it doesn't really scale up to the rigors of my business. So, I cannot really use Agile for any innovative processes whereas some people who might be used to a more lightweight or more freewheeling culture for example of innovation they say you know what why should we even have these kind of a things there my innovation process as it is good enough there. So, what is the real answer there is it to have Agile as an answer as an antidote for as a I won't say antidote but at least as a penacea for stimulating or catalyzing innovation or are there better methods to do that. So, with this panel we would like to explore some of these questions there and what I would do is I would go with the lady in the team here first and I would talk about Sojata who heads Voltec India operations as the chief operations officer and delivery head and she has been instrumental in playing the key role for transformation journey of Voltec India to become Agile. She's passionately driven results oriented customer centric and she believes a lot in continuous improvements in operational excellence using multiple process models of excellence. So, Sojata thanks for joining the panel and welcome to the panel what I would like to understand from you in your business that you come from what is your perspective of what does Agile mean to you when it comes to innovation. Okay, good evening and thanks to ASCII for really encouraging us to have this session thanks to all of you. Yeah, coming back to Agile and innovation before I start I really want to say it's a false dichotomy. Okay, it's not one complimenting the other it is intertwined and I would really say that innovation what does it mean to me is that how I can do things differently to achieve better result in terms of really making it smart way of working for a better productivity better quality and also how customers sees and especially when I work with European customer they don't want the boring thing as as we do all the time from a services perspective they really see how we really improve year on year and they tremendously want to see the improvement happening and that too when you say you're an agile organization. So from that perspective I see that we have to really run faster even to survive in this world. So we have to be innovative and whether you do it with Agile without Agile definitely there is a way to really do a smart way of working. See your customers really care about what what I could probably call as a drip feed way of innovating which is like continuous steady improvement happening all the time. Improvement with innovation either with the process of methodology or the tools or smart way of working it could be a simple way of making your code highly robust and with limited number of code with the code trace and optimizing it also. So that could be also an innovation. Okay okay well thanks Sojata we'll come back to you later with that. Let me go around the panel here. Let me introduce Praful here and Praful is a senior VP and location head of Bangalore Center at Sun Guard Solutions. Praful also is leading the Agile Center of Excellence for STS. He is a strategic relationships oriented results driven senior management IT professional with more than 25 years of experience in combining outstanding leadership skills and proven all-round cross-functional expertise with global and multicultural organizations. So Praful you come from a multinational a large multinational which has interest in multiple areas financial systems here. What is your view about how Agile how in your world of the world how do you look at Agile is it catalyzing the innovation or is it taking a backseat? Thank you and hello everyone am I audible? Yeah okay great. Agile and innovation you know in fact combining these two words itself is an act of innovation right I think you're creating a new meme if I may put it that way. So anyway when we talk about innovation I think the way I see innovation are two types you know okay let me step back here innovation actually starts with a creative idea okay an idea that is of that is new and that is valuable but not to the person who creates that generates the idea but to the onlookers. If you think the idea that I propagate is making sense and it's valuable then it becomes creative right and what is innovation it's nothing but realization of that idea. So from a product company perspective you know we have all these blogs and all these sites where you put start putting ideas but the one that gets picked up is something that is of value and then innovation actually comes when you're creating it okay now when you're creating something by definition there is something disruptive happening there okay so the question is can Agile process as a process can Agile actually help you support that I'm not very sure about that okay because when you talk about innovation what do you do you're stepping out of your comfort zone and you start thinking about a particular concept okay and it is basically intersectional and think about science and math combining itself and creating a new field okay now that's disruptive so how does one actually combine a process and wrap something that's as disruptive as that with the process that's I think so we would like to know more about your perspective on how you see that as we come to as we get more into the conversation I would now like to introduce Oven Rogers at the far end here and Oven is a product lead with Perse Energy a leading energy analytics software company for commercial buildings for the past four years Oven has been applying lean startup concepts to deliver software as a service products to a rapidly evolving market before Perse Energy Oven was a consultant with ThoughtWorks cross coaching cross-functional teams in Canada China India and the UK so Oven my question to you is from from how you see in the energy which seems like a very capital intensive world at least to an outsider what's your view of agile and innovation is it a is it mixing together or are they like not really talking to each other I think of agile as being a tool and like any tool it can either be used to support the the application that is being put to or it can act to undermine it and I've seen agile being misapplied in ways that completely stifle innovation that add way more process than is necessary in order to in order to be able to allow innovation to flourish yet at the same time adapting agile in a way that is contextually appropriate can really allow innovation to flourish so it's really it comes down to the application of the approach rather than the approach itself I mean agile itself is so so broad in terms of its definition that you really need to get down to specifics from from my perspective being actively involved in a startup for the last several years I think startups are really where innovation happens innovation doesn't have it does happen in large companies but startups live and die based on their ability to innovate and so looking at what processes and practices are used in startups and to what extent those processes and practices overlap with what is in the agile canon of processes and practices I think give a pretty scent pretty good sense of the degree to which it supports or undermines innovation so have you also seen some patterns of for example one key thing that I learned from your thought processes there is a little bit of a contextualness in that you have to really understand there's no one-size-fits all kind of thing and depending on the context probably depending on the class of problem that one is looking at some method might work some method might work in the startup context to people talk about a lean startup a lot and you had a call you just talked about that as well do you see that is really becoming a more if we remember the Stacy matrix kind of problems that this is solving is that really seem to be flavor of the season right now with the other results that we can talk about there any thoughts on that well I I'm personally I'm a big proponent of the lean startup method and I think that it is much more tailored to for for startups and it really helps encourage innovation in a way that is not necessarily as directly supported within more established agile methodologies in fact most of the agile methodologies say relatively little about the about about the product ideation and design process they're more focused on the delivery side and delivery is is is obviously less less of where innovation happens I mean there is as as you have to mention innovation does happen within the delivery but I think within the context of this discussion we're really talking about the broader innovation around bringing new products and ideas to market in order to really solve significant problems thanks and we'll come back to you and let me introduce Udayan sitting right next to me here and Udayan is an agile enthusiast and then has been associated with IT industry for our for about 35 years now he looks he's much younger than that looks definitely 35 years doesn't probably talk about that but he looks after the technology he's a CTO for NIIT technologies and he looks after the technology innovation center at NIIT technologies and helps formulate the technology roadmap for the organization he has also personally been involved in adoption of agile methods for more than 10 years which would so I would like to actually open it up how what changes have you seen here what mindset changes have you seen here in the last 10 years that you have been associated with kind of spearheading or or leading the teams into agile adoption and what's your take on does it really help innovation at the end of the day or is it like it's it's an end by itself thank you the fire but I'll probably start from a different starting point how many of you were there in the keynote session of Mary Mary popending she made very two interesting points and yes I want to bring that to your notice she started by saying that one of the biggest challenge this whole industry is facing is that trying to deliver shareholder value quarter on quarter and second thing something he mentioned with Jeff Bejdo had said saying that I'm not concerned about what I'm going to do in the next few months but I'm more interested in what will happen 10 years down the line so agile actually when you look at agile there are so many things in it that some things will help innovation and something will not but I'll take a specific part of agile which is the focus on trying to deliver continuous value feature after feature sprint after sprint and trying to prioritize all your feature that you want to do based on how much value it will deliver to me it somehow somewhat sounds similar to CEO trying to deliver shareholder value quarter after quarter and if that is the focus on agile where whatever you do you want to measure against how much value it will produce for that specific feature and you'll rank all your features in that line I wonder what happens to the long-term and who's really thinking about it and second point is that if you have done ORN nonlinear optimization you will know that there are local optimum and there are global optimum and agile is about incrementally keep improving so if you are stuck at a local optimum and you try to improve it you would never reach to the global optima to go to the global optima you have to take a drastic step move somewhere else and then start searching for that so in that context I will think that if you are only concert concentrating on value delivered through each feature that may not actually help innovation okay so yeah it will be interesting to listen to your views with them because what I heard you saying is that repeated application of agile will probably make your product or your process world-class and you can really improve on that but that by itself may not qualify for the innovation at the next level probably possibly that like if you are really going in that direction you might miss the wood for the trees okay so yeah it will be good for us to understand from from rest of the panel as well do they agree with you or not but let me go on next let me want to Henryk now and Henryk needs no introduction he's been author of three books half a million people have read his books he is a lean agile code based out of Stockholm currently works for Spotify and he likes enjoy helping companies succeed with both the technical and the human side of software development and during the past 15 years he has been CTO of three Swedish IT companies and help many more get started with agile and lean software development Henryk so the question is we have heard couple of views already by now what is your position on that you've been a CTO also and you have seen the human side as well straight question does agile kill innovation what's your thought process no would you like to qualify that did you have any other questions sir so so why do things so would you like to help the reason I don't think agile kills innovation is because I've seen so many companies create awesome innovation using agile methods so if agile killed innovation I don't think that would have happened okay but what kills innovation is bad management what kills innovation is focus on short term focus on things like research utilization kills innovation focus on things like predictability 100% predictability kills innovation so there's a lot of things I kill innovation agile doesn't to me agile I'm with I'm with Owen there it's it's to me it's like it's like a car I get into the car I can choose to crash the car into a wall but I don't have to I can choose to use the car to get from a to b because I want to get to be or I can choose to use the car to explore the world and find you cool places which would be the innovation and whether or not I succeed it's not the car's fault right it's the driver deciding what what to do with it yeah okay okay so yeah we have we have some more interesting thought process here and I would like to introduce the last speaker of the session here so deep or sudi and sudi heads the consulting practice for digit a and he's seen a VP at digit a in his role he advises customers in adoption of agile ALM and Kanban methods he's passionate about transforming project team from traditional working models to lean Kanban execution and he has been in the industry for the last 23 years and seen various areas of product development process engineering consulting sales and offshore so sudi we heard about Henry having a very strong opinion that no it doesn't kill it's all really about mismanagement would you like to take off from there and add your own perspective to that so thanks in the first if I take our own example of what we have been able to accomplish in the last two years we were a delivery team that was doing three releases in a year 20,000 test cases only 30% automated the remaining taking about roughly two months of calendar time to even get one test cycle completed from that kind of a development time frame we did not use scrum we we kind of directly went to Kanban but but obviously we we kind of did the user story and breaking up into smaller things and from that kind of experience we moved right now to one release into production deployment every two to three weeks we we build a swift Kanban product in roughly about we started thinking about two years back but we but we are in about in our 18th month of our development lifecycle and it is with the same team with the same team size maintaining the same along with maintaining the earlier product lifecycle that we have been able to do so there's been a lot of innovation in terms of just opening people's mindset in just making people think that you know testing is somebody else's baby and there will be a separate testing guy who will do that but and making the development team think that that hey writing test cases before I jump into writing the coding itself is part of is a valuable part of the process to me that itself is innovation just making people see and realize that itself is a big part of the win and and I often say if you have an open mind if you're open to change you can do a lot more things right as long as you are continuously in that bottleneck environment that these are my constraints these are my limitations and I can only do these things that is a handicap so I definitely believe that at least adopt for us adopting Kanban in the last two years has helped us dramatically reduce our cycle times dramatically reduce and just being able to deliver a lot more including a new completely product from the very same same team okay I think so that I would like to add something yeah I just want to take the cue from what would I mentioned the CEO would like to really take the shareholder value up but if you really look at it we are pushing we as management and leadership would like to push our team to really be part of innovation and then try to really make them do good better and better by through whatever they are doing but if you look at it the butt stops with either projects or program level what do we do at our level to innovate does agile help us in any which way on that direction so if you really look at it this is where the yes and the no part of agile kills innovation no does you know it comes in here to really make whether agile can really go beyond the execution part even making the thinking part very loud and clear from a value based system I think that evolution has to happen otherwise it stops with only with the execution on okay can I answer that actually with all balls down to what is the definition of agile because I have looked at it and I have not found well understood definition which is accepted by everybody so we had to go back to our agile manifesto and the main thing which comes out from there is that the emphasis on working code day in and day out so if you say that okay how will management look at agile so in a way they don't apply if the agile manifesto and agile methodologies were thought of to deliver working code so in that sense the agile that we are using in the terms of software it is for software development purely you can use agile saying that I want to be faster and do things in a better way so but that agile is different from what is mentioned in the manifesto but let me qualify my statement saying that whether agile is better for innovation compared to waterfall I'll definitely say yes so let me just say if I if you allow me I would like to just be a devil's advocate here because I think it was 200 years back that Pascal said if I had more time I would I would have written a shorter letter the point I'm trying to come at is that sometimes I mean we associate innovation the front part of that is the sexy part which is the creativity part and really the dirty the heavy lifting part is innovation where we are trying to productize the whole thing there and one of the one of the things that I see is if I'm going to really limit the time box and and the amount of time that I'm able to do I'm not is it not I'm going against the basic tenets of what does it take for me to be a free thinker and really be a creative guy there so I would like to probably know I think Henrik has some ideas that he would like to probably rebut me with oh yeah I'm kind of fascinated by this debate about whether it's good to time box innovation or not and I keep changing my mind but one very concrete example of how time boxy what's that the question by the way sorry at Spotify last week we had a thing which we call Spotify hack week and that's when everybody which is like 400 developers everybody gets to do whatever the hell they want for the whole week they get to do what whatever they want work with whoever they want working whatever way they want for the whole week and there's parties and live music and stuff in this all includes designers and product people and everybody and then but everybody knows that this is one week and on Friday there's a party and there's going to be voting and there's going to be demos and we're going to be up you know finding what's the coolest thing that came out of this mostly just prototypes some and it was absolutely awesome incredible things came out that never would have came out otherwise and I think time boxing was crucial to that everybody knows that the MVP is whatever we get done by Friday right so I'm not saying time box is always right but that's one example of what it definitely what was right so I would I would actually just I want to add something there for example and maybe I would probably go to I think ruffle has something to add here yeah so so the point Henry makes is you know that one week of high energy you know thinking process I'm just curious just think about that entire one week high energy partying thinking ideation and you wrap an agile process around that how do you think that would work that's what I'm trying to say innovation is all about sitting and trying to find out what is the best possible solution that can either change something okay and this is what is called an intersectional innovation but point I would perhaps agree agile as a process what I've heard here is agile as a mindset and philosophy and things like that okay but when we talk about agile as a process perhaps in one area which is called directional innovation it might work now what do I mean by directional innovation in the product world okay if I'm doing a delivery or if I'm releasing a product and I find out that a particular customer issue is the release upgrade of my enterprise scale application takes you know thousand hours okay and it contributes to a lot of other support costs for me and then I say can I innovate around that area to bring that down by 50% okay now that can be still wrapped around an agile framework to be able to execute on that okay but the act of thinking about how I'm going to do it might again fall outside that one last point the other point is innovation also has another big component you know what that is failure the risk yeah failure how does agile process support that that's a question so yeah now I was just thinking maybe Owen had actually something from a lean start of perspective if I missed your cue at that time you were actually ready to answer some question so would you like to take what profile had actually because that whole notion of like for example if you have a velocity based on which you have done the release planning and you have a velocity and a reputation to keep would you be would you be taking a big bets for example in that context because you know that there is an element of failure there's an element of probability of failure and if you fail then your productivity or your whatever way you are being measured in the organization is going down there would you be doing that or would you rather take very small bets and make sure that it's lights on basically and nothing really changes you're not rocking the board and everything is going fine to that extent is agile not impeding or coming in your way of innovating and taking big bets what we associate that with any thoughts well I think both types of innovation are essential I I think what would I was talking about reminds me of the innovators dilemma talks about incremental innovation versus disruptive innovation and at least I don't believe that existing agile processes will get you to disruptive innovation I think it I think agile is a disruptive innovation but I don't think you can apply agile to bring about disruptive innovation within the market I think it's fantastic for for incremental change and I think in order to be able to get to disruptive innovation it needs to be paired up with other things and I think lean startup is much better suited to attempting to realize truly disruptive innovation within the marketplace so I'll probably want to go and talk to Sude on that because just taking these two points here I think what profiled you were alluding to was for example really radical new innovation that we are looking at for example there is no notion even of a product backlog to begin with Steve Blank talks about the whole notion of customer development for example and you have to go out and do the customer discovery and understand that you are saying that agile to a large extent is probably putting a precondition to you that I have a I have a backlog the existing right in front of me what if there were no backlog what if you were creating a Twitter 1.0 from the scratch and the world has not seen what the Twitter looks like where are you going to get the backlog from is so from that perspective I entered to shift that to Sude as well you've been doing the product and doing it do these ideas resonate in your kind of problem-solving well the challenge absolutely exists and and and anytime that you are wanting to make a differentiator in the marketplace which you do not which is not around and and somebody the product manager or the team believes that it is incremental it is of significant additional value that problem comes in then the way we solve the problem was not not like hackathon experience like the way Henryk said but but we would designate a team of three four guys and ask them to work on two three themes and they would not get into the rigor of the rest of the project sprint tracking and the and the velocity tracking so that way we do let them let them succeed fail let them take two weeks or four weeks and obviously they are still being tracked for what they are being able to at least being able to go to the product manager and show at the end of the week that you know this is the direction that I'm headed to does it make sense does it not not make sense but but we do take them out of the delivery rigor to say don't worry about that you and you need to have something within that three week or the four week sprint so that's the way we tackle that problem so which brings I would like to ask to Sujata a follow-up question on that in your business where you are having a lot of interaction with your clients do you say you do have the same flexibility available or do you see the possibility of having similar way in which you are able to let's say for want of a better world I just use stimulants here for innovation happening there is that the way you are able to look at that or do you think there are other factors to consider no primarily there are two things here I just take both the cues from both the people in certain area where feature comes as top priority within feature the customer is not asking us to really stopping us to innovate it could be innovating a new method or new process or new technology but what they expect is that if you have to really complete that 80% of your scope and you have to really give the way I've just come in from leadership and management perspective is that they all know the values but still they fail to take the risk with the team can I really allow them to have 10% slack time or I want all the time to be built so that's what I said the management commitment is important for the team to really have the slack because when you do a retrospective all this come up but still be sidelined anything related to management action and make them suffer then they really go and work 10 hours a day it's not agile that's what I'm saying you say something and then do something so in the whole process what I'm saying customer is very happy to get the best all the time and paying the least and they wanting to do the best and at the same time and we go back and say we are trying all this stuff and we would really take some time because of this some of the features may be lowered and we will take it in the next iteration with their consensus we do it because it and we have to really bring in the ROI in the long term how it's going to be better for them one such activity what we did in our product framework development activity is that how we can optimize the code instead of 100 lines how we can really do the same logic in 30 30 lines okay it's very tough call and we really wanting to give that space and freedom 7 to 10 percent of the slack time is given and they all did that innovation it was very successful so you know this is one idea from our way of working so I saw Udayan and Hendrik just a quick comment there I think we should really be clear about separating the principles from practices in my experience the agile like principles and values are fine are great for innovation some of the practices collide with innovation so the most innovative teams I've seen they don't do velocity they don't do burn downs they don't do estimation and if they get forced to do that that kills innovation but of course that that's like a management problem rather than with problem with agile itself but yeah so out the more innovation is required the more I would relax the constraints to use this or that practice and I'll be giving up on predictability and more embracing failure and focusing more on the principles of agile instead of the specific practices I just want to follow follow on with that and and touch upon what I was saying before in terms of startups being where innovation happens and also about agile being a disruptive innovation itself if you look at the origins of agile in terms of the founders of the different methodologies if you look they they actually all came from a startup background and in many ways honed their processes within startups that they worked within I think the the disruptive nature of the agile innovation is that they took practices within a startup context formalize them and made them palatable for enterprise customers so really that was that was the crossing that was the innovation the agile innovation at least as far as I see it and really in virtue of doing that they they made a process that allowed established enterprise companies improve their incremental innovation process so they could they could incrementally innovate faster but in virtue of that that crossing over from a startup context into an enterprise context they eliminated the truly disruptive innovation aspects of the methodology in terms of the essence of what it is to be in a startup so so from your perspective and I want to come to Odin here and really understand I think that's a great observation the way you put it over agile by itself is an innovation based on a lot of lessons that people learn from the startup experiences and it probably furthers the incremental innovation and I think what Henrik said seemed to suggest that the best teams which probably do a more disruptive innovation are the ones who probably do away with some of these bells and whistles of agile really and really focus on core way of really doing a learning much faster in the day time and then in the in the cycle really and make sure that they are able to proceed on that without really piling up a lot of assumptions a lot of inventory in the process there so within you come from a large company perspective there from some of these lessons there which seem to hold pretty well in the small company context or a startup context is that really working for you as well or because you had a different position on that yeah actually on the whole about this whole agile thing one thing which has always been bothering me because we seem to not have any clearly understood definition of agile what agile is of course there is a manifesto which states a philosophic position but at no point of time I can say that okay this is the process I'm following am I agile or am I not agile and there is no barometer or no measure I can say that okay you are agile you're not agile Henrik made a point saying that agile doesn't fail it's a bad management which fails now the question is that how do I know which is good management and which is bad management so one way I can turn around and say that no agile project will ever fail because if the project succeeds okay I have done agile and it succeeds and if the project is fair it has failed because that's it's a my management issue so there I have a problem saying that we do not have a as a practitioner a clear way of saying that okay this is I'm following agile and I'm not so you're not comfortable with the cherry picking that if if if someone succeeds it's because of the process and someone fails it's because of one so we are we are taking a convenient approach there and I think Owen seems to have some perspective on that I was just going to give you a simple definition of agile agile equals equals good so can somebody in the room define chair for me what's a chair a chair a chair what is a chair something you sit on so this is a chair that's the one that has a committee my point is I don't know what a chair is I'll recognize one when I see one there's a lot of edge cases it's really hard to define even something simple as a chair so yeah don't bother trying to define agile okay would you like to add something here too see one of the fundamental things you know traditionally we were always doing waterfall and maybe a little bit of iterative development and then we had these agile consultants who came in and actually told us why that would work you know speed shortest distance to customer predictability okay these concepts were great and what they didn't tell us was how to change that mindset okay that is something we learned the heartbeat a lot of blood has flown on the floor learning that okay but okay now we have kind of institutionalized that learning okay now even in the context of sun guard one thing we we figured out that if we have to I mean there were certain mandates about certain product spaces that we wanted to focus on and whatnot I want to spare I will I'll spare you the details but consciously like most of you I think in Sujata mentioned we realized that within the framework that existed okay be it waterfall be it agile or whatever it is we could not support a product creation or ideation process it would not work okay so what did we do we did exactly what you did you know we put people outside the system okay unaccountable from the agile world okay not non-compliant I mean a process guy would constantly beat us in these are non-compliant okay but the management support was these three or four people would work on something that we wanted them to work on this was basically the big data space now these people again what was the optimal size that we decided we consciously decided I mean a typical large company would put a project manager and half a dozen bodies around the place and build a huge organization around that then create strategy documents around that and have constant ROI reviews we dropped all that we said we will create a small team okay and the size of the team by definition was a team that would be small or large enough to share a large size pizza literally okay that's the size of a team that would actually work on this and we actually kept them outside the purview of all this for them to actually contribute and bottom line was in four months they came up with a fantastic prototype which we presented at the Hadoop World Conference in New York you know that was I think the outcome of actually consciously pulling these people outside this frame okay so I just want to go to Sude before we go to the audience Q&A now so we have we have we are at quarter past six actually so last 15 minutes we'll do that Sude I would like you to kind of no I just wanted to highlight that the question was that does agile kill innovation uh innovation was there pre agile pre waterfall in the 18th century and in the 19th century and will continue to be in the future so I think innovation has always been around as long as people are open to to trying something new and not being penalized for failure uh innovation will thrive I think the the the good thing that that agile helped is to be able to say can I do can I take an idea in a small scale try prototype it show it demonstrate it and if that if the feedback is good then go forward on it I think that psyche that openness of the management to to try something small take feedback that psyche used to the process I think makes it a little more easier to you know wait and to be able to productize it and productionize it so I just wanted to lay that context so I think agile has definitely gone ways there thanks Sude I think we we had some good thought process here and as you can see the daggers are drawn I think there are strong opinions and and and there are enough I mean these are all senior leaders who have experience and they are able to talk about data from their own perspective there so with that we would like to open it for the audience Q&A and if you would like to raise your hand and I think we have some volunteers helping us we have one hand here in the then later so please tell us if you would like to ask to some somebody specific or if anybody you would like to answer yeah I would like to ask to the panel over there so the point that I was wondering me after listening to this conversation is maybe we were one side saying that agile in itself is all about disruptive innovation it is part of it it's not a part on the other hand we are also saying if we have to really get things innovative make those best guys out of their team or out of the agile world so is it not something that there is a disconnect in what is actually being conversed Sude I think so we did not take them they were part of the same team it's it's not that they were part of the agile system it's just that we took them out of the delivery rigor and the burn down and the velocity tracking drill that the team was otherwise being subjected to because fact is that if you the team that is focused on delivery as it is all of you would agree as it is the scope is generally a little higher than what they can chew on top of that there are things that keep coming in so though for them they would obviously choose the safest path out not try just do the same vanilla thing and that is the mindset that is that is the milestone to month on month three weeks to be sprint to sprint milestone psyche that works so I don't think I was saying take them out of the agile system just take them out of this drill of delivery but then if if we do that say for example like three or four guys to who get exempted out of this delivery commitments and focused on innovation does it not impact the others great question so what we do is we don't have a fixed team that is only doing this so I have for example a team that is focused on I mean based on the different modules that we have it's a question of people want to try something new like for example we we were trying to build a new hierarchy interface so it was a group of guys from different teams that went taken together so it is for that objective and once that objective is met it for for the next initiative it could be a different bunch of guys it's not a permanent team by any stretch so I was just listening the interesting conversations but I have a different perspective about agile and innovation right agile by itself when you talk about manifesto it is actually creating space for innovation and the innovation existed from many many years but mostly it was actually invention right what agile is trying to do is if you want to convert your inventions to really innovation you have to really make them apply in the world and how do you apply without getting to the people without without welcoming others opinion so it's driving everyone towards collaboration at the mindset level right you talked about bad management if the agile is not applied at the mindset you will end up doing bad management so it's it's actually a collaborative effort and a mindset effort across everyone across the organization and so definitely it can never kill innovation it can foster provided it is applied at the mindset that's my opinion okay absolutely I go with you because out of the four you know statement given in the manifesto definitely individuals and interaction really really make this innovation happen in agile I think without that after all the people those are going to make the difference nothing else it's not the technology so I like the view okay I have a question here so I have seen you know both product teams and service teams service industry teams actually embracing agile right they've been they keep working on a sprint by sprint basis one of the complaints I've heard is you know since the iterations are faster it's like a t20 match right you just keep having the you keep getting the balls right so one of the complaints that I have heard is they don't get a chance to innovate and learn right this is a complaint that I've actually heard from from the dev teams and the qa teams I like to know obviously this is a valid obviously you can take and then convince them and all those stuff right that's the job of a scrum master or a project manager I would like to know what kind of model that you any of you have experienced to foster innovation in a sprint or in a in a scrum or agile model I come from services side so I would like to say as part of the sprint goal definitely we based on the last retrospective we really make one particular activity related to this kind of innovation it could be process method or tool or it could be technology so from a typical example we are into a product a framework development where we stated that optimization of code is very important aspect maybe they just took three or four sprint to really working on it but they did incremental every sprint with the idea and we were doing activity within the sprint itself as one of the goal it's not a separate team working out on this as a team they have been given the mandate the goal is given but the direction is left to them to decide so some of the feature or task related to seven to ten percent is based on this activity so is there also model I think Ode or one of the panelists also mentioned that you also kind of take out a couple of guys to specifically concentrate on innovation is that also a kind of you know experience that a lot of panelists have seen or it's just one of see as I said you know when we talk about consciously putting people out there and trying to do it's what I call the intersectional innovation which is getting into one area and trying to trigger something which is hopefully path breaking okay or something that's going to add tremendous value to the company what your talk your question is about how does one deal how does one try and do innovation and learning in that process it is possible and that is where I the the directional innovation going deeper into your area is definitely an opportunity you know just to go back to that example what more can I do in this particular feature and functionality that I'm contributing back to the customer okay even that simple question can trigger innovative thinking when you're actually delivering pieces it could be a user interface it could be a piece of code or it could be the entire process of doing maybe an agile testing team that is actually delivering what more can you do if that question is delivered I think the teams are very competent enough to actually figure out incremental innovations there are some very concrete things that came to mind in response to your question that what you what you can do to to make space for innovation as from the management perspective and the number one is actually to to give give it a number decide how important is innovation right how much percent of our time roughly are we allowed to spend on innovation which means completely giving up unpredictability for that time suppose it's 20 percent right then okay then we talk to the teams and say okay 20 percent of your time is like google right do whatever you want now the question is how do we do that is it you know a few days per sprint or is it hack weeks or that's the how but getting that time it's like a test because if I go to the management and their answer is zero percent that's a statement saying innovation does not matter here and then you can choose to find a new job or stay that's up to you right that's the one thing second thing is to look at hiring practices right because there are people who are really creative and innovative so look at what questions you ask the people that you hire do you ask questions like what you know what what what do you play with on your free time right or what kind of you know experiments you do or what yeah so hiring practices and making sure that there's slack in the organization would be two very concrete actions that they don't magically cause innovation but they increase the likelihood I think the lady here so I heard all the discussions and you know I clearly don't understand one thing which is we are saying agile and innovation and scum teams working on you know a particular delivery cannot get involved in innovation that's out of my experience what I'm saying this is because we had a goal of having at least three patents coming from our team okay and initially we thought oh it cannot be possible we can never think with the deadline what we had but then you know we came up with a small team called innovation team okay and we also you know bought in some time between the sprints where the teams actually come up they they ideate you know there's there's just one one hour or two hours a week which was dedicated for this and the results were really amazing you know when the team is actually working on the deliverables they also have this back in their mind that yes I have this idea I'll pair it with somebody and you know just come out with something else because when you're actually working on the sprint you know it something might just click up you know and and things can really happen so and you know to see the result I think we had actually five patents and not three and the team had done a great job here so I think it's it's all about mindset also which you know we have to think that it's okay to have the 10% if you think the great value which the team can get in and we delivered also things on time because there was a lot of motivation which got added and everybody felt that yes it's not one or two guys who can innovate this you know each one of us have equal capabilities and get paired up and then you know okay really do great things so I think your your experience and your experience as well we're based around establishing slack within your process in order to allow innovation to happen but I mean where does innovation come from? Innovation is a byproduct of learning, learning something new and learning something new is a process of discovery where does discovery come from? Discovery comes from conducting an experiment really and so I think that you can achieve you can achieve innovation through having a dedicated team or having certain individuals that maybe have more of their time available to focus on discovery and experimentation or you can try and make it part of your organizational culture where experimentation is just something that you do and that learning is one of the key objectives for the organization it could be how people are are measured is what they've learned. I don't know how many people came to Fred George's talk yesterday but he was talking what the the key point in his presentation was that if the agile that you're practicing now is the same as the agile that you were practicing six months ago then you're doing something wrong and I think that that's that's that's a great statement because if it is if it's coming down to learning and to discovery then then you know that means that you're innovating. Yeah probably just another thing that it was an open innovation it was not limited to what we were actually working it was not a process improvement or it was not a tool specific improvement it was nothing to do with that but it was the team members were free to think anything which can actually make a difference it could be probably a business which probably something which none of us would have thought which would work here okay and we had few patents which we had to give to our different domain because it actually fitted there not our actual you know thing but then it added value to the entire you know perspective so if you realize what you guys did was you made almost the goal of making patents the project objective and absolutely right and so that's a little trick but it does work but but in most cases that would be a by-product of the core project business goal I do one of our customers is is Honeywell anybody from Honeywell at all HTS so so I've seen in their office labs where they are actually tracking quarterly number of patent filings done right so that is an objective very clearly but I can assure you that if a business project deliverable doesn't hit the milestone the amount of noise and fire would be many times more than if a patent objective doesn't get met so I think to your credit the management gave that and focused on patent as an objective but it's a fairly rare case it would be my humble submission okay we are almost at the end of it but we can have probably one or two questions okay this is for Henrik based on your one of your comments that you made saying that innovation is killed not just by agile but genetically modify them that's that's that's my second question basically can I get back to you now in a month that's that's second question is this we all know that when we are talking about agile it's about converting the culture in the organization right from the roots right and now we have the higher management who doesn't want to reroute the plants and the trees and then they want fruits to be yielded with innovating different things we should start with cultural change and that starts right from the brains of everyone involved based on your experience I just want to know some of the things as to how could we reroute this in the brains of the management that's what I'm really thinking of last seven years still we are not we are not achieved but one thing I want to tell you taking a cue from here and somebody said about the recruitment how you recruit people definitely from a local optimization we have to really have a system thinking if you really do a system thinking definitely maybe best in us when you really talk about lean startup actually culturally they are there to really innovate and I think I speak on my Indian mindset primarily because we are all bound to listen to our elders from day one you know that's that's been the pedigree right so definitely even if you have a nice idea if you bring it up the first thing you know shut up do your duty and then you finish what we have given first then we can think about innovation this has been there ages in our DNA so definitely we have to eradicate and then bring in a different culture and change in the culture and mindset definitely go from a local suboptimization to a global system thinking definitely it'll work and I think we're all here to do be the change agent and the catalyst to do it I think that's the best we could really do it to our society yeah I think I certainly agree with your points what I feel is like the organizations should allow teams to build products it shouldn't be allowing teams to be catering to our deadlines okay the moment you put a deadline for anything you're you're already giving a first step for killing innovations that's what I feel no but if you if you just no what I mean is just leave the teams to build a product the team is going to anyway come up with a great way to cause innovation I'm gonna just counter you now right a great way to cause innovation is give them a really challenging deadline and a really challenging problem and say go for it you don't give them a solution you give them a really tricky interesting problem ideally give five teams that interesting tricky problem and we give a deadline say let's figure out something really cool that's one approach but that's not really what I wanted to say I want to respond to the questions that I've been dodging now for the past thanks for helping me by the way so it's about how to change culture right and I have no idea but I've seen it happen sometimes and I thought about why did it work in this particular case and I think when I say bad management I don't necessarily mean bad managers managers typically want to do a good job but broken systems cause bad management to happen so what you can do as an outsider which is normally my perspective as a consultant you have a unique advantage as an outsider it's a fresh perspective for a little while until you're part of the system and then you're screwed right but fresh perspective you can notice ah these behaviors are causing bad management which are causing which are killing innovation you can hold up the mirror you can reveal the system to itself using tricks such as Kanban and you know various metrics and whatever right reveal the system to itself and sometimes incredible things happen and bad management becomes great management not always but it can happen and it's quite cool when it does so if I can use I was about to come to that with this if you don't mind because we talked about time boxing so I need to time box this conversation also we talked about taking the innovative ideas out of the time box out of the realm of predictability like there's Steve Jobs kind of the the super secret iPhone labs or something I think we will have time right after that at the at the waterhole there so I'm sure that you can use the time for that I have to do the bad job of time boxing it so I hope you will pardon me for that but I would like to give 30 seconds I will take a cue from Henrik sir I'm I'm going to give a challenging problem to the panel and a challenging time period of 30 seconds for them to wind up their position and come back and really wind up what their thoughts are so that we can wind up this panel discussion there so then already has a microphone yeah so let me start actually in India the whole software outsourcing business started from a perspective of conformance to requirement and we have spent maybe 15 20 years trying to perfect that but slowly there's a realization among the management saying that we have outgrown that and we have to now deliver value or we have to focus on customer delight so I think in next few years you will see a lot of change happening in the thinking in management in terms of how we deliver things and how things are going on so even though I do said that agile really kills management that's not really my position so here we have a change in position now okay okay and what I'm seeing in India is that most of the top management has already realized that just conformance to requirement or just taking orders to deliver that is not going to be what will lead us to the next level and you're going to see a lot of change in the next few years in all companies from my perspective I think agile is not about process and I think if there's one thing that you can take away I think everybody emphasized it either directly or indirectly it's about a mindset okay so anybody who's talking about and when you're talking about hiring people I would urge you to actually put them into a clean room and get them inducted into the agile process which is about thinking before you actually get them on board and on to your teams that's going to be a very very critical thing for you to do okay so agile and innovation they can coexist but the point is if you take an extreme position in either way I think it's bound to fail so I guess you all know that I do believe that agile supports innovation but I do kind of believe that the the pioneers of the Indian sectors still today are pretty comfortable with with their position where they are with their 10% growth model quarter on quarter whatever they're able to get and till the time that they're not going to be willing to give away the drill of filing time sheets and not get out of the mindset of getting 70 to 80 metrics project by project month by month I think the talk of agile is still a little distant away that's the way I view it yeah my wrap-up is yeah agile does agile kill innovation no does agile cause innovation no it's a tool people can use people people can use agile to cause great innovation people can use agile to completely kill innovation so it's really up to you okay so coming back to management I think you know the statement about bad management or something if somebody were to really hear us and then throw the stone it'll be on first of these panel only okay so we cannot talk bad about the bad management okay so coming back to the the whole thing if we can really get the best out of every individual in an organization by whatever tool or method or you call by any name if we can achieve that when they really get back to their office on the next day if they really have a renewed energy and enthusiasm and they're wanting to contribute something then what the project manager rascram master is telling or the management is telling that's where we have really got the innovation out of it you call it by any name so agile neither kills nor fosters innovation if innovation is an important objective for your organization that should be your starting point and look at tools like agile that you can bring into your organization to whatever extent it facilitates that innovation and learning process but looking at it from the other way around and saying okay i'm going to apply agile so that i can innovate that's completely backwards so with that i would like to close the panel discussion thanks for your patient attendance and to the all the my fellow panelists it's been a pleasure hosting you this evening there thanks for sharing all your views i'm sure there will be some conversations that will follow from here to the waterhole please use the rest of the evening for this opportunity because most of the people will be around there thanks a lot and wish you all the best in your journey of innovation thank you thanks a lot