Software People Stories

Agile transformations, like any other are challenging for most organizations. This episode engages experts from PM Power Consulting J Veeraraaghavan, Vishveshwar Hegde and Anand Natarajan in dialogue, sharing their agile leadership coaching and consulting insights. The dialogue also explores common challenges and approaches to agile transformations for leaders and geographically distributed teams with diverse view points of the experts. The case study reads as follows : **Trailblazers Inc. have decided to embark on an Agile transformation journey with their SVP of Engineering. Mike Simpson, personally kicking off an initiative targeted at improving predictability, reducing cycle time and improving customer responsiveness. Mike wants Neeraj who is the VP of Engineering at their Bangalore development center to drive this initiative with Scrum as the primary approach and complete the transformation within the next one and a half years.** **Neeraj approaches you as an Agile coach to help him with defining and implementing a program that will ensure the success of this initiative.   ** To Summarize key aspects from the dialogue: 1. Define specific objectives for this initiative based on senior leadership directive. 2. Use a wholistic approach (rather than just training) that considers where the organization and teams are currently with respect to the objectives and specific interventions such as training and coaching targeted at addressing the gaps identified . 3. Ensure senior leadership team at both locations has bought into the initiative and is fully committed to it. 4. Use of constructs such as different levels of planning, scrum of scrums, meta scrums etc. for effective cross-team collaboration.

In this episode, Shiv will be talking to Gopalan, the Managing director of Global Automation, India. Gopal, as he is also called, has been in the international IT products and services industry since 1979. Listen to Gopal sharing some personal stories that touch upon various points including: * Attitude of working for someone  * Culture aspects, when working in various cultures  * Arrogance of a fresher - or how one can miss out the real user needs  * A tough situation he faced, caused by the differences in implementation of a standard protocol in the Airline industry, which, in hindsight - appears funny  * Cyclic Redundancy Check – CRC  * His views on Agile  * His views on technology / architecture patterns  * Some suggestions for Skill / capability development for those entering software field now

My name is Sivaguru. I have been in the IT industry since 1980 - and started my association initially with hardware - building a single board microcomputer - and them switched to software. Over the years, working with multiple technologies to create solutions across various domains - and working in multiple countries, I gained a lot of experience by doing myself as well as learning from others. I share two specific learnings in this episode. 1\. The importance of DevOps for every developer 2\. The importance of user experience or designing with the user in mind Do join me and share your thoughts as well.. .