Deepti Jain
At gatherings all around India, the talk is about different tools, techniques and agile experiences. Butmany of the experiences are either not from India or only partially achieved here. Agile experiences in India invariably fall short of full-fledged organization-scale self-sustaining irreversible transformations. Most are about rather short-term limited-scale team-level externally-supported “agile adoptions” or about lower-order internal efficiency gains such as faster builds, or higher code coverage, lower tech debt, or quicker deployments. No doubt these accomplishments are important from a product development standpoint, i.e. “building the product right”, as well as a product management standpoint, i.e., “building the right product”. However, in most cases, any objective assessment or quantitative demonstration of improved agility in terms of market-facing metrics (such as revenue impact, percentage of market share, number of paying customers, etc.) is conspicuously absent! Roles in functions such as product management or user-experience design have only begun to spring up in last few years. Hence, the matter of fact is not many have seen real Agile Transformation in India, and those who have seen it, recognize that scaling it across the organization and sustaining it over a reasonable period of time is a wider and chronic problem. So, to bring out the real state of Agile in India in the open, we (Deepti Jain and Tathagat Varma) called for a Summit—a “Change Agents Summit” – India’s first flip conference focused on research and report creation, empowering Lean-Agile researchers and learners from Industry and Academia to create an authentic account of the situation.
Assessment, Research, Agile Transformation, Report, Unconference.