Now that the dust has settled from Discuss Agile Day Delhi – One Day Conference which took place on 14th September, and everyone is back to business as usual, we have had time to process our highlights from this amazing event.
This was the 5th conference organized by Discuss Agile community, an Scrum Alliance user group, who were also our title sponsor for the event along with iZenBridge Consultancy.
First off, Discuss Agile Day Delhi certainly delivers on what it promised: “to gather and create a platform for the like-minded agile practitioners, trainers, coaches, and enthusiasts where one could share their experience & learn from industry experts”. It’s true that many of the key people and organizations shaping the industry were present and ready to engage in meaningful presentations and conversations about the direction of our space.
We received numerous talk proposals for this conference where experts from different parts of country pitched in. It was undoubtedly a tedious task to review all the talks, but nonetheless our review committee did a tremendous job in evaluating each of the talk proposals and then sharing feedback with the speakers. Our review committee team comprised of some of the well-known faces in the industry i.e Jaya Shrivastava, Gaurav Rastogi, Diana Kirkova, Abhigya Pokharel & Seema Sonkiya.
Event Day
The morning of 14th September took off with a hustle and bustle for the organizing and volunteering team, while most of Delhi was still sound asleep. The venue chosen for the conference was Hotel Holiday Inn in Mayur Vihar, which has been our old turf for conducting training & other similar programs for a long time. The setup did not take much time given we had an experienced team volunteering for the event. We were all set to welcome the guests/attendees by 8AM.
We had it all planned and things were on track with attendees started walking in by 8:30AM, the registration desk seemed to be at the midst of busy expressway, but our Volunteers –Poonam, Shefali & Alpa had it all under control.
Following up, the attendees were led to the main hall (Ballroom) where the opening speech took place right on time at 9AM by Kumkum Sharma followed by the Keynote talk by Saket Bansal.
As per the Agenda we had 3 official tracks which were running in parallel where speakers shared their talk to the audience in their respective time slots. We had also planned a 4th track with an informal setup; we had scheduled learning & sharing session among the audience. The attendees had complete freedom to choose among the tracks which were running.
We had some of the most interesting talks during the whole day. A glimpse of all the talks as per track:
Track 1:
Shweta Jaiswal began with the first slot from 10 AM to 10:45 AM where she spoke on “Personal Agility – A Powerful Framework for Leaders“. In this session, we learnt how to create more alignment in your organization and apply Personal Agility as a leadership framework to guide your teams toward reaching a state of higher performance.
Following the tea break there were two more talks aligned before the lunch.
11:15 AM to 12 was scheduled for Vamsi Krishna Kakkireni & Bhanu Golconda who spoke on anti-pattern in scrum team – “How Scrum Master can help the team in quitting ‘SMOKING’”. Post this, from 12:05PM to 12:50PM Satya Yellapantula & Manjunatha Gopalakrishna took the stage to present their talk on “Product Backlog Refinement – The UnSung “Hero””. In this talk, we realize Product Backlog Refinement lays the foundation of the Release/Sprint planning. How can PBR be more effective and help teams plan better, be more predictable, help in being more productive, and encourage the teams to take calculated risks when needed – these are few of the things we would discuss during the session.
Post lunch we started with Vikrant Kardam who spoke on “Who is driving Disruption – Technology vs Customer”, followed by Saket Bansal who explained about 7 certifications to follow in the journey of Agile.
The final talk was presented by Janmejay Rai on “Scaling or No Scaling – A Scrum Perspective” where he explained about when is the right time to scale Scrum teams as it has always remained a big question for organisations.
Track 2:
In track 2, Koyelia Ghosh Roy began with the first slot from 10 AM to 10:45 AM where she spoke on “- Techniques for User Story Splitting (Workshop)“. In this session, we learnt that the large user stories (epics) need to be split in such a way that would incrementally provide user value through the development cadence. This also enables to get quick feedback before the entire feature is released.
11:15 AM to 12 was scheduled for Nitin Mittal who spoke on “A Mindset Transformation journey – Bringing in Cultural Change”. Followed by Raghavendra Meharwade & Anubhav Gupta from 12:05PM to 12:50PM took the stage to present their talk on “Product Owners: Are you ready to ride on AI wave?”. In this talk, we explored how Artificial Intelligence (AI) going to change the way we conduct business, and live our lives, forever.
Post lunch we started with Dinesh Sharma & Geetika Dua who spoke on “Tentative Agility” where they spoke about how Implementing Agile for Non-IT organizations is a greater challenge and requires a different approach of implementation. Followed by Seema Sonkiya who Spoke on “PRODUCT ROADMAPS – Set Direction for Success”, This workshop engaged each participant and worked together to understand how to focus on outcomes rather output in developing a product roadmap and how to set a clear direction.
The final talk was presented by Mohit Jain on “Leveraging Data Analytics to improve Sprint Velocity”.
Track 3:
In track 3, Venkat Raman began with the first slot from 10 AM to 10:45 AM where he spoke on ” Inspect and adapt using metrics“. In this session, he demonstrated the use of GROW coaching model for team retrospective and how it helped in identifying problems within the team.
11:15 AM to 12 was scheduled for Ranjith Tharayil & Parvinder Jeet Singh who spoke “SHE QC ideation, a story grooming technique”. SHE QC is an effective technique to structure your never-ending grooming meetings. One can use the technique to structure their 3 Amigo discussion to elaborate and define scenarios. It is a highly structured & time-boxed grooming technique used by advanced engineering teams to learn, define what needs to develop and remove any second-degree ignorance.
Followed by Hariharganesh who took the stage to present his talk on “Culture and You”. Culture is a soft concept and like strategy it cannot be copied. Is there a way to measure culture? If not, then how do we say whether particular culture is good or bad? In this talk, we understand a world of culture delivered a capsule. We would not only multiply your knowledge but will go home with resonating thoughts that would drive you to do more of cultural transformation at work place!!
Post lunch we started with Ranjith Tharayil, Jeffson Dsouza & Parvinder Jeet Singh who spoke on “Dojo Delivery Agility : The Art of Crafting High Performing Teams”. In this talk, Dojo Delivery Agility as a process framework is crafted on the fundamentals of SCRUM, XP, and Agile Dojo. They discussed about their studies on teams that adopted Dojo as a way of working which showcased substantial improvement in predictability, productivity, and technical agility.
The final talk was presented by Gaurav Rastogi on “How I raised myself from Project Manager to Scrum Master” where he shared his story of 9 years journey from a project manager to scrum master.
We had dedicated two track owners who had few major responsibilities including smooth transition from one speaker to another, connecting with each speaker of the track and understanding the requirement for their talk, to check if all the technical system were up and running (sound, projector, air-conditioning, and logistics in each track). This was not an easy task, but we had Sumit Jaiswal & Namita for track 1, Abhishek Kumar & Jyoti gupta for Track2 and Seema Sonkiya & Vandana Bansal for Track 3.
We were fortunate to experience and capture some of the best moment of the conference. Making the event more memorable were the photographs, which was significantly taken care by Tushar and Atul. Check out our Facebook page for more such photographs of the conference.- Facebook & Google Photos (Album 1) or Google Photos (Album 2)
Apart from photographs Imran took the lead in capturing excellent videos of the event. With help of Akshay, he recorded the experience of the attendees and talk description of the speakers. Check out the below playlist for the interview sessions.
The day was approaching towards its end and so was the conference; our team, the attendee and the speakers were simultaneously exhausted but energized as well. The stage was set for the final closing talk by Saket Bansal, with his electrifying speech we all got on our toes to look forward to enhance our agile community with more such conferences to look forward to.