The customer wanted to improve their agile maturity and adoption of agile practices across their organization. The consultant used design thinking principles to understand the customer's needs, culture, and challenges. They proposed a working model with Kanban and Scrum practices, value stream mapping, and focus on continuous improvement. Key steps included empathy interviews, defining problems, ideating solutions with the customer, prototyping practices in pilot projects, and establishing standards and metrics for ongoing progress. Initial results showed improved transparency, collaboration, and flow of work, while further improvements were still needed in quality processes and work-life balance. The consultant emphasized understanding the customer, avoiding premature suggestions, and iterating solutions with them.

1. @sudiptal
Lean-Agile Transformation with DT

2. @sudiptal
Agile/Lean Practitioner
Head of Engineering and Products @ Digité
• Development of SwiftKanban, SwiftALM, SwiftEASe products
• Organize the LimitedWIP Societies in India
Sudipta Lahiri (Sudi)
3 decades in the industry
2

3. @sudiptal
Our Customer - Global Consulting Services
PORTFOLIO

4. @sudiptal
Their problem statement
• They tasted some success with agile, but that wasn’t
enough to move up the maturity curve
• With increasing opportunities for business facing
solutions and applications, adopting agile became the
need of the hour
• They understood the theory but practice wasn’t easy
• Agile model for services and consulting was not very well
understood or practiced

5. • They spoke with multiple agile consultants/coaches, understood
their approach
• They made their choice based on:
• Practical approach to Agile coaching
• Knowledge of tools, methods and metrics
• Experience from services and consulting world
• Confidence to partner with them in making them successful in their
Agile transformation journey

6. What they wanted
• Understand their pain, their teams, customer context and design an
approach what would work for them
• Discussion led approach: Propagate an energy of collaboration
• Be part of their adoption and maturity journey as a coach
• Sustain the Lean-Agile adoption, and improve incrementally

7. @sudiptal
• We didn’t want to jump to anything
• We wanted to understand them a lot more before we suggested
anything at all:
• The problem
• The people/culture
• The pace of change
• Existing perceptions and myths
Our approach for the partnership…

8. @sudiptal@sudiptal https://twitter.com/gartner_sym/status/799174404068560896

9. @sudiptal
The 1st Step: Empathy
• Empathy is about standing in
someone else’s shoes, feeling
with his or her heart, seeing with
his or her eyes!
• It is hard to outsource and
automate
• Daniel Pink
https://www.adam-eason.com/scientific-ways-improve-increase-empathy/

10. @sudiptal
If Empathy is “Why” we do it…
… “How” do we go about it?
… “What” do we do?

11. @sudiptal
A two pronged approach…
Top down…
• Leadership Alignment sessions
• Middle Management Alignment
sessions
Bottom Up
• Understanding the “Gemba”
https://www.mrcpa.org/events/gemba-walk/

12. @sudiptal
Doing the
“Gemba”
Walk
https://traccsolution.com/resources/gemba-walk-questions/
Participate in as many
team interactions,
customer meetings
Look at Status Reports –
internal or external
Tools
LISTEN – Don’t judge or
conclude

13. @sudiptal
From Empathy => To Definition

14. @sudiptal
Their pain points
• Maturity on delivery processes
was evolving as nature of
majority of work in the past was
consulting and customer
managed
• Getting started on agile journey
to bring cultural shift was a
tough goal
• Rapid changes in their service delivery
model prompted a re-think of our agile
execution
• Cadences and transparency were a bit inconsistent
• Requirements could be managed better
• Early view/demos to business could improve
• Estimates were still must-do
• Quality/entry-exit gates needed a tune-up (DoR/DoD)
• Automations and tools

15. @sudiptal
Consultant’s “definition” view of the problem
• What is “Agile”?
• No reference to “Lean”
• Focus is on the team; most
problems elsewhere
• Upstream
• Estimation
• Commit scope and timeline
• Requirement Decomposition
• Automation – team level
problem
• Agility in parts of the Value
Stream

16. @sudiptal
From Empathy => To Definition => To Ideation
www.etpowerofideas.com

17. @sudiptal@sudiptal
Visualise
Upstream
and
Downstream
separately
Start with
practices like
Standup,
Retrospectives
Make
team
members
own the
stories
Focus on
flow. Stop
starting and
start
finishing
Visualize
scope;
not tasks
From
large
scope to
small
stories
From
effort
estimates
to relative
sizing
Try and
make the
Customer
align to
Agile
Encourage
Automation
– unit and
functional
Re-align
the role of
the Leads
to Agile
way
Re-align
the role of
Project and
Program
Managers

18. @sudiptal@sudiptal
Working
Model
Value StreamsKanban
Practices
SCRUM
Practices
Engineering
Practices
Communication
Practices Tools
Plan
DoCheck
Act
http://ustore.com.br/disaster-recovery/hiperconvergencia-disaster-recovery/

19. @sudiptal@sudiptal

20. @sudiptal@sudiptal
P
R
O
T
O
T
Y
P
I
N
G
https://blog.prototypr.io/what-the-hell-is-rapid-prototyping-fe101e446a78

21. @sudiptal
Where do you start?
• We decided to pilot Agile model in a few pilot projects
• We shortlisted with mix of projects
• Projects that could benefit the most from the transformation – we chose
most “challenged” project as opposed to just low risk
• Co-located, bonded and willing to adapt teams
• Where customer buy-in was achievable

22. @sudiptal
Onboarding
• Once the pilot teams/projects are identified…
• Explain the Why, How and What (Golden Circle)
• Explain the Working Model => Let them “Adapt” the Working Model
• Give flexibility => Some teams chose SCRUMBAN, some teams chose Kanban
• On-boarding each project/team
• Training
• Setting up the Board with the Value Stream and the Cards

23. @sudiptal
Testing the Prototypes…

24. @sudiptalhttps://pixabay.com/en/river-flow-water-rocks-cascade-89180/
Execute, execute… execute
• Keep hand-holding teams; share “Observations”; encourage course-
correction
• Do not make rapid changes frequently… let change stabilize and then evolve
• Understand the impediments
• Identify Short Term adaptation + Long term impact to Working Model
• Stay away from “Religion”

25. @sudiptal
This is how we started …

26. @sudiptal
… and how they work now

27. @sudiptal
This is how our cards flow…

28. @sudiptal
This is how EPIC Value Stream flows…

29. @sudiptal© 2018 Software AG. All rights reserved
Let’s interpret our CFD…
Our intermediate lanes are flowing better
than the last lane…
We are doing Scrumban…so, we will still some
batch movement for the last lane!
Throughput is continuously improving…
UT Automation is the bottleneck in the VS
now

30. @sudiptal
We see a few more interesting things…
We see some VS stages skips… We see a wide variation in CT between 2 Sprints…
This shouldn’t
take this long!
Notice the increase (improvement) in the CT of
the pre-Development VS Stage; however, there
is still a lack of CT in the NFR Analysis lane!

31. @sudiptal
PDCA – with Standards
• Lean-Agile community is very
light about the importance of
“standards”
• Processes degenerate unless
there is a focussed attempt to
sustain them
• Therefore, we defined a set of
Lean-Agile practices

32. @sudiptal
Defining a “Guidance” framework
From SCRUM BOK
• Sprint Planning
• Stand-ups
• Burndown Tracking
• Retrospective
• SCRUM Roles
• Velocity Tracking
From Kanban BOK
• EPIC Value Stream
• Story Value Stream
• WIP
• Pull based execution
• Flow Metrics
• Throughput Metric
Common to both
• Transparency (Customer)
• Story Ownership
• Demo by Story Owner
• Independent small stories
• CI/CD
• Unit Test Automation
• Functional Test Automation

33. @sudiptal
… with a 10 point “rating” scale
Not understood theory 0
Theory understood but not practiced 2
Occasionally practiced 3
Practiced but significant scope for improvement 4
Mature, Consistently practiced 7
Very Mature, Continuously improving 10
The scale is not linear to reflect the increasing level of difficulty between the subsequent levels.

34. @sudiptal
Defined the “Initial” state…
Let teams define their “to be” state in 3 months

35. @sudiptal
Teams choose 3-4 quarterly objectives…

36. @sudiptal
Challenges from Customers POV
• Development followed Lean-Agile; E2E value stream is still waterfall
• Distributed teams created need for redundant communications
• Demos to business IT missed feedback from end business user
• Process alignment are still underway

37. @sudiptal
Challenges from People POV
• Sustaining the initial
enthusiasm and pace of
adoption
• Ways to avoid pit-falls
• Agile champions
• Internal Gemba walks and observation
sharing
• Increased process focus
required discipline
• Agile does not assure
quality; it makes quality
issues visible faster
• No getting away from engineering
steps for high quality
• Continuous churn of product
functionality creates fatigue

38. @sudiptal
Outcome from Customer POV
• Improved visibility with better
use of JIRA, Confluence and
SwiftKanban
• Metric created some aha
moments
• Impediments /Risks visible earlier
• Improved collaboration between
Customer and us
• Story Maps were useful in
getting big picture of the
projects
• Quality metrics, defined in
collaboration the customer,
helped in alignment
• Frequent demos helped set
business expectations

39. @sudiptal
ANONYMOUS SURVEY CONDUCTED IN JUNE’18
• 75% feel that they understand the customer priority
• 75% say identification of blockers have improved
• 68% said Demos are effective and helpful now in terms of getting early feedback from customer.
• 78% are confident within the team to take up tasks and execute
• 77% said Sprint planning is helping for work transparency and effective work planning.
• 75% said turnaround time for requirement clarification has reduced.
• 85% say that daily stand-up is more effective and helpful to get update from each other and know the
dependencies
• 68% said working together as a team has improved
• 81% say that we have a safe environment to raise impediments and challenges
• 90% say that we have learning culture and are making active, regular improvements: technical competence +
process
Team Work
Planning and
effectiveness
Learning Culture
Requirements
turnaround time
Improvement Areas:
• 41% feel that Defect notification and triage
mechanism is not sufficient and effective
• 40% say that it has not helped to get early
feedback from customer
• 40% said work-life balance is not OK
Outcome from People POV

40. @sudiptal
© 2018 Software AG. All rights reserved
What worked
• Great partner and coaches who could empathize
with their problems and watched our back
• Right tools to solve problems
• Drive to continuously improve
• An “open” team!

41. @sudiptal@sudiptal https://www.oceanit.com/services/design-thinking

42. @sudiptal
Summary…
• Understand the customer before you
suggest
• Follow a structured process to
understand your customer
• Avoid names to create “reactions”
• The steps are so logical that no one will
say NO
• Ideate with the customer; iterate with
the customer to close on a Working
Model
• Continuous Gemba and feedback loop
• Focus on the principles
• Don’t attempt to do anything without a
VSM
• For greenfield projects, INVEST is a
major challenge!
• Do 5Why to identify the real source of
an issue
• Standardise to baseline the maturity
achieved; then, push for next Kaizen

43. @sudiptal
Thank you… you can reach us at:
• Sudipta Lahiri
• Heads of Products and Engineering, Digité
• slahiri@digite.com
• @sudiptal
• lahiri.sudipta@gmail.com
Join us at the LimitedWIPSociety Meetup groups…