3. About Nepal
• Landlocked country
•Home to the Himalayas
• Very warm and welcoming people
• Severely lacking in basic amenities
4. Information Technology in Nepal
•IT companies range from 7 employees
to 100 employees
•Small but competent IT community
•Tremendous interest in Agile among
Professional and Student community
• Agile IT event - over 80 students and
100 plus professionals
•Agile Leadership Network in Nepal
5. Verisk IT
•Largest IT Organization in Nepal
• ~350 employees
•Serving clients in the US
•260 Certified Scrum Masters
6. My experience with Agile Rollout in Nepal
•Tremendous enthusiasm for Agile
•The latest fad
•Younger workforce
•Open to change
7. Self Organization
•Challenge:
•Strong hierarchical mindset
•Guru-shiksha – culture of obeying
•Sense of helplessness
•Ready to take orders
•Impact:
• Design is an ongoing daily process between onshore-offshore
teams within a Sprint
• Lots of activity, no progress
•Approach:
• Make your team responsible for „failure‟
• Help them to challenge everything
•Design
•Architecture
•Process
•Even your Agile Coach
8. Communication
•Challenge:
•Good communication is NOT a value
•Best speakers are not the ones that speak at meetings
•Self assertion is not a virtue
•Language skill improvement is not a career goal
•Impact:
•Creates a wrong impression of team‟s technical capabilities
•Turns people off – communication frequency is reduced
•Collaboration suffers – lets just design and give tasks to offshore
•Lots of activity, no progress
•Approach:
•Use the best communicators on meetings
•No local languages to be used except „English‟ within the organization
•Make Good Communication a career goal
•Encourage “pecha kucha” sessions to gain experience
9. Escalation
•Challenge:
•Escalation is looked upon as being non-cooperative and difficult
•Fire-fighting is a virtue – I save the day, team and organization
•„Work-around‟ over a solution
•Wrong sense of team
•protect a member/team that is failing
•Calling out a superior is sacrilegious
•Impact:
•Inefficiencies abound
•Failures are repeated
•Team velocity significantly impacted
•Approach:
•Make the team responsible for failure, irrespective of where the issue is
10. Development Process
•Challenge:
•Mostly home-grown
•Agile „misconceptions‟ are easily adopted
•No documentation
•No analysis-design-build/test approach
•Impact:
•Further erosion of development process quality as a result of „adopting‟
agile
•Approach:
•Introduce Development processes along with Project Management
Processes
•TDD needs Automation
•Environment to support Agile development techniques must be available
11. Communication Infrastructure
•Challenge:
•Communication infrastructure quality is not a priority
•Poor communication infrastructure exacerbates language skills and
accents
•Impact:
•Loss of productive time especially on large meetings
•Creates an incorrect perception of a low quality team
•Reduces open and extensive collaboration
•Creates a wall – throw work over rather than collaborate
•Approach:
•Make good communication infrastructure a critical organizational goal
• Infrastructure teams need to be held accountable
•Institute metrics to measure the quality of communication
12. Values over Process
Inculcating
Values
is a key step
to creating an environment
that becomes
Self-improving
23. Key Considerations for remote Agile teams
Feedback:
Feel much more connected to the business in the US
Now see meaning in what we do
Enjoy coming to work as I see myself moving forward
-Communications (Tools and Technologies)
-Adapting the right approach (Language and Culture)
-Aligning on-shore and off-shore teams on Agile Principals
-Communicating by value rather than effort
