RIP- Dr APJ Abdul Kalam

Yesterday night while I was watching the news the sudden demise of Dr Abdul Kalam was announced. What struck me was this unassuming man who won the hearts of millions of people passed away without troubling any body while doing what he was passionate about. He did not suffer even for a moment.  The Gods above must have loved him and taken him to their abode.

I had the privilege of  seeing him in close quarters while I was working in Navy. He had the ability to read a brief running in to pages in a couple of minutes and understand and ask the most incisive questions.  He was truly secular and a patriot. During his leadership DRDO and ISRO achieved astounding feats casting away doubts about their ability. We became a nuclear power.

He loved children. His interaction with students in schools and colleges have inspired whole generation of students who will strive to achieve his dreams.  He was a simple man , a great communicator and would instantly strike a bond with the common people. He was truly a people's president.

An academician and teacher at heart he had a passion for teaching. He has authored a number of books and his book 'Wings of Fire' has inspired millions of Indians. A remarkable person he never got in to any controversy.  In an age where your words are taken out of context to create controversies he steered clear of controversies.

He has been my hero and role model. I have a passion for teaching too and would like to teach as long as my health permits.  My salute to this great soul and may his soul Rest In Peace. Let us works to make his dreams come true .

AGILE SCRUM AND ORGANISATIONAL CHANGE

   Not many realise that to implement agile scrum successfully in a company it eventually needs organisational change .Agile Scrum is not just a framework for development of software, it eventually leads to transformation of organisation. It is a question of mind set. When you are building self sustaining teams which are empowered they have to be supported by the organisation. The managers have to work as enablers instead of telling the team what to do and assigning work. The leadership model changes. The command and control model does not work and creates more disruptions. The senior management suddenly finds that the traditional model for predicting a release and the feature set in the release does not work and they have to work  with scrummasters and product owners.
   When I was helping teams to transition from waterfall to agile one of the questions that I often had to face from the team was about their performance assessment and growth path. The traditional model of performance assessment does not work when you are following a collaborative model. The people managers and HR have to be brought on board and educated to evolve new practices and this also involves a behavioural change.
    In my experience one of the biggest challenges for transforming an organisation is changing the mind set of the management to adopt new practices. Resistance to change is natural. People are scared of change. It is better to tackle this issue from top down.  Management needs to be convinced about the immense benefits that agile practices can bring in. Therefore a prudent way of going about this is to find a sponsor in the top management who is convinced of the benefits of Agile and the ROI it can bring in. It is essential to do a presentation to the top management emphasising the benefits of Agile.
    In traditional organisations you have separate development teams and QA teams and most of the time the teams are not co-located and have separate managers. People need to realise that development and testing are only skills and every one is a software engineer and the whole team needs to have just one goal and that of meeting the commitment made for a sprint. Whatever it takes to produce good software and meet the 'done' criteria is the team's responsibility. To achieve this you may need to change the organisation. Sometimes the roles may change. In one of the organisations we changed the designations of managers from "Dev and QA managers " to " Engineering Managers" and reorganised the teams. It worked very well.
   Any transformation means change in the organisation. Change brings in resistance. Therefore it needs to be done in a phased manner after taking everybody on board. It needs a skilled transformation agent to bring about the change successfully. Initially start with a small project/product find a sponsor from the top management and train the team.  As the team goes through the sprint you can demonstrate the results to the top management. It is essential to have a good Agile Coach who can guide the team and work with top management to convince them and begin the journey of transformation.