srijan - agile tour 2015 -- building agile cultures
TRANSCRIPT
BUILDING AN AGILE CULTURE
www.srijan.net | [email protected]
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EXPERIMENTS AT SRIJAN
A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY
The Journey :: 2002 - 2003
● Estb 2002
● No grand vision, no grand ideas!
● Simple personal pursuit of ‘making meaning out of
my own life’
No Grand Vision!
The Journey :: Mar - Jun 04
● Srijan was doing custom PHP and ASP -- hand-
coded CMSs; later open-source Postnuke
● Came across TYPO3
● My jaw dropped on reading the feature list -- all open
source and free! Yikes!
● June 2004 we had an incoming lead from a 200-
chain retail store from Germany
The Journey :: 2004 - 2007
● Small Team 10-15 people
● Short-term projects
● Fairly Profitable
● Mostly incoming leads
● Nearly all TYPO3, Germany + Netherlands
The Journey :: Our Values and Culture
● Chance meetings with coaches and well-wishers --
values started evolving -- mine and as a result Srijan’
s
● Team oriented
● Take on challenges
● Work very hard
● Nimble, Responsive, Responsible
● Less processes (chaos + processes)
Books that defined culture
● Chance meetings with coaches and well-wishers --
values started evolving -- mine and Srijan’s
2002 - 2011
● Short-term projects
● Fixed Cost
● Incorrect estimations (nearly always)
● Tail of the projects always dragged (endlessly)
● Each time we bore the brunt (of such cost over-
runs)
● Change requests were “difficult to capture”, “scope”
and estimate
● Fingers pointing all over (sales -- developers)
2002 - 2011
● Financial constraints led to staffing developers on
new projects (before completing one at hand –
endless project tail!)
● One-person-team staffed on a project, was not
unusual
● Low developer morale
● Low leadership morale
● Poor financial health (even after a lot of hard-work
for years)
WHERE ARE WE NOW?
2015-2016
● Financial Year closing we should be touching 30 Cr
in revenues
● 150-175 people
● Fairly high people happiness index
● Low attrition
● High EBIDTA margins
● 70% business from Enterprises
● We’ve grown 50%+ each year over prev 3-4 years
SO WHAT WORKED?
“Learn to live life, and you shall learn to write” Shama Futehally
● A certain ‘Authenticity’ and ‘Integrity’
○ with people
○ with customers
○ with finding the purpose of your own life as
well as the business
Sense of Purpose, Authenticity
Role of Luck & Serendipity
Role of Luck & Serendipity
“Lucky people have an openness, an authenticity, and
a generosity towards embracing people - without
overthinking ‘what’s the value exchange?’”
~ Anthony Tjan,
Co-author of “Heart, Smarts, Guts & Luck”
● With support of a business coach we started
setting financial goals in 2011-12
● 10 Cr, 15 Cr, 30 Cr
● Darts on the board
Impact of Business Coaching
● ‘Articulated’ our internal values
○ Authenticity
○ Responsibility
○ Respect
○ Sharing
○ Equal Opportunity
○ Learning (Continuous Improvement; Growth)
○ Excellence (we’re low on this metric)
Impact of Business Coaching
● Defined a sense of purpose
○ External : ‘We run our company like a
hospitality business’
○ Internal : “What comes from the people
must go back to the people many-many
times over”
Impact of Business Coaching
Focus on Customer
Experience
Focus on Customer Education
Consultative Sales
Solution Selling
Free Half day
workshops
Paid Discovery workshops
Early Customer
EngagementLeadership
training workshops
Focus on Continuous
Improvement
Coaching
English Training for Associates
Empowered team
members
Appraisals promote
team behaviour
Shares/Stock ownership
Independent decision making
Deep sense of ownership of
client success
Profitability transparency
Encourage dissent &
self expression
Talks, Blogs,
Community work
Employee brand
developmentAgile & LEAN
Delivery process
Customer deeply
involved
Rapid Prototyping
Split contracts
Focus on project
outcomes
Seek repeat business
High developer
time & utilization
High profitability
Constant Dev/Training
of Staff
● Central to Srijan’s strategy is “Customer Experience” -- focus on
delighting our customers; we try and embed ourselves into the
client’s business
● It is around this -- Customer Experience -- that all other core
activities emerge:
○ Agile & Lean development processes
○ Consultative Sales process
○ Continuous Training & Development of Staff, Managers, &
Leadership
○ Empowered Teams
○ Clients with repeat business potential
Impact of Business Coaching
● Consultative Sales process
○ Early client engagement; free 1-2 day workshops;
understanding client’s business
○ Solution selling; we do not have pure sales (saelu) in our
company; sales is focussed around solving customer needs
● Continuous Training
○ at all levels in Srijan -- from CEO to interns, a lot of people at
Srijan are constantly some sort of a) training, b) leadership
development & c) self-development programme/initiative
(internal or external)
Impact of Business Coaching
Hug Your Customers
● Talk by Anand Deshpande,
CEO - Persistent Systems
● Long-term contracts with a
few clients -- we’ve “hugged”
them
● Our customers love us!
Agile Teams
● Deeply “motivated leaders” -- to uphold our core
values
● Org Structure
○ Group Leader (across 3-4 teams)
○ Team (SM, Dev, CSS)
○ Architect (across 2 teams)
● Bring ‘projects to teams’, as opposed to assembling
team for projects
Agile Teams
● Tying “Performance Management” to Customer
Happiness (Balanced Score Card)
● Setting up ‘goal sheets’ for developers, scrum
masters, group leads
● Quarterly 360 appraisal process, including bonus
payouts
Agile Teams
● For our delivery teams
○ Ongoing trainings -- agile and otherwise
○ Constant coaching -- agile and otherwise
● Basically, constant investment in
○ people’s growth
○ creating alignment across the organisation
In Closing
● “Being Agile! cultures” require an integration of the
○ organisation’s values, purpose
○ delivery (agile)
○ team structures
○ appraisals
○ sales processes
THANK YOU
www.srijan.net
Rahul Dewanin.linkedin.com/in/rahuldewan@rahuldewan