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[Intro music] [Sliding Titles: Agile Open Southern California
2013] [Sliding Titles: Participant Interview, Pankaj
Swami, Scrum Coach, Software Development Manager]
[Question music] [Interviewer Question Title: What is the biggest
>> P. Swami: The biggest takeaway is that I thought that I was practicing or implementing
a lot of Agile principles at work, but I realized that there is always a level of stagnation
that the team reaches. It’s a comfort zone and you think that you’re doing good and
you just want to continue doing what you’re doing, but what I learned from this experience
is it’s always good to try and push the limits, because unless you do that, you will
not be able to achieve high results. I’m going back very energized after talking to
the people here, because I got to learn about a lot of new techniques, a lot of new processes
that these people are using across a different range of industries. So, it was a very good
learning experience for me.
[Question music] [Interviewer Question Title: It almost sounds
like you’re tapping into a kind of continuous improvement in regard to your practice of
Agile.
>> P. Swami: Yes. I’m a big proponent of continuous integration and I’m right now
playing the role of scrum master and scrum coach. I’m scrum master for one team and
then we have a scrum of scrums model where we have four scrum teams and I’m the scrum
coach and scrum master for the scrum of scrums. In our organization, in our journey, along
the Agile path, we have made incremental improvements over the last two years, but one thing that
I learned in this conference was there is still a long way to go, so we should not just
rest on our laurels and say, okay, we found something that kind of works for us. We should
continue making improvements. The other thing that I do realize and I’m very careful about
is that the improvements have to be coming from the team. It’s not desirable when a
stakeholder or a senior executive comes and says, “Okay, you guys need to [00:02:00]
do this,” the team will not necessarily adapt those changes as well as when they find,
you know, I think if we do this, we might see better results.
That’s where the scrum coach and scrum master comes in and helps the team realize the avenues
of improvement, rather than having them enforced from upper management.
[Question music] [Interviewer Question Title: The sign upstairs
says, “Be prepared to be surprised.” What has surprised you at Agile Open?
>> P. Swami: One of the things that surprised me was the techniques that people are using
for retrospectives across distributed teams. We have a large distributed team at Hyderabad
and our primary team here is in Lake Forest and we’ve been doing retrospectives across
the distributor teams over remote conference calls and live meetings and we thought we
were doing a decent job, but then when I attended the session yesterday and I came to know about
these techniques that people are using, innovation games and there’s a new model that I learned
about ‘turning the tables.’ I thought that would be extremely valuable to go and
try back in my organization. Some of those things were very good surprises and I also
learned a lot from sessions that Llwellyn Falco and his group of guys did. They have
very, very interesting ways of looking at things. A lot of these things might not necessarily
apply to every organization, but I just feel that they are the underlying skills and techniques
that can be catered to your specific industry, but it’s the skill and just the introduction
to that skill that I thought was a very good learning from this conference.
[Question music] [Interviewer Question Title: What would you
tell someone that is thinking about Agile Open? What’s the real value of coming to
>> P. Swami: The biggest differentiator between Agile Open and any other conference that I’ve
attended so far is that you as a participant get to set the agenda. The agenda is not defined
[00:04:00] by the vendor who’s sponsoring the event or by the vendor that is providing
the T-shirts and the pamphlets and things. The first day when we came in, we had the
open circle and the participants got to decide the topics that they wanted to talk about.
The only flipside is that if you put up a topic, you’re also supposed to host it,
but this is my first experience and I would say it’s a very good learning experience.
I would be more than happy to try it again and I would highly recommend this to my colleagues.
[Outro Music] [Sliding Titles: Agile Open Southern California
2013]