Align, collaborate and co-create: Six tips for creating an Agile-ready business

By Umesh Kumar, Banking and Financial Services Account Director at TCS

Scrums, standups, grandmasters and sprints; future-proof your operations and leverage Agile processes as a key digital transformation tool. How is your business moving along its journey to Agile-ready?

Here Umesh Kumar, Banking and Financial Services Account Director at TCS shares his key learnings and insights from the Future of Work conference and how TCS is adopting the Agile methodology on itself.

The Agile method is often referenced in the same breath as emerging technologies like the Cloud and Automation - digital technologies that are use every single day.

By 2020 our ambition is for the whole of Tata Consultancy Services to operate on - at minimum - basic Agile process. When you have close to 400,000 team members across the world, such a statement is an ambitious one, but it is a goal that we at TCS are well on our way to achieving. As a global organisation, we recognised long ago that we needed to enable our own staff with the Agile skills required to effectively deliver for their clients in the midst of their own Agile transformation journeys. 

In the 2017 / 2018 financial year alone, our workforce completed over 5.6 million learning days, with 208,000 of our employees being trained in Agile processes. We have 5,000 plus Agile grandmasters and in excess of 30,000 Agile team leaders spread across the business.

So how can a business that recognises agilility as the way of the future, pursue such a complex goal? Here are our top tips for fast tracking your Agile adoption.

1. Spread the wealth - Knowledge MUST be accessible
Nothing is gained by creating silos of information. At TCS, we created a networking platform called Fresco that approximates the functionality of WhatsApp with none of the security risks associated with an outside communication platform. We created Fresco because we wanted our teams to be able to crowdsource their issues - not only project-based development issues, but also issues they were experiencing within their jobs.

Fresco also supports self-learning with staff being able to access bite-sized video courses on Agile - typically five to eight minutes in length - so that they can self-educate on their way to work, on their breaks or prior to a team meeting. 

Knowledge is the foundation of Agile method and you need to begin as you mean to continue by sharing with staff as early as possible the resources they need to become proficient.

2. The right mix - Create project teams with multiple skill sets 
Our then CEO and now Chairman briefed us on what he wanted from the beginning. He felt that the most successful adoption of Agile would begin with the creation of project teams where staff from multiple business verticals - HR, engineering, marketing, automation - were arranged into teams based around a specific customer or project. 

3. Team effort - Collaborate as early as possible
Creating project teams allowed all stakeholders to be brought into the process early, creating a true sense of collaboration that resulted in work with fewer compromises and a greater sense of ownership from beginning to delivery.

4. Just do it - start with basic agility and worry about mastery later
Doing is the most important part. If you give your staff access to the tools they need to learn and get them working to Agile as quickly as possible, the process itself becomes the learning. Once you are in the midst of operating in an agile way, you can worry about refining your process. 

5. Are you T-shaped? Specialists are not the way of the future, generalists are
We want all our TCS staff to maintain competitiveness and relevance by ensuring that the skills they are refining in their roles are transferable. Around eight years ago we stopped putting emphasis on specialists and started asking our staff to develop broader proficiency in all the tangential skills they may need during an Agile project sprint. The result are team members with deep mastery in one or two skills with a broad understanding across five or six others meaning they are able to nimbly slot in place to suit project requirements. 

6. Agile is the word - Give people the language and set expectations
To begin with Agile adoption you do need to use the language so you can do the processes. Daily stand ups are important as are analysis of what is standing in your way and who are the gatekeepers helping and hindering you. You need to do the processes so you and your team can learn and become proficient. Break your production timeline into iterations, organise face to face meetings and worry about measuring success at the end of the process. 

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