Saravanan Varadan Chakrapani

Saravanan Varadan Chakrapani - Passion for Agile

My Agile journey started in 2009 while I was a Solution Architect for huge waterfall projects that spans years and sometimes had 100+ resources working on them. Agile was a new age term to me. I was, so to say - unwillingly forced into Agile world. The first few months was difficult, then something life changing happened. While involved in Agile rituals (was not perfect still), but I could start seeing the team contributing more, Product owners inputs were instant and just in time which helped the team deliver faster and most importantly the Product owner and the business was happy. We could accomodate change requests late in the cycle, which in turn meant the delivered product had better value, ROI was better and within a few months senior leadership were looking forward to demo meetings.We still had Iteration 0 for projects which helps is planning the overall framework and just in time planning every iteration. Iteration grooming meetings also helped identify PoC which were added as user stories/spikes in the backlog. From the team prespective the team became more empowered, they pulled tasks that they wanted to do, I noticed that what was committed by the team was delivered as their personal ego was at stake if they dont complete what they committed. 

Overall I realized that people play a key role in the success of a project and not just process and tools. After a couple of successful implementations, no looking back - from a avid hater of Agile I was converted to a passionate servant leader in Agile! I have trained 100's of folks , done implementations for fortune 100 companies and lead the Agile CoE for my company. I am on my way to CSC and CST! :)