Amandeep Bhatia

I am a engineering profesional with over 13 years of experience of working in IT companies on domains ranging from Aerospace to control systems to enterprise systems to healthcare. Worked with companies ranging from Fortune 500 MNCs to startups. One thing I am always interested in my career is to learn new methodlogies to deliver projects more efficiently and with more relevance to customer. I joined Agile bandwagon some 6 years back when Agile was becoming a buzzword in Indian markets and many companies were exploring to adapt to this new Process. 

I started my career with Honeywell working in Aerospace group for big commercial planes. The project has to satisfy regulatory requirements of FAA and thus the processes were very well defined and extensive. I learned how to operate in a CMMI level project and how detailed requirements was mapped from specifications to tests. Though we were following waterfall cycle and there was many teams working on the same product globally , yet there was some sort of flexibility . Due to the vast experience of people working on the similar projects earlier  it was still feasible to steer project in a waterfall style and it was working too. I realised the importance of skills and domain expertise there. But there was always something missing . Such as our exposure to customer insight was very limited and many teams were working on there individual module with less interation between them.

I changed few comanies in between to work on some projects which were starting to setting up teams in environment but was not knowing about Agile practises much. During all these years I was observing a gap where customer and developers are two far off entities as if they are from north pole and south pole. Teams and individuals are mostly working on their parts without realising the big picture of how their part fits in whole. Even my friends in industry mentions same and was disappointed how things are.

In 2007 , I got a chance to know about and experience Agile methodology and started getting fascinated by it. As I was getting involved with Agile principals more and more , I was realising that this approach is mapping more and more to real world sceraios than anything else I have seen. Then I delved more into other practises such as XP and lean and started to implement them in our projects . The results were eencouraing . My team was getting more interactive , communicative and they were aliging with custmer goals in a better way. I was excited when I saw team mebers becoming more courgous and started sharing there viewpoints with Product owner regarding business values.

I was lucky to get my manager as my mentor who is also a stauch believer in Agile values and how they can make a difference. We started adapting more and more practices of XP such as TDD , paid programming etc . 

I am a CSM and have cleared PMI - ACP exam and looking to adapt more and more to Agile practises and I believe in them fully to provide real value to customer as wel as empowering developers.