Agility revitalised: Making a little bit of history with RSG SL 2022

There’s always a first for different types of events and some of them are quite special. I recently had the chance to be a part of history in the making for Sri Lanka. An event that was the first of its kind for the country, and that too, during times such as these. It was an event worth celebrating in every way. 

The Sri Lankan IT industry has a long history delivering world-class software solutions using project management principles like Agile and Scrum. But despite the many practitioners who apply them daily, we have never hosted a "Regional Scrum Gathering". Until recently. So, a big round of applause for the two Co-chairs of the Regional Scrum Gathering Sri Lanka, Janani Liyanage, Founder Agility Tune up and Rumesh Wijetunge, Agile Coach at Wiley Global Technology, Sri Lanka, for pulling off the daunting task of organizing not just one but two events back-to-back. 

Some Agile principles and practices were certainly used in the planning! 

What’s fascinating is how they hand-picked passionate individuals and gave them an opportunity to showcase their own talent in organizing such an event. Truly commendable work by the wonderful organizing committee, taking up this challenge and delivering an amazing event in style! It is testament to the fact that Sri Lanka has talented and passionate individuals within the Agile and IT professional community. 

What I want to share about this event is my experience both as a reviewer, moderator and panelist helping to add some value to the events in some small way as well as an active participant who was able to absorb a great deal of valuable content!    

A "Regional Scrum Gathering" is required to follow the stringent guidelines set by Scrum Alliance to ensure the quality of the submissions to the conference. This process and procedure were followed to the letter by the Program Review committee within which, I was a part of leading the “Personal and Team Agility” track review subcommittee. Right from the start, we self-organized and used the best practices of past conferences. I am privileged to have worked with global as well as local thought leaders in Agile. Especially Nagini Chandramouli an experienced Enterprise Agile coach, from whom I learned the art of reviewing submissions in a very methodical and analytical way. My warmest regards to all who contributed towards this effort. 

Having received 64 submissions in various talk formats and tracks, it was a difficult task to pick the top few who would feature live in the virtual event held on 29th and 30th October 2022. All the submissions were reviewed by all reviewers in a track who used a marking scheme to find the highest scorers. This method ensured impartiality and our recommendations were again vetted by the program committee to arrive at the final agenda. What was special was that we not only marked these submissions considering the topic, content, organization, and delivery aspects but we also helped the speakers to improve their submissions. 

The day of the event was also extremely well organized and included multiple mock sessions with the speakers doing live talks (45 mins) and workshops (75 mins). Long were the nights we spent going over the various features and dry runs after dry runs. I can’t imagine how tired the core organizing team was including the admins of the Hopin tool must have been, especially the lead admin Kumudu Bandarage who was cool as a cucumber and on the ball all the time! I believed this level of preparation and creating familiarity with "Hopin" the online platform used, made a difference in how smoothly the conference went, as it ensured there were almost no glitches and problems during the event. This was a formidable feat given that there were more than 400 attendees from 9 countries including Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Australia, Switzerland and Indonesia, who attended the event which crossed four time zones (Asia Pacific, England, US and IST) absorbing 38 learning hours of sessions delivered by more than 50 speakers. As a moderator, I enjoyed helping these accomplished individuals such as Izis F., Vineet Patni, Craig Riley, Prateek Verma and Priya Patra by making them comfortable and focused on delivering the best value to the attendees. My co-moderator Joel Wickremasinghe was a breeze to work with, ever so helpful and full of positivity.     

While the RSG event was a great experience and learning for me personally, the cherry on top was the physical event, the "Agile Coaching Symposium", held on 5th November at the Movenpick Hotel, Colombo 03. This was the country’s first ‘Open Space’ style conference and attracted 120+ agile and coaching enthusiasts.   

I was honored to be a speaker for the panel discussion titled “Organizational Transformation and the Role of the Coach”. My fellow panelists were Anushly - Org and Relationship Systems Team Coach, ICF PCC Assessor, Coach Developer (a Professional Certified Coach with 5000+, Accredited Coaching Hrs and Founder – ImproShare Global), Inoka Dias (another Professional Certified Coach (PCC) and head of HR for Pearson Sri Lanka), Rosita De Rose (Experienced Enterprise Agile Transformation specialist and Senior Manager - Delivery Excellence at Virtusa), and Hiruna Dissanayake (an Enterprise Agile coach and leading agile transformations, currently Director Software Engineering | Agile Coach at Cambio Software Engineering). Roshantha Jayatunge did a fantastic job of marshalling the collective wisdom of the panel and bringing out the best value to the audience as an expert moderator! It was great to share the stage with all of them.  

During this session, I got to speak on the key factors which can help to get change initiatives off the ground. I focused on highlighting pointers like the fact that communicating the reason for the change, the ‘why’ part is key. I also pointed out that the sense of urgency or the imperative for change are derived from this. Further, I highlighted the importance of getting leadership buy-in and authenticity which will go a long way to help make organizational transformations successful.  

Talking about the event, the "Agile Coaching Symposium", it was probably the first time that the Agile and Coaching communities truly converged at this scale to establish the symbiotic relationship between the two. I feel that the potential for "cross pollination" between these two disciplines is huge. Kudos to Jayantha Fernando PCC and Andrea Jayatilleka-PCC for illustrating the power of coaching to me and the rest of the audience!

I saw first hand how much effort was put into organizing this physical event. This was probably because it was the first time an ‘Open Space’ event of this nature and scale was conducted in Sri Lanka! An open space event requires participants to be engaged as they are the content creators. It was a great experience as a facilitator to see Sri Lankan agile and coaching enthusiasts get the hang of this novel approach and create a great learning experience for all involved. All it took was a small push in the right direction and a little guidance on following the 4 guiding principles and 1 law of Open Space conferences.

Last but certainly not least, I was proud to represent my company Sysco LABS at this event. Sysco LABS is an organization committed to continuous improvement in the mature agile practices it already has. Being the Platinum Sponsor of the biggest Agile and Scrum gathering in the region is an extension of Sysco LABS’s broader vision of encouraging a culture of continuous learning and innovation within the organization. Teams at Sysco LABS practice Agile daily while the company’s senior leaders are proud Agile advocates, encouraging and empowering teams to "be more Agile".

In addition to Sysco LABS sponsoring and sending folks to take part in the event, a few of my colleagues at Sysco LABS were part of the organizing committee, actively helping to ensure these events were top notch. Asanga Nugawela, Senior Director – Delivery was the Program and Review Team lead. My own team member Buwaneka De Silva, Senior Associate – Process, was a part of the organizing committee ensuring the very first RSG for SL - which was a fully online event - went live without a hitch on the virtual conference platform.   

In conclusion I was truly enriched by this experience of attending and contributing to these two events, and I believe it was so for many others. What this proves is that Sri Lanka has world-class Agilists and Coaches with a passion for excellence. All this augurs well for the Sri Lankan Agile community. May it prosper and increase in strength in the years to come!