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What is Business Agility? Business agility is a management approach that empowers organizations to develop, succeed, and prosper by responding quickly to changes and opportunities with innovative and streamlined processes. Agile originated in IT, where organizations use it to break big projects into smaller chunks, ensuring faster and more sustainable software delivery. Slowly, it gained popularity outside of IT, particularly in marketing where the same principles have been adapted to fit the needs of that field. Now, there’s a trend of Agile spreading to adjacent departments such as sales, finance, and HR. The 5th State of Agile Marketing Report reveals that 33% of sales teams use Agile practices, followed by 20% in finance, and 16% in HR. This is driven by a key fact uncovered in the same report: Agile teams overwhelmingly prefer working with other Agile teams. In other words, the more Agile the organization, the merrier the teams within it. Agility empowers individuals, teams, and companies to innovate, experiment, satisfy customers’ changing needs, and adapt to market shifts. As a result, organizations can stay competitive and relevant by streamlining their processes, emphasizing frequent delivery using fewer resources, being adaptive, and focusing on the value they provide. How to Have a Successful Business Agility Transformation? No matter the industry you’re in, Agile is likely to become a bigger part of what you do in the near future. So, to get yourself prepared, here are six things you can do now to start embracing the Agile mindset. 1. Create Self-Organizing Teams 2. Flatten the Hierarchy 3. Build a Queue 4. Visualize the Work 5. Limit Work in Progress 6. Establish a culture of continuous improvement

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Like in much of life, there is a serious paradox tearing at the very heart of teamwork. In today’s Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous business world (VUCA for short), being an Agile business is not an option but an existential necessity. In this backdrop, when we look at work in teams and organizations, especially knowledge work, the divide between methods, versus flexibility, is as paradoxical as day and night. This is especially a challenge for large, established and successful companies. Policies and Autonomy – Uncomfortable Bed Fellows? Let us look at some implicit assumptions about rules and policies in an organization. For one, it dumbs down the ability of the individual employee and downgrades/ degrades her identity. For example, we could argue that by having an HR policy for leave or work place/ hours, you have implicitly downgraded the employee’s judgment and ownership. Perhaps, by doing this, you have also inadvertently increased the divide between us (employees) and them (management). Not the ideal nurturing environment we want in organizations. In the ideal world, we would expect the employee to take leave in a way that doesn’t negatively impact any deliverables or commitments that the company has made to its customers. You don’t require a five-page policy for this. Another way to think about this – it would be bizarre for a family to have a well-documented and defined policy for when the parent takes a day off/ vacation from taking care of children or home. When a parent needs to take time off, the rest of the family members pick up the slack and this happens without any written rule or policy. Much of the behavior of the family is determined by context and circumstances. The family operates on some broad implicit unwritten rule and context; in this case, it may be that they are going to work towards taking care of the kids and working in the family’s best interest.

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The world is rapidly moving towards of AI and ML-based transformation in all fields and domains. Software products are first to adopt and in fact lead such transformation. At Digité, we are thrilled to be doing our bit! As a provider of software tools for Lean/ Agile project management, especially with large customers who run large and complex projects for their enterprise customers and have 10s of thousands of users working on our products, we generate a large amount of project performance and delivery data. Large swaths of transaction data get added to our project databases every day. This includes both structured and unstructured data, including team member conversations and comments as well as customer comments and feedback, and as such has a great potential for applying AI/ ML techniques. The application of AI and ML techniques to this data has the potential to provide organizational insights to underlying patterns, hitherto unseen and enable them to make data-driven decisions far more effectively than what traditional metrics and measurements allowed them to. At Digité, have started our journey in this direction with our products and this capability has been extended to all of our products over the several months.

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Agile methodologies have come a long way since the 2001 manifesto, which was primarily aimed at software teams and considered subversive at the time. Although most companies still haven’t fully adopted Agile, the business world is waking up to its merits far beyond software development. According to a recent survey, roughly 80 percent of businesses are now using Agile – at least to some extent – throughout major lines of business like customer service, marketing, sales, and R&D. Furthermore, “Agility Masters” who leverage the principle across their entire organization report 60 percent higher revenue and profit growth than their peers. How is a development philosophy built for technical teams and considered risky until recent years now turning into a reigning best practice – a signifier of innovation and versatility in crowded, competitive markets? Why Agile Works? In case it’s been a while since you read up on the tenets of agile, here’s an overview. Agile is a product development approach that drives progress in short, repeatable iterations run by self-organizing, cross-functional teams. Instead of a master plan with milestones, Agile focuses on smaller segments of work and continuous adaptation. Instead of a product manager, responsibilities are distributed among the team. Overall, the goal is to get a working product out the door as quickly as possible, then test and learn.

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Over the last few years, a new era of innovation has emerged. Factors such as Big Data, Blockchain technology, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are having an increasing impact on our day-to-day lives and activities. This fast-paced change is leading to a revolution of new AI-powered decision making and support systems. Everyday activities on both the personal and the professional front are slowly being impacted through the introduction of AI-based tools and services. AI – The Game Changer The rules of the game are constantly changing, and businesses must adapt to this fast-changing world to be on the forefront of the competition. For companies that work on projects regularly, AI-based solutions can increase productivity and reduce errors drastically. Project management/ delivery involves knowledge and skills to carry out activities in order to achieve established corporate goals, whether related to the profit of the organization or the policies that govern the company’s everyday routine. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), companies now have the capability to not only improve the efficiency of their day-to-day activities, but also plan better for the near future. Advancement in the field of AI has also reduced the need for humans to be occupied with redundant tasks, thereby enabling the workforce to be engaged in better, more rewarding tasks. Let us see how AI-based solutions can aid organizations in managing project deliveries. 1. AI-Chatbot Assistants 2. Reduction of errors 3. Predictive Analytics Solutions 4. Improve Productivity & Efficiency 5. Help in making decisions

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A few decades back, Artificial Intelligence (AI) was no more than a dream, but now it has become such an inseparable part of our daily routine that imagining life without AI seems impossible. From self-driving cars, smart phones, and smart devices like Alexa and Siri to Google Maps that help you navigate your daily life, everything has become influenced or driven by AI. Thanks to the technology revolutions that make impossible things possible! As the innovations and the usage of AI has hit our day to day life, its impact on software development is not far away. One of the examples of that is Test Automation (or automated testing). If you have spent any time in software development in the last two decades, you might remember the days when manual testing was the norm – in fact, it might still be the case in many organizations! It took several hours to test the software and it still could not be tested comprehensively. Thanks to test automation, that landscape changed completely and allowed us to test software with minimal manual effort, providing high-quality results. What is AI? Artificial or Machine Intelligence is intelligence shown or performed by machines (computers) based on the observation of human behavior. An AI-based system collects data of human behavior including speech, voice, face recognition and other things and learns from it. It then suggests answers to our queries based on its learning or observation. If you have an eye for detail, you must have noticed that all AI technologies have very specialized functions and not generalized. We still have a long way to reach the stage when AI will be able to do all the things that human beings can do, not just specialized activities. The role of AI in Software Testing The rise of test automation has coincided with the adoption of Agile methodologies in software development. This enables teams to deliver robust and bug-free software in small batches. Manual testing is limited to business acceptance testing only. Test Automation along with DevOps helps Agile teams to ship a fail-safe product for SaaS/ cloud deployment via a CI/ CD pipeline.

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DevOps has been instrumental in transforming IT responsiveness to business, as is evident by the fact that we have enterprises from all walks of life including Banks adopting DevOps. It’s certainly not a thing that hip web companies do now. However, with this rush to “do” DevOps comes the noise associated with it and hence, the confusions. I’ve been asked quite a bit off late we’re practicing Lean Kanban already how would DevOps help us? or even Do we need to do DevOps when we’re practicing lean? This blog is an attempt at two things, at showing how DevOps borrows Lean principles and it’s really not an either/or equation between these practices as they complement each other. DevOps While there are many definitions of DevOps the one I like to stick to is: "A cultural and professional movement that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and IT operations professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes". While there wasn’t necessarily anything more to DevOps than an observe and solve sort of cycle initially. Over the years we’ve had a more formalised way of working in DevOps. I’d still say most of it is common sense but then creating a structure or nomenclature does help majority of human beings to identify better. DevOps therefore has certain principles that make up most of what we know as DevOps today. Lean Most of us would know Lean well enough; the classic definition in IT industry context is "Lean IT applies the key ideas behind lean production to the development and management of IT products and services". And to know more about Lean Production you can start from here. Let’s look at the lean principles before I elaborate on this blog’s theme. 1. Define value precisely from the perspective of the end customer 2. Identify the entire value stream for each service, product or product family and eliminate waste 3. Make the remaining value-creating steps flow 4. As flow is introduced, let the customer pull what the customer wants when the customer wants it 5. Pursue perfection

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DevOps is the acronym given to the combination of Development and Operations. It refers to a collaborative approach to make the Application Development team and the IT Operations team of an organization to seamlessly work with better communication. It is a philosophy that encourages adopting iterative software development, automation, and programmable infrastructure deployment and maintenance. DevOps emphasizes building trust and better liasioning between developers and system administrators. This helps the organization in aligning technological projects to business requirements. Changes rolled out are usually small and reversible, which the entire team begins to comprehend. DevOps is visualized as an infinite loop comprising the steps: plan, code, build, test, release, deploy, operate, monitor, then back to plan, and so on. While the visualization helps us understand how DevOps works, let us try to dig a little deeper to figure out which are the different DevOps tools, and how they help an organization. 1. Build Automation 2. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment 3. Infrastructure as Code 4. Configuration Management 5. Orchestration 6. Monitoring 7. Microservices Once you start following DevOps methodologies, it finds one way or the other to make the software act in a similar way right from development to production, via testing. It deploys changes individually, thus making bugs easily visible. These, once discovered, lead to code improvements through investigations and constant feedback channels. While developers run live software and IT Ops are involved in design meetings – both of them, along with other specialists, can contribute to investigations and feedback channels, which help foster a DevOps culture. With the cycle time from ideation to software going live reduced, your organization can capitalize on market opportunities, thus providing you with a competitive advantage for your business. Evolution of DevOps Originally coined by Patrick Debois, DevOps has become a critical discipline for realizing the benefits of Agile that ensures that rapid, iterative code development results in rapid, iterative code deployment! While Agile’s gained popularity, often at cross-purposes with the more formal and “heavy” ITIL methods popular with IT in the early and mid-2000s, DevOps resonated with both sides. Organizations that have adopted ITIL can also implement DevOps, especially for Cloud-based applications. Starting with The Phoenix Project, by Gene Kim, DevOps has steadily gained popularity and supporters and is seen today as a crucial element of any Agile technology organization. Consequently, large corporations and all sorts of technology vendors now support DevOps. DevOps jobs have become ever more popular – and the norm – in Hitech organizations. With the emergence of AI and ML in all aspects of the software lifecycle, AI for DevOps is starting to make DevOps even more smart, fast and seamless – tho’ a lot remains to be done.

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Digital Transformation (DX) is one of the, if not the, most crucial initiatives that many organizations have undertaken or are taking up. The perfect storm of a wide range of technologies such as SaaS, Mobile, Robotics, IoT (Internet of things), Virtual Reality (VR), etc. is playing a crucial role in the Digital Transformation (DX) of companies. However, it is our belief that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) will be the key technologies that will propel organizations through the Digital Transformation. Let’s dive in: 1. What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)? 2. The Resurgence of AI 3. Applications of AI in Real World 4. Implications of AI in Workplace 5. What’s Ahead? 6. Digité & Artificial Intelligence Thinking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) may seem like thinking of a futuristic world akin to those in science fiction movies, but in actuality, the lines between reality and fiction have blurred. AI is changing the world and the lives of people and is becoming the engine of growth of economies and organizations. Whether it is a simple Google Search, a conversation with Amazon Alexa or Google Home or Apple’s Siri, or a simple Chatbot on some website you visited, you may already be interacting with AI/ ML-driven tools and – well – bots – in many of your daily activities!  This, without a doubt, is changing the way we perform our daily activities, organize our work, our business and how we take decisions in our everyday lives. According to International Data Corporation (IDC), at least 40% of organizations will have a fully staffed Digital Leadership Team versus a Single DX Executive Lead to accelerate enterprise-wide DX initiatives. 40% of all DX initiatives will be related to AI. Web interfaces will be quite diversified, with 30% of all web browsing sessions will be done using Augmented Reality (AR) and about 50% of all new mobile applications will have voice as their main interface for people to use them. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here to stay and is leading an industrial revolution to make organizations more competitive and efficient. AI has already become a strategic factor to generate sustained growth and provide a competitive advantage to organizations. The challenge for all of us is how we manage the changes needed in organization structure, management culture and the investment needed in the development of skills so that the workforce has the capability to adapt to this global trend that we already find in our professional and personal lives. https://www.digite.com/blog/digital-transformation-and-artificial-intelligence/

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Integrating chatbots on websites is a more comprehensive way to grab your customers’ attention at one glance. A Chatbot lives on your website. It interacts with the website’s visitors via voice or text interface. Curious how chatbots can be used for many purposes and help in your marketing efforts?. It helps visitors find relevant information about your products and answer their questions. It offers hassle-free appointments and reservations to customers. Chatbots also assist in filling out surveys and feedback forms. Whatever function a chatbot performs, it performs efficiently to accelerate your business? Chatbots can work wonders for your website. Here’s why you should adopt a chatbot to transform your business: 1. No customer loss 2. Easy access to information 3. Personalized experience 4. Lead generation 5. Cost-saving 6. Customer Insights 7. Multi-lingual responses 8. Enable push notifications 9. Consistency 10. Automation for repetitive tasks

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The Waterfall and Agile methods of project management are often pitted against each other. And for good reason – the former is the oldest and the latter the most popular in recent times. The two methods are based on significantly different ideologies and have found their niche across industries. For the longest time, the Waterfall method was ubiquitous due to its simplicity and common-sense approach to working on a problem. However, this method has fallen short in today’s dynamic marketplace owing to its lack of flexibility and speed. This is true, especially in the software industry where requirements change rapidly and a turn-around time of several months will simply not cut it. The Waterfall Method In this method, a project is divided into distinct phases which are executed sequentially, with each phase cascading into and informing the next. Each phase begins only after the previous one is completed and the deliverable is deployed to the end-user in its entirety only in the final phase of the project. A Waterfall project typically goes through the phases (in sequence) of conception, initiation, analysis, design, construction/implementation, testing/verification, deployment and maintenance. Generally, there is stakeholder involvement mainly in the initial phases and at predetermined stop points (phase gates) when certain milestones are achieved. Agile Methods The Agile approach advocates that a project’s deliverable be broken up into small, easily workable chunks (typically epics and user stories) to be worked on and delivered iteratively (in sprints or iterations). The team works on one iteration/sprint at a time, at the end of which the customer is given a working piece of software or a deliverable of value.

https://www.digite.com/blog/Waterfall-vs-Agile-Project-Management-Approaches

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What Does Adopting Agile at Scale Mean? The idea of scaling agile is to enable you to adapt and stay competitive by responding quickly and adequately to customers’ needs and adding delightful touches to keep customers coming back for more. Ultimately, and in practical terms, it means spreading agile working to every team at every level and in every department — including top management, and reducing coordination and control to a minimum. The main tools for this are autonomous teams, alignment on values and goals, and accountability and transparency at every level — both up and down what remains of an original hierarchical structure. Obviously, you’ll be dealing with different issues spreading agile to one or more teams within the same department, than when making the jump to departments beyond software engineering or IT (where agile originated). The variety in scaled agile frameworks, the structure and practices they advocate, and what specific issues they address, varies. Which one will suit you most depends on what stage you’re in on your agile journey and how well what a framework is designed to accomplish fits your aspirations for scaling agile and eventually becoming an agile business. Now, this is important, there’s a lot more to do than adopt a framework. What Are the Real Challenges in Scaling Agile? A framework helps you avoid reinventing the wheel with regard to the structure, processes and the principles to follow for you to become agile. But the real challenges in an agile transition are at a completely different level. They have to do with the mindset and the culture you need to become truly agile: letting go off (much of your) control and trusting that everyone wants to perform at their best.

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What is Machine Learning? Machine learning (ML) is a technology or concept that allows the machines to learn from the data (example and experience) provided by us, examine them and then predict future outcomes in whatever context it is being applied in. Unlike other applications, it doesn’t require coding or programming for its learning. However, an important part of ML is algorithms. You provide data to these algorithms and based on the past data and examples, the algorithms build logic and suggest future actions. How is Machine Learning different from Software Development? In Software development, you define the Input and write rules to generate the desired Output. But in the case of Machine Learning, you provide the input and the output, and the rules are written accordingly. Isn’t that intelligence?! How does machine learning work? The concept of Machine Learning is possible because of algorithms. A machine learning algorithm (like any other algorithm) is a set of instructions and rules to be performed on data.  A machine learning algorithm is provided with a set of training data to analyze them, build logic of the data and create a model of it. These models are used to make predictions. The more quality data you provide to the machine, the stronger and more accurate their predictions become. While providing training data, some part of it is kept as testing data (usually in the ratio of 80:20) to check the accuracy of the output given by models. The result or prediction by the machine is tested for accuracy and if the accuracy is acceptable, then these algorithms are deployed. In case, the accuracy is not as expected, then these algorithms are provided with more quality data and trained over and over again until they deliver the expected accuracy. The accepted range of accuracy depends on the applications for which the algorithms are built. For some applications, 85% to 90% accuracy is good enough while some critical applications may require higher accuracy.

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What is Agility in teams and business? Agility is the ability of an individual, team, or organization to adapt and respond rapidly, creatively, effectively, and flexibly to market changes for better outcomes to all stakeholders. In the current VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) environment, both Threats and Opportunities arrive faster than ever. This is being further accelerated by the disruptive nature of technology that is forcing the reimaging of old ways. Businesses must embrace agility to adapt faster and thrive or face the prospect of becoming irrelevant and perhaps extinct. Among other things, it involves scanning the (business) environment, seeking inputs, detecting changes, analyze, and understanding the impact of the changes, and best responding to the (business) challenges. What is an Agile Mindset? Though this term is used widely, it doesn’t have a good, agreed-upon definition. In most cases, it gets defined as a set of attitudes and behaviors that allow for value delivery, being open, facilitating collaboration, teamwork, creative thinking, rapid iteration, continuous improvement, etc. Some others define it even more broadly – the mindset that allows agile to flourish is the agile mindset. Yet others define it as an agile mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset.

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Chatbots have now become an indispensable part of human lives. Today’s consumer demand for better, faster, and more personalized interaction. Chatbots are programmed to react to queries with quick answers in nanoseconds. One cannot imagine meeting customers’ expectations without chatbots in the business. Let’s take a look at 7 top reasons why you should say yes to customer support chatbots: 1. Enhanced customer experience 2. Personalization 3. 24*7 support 4. Process automation 5. Brand recognition 6. Easy scalability 7. Minimize customer support costs

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Project management software is a tool that helps you plan, manage and execute your projects in a disciplined way. Project management software is used by a wide range of companies to enable project planning, resource allocation and scheduling of activities. Till recent times, Project Management was thought to be just a hand-drawn concept following a set methodology. But now with Project Management software, a user or an organization can carry out all the steps of Project Management on a designated tool, usually customized to suit the requirements of the team/ project. A Project is made up of a series of interrelated tasks each with its peculiarities and the use of project management software is inevitable, as it helps managers to analyze the interactions between the tasks and plan them efficiently, identifying the most advantageous paths for the team to follow during task execution.

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John dreads his Friday evenings. It is that time of the week when he tries to track the progress of his team of thirty, spread out across the country, working on a mega project to migrate the company’s on-premise infrastructure to the cloud. He feels overwhelmed as he spends all weekend sifting through hundreds of emails, chat messages, spreadsheets, printouts, and even sticky notes to put together a coherent picture of where the team stands on the project front. Are they on track to finish setting up the cloud database by next Thursday? Is his team overworked (well, he certainly is!)? Will adding that extra replica exceeds their budget? Will he be able to spare a team member to work on that long-pending patch? With more questions than answers, John wonders about his performance and that of the team he manages. John’s boss has similar concerns about his team of managers. So does John’s boss’s boss and so on.

In companies such as John’s, the lack of visibility and inefficiencies get amplified as one goes higher up the chain, with errors falling through the cracks and unpleasant surprises always around the corner. The problem lies in

1. Outmoded project planning methods, archaic management practices, and sluggish organization culture, and

2. Poor tooling for effective management and collaboration. For organizations to be competent in the constantly evolving, dynamic marketplace of today, it is imperative for them to address both the aforementioned issues.

Organizations the world over have successfully tackled the former by moving away from rigid management practices and towards more flexible ones, such as those based on Agile Program Management principles. An agile organization is a company that puts people ahead of processes, promotes collaboration, values transparency, and adapts quickly to changes to stay relevant in an ever-changing marketplace. According to research published by McKinsey & Company, “…agile organizations have a 70 percent chance of being in the top quartile of organizational health, the best indicator of long-term performance”.

To address the second challenge of giving teeth to project management methodologies, organizations would be wise to invest in the right tools. Enterprise-class software with agile project management tools and capabilities, such as Digite’s SwiftEnterprise, can help large companies conveniently streamline their project management. With all the right features to manage a project through its entire lifecycle from concept to launch, such software can give a company and its people the reins to effectively manage and control their projects.

Here’s how organizations, big or small, with projects, budgets and workforces of varying sizes can reap the benefits of using the right project management software.

1. Working seamlessly from anywhere on the planet 2. Fostering a sense of Responsibility/ Accountability 3. Tracking Status made Easy 4. Helping Managers reduce Overburdening 5. Knowing the Risks and planning for them 6. Revitalizing productivity 7. One team, one spirit

“With great power comes great responsibility,” is an adage popularised by a certain, webbed superhero. If you have the power to do something, you are duty-bound to use it for the greater good. In the context of program management and agile methodologies, the same adage can be interpreted to mean that an empowered workforce will work responsibly. Companies will benefit by reflecting on how they can equip their workforce with the right processes and tools, and a safe, trusting environment to make them feel empowered and work towards the success of their projects.