BUILDING AN AGILE CULTURE

www.srijan.net | business@srijan.net

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EXPERIMENTS AT SRIJAN

A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY

The Journey :: 2002 - 2003

● Estb 2002

● No grand vision, no grand ideas!

● Simple personal pursuit of ‘making meaning out of

my own life’

No Grand Vision!

The Journey :: Mar - Jun 04

● Srijan was doing custom PHP and ASP -- hand-

coded CMSs; later open-source Postnuke

● Came across TYPO3

● My jaw dropped on reading the feature list -- all open

source and free! Yikes!

● June 2004 we had an incoming lead from a 200-

chain retail store from Germany

The Journey :: 2004 - 2007

● Small Team 10-15 people

● Short-term projects

● Fairly Profitable

● Mostly incoming leads

● Nearly all TYPO3, Germany + Netherlands

The Journey :: Our Values and Culture

● Chance meetings with coaches and well-wishers --

values started evolving -- mine and as a result Srijan’

s

● Team oriented

● Take on challenges

● Work very hard

● Nimble, Responsive, Responsible

● Less processes (chaos + processes)

Books that defined culture

● Chance meetings with coaches and well-wishers --

values started evolving -- mine and Srijan’s

2002 - 2011

● Short-term projects

● Fixed Cost

● Incorrect estimations (nearly always)

● Tail of the projects always dragged (endlessly)

● Each time we bore the brunt (of such cost over-

runs)

● Change requests were “difficult to capture”, “scope”

and estimate

● Fingers pointing all over (sales -- developers)

2002 - 2011

● Financial constraints led to staffing developers on

new projects (before completing one at hand –

endless project tail!)

● One-person-team staffed on a project, was not

unusual

● Low developer morale

● Low leadership morale

● Poor financial health (even after a lot of hard-work

for years)

WHERE ARE WE NOW?

2015-2016

● Financial Year closing we should be touching 30 Cr

in revenues

● 150-175 people

● Fairly high people happiness index

● Low attrition

● High EBIDTA margins

● 70% business from Enterprises

● We’ve grown 50%+ each year over prev 3-4 years

SO WHAT WORKED?

“Learn to live life, and you shall learn to write” Shama Futehally

● A certain ‘Authenticity’ and ‘Integrity’

○ with people

○ with customers

○ with finding the purpose of your own life as

well as the business

Sense of Purpose, Authenticity

Role of Luck & Serendipity

Role of Luck & Serendipity

“Lucky people have an openness, an authenticity, and

a generosity towards embracing people - without

overthinking ‘what’s the value exchange?’”

~ Anthony Tjan,

Co-author of “Heart, Smarts, Guts & Luck”

● With support of a business coach we started

setting financial goals in 2011-12

● 10 Cr, 15 Cr, 30 Cr

● Darts on the board

Impact of Business Coaching

● ‘Articulated’ our internal values

○ Authenticity

○ Responsibility

○ Respect

○ Sharing

○ Equal Opportunity

○ Learning (Continuous Improvement; Growth)

○ Excellence (we’re low on this metric)

Impact of Business Coaching

● Defined a sense of purpose

○ External : ‘We run our company like a

hospitality business’

○ Internal : “What comes from the people

must go back to the people many-many

times over”

Impact of Business Coaching

Focus on Customer

Experience

Focus on Customer Education

Consultative Sales

Solution Selling

Free Half day

workshops

Paid Discovery workshops

Early Customer

EngagementLeadership

training workshops

Focus on Continuous

Improvement

Coaching

English Training for Associates

Empowered team

members

Appraisals promote

team behaviour

Shares/Stock ownership

Independent decision making

Deep sense of ownership of

client success

Profitability transparency

Encourage dissent &

self expression

Talks, Blogs,

Community work

Employee brand

developmentAgile & LEAN

Delivery process

Customer deeply

involved

Rapid Prototyping

Split contracts

Focus on project

outcomes

Seek repeat business

High developer

time & utilization

High profitability

Constant Dev/Training

of Staff

● Central to Srijan’s strategy is “Customer Experience” -- focus on

delighting our customers; we try and embed ourselves into the

client’s business

● It is around this -- Customer Experience -- that all other core

activities emerge:

○ Agile & Lean development processes

○ Consultative Sales process

○ Continuous Training & Development of Staff, Managers, &

Leadership

○ Empowered Teams

○ Clients with repeat business potential

Impact of Business Coaching

● Consultative Sales process

○ Early client engagement; free 1-2 day workshops;

understanding client’s business

○ Solution selling; we do not have pure sales (saelu) in our

company; sales is focussed around solving customer needs

● Continuous Training

○ at all levels in Srijan -- from CEO to interns, a lot of people at

Srijan are constantly some sort of a) training, b) leadership

development & c) self-development programme/initiative

(internal or external)

Impact of Business Coaching

Hug Your Customers

● Talk by Anand Deshpande,

CEO - Persistent Systems

● Long-term contracts with a

few clients -- we’ve “hugged”

them

● Our customers love us!

Agile Teams

● Deeply “motivated leaders” -- to uphold our core

values

● Org Structure

○ Group Leader (across 3-4 teams)

○ Team (SM, Dev, CSS)

○ Architect (across 2 teams)

● Bring ‘projects to teams’, as opposed to assembling

team for projects

Agile Teams

● Tying “Performance Management” to Customer

Happiness (Balanced Score Card)

● Setting up ‘goal sheets’ for developers, scrum

masters, group leads

● Quarterly 360 appraisal process, including bonus

payouts

Agile Teams

● For our delivery teams

○ Ongoing trainings -- agile and otherwise

○ Constant coaching -- agile and otherwise

● Basically, constant investment in

○ people’s growth

○ creating alignment across the organisation

In Closing

● “Being Agile! cultures” require an integration of the

○ organisation’s values, purpose

○ delivery (agile)

○ team structures

○ appraisals

○ sales processes

THANK YOU

www.srijan.net

Rahul Dewanin.linkedin.com/in/rahuldewan@rahuldewan