Microsoft MVP Connection in Hyderabad

For the last two days, I was attending in Hyderabad  – Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) Connect 2017 event. As a Microsoft Regional Director (honorary title) I was invited to speak in the two days program – which was a get-together of all MVP’s in India. I thoroughly enjoyed the interaction with the MVPs and Microsofties – the energy in the room was palpable. Most of the MVPs were excited with the new features that have come in Xamarin developer tools and the Azure platform.

MVP Community Connection – November 2017 – Hyderabad

View of MVPs in the room

(From left) Venkatarangan, Praveen Srivatsa – RD from Bangalore, Deepak Rajendran – Community Program Manager, Microsoft India

Laurent Bugnion from Microsoft demoed an end to end scenario of using various Azure tools, including Azure functions and Azure Mobile Center which showed on how to read bitcoin value every hour and plot a rich trend graph – then deliver it as a native mobile app for Android and iOS. He talked about his role along with other Cloud Developer Advocates that are spread around the world helping developers using Azure. Be sure to follow their twitter handle @azureadvocates.

Microsoft Cloud Developer Advocates

The next session was presented by VSTS (Developer tools) team from Microsoft IDC on how their team of over 6000+ developers moved from a waterfall model to devops and their learnings in the process.

• One of the books that initiated the thought process was “Drive” by Daniel H.Pink – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. 
• Each sprint is about 3 weeks, this duration just felt right; 3 sprints make a Plan; 6 months makes a Season; 18 months planning makes an Epic. Leadership is responsible for Seasons and Epics; with each team having autonomy over Plans and Sprints.

You can watch this talk in YouTube – “Moving 70,000 Microsofties to DevOps on the Public Cloud” and read more on “DevOps at Microsoft”.

We also got to see a demo and explanation on Microsoft’s Kaizala, a mobile app that makes it easy to connect and coordinate with your task workers.

Presenting on “70 Years of Software Development and Change Management for Software Industry”

Today morning I spoke on a topic that is near to me – 70 Years of Software Development and Change Management for Software Industry (Download the Slides)

70 Years of Software Development:

• On 19 February 1946 Alan Turing designed the first well-known software for a stored program computer.
• Today’s mobile apps like Microsoft Word or Facebook are more complex than entire software stack that powered Apollo 11 spaceflight.
• The technology powering Google Now or Microsoft’s Halolens were impossible even ten years before.
• Whether all this development has changed the way engineers write software?. The answer will be “NO”.

For any change management to succeed, you can use the C6 framework developed by my friend Sankaranarayanan, which we had talked in a NASSCOM program earlier this year:

1. have a Coalition comprising of top management, influencers, cross-functional representatives and diversity amongst its members;
2. paint a Concept of future which is clear yet ambitious;
3. the importance of Communication can’t be overemphasised. Here you can use framework used in storytelling like Villian-Victim-Hero for impact;
4. ensure you have the Commitment of all stakeholders for the long-haul;
5. Celebrate even small wins along the way to keep the team motivated;
6. remember Culture eats strategy for breakfast (Peter Drucker).