Culture is something that is always present. Regardless of tools or methodologies introduced, an organization’s culture will influence how they are used and how well they are adopted. Organizational culture is also something that is not easily changed and requires long term sustained effort.
In this talk, we will discuss why culture change is essential to agility. An organization going through an agile transformation should be as concerned about how their culture will adapt and adopt an agile mindset as they might be around adopting Scrum or Kanban processes. We will dig into what a culture of agility looks like as well as what an organization can do to create this culture and more importantly ways to iterate on the culture itself to sustain the agility mindset over the long term.
Vice President of Engineering, Rx Savings Solutions
Shahzad Zafar is the Vice President of Engineering at Rx Savings Solutions. Before joining Rx Savings Solutions in 2018, he worked at Cerner for 13 years, where he led the Cloud Platform development business unit while being an agile coach as well.
Shahzad has a degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2005 and also received his Masters in Business Administration from the University of Kansas in 2009. He joined Cerner in 2005 as a software developer, working on C++ and Java. He got the benefit of seeing projects being run in a waterfall methodology before transitioning to Agile development. As an Agile Champion and Coach, Shahzad gets the opportunity to work with other teams to offer support and guidance to setup productive and successful teams by leveraging Lean/Agile methodologies.
Shahzad is also a board member for AgilehoodKC and speaks regularly at meetups and conferences such as LeanAgileKC, KCPMI PDD, Agile Midwest and KCDC. He also teaches classes around Information Technology in the University of Kansas Business School's Graduate program.