Interview I recently did

Profile:

My official job profile is an Associate Architect with QuickOffice, responsible for all architecture for future products shipping out of India Operations. What would amuse you most is that I was an Agile Project Manager for last 4 years and I am also a Scrum Master. Also, I am an evangelist for both Agile processes and Technology trends. I speak at various technical conferences in Pune. Moreover, I do a lot of counseling for people around me.

This might seem to many as sailing in more than one boat, not really

I believe in today’s fast tracked world, being technology leader, managing people and evangelizing new tracks goes hand in hand. There is no way a Small to mid size company can afford pure Architects or pure Managers. This is the new age requiring people to be Agile in Processes and Technology as well.

1. How the career journey started? Or who inspired you to enter in this field?

If you are talking about my journey into the industry, I always wanted to work in Computer. I had been taking my Computer Education from Grade 6.
However, the major change came to my journey when I had 3-4 years experience. Before this, I can say I was a mediocre Software Professional, working for Money or a Position, basically in a Rat race. This helped me understand the typical mentality what people have and helps me know how to inspire them.

My first inspiration was an Architect in Sigma Software named Sumeet. He was a person who work shipped Math and Logic. There I learned about going thorough with anything you do in life.

My second inspiration was Director of Engineering from QuickOffice named Keith Bottner. Now he is a part of Google, doing exciting work there. He was a right mix of person driving technology and understand people management.

Recently, I am inspired greatly by the VP of Engineering at QuickOffice, the legendary David Halpin. Amazingly deep in Technology plus extraordinary understanding of processes and human psyche, that is how he had been delivering successful products after products all his life.

Last I cannot go without talking about Gouri Pendse, the best people’s manager I worked with. This person was clear in terms of people’s behavior and expectations.

I think I was blessed throughout my career with great mentors both on People management and Technology, that I am where I stand today.

2. Share some info about your career graph.

• • After the first 3-4 years in industry, when the mist of confusion got cleared, I focused myself greatly to learning. Learning about Learning itself, Technical Skills, clear foundations. But also I focused on various soft skills, ways to introspect myself whenever the opportunity presented itself.
  Owing to this, at 4 years of experience I become a Project Lead and at 5 years I become a Project Manager. I carried the flagship of Agile when it was just introduced for my Company. At year 6 I was a public speaker for various Google Technologies and already talking on number of platforms in Pune. I joined Google as a Evangelist for a short time. Then joined back my pervious Organization.
  Now at year 9 I am the following
• Associate Architect with QuickOffice
• Hiring Manager for QuickOffice
• Agile Evangelist at Synerzip
• Certified Scrum Master
• Technical Speaker in Pune
• Corporate Trainer
• Project Guide for various Colleges

The most important part is I enjoy everything I do in my work place. I think that is a much bigger achievement than things above.

3. What exactly you wanted to do when you started career?
I understood little when I started, like most of us. But overall, as I knew more, I was more and more inclined towards Leading an important effort in an Organization. I thought of leading a complete department both people wise and technology wise. Most important was to lead in an unconventional ways; Unconventional ways, which are logically sane, which makes people feel better about themselves. Making the people assets and treating them like one, this one thought was always on the top of my mind.

4. What kind of difficulties you had faced while entering into this career field?

Quite frankly I faced two difficulties. One within my self and one within the way companies function.

Difficulty within Myself:

I learned an important lesson in life, “Life is very fair”. It’s we who make it sound like unfair. My basic difficulty was to believe I deserve more, when I did not. It was not until I joined a class “Hope Academy”, not until I learned about mediation to see things clearly, not until I studied Psychology, I understood, my Ego came in my way to learn more and improve more.

This is something which people don’t talk about hence I do.
Once I came over the issue of “Life is not fair”, my learning and understanding took a leap beyond any bounds. This is where I was born again.

Another difficulty I faced due to ambitions and high goals, was deteriorating physical and mental health. Yes, we all know it quite common in IT. But I realized this will be a hurdle always.

Difficulty within Organizations:

Most organizations treat people like resources. By resources I mean objects. This is the first basic flaw they have. Often Processes are much more important than people. I saw this as a basic issue, which leads to “Lack of pro activeness” in all bigger organizations.

I mean the basic disregard to people was amazingly profound. I when joined such organization felt ignored, part of a crowd, with no regard to my contribution to the organization. The result was a similar feeling towards the organization from my side.

5. Share with our readers about discovery period when you were facing difficulties in your career?

Looking at my own difficulties I discovered Life is very fair, it gives you right opportunities, you just have to say “Yes” to them. The only way to grow up (instead of growing old) was to “Plan, Act and Introspect”.

I discovered that I actually loved learning (I bet it’s the same with others), but this got lost due to conflicts in my own mind.

On the career side I learned everything in the following manner

1. Why
2. What
3. How

This made any big technical problem small. Now the why was more important. Given an Enterprise solution, once the Why is understood and What is understood, half the journey is done.
Amazingly, a clarity in thought came to me and when I shared the same with people around me, they too took very well to it.

I remember when I was in Persistent Systems. After a while, I stopped blaming and complaining and took to serious study of Java, Enterprise Java and the product I worked on in general. I was joined by my collegauge Aditya (a QA person that time, now a Developer in Tibco), we two studied the Why, the What and we shared ideas on the How.

Now the Work was exciting and happening!

About the discovery in Organization, I learned the only way to get respect is to give respect. World is a Mirror, What you give is what you get back.

Certain thoughts made place in my mind, I was clear I need to follow them whenever I have a say in leading a group

1. Put people over processes, they will make wonders happen for you.

2. Giving right Gratitude, earns back the right respect
3. Tell people What, they will amaze you with the How

6. Share with our readers about your experiment period after discovery period?

This was an exciting period in my life. Often in organizations there is a basic disconnect

1. What boss wants and what people do?

2. Understanding of why people are payed

3. Who is considered as a top performer?
4. Leadership and Learning is a continous process

In fact above where answers which came to me, from my experiments.

First Experiment, I did was I had a frank talk with my then mentor “Gouri Pendse”. We talked openly about what she expects and I did. Initially it started from her side, which I picked up and continued. I was surprised a number of times, to see what she often wanted, I did not think about. As this gap diminished, I made her redundant in her current role, she got promoted, so did I

Second experiment, I took to was due to my desire to earn more. I wanted to understand the secret to earn more. Here again my mentor, Gouri told me in simple terms

“If you want to earn more mooha, you need to make company earn more mooha”. I think everyone who hears this, would say “we already know so”, but really knowing and acting on it are two different things.
I took every opportunity to expand my team, working with my client and selling more ideas. The team was expanded to twice the size, my salary too bloated up.

Third experiment. I wanted to be top performer in my Company. But before I put energy I wanted to know what it means. I did understand very well, that what ever I do extra, should not affect my current work. I trained my team to be expert in that (and they did splendid good). With the extra time at hand, I started defining “Top Performer”.

I talked to the CTO of my company “Vinayak Joglekar” about my desire to be some day in his shoes. Amazingly, he revealed the great secret, he told “I reason, I am a CTO of this company is not only because I know technology, or because I know the right kind of people, but mainly due to the fact, the right kind of people know me”.

This clicked, it made sense, My Smart Work, needs to be firstly seen, then appreciated and replicated. Only then, I would be recognized as a thought leader and a Top Performer.

I got my definition of a Top Performer – “The one who not only himself/herself is Good in what he/she does, but also brings the same effectiveness in his/her team or organization”.
Believe me, this was a definition of “A” in our appraisal sheet and it still is

Fourth Experiment was very simple; it was to follow all this every day without any exception. I became a Project Manager the same year

This was about one stage in my life. In a stage not so far in past. I was effective but struggling with people I worked. It was shared with me in my appraisals, that I cannot let people work at their pace and some people cannot and will not follow mine.
First human reaction was I was taken a back with the fact, I was still not able to see the mirror. Lesson learned, it’s a process, I need to keep taking feedback from others. I consulted my Team Lead Yogesh Patel (a great guy by the way). He told me simply, you do lead by example, but you definitely need to give people space. He continued, If I pushed them further some people will go negative or go mum. And Yes that was happening with few of my team members.

Next project, I learned from my Team Lead Yogesh, lead by example and gave people space. This time, I took off my judge hat and threw it. I continued to be show gratitude to my team, as they were really working well. Amazingly, this time the results where extra ordinary. I was extremely proud of my team. All of them performed very well, everyone was an expert in one or two aspects of the product, process or technology. This was the best team I got the opportunity to work with.

“Lead by Example, Give Space”

On other experiment, more on Technology side. I kept of learning not only the technology I worked on but anything which was interesting. I saw, no two technology are disjoint, some where the same principles are followed. I had worked on Enterprise Java initially, then databases alone, then Web 2.0. Then cloud computing, now mobile applications.

Concentrating on the Why and What, but understanding the commonality in the how gave me great insight into products architected well. They all leveraged Engineering Principles. There was real engineering work done, instead of just using some apis and building a application.

I am not sure you will look at this as an experiment, but the end result is very important. Under the leadership of one of my mentors “Keith”, we delivered a software library to Google. Google was struggling with an engineering problem. We took on the engineering problem, instead of relying on third party solutions, we built everything from scratch knowing this needs to be better than anything in the world.
An Office with few people of my profile and rest 25-27 years experience people delivered a library to Google, which would become part of their backend.

Now how cool is that!

7. What are your future plans? Or now what is your vision for next five years?
Frankly, Career plans don’t work. Instead I would talk about what I would like to do wherever I work

1. Work only where my goals and my company’s goal match. “Be no 1 in market, and feel great working towards it.”

2. Understand business needs and plan how to make company become no 1 in that (yes even as an Architect or Project Manager, I can make a difference)

3. Align everyone I work with to Company’s goals.
4. Make more leaders out of people. Make a breeding ground for more thought leaders.

I see that being possible as a VP Engineering or Director of Engineering. But time will tell, as long as I do what I love to do, role and place hardly matter

8. What will be your advice/suggestion for new candidates for entering into your field?

I can talk a lot, but for new candidates just be like “Aamir” in the movie “3 Idiots”. Give more importance on how you Feel when you work than what money or status it gets you.

You must become an expert into one thing in life to be able to succeed. Plan, Act and Introspect through out the life. And most important, thank people, even those who create problems as they are giving you opportunity to grow further.

For people in IT industry, please learn, learn and learn then practice, practice and practice. Growth will happen automatically.

But most important while doing all this, I made sure did I sleep more than 8 hours a day.

Let me tell you a small story, I just heard yesterday. There was competition between lumber jacks. In the finals there where two people selected Bob and John. They had a curtain between them, so they cannot see each other. The competition was to cut maximum lumber in 4 hours.

In the first hour Bob (better build than John) chopped 6 trees, while John chopped 4. Next hours Bob was down to 5 and John was still 4. Then Bob reduced to 3 and then to 2. John was 4 constant

Hour	Bob	John
1	5	4
2	4	4
3	3	4
4	2	4
Total	14	16

While Bob just worked hard every hours and harder at the end, Bob worked smart. Every hour he took a break of 10 minutes from chopping and sharpened his axe. So he was well rested and the axe was always sharp. Bob put the same energy into his work as in the beginning but his axe was blunt.

I do what John does, I spend few hours every day studying, learning and introspecting, making my axe sharper and sharper.

If you young guys can follow this, you will get my kind of Success, “With everything like money and status coming your way, every day of life is doing what you enjoy and feeling good about it”

9. LinkedIn URL

http://in.linkedin.com/in/rohitghatol

10. Twitter URL

http://twitter.com/rohitghatol

11. Websites URL

http://blog.punegtug.org/

http://progressiveagile.blogspot.com/

http://progressivechannel.blogspot.com/

http://pune-logic-puzzles.blogspot.com/

http://pune-java-puzzles.blogspot.com/

12. Tel / Mobile

Mobile – 9923085006

Profile :

Leadership is taking strong decisions when needed

Today, i would jot down some points about Leadership, especially around taking stern decisions.

Being a Leader is not a position or event in time, its a process. Its a process governed by some simple ethics and principles.

One of the characters of being a leader is showing Courage when your are expected and especially when you are not expected to show it.

Things are always easy to tell as a story.

A person in my team for name sake I will call him Johnny. Johnny is a productive person from my team. I am proud to have him onboard and he has some skills that add real value to the team.

Our team recently had a change in our core business hours, also over all there are some org level changes going on. All this puts a strain on the entire chain. As my role of Scrum Master, I took all that I could and shield the team from other impact. But there is always chance of me improving and hence some of these strain did got passed over.

Johnny may be took it in a different mindset and decided to call it quits. Its bad we are losing a productive person. But at the same time, till the time he is relieved (which in India is around 1 month to 2 months of notice period), more issues surfaced.

Johnny did not particularly had loss of productivity, but choose to relax and let team take the heat. However, no matter how good he is, when one tries to take advantage of the situation, its not right to allow it.

Release time came, team is taking the heat, fellow peers are asking him to chip by making it to Office in core business hour. Johnny, in his pride took to the thought, I am good and I will not give in to these restrictions. Not unacceptable, if you don't believe don't live it. But in an organization as long as the contract is there, please complete it and go on.

This story continues as this. There is a mail exchange to discuss relieving date. As all these mails are they are beautiful. They show a lot of emotions and affinity and much of it is true also.

I reply to this email, agreeing to the fact, we had great time together and he was an assets to us. It continues to say that this not being lived up to now.

The message clearly acknowledges the fact, that this person was good in his work and that I was proud to work with him, at the same time, it clearly mentioned that current behavior was quite opposite. I even mentioned, that If I were asked to complete the formalities of relieving him, would I sign "OK". I mentioned "NO", I am not ok.

I believe being a leader, you have to take firm decisions, strong but thoughtful steps, which talk about transparency. People should know what is fine working in what situation and what is not fine. No mixed feeling, no confusion there.

Yes you where good in the past, but if it comes to saying "Has he completed his formalities?", the answer is what it is seen as. The past and present are different. A Hero in the past can not get away with his/her ignorance in the present. A Hero has to grow up to be a Leader by being a Hero through and through.

Cheers,

Rohit

Playing Games is the best way to learn - You must try it too

Open up to playing Games - Learn like never before!

Today, my Agile Mentor Vinayak Joglekar, showed us one concept by making us play a game.

So far, I liked playing games, but felt ridiculous to initiate one. Yes, I call myself an Agile Evangelist, but there was a ice breaking required.

Vinayak is Founder and CTO of our firm Synerzip Softech. He helped us start a group named Agile Evangelist. We meet every monday at a coffee play to discuss things.

Today we played a Game which showed us the basic principles of Kanban.

Here is the premise of the game. There are two designers who keep designing module, they pass it to the two developers. The developer in turn pass it to one QA who passes on to one Deploy Person.

The key thing of the game is the productivity factor introduced by giving each person a dice. Along with dice each designer is given a set of cards.

The flow of cards is from Designer -> Developer -> QA ->Deploy (From right to left)

How it is played?

Understand the purpose of Dice and Cards.

Dice show the productivity of a person each day. People have good days and bad days, and his does effect their productivity. The cards represent the amount of work they got done.

Each person rolls the dice and for each dot on the dice they pass those many no of cards.

This means if Designer rolled dice and had 5 dots, he will pass five cards to the Developer. If developer rolled the dice and he had 2 dots, he can pass 2 cards to the QA. If QA rolled the dice and it had 4 dots, he can still only pass 2 cards as that's what he had.

Also, at any given time, a person can keep rolling the dice and he may not have any cards to pass, so he waits until he has cards to pass on.

Phase 1

Be Super man and take max items on your plate

1 Dot = 1 Card

2 Dots = 2 Cards

3 Dots = 3 Cards

4 Dots = 4 Cards

5 Dots = 5 Cards

6 Dots = 6 Cards

In phase one each person rolls the dice and passes those many cards to person on left. So if a person constantly roll 5 he will keep passing 5 cards to left. Now it the person on Left, constantly rolls 2 he will keep passing 2 and more cards will pile up with him.

Why does this happen? Think about it for a while.

Phase 2:

Be a Normal person (and wear your underwear on the inside)

1-3 Dot = 1 Card

4-6 Dots = 2 Cards

We have learned our lesson, we take limited work on our plate at time.

Play this version to see what is the result.

Overall, we observed unlike before any time, a person does not have a pile of cards with him/her. The person's mood does not effect his productivity so much. Overall we limited the threshold of work a person can pass on (meaning process).

At last, the moral of the study. Don't try to be Superman, wearing your underwear on the inside , is more comfortable.

Cheers,

Rohit

Selling within Company

Evangelizing Agile sounds great to hear. But like any things if the goals are not decide, you will reach where you intended, which is NOWHERE.

Step 1: Set Simple Goals to achieve, mine are

1. Make Synerzip follow Agile more than before. Be more specific - All team to do Daily Scrums in next 2 months
2. Evangelize Synerzip's Agile Profile to rest of the world.
3. Have loads of fun while doing it

Step 2: Catch what we do right, before asking people to act on new ones

1. You can only EVANGELIZE, if you can catch People doing RIGHT Things. And Surprising people do a lot of right things :)
2. Simple principles to remember, when dealing with People.
   a. Criticizing NEVER HELPS
   b. What is appreciated gets repeated, what is ignored disappears.
   c. Making interaction between people a Celebration, is the best way to make it a Ritual
3. Appreciate publicly what you see your people doing Good. They will not only open their ear but their hearts to you.

Step 3: Talk more about people within than people out side

1. Interview one team and find out what they do right in Agile. Record the Interview, Write the Interview and Publish it first inside.
2. One team does one thing better than other team. The goal is to show the good in very team to inspire others to follow it. Caution - Never ever Compare.
3. Let team compete amongst themselves, this is a welcome social change. Infact, encourage this.

Step 4: Reward should be achieving the Goal itself

1. Instead of Monetary goals or KPIs, make people who helped achieve the goals as Star of the Organization.
2. Publish his/her interviews on Youtube or blog (Ofcourse after talking to legal).
3. Nothing can compare to a person being highlighted in a unique way. e.g Brijesh carried the Agile flagship for my team in Synerzip.

My 50 Cents, more for later

Cheers,

Rohit

Leading by example - Playing Scrum Master in difficult scenario

Like a lot of people I have taken certification in scrum practice and understand it. Often for one reason or another we are asked to or made to abandon our Scrum Master hat.

I would like to be different, and I am ready to pay the price, Smilingly :). I am one of the few who is lucky to have a Great team, who loves me and adores me. And I mean Great, Guys who take responsibilities, don't shy way from additional loan when it comes. Guys who can solve any problem in the world. This bonding and building of Great team, happened due to lot of things I learn in my Scrum Master Training (Thanks to my coach Pette Deemers).

It was there where I learned to be a Servant, Body Guard and Coach for my team.

Quite recently it happened, I was asked to finish some fixed number of Goals in bug fixing sprint. The team worked fabulously and by half the sprint our first goal of 0 Defect looked close. Since this was the most important goal for the sprint, I asked the team to only focus on that till it look almost easily achievable. After half the sprint, I asked the guys to see if they can take up the other goals as well. And they did great on that, distributed it amongst themselves.

The came another Goal (disguising itself as stretched goal). Team has Priority 1,2,3,4 and Priority 5 gets added, asking them to start on it in parallel.

What do we do here? I am sure many of us have faced this situation and most of us give me.

For the greater good, its always worth stretching and giving in. But for a priority 5 goal, you need to take out and wear your scrum master hat.

I stood for the principle, its the team call to start with Goal 5 in parallel or get Goal 1,2,3,4 to delivery. Its more like Kanban, at one point in time, team will do X no of things not more.

Being Scrum Master is not easy not unless you put in your heart and job on the line. If I am trained to be a Scrum Master and payed to play the role of a Scrum Master, I should just play it.

Yes, today I was a Protector. Tomorrow, I have become a coach to show higher management the side me and my team can clearly see.

Chao,

Rohit

Are you really following the spirit of Agile?

Agile is very powerful tool for success of a Company and its clients.

But the question is are you really following the true spirit of Agile?

Answer the following questions and find out.

1. Do all the members in your team share responsibilities?

2. Do all the members in your team know clearly what is to be done with in a sprint?

3. Is the metrics e.g completion status and bug count up to date by itself?

4. Do your developers and QA spend most of their time on their desk working instead of meetings?

5. Is most of the stories/features completed with no bugs with in a sprint?

6. Do priorities comes from Product Management and estimations/cost come from Developers/QA?

7. Are there no extra meetings than daily scrum, sprint planning and demo meetings?

If you answer Yes to most at least 5 questions than your are following Agile to a good extend.

The irony I have seen in Organizations (prev Waterfall) people are been told to follow Agile. Agile can not be told be followed, he has to be sold. Its more of a mindset than a process.

Any Process that is closer to becoming a mindset has much better chances staying alive.

Lets start at ground level up, by following agile your Developers and QA should have following benefits

1. They should be spending more time doing their core work on their desks. If they are in any meetings these must be mostly due to their own need to collaborate on understanding a feature or design or an approach. If your developers and QA are being pulled in to meetings by project manager, THIS IS NOT AGILE.
2. Agile means doing common sense, more trust delegated to people. If asked to any member of the team what is the sprint goal and upcoming release goal, the developer/qa must be able to clearly mention this. This is what we call People over Processes. We invest in people and trust in people. Processes are need only when
   1. Managers fail to communicate the goal to the team
   2. Organization lacks trust
   3. Weak Leadership which is unable to replace people who do not align with
   Organizations's Supreme Goal.
   That is why I am against extreme processes. An Organization which relies heavily on Processes is either
   1. Concentration Camp
   OR
   2. Deck of Cards which keeps on falling apart
   
   
3. Agile needs team members who can share responsibilities. The easiest way to make this happen is to show employees that you have trust in them and keep on grooming them. Keep appreciating regularly what people do correct, so it becomes a habit and keep communicating what is expected from them, so they are constantly reminded. If your team has 1-2 heros who pull of things, this is a BAD sign. ACT NOW and give others opportunity to become successful with in the team.
4. You as the person in charge needs to make sure team is not pulled into extra meetings (which management requires) and they are stopped from working. This only means they are always serving others and in doing so staying late. Project Manager/Scrum Master needs to go to the team and provide them information instead of calling them to meetings. I personally saw this helps in getting a team extremely productive and motivated.
5. Lets go a level up, team should be provided the right information at the right time. Only then you can expect productivity out of them. Product Managers are required to communicate what they want from the team well before next sprint. They are to clearly give every thing the team needs. Say mockups for functionality expected. If Product management is stretched or absent, a QA preferably or developer should be assigned a story to create a mockup or PoC of the work to be done in next sprint. This than has to be then frozen by Product Owner/Manager. Idea is team needs to be told what is expected out of them.
   Another important and most difficult point is estimations should come unbiased from team members. Although most Organizations like to have some control on these, more or less Team Members should be told to drive the estimates to get the best quality shippable product
6. The team needs to become mature for Agile mind set. This is all about taking responsibilities and understand how metrics and information flows in deciding the fate of Organization. Ground level metrics (light weight) like how much a user story is complete, which user story is started on, what is the bug count, needs to be done by the team by itself. Unless this does not happen, team is not mature. The team needs to understand where their status updates and metrics used at high level to take decisions.

The above can not be found in any Agile book or workshop, but had been by personal experience to running a highly effective team.

My 50 Cents on finding out If you are really Agile or not.

Evangelizing Agile in your Company

Evangelism is selling your ideas.

An Evangelist is a sales man who sells a way of doing things. Like any sales, you sell the following

1. Convenience

2. Dream

3. Better Self Esteem

Rules of Evangelism (in short what sells)

Evangelist has to sell ideas, basically implant the ideas in some one else head. Unless we don't have the technology of "Inception", we will have to make do with following

Non Intrusive

Never intrude or force your employees to listen to your evangelism speech. That's not evangelism. Do not force them to watch some thing or spam their inbox or force them into unwanted meetings or sessions or workshops.

Psychology says brain rejects anything which is forced. Brain accepts any thing which is strange, extra ordinary and interesting

Attract, Evangelize and Reward

First you need to find ways to make people come to you. Often organizations are autocratic in forcing ideas, they should instead be selling ideas.

Forced Ideas never stick, Sold Ideas not only stick they grow.

Some Fun ways of doing Evangelism for Agile

Agile Fiesta

Inviting People to the occasion

Every now and then call on to Agile Fiesta in your company. This is a reward to them to let them freak out and enjoy.

Remember, If you want people to come, please invite them for free food and drinks. Important point to note is they are your guests and not just your employees.

Yes, Certain Investment is required.

Investments in knowledge and learning pays out big time throughout life

Some stalls are for food, some are for agile (Food for brain)

Evangelize

Have your evangelist, sell Agile. Their key work is to talk to people one on one who approach them. Apart from selling Agile, they should talk to them about how things work and not work in their group.

Evangelist are public speakers but also great Listener

Question: How to make sure people go to the stalls?

Answer: Probably you are asking the wrong question, in the first place.

Question should be : How to make it interesting and fun to people to go to the stalls?

Answer: Simple, like in any carnival and fiesta, people go to the most fun stalls to play games and win some thing

Question: How to make sure people find their way to agile stalls?

Answer:At any stall, a person gets a Agile-Learning Sheet. He has to take this with him to each stall, if he wants to win a reward and be eligible for the lottery.

When a person talks to an Evangelism, based on the interaction and depth of questions. The Evangelist gives stars to him/her. This could even work in this way, a stall has 3 people telling 3 aspects of Scrum. Each can give one type of star. If the person talks to all 3 people at the stall, they win all the stars for Scrum.

Here is how it can look

Agile-Learning Sheet

Reward and Lottery

At the Reward and Lottery stall, the people who had filled the Agile-Learning Sheet exchange it for rewards.

The rewards are based on how many stars the person earned. Also, all the people who turned in filled in sheets are eligible for lottery.

Rewards have to relevant to what is being evangelized.

Go on Evangelize Agile!