Physical-Digital Transformation at a 125 year-old startup

Researching and experimenting the transformation of a traditional industrial business to adapt and thrive in changing times, two GE engineering leaders share their transformation through stories and pictures – illustrating their shared failures and successes in applying innovative Scrum techniques across GE’s traditional hardware and physical engineering-oriented business units with significant software integrated into their products.

Organizations that undertake an agile transformational journey have multiple challenges to overcome in transitioning to an agile mindset within the organization to ensure positive outcomes and transformational culture change. Doing so at one of the world’s largest conglomerates focused on designing, manufacturing, and servicing large industrial assets brings some unique challenges in adopting scrum and requires creativity, innovation, and persistence.

Sudhir and Lars have been at the forefront of agile transformation across multiple ‘physical’ GE businesses including Aviation, Healthcare, Oil & Gas, and Global Research. Each of these organizations pose different organizational and cultural adoption challenges and through real-life pictures, the speakers will share their journey and lessons-learned in driving GE’s transformation into a Digital-Industrial company. 

Learning Objectives

Participants will be able to glean from the presenters some of the challenges in initiating and sustaining agile and how they can as an organization account for some of these same challenges and overcome pre-conceived notions that may manifest themselves in their own organizations. The participants will also leave with an appreciation for the complexities of agile in the industrial domain and how agile can play an important part as a learning, execution and experimentation engine. 

Sudhir Nelvagal

Digital Mission Leader @ GE Global Research

Sudhir Nelvagal is a Digital Mission Leader at GE’s Global Research Center based in Niskayuna, NY. He has 22 years of software engineering experience, developing relational database engines for the first 10 years of his career at a commercial database company. Since moving to GE 12 years ago, he has held various leadership roles in GE Healthcare, headed the Subsea Controls software group in GE Oil & Gas and is presently working on IoT technologies at GE’s research center since 2016. He has been a champion, practitioner and evangelist of all things Agile.

K. Lars Bruns

Technology Leader @ GE Global Research

Lars Bruns is a Technology Leader for GE Global Research’s Digital Breakout initiatives. He began his career at Andersen Consulting/Accenture where he worked in the financial services industry for ten years before transitioning into the healthcare industry with GE Healthcare in 2006. Lars has been driving agile and culture change initiatives for the past 10 years and has been leading teams at GE’s Global Research Center since 2013.

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