Episode 190: Talking Agile Live From The Man Cave with Serge Beaumont

Renee, Craig and Tony are together to chat with Serge Beaumont, Principal Agile Coach at Xebia, live from his man cave and despite showing their lack of mathematical skills in relation to dice they chat about:

In relation to culture, if the human connections are there you can handle just about anything
A foundational cultural aspect at Xebia is that they implemented Xebia Knowledge Exchange (XKE) – every second Tuesday the team has dinner and then has a mini-conference of about 20 streams
Xebia were at the foundation of the ING Agile transformation
Gloomhaven
Rode PodMic
You need leadership that truly believes in culture as a powerful thing
Renee does story maps like trees and Serge prefers to ensure that he finds his epic on the horizontal slice rather than using the activities on the vertical backbone, building towards an MVP
All backlogs should be tree structures
An epic is a user story that is too big
Deltas go in the backlog and constraints go in the definition of done
two rules for scaling – autonomy over coordination and Scrum is a fractal
Scrum@Scale
If you think you can assume a big framework forever, you are not Agile – you need to change constantly and not take the rules too seriously
“If SAFe is the only thing they will do to accept Agile, I’ll take it…”
HIP sprints – Hardening Innovation Planning sprints
Bol.com agile transformation – now have a variant of holacracy in place called Spark
TomTom agile transformation
Webinar “Coordinating multiple Scrum teams in times of remote working“
Webinar “Preventing And Dealing With Burn Out From Someone Who Has Experienced It All“