Tag Archives: Craig Smith

Episode 175: Self Selecting Teams & Olympic Lessons with Sandy Mamoli

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Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and chat with Sandy Mamoli, Agile Advisor and Coach at Nomad8 and co-author of “Creating Great Teams” and they chat about:

  • Nomad8 is a managerless agile coaching collective in New Zealand, based on the Crisp model
  • The lost podcast
  • Kanbanfor1 (and Jim Benson – Personal Kanban)
  • “Creating Great Teams” book with David Mole – based on the journey at Trade Me, if people can organise themselves for a Ship It day it should work for everyday work
  • You do not need to change reporting structures to make self selection work nor does the size of the organisation matter
  • Original paper on Self Selection
  • Larger companies should probably split to tribes of no larger than 150-200 people
  • Heidi Helfand – “Dynamic Reteaming” book and podcast
  • Should do self selections again every 6-9 months
  • Team structures can change during a self selection as required
  • You usually need multiple rounds of self selection, rounds are usually about 10 minutes long
  • YOW! 2017 talk “How the Olympics Can Make You a Better Person” and Agile Australia talk
  • “Be the worst player on the best team that will take you” – allows you to amplify learning
  • AgileWelly
  • State of Agile in New Zealand – along with Australia are ahead of the USA due to smaller companies, age of companies, less fear and more innovation
  • Agile Principle and Modern Agile  and Liftoff cards
  • Holocracy – pushing decisions into circles has allowed fast and good decisions, this will continue to evolve
  • #JAFAC conference

TheAgileRevolution-175 (40 minutes)

Episode 174: Dynamic Reteaming with Heidi Helfand

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Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and talk to Heidi Helfand, Director of Engineering Excellence at Procore Technologies and author of Dynamic Reteaming and they talk about:

  • YOW! 2017 talk “Dynamic Reteaming: The Art & Wisdom of Changing Teams“
  • The general belief is the best teams are the ones that are stable and don’t change, but the opposite is often reality
  • Dynamic Reteaming is inevitable, you might as well get good at it
  • Tuckman added adjourning later, as an acknowledgment that things don’t stay the same
  • Teams by percentage gives dynamic reteaming a bad name – this is an antipattern
  • Good agile practices tend to help the ability to dynamically reteam
  • Ties nicely into Modern Agile, particularly experiment and learn rapidly as well as make people awesome
  • Dr. Spok – the “single point of knowledge”, may he live long and prosper!
  • Shared experiences and fun are great ways to break down the barriers and build community
  • Drexler/Sibbet model
  • GTKY – Getting to Know You Lunch – budget to encourage people to get to know each other, especially in companies that are growing fast
  • Innovation by Isolation Pattern – GoToMyPC was created this way
  • Dan Pink – “Drive“
  • Sandy Mamoli – “Creating Great Teams” – “what would you if you weren’t afraid?”
  • Dan Mezick – “show a new idea and invite people to try it”
  • Craig Larman – “you need to own ideas and not rent them”
  • Episode 106: Turning the Agile Ship Around with David Marquet and intent based leadership
  • What is the sweet spot for freedom where the things I want to to do match with the goals of the company and freedom for learning

TheAgileRevolution-174 (38 minutes)

Episode 173: Modern Agile (Is Not A Framework) with Joshua Kerievsky

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Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and catch up with Joshua Kerievsky, CEO of Industrial Logic and founder of Modern Agile and they talk about:

  • Episode 20: Lean Start-ups with Joshua Kerievsky
  • Industrial Logic and the Extreme Programming Playing Cards
  • If you are a consulting company and don’t have your hands dirty building a product, you are missing out – try it out on yourselves before you try it out on your customers
  • Episode 116: The Heart of Modern Agile
  • Modern Agile recognises that there are other people who are not building software who also want to be agile and want to leverage the agile and lean concepts
  • Modern Agile principles – Make People Awesome, Make Safety a Prerequisite, Experiment and Learn Rapidly and Deliver Value Continuously
  • Lightweight methods movement came out of minimalism, but now we are in the Agile Industrial Complex – Agile has lost its simplicity and lightweight qualities
  • People need recipes to get started but we often get stuck on these
  • Forrest Gumping – stupid is as stupid does!
  • A lot of methodologists don’t pay attend to economics – be too idealistic and you won’t make money
  • We are in the business of helping individuals be agile, not organisations
  • Make people awesome is about being obsessed with our customers and making each other awesome in our organisations
  • Kathy Sierra – “Badass: Making Users Awesome” – focus on making the user awesome, not the product
  • Make safety a prerequisite – anzeneering – you can’t make anyone awesome if you can’t protect them
  • Project Aristotle – psychological safety is important for high performance
  • Modern Agile Meeting Agreements Poster
  • “Modern Agile is not a framework” – sing along!
  • * “The leftovers” – we value the things on the left over…
  • Modern Agile activities catalogue
  • Modern Agile Show
  • YOW! 2017 talk “Modern Agile“

TheAgileRevolution-173 (41 minutes)

Episode 172: Business Agility & DevOps Health Radars with Sally Elatta

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Craig catches up with Sally Elatta, president of Agile Transformation and the founder of Agility Health Radar and they chat about:

  • Companies struggle to get the metrics to know if their agile transformations are making a difference, hence the creation of Agility Health Radar
  • Business Agility pillars – customer seat at the table, lean portfolio management, organisation structure and design, agile framework, leadership and culture, make it stick, technology agility and agility metrics
  • DevOps pillars – faster value delivery, higher quality, culture of improvement and building the right product

TheAgileRevolution-172 (27 minutes)

Episode 171 – Beyond Legacy Code with David Bernstein

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Craig is at Agile 2017 in Orlando, Florida and speaks with David Bernstein, author of “Beyond Legacy Code“, and they chat about agile technical practices:

  • Agile does have something to with software development
  • Agile 2017 talk “Create Software Quality
  • The real value of Agile is in the technical practices so we can build iteratively, but still very few people practice them
  • The future is already here, but it is not very well evenly distributed – the same applies to Agile
  • Companies are being consumed by their technical debt and they don’t even recognise it
  • What is always cheaper in the virtual domain is building quality
  • Continuous Integration makes the most painful thing in software development (integration) our greatest asset – this in turn gives us feedback
  • We don’t necessarily know there is a better way to do things – but there is a better way to do things
  • We traditionally think of software as a write once event, but it is write many – users want it changed
  • We think procedurally so object oriented code often ends up being procedural with a class statement wrapped around it
  • Test First Development – very few developers know how to write a good test because they haven’t been taught, it was intended to assist with refactoring
  • Studies show about 10% of people follow the Agile technical practices like XP, and only 10% of those are doing it correctly
  • The mindset of testing is different to the mindset of coding and they are mutually exclusive (in the same way we need editors when writing a book)
  • Refactoring is at two levels because we learn in chunks – we need to do while doing test first as well as in the large
  • “The Art of Agile Development” – spend 10% of your time refactoring
  • Communication – say what, why and for whom before how – we think in implementation
  • CLEAN code – cohesive, loosely coupled, encapsulated, assertiveness and non-redundant
  • Need to understand what quality means in software
  • Troy Magennis talk “I love the smell of DATA in the morning (Getting started with Agile Data Science)“

TheAgileRevolution-171 (34 minutes)

Episode 170: Agile Our Way at Flinders University with Kerrie Campbell

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Craig is as LAST Conference in Canberra and with guest co-host (and co-founder of LAST) Craig Brown they talk to Kerrie Campbell, the CIO at Flinders University in Adelaide and they talk (amongst some unscheduled cup stacking) about:

  • LAST Keynote talk “Flinders University Transformation“
  • Leadership through seeding rather than driving by changing language, building mindset and removing impediments
  • Open the kimono and leaders do Agile by example and muddle through it publicly
  • Story telling to move through the change
  • Eliminating the PMO – don’t need a middle man to get in between the IT and business to slow you down and sort out the projects if the team is cross skilled and cross facilitating
  • Disrupted finance through asking for a five year envelope of money and working and modelling the work that is ready to be done
  • Heart of Agile takes the complexity out of Agile – deliver, trust, reflect and improve
  • The CIO needs to fix the chaos of systems and make them more simple so we can get closer to the customer and work on their innovations
  • State of Agile in Adelaide (and a shout out to the Agile Brisbane and the Melbourne Agile and Scrum meetups)

TheAgileRevolution-170 (21 minutes)

Episode 168: Agile 2019 (Un)bagging

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Craig and Renee are in Washington, DC at Agile 2019 and ahead of day one have some fun and decide to open up the swag bag after collecting their badges and see what is inside:

TheAgileRevolution-168 (48 minutes)

Episode 167: Unlearning and the Improv Effect with Jessie Shternshus

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Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and with guest revolutionist Toby Thompson (who was sitting at the table and initially didn’t want to speak on the podcast but then we couldn’t keep him quiet!) catch up with Jessie Shternshus, CEO at The Improv Effect and author of “CTRLShift“:

  • Agile 2015 keynote “Individuals, Interactions and Improvisation“
  • CTRLShift – 50 games for different types of days you might be happening
  • Agile Australia keynote “Unlearning: The Challenge of Change“
  • When you are facilitating you need to know your audience and believe in what you are doing – to get people involved, do things in small groups in partners so nobody has the attention on them initially and then build them up to group activities
  • Make people safe and get them to laugh – then you have them for the ride
  • Tony imitates a dinosaur (which we keep telling him doesn’t work on a podcast)
  • Introduction Tiebacks – introduce yourself as the facilitator and then when it comes to your turn tie your introduction back to the person who came before you
  • Game ideas come from twists on old games or from things people say
  • Last Letter Conversation – use the last letter from what someone just said to be the first letter of what you say
  • Improv Encyclopedia and a bunch of books are good resources but are usually made for actors (so you need to amend for the workplace)
  • “Improvisation For The Spirit” and “Improv Wisdom” are books more geared towards people and everyday life
  • Agile Australia keynote from Martin Fowler “Agile in 2018” around faux agile
  • Our brains have a hard job letting go, need to help people figure out what’s in it for them (the haveta versus the wanna)
  • The Backwards Brain Bicycle
  • Helping people change comes back to listening and empathy
  • Walkshop – 4 day hike for leaders to help them unlearn and connect
  • Unlearning – need to find experiential learning that helps people unlearn – backwards number game or name things around the room differently
  • Mayor of Weirdsville – dealing with pushback, pretend you are the mayor, make a proclamation and then the rest of the town has to poke holes in your idea

TheAgileRevolution-167 (25 minutes)

Episode 166: A Trip Down Agile Memory Lane with Jeff Smith

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Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and talk to their former leader Jeff Smith, EVP and COO at World Fuel Services and former CEO of Suncorp Business Services:

  • Australian Agile journey took him from Telstra, to a small startup and then to Suncorp, and later IBM and World Fuel Services
  • Scale of thought is more important than scale of people
  • The Suncorp Agile Academy was born out of the fact that learning matters, but the idea was for other companies to create content that could be shared in the Agile community which did not happen
  • Suncorp Building Quality In program
  • It all comes down to great people and working through problem
  • It’s hard for companies to build great leaders that are interested in building great teams
  • Jeff Smith keynote “Leading an Agile Company“
  • Availability is not a skillset
  • Thinking from a team point of view is important – at World Fuel for example, the MTR dropped 80% due to this approach
  • Don’t waste time on people who don’t want to follow what you want to do
  • Most companies surround themselves with the companies being disrupted, not the disruptors – need to work with people and companies who want to change the game
  • You learn a lot from being around better people
  • For ANZ, the key to their Agile journey has been that CEO Shayne Elliott was willing to spend time outside the organisation and learn
  • You need to be structured to support end to end cross functional teams formed around the work – the structure of the team matters
  • The next disruption is the physical versus virtual world, in particular what happens to things like networking appliances
  • It’s easy when something is new to find ways to shut it down, its harder to keep it going

TheAgileRevolution-166 (33 minutes)

Episode 165: Two Years and Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad

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Craig and Tony sit down for a personal chat with the microphone turned on for the first time in 2 years (that is not an interview) (wow, time files…), unfortunately without Renee who was out sick:

TheAgileRevolution-165 (69 minutes)