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

January 8, 2021 by The Agile Revolution

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“

TheAgileRevolution-190 (51 minutes)

Episode 186: Managing the Unmanageable with Ron Lichty

July 13, 2020 by The Agile Revolution

Craig fires some questions at Ron Lichty, co-author of “Managing the Unmanageable” and the “Study of Product Team Performance“:

Author of machine Language programming books “Programming the Apple IIGS in Assembly Language” and “Programming the 65816“
Managing the Finder team at Apple – hired for stellar C++ coding ability and customer empathy
Software development is a team sport – including QA, a dedicated product manager / product owner and designers
After Dark and Flying Toasters at Berkeley Systems
“Managing the Unmnageable” is 9 chapters and around 300 rules of thumb and nuggets of wisdom (the creamy centre), the tools used to manage software development teams plus the authors own insights
There were very few books (7 at the time) on managing software developers (unlike project management and agile)
Fred Brooks – “The Mythical Man-Month“
Situational Leadership – opens your eyes to delegating and supporting the people on your team
The most important rule – always be recruiting
The Study of Product Team Performance – effective onboarding correlates with the highest performance teams (yet 7% consider this to be a best practice)
Self organising teams are where every single member of the team is a leader from their expertise
A team created definition of done may be one of the most important practices in Agile
The frequency of standups correlates with the performance of the team
The Daily Standup was not intended to be a status meeting but rather a replanning meeting
Teams that have stories for their entire backlog are correlated with the highest level of team performance
Steve Bockman – “Practical Estimation” and “Predictability“
Pragmatic Institute framework – the skills of a Product Management
Ambiguities in the requirements typically popup in the middle of the programming, which is why it is so valuable to have a Product Owner nearby to address these
Software development is a team sport – what gates teams is collaboration and communication – we need to nurture and provide support for that to thrive
We have two ears and one mouth and we need to use them in that proportion
We can’t over communicate in software development

TheAgileRevolution-186 (49 minutes)

Episode 126 – Agile Snotfest

April 19, 2017 by The Agile Revolution

Renee has been busy being sick (and Tony and Craig are sick of being busy) and thus it has been a long time between cough syrup for our Revolutionists…