Tag Archives: Heart of Agile

Episode 185: Heart of Agile Academy with Alistair Cockburn & Soledad Pinter

by

2

Tony, Renee and Craig speak to Alistair Cockburn and Soledad Pinter about the newly launched Heart of Agile Academy:

  • The Heart of Agile Academy is the opportunity to reset Agile learning with a clean sheet of paper
  • The core design decisions were to remove the classes being tied to a title and to be better at the specialities that make up the Heart of Agile
  • Heart of Agile is just four words or focus areas: Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect and Improve
  • Alistair and Ahmed Sidky tried to solve this problem in 2010 when they launched ICAgile
  • There are over 3,000 different certification programs for Agile
  • The Academy has courses at different levels that are taught by Agile experts from around the world (and in multiple languages)
  • There is an accreditation ladder and process for bringing on new courses and trainers
  • Designed to be a marketplace for Agile classes and open for business now!
  • The values of the Heart of Agile community are openness, dialogue and humanity

TheAgileRevolution-185 (50 minutes)

Advertisement

Episode 181: Change it with the BOSSAnova with Jutta Eckstein

by

1

Craig and Tony are at YOW! conference in Brisbane and chat with Jutta Eckstein, author of “Agile Software Development in the Large“, “Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams“, “Retrospectives for Organisational Change” “Diving for Hidden Treasures: Uncovering the Cost of Delay in Your Project Portfolio” with Johanna Rothman and “Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy: Survive & Thrive on Disruption” with John Buck

  • Smalltalk and pattern languages was where a lot of the early work and a lot of the early players converged
  • Scrum had great marketing and certification over Extreme Programming
  • Agile Software Development in the Large came out in 2004 and was probably way before its time
  • Craig Larman and Bas Vodde book “Scaling Lean & Agile Development“
  • IBM book “A Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum“
  • A framework is not really necessary, stick with the Agile values and principles regardless of your context
  • Heart of Agile (and Tony’s rant on scaling)
  • 40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes
  • Retrospectives are great for any sort of change, not just software
  • There is no way of becoming Agile as a company without the CFO on board and moving from yearly budgeting – beyond budgeting assists from both the money side and the strategic side
  • Sociocracy looks at the organisation from the structure side – we need to build structures that allow us to make decisions more quickly through double linking and built in feedback loops
  • Open Space techniques are essential for facilitation and product liftoff and about using the passion of the people for innovation of your products
  • If you trust people maybe its cheaper than checking procedures
  • Need some background, come up with a hypothesis, design some experiments and measure
  • Experiments need to be safe to fail – either if the hypothesis is not true or the outcome is not valuable
  • Not “safe to fail” but “failing safely” or “safe to learn”
  • Publish your experiments so people can learn from each other (even if only internally)
  • agilebossanova.com – collecting stories
  • Agile Alliance Speaker Reimbursement initiative – support for Agile meetups and conferences to bring in external speakers and go towards cover travel reimbursements

TheAgileRevolution-181 (41 minutes)

Episode 179: The Heart of Agile Distilled with Alistair Cockburn

by

4

Tony and guest host Phil Gadzinski talk to Alistair Cockburn for a brief overview and understanding about the Heart of Agile (and the link to how it all started in Australia):

  • Scrum training had turned into training wheels and consistency – wanted to get back to the essence of Agile
  • Progression from shu (follow techniques), ha (collect techniques) and ri (fluency) – wanted to move to a fourth stage – kokoro (heart or essence of being a samurai – master the basics)
  • Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect, Improve – simple and direct, just do this and you will get all the benefits out of Agile
  • Normally you start with collaborate (because it’s the easiest and most obvious place to start) but there is no real starting point
  • Deliver is misunderstood – forget software and product, we are delivering decisions, it is the molecule of our work, every decision needs to see the harsh light of day so we can find the bad decisions early
  • What is the smallest that we could expose to review to try and correct decisions early before we build too much (directional decisions)
  • Create a culture of listening

This interview was originally recorded as a video for the Agile Brisbane meetup.

TheAgileRevolution-179 (17 minutes)

Episode 177: The Human Side of Agile for Non-Software Teams with Gil Broza

by

2

Renee and Craig are at Agile 2019 in Washington, DC and talk to Gil Broza, Agile Mindset and Leadership Coach / Trainer at 3P Vantage and author of “The Agile Mind-Set“, “The Human Side of Agile” and “Agile for Non-Software Teams” and they talk about:

  • Agile 2019 talk – “How to Help your Non-Software Colleagues Adopt Agile“
  • Outside of software, they notice Agile and want what they have – a different team experience and doing things better
  • Focus on a principle based transformation rather than practices – have conversations early and often on how we want to be and how we want to operate
  • The Agile Manifesto principles are partial and software heavy, the values and beliefs are the root and leadership should keep these alive
  • 26 principles in “The Agile Mind-Set” book and includes transparency (which is harder in areas like HR and Finance)
  • Craig’s Agile 2010 talk “I’m The Business & Agile Was My Idea” (and we were before our time!)
  • The practices really don’t matter and there aren’t really equivalents outside of software
  • We are obsessed with the how in Agile (the implementation), Lean has always been about principles
  • We have crossed the chasm of Agile at team level but not at scale – or have we? Nail it before you scale it!
  • Ceremonies mean people turn up and go through the motions (The Scrum Guide says events), use workflow instead of process (which means I do work and send it in for approval), work item or task instead of user story (Scrum calls them backlog items)
  • The common denominator between software and the rest of the organisation is the principles
  • If you don’t think differently, doing differently won’t matter
  • Renee recommends “The Human Side of Agile” as well as “Coaching Agile Teams” for new Scrum Masters
  • Heart of Agile (Gil is not familiar with it so Renee and Craig channel their inner Tony to explain it!)
  • Oath of Non Allegiance
  • Are you coaching around values, principles and mindset or practices?

TheAgileRevolution-177 (57 minutes)

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

by

1

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

by

1

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)

Episode 116: The Heart of Modern Agile

by

6

heartmodernagileCraig and Tony are sipping a sarsaparilla or two on a balcony in Brisbane and start trying to dissect the state and heart of modern agility:

TheAgileRevolution-116 (46 minutes)