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

June 13, 2020 by The Agile Revolution

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

Episode 169: A Slice of Agile Pi with Betsy Kauffman and Oscar Rodriquez

September 3, 2019 by The Agile Revolution

Craig is in Charlotte, North Carolina and catches up with Betsy Kauffman from Agile Pi and Oscar Rodriquez and they chat about:

40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes at Charlotte Agile Network meetup
The role and the state of Agile coaching
Agile Practice Guide
ICAgile, the ICAgile Certified Expert In Agile Coaching (ICE-AC) and non-framework Agility
Agile and crossing the chasm
The state of Agile in Charlotte and the compliance conundrum
The PMI-ACP is starting to more and more be a job requirement and one benefit is it’s ensuring a wider knowledge of Agile practices exist
The state of Scrum Masters
Meet the organisation (and people) where they are at
OnAgile 2017 Roman Pichler talk “Building a Product Users Want” then straight after Colleen Johnson talk “Death of the Product Roadmap“
It’s a messy complicated world!

TheAgileRevolution-169 (56 minutes)

Episode 168: Agile 2019 (Un)bagging

August 9, 2019 by The Agile Revolution

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:

Air Force One Experience next to the conference hotel in National Harbor
Women In Agile 2019 conference tshirt
Octo Consulting and Lockheed Martin webcam covers and/or popsocket
ICAgile pen
Express Scripts blue tape
Freddie Mac gum (because great teams stick together)
Excella bottle opener
Scrum Inc mobile phone credit card holder
Scrum @ Scale metal straw (which Renee thought looked like a recorder case)
Scaled Agile wooden phone holder
PMI metal straw (which Renee thought was a pen)
Paperwork from Planview (giving away a Yeti Hopper), Lockheed Martin, Insight, Nisum, LitheSpeed (and the theagilevmo.com), Cprime, Esther Derby and her new book “7 Rules for Positive, Productive Change“, Adventures with Agile, Nureva, Express Scripts, The Braintrust Consulting Group, Synerzip (#DontGoChasingWaterfalls), ICAgile (Craig is Certifiably Awesome), Rally, Scaled Agile, Scrum Alliance, PMI, AgilityHealth, CollabNet VersionOne, ServiceNow (and the Ring video doorbell), Fans of LeSS, Deloitte Government Trends 2020, BP, Coveros (and TechWell), Comparative Agility, Scrum.org, CertiProf, UST Global, IIBA (Agile Extension to the BABOK), Netmind, Atlassian, Easy Agile
This podcast brought to you by Unbound DNA
Apollo 11
The ScrumStudy Guide
Clean Language and Judy Rees “Clean Language” book (Renee wants to start the foul language movement)

TheAgileRevolution-168 (48 minutes)

Episode 111: M&Mailbag

June 30, 2016 by The Agile Revolution

Craig and Renee, sitting in a shoe-box sized hotel room in Sydney eating peanut M&Ms, decided to rustle through the mailbag and answer a bunch of outstanding questions.

Note: this episode is not sponsored or endorsed by M&Ms but we certainly enjoy their product!

Crossing The Chasm

more and more organisations seem to be crossing the chasm to Agile, but too many are still just doing and not being Agile
inimal viable product (MVP) is still the trend word, the next stage is Minimal Viable Experience and then Minimal Viable Robustness to Minimal Marketable Product and finally Continuously Evolving Product
Enterprise Transformation Meta Model
Agile is a true north concept, not sure that you will ever get there

Suggested reading list on where to start with Agile:

General Books: Scrum Guide, Extreme Programming Explained
Developers: The Pragmatic Programmer
Scrum Master: The Human Side of Agile
Kanban: Personal Kanban, Kanban In Action
Portfolio: Essential Scrum
Product Owner: Agile Product Management with Scrum, User Story Mapping
Business Analysis: User Stories Applied, Writing Effective Use Cases, Specification By Example, UML Distilled, Agile Extension to the BABOK Guide
Testing: Agile Testing, More Agile Testing
see the Top 100 Agile Books list, unfortunately the world is still too complex

What certification should a new Scrum Master get:

passing through the corporate filter, you probably need some key certification to get a look in
CSM / PSM is valuable if you have a good quality trainer
Kanban resources include the Kanban Yahoo! Group, Kanban and Kanban and Scrum: Making The Most of Both
Craig’s 2010 talk “Kaizen with GreenHopper: Visualising Agile & Kanban Storywalls“
one of the various scaled certifications (versus building your own)
ICAgile pathway is good as it is allows you to be skillset specific
Agile Coaching Institute (starts at ICAgile skill set)
learning is 70:20:10
just get your hands dirty!
leadership needs to support as Agile well: The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management, Creating Great Teams, Management 3.0
community events like meetups and conferences
get a mentor!

Building your own scaled framework

Holacracy and Reinventing Organizations
need to answer questions around ensuring quality, growing capability, benefits realisation, etc…
at what level do the questions need to be answered
Minimal Viable Organisations
scale on the operational cadence of the problems of the organisation, not following a framework
how often do we check that our approach is meeting our needs

Visualising business analysis in a Scrum team

3 Amigos approach
call it what it is if you’re sprint length is longer than it is
focus more on Kanban flow

Reading List

Renee is reading about climate change (and how that applies to Agile) including “This Changes Everything” by Naomi Klein
Craig is reading “CTRL-SHIFT” by Jessie Shternshus and Mike Bonifer

TheAgileRevolution-111 (71 minutes)

Episode 49: Merry Manifesto Madness with Alistair Cockburn

November 14, 2012 by The Agile Revolution

Craig and Renee lob around to Tony’ abode to interview his house guest, Alistair Cockburn. Alistair spends time:

denying a K Stew affair
answering what brings him to Australia
plugging his fantastic Advanced Agile Course
presenting his thoughts on where Agile is going
answering how the Agile Manifesto has shifted and whether the last line should be shifted earlier
talking about the simplicity principle
explaining the difficulty of Agile Organisational transformations
answering whether transformation that succeed better can be big-bang or have to evolve
discussing the sticky middle management layer where transformations become hard
ponderings on what is happening in the ICAgile space
generally taking the p*ss out of Renee, Tony and Craig