Tag Archives: Leadership

Episode 194: Business Agility Sparks at Lithespeed with Sanjiv Augustine

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Renee and Craig are at Agile2019 in Washington, DC and catch up with Sanjiv Augustine, author of “Managing Agile Projects” and “Scaling Agile” and founder and CEO of Lithespeed:

  • Craig’s InfoQ interview with Sanjiv
  • “Leadership is about managing change while management is about managing complexity… you need to be both”
  • Lithespeed = flexible speed
  • “Reinventing Organisations” by Frederick Laloux and the Morningstar model
  • The Agile community is excited about the benefits of the teal level but not the responsibility
  • Business Agility Sparks – need to shift left from IT to the business and shift right to DevOps and shift up into leadership
  • What makes you successful at the executive level is working with others
  • Agile Value Management Office (VMO) is a cross functional leadership team that manages the flow of work from end to end
  • PMO is more oriented towards best practices process, whereas the Agile VMO is more about flow of work to a business outcome (rather than output)
  • Collaborate with external auditors to determine what documentation is really needed and the controls required
  • Basic agile transformation model – build a true end to end value stream team, implement lean discovery and dual track discovery / delivery and an Agile VMO
  • Agile VMO is needed when there are obstructions to the flow of value
  • Dynamic strategy (top down, bottom up and outside in) and decision making velocity (speed to make a decision) and ensuring leadership is not a bottleneck to decisions
  • We still have work to go in taking Agile to other parts of the organisation and taking it to the executive and the board room
  • “Only the paranoid survive” – Andy Grove
  • “If we are in danger of being disrupted, why don’t we disrupt ourselves” – Andy Grove

TheAgileRevolution-194 (43 minutes)

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

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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:

TheAgileRevolution-190 (51 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 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 162: Leadership and Coaching Beyond the Team with Esther Derby

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Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Sydney and catch up with Esther Derby, co-author of numerous agile books including Agile Retrospectives and Behind Closed Doors. We also ask the question whether Tony is cool or not….

  • Agile Australia keynote “Leaders At All Levels“
  • Leadership is the ability to adapt the environment so that everyone is empowered to contribute creatively to solving the problem
  • Need to develop the people we are leading as well as the environment
  • Need a bigger overlap of the knowledge in organisations so that we can make better decisions
  • Systemic failure that we assume because you are good at something (like software development) you will be good at management / leadership – they are very different skills
  • Three C’s – clarity (people know what to work on and how it fits into the big picture), conditions (the means to do the work and access to resources required) and constraints (guidelines to know to act and decide) – things you need to consider if you want to move a complex, adaptive system and build empowered teams
  • Need to focus on the work that needs to be done not just on the little boxes or our job description
  • Ask the question to leadership – what are you willing to change?
  • Coaching Beyond the Team workshop with Don Grey
  • Whilst smaller organisations can focus on the team, bigger organisations have to focus on the systemic level to make any visible difference
  • People are interested in the allure of the Agile benefits and what to cherry pick in relation to practices, the same happened with TQM and Lean – need to ask what next shift will help you deliver value to your customers
  • The millenials will be a big disruptor to management practices

TheAgileRevolution-162 (32 minutes)

Episode 157: Transforming the UK Government Digital Service with James Stewart

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Craig is at YOW! West in Perth and has a conversation with James Stewart, formerly Deputy CTO for the UK Government and co-founder of the Government Digital Service. In varying locations they talk about:

  • YOW! West keynote “Lessons Learned as a Government CTO“
  • UK government had some large IT failures  in the last like the NHS National Program for IT (12 billion pound failure), but now lots of successes like Spine 2
  • Agile techniques have been successful in the UK government not just because other approaches have failed so badly but the cost of an IT project is only a fraction of the overall cost of a system
  • The Government Design Principles – start with user needs – successful projects start with clearly articulated principles, did not realise how much they would resonate
  • Worked around a number of government process early on, support from the Minister and investing time to find allies was essential
  • Design Principle posters – essential to invest in presentation, help people feel involved
  • Were never dogmatic about flavours of Agile, this presented challenges with vendors – can you make changes quickly, can you ship software faster, have you thought about quality?
  • The problem is not scaling frameworks, it’s that you tried to start big – need to start with a small team and seed the trust
  • Tackled the financials with the spending control process and an Agile business case (based around progressive funding) and align spending around Discovery, Alpha, Beta and Live stages and approval for later stages comes from what you have learnt from the previous stage
  • Genuine leadership requires openness – be self reflective, clearly articulate values and principles, the biggest risks you are concerned about and the outcomes you wish to achieve – then build trust with the team to achieve this
  • The strategy is delivery
  • Don’t start until somebody can express an outcome – once they do, turn something around quickly
  • Digital By Default Service Manual – good place to start, how to do delivery
  • UK Government Technology Code of Practice – underpinning of spending controls

TheAgileRevolution-157 (43 minutes)

Episode 150: FailAgility – Live from LAST Brisbane 2018

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Craig and Tony were privileged to be asked to be the keynote speakers at LAST Brisbane 2018. This is the audio from the keynote with introductions from long time listener Dave Pryce. You can follow along with the slides below:

TheAgileRevolution-150 (49 minutes)

 

Episode 138: A Responsibility Deep Dive with Christopher Avery

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Christopher AveryIn this episode of the Agile Revolution, Renee Troughton and Peter Lightbody join Christopher Avery again as entertains and educates Australia on The Responsibility Process and The Leadership Gift.

Whilst we looked at The Responsibility Process in Episode 114 of The Agile Revolution, this episode does a deeper dive and looks at:

  • Christopher’s talk at Scrum Australia on how Agile Leader’s improve results with The Responsibility Process. You can check out the LinkedIn article Christopher refers to here
  • Self leadership and self management
  • WL Gore and Associates core values and how it relates to The Responsibility Process.
  • The four minute overview of The Responsibility Process including denial, lay blame, justify, shame, obligation and responsibility.
  • How The Responsibility Process is a self-use tool
  • How to work with others (individuals or groups) using The Responsibility Process
  • The subtlety in the word of “responsibility” over others like “accountability”
  • Overcoming catastrophic events using the responsibility process
  • How The Responsibility Process aligns with other similar fields of thought such as Byron Katie’s “The Work” and Samuel Arthur’s vocal coaching
  • How responsibility is different from “being good”
  • Taking responsibility is about being at choice
  • What organisations can do to make an active practice of responsibility through “wins” using Intention and positive psychology
  • Walking through an example of the responsibility process in action
  • The difference between Quit and choosing not to act
  • Don’t try these with the Responsibility Process…
  • The Leadership Gift Program
  • The Responsibility Process Book

You can ask Christopher Avery for more information through his main website at ChristopherAvery.com.

TheAgileRevolution-138 (50 minutes)

Episode 114: The Responsibility Process with Christopher Avery

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caveryCraig and a late-arriving and quietly spoken Renee talk to Christopher Avery, author of “Teamwork is an Individual Skill” and the visionary behind The Leadership Gift and The Responsibility Process, at Agile 2015 in Washington, DC:

  • Management science says that the problem of business performing highly and being profitable and people having a life at work are highly at odds with each other, Agile has challenged that
  • Organisational Agility and self organising teams have been around since the late 80’s / early 90’s
  • Keynoted the first combined XP / Agile Universe Conference in Calgary 2004
  • The Responsibility Process is now in 26 languages, including Klingon
  • The Responsibility Process is a naturally occurring pattern that occurs in our mind that shows how we respond to upset or frustration in ways that we either cope with it or take responsibility to learn and grow
  • Correlation between The Responsibility Process and the 7 stages of grief
  • You go through each stage, even if it is for a microsecond
  • The mental state of responsibility is available to you all the time
  • Listen for yourself saying “I have to…” then catch it and change it to a statement you are willing to own like “I am…” or “I choose…”
  • The Responsibility Process Game – each day score yourself for when you heard it, said it or caught it
  • Research started in 1984 and collected through participant observation and interaction
  • “The first job of a leader is to define reality” Max De Pree
  • First principle of leadership of The Responsibility Process – “No group in an organisation will consistently operate at higher levels of responsibility than the people to whom they report”
  • The Leadership Gift program for individuals via christopheravery.com and corporate solutions as well via Partnerwerks
  • The Responsibility Process book (coming soon)

TheAgileRevolution-114 (28 minutes)

Episode 112: Inside Spotify with Anders Ivarsson

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AndersRenee and Craig are at the Agile Australia conference and talk to Anders Ivarsson, an organisational coach at Spotify, and learn some of approaches that make Spotify tick:

  • Agile Australia talk “Autonomy and Leadership at Spotify” and workshop “Organisational Improvement: Design-inspired Problem Solving”
  • Agile Coaches spend time with squads versus a new role of organisational coach that looks at the culture, ways of working, vision and systemic wastes
  • Spotify is not a model
  • Original Spotify scaling paper, never imagined the spread or the impact
  • Spotify have shared a lot of the things that have worked well, but they do also have challenges as well – one is alignment across teams as the organisation gets bigger so they have been working on visualisation and prioritisation
  • Spotify Culture videos (Part 1 and Part 2)
  • use microservices to ensure that the organisation can work in the way they want to work – great autonomy but a challenge in keeping a consistent design language and customer journey
  • Agile culture is spread throughout Spotify, use what works rather than one particular approach
  • The Oath of Non Allegiance
  • POTLAC – Product Owner / Team Leader / Agile Coach – leadership cell at Spotify
  • use internal blogging to share Agile approaches and patterns, started to recognise the value of story telling
  • Agile Product Management in a Nutshell video – Henrik Kniberg is a genius at making things simple and understandable

TheAgileRevolution-112 (24 minutes)