Episode 182: Unlearn-ing with Barry O’Reilly

Craig and Tony are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and (despite a bin rolling by) sit down with Barry O’Reilly, co-author of “Lean Enterprise” and author of “Unlearn” and they talk about:

  • Reminiscing about Barry’s resume that includes CitySearch (and its competitor Zip2 owned by Elon Musk), Snake, Wireless Pets on Nokia and Lilo & Stitch using J2ME and eventually onto ThoughtWorks
  • Lean Enterprise was written after “The Lean Startup” was released but to explain how it works if you are not a startup and increase experimentation in organisations
  • When people can design good disciplined experiments, you have system to break down problems and grow your system and people
  • Fortune 15 executives and successful startup leaders don’t sit around and ask “if we are doing the framework correctly”- they have their own system, in the same way as Toyota created their own system
  • If you choose an off-the-shelf framework it is just a starting point – you need to evolve your system of work to your context to have a competitive advantage
  • ExecCamp – take execs out of their business for up to 8 weeks with the aim to disrupt themselves in a safe environment
  • Unlearn – we are in an industry where we need to learn but that is not the limiting behaviour, it is our inability to unlearn our existing behaviours that holds us back from getting breakthroughs of higher performance
  • YOW! talk “Why Great Leaders Must Unlearn to Succeed
  • Mean time to discovery – how quickly can you see that an assumption is invalid so that you can then make better decisions
  • How often are you spending time with customers, how are you getting customer feedback and how are you feeding that information back into your system of work to improve it
  • Think big but start small and learn fast – safe to fail experiments
  • Agility is hard…
  • Everybody has a need to unlearn

TheAgileRevolution-182 (37 minutes)

Episode 101: The Lean Mindset with Mary and Tom Poppendieck

craig-poppendieckCraig catches up with two luminaries in the Agile and Lean space, Mary and Tom Poppendieck at YOW! Conference to talk about agile, lean, rapid feedback, culture and leadership. The discussion points include:

  • Making the link between lean and software development and discovering that waterfall makes no sense
  • The origins of the first book: Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit
  • Agile is not lean in software development, Agile is lean in a delivery organisation
  • How long does it take you to put a single line of code into Production?
  • The manifestation of lean really kicked off in 2010 with both the rise of DevOps and the Lean Startup
  • Delivery organisations versus engineering organisations and the journey of Agile
  • Agile has not well addressed delivering the right stuff, solving the right problem and the architecture of rapid deployment
  • Only two goals at ING: Deliver every two weeks and don’t crash production, resulted in rapid feedback loops
  • “The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest” by Yochai Benkler
  • Latest book: The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions 
  • Create centres of good culture and let people find it, to survive in a competitive environment you need to do something different
  • Goal is to create an environment where people enjoy the challenge of developing software
  • The critical resource to be managed is not capital but the passion and energy of bright and creative people
  • People don’t resist change, they resist being changed
  • Build a change platform, not a change program
  • YOW! 2014 talk – The Scaling Dilemma
  • The military model – leaders have strategic awareness two levels down and situational awareness one level up and the concept of working leaders

TheAgileRevolution-101 (43 minutes)

Episode 78: Renee-Renee-Renee

ReneeYes they’re at it again ! The revolutionists bring forth their innermost thoughts on the life the universe and most importantly Agile . Oh yeah and Craig and Tony ask the question repeatedly ….Renee,Renee……Renee

 TheAgileRevolution-78  (61 minutes)

Episode 73: What Made You An Agile Coach?

AgileCoachTony asks a philisophical question , whilst Renee harnesses her nineties pop star – Ice Ice Baby and Craig marvels at Tony’s  cool intro – probably the coolest intro he’s done since the eighties.

The Agile Revolution – 73 (54.21)

Episode 72: Shipping at Facebook with Joel Pobar

From YOW! 2013, Craig and Renee talk to Joel Pobar, currently working at Facebook as an Engineering Lead and JoelPobartalk about:

  • Joel’s journey to Facebook
  • Common Language Runtime (CLR)
  • Building and shipping fast
  • The value of a developers time and their critical paths
  • A day in the life of a Facebook manager
  • Who is the Product Owner in an infrastructural team?
  • A/B (experimentation) testing in New Zealand
  • Stabalisation and release process
  • Recruiting the right people
  • Pulling out the sharpies when pivoting on PHP
  • Striving for infrastructural efficiency and how to empower the team to this goal
  • Owning the stack from the bottom to the top and its impact on agility
  • Checkout HHVM, the Facebook Engineering Blog & Open Compute

You can contact Joel at facebook or on twitter at @joelpob.

The Agile Revolution- 72 (41 minutes)

Episode 51: YOW! 2012 Programmer Anarchy with Fred George

Fred GeorgeIn this episode Renee and Steve Dalton from the Six Degrees Podcast (formally Coding By Numbers) at YOW! 2012 talk to Fred George (fgeorge52) from Forward on:

  • What is Programmer Anarchy?
  • Old school development and cowboys
  • Risk and appropriateness of anarchy to culture
  • Lean startups and parrot cages

Thankyou to the YOW! 2012 conference for inviting The Agile Revolution to record podcast interviews at the conference!

TheAgileRevolution-51 (38 minutes)

Episode 48: Declan (Not Dexter)

Declan WhelanAt Agile 2012 in Dallas, Texas, Craig chats with Declan Whelan, a Canadian Agile Coach at LeanIntuit, the CTO and co-founder of a new startup called Printchomp and a newly elected member of the Agile Alliance board. Amongst other things we talk about pair coaching, running a Lean Startup, the direction of the Agile Alliance and the future of Agile.

His talk at Agile 2012 (with Alistair McKinnell) was entitled “Simple Design Applied: Spend More Time Creating Valuable Code“. Look out for a longer video interview with Declan on InfoQ.

TheAgileRevolution-48 (25 minutes)

Episode 32: Agile Australia 2012 Kickoff

Agile Australia 2012Craig and Renee are at the Agile Australia 2012 conference speaker breakfast where they discuss the workshop day, the upcoming conference and their respective talks and a Lean Startup story about monkeys and bananas.

TheAgileRevolution-32 (9 minutes)

Episode 29: Offshoring at IBM

IBMCraig, Tony and Renee talk about the news Scrum Inc style, discuss the coolness of Lego for reporting, chat about Net-Map and discuss the state of IBM.

Quotes:

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new” – Albert Einstein

“The greatest waste is failure to use the abilities of people. Learn their frustrations and contributions they’re eager to make” – Deming

https://twitter.com/flowchainsensei/status/193226902171955200

Episode 28: Lean Starts Us Up and The Agile Top 20

Lean StartupCraig, Tony and Renee go all Lean Start Up and look at who made the Agile charts.

TheAgileRevolution-28 (43 minutes)