Tag Archives: scrum

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 189: The Alistair Cockburn Fan Club with Martin Kearns

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Tony and Craig are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and they (finally) catch up with Martin Kearns, the Chief Digital Officer at Innodev and co-organiser of Scrum Australia, and they chat about:

  • Alistair Cockburn gets mentioned at around the 2:30 minute mark, and Martin was responsible for first bringing him to Australia
  • Being coached is being open to an experience you aren’t controlling
  • Certified Agile Leadership
  • Agile is always going to hurt, need to prepare for pain and enjoy it
  • Australia 2030: Prosperity through Innovation – need to understand the environmental factors that are forcing Agility into organisations
  • Knowledge of customers is more superior than ever before – due to education and social intelligence (Target inappropriate clothing for children)
  • VUCA is here to stay – accept that you need to listen
  • Australia Post is a good agile example organisation – reinvented themselves through identity services, travel insurance, etc
  • Australian government has a greater openness to Agile than the private sector – Energy Safe Victoria understand purposefulness
  • FailAgility
  • Agile Contracts

TheAgileRevolution-189 (29 minutes)

Episode 184: Agile Virtual (Pizza) Summit with Adam Weisbart

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Craig, Renee and Tony catch up with old friend and “irregular” guest Adam Weisbart about Agile Virtual Summit, Recess retrospectives, Build Your Own Scrum and making your own pizza.

  • Renee realised Washington state is nowhere near Washington, DC
  • Agile Virtual Summit 1-5 June 2020 – a collection of great speakers and registration is free!
  • Distributed retrospectives – important that people give a voice-over to the items that they add
  • Tips for Remote Agile ceremonies – recreate being in the same room with technology as much as possible, avoid the asynchronous Slack bots, actually standup,
  • At Slack, you are not allowed to hold a meeting via Slack!
  • Recess – retrospectives in a box!
  • Making virtual retrospectives fun – change them up, craft retrospectives into a story (Recess does this), remember the future (where would you be if you had the most awesome sprint ever)
  • The next thing in Agile just sounds like Agility!
  • No apologies meeting rule for children, dogs or ringing the bell…
  • Build Your Own Scrum in a virtual world works well on Miro and Mural (and the exercise started as an accidental panic!)
  • Build Your Own LeSS
  • Bad Scrum Master Video
  • pizzamaking.com is the nicest place on the entire internet
  • ‘Zoom fatigue’ is taxing the brain. Here’s why that happens

TheAgileRevolution-184 (57 minutes)

Episode 181: Change it with the BOSSAnova with Jutta Eckstein

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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

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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 139: Talking Agile Craft with Steve Elliott

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Craig chats with Steve Elliott, the founder and CEO of Agile Craft and they discuss:

  • Dependencies are the number one thing that kills agility
  • Scaling agility across a large organisation is a 5 – 10 year journey
  • Scrum is often disconnected from the portfolio planning layer, the scaling methods are making the program level agile and predictable
  • If you want business agility you have to hinge the technology into the business
  • Sometimes it takes a few attempts for agile transformations, like tipping over a Coke machine (and unlike tipping a cow), you need to lead with results and then work on cultural change to be successful
  • If the leader of an Agile transformation left the organisation, would they go back to the old way or is Agile part of their DNA – if they would go back they have not been transformed
  • The scaling Agile frameworks are relatively new and evolving with major changes, without these though there is a lot of chaos and you need them to do Agile at Scale in a large company
  • The companies that win are the ones where the technology and the business are in sync, you need some process to do that
  • If we do more experimentation with the scaling methods and some of the lesser frameworks get traction, the community will be better for it
  • SAFe is the leader in the scaling space, but LeSS is very popular in Europe
  • Startups are all about business agility, because long feedback cycles are deadly, we need to be able to make decisions and react quickly
  • Amazon is a good technology company that through business agility threatens everyone
  • The technology curve is only going to accelerate; physical, digital and biological is going to come together and the application is going to disrupt many businesses very quickly
  • We still need more data to improve the software process using machine learning to do simulations to get better quality, predictability and value
  • Agile Craft brings together the product strategy, the team ALM tooling and the business strategy together from the top down, and is multi-modal (it works with all levels of Agile maturity) to nudge teams across to Agile practices faste. The tool has automated coaching built in (no, they have not built a robot coach, yet…!)

TheAgileRevolution-139 (45 minutes)

Episode 136: Water-Scrum.org-Falling with Dave West

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Craig catches up with Dave West, product owner and CEO at Scrum.org, at the Agile 2016 conference in Atlanta. They talk all things Agile and Scrum including:

  • Water-Scrum-Fall came about because Scrum is often delivered in the context of a organisational waterfall lifecycle
  • Scrum implies a magical Product Owner that is empowered and understands the market to effectively create a backlog and manage it and the Scrum Guide provides very litte guidance around this
  • Nexus is a way of getting multiple teams working from the same backlog and provides an exoskeleton to Scrum
  • “Scrum 21 Years and The Future” talk at Agile 2016
  • People don’t get Scrum, it is always surprising how few people have read the Scrum Guide
  • The Scrum Guide is in audiobook form (but not yet in Klingon)
  • The Sprint Review is not a phase gate, it is the opportunity to inspect and adapt at the boundary of the sprint, try running it with continuous delivery and production results
  • The way mono goes through a high school is the way in which Scrum should go through an organisation (according to Dave!)
  • Some of the initial ideas and avenues for Scrum include The New New Product Game, Agile Manifesto, Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance
  • Scrum.org was created to push the focus of Scrum back to the delivery of software (rather than the world of work and LEGO) and to decouple the assessment from the classes
  • Scrum.org assessments include PSM I (I understand Scrum), PSM II (I practice Scrum) and PSM III (I am a coach / mentor around Scrum) to validate your learning as you grow into the role of a Scrum Master
  • Over a million people a day are doing a Daily Scrum!
  • State of Scrum – after 21 years the world is full of Scrum and software is being developed better, but the profession has not improved in the way we had wanted it to (we are not driving to value fast enough and we are not engaging the business correctly)
  • Software is the business now, Scrum cares about product delivery
  • Looking into Evidence Based Measurement in Scrum, how to help people do done (Scrum Delivery Kit)
  • Organisational change is almost impossible – it is hard to change the existing organisation to do Scrum
  • “Software in 30 Days” book and section on Scrum Studio (how do you build a persistent studio that delivers innovation on a business level)
  • Pragmatic Marketing

TheAgileRevolution-136 (37 minutes)

Episode 133: Rules Are For Pussies!

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Craig and Renee are both in Sydney and catch up around the kitchen table to discuss a bunch of things happening in the Agile universe:

TheAgileRevolution-133 (76 minutes)

Episode 126 – Agile Snotfest

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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…

TheAgileRevolution=126 (64 minutes)

Episode 111: M&Mailbag

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peanutmmCraig 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:

What certification should a new Scrum Master get:

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)