Month: July 2016

Episode 114: The Responsibility Process with Christopher Avery

/ Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

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
  • Responsibility Process is now in 26 languages, including Klingon
  • 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…

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Episode 113: GreenHopper Handyman Folio with JC Huet

/ Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

JCHuetCraig and Renee, sitting on the banks of the Potomac River on a sunny but slightly windy day at Agile 2015, they catchup with JC Huet, creator of GreenHopper (renamed to JIRA Agile and post-podcast now JIRA Software) and Tempo Folio:

  • Craig was apparently the first client of GreenHopper that was built in a basement, now JIRA Agile is the most popular JIRA add-on with over 500,000 users, used by more than 80% of JIRA users
  • the idea was to have a tool that brought bugs into software management
  • the name GreenHopper represented the Green company branding at the time, and Hopper was for cards hopping between columns
  • a shout out to our friend Nick Muldoon (who is now writing Atlassian plugins at Arijea)
  • Tempo Folio plugin is about supporting cost management, including time sheeting, estimation, forecasting and allocation
  • time and dedication and about three months is…

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Agile 2016 – Coaching Nightmares: Lessons We Can Learn From Gordon Ramsay

/ Craig Smith / 4 Comments

Agile2016-SPEAKER-300x250My presentation from Agile 2016 called “Coaching Nightmares: Lessons We Can Learn From Gordon Ramsay” is available on Slideshare.

When you look for inspiration in the Agile Coaching community, the name Gordon Ramsay is probably not the first name to come to mind. He has been known to be belligerent, condescending and downright rude, but underneath this brute facade is a treasure trove of skills and talents that influence change.

In this presentation we will draw insights from his ‘Kitchen Nightmare’ escapades and draw parallels with how much his work aligns with that of an Agile Coach and the goal to successfully drive change and introduce a number of models and techniques that are indispensable in the coaching toolkit.

Learning Outcomes:

Understand the difference between coaching, advising and mentoring

Approaches to having confronting coaching conversations

Dealing with denial and unengaged staff

The criticality of a burning platform to invoke change

Why it is important to have coaches as experts

Agile coaching is more than the GROW model (or other coaching models)

It was extremely disappointing that my partner in crime on this talk Renee Troughton could not make the trip to Atlanta to deliver this with me, I certainly hope I did her parts of the talk justice.

Here are a few of the tweets from the talk:

 

Episode 112: Inside Spotify with Anders Ivarsson

/ Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

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…

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Episode 111: M&Mailbag

/ Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

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:

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