Episode 194: Business Agility Sparks at Lithespeed with Sanjiv Augustine

06/04/202106/04/2021 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

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…

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Agility Today 2021 – The Agile Revolution LIVE!

27/02/202114/03/2021 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The video from the Agile Revolution LIVE! session that I co-hosted at the Agility Today 2021 Unconference with Renee Troughton and Tony Ponton is now available on YouTube. The audio podcast will be released soon.

Episode 193: Agile Australia 2019 Vox Pop #2

15/02/202115/02/2021 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig and Tony are once again roaming the halls at Agile Australia in Sydney and once again chat to some old friends from the Australian Agile community:

Keynotes from Ali Walker and Marty Cagan
Elabor8 (nice plug Tony)
Sharon Robson from enterprising agility – enjoying the recognition that Agile adoption starts from the top down, agile at scale is about the thinking and thought processes being applied throughout the entire organisation, looking forward to Sandra Davey on “Upon retrospective: the board went Agile“
Steve Lawrence – a member of the “11 club”, agile should be a mechanism to create greater value not reduce headcount, every small step you take is a step forward

TheAgileRevolution-193 (18 minutes)

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Episode 192: Agile Australia 2019 Vox Pop #1

15/02/202115/02/2021 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Sydney and run into some old friends:

Cathy Tang – “stroke the ego and crack the whip”, making the leap from logistics to Scrum Master
Rachel Slattery – Agile Australia Director and Director of Slatts Group, surprised by the large number of new attendees
Keynotes by Emma Murray and Jez Humble
Hayley Pepper from Sunsuper – enjoyed talk by Roger Almeida “Lessons from leading a “you build it, you run it” team” about platform teams
Charlotte Hinton from Service Innovation Lab and organiser of AgileWelly – each year we hear similar problems and are we making traction, enjoyed talk by Sarah Taraporewalla “Complex is easy, it’s simple that’s hard“

TheAgileRevolution-192 (14 minutes)

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Episode 191: Accelerating DevOps with Jez Humble

15/01/202115/01/2021 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Sydney and after many years of chasing him around finally get to speak to Jez Humble, co-author of many fine books including “Continuous Delivery“, “Lean Enterprise“, “The DevOps Handbook” and “Accelerate” and they discuss:

Accelerate is based on a research program where practices are validated on the impact they had on various organisations
Agile Australia keynote “The Key to High Performing Tech Organizations“
There is enormous scope to extend the Accelerate-type research to the rest of the value stream
“Thinking Fast and Slow” – Daniel Kahneman shows that you can measure psychological and behavioural science
Project Aristotle by Google – were able to replicate results around culture
State of DevOps Report
Jeff Smith at Suncorp
We all want to ensure that people and data are safe – need to…

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

08/01/202108/01/2021 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

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:

In relation to culture, if the human connections are there you can handle just about anything
A foundational cultural aspect at Xebia is that they implemented Xebia Knowledge Exchange (XKE) – every second Tuesday the team has dinner and then has a mini-conference of about 20 streams
Xebia were at the foundation of the ING Agile transformation
Gloomhaven
Rode PodMic
You need leadership that truly believes in culture as a powerful thing
Renee does story maps like trees and Serge prefers to ensure that he finds his epic on the horizontal slice rather than using the activities on the vertical backbone, building towards an MVP
All backlogs should be tree structures
An…

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Episode 189: The Alistair Cockburn Fan Club with Martin Kearns

04/01/202104/01/2021 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

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…

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Episode 188: Doing Agile Right with Steve Berez & Tony Christensen

30/12/202030/12/2020 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Tony and Craig catch up with Tony Christensen and Steve Berez, co-author of “Doing Agile Right: Transformation Without Chaos” as well as from Bain & Company and they chat about:

Saw a lot of companies doing agile wrong and a lot of pain suffering and probably worse off than when they started – book is to try to share learning and get agile on the right track
The conditions for agile to flourish need to change, particularly beyond team level
RBS – one of the key impediments was funding, changed to funding persistent teams
Most organisations have a dissatisfaction with their financial process – need to have an honest conversation around the pain points of trust and process and seeing the promise of early return
Bosch – were not innovating as quickly as they needed to, now using Agile for product design, manufacturing process and supply change…

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Episode 187: Domain Driven Yak Symmathesy with Jessica Kerr

28/12/202028/12/2020 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Tony and Craig are at YOW! Conference in Brisbane and chat to Jessica Kerr, software developer, consultant and symmathecist (look it up or listen to the podcast) and apart from our first live podcast sneeze they talk about:

YOW! 2018 keynote “The Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming“
YOW! 2018 talk “Shaving the Golden Yak“
Great teams make great people – if you want to become great as a developer, focus on the team
You can’t document what is obvious to you – whenever you say the word obviously, replace it with “I cant explain it, but…”
Yak shaving – all the tasks that you do that get in the way of your work
If you are an agile person but you wish agile had more code in it – go to the Domain Driven Design community
We need to embrace complexity…

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Episode 186: Managing the Unmanageable with Ron Lichty

13/07/202013/07/2020 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig fires some questions at Ron Lichty, co-author of “Managing the Unmanageable” and the “Study of Product Team Performance“:

Author of machine Language programming books “Programming the Apple IIGS in Assembly Language” and “Programming the 65816“
Managing the Finder team at Apple – hired for stellar C++ coding ability and customer empathy
Software development is a team sport – including QA, a dedicated product manager / product owner and designers
After Dark and Flying Toasters at Berkeley Systems
“Managing the Unmnageable” is 9 chapters and around 300 rules of thumb and nuggets of wisdom (the creamy centre), the tools used to manage software development teams plus the authors own insights
There were very few books (7 at the time) on managing software developers (unlike project management and agile)
Fred Brooks – “The Mythical Man-Month“
Situational Leadership – opens your…