Craig Smith

Episode 140: Spinning the AgilityHealth Radar with Sally Elatta

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The Agile Revolution's avatarThe Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig sits down with Sally Elatta, Founder and President of Agile Transformation and AgilityHealth at the Agile 2016 Conference in Atlanta and they talk about:

  • First things first, the AgilityHealth discs are not a frisbee!
  • The AgilityHealth vision is to help Agile teams have a consistent way to measure their health and performance and see the results in a visual way and secondly for leadership to understand the cause and effect – the radar opens up a conversation
  • AgilityHealth radars
  • The team radar has five dimensions – leadership, performance, clarify, foundation and culture – a healthy team should have these
  • It is not a survey tool, it is a facilitated retrospective to promote healthy conversation and create an action plan
  • We should be doing tactical retrospectives every sprint, but the missing component is strategic retrospectives once every quarter
  • Business agility relies on having healthy teams
  • Many other radars including…

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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…

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Mervin Chiang – In Conversations with Craig Smith

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A short video conversation I had with Mervin Chiang from Procensol for his “In Conversations” series.

Agile master Craig Smith in conversation with Mervin Chiang on all things “Agile in Business”. Craig, Director of the Agile Alliance and Unbound DNA is one of Australia’s premier Agile trainers, coaches and practitioners and a significant contributor to the Agile community.

You can watch the conversation on YouTube.

Episode 137: The State of JIRA with Jake Brereton

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The Agile Revolution's avatarThe Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig sits down with Jake Brereton from Atlassian who is the Senior Product Marketing Manager of JIRA while roaming the product halls at Agile 2016 in Atlanta.

  • JIRA is no longer just JIRA, now people outside of software are using it – now JIRA Software (that includes JIRA Agile), JIRA Core (lightweight version of JIRA) and JIRA Service Desk
  • Over 70% of users were using JIRA Agile
  • JIRA has over 1,000 addons in the Atlassian Marketplace, some exciting work being done around analytics and data
  • Many organisations are starting to question whether they need to adhere to all of the practices and overheads – find the way that is most efficient and productive that works for you
  • The double-edged sword of how configurable and customisable JIRA is – improved onoboarding experience, test instance with demo data and an active online presence
  • Acquisition of Status Page
  • Launched JIRA Software Mobile and…

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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…

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Episode 135: DevOps & Electric Cloud with Anders Wallgren

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Craig speaks to Anders Wallgren from Electric Cloud about Continuous Delivery and DevOps at the Agile 2016 conference in Atlanta. The topic of conversation included:

  • “Release It!” by Michael Nygard
  • We can’t declare victory on Agile, but it is the winning methodology
  • We are now plumbing the last mile of deployment and we also need to move it left
  • Joshua Kerievsky Agile 2016 keynote on “Modern Agile“
  • Software process is like human DNA, we are different but essentially the same
  • Gene Gotimer Agile 2016 talk “Experiences Bringing Continuous Delivery to a DoD Project“
  • You will fail if you don’t pay attention to the cultural aspects of Agile and DevOps
  • State of DevOps Report
  • Critical to automate everything to eliminate manual process errors and loss of valuable data
  • DevOps is starting to push into complex and regulated environments like finance, health and aerospace with an…

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SoftEd Agile Program & Portfolio, Facilitation & Coaching Programs

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I recorded a bunch of short videos for SoftEd on a number of our ICAgile training programs – namely Adaptive Program and Portfolio Management, Agile Facilitation and Agile Coaching. The full suite of videos is available on the SoftEd YouTube channel.

Adaptive Program and Portfolio Management

Agile Facilitation

Agile Coaching

 

 

Episode 134: Unicorns, Distributed Teams and Agile User Groups with Mark Kilby

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Craig is at Agile 2016 in Atlanta and catches up with Mark Kilby, an Agile Coach at Sonatype and co-founder of Agile Orlando and Agile Florida. Along the way they discuss:

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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:

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Episode 132: Usability Made Easy with Steve Krug

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Tony, Craig and Renee are at Agile Australia and catch up with Steve Krug and talk usability and along the way try to figure out whether Tony is lean, agile or just old…

  • “Don’t Make Me Think” book, now in 3rd edition
  • Agile Australia keynote “You’re not doing usability testing? Are you…nuts?“
  • need to start doing usability early, to find issues early and have time to fix it
  • Laura Klein’s book “UX For Lean Startups” is a good book on lean
  • issues with lean from a usability perspective is failure and disruption
  • usability is a user advocate role
  • cubicle test – draw a paper prototype and ask the person in the next cubicle to fill it out and observe the issues
  • CX is basically UX owned by marketing!
  • UX is design where usability is more about testing
  • start by taking to customers then do regularly…

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