Leadership

Episode 194: Business Agility Sparks at Lithespeed with Sanjiv Augustine

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The Agile Revolution Podcast

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

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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 170: Agile Our Way at Flinders University with Kerrie Campbell

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The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig is as LAST Conference in Canberra and with guest co-host (and co-founder of LAST) Craig Brown they talk to Kerrie Campbell, the CIO at Flinders University in Adelaide and they talk (amongst some unscheduled cup stacking) about:

  • LAST Keynote talk “Flinders University Transformation“
  • Leadership through seeding rather than driving by changing language, building mindset and removing impediments
  • Open the kimono and leaders do Agile by example and muddle through it publicly
  • Story telling to move through the change
  • Eliminating the PMO – don’t need a middle man to get in between the IT and business to slow you down and sort out the projects if the team is cross skilled and cross facilitating
  • Disrupted finance through asking for a five year envelope of money and working and modelling the work that is ready to be done
  • Heart of Agile takes the complexity out of Agile –…

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Episode 166: A Trip Down Agile Memory Lane with Jeff Smith

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The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and talk to their former leader Jeff Smith, EVP and COO at World Fuel Services and former CEO of Suncorp Business Services:

  • Australian Agile journey took him from Telstra, to a small startup and then to Suncorp, and later IBM and World Fuel Services
  • Scale of thought is more important than scale of people
  • The Suncorp Agile Academy was born out of the fact that learning matters, but the idea was for other companies to create content that could be shared in the Agile community which did not happen
  • Suncorp Building Quality In program
  • It all comes down to great people and working through problem
  • It’s hard for companies to build great leaders that are interested in building great teams
  • Jeff Smith keynote “Leading an Agile Company“
  • Availability is not a skillset
  • Thinking from a team point…

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Episode 162: Leadership and Coaching Beyond the Team with Esther Derby

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The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Sydney and catch up with Esther Derby, co-author of numerous agile books including Agile Retrospectives and Behind Closed Doors. We also ask the question whether Tony is cool or not….

  • Agile Australia keynote “Leaders At All Levels“
  • Leadership is the ability to adapt the environment so that everyone is empowered to contribute creatively to solving the problem
  • Need to develop the people we are leading as well as the environment
  • Need a bigger overlap of the knowledge in organisations so that we can make better decisions
  • Systemic failure that we assume because you are good at something (like software development) you will be good at management / leadership – they are very different skills
  • Three C’s – clarity (people know what to work on and how it fits into the big picture), conditions (the means to do the…

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Episode 157: Transforming the UK Government Digital Service with James Stewart

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The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig is at YOW! West in Perth and has a conversation with James Stewart, formerly Deputy CTO for the UK Government and co-founder of the Government Digital Service. In varying locations they talk about:

  • YOW! West keynote “Lessons Learned as a Government CTO“
  • UK government had some large IT failures  in the last like the NHS National Program for IT (12 billion pound failure), but now lots of successes like Spine 2
  • Agile techniques have been successful in the UK government not just because other approaches have failed so badly but the cost of an IT project is only a fraction of the overall cost of a system
  • The Government Design Principles – start with user needs – successful projects start with clearly articulated principles, did not realise how much they would resonate
  • Worked around a number of government process early on, support from the…

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Episode 150: FailAgility – Live from LAST Brisbane 2018

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The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig and Tony were privileged to be asked to be the keynote speakers at LAST Brisbane 2018. This is the audio from the keynote with introductions from long time listener Dave Pryce. You can follow along with the slides below:

TheAgileRevolution-150 (49 minutes)

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ThoughtWorks Sold to Private Equity Firm Apax Partners

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Global software development and digital transformation company ThoughtWorks is to be acquired by London-based private equity firm Apax Partners. The terms of the deal were not disclosed and it is expected to close in Q4 2017.

Source: ThoughtWorks Sold to Private Equity Firm Apax Partners

Episode 114: The Responsibility Process with Christopher Avery

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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 112: Inside Spotify with Anders Ivarsson

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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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