Agile Open Summit 2021 – Rethinking Retrospectives: Beyond the Three Columns

26/10/202102/11/2021 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

My talk with Michael Huynh from Agile Online Summit 2021 called “Rethinking Retrospectives: Beyond the Three Columns” is available on Slideshare.

The concept of continuous improvement is to stop, pause, reflect, and make small adjustments for the team to improve. But are retrospectives really enough for your teams to improve sprint to sprint? What if your best retrospective still doesn’t yield the results desired and doesn’t move your team out of first gear? What often happens is a narrow view from a team’s perspective on the last sprint or retrospectives don’t provide enough coverage on the broader topics beyond the last iteration.

Simply put, retrospectives are no longer enough!

Join Craig and Michael as they both share their experience and taking your teams to the next level!

Thanks to Craig Smith and Michael Huynh for a constructive session where we learned more about retrospectives and the concept of practice and continuous improvement through methodologies as Micro- Retros, Team health Retros, and double-loop learning. @SummitAgile #CertiProf pic.twitter.com/ajclrIynUD

— CertiProf® (@CertiProf) October 25, 2021

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 163: Agile Australia 2017 Vox Pop #1

10/06/201910/06/2019 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Tony and Craig are at Agile Australia 2017 in Sydney and wander the very busy hallways catching up with attendees and with old friends:

Sieger de Vries – enjoyed Matt Pancino talk “The future of Agile in the enterprise: has the war been lost?”, distributed Agile and use of partnering is here to stay
Mia Horrigan from Zen Ex Machina and Joseph Gard from Australian Taxation Office – lots of Agile interest in Canberra around scaling Agile and leading the change in government, enjoyed Barry O’Reilly keynote “Lessons deploying Lean Enterprise“
Venky Krishnamurthy from The Empirical Coach – LeSS is purely based on evidence from experiments that was created into a framework, enjoyed Jez Humble workshop and keynote “Continuous Delivery Sounds Great But It Won’t Work Here“
Steve Scotson from 4impact – enjoyed the high standard and breadth of subject matter around innovation and organisation change

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Episode 153: The Great Lean Debate – Live from LAST Brisbane 2018

01/01/201901/01/2019 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Stephanie BySouth is the MC of the Great Lean Debate, a fun session recorded live at LAST Brisbane 2018. Ryan McKergow, Shane Hastie, Renae Craven are the “Legendary Agile Sh*t-talkers” team and Craig Smith, Mel Khim and Karyl Crick are the “Getting Agile Sh*t Done” team.

The topics are:

Scaling frameworks
Estimates vs No-Estimates
You can be a Product Owner and a Scrum Master

TheAgileRevolution-153 (37 minutes)

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Episode 139: Talking Agile Craft with Steve Elliott

17/12/201717/12/2017 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

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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Episode 113: GreenHopper Handyman Folio with JC Huet

29/07/201629/07/2016 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig 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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Episode 112: Inside Spotify with Anders Ivarsson

06/07/201606/07/2016 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Renee 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 99: 99, Not Out!

23/12/201523/12/2015 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Despite not feeling well, a sick Renee, a very sick Tony and a trying not to get sick Craig, get the band back together to discuss all the latest in the Agile world, including:

New Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his drive to be Agile, our thoughts on the National Broadband Network (NBN), Australia’s Data Retention laws and the importance of Emotional Intelligence
The Project
Five years, building a culture, and handing it off – the thoughts of outgoing Etsy CTO Kellan Elliott-McCrea
The Nexus Guide (and no, it’s not a new Google phone or a car but yet another scaling framework) and its associated Scaled Professional Scrum Assessment
The Oath of Non-Allegiance
Sanjiv Augustine new book Scaling Agile: A Lean Jumpstart
The Story Behind How Pocket Hit 20 Million Users with 20 People
New CIOs: How to succeed in the first 120 days (and Renee’s quiz…

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YOW! 2015 – 40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes

03/12/201505/01/2016 / Craig Smith / 9 Comments

YOW_2015_Conference_-stacked-PNG My presentation from YOW! 2015 called “40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes” is available on Slideshare. The video is also available on YouTube.

With 73% of the world using Scrum as their predominant Agile method, this session will open up your eyes to the many other Agile and edgy Agile methods and movements in the world today For many, Agile is a toolbox of potential methods, practices and techniques, and like any good toolbox it is often more about using the right tool for the problem that will result in meaningful results.Take a rapid journey into the world of methods like Mikado, Nonban, Vanguard and movements like Holocracy,Drive and Stoos where we will uncover 40 methods and movements in 40 minutes to help strengthen your toolbox.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

Software developers, Agile coaches / Scrum Masters, technical leaders, business analysts, testers and anyone with an interest in the variety of approaches available to Agile teams and organisations.

It was a privilege to be invited to speak at YOW! 2015 which is considered to be the leading software development in Australasia. The talk was delivered in 3 cities: Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. It was also an honour to have some of the most influentional people in the Agile community attending including Dave Thomas, Dan North and Don Reinertsen.

Here are some of the live tweets from each of the 3 conference talks:

Great lightning survey of agile methods by Craig Smith at #yow15. @OptiverAsiaPac pic.twitter.com/MrwgYZ69tr

— Gregory Saunders (@grgsrs) December 3, 2015

Craig Smith giving a fun talk at #yow15. "40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes". pic.twitter.com/awWDxNqV9y

— Joseph Yoder (@metayoda) December 3, 2015

Enjoying Craig Smith’s light hearted but info-packed talk on agile methods. #yow15 pic.twitter.com/L28UalD7y6

— Katherine Lim (@kml) December 3, 2015

Finally catching @smithcdau "40 Agile methods in 40 mins". 3rd times a charm. #yow15 #Brisbane

— Stacy Porter (@mr_stacyporter) December 7, 2015

You can’t say you’re truly agile until you’ve got across the water-scrum-fall problem @smithcdau #yow15 pic.twitter.com/mkaXOJqFY1

— Videesha Saparamadu (@videesha) December 7, 2015

Is there an agile method to decide which agile approach to use? 40 agile methods in 40 minutes by @smithcdau #YOW15 pic.twitter.com/d8a1KNFpFb

— JP Graham (@graham_jp) December 7, 2015

Got lots of good reading ahead thanks to @smithcdau!! Loved 40 agile methods in 40 minutes! #yow15

— Jenna Payette (@jenna_payette) December 7, 2015

So far today I've learnt cool stuff from @tastapod @adrianco and @smithcdau Now time for gourmet beach lunch #yow15 pic.twitter.com/7y01e9CfKA

— James McMenamin (@ithoughtisaid) December 7, 2015

Oh god. And now MoSCoW. @smithcdau should’ve warned audience about possibility for traumatic flashbacks. #YOW15 pic.twitter.com/VUG9TLr6cT

— Kris Howard (@web_goddess) December 10, 2015

Huh. You don’t usually see Eli Whitney mentioned at tech conferences. @smithcdau #YOW15

— Kris Howard (@web_goddess) December 10, 2015

“The biggest mistake is having a DevOps department“ – @smithcdau #yow15

— roman tarnavski (@romant) December 10, 2015

The problem with @smithcdau’s #YOW15 talk is I’ve now got a list of like 20 software methodology books I actually want to read.

— Kris Howard (@web_goddess) December 10, 2015

My favorite official agile methodology so far from @smithcdau's "40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes" talk at #yow15. pic.twitter.com/qXCgnV92Qf

— Ben Teese (@benteese) December 10, 2015

That was a great session on Agile Methods @smithcdau. Thank you. #yow15 #raccoon

— roman tarnavski (@romant) December 10, 2015

#spotify #squadification #agile buzzword bingo #yow15 https://t.co/1XOJcmSXpw pic.twitter.com/b5HeO28SQX

— Jerry van Leeuwen (@jerryjvl) December 10, 2015

I guess it was bit hard to come up with 40 name to fill the 40 Agile methodology names promised in that talk #yow15! https://t.co/3AvBA8aYlo

— Meligy (@Meligy) December 10, 2015

#scrum #lean #adsd #kanban buzzword bingo #winning more, @julliettajung #yow15

— Jerry van Leeuwen (@jerryjvl) December 10, 2015

I remember when XP was this New Big Thing at my first dev job back in 2000. Wow. Just dated myself. #YOW15 pic.twitter.com/QcwJGzQpMS

— Kris Howard (@web_goddess) December 10, 2015

DAD is #agile … WAT!? #yow15 https://t.co/yZil5xr1Qg pic.twitter.com/u98rSfaH4R

— Jerry van Leeuwen (@jerryjvl) December 10, 2015

Very interesting talk @ #YOW15. Hope 2 see full slides & video soon @smithcdau @davidayalas @asamo7 @llorencfranco https://t.co/SD6AEiZVER

— jmirap (@jmirap) December 10, 2015

Episode 94: Agile 2015 Wrap Up

09/09/201521/09/2015 / Craig Smith / Leave a comment

The Agile Revolution Podcast

Craig and Renee catch up after the last session at Agile 2015 in Washington, DC and talk about the highlights of the conference. Sitting in the atrium near a waterfall, they discuss: