Episode 194: Business Agility Sparks at Lithespeed with Sanjiv Augustine

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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 the Agile VMO is more about flow of work to a business outcome (rather than output)
  • Collaborate with external auditors to determine what documentation is really needed and the controls required
  • Basic agile transformation model – build a true end to end value stream team, implement lean discovery and dual track discovery / delivery and an Agile VMO
  • Agile VMO is needed when there are obstructions to the flow of value
  • Dynamic strategy (top down, bottom up and outside in) and decision making velocity (speed to make a decision) and ensuring leadership is not a bottleneck to decisions
  • We still have work to go in taking Agile to other parts of the organisation and taking it to the executive and the board room
  • “Only the paranoid survive” – Andy Grove
  • “If we are in danger of being disrupted, why don’t we disrupt ourselves” – Andy Grove

TheAgileRevolution-194 (43 minutes)

Episode 193: Agile Australia 2019 Vox Pop #2

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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:

TheAgileRevolution-193 (18 minutes)

Episode 192: Agile Australia 2019 Vox Pop #1

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

TheAgileRevolution-192 (14 minutes)

Episode 191: Accelerating DevOps with Jez Humble

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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:

TheAgileRevolution-191 (27 minutes)

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

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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:

TheAgileRevolution-190 (51 minutes)

Episode 189: The Alistair Cockburn Fan Club with Martin Kearns

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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 insurance, etc
  • Australian government has a greater openness to Agile than the private sector – Energy Safe Victoria understand purposefulness
  • FailAgility
  • Agile Contracts

TheAgileRevolution-189 (29 minutes)

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

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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 operations – use Agile wherever a change need is required
  • Best way to manage a transformation is in an agile way – problem is unfortunately a transformation has to be funded using the existing processes and adapt the process as you go
  • Where Agile works well is where it is more organic – give the teams the tools for success and get out of the way
  • Saab Gripen Fighter Jet – built using Agile
  • Set the ambition to be a continuous internal learning organisation
  • We need good recipes – Toyota and Spotify are good examples – sharing is of benefit to each other
  • Persistent teams are recommended to get the best results. – there is a compelling economic argument for this as well
  • How Agile Is Powering Healthcare Innovation – healthcare has had to innovate at a much more rapid pace than traditionally due to the global pandemic – built around small empowered teams that are focussed on the problem

TheAgileRevolution-188 (54 minutes)

Episode 187: Domain Driven Yak Symmathesy with Jessica Kerr

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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 in the business domain – the code should be a tool to learn about the business domain
  • Code doesn’t wait for design, it participates in design
  • Atomist – automation for DevOps

TheAgileRevolution-187 (30 minutes)

Episode 186: Managing the Unmanageable with Ron Lichty

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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 eyes to delegating and supporting the people on your team
  • The most important rule – always be recruiting
  • The Study of Product Team Performance – effective onboarding correlates with the highest performance teams (yet 7% consider this to be a best practice)
  • Self organising teams are where every single member of the team is a leader from their expertise
  • A team created definition of done may be one of the most important practices in Agile
  • The frequency of standups correlates with the performance of the team
  • The Daily Standup was not intended to be a status meeting but rather a replanning meeting
  • Teams that have stories for their entire backlog are correlated with the highest level of team performance
  • Steve Bockman – “Practical Estimation” and “Predictability“
  • Pragmatic Institute framework – the skills of a Product Management
  • Ambiguities in the requirements typically popup in the middle of the programming, which is why it is so valuable to have a Product Owner nearby to address these
  • Software development is a team sport – what gates teams is collaboration and communication – we need to nurture and provide support for that to thrive
  • We have two ears and one mouth and we need to use them in that proportion
  • We can’t over communicate in software development

TheAgileRevolution-186 (49 minutes)

Episode 185: Heart of Agile Academy with Alistair Cockburn & Soledad Pinter

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Tony, Renee and Craig speak to Alistair Cockburn and Soledad Pinter about the newly launched Heart of Agile Academy:

  • The Heart of Agile Academy is the opportunity to reset Agile learning with a clean sheet of paper
  • The core design decisions were to remove the classes being tied to a title and to be better at the specialities that make up the Heart of Agile
  • Heart of Agile is just four words or focus areas: Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect and Improve
  • Alistair and Ahmed Sidky tried to solve this problem in 2010 when they launched ICAgile
  • There are over 3,000 different certification programs for Agile
  • The Academy has courses at different levels that are taught by Agile experts from around the world (and in multiple languages)
  • There is an accreditation ladder and process for bringing on new courses and trainers
  • Designed to be a marketplace for Agile classes and open for business now!
  • The values of the Heart of Agile community are openness, dialogue and humanity

TheAgileRevolution-185 (50 minutes)