Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring Conversations

Latest Episodes:

Gillian Clark on Using "Essential SAFe" on Major Software Update at NZ Agritech Company Nov 17, 2016

Show notes

SPCT4 Gillian Clark shares an experience with Agile Amped about inadvertently discovering a way to distill SAFe down to the bare bones so that teams can focus solely on executing. This was particularly helpful in a recent engagement that Gillian worked on at a New Zealand-based agritech firm who needed to execute a major overall of their herd management software before a hard deadline. Since the company didn't have time as a luxury, they had a laser focus on executing against a single backlog of prioritized features, aligning the cadence of their Agile teams and forcing their PMs to pull from a single budgeting pool. The result was a successful execution by the predetermined deadline. Little did Gillian and her colleagues know that they were using, basically, Essential SAFe. (We're live at SAFe Summit 2016, so background noise is part of the live experience!) SolutionsIQ SAFe consultant Scott Frost hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Steve Mayner - Agile Transformation in the Federal Government, Third Time's the Charm Nov 16, 2016

Show notes

Steve Mayner puts it well when he says that "just about everything in the federal government is very big". He discusses his work with implementing SAFe with the government as an Agile Practice Director. Scaling, understandably, was an issue. This was their third attempt to transform from a traditional mainframe to a modern architecture. After two failures and $3.2 billion spent with zero value, the third initiative, with a $436 million cap and three years to complete, finally succeeded--in large part due to the changes in their approach. Since failure was not an option, they had to be more open minded about their options, including looking into Agile and SAFe. Possibly most pivotal to their success was the close collaboration between two very senior leaders (one from business, one from IT): they were at every meeting, engaged, listening, providing guidance and listening to impediments that needed to be resolved at a higher level. They provided an environment conducive to change. SolutionsIQ's Howard Johnson hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Case Study: Pete Rim On Leading the Transformative Agile Journey at Cisco Nov 15, 2016

Show notes

Pete Rim, Continuous Delivery Agile Coach at Cisco, sits down with Agile Amped to share his recent successes with wider adoption of SAFe and Agile, including 90% improvement in speed (from development to business stakeholders) without losing quality -- improving productivity by 32% across a population of 15,000+ folks. Having begun as a waterfall shop, Cisco is making strides toward organization-wide Agility, now considering such concepts as improving Agile career paths and portfolio management. SolutionsIQ's Evan Campbell hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Robert Mahler Sez Grassroots Transformations Without C-Level Buy-In Don't Work Nov 14, 2016

Show notes

Robert Mahler of Tata Consulting Services (TCS) shares with Agile Amped his thoughts on and experience with Agile transformations and SAFe. In his experience Robert has learned that grassroots transformations without executive buy in don't work. If the C level is not interested, your transformation is going to fail. TCS has integrated SAFe into their approach to effecting organizational change and transformations, using SAFe to help them transform to the SAFe model. Robert also commiserates with those working to effect change in highly regulated industries and with everyone who has problems getting financial and business buy-in from clients. SolutionsIQ's Howard Johnson hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Case Study: Leading an Enterprise Agile Transformation, Starting From IT Nov 11, 2016

Show notes

SolutionsIQ's Evan Campbell and Howard Johnson discuss a recent enterprise Agile transformation that Howard led previously in order to improve the organization's time to market and accelerate change adoption. Howard was instrumental in starting the transformation, which eventually became a "large organizational call-to-arms", from the IT side. By becoming Agile, IT was able to achieve great gains, whereas the business side was not, because Agile didn't obviously cater to the latter's needs. "The business team believed it was IT language... and they didn't understand what Agile meant to business practitioners." Howard shares some key learnings from his experience, including a couple antipatterns. (Mind the clanging halfway through.) SolutionsIQ's Evan Campbell hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Robert Mahler Sez Grassroots Transformations Without C-Level Buy-In Don't Work Nov 10, 2016

Show notes

Sandra Johnson is Retooling Demo Experiences to be More Fun and Valuable Nov 09, 2016

Show notes

Sandra Johnson is a Release Train Engineer in the healthcare-IT industry. She started as a waterfall PM a few years and jumped at the opportunity to become a ScrumMaster in her company's SAFe implementation when she realized "there needed to be an easier way to get things done." She is appreciative of the coaching and guidance that Agile Amped host and SolutionsIQ SAFe consultant Scott Frost provided her years ago. Today she attributes a large part of the success to having buy-in from the leadership level (from the VP level down). Executives attend team training sessions and happily finance the entire transformation. Susan also shares how she has brought the fun back into demos, which can get boring. Susan collaborated with other SMs to retool the entire demo experience, based on what POs decided were the most valuable outcomes from the ceremony. The working group tapped into their own talents (e.g., audio-visual experience) as well as the personalities of their team members to make it interesting, for example through role play or skits. If Susan had advice for new ScrumMasters, it would be to grow some thick skin and to encourage people bringing problems to also come ready with possible solutions. SolutionsIQ SAFe consultant Scott Frost hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Susan Farago Works to Create Certifications that Objectively Measure Human Behavior Nov 08, 2016

Show notes

Certification Program Manager Susan Farago is new to Scaled Agile, but she's been in the certification and credentialing industry for almost two decades. Susan works to create certification programs to train people and "also measure what they know", especially when it comes to new offerings like SAFe Release Train Engineer certification, a critical role in SAFe implementations. Certification often gets a bad rap because, at the onset, quality (e.g., depth of knowledge) isn't always a focus. But Susan argues, in recent years, "we've gotten a lot smarter about what we're testing, and how." Even so, training and certification for hardware and software are much easier to do -- not so with human behavior, which can be "squishy and messy". SolutionsIQ's Evan Campbell hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Inbar Oren on 10 Essential Elements of SAFe, Scrum Mastery and Change Management Nov 07, 2016

Show notes

SAFe Fellow and principal consultant Inbar Oren is excited to announce the new SAFe ScrumMaster course and certification. Of importance for SAFe ScrumMasters to understand are the 10 Essential Elements of SAFe. Miss these and you won't get your results and, Inbar reminds us, "the point isn't to do SAFe, the point is to get your business results." One of the most commonly overlooked elements of SAFe is PI Planning. Another one is leadership training. Inbar advocates for starting training of change agents, executives and leaders early in the transformation -- "otherwise they will hamper the transformation because they don't understand what is critical and what isn't." To this end, organizational change management is crucial for Agile transformations to work, and Inbar shares his thoughts on how to embed OCM in SAFe implementations. SolutionsIQ's Howard Johnson hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

CEO Fabiola Eyholzer Says Lean-Agile HR are Key to Enterprise Agility - at SAFe Summit 2016 Nov 04, 2016

Show notes

"HR is the key to bringing Agility to an enterprise level. If we don't fix our HR approach, we cannot a truly Agile organization." That's what Fabiola Eyholzer, CEO of Just Leading Solutions, shares with Agile Amped at the SAFe Summit 2016. Fabiola has 16 years of experience in human resources and applies her expertise and passion to the task of "bringing HR into the 21st century". How? With Lean-Agile practices and values. According to Fabiola, performance management needs to be rebooted to address today's concerns, such as "How do we recruit for Agile teams? How do we build careers in Agile organizations?" Recently, Fabiola collaborated with SAFe founder Dean Leffingwell to pen a white paper called "Agile HR with SAFe". With Agile Amped, she touches on the first of the 6 key themes for Agile HR, which are: 1. Embrace the new talent contract 2. Foster continuous engagement 3. Hire for attitude and cultural fit 4. Move to iterative performance flow 5. Take the issue of money off the table 6. Support impactful learning and growth Source: scaledagileframework SolutionsIQ SAFe consultant Scott Frost hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Agile Amped Podcast – Inspiring Conversations

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected