Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring Conversations

Latest Episodes:

Steve Sanoff - "The Funny Thing About Not Being Agile" at Agile Camp Oct 06, 2015

Show notes

Lead Agile coach at Western Digital Steve Sanoff discusses some of the technical aspects of his work coaching in the content solutions department of the company. He has his hands full with six teams operating under a model similar to Spotify's leveraging Continuous Integration (CI), two-week Sprints and a quick two-month release cycle. Steve presented on "The Funny Thing About Not Being Agile" at AgileCamp. The presentation touched on how the stupid things that people do when learning how to do and be Agile can be funny in retrospect. He also shared stories that coaches might be able to use in the field to tactfully show a client that someone else had a similar bonehead idea and the results were later laughable.

Joe Justice Leverages Agile for Maximum Awesome! Oct 05, 2015

Show notes

At the intersection of hardware, software, and innovation is WIKISPEED. An Agile hardware and engineering company of 500 collaborators in twenty countries, Team WIKISPEED uses test-first development practices, is run by Scrum teams, and produces road-legal cars, micro-houses, and social-good projects. Joe Justice shares how their 100-MPG road car was created in just three months through object-oriented design, iterative development, and agile project management. Joe describes how agile software techniques are applied to physical engineering and manufacturing, and how cross-functional team members can eliminate the constraints we imagine around traditional manufacturing. "We produce new modules of our car every week," he says. "We demo them every Thursday." Each module goes through a Sprint release cycle, a test cycle, and a release and ship once a week. The same Sprint process can be used in all kinds of product industries including, of all things, champagne.

David J Bland: Less Heroes, More Leaders Oct 02, 2015

Show notes

Self-described "mentor-capitalist" talks anti-heroic leadership with Agile Amped at AgileCamp 2015 in Silicon Valley. Today's leadership, which includes managers, is often at a loss of how to provide leadership in their organizations. The literature of the day touts self-organizing teams who "don't need managers." Leaders and management, therefore, don't have clear models for how to help their own people succeed. Their people teeter between death by micromanagement and death by no management at all. Time to abandon the concept of "the one throat to choke"--because everyone up and down the organization is wising up to the fact that success is a team sport, not an Olympic competition.David is a proponent for helping leaders evolve into mentors, coaches, and advisers within their companies. Says David, "We've promoted leaders over the years based on what they know," but Agile doesn't buy into the follow-the-leader paradigm: Agile, operating under the assumption that the answer is not yet known, means iterating toward success. Hero-leaders don't work in today's creative economy. Enter the servant leader.

Luke Hohmann on Being and Doing Agile at AgileCamp Oct 01, 2015

Show notes

Father, mother, son, daughter--all of these terms connote both being and doing. What does it mean to be a daughter or mother, father or son? Manager and leader are other words with the concepts of being and doing built into it: what is a manager/leader and what does he or she do? Luke is championing the term "Agilist" as a person who is and does Agile. When doing and being are aligned--in other words, when an individual is and does their role, whether father or leader--their output is better. Luke proposes what he calls "serious play" as a way to get individuals to be and do their roles. "When you're in a state of play," he shares, "your doing and being are more aligned. You're actually in a place mentally when you're fully engaged."

Nicola Dourambeis on Cultural Agility at AgileCamp Sep 30, 2015

Show notes

After many years of experience with Agile transformations, Nicola has found that these changes often don't stick long term. At the root of this is the organization's culture type. Nicola often starts out at clients defining what their culture is. For example, is it a culture of fear? Such organizations tend not to allow failure or experimentation. Or perhaps it's a culture of "nice"? Seems nice, right? Except that these organizations tend not to embrace constructive debate and have employees that say they will go along with a decision but don't actually.

Dean Leffingwell Discusses SAFe 3.0, Agile 2015 and Beyond Aug 20, 2015

Show notes

Widely recognized as a leading authority on software development, Dean Leffingwell is an author, serial entrepreneur, and software development methodologist. He is the creator of the Scaled Agile Framework, and author of five books on software development. His most recent books Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs, and the Enterprise, and Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises, form much of the basis of modern thinking on Lean-Agile software development principles and practices. Catch up with him has he discusses his Agile 2015 experience, the Future of SAFe and trends in the industry.

Agile Leadership Patterns: The Agile Way of Doing - Dan Greening at Agile 2015 Aug 20, 2015

Show notes

In agile, we have broad ambitions with no defining principles. We often talk about agile teams, people, departments, organizations and political campaigns, as if the definition of "agile" was obvious. And yet the Agile Manifesto and its principles were written for software development teams. Furthermore, many CEOs tell us how agile they are, because "we can move teams around on a whim" or because "we run sprints every week," but their teams can't produce working products rapidly, increasingly add technical debt, or shamble into work demoralized. Until we frame agile concepts around more general principles and modern psychological and system science research, our best advice will remain marginalized as the dreams of "software zealots."

Ron Quartel Talks FAST Agile Aug 20, 2015

Show notes

The FAST Agile is a combination of Open Space Technology, Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), and Story Mapping. After watching hundreds of participants use open space technology to organize and hold a conference, Ron decided that such self-organization practices could also be applied to software development.Rather than relying control mechanisms like SAFe and LeSS, FAST Agile is a scalable agile framework that relies and individuals and interactions along with pulling work in to teams. Utilizing a 2 day sprint, FAST Agile implicitly requires teams to break their work down in to small chunks and to swarm the work in a #MobProgramming fashion.

Diana Larsen is in the Zone with the Agile Fluency Model at Agile2015 Aug 20, 2015

Show notes

In our journey to help create "more productive, humane, sustainable work places", we in the Agile community often have a tendency to look for a one-size-fits-all solution. But Agile transformations are as unique as the snowflakes requiring them. Diana Larsen's Agile Fluency model, which the industry veteran and pioneer discussed with us at Agile2015, offers a range of possible ways of operating to suit client and even practitioner needs.But first she wanted to clear up a common misconception: The Agile Fluency model isn't a maturity model. Diana shared. "It's a best-fit model... Getting to the end of the scale isn't necessarily the right place to be." The Agile Fluency model, then, can be thought of as having four bus zones: you have to go through each zone to get to subsequent zones -- but Zone 1 may be the best place for you to be, in which case you get off the bus and thrive there. The Agile Fluency model aims to help organizations identify the benefits and tradeoffs they are willing to make and then help them locate the zone in the model that maps best to the identified criteria.

Helping Executives Become Agile Leaders: Coaching the Executive Leader - Michael Hamman Aug 19, 2015

Show notes

From the perspective of the professional coach, coaching executive leaders is different than most other coaching situations. With executives, you are not only a facilitator of their inner process of discovery, as is true with any other professional coaching process: you are also their disorienting partner, provoking them into new ways of thinking. You are their thinking partner, sharing models, frameworks, concepts and ideas that inform them and expand their repertoire of ideas. You're their truth-teller, giving them feedback that no one else will, reminding them of what they are committed to even as they want to run away. Finally, you are their mentor: teaching them about and guiding them through the nuances of enterprise and leadership agility.