Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring Conversations

Latest Episodes:

Taking the "You" out of Scrum Master Mar 19, 2020

Show notes

In addition to both being professional Scrum trainers with Scrum.org, Ryan Ripley and Todd Miller also co-author the new book "Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions to Common Scrum Problems."

While the book has scrum masters as its primary audience, the authors know that anybody working on or with the scrum team can get value out of it. They share their stories, failures, and successes over their combined 40 years of experience. The duo agrees that some of the worst Scrum anti-patterns arise when the scrum master fails to act as an effective servant leader.

Gems:

- Todd Miller on meaningful business metrics: "During sprint planning, the idea isn't just to fill up a plate of work and then everybody disappear and do it, and then if you did all the work, you're successful."

- Ryan Ripley on the three aspects of an effective scrum master: "The scrum master has to love their team… want[s] them to be wildly successfully… and finally [has] to have zero tolerance for anything that gets in the way of [the team] being successful."

Leslie Morse hosts.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media!Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped

Leading Authentic Change at Western Digital Mar 12, 2020

Show notes

Agile Transformation is a journey that requires more than implementing a few new meetings into the work week. It's a continuous learning journey that is built on a desire to deliver real value to customers. However, many efforts to implement Agile within organizations end up being superficial, because they don't make room for the necessary mindset change.

According to Simon Chesney, the goal of an Agile Transformation needs to be focused on creating a "self-sustaining lean/product development culture". Chesney is a Lean Enterprise Agile coach currently working on a transformation at one of the world's largest infrastructure companies, Western Digital.

Chesney believes that authentic change occurs when a learning culture is embodied and empowered by the leadership of the organization. He states that you can observe sustainable change in the care taken throughout the organization to relentlessly improve. Chesney also talks about the transactional competencies, consequential environments and insights needed to sustain Agile cultures.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse hosts from the 2019 Global SAFe Summit in San Diego.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media!

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped

Strangling Monoliths: Modernizing Legacy Systems Mar 05, 2020

Show notes

How much of your core and legacy systems are keeping your organization from seizing market opportunities and differentiating their business? Director of Pivotal Labs Sydney, David Julia, offers advice on how companies can deprecate, modernize and get more value out of monolithic legacy systems that are often where the heart of each business beats. One way is the strangler approach where you iteratively decommission legacy apps and start "to cut bits of your monolithic application off and gracefully retire that."

Julia also recounts the real-life story of how one team successfully rewrote a legacy health insurance system so complex that a tiny mistake could put millions of dollars at risk. His advice for businesses looking to modernize their legacy systems is "Start small. Build quality into your system. Evolve your systems over time."

Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Adam Asch hosts at Agile Australia in Sydney.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media!

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped

Baking Privacy and Security into the Technical Architecture Feb 27, 2020

Show notes

Rob Pinna is a 30-year high-tech veteran who is the Chief Product Officer at IronCore Labs. His passion is protecting the privacy of data stored in the cloud.

Pinna says we shouldn't build software and then make it secure. Instead, you want to bake privacy and security into the technical platform. That way the system is designed so that developers automatically just do the right thing.

The conversation covers how complex it is to both provide security and privacy early and often, as well as deliver at a large enterprise.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse hosts at Southern Fried Agile in Charlotte, NC.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media!

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped

Half the Fire Drills with Agile Marketing | Business Agility Series Feb 20, 2020

Show notes

Stacey Ackerman, founder of Agilify Coaching & Training, got her start in marketing and is now blending the two. Like so many, marketers used to think of agile as "a software thing" and lived in a world where, as Ackerman puts it, "everything was an emergency" and there was no prioritization. This is what she calls "hair-on-fire marketing."

Today, marketers and marketing teams can take small yet purposeful steps toward agility. Ackerman offers traditional antipatterns – blasting all users, sticking to the plan – as well as some enticing marketing takes on agile classics, including:

– Minimally viable persona "to understand our customers in a faster way so this doesn't become a stage gate and hold up our marketing efforts."

– Brief briefs

– Customer stories, instead of user stories

– And (above all) prioritization – "if there was anything I would recommend, it would be just that."

Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse hosts.

Resources:

– Martech Today (blogs by Ackerman on agile marketing available)

– "The Agile Marketing Experience" podcast with Alan Annis

– "The Agile Marketer" by Roland Smart

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media!

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped

Influencing Business Strategy with OKRs Feb 13, 2020

Show notes

Mark Richards has worked with numerous enterprise customers across most industries in Australia and across the globe. A SAFe Fellow since 2017, Richards is also the author of the blog "The Art of SAFe" and working on a book of the same name.

In this episode, Richards poses the question: How do we raise intentionality and reclaim control through our objectives? He discusses the process of setting Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and how they can have a positive influence on business strategy by encouraging reflection and learning.

Mark recommends the following reads on getting started with OKRs:

Radical Focus by Christina Wodtke
Measure What Matters by Doerr

Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse hosts from the 2019 Global SAFe Summit in San Diego.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media!

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped

Mobbing for Business Value Feb 06, 2020

Show notes

Jason Hobbs and Skylar Watson share their experiences with mobbing and pair programming from the perspectives of an organizational leader and a practitioner. Their goal is to get leadership more comfortable with the idea of mob programming and reducing work in progress (WIP) to one task.

The common misconception about pairing, according to Hobbs and Watson, is that "people think it's just two guys with one shovel". The pair shares their journey of mob-programming being an uncomfortable idea to having leadership support.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse hosts at Southern Fried Agile 2019 in Charlotte, NC.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media!

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped

Transformation Case Study of a Major Australian Bank Jan 30, 2020

Show notes

Sarah Traynor is a transformation lead at one of the largest banks in Australia, which has followed the lead of ING in executing a big bang Agile transformation. The scaling effort – involving 9,000 people – was staggered, but the vision and leadership have been clear from the very beginning. Traynor says "engaging people in the story from the onset and being transparent" is very important.

Another major shift for the bank was ensuring everyone was aligned and shared the same values around what it means to lead from where they are in the organization. The bank set 5 new behavioral expectations about leading people:

Be curious
Create shared clarity
Empower others
Develop people selflessly
Connect with empathy

Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Adam Asch hosts at Agile Australia in Sydney.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media!

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped

Too Much WIP? Destroy Your Backlog Jan 23, 2020

Show notes

The struggle to limit work in progress is not a new one. It's a constant balance between our desire to get more done and avoiding employee burnout. It happens at all levels of the organization. Often strategic initiatives stem from a good place - leadership wants to do the right thing – but, as our guest Eric Willeke puts it, "A single piece of strategic WIP equals hundreds to thousands of pieces of individual WIP."

As the Founder and a Principal at Elevate.to, he knows how hard it is to be an effective leader who limits his WIP. As a consultant and someone who cares about humanity, he wants to relieve the strain and stress that people suffer from as a result of their work.

Willeke offers three strategies for reducing WIP across an organization and three tactics for getting started. You'll love the first tactic: "Destroy your backlog."

Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse hosts at Agile2019 in Washington, D.C.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media!

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped

Defining the Product-Focused Model Jan 16, 2020

Show notes

Ross Clanton has built his career reshaping architecture and technology strategies for Fortune 50 companies, driving leadership and culture changes necessary to empower transformation.

Clanton discusses his recently published report, The Project to Product Transformation, and some of the lessons he's learned from enterprise transformations. He goes into detail on the three stages of enterprises (incubate, scale, and optimize), the 4 leadership constraints many organizations commonly deal with, as well as the concept of Dojos that he helped start in his time at Target.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Stas Zvinyatskovsky hosts at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2019 in Las Vegas.

The Project to Product Transformation

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media!

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped