Agile Mentors Podcast from Mountain Goat Software

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#108: Adaptive Organizations with Ken Rickard Jul 24, 2024

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Join Brian and Ken Rickard as they delve into why agile transformations get stuck and uncover strategies for creating adaptive, resilient organizations and people. Overview In this episode, Brian sits down with coach, author, and Lean Change agent, Ken Rickard to explore the common pitfalls of agile transformations and the commodification of agile practices. Ken emphasizes the need to focus on people rather than processes and introduces the art of change, which includes self-awareness and adaptability. And shares the six big ideas of adaptive organizations, such as sense-making strategies and leadership agility. Tune in to learn how to navigate transformation challenges and create an environment that fosters resilience and adaptability. References and resources mentioned in the show: Ken RickardInsightThe Six Big Ideas of Adaptive Organizations: From Frameworks to Sensemaking by Ken Rickard and Jason LittleAgile Manifesto For Software DevelopmentLean ChangeMountain Goat Software’s Agile for Leaders TrainingJoin the Agile Mentors CommunityMountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training ScheduleSubscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Ken Rickard is a spark for transformative good — a change alchemist, deep thinker, and a catalyst for personal growth and organizational evolution. With over 15 years in the agile community, he's honed the art of navigating change and embracing adaptation as the true essence of agility. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:00)Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today I have a really special guest with us. I have Mr. Ken Ricard with us. Welcome in, Ken. Ken Rickard (00:12)Thank you. Nice to be here. Brian (00:14)Glad to have Ken here with us. Ken recently spoke at the the global Scrum Gathering, in New Orleans that I was at as well and had a really interesting, actually had a workshop slot there for a workshop titled Humans Agile and Change, How to Get Your Transformation Unstuck. And wanted to have Ken on to kind of talk through that a little bit. But before we do, for those people who aren't familiar with Ken, let me give you a little bit of an introduction here. Ken is an enterprise coach and change alchemist. I love that. At a company called Insight, he co -authored a book called The Six Big Ideas of Adaptive Organizations, which I know we're going to get into here in this conversation. He's a licensed facilitator of Lean Change. He's an IC Agile authorized instructor. So he's got just a load of credentials and a load of experience to bring to the table here with this. So Ken, let's get into this. Let's talk about humans agile and change and how to get transformations unstuck. What do you think is the main cause of transformations getting stuck? Ken Rickard (01:31)Yeah. So I think, you know, we're all feeling the effects of the high of agile. And I think now we're, we're starting to come down a little bit in the industry. I think everyone's feeling that effect. I mean, I see so many agile coaches on LinkedIn that are still looking for roles and whatnot, scrum masters, you know, a good bit of that, though, I think it's a blowback from the industry and just companies in general who, when they need to tighten the belt, they're actually beginning to look at the roles they've got and figure out which ones that they can do without for now. Or maybe they can do with roles they've already got. And so the effect of that, I think is coming from this idea that, you know, the agile industry, let's even narrow that a little bit more and talk about scrum specifically, has really kind of in the industry has become commodified around this idea that it's a process. And that we just like, we used to do this thing over here and we can just go to the shelf and purchase like scrum in a way. And then like. take that and just drop it into the spot and the practices we used to do. And so when it was only viewed as a process replacement for what they're doing now, it's very easy when, things get rough or tough in the industry as they've been over the past year, year and a half, two years, that our natural, you know, kind of inclination is to kind of hunker down and that hunkering down is to go back to what's comfortable to us, which is typically non -agile, non edge. things because that edge is actually kind of uncomfortable. And so we want to kind of go back and go back into our hole and actually like do the things that we're most comfortable with as an organization or as leaders. And so, yeah, I think that's been kind of what's been happening. And it's just, you know, the follow up from that, I think it's just now hitting the industry, I think in the current times now. Brian (03:10)Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I mean, you talk about it being a commodity and I can definitely see that across the different organizations that do certifications with this, and we're both trainers, we both do trainings. The hard part for me as a trainer is that I don't wanna... discourage people from getting training because I think the training is an important step, right? I think it's you know, you got to know the basics before you can play a sport and You know, if this is the team sport, but it's it's so much easier for me to tell someone all right Well, there's these roles these events and these artifacts Ken Rickard (03:49)Mm -hmm. Brian (04:05)and they can just go, you know, start putting it into their schedule. Here's the events we're going to do, and we have these meetings at this time. It's easy to do that, but it's hard to say, all right, what is openness? And how do we operate in an open environment, you know, or how do we treat each other with respect as we go through this kind of thing? That's hard to train, you know? Ken Rickard (04:10)Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And coming from the, you know, I've spent a three and a half, almost four years now, I think with lean change and Jason little, and, and obviously we co -wrote co -wrote the, the book together, but the, I think the thing that I've learned from all that is, I mean, I want to say that at the beginning, the intention of the folks that created the agile manifesto for software development, their intention was really to help the industry change, but from a software development and probably an adjacent request would have been that the project management kind of behavioral patterns that were there and existing already. They could have actually kind of caused that trajectory to start to shift. And they obviously did over time. I think the one thing, if I had a time machine and I could go back and I could just plant a little seed with those 17 folks, it would be to not look so narrowly at the organization, like just the software development part. Because I think that's what's caused agile and scrum to become that thing that those IT developers do. And it's actually in a way done a disservice, I believe, to the industry at large and then just kind of the trajectory over time and where we kind of landed over these past few years. And it's why with lean change, what I'm trying to do, and I'm not the only one trying to do this. There's a number of folks out there trying to do this as well. But I think Jason and I, what we're trying to do and all the lean change facilitators is to get people to realize. that at the end of the day, everything is really about change. So scrum is just a process. It has all these, like behavioral patterns that come along with it. You're going to need to change, but those things aren't laid out necessarily exactly explicitly in the scrum guide. So you can read through that with your current understanding and your current lens of the world. And you can go, okay, I got this. And okay, all I need to do is go and create a scrum master position and I need a product owner and we need to do these events and then we need to set up these artifacts. And, and that can very easily lead to that kind of mechanical approach to scrum because that's kind of the world they've come from, right? If they've come from kind of project management world where everything is very laid out, very kind of straightforward and linear and then sequentially executed. And I think what we would all probably agree is that what's really missing is that mentality shift and. and the perspective shift. And to get there, we got to really focus on people change. Like, and I don't mean just like, Hey, we're doing a new process. So what do I need to do differently? Or, Hey, we put, we installed this new piece of governance software. So what buttons do I need to push differently? I'm talking about like actual evolution of the individual, their beliefs, their behavioral patterns, and the rituals that match up to those behaviors and beliefs that set underneath them as a person. Brian (06:52)Yeah. Yeah. Ken Rickard (07:14)And so that's what we're really trying to focus on from Lean Change is we're really trying to help people understand that, that to do those things well, to do things like Scrum well, you really have to focus not just on the process change or the technology change, but actually on the people change. You may even have to focus on structures and strategies as well. Brian (07:31)So I'm trying to channel my inner listener and try to think of what they might be asking or thinking about in hearing this. And I mean, what I think about is, all right, well, let's say I'm an organization and I buy an end to all this stuff. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we've tried that. We've tried to implement this stuff and it's all about process and we'd rather not do that. We want to do it the right way. Where do you start? How do you start to... Ken Rickard (07:38)Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Brian (08:00)you come in and just say, hey everybody, we're gonna change how you think and how you, how do you start to get the organization to shift like that? Ken Rickard (08:06)Yeah, that's tough. Yeah. Yeah. And I would actually, I would point the finger right back at ourselves first. I mean, this is the journey I've been on for the past five years. You know, I mean, I, I actually talked about this in the session at the global scrum, scrum gathering. I told the crowd there. I was like, like five years ago, Ken, like if anybody challenged anything or didn't understand how scrum worked, I would essentially kind of like, Brian (08:14)Ha ha ha. Ken Rickard (08:34)just picture this idea of Ken taking them by the arm and leading them over to the Scrum Guide and being like, look, here's what the Scrum Guide says. And that was kind of my go -to thing in a way, variations on that, obviously. But at that time, it was mentality -wise, I was just like, okay, well, we just need to do Scrum. If we just do it well and we do it like it says we're supposed to do it, then it'll fix all the things. And that didn't really get the best response out of it. everyone. You know, it wasn't until I started to shift myself and my own perspective and start to really understand that, okay, I'm not the snake oil salesperson that they probably think I am. I'm actually somebody who's trying to help them change. And so if I look at it from that perspective, now it becomes less about the process or the framework and all the specifics of the framework. And it becomes more about, okay, where are they now? Brian (09:18)Yeah. Ken Rickard (09:29)What mentality do they have now? What are the attitudes that they have about the things that I would hope to put in front of them? Like, are they, are they like, yeah, this is great. Let's do it. Or are they like, no, I don't know. Not so sure. Or are they like, no, that's a stupidest thing I've ever heard of. Like we would never do that here. so better understanding them as an individual and then being able to better show up in a way that is going to be conducive for them to see the need to change is actually the very first. Brian (09:42)Yeah. Ken Rickard (09:55)best thing that I ever did in the way that I shifted my own perspective and how I showed up. And then that started to actually unlock them and their ability to actually pay attention and realize how they needed to change. And then therefore the change started to go. It's a much slower route because you can just go take stuff off the shelf and be like, Hey, we need to do it like this. And you probably will get some traction with some folks, but you're probably going to miss a good bit of them too. So. Brian (10:20)Well, let me, let me ask you this because this is something I've kind of been wrestling with with some other guests on the podcast as well. It's just this, this concept that, you know, partly, I think what's behind some of the problems with this is, is also the short kind of nature of, of how we view change in organizations. And, you know, we want quick results. We, you know, we have a change initiative to do something and we want to see that, that, that benefit of that change in the next three months. Ken Rickard (10:42)Sure. Brian (10:49)And all of a sudden things are going to be completely turned around and we're going to do things differently. But that's driven a lot from this short -sighted nature of, you know, we got to increase our profits quarter by quarter. We got to, you know, please our shareholders and they don't have the long vision that we used to have in companies of, you know, 10 years or something. Ken Rickard (10:54)Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to say something and I'm going to meet it in a completely different way. Planning. Let me explain what I mean by this. all right. And I don't want to make this into the lean change show either, but I'm going to talk about a concept, from lean change real quick. so bear with me, but, so there's this idea that has been created in lean change. It's called, we, we, we refer to it as a big next now. Really what it is is it's like. Brian (11:17)Okay? Hahaha. Ken Rickard (11:42)Think of like an overarching rainbow at the top of like, Hey, what's the largest, biggest thing we're trying to accomplish? And what's the strategy around that? And if we can define a high level strategy around that, it will help us be, get like an orientation towards what outcomes are trying to seek it at the grandiose level. Let's say it's an agile transformation. All right. Underneath there are like a series of smaller humps that are like, okay, what are the goals we might want to actually achieve? Let's make sure those are really loose. except for the ones that are in the very beginning. Does this sound familiar? I'm basically describing breaking down and iterating incrementally changing the organization, right? So, underneath that you'd have like what's referred to as lik…

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#107: Transforming Organizational Mindsets with Bernie Maloney Jul 17, 2024

Show notes

Join Brian and Bernie Maloney as they explore the transformative power of mental models, emphasizing the shift from a mechanistic to an organic mindset in Agile organizations. Overview In this episode, Brian and Bernie Maloney discuss the profound impact of mental models on organizational culture. Bernie delves into how our beliefs and assumptions shape our thinking and behavior, particularly within Agile environments. He discusses the importance of transitioning from a mechanistic to an organic mindset, focusing on problem-solving rather than merely delivering solutions. The conversation also highlights the role of psychological safety in fostering a culture of experimentation and learning. Bernie shares valuable resources, including Amy Edmondson's 'The Right Kind of Wrong,' to further explore these concepts. Tune in for insightful strategies for enhancing your organization's agility and effectiveness. Listen Now to Discover: [1:03] - Brian welcomes Certified Scrum Trainer® and Principal at Power By Teams, Bernie Maloney, to the show.[2:15] - Bernie delves into the concept of mental models, sharing the origins of his philosophy of "making new mistakes" developed during his time at Hewlett Packard.[5:55] - Bernie illustrates the power of mental models and belief by sharing a compelling example that brings these concepts to life.[13:46] - Join us for a Certified Scrum Product Owner® Training, where a year of coaching and development with Mike Cohn, Brian, and the Agile Mentors Community of Agile leaders is included with your training.[14:39] - Bernie discusses how applying mental models can enhance the effectiveness of Agile transformations, creating a naturally adaptive and innovative climate.[18:12] - Bernie offers language as a powerful tool to support the shift to a new Mental Model.[23:30] - Bernie demonstrates the use of mental models for product owners through the Mobius Loop, providing actionable guidance and examples[26:27] - Brian shares a big thank you to Bernie for joining him on the show.[26:59] - If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend, and like and subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast so you never miss a new episode.[27:27] - If you’d like to continue this discussion, join the Agile Mentors Community. You get a year of free membership to that site by taking any class with Mountain Goat Software, such as CSM, CSPO, or Mike Cohn’s Better User Stories Course. We'd love to see you in one of Mountain Goat Software's classes. You can find the schedule here. References and resources mentioned in the show: Bernie MaloneyPower By TeamsMobius LoopThe Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well by Amy EdmondsonAgile Teams Learn From Spikes: Time Boxed Research Activities by Mike CohnCertified Scrum Product Owner® TrainingCertified ScrumMaster® Training and Scrum CertificationMike Cohn’s Better User Stories CourseMountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training ScheduleJoin the Agile Mentors CommunitySubscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Bernie Maloney is an Agile leadership coach and international speaker, leverages his 25 years of engineering and leadership experience to help teams and organizations unlock their full potential. Known for his engaging workshops and impactful coaching, Bernie believes in making performance breakthroughs both achievable and enjoyable. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:00)Welcome in Agile Mentors. We are back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I am with you as always, Brian Milner. And today I have a very special guest with me. I have Mr. Bernie Maloney with me. Welcome in, Bernie. I am. Bernie Maloney (00:14)Thanks, Brian. Happy to be here. Brian (00:16)Great. I'm so excited to have Bernie here. Bernie and I have touched base for years over conferences. We've run into each other and had chats and shared our shared passion for Hawaii and other things. But Bernie was speaking at the recent conference and we've gotten into some conversations. I wanted him to come on because I wanted him to, first of all, if you're not familiar with Bernie, sorry, I see, I just want to jump right into it. If you're not familiar with Bernie, Bernie is a CST. He works at a company called Powered by Teams. He teaches classes, Scrum Master product owner classes and leadership classes and other things as well. But he is a principal at Powered by Teams. So just wanted to give you the basics there before we dive into anything. But the topic that we started to talk about that just as a jumping off place for us is a topic. the topic of mental models. So Bernie, why don't you explain to everyone how you define that, mental models. Bernie Maloney (01:23)So, Brian, this is a great topic. I find myself talking about it all the time. And y 'all, I warned Brian, like, he can press play on this, and it might be 15 minutes before he gets a word in edgewise here. It touches on mindset. It touches on a lot of topics. My talk that Brian was referencing at the recent Scrum gathering in New Orleans was make new mistakes, leadership lessons from an Agile success. which goes back to where I really kind of cut my teeth in Agile at Hewlett Packard. See, I'm a mechanical engineer by training. And I cut my teeth in Agile in the consumer PC division at HP about, this is scary to say y 'all, okay, about 27 years ago starting at this point. And some of the fun stuff, it was a bang up enterprise. It was the fastest business in HP's history to hit a billion dollars. And it was just... Brian (02:05)Yeah. Bernie Maloney (02:18)a great proving ground. We had hardware, we had software, we had distributed teams where volume manufacturing was in Asia, engineering was here where I am in Silicon Valley. Go -to -market for Europe was in Grenoble, France. We had high volume. Some of our products had 100 ,000 units in a single model run, with like 200 models in Europe on a quarterly basis at times. So high volume, high mix, tight margins from a business perspective. A lot of technology products want to have 20 % to 30 % gross margins. That's before you start taking off deductions like expenses and salaries and things like that. On a good day, we had 8 % gross margins for Christmas products, maybe 2 % gross margins. We used to refer to it as we were shipping rotting bananas. And like I said, I was there. When I started, we were shipping six products a quarter. We grew to 20. By the time I left after eight years, we were doing 200 products a quarter in Europe alone. Brian (03:04)Ha ha. Bernie Maloney (03:16)hardware, software, distributed teams, high volume, high mix. And we did all that with weekly iterations of a plan. At one point in my career, I was tactically responsible for the delivery of 2 % of HP's top line revenue with zero direct reports. And part of the secret sauce of success in that organization was really that mental model of make new mistakes. So that's where the talk title comes from. And in fact, makenewmistakes .com will point to poweredbyteams .com because I own that domain too. But that mental model really helped the organization thrive and not just survive. We went from like a number one to a number five share. Sorry, from a number five to a number one the other way around. Because the founding executives recognized that in that tide of a market, mistakes were probably going to happen. And so what they did is they established the psychological safety. Wow, look, there's another great topic. Make new mistakes. You knew that if it was an honest mistake, it would be forgiven. Just don't make it again. Get the lesson is one of the things that they said. I can even tell you the story about the weekend I blew a million dollars of HP's money and I was forgiven, but you'll have to come to a conference talk for that. So that was just like a great experience. And... Brian (04:32)Wow. Bernie Maloney (04:39)After that experience, I went on to TVs. Another part of my background is I shipped the very first internet connected TVs. Look it up, the Media Smart 3760 from HP. It shipped even before Apple TV. It bombed. Okay, it was way ahead of its time. But I recognized that that had been such a joyride. And then I recognized some other stuff that really gets into the psychological, the mental aspects of leadership, high performing teams. And I could, Brian, I could talk about that too, but okay. But that kind of got me to recognize that with those skills, the success that I had experienced at HP could probably be replicated. That's kind of been the path that I've been on for the past 15 years is really helping organizations go along that path. So mental models can be really big. Let me give everybody here an example. And so Brian, I'm going to speak to you as a way of illustrating mental models. So imagine you are physically where you are right now. Brian (05:24)Yeah. Bernie Maloney (05:37)but it is 150 years ago, okay? Imagine you're physically where you are right now, but it's 150 years ago. Now, Brian, let me ask you, can man fly? Brian (05:47)boy, you're testing my history knowledge. Bernie Maloney (05:52)Okay, make it 200 years ago, okay? That makes it easier. Okay, cool. Great, now fast forward to the present. Brian, let me ask you, can man fly? Brian (05:54)No, yeah, no. Yes. Bernie Maloney (06:02)What changed? Nothing about the laws of physical reality. It was just your mental model of what for man to fly means. That's the power of belief, okay? And belief limits a whole bunch of stuff in the way that people behave. So you'll hear Agilent talk all the time about, this is all about changing mindset. I'm probably, Brian, gonna give your listeners some ways of. Brian (06:06)invention. Bernie Maloney (06:30)changing mindset as we go through this, but that's going to illustrate the power of mental models. Now, a big one that I like to use that's specific to Agile comes from Gabby Benefield. She's an Agilist out of the UK, and it's called the Mobius Loop. And I think she's got the domain mobiusloop .com. So everybody can imagine a Mobius Loop. Okay. And what I really like about this model for her... Brian (06:32)Sure, yeah, please. Yeah. Bernie Maloney (06:56) is the right -hand half is what a lot of organizations think Agile is. Build, measure, learn, build, measure, learn. The whole idea of the build trap that we talk about in Agile. It's all about the delivery of a solution. Okay? But the left -hand half is all about the discovery of the problem. Okay? And the discovery of the customer. And that's a part of Agile too that most organizations overlook. So you got to ask why. And it comes down to kind of mental models. So when I was at Persistent, if you go look me up on LinkedIn, you'll find some of my employment history. I was at Persistent for a while. They had a really good mental model. And it's something I still use when I go into a client. And they would talk about there's kind of three eras of a company culture. And so culture is really the environment that an organization lives within. And there's an era. where cultures were formed before the internet. So things like finance and government and mining and manufacturing and oil and gas field developed. I mean, I've had clients in all of these areas. And in that sort of an environment, okay, it was, well, an era. One of the things I'll ask, and Brian, I'll kind of like let you represent the audience. Would you say in general, the people that you work with, the markets that they serve, Are they moving faster and all up into a thumbs up, slower, thumbs down, or about the same, thumbs sideways? Are the markets moving faster, slower, or about the same as they were, say, five or 10 years ago? Brian (08:32)I think everything's moving faster, yeah. Bernie Maloney (08:34)Cool. Okay. Now, how about the technology that your clients use to solve problems for that market? You know, moving faster, thumbs up, slower, thumbs down, or about the same as it was, say, five or 10 years ago. Faster. Yeah, cool. Okay. Now, when things are moving faster, thumbs up for yes, thumbs down for no. Do they always move in a straight line? Brian (08:46)No, faster. No, not always. Bernie Maloney (08:56)Okay, cool. So now things are moving faster, but they're not moving in a straight line. So let me ask you, do most organizations try and plan and predict? Is it possible for you to plan and predict when things are moving faster and they're not moving in a straight line? Is it easier or harder to plan and predict? Brian (09:19)I think it's definitely harder. Bernie Maloney (09:21)Yeah, but organizations are trying to do that, aren't they? And it's because their mental model is as a machine. So organizations born before the internet have a mental model of the entire organizational system being a machine, the industrial age, which you can plan and predict. They treat people like cogs in a machine. In fact, the thing that us Agilists will say is, when you say resources, did you mean people? See, that's... Brian (09:35)Yeah. Bernie Maloney (09:50)That's kind of now we're starting to get into some of the culture aspects of this because language actually forms culture. And so you'll hear Angela say, did you mean people? Like when that whole word of resources comes up. But organizations born before the internet, they've got one culture. Okay, they were born in an era of plan and predict. They've got a mental model of the system being a machine. And your listeners would probably agree most of them struggle with Agile. Okay, now there's another era born in the internet but not the cloud. So some examples like here in Silicon Valley, Cisco, PayPal, okay, lots of us have had exposure to them and lots of us recognize they still struggle with agile because agile wasn't really fully formed and articulated. Then there are organizations that were born in the cloud and so places like Striper Square and I use payments because I've had... clients in finance across all three of these eras. So Stripe or Square, they were born in the cloud where things were almost natively agile because the Agile Manifesto had been published by that point. They just inherently get agile. So these mental models of your organizational system being a machine get reflected in the language. So things like people or resources, it turns them into objects. It enables something I've heard called pencil management. Wear them down to a nub, go get a new one. In fact, if you do the research on where the word resources was first applied to human beings, it might shock some people. So I don't talk about that openly. They'll have to find me privately. I'll be happy to point you out the reference. And once I do, it's like, ooh. But one of the jokes I'll crack. And this is one of the ways that you can start to shift the language. If people call you resources, because you know that turns you into an object, start calling them overhead. Brian (11:23)Yeah. Ha ha ha. Bernie Maloney (11:48)Okay, it can kind of m…

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#106: Innovating Through Economic Downturns with John Barratt Jul 10, 2024

Show notes

Join Brian and John Barratt as they delve into the current state of the agile industry, exploring the impact of economic downturns on agile coaches and Scrum Masters, and discover innovative strategies to navigate these challenging times. Overview In this episode, Brian and John Barratt dissect the current state of the agile industry, focusing on the effects of economic downturns on agile coaches and scrum masters. They discuss the reasons behind organizational layoffs and cost-cutting measures, emphasizing the need for innovation to thrive during challenging periods. The conversation shifts to redefining the roles of scrum masters and agile coaches, highlighting the importance of delivering value and outcomes rather than merely facilitating meetings. John introduces two essential resources—the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel and the Agile Coaching Code of Ethics—to support agile practitioners in their professional development. The episode concludes with a discussion on the significance of mentorship and continuous improvement within the agile community. Tune in for invaluable insights and practical tools to enhance your agile journey. Listen Now to Discover: [1:08] - Brian welcomes Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Team Coach®, & Certified Enterprise Coach®, and host of the Clean At Work podcast, John Barratt.[4:42] - John reveals the core issues behind struggling organizations and shares how innovation can allow an organization to thrive during challenging times.[5:50] - Brian and John analyze the impact of economic downturns on organizations and agility, offering strategies to navigate these challenging times successfully.[10:04] - Brian and John explore the role of Scrum and Agile in an economic downturn.[16:08] - Join Brian and the Mountain Goat Software team for not only a Certified ScrumMaster® class but a full year of membership, learning, and support from Mike Cohn, Brian, and the Agile Mentors Community. You don’t have to lead alone.[17:09] - Brian poses an opportunity to expand the definition of done of Scrum leadership.[19:43] - John introduces the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel and the Agile Coaching Code of Ethics as powerful resources to help Agile practitioners and leaders enhance their skills and progress in their development.[23:42] - John shares the tool of Agile Scoping, based on From Contempt to Curiosity by Caitlin Walker, to lean into Scrum success within an organization.[32:25] - Brian shares a big thank you to John for joining him on the show.[33:04] - We invite you to share this episode with a friend and subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast.[33:57] - Do you have feedback or a great idea for an episode of the show? Great! Just send us an email.[34:16] - If you’d like to continue this discussion, join the Agile Mentors Community. You get a year of free membership into that site by taking any class with Mountain Goat Software. We'd love to see you in one of Mountain Goat Software's classes, you can find the schedule here. References and resources mentioned in the show: John BarrattClean At Work podcastScrum Events Meetup#93: The Rise of Human Skills and Agile Acumen with Evan LeyburnThe Agile Army - John BarrattAgile Coaching Growth WheelAgile Coaching Code of EthicsAgile ScopingFrom Contempt to Curiosity by Caitlin WalkerAgile 2024 - The European Experience - ManchesterAgile Coach Camp UKCertified ScrumMaster® Training and Scrum CertificationJoin the Agile Mentors CommunitySubscribe to the Agile Mentors PodcastMountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. John Barratt is a Certified Enterprise Coach® (CEC) and Certified Scrum Trainer® (CST), passionate about helping individuals, teams, and organizations achieve their best through agile coaching approaches. With a background in the military and a keen interest in systemic modeling, John constantly seeks new ideas and innovations to support organizational resilience and agility. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:00)Welcome in Agile Mentors. We are here for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I am with you as always, Brian Milner, and with me today, I have a good friend of mine that I've been trying to get on the show for a while. Mr. John Barrett is with us. Welcome in, John. John Barratt (00:14)Thank you for having me Brian. It's been a while. We've been trying. We're here today. I'm really pleased. Brian (00:18)Yeah, very, very excited. John and I have seen each other at conferences for years. We've crossed paths. And I kind of jokingly said to him, I'm threatening to have a conversation with you not at a conference at some point. And that was kind of how we started this. For those who aren't familiar with John and his work, John works with a company called Agile Affinity. John Barratt (00:34)Hahaha! Brian (00:43)He is a certified Scrum trainer, a certified team coach, and certified enterprise coach. So he has the holy trifecta of Scrum Alliance certifications there from the guide community. He's a coach and trainer. Couple of interesting things. First of all, we'll talk a little bit about this, but John has his own podcast called the Clean at Work podcast that we can talk about here a little bit. But another interesting thing that he told me before, I didn't realize this, but John actually started in the military. So do you want to say anything about that? How long were you in the military? John Barratt (01:19)Yeah, so I was in the military for six years, joined accidentally when I was 18. So I went into the career office with a friend who was joining. And they were like, you're a bright lad, you can earn all of this money. So it was either go to university and getting lots of debt or join the army, get lots of training and get paid and see the world. So no thoughts of joining before that day accidentally joined. Did six years including a tour of Iraq. And the important thing about that for me is when I left, I felt really isolated. So Army is all about team, right? Team focus. Left the Army, was in IT, and it felt totally different. People were there stabbing me in the back, not supporting me. And then I found this thing called Agile, which was about teams again. And this thing called Scrum, where it was a team game. I was like, this is what I've been missing. Where's this been for the last two years since I left the army? And the rest is history. I did do a keynote at Central Agile Spain. I'm not sure what year, but it is on YouTube for anyone who's interested in hearing more about how the army is actually rather agile in my humble opinion. Brian (02:22)Yeah. That's awesome. We'll find that and put that in the show notes here. So if people are interested in finding that, they can go and watch that. John Barratt (02:45)Yeah, we'll have to dust it out of the archives. Brian (02:48)Well, yeah, yeah, I'm sure we can find it. But we were talking before this about our topic and I think this is going to be a topic that's interesting to a lot of people. Really, really kind of diving into the state of the industry right now and what we're seeing as far as the economy in the agile industry. You know, there's there's several organizations that have laid people off You know, there's there's less demand at the moment in the coaching kind of realm So kind of what's behind that the the shifts and you know What might be driving this kind of thing? So I know John you got some opinions on this. So let us have it John Barratt (03:18)Mm -hmm. Yeah, so I don't want to talk too much about the global economics. I don't pretend to be an expert on why we're seeing a recession. We can talk about, you know, COVID and the cost of that and also the war in Ukraine and, you know, all of the pain and suffering that that's caused much more than, you know, what we're seeing, which is, you know, a few people being laid off. So I don't want to go into that. But what I do want to really explore is, so if an organization is struggling, there's two elements. for that. Do they try and cut back as much cost as possible or do they try and innovate themselves out of that recession? Do they try and do something different and in a unique way? Unfortunately what I'm seeing a lot of is the first one which is cut back, reduce cost as much as possible and that's to the detriment of the the Scrim masses and and agile coaches that we see and I'm going to talk a little bit why they are the ones that often are in danger in a minute. Instead of where they should go, which my bias opinion should go, right? What I'm trying to do in the company that I run is to actually lean into that as an opportunity and try and innovate and see, well, what is possible in this new, exciting world that we're perhaps moving into? Where do we need to go when organizations are struggling? What are the opportunities, an example, AI that we've seen and what difference will that make in the next few years? I mean, who knows? Brian (05:14)Yeah, yeah, I think it's fascinating and you know, there's something I've talked about with some friends for several years and that is that I think there's sort of a, boy, I don't know how deep we want to go on this, but you know, you have a lot of executives now that get hired to come into a company and it's gamesmanship because the idea is I've got to increase our... our stock price by however many percentage points. And my bonus is tied to that. The more I can increase it, the more I get a bonus. Well, it's kind of like if you go to a team and tell them, hey, can you do more story points? They can certainly game that and all of a sudden have more story points. Well, the same thing with a short -term kind of executive. If you're in an organization and you're only going to be there for a couple of years, And you know your site is, if I can raise it three percentage points, I get a bonus. Well, there's a lot of easy cuts I can make that all of a sudden I've gone up three percentage points. But the long term of that company has not benefited. It's only the short term. And it just feels like, I don't know if it's a day trader thing, if that's really why this is kind of becoming more prevalent or not. But it seems like investing is kind of more of the short term. Now, and it used to be when you buy a stock, you'd buy it for 10, 20 years because you believed in that company and you expected to pay off over the long run. There's still a little of that, but it seems much more short -sighted. And I think that's trickled down to our, like I said, I don't know how deep we want to get on this. I think that's trickled down to our executives. And I think from the executive, that's trickled down to the employees. And that's really affected how... John Barratt (06:41)Mm -hmm. Brian (07:06)you know, when we've had layoffs and we've had downturns in the economy that just, hey, this is an easy way for us to show an increase in profits. John Barratt (07:15)Yeah, I think that's a really good point. It reminds me of Craig Lammon's laws, structure leads culture. And when we talk about structure, we don't ever just mean the hierarchy, we mean the bonus system, how people are rewarded and paid and all of those things. And so if you're rewarding shortism by giving these execs bonuses based on Brian (07:34)Yeah. John Barratt (07:41)profit for this year or as you said stock increase by 3 % then they will cut costs because what looks good for short term and for stocks is to have the minimum operational expense possible right if they can keep that as low as possible then that looks like a solid company because they're keeping controlling costs they talk about and and If they're working on margins and profits start to go down, which is what we're seeing as a trend at least UK, US, I can't say if it's completely global, but it seems like a large percent of the company and the organizations are going in that way, then what they do is to keep their margins so that they get their bonus is they start to reduce that, right? Because they need to keep that buffer. If they were to do what I'm suggesting, which is to lean into that and perhaps spend a little bit, spend some money to make some money, or at least keep it lying and try some innovative stuff, then that's high risk for them. Hmm. Brian (08:50)Yeah. Yeah, I've seen things before that have said that when there is economic downturns, that their evidence shows that the companies that invest more during the economic downturns actually end up increasing their positions to a much greater extent when the downturn starts to turn around because... John Barratt (09:02)Mm -hmm. Brian (09:14)they haven't just set idle or they haven't tried to reduce, they've tried to invest and now they're positioned to really take advantage of it once the economy starts flowing again. I'm not like you, I'm no economic expert, I'm no economist. So I don't know all the ins and outs of what's causing that. But it certainly has caused pain in our sector. And I think a lot of sectors, because I have I know lots of people who have gone through layoffs, not just in the tech industry recently. So I guess kind of the question that I ask about this as far as the agile community is concerned is, if we were delivering value, right? If it was undeniable that what we were doing was increasing profits, increasing value to our customers, I think that would make it a lot. harder for these kind of layoffs to happen. So I don't want to entirely say, hey, it's bad leadership, right? I think we have to take ownership a little bit. John Barratt (10:23)Yeah, and I'm going to say something I think is quite controversial here, which I actually blame servant leadership for this. So I know in the latest version of the Scrum Guide, we use the word true leadership, but I still like the word servant leadership. And I've actually changed my mindset and how I teach these things over the last few years because of this, because we've started to see this trend. Brian (10:28)Go for it. All right. John Barratt (10:51)And I've seen it in organizations where I've worked, I've left one year later, and then they've made all the agile coaches redundant. And I think it's down to how we use and perceive servant leadership. So historically, I was always, you know, Scrum Master or Agile Coach is the great person in the background. They let everyone else take the credit. They're there to help and support the team and to do all of that stuff, which is great, right? until someone with a balance sheet comes along and goes, what are all these scrum masters who aren't delivering any value, right? They're an overhead. They're seen as an overhead. Not delivering any value. No one can even tell me what value they've created. These developers over here, they're doing great. And the product owner is really maximizing t…

Full show notes at the publisher

#105: Scrum Conferences & Neurodiversity with Brian Milner Jul 03, 2024

Show notes

Join Brian as he delves into the powerful response to his talk on neurodiversity at the Global Scrum Gathering in New Orleans, which emphasized small but significant changes to make environments more accommodating. Overview In this episode, Brian shares his memorable experience at the Global Scrum Gathering in New Orleans, emphasizing the event's stellar organization and inclusive atmosphere. He reflects on the success of his talk on neurodiversity, which resonated deeply with attendees and sparked meaningful conversations. Brian also underscores the importance of attending conferences for networking, learning, and expanding professional connections. Encouraging listener feedback and engagement, Brian hopes to inspire more inclusive practices within teams and the broader Agile community. Tune in for insights on fostering inclusivity, the value of professional gatherings, and much more. Listen Now to Discover: [1:08] - Brian warmly welcomes listeners and invites you to join an engaging conversation about the value and insights gained from Agile conferences.[2:45] - Brian kicks off with heartfelt gratitude to the behind-the-scenes teams whose hard work and dedication ensure these conferences run seamlessly and effortlessly.[5:04] - Brian celebrates the often-overlooked joys of conferences, from hearing fresh voices and engaging in hallway conversations to making meaningful connections and sparking innovative ideas.[9:57] - Brian highlights and commends the Scrum Gathering for its intentional efforts to accommodate and include attendees with neurodiversity and those with additional needs.[14:15] - Brian shares that the goal of his talk was to demonstrate how small changes can create a more inclusive environment, such as playing neurodivergent-friendly music, dimming bright lights, and establishing quiet spaces.[20:18] - Brian discusses the overwhelmingly positive response to his talk and expresses his hope that these inclusive practices will be adopted widely, transforming the way we all work with our teams.[23:08] - Brian encourages listeners to attend future conferences to gain new insights, broaden their horizons, and forge valuable connections.[24:20] - Do you have feedback or a great idea for an episode of the show? Great! Just send us an email. If you’d like to continue this discussion, join the Agile Mentors Community.[24:33] - We invite you to like and subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast and pass this episode along to a friend. References and resources mentioned in the show: Slide Deck From Brian’s Talk#76: Navigating Neurodiversity for High-Performing Teams with Susan FitzellScrum Alliance’s Global Scrum GatheringAJR BrothersSubscribe to the Agile Mentors PodcastJoin the Agile Mentors Community Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:00)Agile Mentors, how the heck are you? How's your week going? Hope it's going pretty well for you. I wanted to spend some time with you on this week's episode because I just had an event that took place that was really, really a phenomenal event. And I wanna kind of share with you some personal insights that I had from it and just sort of give you a picture of what it's like. If you've never been to a conference before, Maybe I can entice you to maybe go to one. I think you'll benefit from it. And I think you'll kind of see your career maybe even go in new directions if you decide to go to one. We just had the global Scrum gathering that took place in New Orleans. That was the 2024 conference. And the Scrum Alliance has changed things up a little bit. I don't know if people are familiar with this or if you're aware of this, but... Scrimmelines used to have two conferences every year. They used to have one that was somewhere in the US, and then they would have another one that was mostly in Europe. But now they've kind of switched up their strategy. They're going to have one in the US one year. And then next year, it'll be somewhere else globally. So they're really leaning into that global title here for global Scrum gathering. Next year's, I believe they announced here at the end of our conference, is going to be at Munich. So still staying within Europe, but that's not always going to be the case. So there won't be one in the US next year. It'll be the first year that that happens. So every two years, if you're here in the US, you get a chance to attend. If you're somewhere else in the world, maybe there'll be one that appears in a location near you. And that might be a little bit more convenient for you to attend. But I want to talk about this one that was in New Orleans. And I have to start by just, I want to say to all the support staff, to all the people who volunteered their time from. from the teams that helped set up the rooms to the program team that helped kind of put this all together and create the environment and select the talks and everything else. Phenomenal job. Just phenomenal job. I couldn't have asked for it to have been run any better. I saw zero hiccups in my time there and just had a fabulous conference. It was a great time. Enjoyed the heck out of it. Enjoyed New Orleans. It's always great to realize I had not actually visited New Orleans prior to this of all the places. It's not very far from where I live, but for whatever reason, it was just one of those black holes in my map. It was one place I had never been to and it was a place I loved. I thought it was just amazing to meet some of the local people there. and to get a flavor of what it was like on Bourbon Street and Frenchman Street and some other parts of the town after the conference. It was just a really great experience. I was very pleased with the whole thing. And so I just want to make sure that that's out there, right? There's a lot of volunteers that go into working for a conference. I've been a part of that group from time to time. I've reviewed different submissions. If you're not familiar with that process, Speakers at a conference submit their ideas. It's no guarantee anyone's going to get picked. In fact, it's a very, very small percentage. They end up getting picked. So it's a very tough process for the reviewers. And it takes a team of them. They have different tracks that they take submissions in. And they kind of have to whittle those down. One of my friends who was on the team was describing to me, you might have one talk on, or you might think about a topic like daily scrums. And you might have five submissions on daily scrums that are all amazing talks. They all sound like they'd be incredible with great speakers. But somehow they have to whittle that down. They can't have five talks on Daily Scrums. They've got to limit it. And they've got to have talks on things that they feel the majority of the visitors are going to be interested in. So it's a thankless job that goes on behind the scenes. And I just want to publicly thank them. I know I got to rub shoulders with several of the people on different aspects of the teams and just really, really appreciate all the work that you guys did to make it such a successful conference. I really always enjoy the scrum gathering conferences. I think they're, they're, they're a fun event. they, they always have a Monday mingle kind of activity. That's always, something you, you write home about if you will, just something fun to do. this year we had a location was not very far from, the hotel so we could walk there. And just had lots of things that were going on there, food and drink and that sort of stuff. But it just gives you a nice kind of off campus place to unwind and interact with other people and kind of maybe meet some people that you wouldn't get a chance to otherwise. So I always appreciate some of those social events. Even though I'm an introvert, I just enjoy having different space, kind of a different opportunity to do that sort of thing. And I just want to say, you know, the talks I heard this year were incredible. I heard some really good first time speakers that had never spoken before. And I love the fact that, you know, they're doing that, that they are expanding and it's not just the same crop of people that you hear every single conference. You know, it's a different set of people and it really depends on your topic. It depends on what it is you're trying to talk about. So I was really thankful to get to hear some new voices there in our community. And the only thing that I wish I could change about that, and this is the same no matter what conference it is, every conference I have this issue, it always seems like the ones you want to go hear the most are if you're speaking, they're happening when you're speaking, or they're all grouped into the same time slot. And you'll get three or four talks that you really wanted to go to. And you got to pick. You got to choose one of those that you can go to and kind of just plug in there. I'm not one that likes to bounce between the different rooms. I don't have any problem if someone does that. I don't have any problem if someone does that in my talk. But I just like to commit. And that's kind of the way I look at it, is when I come in there, I'm committed, I'm here, I'm giving my full attention. I want to learn from this person. and leave with something I didn't know in advance. So really, really enjoyed that. There was a talk that was put on by women in Agile that was three new speakers that were three women who had not spoken before. Really enjoyed that and loved their approach. They have a mentor for each person that kind of helps them prepare and get ready for it. So that was awesome. Really enjoyed listening to that. And just... I don't want to call out any specific talk because they were all so good. I will say there have been years in the past when I have had sort of slots where I've thought, there's not really one I want to hear in this slot. So maybe I've set out or I've done something else. That wasn't the case for this one. Every slot had something I was like, I've really got to go hear that. I've got to hear that person talk or really want to hear about that topic. So just really enjoyed that. Couple milestones, kind of, I noticed that happened here. One of my mentors and someone I've had in the podcast, David Hawks was there and he's kind of publicly announced this now that he's retiring, he's stepping back a little bit from doing this stuff and he gave his last conference talk. So it was neat to be there to see his last one. He's a really engaging speaker and always has really deep kind of... needy content for you to chew over that you leave thinking about. So it was kind of an honor to be there for the last thing that he did at a conference. And the other thing to say is that I really kind of just enjoy the one -off conversations, the hallway conversations. There's breakfast and lunch every day. And when you do those, you sit down at a table, you've got to find a spot. And sometimes I'm just trying to find any open spot. But what I'm trying to do is find the table with people that I don't know, that I haven't met before, that I want to. maybe rub shoulders with and learn a little bit more about what they're doing their organizations. So those are a great time that they're kind of built in naturally to try to meet some new people. And you know, I'll tell you, I wore a little thing at this conference before it broke on me, but I had a little pin that was kind of my emotional, no, it was my social meter. That's what it was. And it had like a high and a low ranking on it. And you know, I'd start out every day with it on the high ranking. I'm ready to go. I'm excited. And as the day went on, it would kind of go a little bit further down. And by the end of the day, I was spent. I didn't really have any more I could give out. And I just wanted to wear that sort of a visual fair warning to people. If they saw me and they saw where my meter was, they could say, OK, Brian's kind of running low. Maybe. Maybe I'll wait till tomorrow and have that conversation. Not that I'm going to be mean or rude to anyone, but just there are times when you just are all empty. You're just out, and you don't have anything more that you can give. And that's certainly the way I feel sometimes at the end of some of these long days. I've been known sometimes to just go up and spend time taking a nap in my room, maybe doing some emails or something, just something to give me a break to go away. And that's sometimes something I need in these kind of big social environments. I do want to really, really congratulate the Scrum Alliance on one thing that I noticed particularly here in this conference. They clearly made an effort to make some accommodations for some different personality types, neuro types, and you know, I've shared with this podcast before that my talk here at the Scrum Gathering was on neurodiversity and how to be more inclusive of different neurotypes in your teams. I'll get to that talk in just a second. But there were things that I had been studying and learning about that were small accommodations that people could make that helped some of these different neurotypes. And it was clear that the Scrum Alliance had deliberately made an effort to do that. One thing that I didn't know was going to happen until I got there, for every keynote presentation they had on their big video monitor, they had transcription. So there was closed captioning of anything that was being said, which is a very important feature for some various neurodiversity types. And I was very, very pleased to see that. I just thought that was a good change that they made. Small change, not really anything big that they had to do to do that, but it makes a big difference for a segment of the population. And I'm really thankful that they did that. The other thing that I noticed that they did was they had a quiet room. There was a room that was right in the mix of all the other conference rooms where presentations were going on that was a quiet room. It was dim lighting. They had some nice cushy soft like beanbag chairs that were in there. They actually had like some soft quiet like atmospheric kind of effect noises going on like waterfalls and that sort of thing. Rain rainfall, ocean waves, things that were very peaceful and quiet. And they also had made available in that room earplugs for people. And for those that have noise sensitivities, sometimes you can walk into these conference rooms and I can say, I've been guilty of this as a speaker. I want to create an exciting atmosphere. So I blare the upbeat music as people are coming in just to get people in the right kind of excited mood. Well, if I have noise sensitivities, that's going to not only not be exciting, it's going to be painful. And having the ability for someone to self…

Full show notes at the publisher

#104: Mastering Product Ownership with Mike Cohn Jun 26, 2024

Show notes

Join Brian and Mike Cohn as they dissect the vital roles and responsibilities of the product owner, from story mapping to stakeholder management. This episode is a treasure trove for anyone looking to sharpen their Agile skills and understand the nuanced demands of a product owner. Overview In this insightful episode, Brian and Mike Cohn explore the multifaceted role of product owners in Agile development, discussing everything from market analysis and vision creation to the nuts and bolts of sprint planning and retrospectives. Emphasizing flexibility and adaptability, Brian and Mike offer a comprehensive look at how product owners can excel by focusing on strategic planning and fostering strong team dynamics. This episode is essential for product owners seeking to enhance their impact in Agile environments and drive successful outcomes. Listen Now to Discover: [1:07] - Brian welcomes special guest Mountain Goat Software and Agile Alliance founder Mike Cohn. [1:31] - Brian introduces Mountain Goat Software’s What Happens When for a Product Owner, and Mike flips the script, setting Brian, as the creator, into the guest seat on this episode.[3:16] - Join Brian as he explores the vital, behind-the-scenes efforts of product owners that set the stage for Scrum success, all before the first sprint begins.[6:24] - Brian explains the dynamics of crafting a product vision, clarifying how much responsibility lies with the product owner and how much is shared with the team.[7:46] - Brian offers expert guidance on the optimal timing for creating a story map within the Scrum process.[9:46] - Brian and Mike explore the optimal quantity of backlog items to have ready before adding them to a sprint.[13:45] - Join Brian as he explains the importance of setting a product goal in Scrum, detailing how it enhances functionality and guides the development process.[17:03] - Brian invites you to download Mountain Goat Software’s What Happens When for Product Owners, a comprehensive guide designed to support your Scrum journey.[17:43] - Brian explains how to effectively integrate road mapping into the Scrum process, ensuring it adds valuable foresight and preparation without causing shortsightedness.[19:55] - Mike suggests a strategy for managing stakeholders who overemphasize the product roadmap, offering a creative approach to preserve the flexibility and adaptability that effective road mapping allows.[22:48] - Brian delves into the critical role and strategies of effective sprint planning, essential for driving successful Scrum projects.[24:20] - Brian offers his perspective on the significance and involvement of the product owner in the daily scrum, detailing their role and contributions.[26:15] - Mike recounts a memorable story about receiving exceptionally impressive customer feedback at trustworthy.com, highlighting the impact of genuine client interactions.[28:30] - Brian emphasizes that the product owner is an integral part of the team and its goals, underscoring their collaborative role rather than being separate.[29:18] - Brian explores the crucial involvement of the product owner in the backlog refinement process, detailing their responsibilities and impact.[30:48] - Brian explains why he views the sprint review as the product owner's event and offers strategies for executing it effectively.[32:17] - Brian delves into the product owner's essential participation in the retrospective, emphasizing that their insights and experiences are crucial for the team's growth and improvement.[34:10] - Brian outlines ways the product owner can proactively prepare for the next sprint, ensuring a smooth transition and effective planning.[35:27] - Brian discusses a key pitfall that product owners should avoid to ensure success in their role.[37:35] - Brian shares a big thank you to Mike for taking over this episode of the show.[37:57] - Do you have feedback or a great idea for an episode of the show? Great! Just send us an email.[38:08] - We invite you to like and subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast and share the episode with a friend who could benefit.[38:56] - If you’d like to continue this discussion, join the Agile Mentors Community. You get a year of free membership into that site by taking any class with Mountain Goat Software. We'd love to see you in one of Mountain Goat Software's classes, you can find the schedule here. References and resources mentioned in the show: Mike CohnWhat Happens When For Product Ownerstrustworthy.comSubscribe to the Agile Mentors PodcastMountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training ScheduleJoin the Agile Mentors Community Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Mike Cohn, CEO of Mountain Goat Software, is a passionate advocate for agile methodologies. Co-founder of Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance, he thrives on helping companies succeed with Agile and witnessing its transformative impact on individuals' careers. Mike resides in Northern Idaho with his family, two Havanese dogs, and an impressive hot sauce collection. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:00)Welcome in Agile Mentors, we are back. We are here for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm here as always, Brian Milner, and today I have the big man back with me, the OG, we've got Mike Cohn in the house with us. Welcome in, Mike. Mike (00:15)Hey, Brian, thanks for having me back. Brian (00:18)Always happy to have Mike here. Always a pleasure to have him here and learn from his experience. And really, really grateful he's here. We wanted to have Mike on because we have something that we put together recently. Honestly, it's kind of been something we've been talking about we just haven't put together. We had a document that we had out there called What Happens When for Scrum Master. And we just didn't have one of those for a product owner. So I did some work there on the side on that and put it together. And we're getting that out for people so that you can find that and download it from our site. And we wanted Mike to come on to share his wisdom in that area as well, because a lot of this is stuff that I put together. But we wanted to get Mike's insights on these areas as well. Does that sound about right, Mike? Mike (01:11)That's what we agreed to do, but it's not what I'm going to do. Brian (01:14)Okay. Sounds good. Mike (01:19)I'm going to turn the tables on you, Brian, because it's your PDF. It's your document. You're the ideas behind this. So I kind of want to turn it around and take over. I'm going to kind of interview you, ask you things. I mean, I'll chime in with opinions here, of course. I can never shut my mouth long enough to not share an opinion. But it's your PDF. I want to ask you some questions about it, if that's OK with you. And I assume we'll have the link for this in the show notes for folks. They can get the. Brian (01:41)Sure, fair game. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, they'll be in the show notes. Anyone can find this. If you want to download it now and follow along, just pause, you know, go find that in the show notes and you can follow along as we talk through this. Mike (01:55)Great. So Brian, you separated the document out into things that a product owner does. And of course, I mean, kind of naturally you did it by timeframe, right? Do this before you even go and do this every sprint, things like that. I want to talk to you about some of the stuff that we do before the project that a good product owner should do before a project. You had in there a couple of things like do market analysis and create a vision. You tell me more about what you would expect of a great product owner in that world. Brian (02:25)Yeah, that first bullet point, what I was trying to capture is that there's some behind the scenes kind of product, standard product work that we don't really account for in a scrum sense. Things like market analysis and trying to understand the competitive landscape. There's a whole discipline there of activity and work that goes on behind the scenes. And I think it's important to understand, that Scrum isn't in any way saying throw that out or that that's not needed, that is something that would come, in my opinion, before you even begin this kind of work. Scrum does not include in it a process that would say, let's verify that they should fund this product. Let's do a pitch. So the CEO of, you know, here's why you should have this product. That's what I was trying to capture in that first bullet point is just understand there are some standard kind of product development work that goes on that we're not, we're kind of skipping over a little bit. Mike (03:36)That's one of the things I've always loved about Scrum is that Scrum is silent, deliberately so on many topics. And occasionally I will have somebody that I'll meet and they'll say, Scrum doesn't say how we should do product envisioning, right? It doesn't say how we should do that. So I guess we don't do it. It's like, well, Scrum doesn't say that you should code, right? Nowhere in the Scrum guide does it say code your software product, right? Yet if you're doing a software product, somebody's coding, right? Somebody's doing something. And so I like that Scrum is deliberately silent on a lot of things like this because you're talking about doing this market analysis. I work with plenty of companies that are doing internal software. And if we're doing internal software, we're not going to do a market analysis, just kind of internal user needs analysis perhaps, but it's going to be very different. And so I do like that flexibility there. Brian (04:13)Hmm, yeah. Yeah. So that's a good point, though, is depending on the product, it is sort of more as needed or as it would fit. Like you said, if it's an internal product, it's going to look very different than if you're doing a public -facing one. Mike (04:40)I think for any of the steps that you've outlined, I think they can vary. I'm sure some are going to be the same for everybody, but I always think of it as commercial development, right? We're making Microsoft Word, right? I think of it as in -house development, right? We're making a payroll system to pay our employees or contract development are kind of the three big branches to me. And then things get very different within those three types of development. I'm thinking more product development there specifically, but of course we can be using this for non -product things. Brian (05:10)Well, and I do want to say that that second bullet point, they're talking about vision. That's where I honestly, from my perspective, that's where the product owner portion of this begins, right? Because that's sort of the first thing you need to do. And in fact, when we teach our CSPO class, this is, you know, if you've been through a CSPO class with us, you will recognize this order because that's exactly how we go through it in our CSPO class, very deliberately. You know, that Mike (05:39)I'm sorry, I was getting off there, but I was getting interested in something you're saying there. So product owner kind of starting with the vision. I know that the team can influence the vision, right? But where would you draw the line or how much of the vision is the product owners? Is it like, you know, I'm the product owner dictator. Here's my vision, shut up and build it. Brian (06:02)Yeah, I don't know that there's one answer there. I mean, I have seen in certain situations where it's more of a group effort. And that might be part of that earlier genesis of the product, where we go through an effort to define the vision with other key stakeholders, with leaders in the organization. I do think that there is sort of a separate activity that I would take with the team itself. So I might spend a deal of time with key stakeholders developing a vision, but then I might also then have a separate meeting with the team once that's established to say, you know, here's kind of what we're defining it as. Let's walk through this. Tell me if you agree, disagree, or how you might improve or change this. Just so that we, you know, part of our job as a product owner is to cast that vision. and help people get caught up in the excitement for what it is we're trying to do. So that's kind of the purpose there I see of doing that. Mike (07:04)Yeah. Yeah, the more excited we get people about it, the better off we're going to be throughout the course of the project. You also have some things in here about things to do before the first sprint about identifying users, possibly go into the persona level, but then also story mapping. I want to ask you about the story maps for a second. What's your guideline? Because somebody asked me this recently, I'm curious on your answer. What's your guideline for when we should create a story map? Do you do always, only at the start, only in the middle? What's your advice? Brian (07:35)Creating it, I always created at the start. I mean, my, just, and again, this is my experience, right? But what I have found to be useful is to do it at the beginning. And it's sort of right in that order, right? I've done the vision, I've talked, I figure out who my users are. And then I wanna know what the general big picture is for my product. I wanna be able to step back from a 50 ,000 foot view and say, all right, here's kind of the step by step of what we're gonna be doing. Because, you know, kind of like a product backlog, it's a living, breathing document. It's not done, you know, we do it once at the beginning of our product and then it's done set forever. It's constantly adapting and changing as we add new feature areas, as we, you know, understand differently how our users would interact with the product. We're going to adjust and change it. I want it to always reflect reality. Mike (08:30)Do you, so let's talk about reality there. I mean, I agree with that, but what I see is story maps that are hard to keep up to date. Are you seeing teams that really succeed at keeping them up to date all the time? I know the living breathing thing for like a couple months and then it's like the dusty old story map, right? Brian (08:47)Yeah, well, this is kind of one of the things where it was kind of hard for me to put this in a time frame because there's really two time frames that I would like this to appear in. Yes, I do think we should do it before the first sprint. And by the way, again, there, I would do this in multiple rounds with different sets of stakeholders. But then once it's established, I kind of would slide that into that quarterly kind of activity to say, we may not touch it every quarter, but every quarter I would want to... Mike (09:03)Sure. Brian (09:16)check in on it and just say, is this still accurate? Do we need to adjust it? Do we need to do anything different about it? Mike (09:16)Okay. see that. A couple of the…

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#103: Developer Relations and SQLMesh with Marisa Smith Jun 19, 2024

Show notes

Join Brian and Marisa Smith as they dive into the world of developer advocacy, the challenges of agile methodologies in data engineering, and the vital role of open-source communities. Discover how to better support and communicate with your developers in this insightful episode! Overview In this episode, Brian Milner interviews developer relations expert Marisa Smith to explore the vital role of developer advocates in bridging the gap between companies and their users. Marisa shares her insights on the challenges of communicating with developers, emphasizing the need to create a welcoming environment for questions and feedback. She also discusses the unique difficulties developers face when implementing agile methodologies, particularly in the realm of data engineering. They highlight the significance of open-source communities in fostering innovation and collaboration and provide a preview of Marisa's upcoming talk at Agile 2024 on enhancing data pipelines with SQLMesh. Listen Now to Discover: [1:08] - Join Brian in an engaging conversation with Dr. Marisa Smith, PhD, Developer Relations Expert, Developer Advocate, and Speaker.[2:43] - Marisa Smith sheds light on the crucial role of a developer advocate, explaining how they bridge the gap between developers and the wider community.[3:49] - Brian digs into common mistakes in how we communicate with developers and poses the question: what are we getting wrong in our interactions?[5:57] - Marisa outlines the hurdles developers face in a Scrum team environment, shedding light on common obstacles.[12:00] - Marisa explores the hurdles in developer communication, offering insights into improving dialogue and understanding.[12:55] - Mountain Goat Software offers Working on a Scrum Team, a private class to help Scrum teams foster a team dynamic that supports the whole team, including bridging the gap in communicating with developer teams.[15:00] - Marisa discusses how SQLMesh has empowered data engineers to streamline their tasks, sparking a sense of 'Marie Kondoing' their work.[24:11] - Marisa emphasizes the vital importance of open-source developer communities for fostering innovation and teamwork.[26:51] - Brian shares a big thank you to Marisa for joining him on the show.[27:50] - We invite you to subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast. Do you have feedback or a great idea for an episode of the show? Great! Just send us an email.[27:54] - If you’d like to continue this discussion, join the Agile Mentors Community. You get a year of free membership into that site by taking any class with Mountain Goat Software, such as CSM or CSPO. We'd love to see you in one of Mountain Goat Software's classes, you can find the schedule here. References and resources mentioned in the show: Dr. Marisa Smith, PhDJoin the SQLMesh CommunityAgile 2024SQLMeshWorking on a Scrum TeamSubscribe to the Agile Mentors PodcastMountain Goat Software’s Private TrainingCertified ScrumMaster® Training and Scrum CertificationCertified Scrum Product Owner® TrainingMountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training ScheduleJoin the Agile Mentors Community Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Marisa Smith is a Developer Relations expert who bridges the gap between the community and development teams, addressing problems and promoting open-source software. With a Ph.D. in Computational & Theoretical Physical Chemistry, she has a background in simulating radiation effects in water. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:00)Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're here for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today I have the one, the only Marisa Smith with us. Welcome in Marisa. Marisa (00:13)Hi, thank you so much for having me. Brian (00:15)Very excited to have Marisa with us. If you're not familiar with Marisa, her title is Developer Relations Expert. So right there, that's an episode, right? We could talk just about that. And we'll get into that a little bit more, but there's a lot of really interesting stuff here about Marisa. She has her PhD in theoretical and computational physical chemistry. So... Marisa (00:41)Yeah. Brian (00:42)Again, wow, right? I mean, this is amazing stuff. She's worked at Streamlet. She was their very first developer advocate there. And she has since, Streamlet's been acquired by Snowflake. And you founded Tobacco Data, is that right? Marisa (01:07)Uh, no, I, um, I am their first developer advocate at Tupiqium data. Yeah. No words. Brian (01:11)OK, gotcha. Sorry about that. Messed that up. So very, very interesting background. And one of the things that caught our notice, Marisa spoke last year at Agile 2023 and is speaking again this year at Agile 2024. So again, if you're going to come out, I highly recommend you attend her talk. Her talk is called Marie Kondo. your data pipelines with SQLMesh, which I think is really, really interesting. But I'm talking too much, and I want to turn it over to Marisa here. Help us understand developer relations expert and developer advocate. What does that mean? Marisa (01:59)Yeah, so I am, what I always say is that I am the person that connects your company to the people who use your product. And it just so happens that the companies that I work for are companies that work in the tech industry. They're building some sort of piece of the tech stack. So the people that use it, their customers are other developer, developers essentially, or technical people. Brian (02:22)Yeah, so you're an expert in the... Marisa (02:27)in the art of, in the art of like, how do we communicate with other developers? How do we pass that information back and forth between the developers that are making a product and the developers that use a product. And how do we make sure that, you know, we're getting, we're, we're getting the best out of our, out of our users and that they're getting the best out of the technology that we're trying to build for them. Brian (02:49)That is so, so interesting. And so I'm sure product owners are listening going, yeah, help me. Help me. I want to understand. How do I talk to developers? So gosh, there's so many directions we can go with this. What do you think people misunderstand most when they try to communicate with developers? What do we get wrong? Marisa (02:55)hahahaha Oh, wow, that's a great question. Let me think about this for a second. I think, I think from, from, from my perspective, as somebody who spends a lot of time, like running different communities, especially open source communities, I think that people get the wrong idea in that. Yes, these developers are your customer, but a lot of the time they have very limited time. They come in, they look at, you know, maybe your open source product or, uh, you know, your free version or something that they're trying to see if they can integrate this in their own stack. And I think people can. or companies can come at them a little bit too quickly, a little bit too salesy, right? And then that ends up driving them away. They're like, no, no, no, I'm really not interested in any of this. I'm just trying to figure out if this is the right technology. A lot of developers like to iterate. They try things out, right? And so I think if you come at them too early with, oh, here's our sales process. Here's this, this is how much this costs. It's like, no, no, no, I'm like... way early, I'm MVP POC type of thing, trying to see if I can understand, or if this works with my team, my workflow, my current pipeline, the other technologies that we use, you know, that, that type of thing. I think that's one of the biggest mistakes that you can make, especially when you're talking about open source, which is kind of like my bread and butter. Brian (04:28)Right, right. Yeah. And you know, the communication, especially, I mean, because we talk about Scrum and Agile here on the podcast, you know, that relationship between the business side of the house and the developer side of the house, it's almost like, you know, Romeo and Juliet and the two houses, you know, they speak different languages. They want different things. They see the world in a very different way. Marisa (04:34)Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Brian (04:58)And yet somehow these two groups have to figure out how are we going to work together to really deliver something that is valuable, right? So you work with a lot of developers. You talk with a lot of developers. And I know there's lots of different kind of practices and things that are out there that developers are using these days. Marisa (05:09)Yes. Yeah. Brian (05:26)When you talk to them about something like Scrum, or when that kind of process comes up, what are some of the chief complaints that you hear from developers when they talk about working on a Scrum team? What are they not like about it? Marisa (05:44)Ooh, interesting. Yeah, I would say. I would say, I mean, in the area that I'm working in right now, I'm working pretty deep in the data pipelines. So Tobico data runs these two open source projects, SQLMesh and SQL glot. And it's essentially your T of your ETL pipeline, right? We're using SQL, we understand SQL and we're transforming your SQL queries into these tables and we're helping you manage these pipelines as they evolve over time. And so, um, and so I think, you know, in this space, what happens is when you're talking about, you know, working with scrum teams and stuff like that, one of the pieces of agile is trying out new things and iterating. And that can actually be super difficult for a lot of like these data engineers and developers to do, because you have accountability at the end of the day, right? If you're changing up your data, you're mutating some, some SQL query that changes some model that changes your data pipeline downstream. And then all of a sudden. you know, you've pushed it to production and, uh -oh, this data is not what you expected. It's not what you had like originally tested for. And that's because, you know, teams have to work across many different, um, they have many different like iterations that they're working on and many different teams are, you know, making changes potentially simultaneously. And so I think that for, for developers, when you talk about scrum and you talk about agile, particularly if you're talking about like, adjusting tooling or trying out something new again, coming back to this fact that like, you know, they're just there to test things out. They have very limited time and that's because they get stressed out. It's like, well, I don't want to break production. We have to protect production, your production environment as much as possible. And, you know, part of agile and part of doing all these things is trying, trying these new tools, trying these new companies, trying these new methods. And you can get a lot of resistance from that because. they know this method works, they know that they have accountability and they know that production will be fine if they use this methodology that they've set up. Sometimes it can be a little bit of a matchstick thing in the back end. Brian (07:47)Yeah. Well, and I mean, just hearing you talk about that and thinking about it, I know one of the big friction points between the business side and the developer side is take SQLMesh. If that's something that my team has never worked with and I have someone on the team who is interested in that and wants to, thinks it might give us some benefits, There's friction there with the product side to say, product has all these things they want, and they want to push these things forward. But I think this bit of adding this to our stack is going to improve things. But how do I communicate that to the business to give us the time to do this? Because it's not directly leading to a feature, but it will improve things moving on. How do you? How do you balance it? How do you have that conversation with a product person or the business side of the house to really say, Hey, this is worthwhile. Marisa (08:50)Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, it's super difficult. And I think it's really a balance of, you know, having to have these engineers dedicate some time to new tooling and testing things out. And then once you have done that in their schedule, you know, I don't know how frequently you may want to do it like once a month or something like that, where they, you know, take a day and just review what new is out there. What else should we be looking at? What other tools, what other... You know, with, especially with the emergence of AI and all of that recently, that changes a mile a minute, I think. So, you know, keeping on top of that is, is, is a huge burden on these engineering teams. And so time needs to be dedicated for actually getting that kind of stuff done and the freedom to actually try these things out and do like just a minimum viable product, right? Just a tiny POC with like a little Tinkit data set. And then on, I think there's some. Brian (09:23)Ha ha. Marisa (09:45)there's some weight of this on the company that's developing these open source products or new tooling, that they have to start communicating and figuring out their business value as well. Because those developers cannot, with this little example, show all of the benefits that you would get. What cost savings do you get? What efficiency savings? What increase in productivity? All of that has to be done by the company and you need to have that ready. so that you can back up your developers that are trying out your product and your open source projects so that they have something to go off of. They're like, hey, look, I made this. It took one week or something like that. And I got it to a place where it's really good and look at all these cool features. And this will make us so much faster in our pipeline. And then here is the company's documentation or case study or whatever it is that says this should increase our productivity approximately this much. And... that these other big companies that are similar to us have this sort of success with it. And, you know, it, I think those two combined can really help alleviate these pressure that the developers feel and give them the time to actually try out new tools, which in many cases they love to do. They love to try new things. They love open source, right. And they will be your best advocates. If you spend the time talking to them, communicating with them and giving them the things that they need to be successful. Brian (11:12)Yeah, I would think that's kind of a, there's a duality to, I would imagine your role in speaking with them about your product, because in one case you have to sell them on, hey, look how beneficial this is. This is, you should add this to your stack. But on the other hand, you've got to equip them with the, the, uh, the sales pitch, I guess, that they can then make to their business to say, hey, you should allow us to do this. You should give us the, whether it's finance…

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#102: Communicating Agile Transformations with McCaul Baggett Jun 12, 2024

Show notes

Join Brian Milner and McCaul Baggett as they explore the power of empathy and storytelling in successful Agile transformations. Learn McCaul's five-step approach to effective communication and discover strategies to overcome common pitfalls in organizational change. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner sits down with McCaul Baggett, Chief Agile Officer at CAVU, to discuss the intricacies of communicating change within organizations. They delve into common pitfalls in Agile transformations and highlight the importance of empathy and storytelling in engaging teams. McCaul shares his five-step approach to effective communication, emphasizing the power of testimonials and spreading awareness. Tune in to gain valuable insights and practical tools for navigating and leading successful Agile transformations. Listen Now to Discover: [1:10] - Join Brian as he welcomes McCaul Baggett, Chief Agile Officer at CAVU and a master of Agile transformation, to delve into the secrets of successful Agile transformation.[3:15] - McCaul emphasizes the critical role of storytelling in engaging and guiding teams through the process of Agile transformation.[5:57] - Brian addresses a common challenge in Agile transformations: navigating the unknown and its impact on team dynamics.[8:01] - McCaul explains how effective communication and a compelling narrative can help teams grasp their value during a transformation.[10:40] - McCaul advocates for going beyond the basic 'why' by incorporating testimonial narratives to create more meaningful connections.[14:39] - Brian suggests using these tools to foster empathy, advocating for their use in both top-down and bottom-up approaches when initiating a transformation.[16:29] - Dive into Mike Cohn's book, Succeeding with Agile, for practical advice on navigating your transformation. Discover strategies for communication, overcoming resistance, and other key aspects of Agile success.[17:54] - Brian inquires about effective ways to connect with and engage resistant individuals within the team.[22:49] - Join McCaul and Brian as they discuss the importance of creating specific best practices that suit the unique needs of this particular team and organization.[28:07] - Brian shares a big thank you to McCaul for joining him on the show.[28:33] - Join Brian in attending Agile conferences to connect with and learn from Agile experts and peers, fostering valuable discussions and insights.[29:53] - If you’d like to continue this discussion, join the Agile Mentors Community. You get a year of free membership into that site by taking any class with Mountain Goat Software, such as CSM or CSPO. We'd love to see you in one of Mountain Goat Software's classes, you can find the schedule here.[30:35] - We invite you to subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast. Do you have feedback or a great idea for an episode of the show? Great! Just send us an email. References and resources mentioned in the show: McCaul BaggettCommunicating Change Made Easy with McCaul Bagget and Tom BullockSucceeding with Agile by Mike CohnAgile 2024Subscribe to the Agile Mentors PodcastCertified ScrumMaster® Training and Scrum CertificationCertified Scrum Product Owner® TrainingMountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training ScheduleJoin the Agile Mentors Community Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. McCaul Baggett is the Chief Agile Officer at CAVU, specializing in Agile transformations and effective communication strategies. With a focus on empathy, storytelling, and practical tools, McCaul helps organizations navigate change and foster sustainable Agile practices. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:00)Welcome in Agile Mentors, we're back. This is another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today I have the one and only Mr. McCaul Baggett with us. Welcome in McCaul. McCaul Baggett (00:13)Hey, thanks Brian, really glad to be here. Brian (00:15)Very excited to have you. For those who aren't familiar with McCaul, McCaul is the chief agile officer at Cavu. He has been working in transformations for quite a long time doing some large-scale transformations at different organizations. One that he is allowed to publicly mention is John Deere, but there's others that he's been a part of as well. You know companies are funny that way. They don't always necessarily want you to publicize things for some reasons. I don't know why. McCaul Baggett (00:43)Yeah. Brian (00:44)We were joking about that earlier. But I wanted to have him call on because we were both at the Agile 2023 conference, and I saw him on the agenda, and it was one of those sessions I didn't get a chance to go to, unfortunately, but really thought it was an interesting topic. I wanted to have him come on and kind of chat with us a little bit about this. So his topic was about communicating change and communicating change in an easy way, you know, kind of making that an easy process. So let me start there with you, McCaul, on this is, what do people get wrong when they're going through a transformation and we make the decision to go through a big change in our organization? What are some of the common pitfalls organizations fall into when they make that decision? McCaul Baggett (01:34)Well, let me start by saying it wasn't me solely that was doing the talk. I did have some partners there with me. And if you look it up, you should definitely speak to them as well or look them up as well. Dana Dismukes is a transformation lead for Dell. Tom Bullock is the chief storyteller for Scrum Inc. And really the academics of the talk came out of Tom's brainchild. But through my work, I got a chance to apply it. And it was precisely because of this very issue, the ch- the- non-working approach that many organizations take to communicating about change. There's a tendency in a lot of change management structures to discuss the need for communication, but as Agilists, we don't inherently do a lot of study of the nature of communication. And so I would say probably the biggest, most common error that people in a transformation of any kind and most close to my experience in Agile transformations make in communicating about change is going about it from a way that is, from the perspective of trying to reassure their teams, their departments that this is something that has leadership endorsement by communicating from the top down. I mean, please forgive the hierarchical metaphor, but getting some senior leader to say, hey, this is gonna be great, you can do it, we're gonna do this. When in fact, the most effective way to communicate to someone, especially someone who's not fully bought in, is by telling them a story of someone who is like them, has experience like them that they can relate to. And that storytelling perspective is what we talk about in this talk, Communicating Change, maybe. Brian (03:16)Yeah, there's a lot just in there to unpack. I mean, just the idea, thinking about, I've talked with a lot of organizations and a lot of people have come through classes and stuff that I've talked with who are going through changes like this, but then they're not really even sure how much their leaders are on board with this. They just, they have some layer of management who says, yeah, this is what we're gonna do, but do the people at the top really feel that way? Do they even know what it is that we're doing? McCaul Baggett (03:34)Sure. I mean, that's even tougher. I would find it hard to even consider it a true transformation if you can't be sure your leaders are bought into it. But you're not wrong. It is stunning how often you get these folks that you run into and they say, my leadership may be willing to do this. I teach a lot of Scrum at Scale. And so we talk a lot about executive Metascrums and executive action teams and prescriptions about how involved the leader should be. And people will sort of stop and say, wait, you want a leader to meet about team obstacles every day? And I say, yeah, or however long those executives are willing to let their teams go without support to removing their obstacles. Like, what is it that they're doing that's more important than clearing the impediments for their teams? But that does tend to be the perspective is, I don't know if my leaders even bought into this change. That's tough. Brian (04:34)Yeah. Yeah, it is. And I think that speaks to some of the fundamental flaws, I think, that people have with transformations before you even get to communicating, right? Just do we know why we're here? Do we know what it is we're trying to do? Those kinds of things. I like to focus on the communication, though, here because communication is such a McCaul Baggett (04:46)Yeah, that's true. Brian (04:56)delicate beast. I mean, it just, you know, when you're trying to speak with another human, even if it's just within your team, you know, it's difficult because we're different personalities and we have different backgrounds and everything else, much less when you're talking about it over an entire organization. I would imagine, and you, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I would imagine that one of the biggest sources of kind of consternation or, you know, anxiety I think when these kinds of things happen is the unknown, just not really understanding how do I fit in and what does this mean for me. McCaul Baggett (05:33)Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Sometimes it's phrased that it's termed what's in it for me. And I think that's the wrong perspective to take. People aren't often necessarily, people are not always looking for some kind of payoff for the transformation. They don't need to know sort of what they get out of it. But I think that you really put your finger on a lot of the reason that we see trepidation with a transformation is because it implies that Brian (05:38)Mmm. McCaul Baggett (06:00)Business as it had been occurring before was not acceptable. What you'd been doing previously was not good enough. And now we need to get you to do it another way. That inherently sort of fundamentally starts with a position of questioning whether or not your position is stable. And that gets, you get some amygdala hijack stuff going on. You get the brain started worrying about existence, not just change. So you're right, contextualizing. Brian (06:26)Yeah. McCaul Baggett (06:29)your communication about this is really important. And I think taking a perspective of empathy and meeting especially resistance in a change environment, a changing environment, meeting resistance with an attempt to understand the perspective really fundamentally underpins any successful communication you're gonna have about change management in general, but communication in particular. Brian (06:52)What do you think about that, McCaul? I mean, if you're a leader in that kind of organization and you recognize this and you see, people are gonna, I'm gonna send people into a little bit of a panic, right? Because you're right, there's no way that I can hear that message, hey, we're gonna do things differently than the way that we've been doing them without kind of self-internalizing, well, that means that something I've been doing has not been acceptable, it's not been good enough, it's not been what the organization needs. How do you communicate that in a way to say, no, it's not you, right? It's kind of a process thing. It's not that you did anything wrong. It's that we found this is a better way of working. McCaul Baggett (07:30)Yeah, so I think starting with that fundamental basis of why this is occurring is really key. But even before you get to the communication about why, it's really important to figure out who it is you're speaking to. So going back to that sort of, that empathy piece, there is a need to get that communication about, okay, it's not that you did anything wrong. and here are the reasons why we're doing it, that is the message we're looking to communicate. But at a communication level, like understanding even how to begin that communication really requires us to take a step back so that we can consider the people we're telling that story to. So just to connect this to the topic that actually came up in the talk about how we do that communication, it's really fundamentally about, and just a quick aside about that talk. So in the Agile 2023 conference, we actually applied for a longer workshop, like 120 minutes, 160 minutes, one of the long time boxes. And they'd come back to us and said, why don't you do one of these 30-minute segments? So we really pared down a lot of the things that we wanted to say. And so to connect back to what really, what emerged was actually, it was actually probably a better talk than if we'd had a longer period of time to do it. We just, we had to cut everything until we could come back with just, Brian (08:36)Yeah. Hahaha. Mm. McCaul Baggett (08:58)the real good nuggets. And what stayed was this. In order to communicate effectively when you're going through any kind of change management process, first of all, having a change management process and a plan for how you're gonna manage that, that's your beginning. But to get a little bit more particular about how we communicate about that change, there is one technique which we agreed was probably the thing to focus on so that it would be most universally helpful. in any stage of a transformation that was going on. And that was creating a, finding a way to create a narrative, a personal narrative that could connect to the various people that you're trying to connect to, right? So to create a testimonial. And so we spent our time in that talk discussing how to really get a useful testimonial. And then once you've... got that how to do something useful with it. And we outline kind of five steps for how to think about this. Brian, tell me if I'm getting too deep or you kind of want to... Okay, cool. And I don't know that these are the only five steps. We try to make it easy to remember. The takeaways that we were trying to give were, you have to be first thoughtful about what it takes to make a compelling testimonial. So this is where I mean, you can't start with why. Brian (10:00)No, no, this is awesome. Go for it. McCaul Baggett (10:21)we're doing this, you have to start with who you're speaking to about why. Because the why shifts. If you're speaking to stakeholders, there's one why. And if you're speaking to the organization, to your employees, to the people that are doing the work, it's not that the why is different, but the way that you talk about it may be different. So once you know what it's going to take to make the testimonial, the next step would be to think about how you can work. how you can set yourself up ahead of time to maximize the potential to make an impact with your audience, to plan. how you're gonna get…

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#101: Fostering Sustainable Change with Leor Herzfeld Jun 05, 2024

Show notes

Join Brian as he discusses the crucial elements of sustainable agility with Leor Herzfeld, Agile Coach and CEO of Integral Agile. Dive into the human side of sustainability and discover the 14 dimensions essential for creating a culture that truly engages. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner sits down with Leor Herzfeld to unpack the concept of sustainable agility from a deeply human perspective. They explore why external changes often fail and how a focus on individual health—encompassing safety, autonomy, mastery, purpose, and accountability—can lead to genuine, lasting transformation within organizations. Leor shares practical tools for leaders looking to foster an environment that supports continuous agile practices and nurtures employee engagement. Listen in as they discuss how to achieve a resilient and thriving workplace. Listen Now to Discover: [1:01] - Join Brian as he explores the vital role of sustainability in Agile methodologies with expert guest, CEO of Integral Agile and author of the upcoming book Reimagine Transformation, Leor Herzfeld.[2:09] - Leor delves into the meaning of human sustainability, explaining its significance and impact.[4:33] - Brian discusses the inherent resistance to change, noting that even positive transformations require adjustments.[5:22] - Leor poses the shift from thinking about only the holistic, healthy Agile culture and team to focusing on a healthy individual. [7:14] - Brian and Leor explore what sustainability and sustainable pace practices entail in real-world scenarios.[10:03] - Leor examines the reasons behind employees' lack of engagement in their organizations and work environments.[11:49] - Leor discusses 14 key aspects of individual health that are essential for creating a sustainable and healthy environment at both individual and organizational levels.[14:03] - Leor shares a tool to assess the Agile health of your team or organization.[14:53] - Enhance your team's performance with Mountain Goat Software’s specialized private training, including exclusive classes for leaders that accommodate their busy schedules. Dive into training that promises to elevate your team and organizational health, ensuring success across the board. You can email the Mountain Goat Software team for detailed information.[16:43] - Leor shares how he measures the sustainability and health of the teams and organizations he works with.[18:46] - Brian highlights a frequent issue encountered in classes: Agile teams feeling unsupported by their organization's culture.[22:27] - Leor delves into the evolving landscape of the Agile world, exploring how shifts can foster greater organizational support and, thereby, sustainable environments. [28:58] - Brian shares a big thank you to Leor for joining him on the show.[29:52] - If you’d like to continue this discussion, join the Agile Mentors Community. You get a year of free membership into that site by taking any class with Mountain Goat Software, where we get right into the good stuff and have some deep discussions. We'd love to see you in one of Mountain Goat Software's classes. You can find the schedule here.[30:17] - We invite you to subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast. If you have feedback or a great idea for an episode of the show, send us an email. We can’t wait to hear! References and resources mentioned in the show: Leor HerzfeldIntegral AgileIntegral Agile Health and Happiness AssessmentReimagine Transformation by Leor Herzfeld, David Hersey, Ben Williams, and Julio PizarroOrganizational Transformation: A Case Study For Creating A Cross-Functional Team Of Teams (Art) Aligned To A Value Stream Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel PinkAgile For LeadersMountain Goat Software’s Private TrainingSubscribe to the Agile Mentors PodcastMountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training ScheduleJoin the Agile Mentors Community Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Leor Herzfeld is an Agile Coach and creator of the Integral Agile Approach, combines his artistic and scientific expertise to drive transformative changes in the financial and educational sectors. He is dedicated to developing advanced collaboration tools that enhance organizational design and enable seamless workflows, drawing from his unique blend of artistic vision and scientific insight. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:00)Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're here for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I am with you as always, Brian Milner. And with me today, I have Mr. Leor Herzfeld with us. Welcome in, Leor. Leor Herzfeld (00:13)Thank you, Brian. Happy to be here. Brian (00:16)Excited to have Leor with us. Leor is somebody who we kind of cross -passed at the Agile 2023 conference this last year. And he had a talk there that was really, really interesting. And we wanted to have him on for a while now to kind of share some of the insights from that talk with us here on the podcast. So his topic was called sustainable agility. But we were talking about this before he had. So Leor, I'll kind of turn this over to you. Help us understand, because it sounds like that's maybe, that might be a little misleading into what we're really talking about. So what are we really talking about? Leor Herzfeld (00:56)Well, yes, so it's misleading from the perspective of sustainability with regards to the buzzword that it is today, right? So we think about, you know, are we being ecologically responsible and so on and so forth. But in fact, this is sustainability from a more human perspective. So what happens typically when the coach or scrum master leaves the team? Oftentimes things fall apart, right? When that kind of protective presence leaves. the gains that were made tend to erode. Now, why is that the case? Often it's the case because whatever change they've put in place was external. It was a process -oriented change and it's not something that really penetrated into the hearts and minds of the people there. Brian (01:44)Yeah. Yeah. I make an argument there as well. Cause I know this is something that, uh, like Lisa Adkins will, will mention is that, you know, if that, if that coach that leaves and there's a vacuum and a hole, and now they're kind of lost, that coach didn't really do a great job because part of our role is to create that capability so that they don't depend on the coach. Right. Um, so yeah. Leor Herzfeld (02:10)Yeah, and you know, I'm going to go ahead and take the coaches side here, which is a rare point of view for me. Don't get me wrong. I love coaches and I love agile. But I often think, you know, sometimes coaches might be coming at the situation from, you know, a lack of empathy. You know, they're very process oriented and I've heard many coaches blame the client for, you know, not listening to them where. Brian (02:16)Hahaha. Leor Herzfeld (02:36)you know, as a coach myself, someone who's been a coach for 15 years, I've always felt like it's my responsibility to connect empathically with the person because what are we doing when we're coming in to bring in a massive change? And in essence, Agile is asking people to think backwards, right? It's thinking from the perspective, whether we're talking about, you know, the definition of success is no longer output, it's now outcome. or we're not going to do right to left planning, they're going to say, oh, when's something going to be done? And we're going to say, well, I don't have a baseline for how your teams are performing yet. So let me get back to you in about a month after we'll establish what the team's velocity and throughput is. And that's a terrifying thing for people to hear who are accustomed to doing things a particular way for five, 10, 15 years. So when coaches come in and they're just like, well, here's the process and it must be done this way, why aren't you listening to me? You know, that's where I sometimes take exception with how coaches approach it. I see it as a personal responsibility as a coach to understand the intrinsic motivations of every individual with whom I encounter and really help them get that I understand that you're taking a risk. I understand that you've spent, you've gotten where you are today in terms of your career. You've gotten here by doing these things. And I'm now asking you to throw that out the window and do things differently. Brian (04:02)Yeah, it's tough. I mean, the change in itself, anytime we go through change, it's hard and there's resistance to any kind of change that we encounter in our lives. You know, even changes that we would seek out, you know, like getting married or having a kid or anything like that, you know, like it's, we, we, we, uh, we enter into those changes very willingly, but it doesn't mean that every aspect of that change is something that we embrace wholeheartedly, you know, uh, There's adjustment periods and there's just something that you got to get used to when you go through those. And I agree with you. I think the organizations are the same way, the people in those organizations. So I love this approach. I love kind of thinking about it from the human perspective and kind of the impact it makes there. So let's go further into it. So if we're talking about kind of the human aspect of this, help us understand that a little bit more. Leor Herzfeld (04:56)Right. So this is something that, you know, that integral agile, this is my company, we've created the integral agile approach. It's intention. So when I say I'm having empathy for coaches here, agile talks about how important the mindset is. And they talk about how important it is to create a healthy agile culture. But if you Google how to create a healthy agile culture or how to cultivate a healthy mindset, there isn't anything that someone can have a look at. and say, oh, I'll just do that then. And the reasons for that are, of course, is it varies place by place. And it's ethereal, right? It's a very difficult thing to codify. We've tried to do that anyway. So the basis of the talk I gave at Agile 2023 was about, if we're talking about sustainable agility, the individuals. So Agile often talks about healthy teams. But I never hear it talking about healthy individuals. And is it possible to have a healthy team if the individuals who make them up are themselves not healthy? Brian (06:05)Yeah, that's a very, very good point. And by the way, I got to just stop down here because I got so excited with our topic that I kind of skipped over really giving Leor a proper introduction. I'd said that we cross paths from Agile 2023, but you just reminded me that I didn't really introduce you. Leor is the CEO of a company called Integral Agile. And their philosophy is trying to work to have Agile deliver the results that it promises, which is, again, we were talking a little bit before we started about how that's just not always the case. We see, in fact, it's often not the case. There's a lot of circumstances where organizations are just not getting the promise that they thought they were going to get with Agile. There is a book that is not out yet, but is coming out that Leor is going to have out in a bit called Reimagine. transformation. And so be on the lookout for that. That's going to be a really, really important book, I know. So sustainable from a human perspective, sustainable is the person healthy, is the person working in a way that they can kind of keep that up over a long period of time. There was an interesting thing I came across actually on this that I don't know if you've. encountered this or not, but I know when the whole agile concept of working at a sustainable pace, before that even came up, I think it was from the XP team, when they had originally started to deal with this whole concept of sustainability, their original kind of approach was about, when they started, they actually quoted it as something like, people shouldn't work more than 40 hours a week. And they started from that perspective of we got to limit all this because we're having all these people work nights and weekends. And so let's just say people shouldn't work more than 40 hours a week. But that adjusted over time and it changed it to sustainable because what they realized was, well, for some people, sustainable is less than 40 hours. For other people, it's more than 40 hours. So who are we to say, you know, Hey, this is what sustainable is for you. You've got to find your own sustainable pace. Leor Herzfeld (08:31)Yeah, and sustainable pace is a part of it. But you know, if we're talking about so you you, you also may have seen, you know, the Gallup State of Work poll that came out last year. And we've heard about quiet quitting. And, you know, you just have to see now, especially with with Gen Z coming into the marketplace, and, you know, they've got a completely different mindset and they have different expectations at work. They have expectations that are valid. They have expectations around psychological safety, diversity, equity, inclusion. There are things that organizations are struggling to adapt to because there's been this kind of like, you're going to come here and work and you hear people being called resources and that makes us cringe. But there's this old school mindset. And again, I really want to respond to this with empathy and not make like where we are in the world today. This is a slice of human history. And it's very easy to look at, you know, to try and make things wrong, whether it's like there's a mismatch in culture, you know, boomers versus Gen Z versus, you know, millennials, Gen X, whatever. We've got different cultures. We've got different mindsets and we need to figure out a way to come together. So something like... Let's not work 40 hours a week is important, right? But it's not sufficient to say, okay, well, we now have a healthy individual. Brian (09:55)Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot more that goes into it, right? There's, I mean, that is part of it, obviously, because you don't want to have burnout and everything else, but I love you bringing up the point about quiet quitting and engagement. You know, there's clearly, you know, lots of organizations deal with this issue of engagement and having a disengaged workforce and trying to have engagement initiatives and raise the level of engagement of employees and all that kind of stuff. So it's clearly a recognized problem. It's clearly something that organizations struggle with and have experimented and tried to find solutions to. So from your perspective, what do you think about that? Why do you feel like organizations are having such a big issue with engagement with their employees? Leor Herzfeld (10:44)I think people don't feel valued. They feel like they're fungible parts in the machine. But more so than that, they lack a connection to pur…

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#100: Navigating the Future of Agile and Scrum with Lance Dacy & Scott Dunn May 29, 2024

Show notes

Join Brian for the 100th episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast as he dives into the future of Agile with fan favorites Scott Dunn and Lance Dacy. Listen in as they explore the evolving role of AI, the continuous need for leadership innovation, and the Agile community's journey towards greater accountability and effectiveness. Overview In the 100th episode, our expert panel celebrates by examining the latest trends and enduring challenges in the Agile industry. They discuss the critical need for organizations to adapt and innovate, particularly through leadership and management strategies that foster high-performing teams. This episode is a deep dive into how embracing change and technological advancement can propel the Agile industry forward, ensuring that organizations not only survive but thrive in an ever-evolving business landscape. Listen Now to Discover: [1:10] - Join Brian in a special celebration of the 100th episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, featuring a look forward to future innovations in Agile![1:43] - Brian kicks off the landmark 100th episode with a forward-looking panel on Agile and Scrum's future, featuring experts Scott Dunn and Lance Dacy.[4:01] - Listen in as Brian asks the panel to share their insights on emerging trends within Agile and Scrum, setting the stage for a thought-provoking conversation.[4:15] - Lance highlights key trends including solutions for scaling challenges, the integration of AI in Scrum, and innovations in leadership and management.[6:54] - Scott emphasizes the enduring impact of Agile and Scrum in driving organizational enhancements.[11:36] - Lance underscores the critical need for leadership and management to adopt innovative approaches and acknowledge generational changes to effectively engage and support their teams.[13:30] - Addressing the provocative statement that 'Agile is dead,' Brian explores its implications on the real-world demand for Agile compared to its perceived necessity.[14:50] - Brian, along with Scott and Lance, urges the Agile community to recognize its shortcomings and learning experiences, which they believe may be contributing to negative perceptions of Agile, and how the community could approach it differently.[24:10] - Brian encourages you to try out Goat Bot, Mountain Goat software’s Scrum & Agile AI tool. This free tool is trained to handle all your Agile and Scrum queries—start asking your questions today![25:58] - The panel explores the impact of AI on enhancing agility in organizational practices in estimating, development, and so much more.[32:20] - Brian stresses the importance of using AI as a tool to support, not supplant, discussing ways it can improve rather than replace human efforts.[43:23] - Brian shares a big thank you to Scott and Lance for joining him on the 100th episode of the show.[43:44] - Brian thanks you, the listeners, for your support and shares his excitement for the future of the show, inviting you to send us your feedback or share your great ideas for episodes of the show. Just send us an email.[44:57] - We invite you to like and subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast.[45:16] - If you’d like to continue this discussion, join the Agile Mentors Community. You get a year of free membership into that site by taking any class with Mountain Goat Software, such as CSM, or CSPO, or Better User Stories Course. We also have Advanced Certified ScrumMaster® and Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner®, where we get right into the good stuff and have some deep discussions. We'd love to see you in one of Mountain Goat Software's classes, you can find the schedule here. References and resources mentioned in the show: Scott DunnLance DacyGoat BotCertified ScrumMaster® Training and Scrum CertificationCertified Scrum Product Owner® TrainingAdvanced Certified Scrum Product Owner®Advanced Certified ScrumMaster®Mike Cohn’s Better User Stories CourseMountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training ScheduleJoin the Agile Mentors CommunitySubscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Scott Dunn is a Certified Enterprise Coach and Scrum Trainer with over 20 years of experience coaching and training companies like NASA, EMC/Dell Technologies, Yahoo!, Technicolor, and eBay to transition to an agile approach using Scrum. Lance Dacy is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®. Lance brings a great personality and servant's heart to his workshops. He loves seeing people walk away with tangible and practical things they can do with their teams straight away. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:00)Agile Mentors, welcome. This is our 100th episode. Can you believe it? We've been doing this for 100 episodes now. So first, before we even get into today's episode, I just wanna say huge, huge thank you to you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for giving us feedback. Thank you for giving us suggestions. We would not have made it to 100 without you, so. Huge thanks to you. And to celebrate, we're trying to do something different here for the 100th and not just let it go by and not mark this occasion. So what I wanted to do was to have some of our regulars, our favorites on together so that we could really kind of look ahead. So let me introduce our panel for today. First of all, I've got Mr. Scott done with us. So Scott, welcome. Scott Dunn (01:00)Thank you, Brian. Glad to be here. This is awesome. Congratulations. That's so cool. Brian (01:04)That, thank you, thank you, thank you very much. And then another favorite that we have on quite frequently is Lance Dacey is with us as well. Lance Dacy (01:13)Hey Brian, congratulations once again. I remember us just talking about this when you were starting out with podcasts and you look at 100. You do this every week, right? Is it a, has it been a hundred weeks? Wow. Brian (01:22)Yeah. Yeah, we do this every week. We missed a couple. Our listeners probably know there's been a couple of times in there we've taken some small breaks around holidays and other things. But yeah, this is going on just about every week since then. Lance Dacy (01:38)Well, congratulations. That's amazing. Brian (01:40)Thank you, thank you. Yeah, I'm amazed and as I said, very, very grateful. And it really hit home to me when I went to my first conference after doing this and people would come up and say, hey, I listen. That was really a cool moment. And I always tell people, hey, I'm speaking to other conferences, come and say hi. Come and say hi to me this year. So as I said, I wanted to have a panel so that we could talk about, we've been... Scott Dunn (01:40)Amazing. Brian (02:10)doing this for 100 episodes and lots has changed, lots have changed over the past year and a half, almost two years now that we've been doing this. We kicked off on, I think it was May 18th, 2022. So we're coming up on two years of doing this. And my thought was, what's gonna happen over the next 100 episodes? Like, where are we gonna be in the next two years? Where are we gonna be in the next five years? What kind of things are changing? What are we going to think about stuff over that time period? So I wanted to have a panel to kind of comment and discuss this with us and Where I wanted to start is maybe not where I think most people are going to think I'm going to go But I want to start with kind of the agile industry kind of the way things are going now for Coaches consultants scrum masters product owners So I'm gonna throw this as an open question and whichever of you wants to go first, go first. But what do you think we're seeing right now? What kind of trends are you seeing in that realm? And where do you think it's gonna, where do you think it's going? Scott Dunn (03:26)I nominate Lance to go first. Lance Dacy (03:28)Okay, here, obviously they're thinking about Scott. It looks like he's got something to say. Okay, well, that's a tough question because I think it still depends on the industry and the organization. It's all made up of people still. So there's still a lot of variables, I think, that affect the way that we do our jobs as transition coaches or business agility coaches or agile coaches, whatever you wanna call us. I think... Brian (03:29)Hahaha Lance Dacy (03:59)You know, I think there's still plenty of organizations out there that are struggling to bring their people together to deliver great products. And it's not because they don't want to, it's just lacking the skills and the frameworks and things to do that. So I still think that there's some organizations out there that benefit from saying, hey, let's just start from what we know and start doing this and then adapt to it as it changes. But I think a lot of times organizations, I think scaling is one of those big. problem child out there that people have kind of learned how to do this with smaller teams and smaller parts of the organization, but getting the whole organization to collaborate together. And of course, they look to another framework for that. And I'm kind of framework agnostic, especially when it comes to scaling, because I think at the end of the day, if you can't do it well in the small environment, it's going to be very difficult to do it well in the large environment. So the best thing you can do is kind of analyze your own situation. with like value stream mappings and cross-functional teams and things like that, and try to make sure that you're organizing yourselves and preventing waste as much as possible, I think is one of the big things. But I've also seen a kind of an uptick in, of course, these practices in agile being distributed over non-software domains. We've seen that for a long time, that's not necessarily a new thing, but I think it's gravitating more. to that. But I think the biggest one is really what we're talking about today is how is this AI stuff or what we have been talking about, how is that affecting this? And I think it's here quicker than we really think, or already here. And so trying to figure out how to handle, you know, data driven decision making based on that and, you know, using these tools to integrate. And then I think the last one that I would talk about is leadership and management. I think There's a specific type of environment and culture required for these people to thrive and collaborate and leadership and management has not seen a lot of innovation in the last 150 years. So, I find myself spending a lot of time coaching executives and mid-level managers on how to foster an environment that we can know how we practice psychological safety, empowering people and making it a great place to work, especially in this remote distributed environment. So I don't know if it's... All that's fairly new, but I think it's more prevalent than it was in the past. So I don't know, Scott, go ahead. Scott Dunn (06:28)No, that's good stuff. And I've only got 35 points I want to walk through. So one, I think we had all agreed that this idea of agile seems to be the common experience we're seeing as we're still coaching out there in organizations. They think that they've already done that. That's in the past. What's next? Or they settled in like, we're just hybrid. And it's not a. So help us move forward. It's like, no, we weren't done that. Here's this other thing. But the other things they're needing. And I like it, Lance. You kind of mentioned a couple of other words that people use, like organizational improvement, organizational chiasm, these ideas, like, hey, we're trying to get better. And I almost rather use those words because if I use a word they think they know, then we've kind of lost the fact that, you know, we're there. It strikes me, it's a little bit like marketing. They're just like, nope, marketing's done. And now we're doing this. And like, no, marketing's always learning, moving forward, growing. And I think we're gonna see this idea they realize, like, oh. Agile wasn't like a destination we check the boxes now they're on Scrum team. So that's one thing we're continuing to see. And the reason I'm saying that is the problems are still the same problems. We're talking earlier about capacity management, visibility, clear, you know, can execs see where we are in these larger initiatives? And the answer is like, no, they're still not doing those well. That speaks to whole org. And two quick stories on that is one, we're working with a company that decided like, yes, we're going to take this whole org approach. Lance Dacy (07:27)Yeah. Scott Dunn (07:45)And once they, within a few months, they'd gone from cycle time of 100 days down to 10. They had tripled their productivity. They went from one release every two weeks to seven in a day, right? But that's because the whole org is represented as they're rolling out, actually holistically. Let's contract that with a company we're just talking to this week. I was trying to describe getting a group together, it's representatives across other departments who have people who have authority, who have influence, finances, et cetera. they could not grasp the idea that there'd be a team working on improvement items across the org. It took several explanations, like I'm not talking at the team level. I'm talking about the team that's working across the org level. And what part of this comes back to is I think of the idea of I'm a manager. This is my own like awakening recently. If I'm a manager, let's say I'm the software engineering manager, I'm the director, my concern, this is my mistake earlier, my concern is not, are we doing ads all right? My concern is, is my boss getting what they want? If my boss wants clear reporting on where we're at the features, I don't care if it's Agile, waterfall hybrid doesn't matter. Did you show me a nice pretty report that gives them what they need? That's what I, that's what I do not wanna be called into her office on Friday about, right? So I keep mistaken, like they wanna do Agile, right? No, they wanna check the box and what they're accountable for and meet those expectations. And I know the higher up the or we go, the less they probably understand about Agile. At least that's the surveys that I'm running is like a... a 20, 30, 50% gap between what these people say their managers think they understand about Agile and what the people actually do in the work know that they understand Agile or not, which is always a large gap. A good example of that is remote. I'm not trying to kick a dead horse when it's down or whatever the saying is, but we've talked about remote a lot, but here's what we're seeing is, I think the basis of a lot of this return to office is simply, I don't know my people are working or not, I just need to see them. Brian…

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#99: AI & Agile Learning with Hunter Hillegas May 22, 2024

Show notes

Join Brian Milner and Hunter Hillegas as they unveil Goatbot, Mountain Goat Software's latest AI innovation designed to transform how we access and learn from Agile and Scrum resources. Tune in to hear Hunter delve into the intricate process of developing and testing this AI platform. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian and Hunter Hillegas, Mountain Goat Software’s CTO, dive deep into the capabilities of Goatbot, an AI-powered tool that makes accessibility of reliable Agile and Scrum knowledge easier. Developed by Mountain Goat Software, Goatbot answers queries using the company’s extensive array of training materials, blog posts, and articles, ensuring that users receive precise and reliable information. The discussion also covers the rapid advancements in AI technology, exploring its burgeoning role in coding and testing. Join Brian and Hunter as they explore how Goatbot was created, its impact on learning Agile methodologies, and the exciting future of AI in software development. Listen Now to Discover: [1:05] - Brian welcomes our beloved Chief Executive Officer at Mountain Goat Software, and creator of Goatbot, our Agile & Scrum AI, Hunter Hillegas.[4:06] - Hunter explains how he and the team were able to make an AI platform to answer Scrum and Agile questions accurately every time.[7:07] - Hunter talks about the experience of working with and developing AI from a long-term programmer's perspective.[10:35] - Hunter and Brian share that Goatbot is available, accessible, and free on the Mountain Goat Software website.[12:25] - Hunter walks through the process of creating Goatbot and some of the challenges the team faced to bring it to life.[15:42] - Brian invites you to come on over and test out Goatbot, run it through its paces, and tell us what you think. Goatbot is free to use and specifically programmed to answer all your Agile and Scrum questions. Ask away![17:23] - As a technologist, Hunter talks about the parts of AI that are exciting and interesting in the tech world.[19:05] - Brian points out the pace that AI technology is improving, underscoring its impact on setting new standards of improvement industry-wide.[22:36] - Hunter shares his approach to integrating AI tools in his coding and testing processes, highlighting when they're beneficial and when they're not.[28:46] - Brian shares a big thank you to Hunter for joining him on the show.[29:30] - Brian shares the array of complimentary tools available at Mountain Goat Software, including Relative Weighting, as well as those tailored for users in the Agile Mentors Community, such as Planning Poker.[30:41] - If you want to ask a question or provide feedback on Goatbot, email hello@mountaingoatsoftware.com[31:06] - We invite you to subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast. Do you have feedback or a great idea for an episode of the show? Great! Just send us an email.[31:39] - If you’d like to continue this discussion, join the Agile Mentors Community. You get a year of free membership into that site by taking any class with Mountain Goat Software. References and resources mentioned in the show: Hunter HillegasGoatbotMountain Goat Software’s Free ToolsMountain Goat Software’s Relative Weighting ToolMountain Goat Software’s Planning PokerMountain Goat SoftwareSubscribe to the Agile Mentors PodcastJoin the Agile Mentors Community Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Hunter Hillegas is CTO at Mountain Goat Software. With over 20 years in software development and a knack for creating high-quality digital solutions, he thrives at a company that values excellence in education and customer satisfaction, living in Santa Barbara with his wife and their distinctive Pitsky, Enzo. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:00)Welcome in Agile Mentors. We are back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I am with you as always, Brian Milner. And today I have a very special guest, a coworker of mine, Mr. Hunter Hillegas is with us. Welcome in Hunter. Hunter (00:17)Hey Brian, thanks for having me. Brian (00:19)Absolutely. Hunter is our CTO. He is the guy who's all about technology. And anytime I have technology questions, this is who I go to. And he is very patient with me and helps me to understand things when I don't understand them. But we wanted to have Hunter on to talk about one thing in particular that we felt like maybe not everyone knows about yet. or maybe you've crossed paths with it, but really are kind of interested in the story behind it a little bit. That is Goatbot. If you don't know, actually, I shouldn't be answering this stuff. If you don't know what Goatbot is, Hunter, tell them what Goatbot is. Hunter (00:54)Yes. Sure, so as the listeners may know, Mountain Goat, Mike Cohn in particular, but also Brian and other contributors, we generate a lot of content, whether it's training material or blog posts, other articles. And for a long time, we've wanted to make that more accessible to people. There's just so much of it that that's always been a little bit of a challenge, even using search and other technologies. And like, A lot of other people, about I guess 18 months or so ago when ChatGPT launched, I became a lot more interested in large language models and got a better sense of what the state of the art was there. So Goatbot is our attempt to meld those two things together to try to solve that problem to make all of our content more accessible using some of that technology. So it is a tool that lets you ask questions about scrimmage topics and it will answer them based on all the stuff that we've written and trained on, etc. Brian (02:06)That's a great explanation. Yeah, that's what it is. That's the idea behind it. And I'm sure Hunter will back me up on this. I'll tell you, when we first started doing this, I was trying as much as I could to put it through the paces. And I think I may have even said this on other podcasts before, but my go -to question I used to ask any kind of LLM about Agile and Scrum, was to have it tell me the difference between a product owner and a product manager. And in fact, I would say specifically, what does Scrum say the difference is between these two things? And the answers I would typically get, they would just give me an answer. They would say, well, a product manager is this and a product owner is that. Hunter (02:46)Hmm. Brian (03:00)And I remember telling Hunter, this is wrong. It shouldn't say that, right? Because Scrum doesn't have a product manager. How are we able to handle those kind of one -off kind of exceptions in working with this? Hunter (03:14)Sure. So anybody that's used some of the more general tools like chat GPT is like I think the go -to example that probably most people are familiar with even though there are other chatbots out there. know that, you know, sometimes it will give you wrong answers. Sometimes it will give you sort of strange answers. It will do what they call hallucinate and make things up essentially, because it really wants to give you an answer, even if it doesn't know what the answer should be. And, you know, that was something that I was worried about when I started to prototype this. Like we are, we have a, I think, I hope. to say, a great reputation in terms of the stuff that we put out there. And the last thing that I wanted to do was to put that in danger in any way by having some kind of a tool that's spouting nonsense out there. So. That was important. And I didn't really know how well it was going to work when I started sort of prototyping this whole idea. And I had some doubts. But what I discovered was that if I gave the model very specific instructions about where it should be pulling. It's, uh, it's information from, i .e. please only use this information I'm giving you, um, that is, we know it's from our materials and not sort of maybe some random article that they found on the web somewhere. That's part of the larger trainings that be very specific. And if you don't know an answer, say, you don't know, you don't need to make anything up. Um, so those sorts of what they call system messages did a lot of tuning there. Um, and ended up with something that actually works. pretty well, I think. I mean, it exceeded my expectations once I started getting, once I got to the point where there was something where I felt like I should share it with the team, that it wasn't embarrassing. And I feel like, you know, the feedback internally was really good and the feedback that we've gotten from people that have been using it has been really good. So I'm happy with how it's going so far. Brian (05:09)Yeah, I've been really, really impressed. It's been just a really nice tool. It's done a good job. We initially had it sort of internal, like you said, and we put it through its paces. We had kind of widening circles of people that would test it out and try it and give us feedback. And Hunter kept tweaking and making adjustments to it. But I'll tell you, I don't know if I even told this to you, Hunter, but I was doing a... ACSM class a few weeks back. And one of the opening exercises we do in that class is to really kind of consider some of the other Agile frameworks that are out there, not just Scrum and see how they compare. And one of the ones I have on my list is one that doesn't get used very often. It's kind of one that died out, but it's called Crystal or Crystal Clear if you know that or you're familiar with that. Hunter (06:00)Mm -hmm. Brian (06:07)But I wanted to see what the Goatbot would say about it, so I asked it specifically, just give me an overview of what Crystal is. And I think I said specifically the Agile framework Crystal, just to make sure it wasn't anything strange. But the response that came back was, I don't have any information on that. I know about Scrum, and I can give you answers about that, but I just don't have any information on anything else. And I. Hunter (06:21)Right. Brian (06:34)Honestly, it really impressed me. Here's another thing that it could have made something up and said, oh, yeah, yeah, it's this. Or it could have pulled from some general database or something else out there. But it's tuned really well to only pull from our data. And I just think that's awesome. Hunter (06:50)One of the things that's been strange slash interesting for me as a long time programmer in all kinds of different technologies from the web to native applications to other things. is how different it is working with these LLMs and trying to get them to bend them to your will. There are instructions in the system message that in all capital letters say do not make anything up. And the fact that I'm having to program a computer, I'm doing scare quotes here, program a computer by telling it not to invent things is just so bizarre coming from a very two plus two equals four world of more traditional programming. But it's also been really exciting and interesting. Brian (07:32)Yeah. Yeah, it is kind of completely opposite from a programming perspective, right? Because we're so used to, oh, it's not going to do anything but exactly what you tell it to do. And it can't fill in gaps at all. And now the problem is it could fill in too many gaps or try to fill in too many gaps. Yeah. Hunter (07:44)Right. Right. Absolutely. And you can think even just beyond, you know, your example of a, of a, of a framework that's not in common use and probably not something that we've talked a lot about on the website and our own own materials. There's all kinds of other instructions that I had to put in. Cause I didn't want this thing sort of going far afield and, and, and, you know, coming up with a really wacky, potentially terrible answer, um, to some of these questions. And so, yeah, we're, you know, we, we do give it some very specific instructions on how it should behave. Brian (08:21) I tell people who come to the class that, you know, I can't a hundred percent guarantee. I can't a hundred percent say, yeah, it's always going to give you a hundred percent the right answer. But what I can tell you is I've, you know, we've all put it through its paces. We've all asked it things that we feel like, Hey, this is kind of tricky. I wonder what it would do with this. And, uh, you know, just my own personal perspective has been when I, when I ask it a question and it gives me an answer, it's, it's. damn close to what my answer would be. It's really close to what I would say on that matter. Hunter (08:55)Yeah, it's encouraging to hear that. And I've heard that from you and from Mike as well, and then also from customers that have been using it over the past, so whatever month and change or so it's been more publicly available that they are really happy with the output. And it's a great way for us to take advantage of all of this material that we've built up over all of these years that otherwise some of it probably would be. something from 10 years ago, still really relevant in a lot of cases, but maybe gathering justice. Cause it's not, you know, the top blog posts on the website or something. So some of this knowledge, it's a little bit more varied. We can resurface it with a tool like this. Brian (09:33)Now, this was something that we initially just had in the Agile mentors community, right? Hunter (09:39)That's how it started. And that was for a few reasons, mostly because, well, a couple of important reasons. One is that with these types of LLM things, there are costs associated with it in the sense that it does cost us per question effectively. And just we wanted to make sure that we understood what those costs were before that we just let it loose on the wider internet. So that was part of it. But also to get a sense of how people would react to it in those early weeks and months got a lot of feedback. feedback on the responses just to get a general sense of did people think that this was a good answer or not so good and use that to calibrate it because you know frankly if it underperformed where we wanted it to be that would be a good signal that we needed to do some more work on it or give it some more time to bake. Brian (10:26)Yeah. Yeah. And now we kind of have opened that up, and it's available to anyone. You can go to Mount Goat Software and look in our menus. And there in our tools, it's under Tools, right? Hunter (10:41)Yeah, so you can get to it from the Mountain Goat site. You can either go to it is in the navigation, I think right next to the podcast for those of you that are familiar with where to find that on the website. I think it's right next to it, at least for now. No matter what you can go to mountaingoatsoftware .com slash goat bot and that will take you to the right place. That's G -O -A -T -B -O -T. And it is free right now. So we've couched that with at least for a limited time. We are again, sort of experimenting with the model and where it's going to go…

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