Future State Now: A Business Technology Podcast

In this week's SoundNotes,  LeadingAgile’s Tom Churchwell and Matt Fischer join Dave to respond to two questions submitted by students of our Certified Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Product Owner classes.

STUDENT QUESTIONS

Question 1:

"How do you see the way companies, after long years of waterfall, trying to move to Agile in few weeks?"

Question 2:

"How does a ScrumMaster correct a development team member?"

CONTACTING TOM CHURCHWELL

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/tom-churchwell/
• Email: tom.churchwell@leadingagile.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/tchurchwell
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomchurchwell/

CONTACTING DAVE PRIOR

• LeadingAgile:http://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/
  
• Email: dave.prior@leadingagile.com
• Twitter at http://twitter.com/mrsungo
  
• Personal Blog: http://drunkenpm.net

SEND US YOUR QUESTIONS

If you have a question you’d like to submit for an upcoming podcast, please send them to dave.prior@leadingagile.com

UPCOMING CLASSES

And if you are interested in taking one of our upcoming Certified Scrum Master or Certified Scrum Product Owner classes, you can find all the details at https://www.leadingagile.com/our-gear/training/

The Scrum Alliance’s Certified Scrum Professional (CSP) designation is changing on Jan 1, 2018. If you meet the qualifications for the current version of CSP, applying before it expires on December 31, 2017 may provide you with a much easier path to the practitioner level of certification offered by the Scrum Alliance.

You’ll find details on the current version of CSP here:

https://www.scrumalliance.org/certifications/practitioners/csp-certification

In order to qualify for CSP there are a number of requirements that must be met including earning 70 Scrum Education Units (SEUs).

With the pending change, I have been recommending to all my CSM and CSPO students that they apply for CSP as soon as possible in order to beat the deadline. Many of them have come back with questions about how to earn the SEUs required for the CSP designation.

In this podcast, Scrum Alliance Director of Global Learning and Assessment, Erika Massie and Scrum Alliance Learning Coordinator, Cody Wanberg break down the changes to the CSP certification, the timeline for the change AND we talk through different ways to attain the required SEU’s before the deadline.

It’s a short podcast, so no actual show notes for this one. Just a few things to keep in mind…

• In order to qualify for CSP before the change, you must have your completed application submitted to the Scrum Alliance before it becomes 2018 in Denver.
• Once you submit, the turnaround time you should expect is 8 weeks.

Here are a few of the ways you can earn SEUs…

• Watch the CST facilitated webinars on the Scrum Alliance website. There are 19 of these and they are an hour each. If you watch them all, you’ll earn 19 SEUs.
• Watch the Scrum Foundations e-learning series to earn 1 SEU.
• If you took a CSM or CSPO, each class is worth 16 SEUs. If you’ve taken both, that is 32. AND, if you’ve taken CSM or CSPO more than once, you get the 16 for each time you take the class.
• During the interview, Cody and Erika explain that listening to something like the Agile Uprising’s Manifesto Author Review podcast series could be submitted under Category E - Independent Learning. You get 1 SEU for each hour of time spent listening. It is a great series and I highly recommend it. You can find it here.
• There are a number of additional ways to earn SEUs and you can find that detailed on the Scrum Alliance site. https://www.scrumalliance.org/certifications/practitioners/csp-certification/ways-to-earn-seus

Additional Questions

If you have questions for the Scrum Alliance about the changes to CSP or SEU’s, send an email to support@scrumalliance.org with the subject line CSP Application Question

In October, LeadingAgile SVP, Scott Sehlhorst spent some time talking with Dave about the importance of Personas and Proto-Personas and how to use them. In this episode of SoundNotes, Scott is back to talk about Empathy Maps, how they work, why they are so valuable and how to create one. During the conversation, Scott and Dave talk through each step of creating an Empathy Map. The podcast is one of our longer ones, but if you are seeking a better understanding of how to put one together, you’ll find a lot of valuable information in this interview.

You’ll probably want to download a copy of David Gray’s Empathy Map to have on hand while you listen to this episode. You can find that here: http://gamestorming.com/empathy-mapping/

SHOW NOTES

• 00:08 Interview Begins
• 00:50 Some background on Scott
• 02:30 Intro to the topic of Empathy Maps and how they relate to Proto-Personas and Personas
• 03:09 What is Empathy? How does it relate to Sympathy and Cognitive Empathy
• 05:46 What is an Empathy Map and who creates it?
• 08:42 Understanding their understanding of their problem
• 09:39 Whose job is it to create it?
• 10:45 Where to learn how to interview users
• 11:30 How do you pick which customers to focus on? (And the set up for the example we walk through)
• 20:20 Who are we empathizing with? (Understanding the role you are focusing on)
• 21:17 Understanding what they need to do
• 24:13 What is the goal they are trying to achieve?
• 26:25 Understanding what success means for the person we are focusing on
• 27:54 What they see and what do they say - situational awareness and how they interpret what they see
• 30:08 The disconnect between what do I see and what do I say
• 32:16 What do they do
• 33:19 The Double Design Process (Double Diamond Design)
• 36:18 Moving from empathy maps to experiment maps or the value proposition canvas
• 37:28 What do they hear (and how it is not all about sound)
• 41:18 What do they think and feel
• 45:45 How often do I revise the empathy map
• 48:35 When I’m done filling out the empathy map, what do I do with it?
• 51:05 How to reach Scott with additional questions about Empathy Maps
• 51:57 Podcast Ends

LINKS FROM THE PODCAST

• LeadingAgile SoundNotes: Using Personas to Reduce Risk w/ Scott Sehlhorst (our earlier podcast on personas)
  http://bit.ly/2BGumyJ
• David Gray’s Updated Empathy Map
  http://gamestorming.com/empathy-mapping/
• "Mental Models"  - Indi Young
  http://amzn.to/2BGBtaw
• "Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights" - Steve Portigal
  http://amzn.to/2zTzQWl
• "Impact Mapping: Making a big impact with software products and projects" -  Gojko Adzic
  http://amzn.to/2k4cKpA
• Double Design - The Double Diamond Design Process
  http://bit.ly/2B9EwvF

CONTACTING SCOTT

If you’d like to contact Scott you can reach him at:

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/scott-sehlhorst/
• Twitter https://twitter.com/sehlhorst
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sehlhorst/
• Blog: http://tynerblain.com/blog/

CONTACTING DAVE

If you’d like to contact Dave you can reach him at:

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrsungo
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/mrsungo
• Email: dave.prior@leadingagile.com

SEND US YOUR QUESTIONS

If you have a question you’d like to submit for an upcoming podcast, please send them to dave.prior@leadingagile.com

UPCOMING CLASSES

And if you are interested in taking one of our upcoming Certified Scrum Master or Certified Scrum Product Owner classes, you can find all the details at https://www.leadingagile.com/our-gear/training/

For this episode of SoundNotes, we’re back with more of the questions submitted by recent  CSM and CSPO students.

In this week’s podcast, Jessica Wolfe and Dave Prior respond to the following questions:

Question 1:

What is the desired relationship interaction between the Scrum Master and Development Managers with regard to developers who are participating on a scrum team, and how does that impact performance management from an HR standpoint? In other words, if there are performance issues with a Developer, where does the responsibility fall for addressing & resolving those performance issues?

Question 2:

I work at a fairly large company on a product that has direct eyesight from the CEO, who constantly says things like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if our app did X?” with the expectation being that it doesn’t matter how cool X actually is, we can expect to be implementing it right frickin’ now. How, for the love of SCRUM can I deal with this within my framework?

Contacting Jessica

If you’d like to contact Jessica you can reach her at:

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/jessica-wolfe/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-wolfe-ab025a36/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/thejessicawolfe
• Email: jessica.wolfe@leadingagile.com

Contacting Dave

If you’d like to contact Dave you can reach him at:

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrsungo
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/mrsungo
• Email: dave.prior@leadingagile.com

If you have a question you’d like to submit for an upcoming podcast, please send them to dave.prior@leadingagile.com

And if you are interested in taking one of our upcoming Certified Scrum Master or Certified Scrum Product Owner classes, you can find all the details at https://www.leadingagile.com/our-gear/training/

One of the best parts of working at LeadingAgile is the continual focus on helping the brilliant people who work here amplify their ability to deliver value for customers. We have a weekly call where we focus on different aspects of the work we do and how we can get better at delivering on the LeadingAgile approach so that our customers can achieve their goals. In a recent call Mike Cottmeyer walked through the Trust Influence Loop, which explains the way we interact with our clients in order to develop the safety and trust we need to be able to help them achieve the outcomes they are looking for. The model had a huge impact on me and I asked Mike if he’d be willing to do an interview on it so that we could share it with others.  While this podcast is a little on the long side, the whole conversation is incredibly valuable.

SHOW NOTES

• 00:08 Interview Begins
• 00:30 How LeadingAgile syncs up in the morning
• 02:47 The Tuesday Night Calls
• 04:17 The Trust Influence Loop Model - Part 1: Influence
• 08:55 Getting Access… then what”
• 11:12 The importance of continually creating safety and earning the right to have influence
• 13:25 Demonstrating empathy, listening and learning
• 17:43 Why it is so important to hear the client’s explanation of the problem
• 19:18 The girl with the nail in her head
• 20:34 The difference between thinking everything is a nail and asserting a position you believe in
• 23:31 The Trust Influence Loop Model - Part 2: Trust
• 26:45 Integrity in context  - are you going to do what you said you are going to do
• 28:04 Developing integrity from the promise through the delivery
• 30:13 Integrity and maintaining a shared understanding with the client throughout execution
• 36:28 It’s not about artifacts, it is about demonstrating integrity, building consensus and reaching shared understanding
• 37:52 You have to understand who the client is and what problem you are trying to solve
• 43:13 How the Trust-Influence loop applies outside of work
• 46:19 Why LeadingAgile writes SOWs that take one trip through the loop at a time
• 49:06 Mike’s journey of unpacking what’s he’s learned and sharing it with other people
• 50:17 Random Question for Mike: What was the last album you downloaded and listened to that wasn’t Collective Soul?
• 51:29 Nothing but peace and martinis

LINKS FROM THE PODCAST

Trust Influence Loop Graphic

You can download a copy of the Trust Influence Loop here

If you want to watch the video of the girl with the nail in her head, you can find it here:

• It’s Not About The Nail

The Slash album Mike refers to during the interview is:

• Slash (2010)

CONTACTING MIKE

If you’d like to reach Mike, here is how you can contact him:

• Email: mike@leadingagile.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/mcottmeyer

For this episode of SoundNotes, we reached out to some of the students who have taken CSM and CSPO classes over the last few months. We got a lot of great questions and will be responding to them over the next few weeks. This week, Derek Huether and Dave Prior respond to these two questions:

Question 1:

My team seems to have a problem with estimating and understanding the estimating concepts.  The team members are accustomed to traditional waterfall projects and estimating everything in units of time.  How can I help them understand estimating, but continue to complete the sprints with no pbis rolling over to the next sprint?

Question 2:

I have a team lead who is skeptical of scrum, especially metrics related to the process. He doesn’t think carryover matters from sprint to sprint as long as we’re “creating value” and getting the program priorities completed. Any advice on how to convince him that metrics can be a tool for good, and that the sanctity of the sprint commitment matters?

Links from the Podcast

If you’d like to check out the Multiple Team Throughput Forecasting Tool that Troy Magennis has created for use with multiple teams who have different ways of estimating work, you can find it (and his other tools) here: http://focusedobjective.com/free-tools-resources/

For an audio only version of the podcast click here.

Contacting Derek

If you’d like to contact Derek you can reach him at:

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/derek-huether/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derekhuether/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/derekhuether
• Email: derek@leadingagile.com

Contacting Dave

If you’d like to contact Dave you can reach him at:

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrsungo
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/mrsungo
• Email: dave.prior@leadingagile.com

If you have a question you’d like to submit for an upcoming podcast, please send them to dave.prior@leadingagile.com

And if you are interested in taking one of our upcoming Certified Scrum Master or Certified Scrum Product Owner classes, you can find all the details at https://www.leadingagile.com/our-gear/training/

If you have ever considered moving into consulting, this podcast is for you.In this podcast, In this interview, Rick Austin, John Tanner and Dave Prior talk about what it is like working as a traveling consultant for LeadingAgile. They discuss how it changes the focus of your work, what it takes to be good at it, how it impacts your personal life and some of the things you have to do to maintain your sanity when you spend most of your life on the road.

SHOW NOTES

• 1:13 Podcast Begins - Overview of Topic
• 2:35 What consulting did to Rick’s world when he started at LeadingAgile
• 3:08 How John got started with consulting and then got back into it
• 3:31 How being a traveling consultant impacts your personal and professional life
• 4:52 Shaping your life around how you work
• 5:23 Being intentional about your life when you are back home
• 6:10 How long each of us can spend on the road before having to take a break
• 7:11 Building relationships and maintaining objectivity on site
• 9:29 The importance of gaining permission to consult and coach
• 11:34 How do you entice people to invite you to coach once you get onsite
• 13:30 Learning how to get people to want you to be there
• 14:40 Why you should not immediately try to solve the problem
• 15;51 Developing better communication skills
• 17:42 How Dave coped with being introverted when building connections
• 18:27 When you meet people you just can’t connect with no matter how hard you try
• 19:46 Taking responsibility for the communication issues you face (It’s on the sender/communicator)
• 22:26 Things you should know about consulting before they start
• 23:57 Taking ownership of the room and holding your space
• 26:36 Engaging with authority
• 27:10 Developing mastery of the subject  and never being caught off guard
• 29:09 Being humble and maintaining confidence
• 30:10 The value of hard knocks
• 30:49 Finding the right people to partner with
• 31:18 Why you need to find a mentor to help you when you are learning how to work this way
• 32:29 What makes consulting difficult and the importance of maintaining personal connections outside of work
• 33:21 When you leave the house time stops for you, but not for the other people in your life
• 33:47 Creating clear space between work and non work
• 34:59 Finding the right company to consult for
• 35:26 How LeadingAgile makes it easy for us to work as consultants
• 36:18 Finding the things you need to do to recharge when you get burnt out from work
• 38:38 Getting in touch with John and Rick

LINKS FROM THE PODCAST

Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help 

CONTACTING JOHN

• Email: john.tanner@leadingagile.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/tannerjs
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tannerjs
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tannerjs/

CONTACTING RICK

• Email: rick@leadingagile.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/rickaustin
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickdaustin/

This is a explaination of the new tool I introduced at the 2017 Digital PM Summit. The session I led was called Hacking Agile for Digital Agencies and the canvas tool I built for the session is intended to help Digital Agencies understand more about why they want to use Agile practices in the first place, how they are expected to help and what they are willing to risk in order to achieve some level of agility.

If you'd like to check out the slides from the actual presentation, you can find them here.

If you'd like to download a PDF of the DPM Agility Canvas you can find that here.

And if you have any feedback or questions, please email me at dave.prior@leadingagile.com

Scott Sehlhorst, SVP and Executive Consultant at Leading Agile, goes deep on Personas in this episode of SoundNotes. During the interview Scott and Dave discuss the difference between Proto-Personas and actual Personas, the importance of empathy maps and how to help management understand that making the investment in developing personas is a great way to reduce risk.
This is the first of several podcasts we are going to be posting on Personas, how to create them and why they are so valuable.

Show Notes

• 00:08 Podcast begins


• 00:56 Scott’s background


• 03:00 Why Scott is so focused on understanding the customer


• 07:10 Scott explains what a proto-persona is


• 10:51 Why we need to understand the customer’s problem at a deeper level than they do


• 13:00 The difference between a proto-persona and an actual persona


• 19:08 Making the case for taking the time to do personas


• 20:20 Why we start by making assumptions


• 24:35 Using empathy maps as a tool to help us test our assumptions


• 26:48 Personas are an investment in understanding the customer and reducing risk


• 28:52 Helping executives understand why they need to make this investment


• 30:34 “You put together a plan and you remove risk and uncertainty from that plan”


• 31:54 Can you stop at the empathy map and how do you move past it into something more data driven


• 36:00 Getting the data we need to get to actual personas


• 39:25 Accepting the risk of not moving all the way to actual personas


• 43:54 What are the most effective ways to collect the data we need


• 49:39 Once you have all the data, then what?


• 52:36 What we’ll focus on in future podcasts about personas


• 53:25 Contacting Scott

Links from the Interview

Dave Gray’s updated Empathy Map
https://medium.com/the-xplane-collection/updated-empathy-map-canvas-46df22df3c8a

Contacting Scott

When you think of the annual Agile conference, you usually think about speakers and content. However, Paul Hammond wants to augment the content at the conference with the answers to your questions and one-on-one time with experts from around the industry. That’s why, this year, the conference includes Agile Therapy. Learn more in this video with Paul and Chris Li.