Future State Now: A Business Technology Podcast

Tricia is the Agile2017 conference Chair and in this video, she discusses how the conference has grown and changed over the years. Also, she speaks about how the speakers are chosen and how the organizers try to provide a variety of things to do for attendees to self-care and stay fresh. Midway through the podcast, Tricia switches gears and talks about her personal ascension to the role of an Agile leader and how she tries to pay it forward to the Agile community.

In this – all LeadingAgile – edition of SoundNotes, Rick Austin and Paul Argiry discuss each of their talks. The talks focus on portfolio management and capitalizing software in an Agile world. In the video the guys discuss the new definition of portfolio management, road mapping, and capacity management as well as how to avoid common accounting pitfalls when trying to fund your Agile initiative.

In this short video, Jesse Fewell and Kim Brainard discuss their talk that they delivered at Agile2017: The PMO Paradox. The talk centers around what to do with the PMO when your organization is in the middle of an Agile initiative. Often, the answer is fire them but Jesse and Kim have a different suggestion. What if you could collaborate with the PMO in an Agile environment to ensure that they are an asset?

We received a question from someone who has been working as a Scrum Master for awhile and is considering moving into coaching. They just weren’t sure how to tel if it was the correct next step and had a lot of questions about what the job involved, what skills were needed, etc.
In this week’s podcast, Tim Wise and Dave Prior discuss the role of an Agile Coach, what it involves, the day to day work, what skills are needed and, if you are in that role, some important things to watch out for.


Show Notes
0:08 Interview Begins
00:25 How Tim ended up working in Agile Coaching
03:32 What skills do you need to be an Agile Coach
06:12 What is the job of a coach - at the team and enterprise level?
09:08 What you need to move from being a ScrumMaster (coaching one team) to being a coach of multiple teams
12:33 Is it better to work as a consultant, moving from team to team and seeing lots of ways of making Agile work (and not) or is it better to stick with one team and get them to a high performing state?
14:30 What areas Tim had to focus on to become effective at providing coaching for multiple teams
16:11 Mentoring, school or hard knocks, or surrounding yourself with brilliant people?
18:53 Be wary of “EXPERTS”
19:28 Moving past imposter syndrome
22:05 Knockaround Guys… 500 fights to consider yourself a legitimate tough guy
23:32 Will coaching camp or certification make you a good coach?
26:07 Always be the student
27:57 Understanding your own coaching shortcomings… and how they may somtimes be strengths
31:00 Practice the skills you need to take risks and be vulnerable
32:00 Avoiding the addiction to pontificating after the team fails
35:15 What does a coach do all day
39:20 How the day breaks down if you are doing team level coaching
40:04 Working with the Executives and using Social Engineering for good
41:41 Two additional skills to work on
43:12 Understanding your own capacity
45:55 How much selling is an Agile Coach required/expected to do
48:28 Building the desire for change
51:54 What does Tim with he had been told about coaching before he got started down the path
53:11  You never know when the seeds will germinate
55:30 Keeping it fresh for yourself
56:38  Getting in touch with Tim
56:57 Scrum Atlanta User Group events
57:41 Interview Ends - Knockaround Guys

Links Mentioned In This Podcast
Agile Coaching Institute http://agilecoachinginstitute.com
Scrum Alliance Certified Team Coach https://www.scrumalliance.org/certifications/ctc-certification
Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coach https://www.scrumalliance.org/certifications/cec-certificatio
Scrum Atlanta User Group https://www.meetup.com/agile-38/

Contacting Tim
Email: tim@leadingagile.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timwise/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/timswise

Mike Vizdos is a busy guy. He’s someone whose passion for helping agile change lives extends well beyond coaching traditional organizations and teaching classes. At Agile 2017, Mike stopped by to provide an update on Agile In Education and the work he and others are doing to bring agile to schools and transform the way we learn. This work is taking place e at every level of education - from grade school up through university. It is an inspiring and impressive thing.

Mike also talks about the work he’s been doing with Ron Jeffries to create an online community that provides mentoring and support for Agile practitioners and coaches.

Here are some of the links mentioned in the interview:

AgileMentoring.com http://www.agilementoring.com/
Agile in Education: http://www.agileineducation.org
Scrum In School http://www.scruminschool.org
The VCU daVinci Center http://www.davincicenter.vcu.edu

And if you’d like to learn more about Mike, check out:

Web: http://www.michaelvizdos.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mvizdos
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mvizdos/

During a recent LeadingAgile offsite Jeff Vogelsang and Tom Churchwell sat down with Dave Prior to break down the TIES approach of Agile planning that they have bee using with clients. This approach been used to help organizations who need a way to manage long term strategy planning that creates visibility all the way down to the execution level. TIES addresses planning at 4 levels:

• Themes – Strategic long term goals broken down into time boxes of 1 to 3 quarters.
• Initiatives – Themes are broken down into elements that collectively address the theme. These are broken down into time boxes of 1 to 3 months.
• Epics – Initiatives are broken down into Epics which would take between 1 to 3 sprints to deliver.
• Stories – Epics are broken down into User Stories that are small enough to be completed by a Team within a Sprint, ideally within 1 to 3 days.

In this interview Jeff and Tom explain the different level of planning TIES, how they work and how they can be used to help management understand their capacity to introduce more work.

Contact Info for Jeff Vogelsang

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeffvogelsang LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffvogelsang/ Email: jeff.vogelsang@leadingagile.com

Contact Info for Tom Churchwell

Twitter: https://twitter.com/tchurchwell LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomchurchwell/ Email: Tom.Churchwell@leadingagile.com

The TIES podcast Tom Churchwell and Dave did previously

https://www.leadingagile.com/podcast/agile-planning-ties-tom-churchwell/

Certified Scrum Master class in Las Vegas

https://www.leadingagile.com/event/certified-scrummaster-training-nevada-10-14-17/

For information on the special CSM training discount available to attendees of the Digital PM Summit

Email: training@leadingagile.com

2017 Digital PM Summit

http://bureauofdigital.com/summits/digital-pm-2017/

In this Agile 2017 interview Johanna Rothman talks with Dave about her new book “Create Your Successful Agile Project Collaborate, Measure, Estimate and Deliver” and how teams that are struggling to make Scrum work may want to adopt an approach that focuses on continuous flow in order to deliver value for their customers with greater frequency. The interview includes a conversation about working with User Stories that are sized to only take the team a single day to complete, how this can help teams that are struggling with estimation, and how Johanna’s approach to writing (she averages about 1 book a year in addition to posting to her blog every few days) involves writing for just 15 minutes a day.

For more on Johanna:
Web: https://www.jrothman.com
Books: https://www.jrothman.com/books/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/johannarothman?lang=en
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johannarothman/

Radtac Co-CEO Laura Powers took some time out of her busy schedule at Agile 2017 to talk with Dave Prior about the benefits an organization can gain from introducing play into the workplace. In this interview she explains how it can help unlock creativity within the team. Laura led an additional session at Agile 2017 called “It’s Not Just About Culture: Co-creating an Awesome Agile Climate in an Imperfect World”. During their conversation Laura explains how to create a working climate that supports safety for knowledge workers. If you work in an environment that does not have a supportive climate, there are tips in her for how to cope with that as well.

If you’d like to get in touch with Laura:

Radtac: https://www.radtac.com/about-us/page/3/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurapowers
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurampowers/

Laura’s session descriptions from Agile 2017
It’s Not Just About Culture: Co-creating an Awesome Agile Climate in an Imperfect World - http://sched.co/ATWv
The Power of Play - Coaching Teams to Play at Work - http://sched.co/ATXu

At Agile 2017 Diana Larsen sat down with Dave Prior to talk about the Agile Fluency model. In this interview she explains what it is (a way of thinking about what benefits an organization needs to get from it’s teams) and how she and James Shore co-founded the Agile Fluency Project with the hope of moving past the question of whether or not a given team, practice, etc. was Agile or not. They wanted to shift the focus to a more positive approach that would help teams develop routine, skillful ease as they move further down the path of adopting agile practices with the ultimate goal of providing enough benefit to the organization so that they, in turn, receive the organizational support for continuous improvement.

If you’d like to learn more about Agile Fluency, please check out the following:
Your Path through Agile Fluency https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/agileFluency.html
The Agile Fluency Project http://agilefluency.org

And if you’d like to learn more about Diana Larsen check out:
FutureWorks Consulting - https://www.futureworksconsulting.com
Her books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Diana-Larsen/e/B002BM7U7Q
Diana on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DianaOfPortland

This podcast features LeadingAgile SVP and Executive Consultant John Tanner who joins Dave Prior foo discuss how to take on a “Goal-Question-Metric” (GQM) approach to gaining clarity on how well Agile is being employed across the organization. Last Spring at Agile Day Atlanta, John led a session called  “The GQM Approach to Agile Metrics”. The session was very well received and when we posted the video of John’s presentation and the slide deck he used, there was a great response and we thought it was worth digging a little deeper on.

SHOW NOTES

01:08 Interview Begins 

02:18 Three distinct ways of looking at metrics

05:22 What is GQM and how does it work?

06:14 How does an organization know if they are asking the right questions? 

08:33 How to know if your questions are well formed

10:00 How do we collect the data?

12:37 Interpreting the data

13:29 Metrics are not the answer. They are just data points that need to be investigated

16:29 Debating whether it is okay to ask the team NOT to work extra hours

17:47 The metrics are very seductive and can create an illusion of understanding

19:48 In their sexy Monopoly pajamas rolling around in money

21:00 GQM and Agile

22:09 For coaches - how to help your customer figure out what their goals actually are

23:25 Contacting John

24:08 Podcast Ends

CONTACTING JOHN

Web: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/john-tanner/

Email: john.tanner@leadingagile.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/tannerjs

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tannerjs

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tannerjs/

Blog Post w/ Video and Slides: https://www.leadingagile.com/2017/05/agile-metrics-gqm-approach/

The GQM Book Referred to in the Podcast:  

Aligning Organizations Through Measurement: The GQM+Strategies Approach (The Fraunhofer IESE Series on Software and Systems Engineering)

http://amzn.to/2x30uxd