Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring Conversations

Innovation, innovation, innovation. It's all you hear in meetings and all you read about in business books and magazines. The confusing aspect behind all of the innovation hype is that we rarely put thought behind how we design environments for which innovation can emerge. I've found that rarely does meaningful innovation occur when people are directly incentivized or tasked with doing so. The best you can do as a leader, is empower your people and design an environment where innovation can emerge.

Collaboration is considered a fundamental part of "being agile" but how can you help your team understand HOW to collaborate? "Improvising" is not really about being funny, or panicking when things go wrong. It's a simple process that groups of actors follow in order to create interesting stories and scenes without the aid of a script. This session will show how the five 'secrets' of improvisational theatre can support an agile team's growth and also give you some practical guidance on how to get your team's collaborative and creative juices flowing from the very start!Follow Paul's journey on Twitter - @PaulKGoddard

Change is often much slower than hoped for, and more painful than anticipated. In the end, you may be left with feelings of frustration and dismay rather than the benefits you hoped for. How can we make change--whether it's adopting Scrum at the team level, or agile at the enterprise level--more successful, and more enlivening? Through her work with many organizations, Esther has distilled principles for successful transformation into Six Rules for Change. These principles address both the complexity of the organization and the complexity of the human experience of change. They provide a set of touch-points to guide Change Artists as they support and enable change in their organizations.

Jim Benson talks about why you should stop using user stories and start using hypotheses.

We all know that User Stories capture goals from the user perspective along with their business value. On the flip side, how can we ensure we've thoroughly examined the ways in which hackers, criminals and adversaries can exploit those stories to get access to our most valuable resources: Our Data! Abuser stories is a way to capture potential vulnerabilities in software systems, using the standard user story format. While user stories are written from a user perspective, abuser stories are written from an enemy or attacker’s perspective and describe the enemy’s mal-intent and motivation.

Pat Reed addresses many of the enterprise adoption  "blockers"  that companies may encounter.

When will it be done?” That is the first question your customers ask you once you start work for them. And, for the most part, it is the only thing they are interested in until you deliver. Whether your process is predictable or not is judged by the accuracy of your answer. Think about how many times you have been asked that question and think how many times you have been wrong. Now think about how much harder it is to answer that question when practicing Agile at scale. Your customers most likely feel like they have better odds of winning the lottery than they do of your next Agile project coming in on time. That you don't know your odds of success is not necessarily your fault. You have been taught to collect the wrong metrics, implement the wrong policies, and make the wrong decisions. Until now. This session will introduce how to utilize the basic metrics of flow to more effectively manage the uncertainty associated with very large scale software development. In it, we will discuss how to leverage the power of advanced analytics like Cumulative Flow Diagrams, Cycle Time Scatterplots, and Monte Carlo Simulations to drive predictability at all levels of the organization. Your customers demand better predictability. Isn’t it time you delivered?

The industry holds that both Mentoring skill and Professional Coaching skill are useful for ScrumMasters, agile coaches, and managers. Yet, the differences between these approaches is not crystal clear for most people. It's time to show more than tell.   Learn about the anatomy of powerful Coaching conversations and Mentoring conversations, see how these skill sets address problems in radically different ways and become clearer on when to use which.

Ed Kraay and Stas Zvinyatskovsky discuss Yahoo's incredible  come- back story and their strategic shift towards business agility

Jeff discusses the fact that only 39% of Scrum Teams have working software at the end of a Sprint - that means that 61% of Scrum teams are not meeting the second principle of the manifesto. This is the biggest problem with Agile today. Aggressive Scrum focuses on using Scrum practices to actually deliver value Sprint after Sprint. Like a synchronized bike team where the leader cleaves the air, a successful Scrum team follows tried-and-true principles to realize value. Agile doesn't mean doing whatever you want; it means working together toward a common vision and producing a potentially shippable product increment at the end of every Sprint. Keeping with the bike team analogy, "the guy leading the bike team  [the ScrumMaster] is parting the resistance. And the faster they go, the more resistance there is... and the more necessary it is for the ScrumMaster to block and tackle."

Brian Bozzuto discusses his experiences  moving from the consulting side to the client side. What is it like to to be the manager you once tried to coach?

The Agility Health Assessment tool is designed for companies that are scaling Agile and want visibility into the performance and health of their teams and enterprise.

David Scott Bernstein discusses his new book "Beyond Legacy Code: Nine Practices to Extend the Life (and value) of Your Software" with over 30 years of experience David shares stories and valuable lessons in Software Development

Johanna discusses her conference sessions, her experiences so far and her new book "Agile and Lean Program Management: Scaling Collaboration Across the Organization."

Anders Wallgren discusses life at Electric Cloud, upcoming events and the importance of continuous integration.