Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring Conversations

It's not uncommon for delivery teams to become so focused on increasing their velocity that they fail to deliver the true business value: features. In the Agile enterprise, it is even more important for teams to focus on delivering complete features rather than simply completing stories. Teams need a way to "look up" to the program level to verify that they're working on the right thing to deliver value at the program level, not necessarily the team level. AgileCraft Peter Jessen says that his company's tool is one such option: it offers a Program Board to help visualize the relationship between team deliverables and program level business value. SolutionsIQ's Howard Johnson hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado. About Agile AmpedThe Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe!Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Kupe Kupersmith has a bunch of experience in business analysis in traditional and Agile environments, and he still hears from time to time, "We don't do business analysis, we do Agile." But Agile needs BAs too. Documentation is a huge part of the BA's contribution, for which Agile prescribes a less heavy-handed approach. Sometimes a photo of a whiteboard with the rough ideas sketched out is enough documentation. Meanwhile, some developers won't work on new requirements without the requisite documentation, but only as a way of deflecting blame for a defect -- because "that's what the document said." Kupe advocates for the team to think like a team: "If we fail, we fail together." SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse hosts at Southern Fried Agile 2016 in Charlotte, North Carolina. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: 

Judith Mills has a simple message: if you want people to listen to them and work with you, you have to listen to them. "In order to show respect and build trust and have people take ownership, it helps if you listen to them rather than just tell them what to do." In her session "Can you hear me now? Start Listening Instead", Judith advises against jumping into providing the solution -- something that coaches and leaders sometimes do. By listening, we create a sense of shared ownership and active involvement. More advice from Judith on listening: - When speaking, think about the listener. How are people taking the information provided them? Did you leave out any pertinent information that might help the message land better? - When listening, are we qualifying what we're hearing? Use paraphrases to validate that you heard what they said. - During problem-solving, don't jump to solve the problem. Try to understand what attempts have been made previously. Problem-solving isn't about proving your value. SolutionsIQ's Dan Fuller hosts at Southern Fried Agile 2016 in Charlotte, North Carolina. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: 

Sococo VP of Sales Jack Crozier shares with Agile Amped his experience implementing Agile practices and tools in his department After the company CEO mandated that every department was to be Agile. At first, the sales team being reluctant and skeptical, but what started in fits and starts eventually grew into a robust sales workflow with clearly defined Scrum processes, tools for visualizing work flow, and a foundation of Agile values to guide future growth. Jack provides tips on how to balance work between a CRM (e.g., Salesforce) and a work board (they used Trello), how to balance existing workload with new lead nurturing, as well as how to focus on outcomes (e.g., closing a sale) rather than on activity (e.g., making a phone call). SolutionsIQ's Setarra DeVeaux hosts at Southern Fried Agile 2016 in Charlotte, North Carolina. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: 

Humans are evolutionarily predisposed to see patterns and make snap decisions based on very little information. The problem is that today's world requires a deeper analysis than most people are willing or can afford to give to very complex problems. Larry Maccherone's session "Going for it on the Fourth Down" is a look into taking calculated business risks and overcoming the cognitive biases and human factors that prevent you from making sound business decisions. In his conference session, Larry also identifies decisions as a kind of forecast of the probability that the choice you decided on will work out better than all the other choices. With this mindset, organizations and individuals can begin to invest in using analyses to make better forecasts (i.e., decisions). SolutionsIQ's Sheila Olds hosts at Southern Fried Agile 2016 in Charlotte, North Carolina. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: 

Jared Richardson sits down with Agile Amped to talk about the GROWS method, a new Agile methodology that hopes to succeed where some feel that "Agile has failed". Of GROWS, Jared says, "It's not about being Agile, it's about being effective." The basis for this methodology is the 3 Rs: 1. The Rhythm: Getting teams to iteratively produce working software at a regular cadence 2. The Right Vision: Getting alignment between leadership and the development teams. For example, instead of having the PO write stories in isolation, bring a skeleton story to the team and have the team help fill out the rest. 3. The Right Way: Building quality into the code using Agile technical practices  SolutionsIQ's Dan Fuller hosts at Southern Fried Agile 2016 in Charlotte, North Carolina. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, 

Often conflict is viewed as something to avoid at all costs. But don't do that because the conflict isn't going to resolve itself just because you ignore it. Besides, "sometimes conflict is a good thing" -- it can lead to positive and productive growth, or resolution of a standing problem. Because you can't avoid conflict, you have to have constructs for navigating through them. SolutionsIQ's Roy Maines shares some patterns for determining the root cause of the problem, taken from his session at Southern Fried Agile 2016, "Navigating Conflict with Teams". He also shares some techniques and perspectives for how to resolve conflict and be more self-aware about how we each, often unknowingly, contribute to it through our actions and words. SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse hosts at Southern Fried Agile 2016 in Charlotte, North Carolina. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: 

Until recently, the concept of Agile data warehousing was ludicrous. Even today there has been a lot of resistance and minimal exposure to Agile in that industry, despite the need for data warehousing processes to innovate, if only to improve their cycle time. But Kent Graziano of Snowflake Computing has seen a shift in the last two years thanks to the work his company has done to bring the Agile principles to traditional data warehousing. Most exciting are the new techniques in Agile data engineering and modeling, Snowflake's "cloud data warehousing as a service" and its dynamic sizing and cost to address real-world problems in real time. Agile data warehousing is possible today because of enabling technology like Snowflake's, which sees queries of petabytes of data daily. The question isn't so much about the technology anymore, but more about whether large organizations are ready for the cloud. This is Kent's second visit with Agile Amped. See his first appearance here: http://www.solutionsiq.com/resources/... SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse hosts at Southern Fried Agile 2016 in Charlotte, North Carolina. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, 

Michael Patrick Benning sits down with Agile Amped to discuss improving working relationships when dealing with creative/UX teams. In Michael's experience, differences in working processes can give rise to conflicts, especially when some teams have moved toward more Agile, iteration-based processes while others still deliver value using waterfall. Michael two examples of UX teams burdened with legacy processes: legacy approval processes (e.g., a simple request necessitating approval by five levels of management) and legacy testing processes. He also highlights for viewers what they missed in his session "Balancing Order and Chaos". SolutionsIQ's Sheila Olds hosts at Southern Fried Agile 2016 in Charlotte, North Carolina. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: 

After testing the waters of accounting and standup comedy, Kupe Kupersmith of B2T Training finally found his calling by combining two of his passions: improv and helping teams be better. As with improv, life has no scripts: "you have to adapt... and be a good listener," says Kupe. When you provide an environment for good, positive communication, the fun happens naturally! Some key skills for using improv in teams: engaged listening and keeping an open mind. One of Kupe's favorite scripts is "Yes, and..." which is geared toward building constructive, rather than destructive, communication. SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse hosts at Southern Fried Agile 2016 in Charlotte, North Carolina. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitt

Tom Cooper has learned through the years that connecting with people is key to building the trust that makes a good working relationship. For years, Tom focused on improving his technical skills but not necessarily his interpersonal skills. When he diverted some energy to connecting better with people, he saw huge improvements in his productivity. This influenced to create the "4 Levels of Thinking as a Geek Leader", a rubric to help techy-types improve their interpersonal skills and influence over others: 1. Individual: What can I do with my own two hands? 2. Team member: How can I work better within my team? 3. Team leader: How do I develop teams? 4. Team builder: How do I develop leaders who create teams who work well as teams? Tom encourages tech geeks to ask themselves, "Where are you on the four levels? And what can you do to expand your definition of success?" SolutionsIQ's Setarra DeVeaux hosts at Southern Fried Agile 2016 in Charlotte, North Carolina. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe!

What do cows and trains have in common? They're both on the Kanban board that Sarah Scott uses to visualize the SAFe implementation at Northwestern Mutual. Sarah walks us through the visualization method they use to track progress of their SAFe implementation, which they use Agile-Lean practices and values to execute on the plan. The team calls their visualization tool a "cow board" rather than a Kanban board because of a funny if somewhat morbid occurrence from early in Northwestern Mutual's history, which taught the then-president a valuable lesson on thinking outside the box. SolutionsIQ SAFe consultant Scott Frost hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter

Dave Rush, Accenture Managing Consultant and Transformation Agent, is passionate about putting an end to projects, because as Dave puts is, "Projects are dead... because by their nature they have a start and end... and a goal to deliver some unique thing." But in Agile work is always flowing, so it makes more sense to think in terms of product life cycles. Moreover, it's time for businesses to think in terms of funneling work to long-lived, high-performance teams. Projects are constantly bringing together stars who have never worked together and, as soon as they get the hang of collaborating, the team is blown apart and the project process starts all over again. In Agile and SAFe, you want high-performance teams who are highly collaborative and practice collective ownership. To make that work in a business context, says Dave, you have to "fund the people and the trains and keep them stable and bring the work to them." Dave also shares his thoughts on why the English national team can never win. SolutionsIQ's Evan Campbell hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/

Teams often lose sight of the business outcomes as they write stories and features in "technicalese", which external users may not be able to comprehend. SPC Stuart Perron thinks that PI objectives are a great way to keep the focus on the results in user language, so they can get quick feedback. Even before the work on the stories begins, stakeholders can rate the value of the completed story or feature. Then again when the story is completed, the team can share the true results and have the stakeholders rate its value, which may be more or less than predicted. SolutionsIQ SAFe consultant Scott Frost hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter

Joe Vallone has a powerful message for enterprise leaders -- that includes managers, directors, VPs and executives. When it comes to executives participating in the transformation, Joe says, "responsibility cannot be delegated... Success or failure of an Agile transformation doesn't belong to coaches... or to individual teams... Leaders need to take accountability and responsibility for this change." Joe invokes Kotter's Acceler8 change management model, saying that his focus has been on step 2: building a guiding coalition. But sometimes leaders are just too busy... An economics geek, Joe suggests starting with just 1% of their available time to start out doing Agile, creating backlogs and experiencing the process--then building on that. SolutionsIQ SAFe consultant Steve Davis hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-