Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring Conversations (Accenture | SolutionsIQ)

Michael Spayd is the co-founder of The Collective Edge, which seeks to “transform the transformers.” In this episode, Spayd shares some of his thinking behind his new book “Agile Transformation” and reminds us of the difference between organizational transformation and what he calls “a big adoption.” Leaders are key to the chances of success: “If you’re going to transform [your organization], you’re almost certainly the first problem,” because “organizations are designed to get the results that they get.”

Oh, and we take a tangent to consider the connection between quantum physics, integral theory and meditation.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s William Rowden hosts.

Learn More: “Agile Transformation” by Michael Spayd - https://www.amazon.com/Coaching-Agile-Enterprise-Organizational-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321885317/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1602615915&sr=8-2

All Quadrants, All Levels (AQAL) - https://integrallife.com/five-elements-aqal/

Systemic constellations – https://www.the-collective-edge.com/systemic-consciousness

Quantum Enigma -  https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Enigma-Physics-Encounters-Consciousness/dp/0199753814/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=quantum+enigma&qid=1602616136&sr=8-1

Nick Horney is an organizational psychologist and founder of Agility Consulting. He spent 23 years in Special Operations in the U.S. Navy, before building a career in the agile space. Horney joins us to discuss his ideas and experience in leadership agility and anticipating change, focusing on 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic. He uses the concepts of “After Action Agility” and the “Leadership Agility Profile 360 Assessment” to gauge how well organizations anticipate and respond to change.

“The whole purpose of doing assessments is not just self-discovery: it’s what do you do with that? How do you convert that into your own individual development plan?”

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Chris Murman hosts.

Learn More:
• agilityconsulting.com
• Leadership Agility Profile 360 Assessment (http://agilityconsulting.com/leadership-agility-profile-360-assessment/#:~:text=The%20Leadership%20Agility%20Profile%E2%84%A2,such%20as%20clients%20or%20customers.)

Diversifying Equity with Agile for Humanity Self-defined Soul Craftswoman April Jefferson applies her experience in coaching, crafting experiences, and conference speaking to help “bring up new voices.” Jefferson shares her story of striving to increase equity of the Black, indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) community in Agile. One way is the Agile for Humanity group and conference – or, should we say, “unconference.” Jefferson is aware that much of how conferences operate create obstacles for diverse voices to participate. She focuses squarely on “how do I unlock others’ potential?” Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Ryan Keawekane hosts. Learn more: • https://www.agileforhumanity.org/conference/ • https://www.agileforhumanity.org/future-search/ 

What does it mean to put customers at the center of everything you do? For Riot Games, the brand behind League of Legends, it means “making it better to be a player.” Our guest Michael Robillard is the Principal of Enterprise Agility for Riot Games, and he shares how business agility unlocks their ability to make good on that promise. One outstanding example of what Robillard calls “customer-centric business agility” happened at the 2018 League of Legends World Championship in South Korea, where a fictitious, VR Kpop group took the real stage to rave reviews from fans around the world.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Ryan Keawekane hosts.

This special episode celebrates the Pride month of June and features the hosts and producer of Agile Amped as the guests. Alalia Lundy (she/her/hers) is a Business Agility Enablement Manager; William Rowden (he/him/his) is a Business Agility Practice Development Associate Director, and Ryan Keawekāne (he/him/his) is a Marketing Associate Manager. We all work at Accenture and also happen to belong to the LGBTQ+ community. We share our stories of being LGBTQ+ in a business environment, some of the “roses and thorns” of our experience, as well as what we are amped about.

Jeff Gothelf helps organizations build better products and executives build the cultures that build better products. He is the co-author of the award-winning book “Lean UX”, “Sense & Respond”, and his latest, “Forever Employable: How to Stop Looking Work and Let Your Next Job Find You.” After waking up on his 35th birthday in a panic about the second half of his career, Gothelf knew he needed a change. So he created a content platform that brings work to him rather than him having to compete on the corporate ladder. He encourages others to approach the service that you provide and your career as a product. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts. The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility. Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/ LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/ 

Facilitation involves “removing obstacles to contribution, connection and equity.” This is at the center of our guest Adam Kahane’s book “Facilitating Breakthrough.” Kahane argues that facilitating isn’t just trying to get people to do things. He discusses what he calls “transformative facilitation” – facilitating in ways that brings in both individual and collective perspectives to move forward together without leading to fragmentation or rigidity.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Allia DeAngelis hosts.

Learn More:
- Facilitating Breakthrough: How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Together (https://reospartners.com/facilitating-breakthrough/)

There isn’t a single playbook or recipe for success, but one thing is certain: while scaled agile done well can turn into business agility, they aren’t the same thing. In his new book "The 6 Enablers of Business Agility," Karim Harbott shares his experience helping getting people and clients to think beyond just (software/team-level) agile to business agility. Harbott’s six enablers highlight the multifaceted, holistic approach required for business agility.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Allia DeAngelis hosts.

Learn more:
https://www.6enablers.com/ - karim@karimharbott.com

Lisette Zounon is passionate about building quality into everything she does. A quality engineering leader with over 15 years of experience, Zounon is agile at work and at home, whether she’s planning her wedding or helping teams deliver excellent products. Her stories inspire the person in each of us that wants to make the world a better place in big ways (e.g., bringing breast cancer care to rural West Africa) and small (e.g., mentoring a young female professional on the verge of quitting the industry).

Accenture’s Ryan Keawekane hosts.

Learn more:
- https://www.zsquare4thecure.org/
- #UpYourConfidence podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/upyourconfidence/id1518304276

Abiodun “Abby” Osoba has tirelessly been creating a community of agilists based primarily out of Lagos, Nigeria, through her commercial and non-profit efforts. Osoba is the founder of the Agile Advisor Africa, co-founder of the Remote Agile Workspace (RAW) as well as one of the creators of the Agile Contracts Manifesto. She shares her journey, her experiences and her vision for business agility in Nigeria and beyond to Africa and the world.

Who do you turn to to celebrate or to commiserate? When Apriel Biggs started her career 15 years ago, she didn’t have a community of agilists who shared her experiences, other Black and Brown people to share her highs and lows with. So Biggs started Blagile, an organization dedicated to elevating Black and Brown voices in agile. In this episode, she shares her journey and the help she got along the way in hopes of inspiring young agilists today.

Accenture’s Alalia Lundy hosts.

Learn more:
- Blagile.com
- Reach out to Apriel Biggs if you would like to guest on the Blagile podcast at hello@blagile.com.

Julian Mancia is interested in helping humans get out of their own way, specifically when it comes to business innovation. As a Director of "What If! Innovation," part of Accenture, Mancia is excited by nebulous projects that might terrify others. For example, helping companies break into the competitive snack market or doubling growth in five years. How does he do it? With adaptive strategies.

Accenture’s Allia DeAngelis hosts.

Sandy Beky is the founder of two companies whose work, at first blush, seems unrelated. The first is HeHop, a nonprofit that uses blockchain technology to empower victims and witnesses of domestic violence to capture and store tamper-resistant evidence for use in court. The second is Kyosei Solutions Lab, through which Beky helps leaders of France’s biggest companies evolve their mindset and approach to leading organizations. In this episode, we learn how Beky sees her work through both organizations as contributing to a greater whole, to furthering humanity. “Human transformation is what is going to trigger the business transformation.”

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s William Rowden hosts. 

In his book “Agility: How to Navigate the Unknown and Seize Opportunity in a World of Disruption,” Leo Tilman offers a comprehensive definition of the word “agility.” According to Tilman and co-author former NORAD commander General Charles Jacoby, agility is “the organizational capacity to detect, assess and respond to environmental changes in ways that are purposeful, decisive and grounded in a will to win.” In this episode we unpack the loaded definition and discuss how (tactical) agile practices and mindsets as we know them in the industry fundamentally address risk – and how agility can help address other types of risk in the world including global climate change, nationalism, and populism.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s William Rowden hosts.

What happens if you put $1 billion dollars in the hands of students to invest collaboratively? Luke Hohmann is Founder and CEO of FirstRoot, which wants “to get $1,000 into a million schools so that children are in control of $1 billion or more of capital by 2030.” Hohmann shares stories of how real school students have invested in their schools and communities – with surprising results. It’s all in an effort to help cultivate civic responsibility in youth and grow the next generation of impact investors. As our guest puts it, the circular economy and impact investing “are the mechanisms by which we can make positive change occur through the normal structures of business in a very powerful way."

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s William Rowden hosts. Learn more at firstroot.co.

Self-identified “agile unicorn” Jackie Chambers de Freitas rarely sees others like her in her work as a VP of technology transformation and executive coach. In this episode, she shares how her uniqueness as a Black woman working in agile can be both a boon and a burden. Mixed in with her own challenges are the general challenges involved with bringing business agility to organizations. De Freitas mentions the “dirty little secret in agile”: agilists are champions of change – but change is tough. It can take a toll on your mental health, both those who are changing and those who are helping to change.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Allia DeAngelis hosts.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ alumna and former Agile Amped host Leslie Morse is our guest in this episode. Serving as Product Owner for the Professional Scrum Community with Scrum.org has put Morse on a journey to help agilists “drink their own prosecco.” She is finding new ways to improve integrity, empiricism, and what she calls “change fluency” in the agile community. The goal is sense of personal agility that makes us all better able to serve others.

“If we can become fluent in change the same way we are fluent in language, what new might be possible in the world in terms of personal and organizational agility?”

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s William Rowden hosts.

Learn more
- Seven Transformations of Leadership by David Rooke and William R. Torbert: https://hbr.org/2005/04/seven-transformations-of-leadership
- Women in Agile podcast series: https://womeninagile.org/podcast/ 

In a former life, Marc Siles was a senior executive chasing a corporate career – until he had a near burnout experience. Originally from Spain, Siles has been living in Finland for the last 18 years, where he dedicates his passion and energy to enable companies around the globe to accelerate their strategic growth.  Siles shares powerful and personal stories about how he identified what matters in his life – his daughter, his family, and his passion for human growth. He offers tips for people who find themselves chasing after what he calls “empty goals” and who are so focused on their professions that they lose touch with their true life vision.  “I still focus on business growth, but via human growth… That is the only way to make things sustainable.” Do not miss the story he shares about his grandmother’s imprisonment in Franco’s Spain and how her life’s passion was key to her eventual liberation. 

Accenture | SolutionsIQ‘s William Rowden hosts. The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Johanna Rothman, a.k.a. the Pragmatic Manager, is author of 18 books and frequent blogger on the topic of product management and more. Rothman shares with us insights about her latest three-book bundle on “Modern Management Made Easy.” These books are full of “the kinds of questions I keep hearing from my clients.” Each chapter begins with a question followed by a popular myth and then many different options for managing oneself, others, and one’s system to be more effective at work. “We are now in the hard work of trying to help entire organizations change their entire cultures… An Agile approach is not a new lifecycle: it’s a culture change. And managers hold and refine the culture for the organization.”

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts. Learn more about Johanna Rothman at jrothman.com. 

Author of “DevOps for the Modern Enterprise” Mirco Hering is a Managing Director at Accenture leading the Agile & DevOps practice in the APAC region. Hering shares with us the two topics that he didn’t find in other books on DevOps, which motivated him to write his own. He also highlights for us why it’s so important to love learning.  

“The world will continue to change and we need to continue to evolve… If you go to uni these days, it’s not a matter of getting that degree and continuing working in that space for the rest of your life; it’s you learn how to learn and now you need to do that for the rest of your career to continue to evolve.” 

Hering covers the areas of knowledge necessary for success in IT today,  but advises that you don’t need to be an expert in all of them. You need a little bit of knowledge in a lot of areas, and specialization in one.  

Accenture’s Keith Pleas hosts at DevOps Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas.  

Reach out to our guest:mirco.hering@accenture.com

Purchase "DevOps for the Modern Enterprise": https://itrevolution.com/book/devops_modern_enterprise/ 

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFacebook: www.facebook.com/agileampedInstagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

Jim Benson is the author of the global bestseller "Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life" and self-identified "Agile heretic." A strong proponent for the values and principles, collaboration, and teamwork, Benson nonetheless is vocal on social media about ways Agile can approve. An example is when Agile teams don't do any documentation, pointing at the Agile Manifesto: "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools."

Benson contends that people mistakenly turn this into a false dichotomy where the former is good and the latter is bad. But, he says, "You can't have interactions between individuals without process, and our process is facilitated by tools... The process is our social contract about how we are going to interact." He agrees that the Manifesto is good but it was written by "a bunch of guys going skiing" and a few relatively minor tweaks could make it more impactful.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts at Agile2018 in San Diego.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFacebook: www.facebook.com/agileampedInstagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

What makes for an impactful customer experience? How does your brand differentiate itself? If you’re a large enterprise like Oracle, you have people like Roland Smart, author of “The Agile Marketer:  Turning Customer Experience Into Your Competitive Advantage” on staff architecting customer journeys using Agile methods and mindsets.

“It’s my strong belief that Agile will become a competitive advantage for marketers,” says Smart, who is also the VP of Corporate Marketing at Oracle. “It acknowledges the reality that we’re living in an environment today where things are moving too quickly to predict the future. So, no amount of analysis is going to lead to in a one-year marketing plan that is going to be recognizable in six months.”

Your best bet is combining Agile, innovative marketing and the “peak-end rule”: customers tend to average out their feeling about a brand based on their all-time best experience (“peak”) and their last experience (“end”).

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Adam Mattis hosts.

This episode of Agile Amped is part of a series in partnership with the Business Agility Institute. businessagility.institute/

Mentioned in this podcast: - Oracle Next podcast - blogs.oracle.com/oraclenext-podcast-v2 - Peak-end rule en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak%E2%80%93end_rule - Buy The Agile Marketer - www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Agile+Ma…ge-p-9781119223009

When Agile coaches Nidhi Sharma and Michael Callahan are looking at changing someone’s mindset and changing the way that they behave and work, they want to start with a purpose. The pair tied it all together in their Four R’s model for transitioning to Lean thinking:

- Why are we doing this work? (Right Reasons)- What work would fit that purpose? (Right Work)- Who needs to be in the room to have those conversations? (Right People)- What is the last responsible moment for doing the work? (Right Time)

Howard Sublett hosts.

Get in touch with our guests: michael.p.callahan@accenture.com and nidhi.t.sharma@accenture.com And find our podcast host on Twitter: @howardsublett

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFacebook: www.facebook.com/agileampedInstagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

William Rowden is an executive coach and consultant here at Accenture | SolutionsIQ. His journey to leading transformation initiatives has piqued his curiosity in org development and adult developmental psychology. For the past few years he has been researching how these two inform each other – and how the focus of an organization’s leaders provides a good indicator for the success or failure of business agility transformation.

He walks us through the different focuses that leaders – and indeed everyone – have: self-centric, group-centric, skill-centric and beyond. Drawing from the work of Robert Keegan, Chris Argyris, Bill Joiner, and more, Rowden provides useful information for agilists for dealing with leaders of many types – do they shoot the messenger or install feedback loops? Do they see agile as a process or a means to an end?

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Bryan Stallings hosts.

Listen to Rowden's previous episode:

Adult Cognitive Development and the Agile Mindset

References:

- Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs, Leadership Agility (2007)

- Susanne R. Cook-Greuter, "Making the case for a developmental perspective," in Industrial and Commercial Training (2004)

- The MAP Institute, "The Leadership Maturity Framework."

- DevOps Research and Assessment, “DevOps Culture: Westrum Organizational Culture”

- Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization (2016)

- William R. Torbert and Steven S. Taylor, "Action Inquiry: Interweaving Multiple Qualities of Attention for Timely Action"

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped

Alicia McLain is an Organizational Transformation | Executive Coach with a keen eye for organizational systems. Her session at Keep Austin Agile 2018, called “Confidence vs. Ego – The Role Empathy Plays in Organizational Transformation,” highlights the differences between acting “in confidence” and acting “in ego.”

Confidence is about responding rather than reacting, being outward-focused and being comfortable in your own skin, whereas ego tends to be self-focused, self-centered. McLain pairs a Confidence-Ego Map with the Empathy Map to help people understand where others are coming from, why they behave the way they do, and what motivates that behavior. This is especially important today as emotional intelligence (EQ) is seen as perhaps even more valuable in organizational transformation than IQ.

Accenture|SolutionsIQ’s Howard Sublett hosts at Keep Austin Agile in Austin, Texas.

To reach our guest:

Twitter: @AgileLeaderSD and @TheLDRSHIPCOACH

LInkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliciarmclain/ 

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFacebook: www.facebook.com/agileampedInstagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFacebook: www.facebook.com/agileampedInstagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

Lars Bruns and Sudhir Nelvagal started working together in GE Healthcare 13 years ago. In this episode, they share their experience helping GE with their Agile transformation. GE, being a long-standing business giant with its fingerprints in virtually every infrastructure domain and every industry, is still traditional in many ways, but it is transforming itself to become a lean startup. Bruns and Nelvagal share their experiences applying innovative Agile and Lean techniques across GE’s traditional hardware and physical engineering-oriented business units. Other topics touched on include failing fast and leadership buy-in.

Hosted by Brent Barton in NYC at Business Agility 2018.

To receive real-time updates: Podcast library: www.agileamped.com Subscribe to our newsletter: www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Connect on Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFollow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped

Where will the Agile space be in ten years? This great question kicks off this edition of Round Table Roulette with our guests Aidee Fischer, Corey Post and Steve Kovach, three experienced Agile coaches here at SolutionsIQ. On the topic of the future of Agile, our guests are unanimous: "Agile will be everywhere."

Other questions and conversation topics that host Howard Sublett guides our guests through include:

• Can Agile work at any scale? If no, at what size does it break down? (Fischer: "Depends on what we mean by Agile. If we're talking about the idea of delivery value quickly to customers, being more customer-centric... making our people or products the best that they can be, then I think that, yes: it could work at any scale.")
• What do you tell managers that want to compare Agile teams to each other?
• Is there a "Dunbar Number" for Agile?
• How do you know if someone is a good or great Agile coach?
• Share a story about Agile outside of software. (Kovach was moved last year by a session he attended at Mile High Agile by the teenaged Aaron Vadakkana who has been using Scrum at home for years. Listen here: Agileamped – Using-scrum-at-home-with-aaron-vadakkan)
• If you could only give one piece of advice to a new ScrumMaster, what would it be?

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFacebook: www.facebook.com/agileampedInstagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

Round Table Roulette time! Daniel M. Lynn, Candase Hokanson, and Audrey Scheere are our "victims" today. The questions coming out of the hat were:

• What was your favorite conference keynote/session ever?
• Mile High Agile (Uncle Bob) - We're gonna get screwed into oblivion if we don't do engineering better.
• Agile2016 - 5 Dysfunctions of an Improv Group
• Scaling Agile: A Guide for the Perplexed
• What's the worst thing you've seen that people thought was Agile?People saying they bought/use an Agile tool, so they're Agile
• What is beyond Agile?
• How do you know if someone is a good/great agile coach?
• If you could only give one piece of advice to a new ScrumMaster, what would it be?
• Know your stuff.
• Come in with a positive attitude.
• Talk less, listen more.
• How did you get started in Agile?

Accenture|SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts at Keep Austin Agile in Austin, Texas.

Find our guests on Twitter:

@rawrdrey

@candasea2006 ‏

@Daniel_M_Lynn

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFacebook: www.facebook.com/agileampedInstagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

Marsha Shenk, coach, consultant and founder of The BestWork People, takes us on a whirlwind tour of how the brain affects everyday interactions. Shenk believes that people fundamentally want to contribute - to be part of meaningful interactions, which is what life - including business - is made up of.

Our favorite quote: "Business agility is not for the faint hearted."

More nuggets of wisdom Shenk offers:- "People get dumbed down by having imperatives imposed on them."- "Fear shuts down the prefrontal cortex, which is where our executive function is... so nothing new happens"- "Business is a social activity. Some people now think that itʻs happening between computers - no. Thereʻs somebody out there making a decision and that person has a beating heart."- "I recommend respecting the limitations of technology and ... physiology."- "In order to keep learning after puberty, you have to develop the skill of building new neural pathways."

Hosted by Leslie Morse in NYC at Business Agility 2018.

To receive real-time updates: Podcast library: www.agileamped.com Subscribe to our newsletter: www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Connect on Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFollow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped

Natalie Warnert is an independent consultant and the founder of Women in Agile, which started five years ago and has spread far and wide. Since then, Warnert has written her theses about why women are less involved in the Agile community. In her research, she has uncovered interesting biases that men and women have about themselves and each other. She briefly touches on current social movements that show how views on equality, inclusivity and diversity are converging. She's also excited about the grassroots pop-up chapters of Women in Agile that people are starting: "It's been so great to see people taking initiative to do these things... I can't do it alone and I don't want to." Other topics include globalization, UX, and AI.

Hosted by Leslie Morse in NYC at Business Agility 2018. Morse mentions this podcast: Agileamped – Limitations-opportunities-of-neurophysiology

To receive real-time updates: Podcast library: www.agileamped.com Subscribe to our newsletter: www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Connect on Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFollow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped

First off, Mark Waite is a test-driven development (TDD) proponent. But - and hear him out - TDD may not actually be needed every single time you write code. Waite shares his discovery that the developers of Git - the leading version control system today - didn't use any tests during the first year or so of development. But why? Waite argues that testing is a quality assurance measure - and sometimes you don't care about things like longevity, breaking the code, or even shoddy value. For example, "Sometimes I need a tool to do something once" and never again. He goes on to point out that TDD is most useful when there is significant risk, or you need to understand the code better, or when there is a benefit to intentional variation.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts at Mile High Agile in Denver, Colorado.

Reach our guest on Twitter: @MarkEWaite

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFacebook: www.facebook.com/agileampedInstagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

Agile coach Ashok Mohan and IT Product Owner Burkhard Lustig sit down with Agile Amped to share their stories working at Ableton, a business focused on making software and hardware for music makers. In particular, the duo discuss an pivotal learning experience with a difficult trade-in program. Although Product teams had already been leveraging Agile development and practices for 10 years, this was not the case for the Business. When the trade-in program revealed gaps in organizational capability, they decided to make changes, specifically taking four major steps:

1. They introduced team planning.2. To make work visible, they organized "expos" - demos more suited to their laid-back culture.3. Because WIP was too high and not enough was getting to done, middle management was brought together to own the work and the process, with coaching from Ashok and Brendan (another Ableton coach).4. After too much WIP, the second top impediment was lack of alignment, so they focused on establishing a shared purpose.

Mohan echoed Marsha Shenk's sentiment (in this podcast - Agileamped – Limitations-opportunities-of-neurophysiology) that "as humans, every one of us wants to contribute... They don't know how to contribute in a system... [but] it's almost always about 'how can you get to people to contribute in a way that's meaningful for them?'"

Leslie Morse hosts in NYC at Business Agility 2018.

To receive real-time updates: Podcast library: www.agileamped.com Subscribe to our newsletter: www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Connect on Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFollow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped

“Everybody knows going into the budget process that people make up the numbers because they know they’re going to get cut, they’re going to get manipulated, they’re negotiating for their bonuses, so it’s already a bad document to begin with,” says Nevine White. White and Mike De Luca from Beyond Budgeting Round Table of North America sat down with us for a deep dive into Beyond Budgeting, including a definition of what it is and some history. They also walk us through two real-world examples of implementing it.

De Luca says Beyond Budgeting requires a different philosophy around leadership: it needs to be very decentralized and is intended to drive decision making to the lowest appropriate level. He points out that the process of implementing Beyond Budgeting doesn’t really end since learning organizations must continue to refine and adapt. However, a lot of the heavy lifting can take anywhere from 6-18 months. Listen to find out what that entails, how to get started, how to measure and successfully transform financial planning in your organization.

Leslie Morse hosts in NYC at Business Agility 2018.

This episode of Agile Amped is part of a series in partnership with the Business Agility Institute. businessagility.institute/

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

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How will agile at scale change in an increasingly virtual world? SAFe Fellow Scott Frost and SPCT Shawn Lowe – both business agility consultants at Accenture | SolutionsIQ - discuss the best approaches and mindset for success in a virtual setting.

While the world has been working virtually for some time, 2020 has pushed us into a new frontier that can be uncomfortable for large-scale transformation and training work. While it’s not business as usual, you can still make sustainable change within your organization. As Frost puts it: “When things change radically, we can survive. We are more adaptable than we thought we were.”

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! 

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In addition to both being professional Scrum trainers with Scrum.org, Ryan Ripley and Todd Miller also co-author the new book “Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions to Common Scrum Problems.”

While the book has scrum masters as its primary audience, the authors know that anybody working on or with the scrum team can get value out of it. They share their stories, failures, and successes over their combined 40 years of experience. The duo agrees that some of the worst Scrum anti-patterns arise when the scrum master fails to act as an effective servant leader.

Gems:

- Todd Miller on meaningful business metrics: “During sprint planning, the idea isn’t just to fill up a plate of work and then everybody disappear and do it, and then if you did all the work, you’re successful.”

- Ryan Ripley on the three aspects of an effective scrum master: “The scrum master has to love their team… want[s] them to be wildly successfully… and finally [has] to have zero tolerance for anything that gets in the way of [the team] being successful.”

Leslie Morse hosts.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media!Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped

In this episode, Agile coach Joe Fecarotta hosts, interviewing Caro Paduch who is currently leading the agile transformation for Learning & Leadership Development at Accenture. Fecarotta has been coaching Paduch for the last 18 months in a remote setting, as Paduch is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Over the course of such a long relationship at a distance, the pair and the wider team have learned some valuable lessons about remote collaboration and agile coaching, including:

• Patience and flexibility are important.
• Virtual is real too, although because you don’t overlap in person, you may have to force people to open up a little about who they are, their families, and hobbies.
• When people don’t put their video on in a video call, it can be a sign of lack of trust, comfort, and transparency.

And as Paduch puts it, “When [you] start to trust, that’s when the magic happens.” “Personal connection at a distance is so critical,” says Fecarotta.

Accenture SolutionsIQ’s Joe Fecarotta hosts.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

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The drive for virtual meetings that are efficient and goal-oriented can often cause us to lose sight of the fact that we are people, needing real connection. Without the visual and often unspoken cues that normally surround us, our virtual interactions can be an uninteresting and lonely place. Morgan Legge, a speaker at the 2020 Business Agility Conference, shares three ways to grow meaningful and connected virtual teams and meetings.   

“Pandemic work is not virtual work. I encourage people to remember that someday, we won’t be working with our kids and family all around us.” 

Accenture | SolutionsIQ Alalia Lundy hosts.  

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

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Sandra Davey is founder of and product coach at Product Space in Australia. She also serves on the board of several Australian companies, including CHOICE. She shares her experience as the board chair for a consumer rights organization that she helped take through an agile transformation: 

“The business plan that the board was signing off was full of operational tactical details of when’s and how's rather than why’s and what’s.” 

Listen to this episode to get a great perspective into agility from a board of directors’ standpoint. You’ll learn why more agilists should join boards and how to encourage other board members to adopt an agile mindset.  

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts. 

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

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Alicia McLain is the co-founder of Agile Coaching Exchange (ACE) in North America, an organization with an intent to bring coaches together around the mission of building competency and community. She joined us to share more about ACE, as well as the nine things she has seen that wildly successful agile coaches do. 

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts.  

Agile Coaching Exchange: http://agilecoachingexchange.com/   

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media!Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

Clarity of purpose, control without controlling, and designing for flow – these are three capabilities that are essential for Agile leaders to possess, according to Agile trainer and coach, Phil Abernathy. “Empowered teams are more dangerous if there is no clarity…[and are] nothing more than powerful horses pulling in different directions,” says Abernathy. The difference between good companies and great companies is discipline – they are not chaotic. Complex structures will always result in complex processes and inefficient controls because leaders believe in the biggest lie – that multitasking is efficient and effective. The idea is to work on one or two things at the same time, maximum.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Henrik Gruber hosts at the Business Agility Conference in Vienna, Austria.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media!  Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped  Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped  Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

How much of your core and legacy systems are keeping your organization from seizing market opportunities and differentiating their business? Director of Pivotal Labs Sydney, David Julia, offers advice on how companies can deprecate, modernize and get more value out of monolithic legacy systems that are often where the heart of each business beats. One way is the strangler approach where you iteratively decommission legacy apps and start “to cut bits of your monolithic application off and gracefully retire that.”

Julia also recounts the real-life story of how one team successfully rewrote a legacy health insurance system so complex that a tiny mistake could put millions of dollars at risk. His advice for businesses looking to modernize their legacy systems is “Start small. Build quality into your system. Evolve your systems over time.”

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Adam Asch hosts at Agile Australia in Sydney.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

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Jardena London’s mission is to help organizations become healthy, productive and fun. She is founder of Souls@Work, a movement to help bring soul back into the workplace.  She explains to us the concept of Structural Agility and how it can help businesses achieve true agility and survive the challenges posed by the changing environment. 

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts.  

Read London’s paper on Business Agility Institute’s website: https://businessagility.institute/learn/structural-agility-using-structure-to-enable-the-flow-of-value/ 

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media!Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

Evan Leybourn is the founder and CEO of the Business Agility Institute, an international membership body to both champion and support the next generation of organizations. He joins us to discuss the key findings from this year’s Business Agility Report, their annual flagship research study revealing where organizations around the globe are in their business agility journey.

Interestingly, this year’s survey responses were collected in the time period preceding and through the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, providing a unique view into the impact of a global disruption while it was happening.

“Those companies that drop the ball now and don’t start making a difference to their agility, when the next crisis comes - and there will be another crisis - they’re going to be at square one. And those who keep it going, they’re the ones who will not only survive but thrive.”

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts.

Download 2020 Business Agility Report

Become a member of the Business Agility Institute: businessagility.institute/join/

Accenture | SolutionsIQ is a founding member of the Business Agility Institute.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media!
Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

Tony Bonfante is an agile coach who shares his recent experience setting up an internal coaching office at a Fortune 50 corporation. The first step in the process is to fill the roles of coaches with individuals who are called to serve others.  

Next, Bonfante teaches the coaches how to really listen to others because “you can’t change someone’s mind if you don’t know what’s in them.” The five levels of listening he walks everyone through are: 

1. Ignoring – making the conscious choice to either ignore or not ignore others. 
2. Pretending to listen – using listening signs like nodding and sounds while focusing on something else. 
3. Selective listening – paying attention to cues such as your name to refocus. 
4. Comparative listening – filtering what you hear by what matters to you. 
5. Empathetic listening – truly paying attention and wanting to learn the other’s worldview.  

This episode is chock-full of practical guidance, including what kind of coaching stand to take in each domain of the Cynefin framework and more. 

Leslie Morse hosts. 

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! 

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This is a special episode. After our blog (with the same title as this podcast) blew up on LinkedIn, the post’s author Evan Campbell was featured on a webinar Q&A hosted by Gene Gendel, organizational design specialist, agile/lean coach and trainer, and consultant. This episode is the audio from that webinar.

Watch the video recording, or read the blog that started it all.

The struggle to limit work in progress is not a new one. It’s a constant balance between our desire to get more done and avoiding employee burnout. It happens at all levels of the organization. Often strategic initiatives stem from a good place - leadership wants to do the right thing – but, as our guest Eric Willeke puts it, “A single piece of strategic WIP equals hundreds to thousands of pieces of individual WIP.”

As the Founder and a Principal at Elevate.to, he knows how hard it is to be an effective leader who limits his WIP. As a consultant and someone who cares about humanity, he wants to relieve the strain and stress that people suffer from as a result of their work.

Willeke offers three strategies for reducing WIP across an organization and three tactics for getting started. You’ll love the first tactic: “Destroy your backlog.”

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Leslie Morse hosts at Agile2019 in Washington, D.C.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! 

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Bruce Nix is the Director of Business Agility at Vaco Memphis, a talent and solutions firm. He shares with us a wonderful example of agility: pairing up people impacted by the pandemic with non-profits in need of their talent. Listen to this case study that began with two people taking action and hear Nix’s recommendations for organizations as they to emerge from a crisis.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts.

Read case study on Business Agility Institute’s website.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: https://www.solutionsiq.com/podcast/ 

Connect with us on social media!Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

Jessica Guistolise is an experienced leader, consultant and coach at Accenture SolutionsIQ. For the past few years, Guistolise was part of a dedicated Dojo team at a major US-based insurance company, where she learned how to scale dojo experiences and even virtualize them. 

From a few remote teams operating as one to bringing Dojo to a completely distributed team in the Philippines, Guistolise is learning that the benefits of Dojo can still be achieved. It just takes more time. Further, as working from home becomes more normalized, people will see into others’ lives, and that opens the door to build trust even faster.  

And a new working agreement structure – and humanity - can help. “It takes practice to not apologize for those very human things” like eating and taking breaks. “It’s a lot easier to shut out life when we’re in the walls of an office.” 

Favorite take-aways: Smartest person in the room (SPITR) and “stand up and wiggle.” 

Accenture SolutionsIQ’s Ryan Keawekane hosts. 

Check out our other podcast on “How to Dojo” also with Jessica Guistolise.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

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Complex systems are in a state of continuous failure. Resilience is the ability of the system to maintain its performance characteristics when failures occur. Benefits of resilience include high availability, quality, scalability, and improved business KPIs. 

But, high level of resilience is hard to achieve and requires a combination of technical, procedural, and organizational approaches. In this episode, Stas Zvinyatskovsky, a managing director at Accenture, covers what it takes to achieve resilience in software systems.  

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts. 

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

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Allen Ringel shares his experience in Agile transformation using SAFe at a large technology company. One key learning that Allen experienced was the need to get leadership engagement early on so leaders could help with the transformation. Something else he would do differently: over-communicate.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

- The data that helped sell Agile at scale to leadership- First steps into SAFe Implementation- Importance of training- How to get people engaged and align them with the vision- How to communicate during an Agile transformation- How critical executive sponsorship buy-in is - Tips for other organizations starting their SAFe implementation

Hosted by SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse at SAFe Summit 2017 in San Antonio, Texas.

To receive real-time updates: Podcast library: www.agileamped.com Subscribe to our newsletter: www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Connect on Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFollow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped

Rob Pinna is a 30-year high-tech veteran who is the Chief Product Officer at IronCore Labs. His passion is protecting the privacy of data stored in the cloud.

Pinna says we shouldn’t build software and then make it secure. Instead, you want to bake privacy and security into the technical platform. That way the system is designed so that developers automatically just do the right thing.

The conversation covers how complex it is to both provide security and privacy early and often, as well as deliver at a large enterprise.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Leslie Morse hosts at Southern Fried Agile in Charlotte, NC.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

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In this special episode, we offer a broad overview of portfolio management that uses lean and agile thinking and approaches. Our guides are Evan Campbell and Kat Conner, who together have 50 years of experience in portfolio, budgeting and funding. 

“Agile portfolio management is matching limited supply to unlimited demand to maximize business outcomes,” say Campbell and Conner. 

You'll hear five parts: 

1. Introduction to agile portfolio management  
2. The supply side 
3. The demand side 
4. Matching and governance 
5. Funding and budgeting 

This is a deep dive into the topic and it’s the full-length story behind our Agile Portfolio Management video series. Watch and share these 5-minute educational videos with your customers and colleagues and watch the recorded webinar to hear real-world examples from clients and coaches in the trenches at solutionsiq.com/apm. 

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts. 

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility. 

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com 

Connect with us on social media! Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/ LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/ 

Ross Clanton has built his career reshaping architecture and technology strategies for Fortune 50 companies, driving leadership and culture changes necessary to empower transformation. 

Clanton discusses his recently published report, The Project to Product Transformation, and some of the lessons he’s learned from enterprise transformations. He goes into detail on the three stages of enterprises (incubate, scale, and optimize), the 4 leadership constraints many organizations commonly deal with, as well as the concept of Dojos that he helped start in his time at Target. 

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Stas Zvinyatskovsky hosts at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2019 in Las Vegas. 

The Project to Product Transformation

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

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How do you know that you’re achieving the goals of your change? How do you know that large dashboard of OKRs and metrics will show you what you need to see? It’s not easy. Many organizations tend to measure the results of a long process, rather than the levers that drive the results.

John Carter, product development expert, inventor, and founder and principal of TCGen Inc. shares his predictive metrics expertise using the example of agile at scale. Whether you’re about to begin a big change initiative, or you have one in progress, John Carter will inspire you to take a fresh look at your metrics.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts.

Reach our guest: https://www.tcgen.com/our-team

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

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Joshua Seckel is an Agile coach and also Sevatec’s Chief Solution Architect for Agile and DevOps. Joshua drives the the adoption of business, technical, and management agility both internally and at client sites. His presentation at Business Agility Conference 2018 is called "Agile Contracting in the Federal Government" and in this podcast he shares his experience helping USCIS not only contract Agile teams but also to evolve the procurement process to be more Agile. With a focus on enabling experimentation and cross-department collaboration, Seckel helped stand up 20 Agile development teams who are able today to deliver to production 4-5 times a week - in a federal environment!

Some recommendations that Seckel wants to share are:1. Many changes are risk-driven, which is directly related to the corporate culture. By adapting the business to allow a little more risk, you can unlock a lot more learning and success.2. Learn fast. Succeed either in learning (e.g., from failure) or in execution.3. Meet people where they are.

Hosted by Leslie Morse in New York City at the Business Agility 2018 conference.

To receive real-time updates: Podcast library: www.agileamped.com Subscribe to our newsletter: www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Connect on Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFollow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped

Fabiola Eyholzer is the CEO of Just Leading Solutions, a New York based consultancy for Lean and Agile People Operations – the 21st century HR approach. She helps enterprises to accelerate their agile transformation by focusing on their crucial asset: their people.

Here’s what you’ll learn:- Why Human Resource Management should be called People Operations- How the function of HR changes in enterprises in Agile Transformation- What is the new currency for competitiveness in organizations- The disconnect between mission statements and core values, and reality- Theory X and Theory Y: Micro-management vs Intrinsic motivation- What is “The Douglas Effect” and why you should get away from it- The percentage of people dissatisfied at work and the cost to economy- How organizations can get to 9% higher shareholder value- Amount of people who would take a new manager over a salary increase- How Agile ways of working don't differentiate between work and learning- How our perception of career is changing- When you should help an employee move on to another organization- Best way for HR teams to quickly adopt Agile practices into their work- The Agile Manifesto for HR www.agilehr.org

Leslie Morse hosts at the SAFe Summit in San Antonio, Texas.

To receive real-time updates: Podcast library: www.agileamped.com Subscribe to our newsletter: www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Connect on Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFollow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped

Head of R&D and Work Futurist at Atlassian, Dom Price sees an unsettling trend: a celebration of Agile teams who do all the right things but don’t get any of the value. While Price sees Agile as “a philosophy, a spirit,” he argues that too many large organizations use it as a means to achieve compliance, managers going around with their checklists, saying “We do x, we do y, therefore we’re Agile tech.”

But Agile is a means to real value - faster time to market, more innovative teams, more engaged teams, which are the true signposts for business agility. Price shares his experiences helping Atlassian with their scaling transformation and a challenge for agilists: “It’s ironic for me that people who are Agile practitioners, ones who are saying Agile is all about evolution, aren’t evolving as people. They’re static. They’re using things they learned 17 years ago and they’re deploying it in the exact same way.”

Howard Sublett hosts at Agile2018 in San Diego.

Access the Team Playbook: https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook?utm_source=teamtour 

Reach our guest:Twitter @domprice twitter.com/domprice

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFacebook: www.facebook.com/agileampedInstagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

Ever asked your team, "How's our KPIs? Are we hitting our numbers?" Cat Swetel says that the answer you get may not be very useful for determining actual value delivery. In her Agile Arizona 2017 session "Agile Metrics You Should Use But Don't," Cat shared some metrics that everyone in Agile knows they should focus on, but for whatever reason get set aside. These include: Start date ("when a story crosses the line of commitment"), End date (when the acceptance criteria and definition of done have been met), how many things in progress, time in process (AKA "cycle time" - which in Cat's experience has different connotations in manufacturing), throughput (units of value per unit of time, AKA velocity).

Cat also shares a powerful story about how a delivery team radiated information to their business representatives about the negative impact expedite requests would have on eminent customer satisfaction and how this sharing of information had a profound, positive impact on communication and delivery flow.

Hosted by SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett at Agile Arizona 2017 in Phoenix, Arizona.

To receive real-time updates: Podcast library: www.agileamped.com Subscribe to our newsletter: www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Connect on Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFollow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped

Neil Smith and Chuck Copello from Red Hat sat down with us to discuss how an Agile mindset can overcome the 6th principle of the Agile Manifesto:

“The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.”

Red Hat is a large open source software company with 11,000 employees globally, 2,000 of whom work from home. Both Chuck and Neil have team members across different continents, and they provide practical advice for how to be a distributed Agile team and still feel united. They even shared with us tips for helping distributed teams collaborate more effectively.

Howard Sublett hosts.

Get in touch with our guests: neil@redhat.comccopello@redhat.com

Access the Google Doc mentioned here: https://www.solutionsiq.com/resource/agile-amped-podcast/distributed-agile-teams-collaboration-over-collocation-at-red-hat/

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

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Matt Badgley and John Krewson sat down to unpack their presentations at Agile2019: “Live From D.C., It’s Saturday Night: The Agility of SNL” and “Let’s Just Skip High-Performing and Go Straight to Badass!” Badgley and Krewson derive comparisons between sketch comedy and agility and take us backstage to the process of producing a show from concept to cash within a week.

The duo also dives into the topics of the real meanings of high-performing teams, failing fast and leadership.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Chris Murman hosts at Agile2019 in Washington, D.C.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

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Allison Flaten is an HR practitioner (and one of our favorite people) with over a decade of experience in working with and leading HR departments in variety of industries, five of which she has spent in an Agile organization. She walks us through the differences between traditional HR departments where the focus tends to be on risk mitigation, compliance, and policy-driven communication, and Agile HR that focuses on how to make the organization the best place for its employees.

Flaten’s advice includes: - Ensure HR can adapt and shift with the needs of the business, as well as with the employees. - Share your HR backlog - Get feedback from employees and leadership to get buy-in before releasing policies - Provide fast performance feedback which can result in immediate adjustment, rather than waiting for an annual performance review

Howard Sublett hosts. Find him on Twitter: @howardsublett

Get in touch with our guest: allison.flaten@accenture.com

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

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Esther Derby has spent the last twenty-five years helping companies design their environment, culture, and human dynamics for optimum success. She sat down with us to talk about an alternative to top down control: clarity, conditions, and constraints.

Her approach is a response to organizations saying that they want their teams to step into responsibility and to be empowered, but yet the management structure gets in the way of that. She doesn’t advocate just throwing away all the direction, but that we’re going to make a direction by making a compelling goal and attractor, rather than by telling individuals what to do on a day to day basis.

"You give smart people a problem to solve and some constraints so they don’t have to figure out on every single day whether they should use this tool or that tool, and they’ll come up with some really great solutions."

Howard Sublett hosts at Agile2018 in San Diego.

Reach our guest:esther@estherderby.com

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFacebook: www.facebook.com/agileampedInstagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

Ken Pugh, author of "Lean-Agile Acceptance Test-Driven Development: Better Software Through Collaboration", gives us a lesson on Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) and Behavior-Driven Development (BDD). And guess what? They aren't as different as you may think. It comes down to whether the tests are written based on acceptance criteria or on the behavior that a system must meet. Pugh reminds us that the important thing is getting the customer representative, the developers and the testers together to write the acceptance criteria in plain human language before a line of code is even written. More kernels of wisdom from Pugh:- "Fixing a defect is valuable, but preventing a defect is even more valuable."- If during development you can't ship until a particular test passes, then that test is a requirement. "Testers aren't writing tests, they're writing requirements."- "If you take more than half an hour to write the tests, then your story is probably too big."- "If you feel like you need a defect tracking system... you've got too many defects. I have been in places where they actually have just one defect! "

Howard Sublett hosts at Southern Fried Agile 2017 in Charlotte, North Carolina.

To receive real-time updates: Podcast library: www.agileamped.com Subscribe to our newsletter: www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Connect on Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFollow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped

Jason Hobbs and Skylar Watson share their experiences with mobbing and pair programming from the perspectives of an organizational leader and a practitioner. Their goal is to get leadership more comfortable with the idea of mob programming and reducing work in progress (WIP) to one task.

The common misconception about pairing, according to Hobbs and Watson, is that “people think it’s just two guys with one shovel”. The pair shares their journey of mob-programming being an uncomfortable idea to having leadership support.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Leslie Morse hosts at Southern Fried Agile 2019 in Charlotte, NC.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/

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Mark Richards has worked with numerous enterprise customers across most industries in Australia and across the globe. A SAFe Fellow since 2017, Richards is also the author of the blog “The Art of SAFe” and working on a book of the same name.

In this episode, Richards poses the question: How do we raise intentionality and reclaim control through our objectives? He discusses the process of setting Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and how they can have a positive influence on business strategy by encouraging reflection and learning.

Mark recommends the following reads on getting started with OKRs:

• Radical Focus by Christina Wodtke
• Measure What Matters by Doerr

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Leslie Morse hosts from the 2019 Global SAFe Summit in San Diego.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

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Scott Prugh is Chief Architect & SVP of Software Development at CSG. He recounts the story of the technical evolution at his organization and the multi-year strides to modernize their application stack as well as mainframe technology.  

“One of the things we found was that when you start taking these crazy, really heavy platforms and you start to modernize them, it starts to free up capacity.” 

Accenture’s Mirco Hering hosts at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2019 in Las Vegas.  

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/

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Agile Transformation is a journey that requires more than implementing a few new meetings into the work week. It’s a continuous learning journey that is built on a desire to deliver real value to customers. However, many efforts to implement Agile within organizations end up being superficial, because they don’t make room for the necessary mindset change.

According to Simon Chesney, the goal of an Agile Transformation needs to be focused on creating a “self-sustaining lean/product development culture”. Chesney is a Lean Enterprise Agile coach currently working on a transformation at one of the world’s largest infrastructure companies, Western Digital.

Chesney believes that authentic change occurs when a learning culture is embodied and empowered by the leadership of the organization. He states that you can observe sustainable change in the care taken throughout the organization to relentlessly improve. Chesney also talks about the transactional competencies, consequential environments and insights needed to sustain Agile cultures.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Leslie Morse hosts from the 2019 Global SAFe Summit in San Diego.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

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The International Consortium of Agile (ICAgile) is a certification and accreditation body with presence in more than 100 countries, with close to 70,000 people holding credentials thus far. Recently Agile Amped spoke with ICAgile leaders, Managing Director Shannon Ewan and Director of Learning Programs Shane Hastie about their new Agile Leadership track.

Ewan shared with us that fundamentally ICAgile enables “becoming an Agile leader, as opposed to teaching Agile for Leaders. If you’re not interested in changing yourself, then it’s not the program for you.”

According to Hastie, “The ideas embodied in this leadership track are built on that respect of people, and that people are the primary source of value in our organizations.”

Our favorite quote from this podcast? “It’s about transforming organizations to be more human-centric. The impact is to truly, fully unleash the potential of people within organizations. Creating cultures of learning; making organizations a place where people continue to learn and thrive and they truly are their best at work.” - Shannon Ewan, ICAgile

Hosted by Howard Sublett.

Find out more information about the ICAgile Leadership Track:http://www.icagile.com/Learning-Roadmap/Business-Agility/Agile-Leadership

Contact ICAgile: info@icagile.com

Find our guests on Twitter: @ShannonEwan@shanehastie @ICAgile And our podcast host:@howardsublett

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFacebook: www.facebook.com/agileampedInstagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

One year ago, Accenture acquired SolutionsIQ, the leading pure-play Agile consultancy in North America. We invited two key players from each side of the acquisition – SolutionsIQ’s CEO John Rudd and Accenture Technology’s practice lead Jeff Emerson – to give a rare behind-the-scenes peek into the process of an acquisition while using Agile practices and embodying an Agile mindset and culture.

"How does a little company that is based on Agile values move into a very large organization, in a way that doesn’t destroy the little company and the same time allows the acquiring company to get the value and the promises out of that acquisition?… And yet that’s exactly what happened." – John Rudd

"We didn’t make an acquisition to have SolutionsIQ come and do more of what Accenture does. We did it to bring that special sauce, that special consulting and transformation expertise that SolutionsIQ has led in the market with. We want to help get that with our clients and with ourselves." – Jeff Emerson

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Howard Sublett hosts.

To reach our guests:john.rudd@accenture.comjeffrey.p.emerson@accenture.com

To find out more about Accenture | SolutionsIQ, visit: www.accenture.com/agile

To join our team, visit: https://www.solutionsiq.com/careers/ 

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFacebook: www.facebook.com/agileampedInstagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

Peter Merel has an impressive résumé: XP pioneer, author of the original Wikipedia wiki-engine, and founder of XSCALE Alliance.

XSCALE Alliance follows de-scaling practices and values, where the goal is, among other things, to “enable [self-organizing teams] to self-manage and self-direct.” Merel takes us on a thought-provoking stroll through topics like: 

• Frameworks as pattern languages
• A “damning statistic” that may have been overlooked in a recent VersionOne’s State of Agile Survey
• Throughput accounting
• YAGNI – “You aren’t going to need it”
• And – most interestingly to us – descaling in a business agility context

“How can we achieve alignment between lots of these little autonomous teams to be able to build something like a self-organizing value stream, or a self-directing portfolio? That’s really our challenge.”

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Adam Mattis hosts.

To find out more about XSCALE Alliance, visit:xscalealliance.org/

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped Facebook: facebook.com/agileamped Instagram: instagram.com/agileamped

Gil Broza is the author of three acclaimed books including his latest “Agile for Non-Software Teams.” It was written to be practical and applicable for the roles “we always forget in transformation,” like marketing and HR.

Each chapter is a step along a personal agile journey and ends with “Here’s what needs to be true until you move on.” Further, rather than prescribing an off-the-shelf agile framework, Broza wants to provide guidance so teams can design their own process, measure progress, and inspect and adapt – an agile approach to an agile journey.  

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts.

Buy the book: Agilefornonsoftwareteams.com

Keep Listening: https://www.solutionsiq.com/resource/agile-amped-podcast/the-agile-mindset-with-gil-broza/

Learn More: 3pvantage.com

Derek Neighbors is the CTO of Tanga, whose Daily Deals make online impulse shopping even more dangerous. Derek dives into the metaphor that they use at Tanga to make product management more fun and, more importantly, more effective. They call it "Blockbuster Product Management": it maps the many product delivery and release processes to similar processes in movie-making. For every strategic initiative, there are pitch scripts, executive directors and directors (the latter being the Product Owner), screenings, and even a cast of characters who "star" in the movie that is developing and delivering a particular product. The cast will include developers, designers, operations people. For the last two to three years, Tanga has been reaping the benefits of this movie metaphor, releasing posters that gets everyone excited - and completely clear - about what products are being released and when. Derek also shares stories about the power of this metaphor - and, yes, there have been sequels and even "straight-to-DVD" products.

Hosted by SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett at Agile Arizona 2017 in Phoenix, Arizona.

To receive real-time updates: Podcast library: www.agileamped.com Subscribe to our newsletter: www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Connect on Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFollow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped

Are educators doing all they can to prepare students for the real world? High school teacher and CSM Bret Thayer feels we could be doing better to give today's students - digital natives - the soft skills that modern businesses need. These include critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity, innovation, collaboration, adaptability. Thayer is all too familiar with the struggle of getting smartphone-obsessed teenagers to acknowledge, let alone learn from, other people - teachers as well as other adults and peers. He uses Scrum and Agile technicals and mindsets to get students involved in their own education.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Howard Sublett hosts at Mile High Agile 2018 in Denver, Colorado.

Reach our guest:Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/teacherswhoscrum/ Twitter: @bathayerWebsite: agileintheclassroom.com/

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFacebook: www.facebook.com/agileampedInstagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

Chris Philipsen understands that “playbook” and “Agile” don’t necessarily go together but the title of his Agile2019 talk “A Playbook for an Agile Manager” was chosen on purpose. A consultant at Insight, Philipsen speaks the language of traditional managers who expect a “playbook” for how to effectively manage in an Agile organization as well as the language of Agile.

He and our host, Agile coach Chris Murman at Accenture | SolutionsIQ, vibe on the differences between managing styles as well as personal and interpersonal coaching techniques. Philipsen invokes the McCarthy protocol of requesting to provide feedback and radiating intention – for which he provides many examples. Ultimately, he is more productive, happier and a better agilist for radiating intent for what he hopes to accomplish in a meeting, in a day and in life.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ Chris Murman hosts at Agile2019 in Washington, D.C.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! 
Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped
Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileampedInstagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

A very familiar voice for the Agile Amped podcast listeners is our special guest for this episode. Howard Sublett, the Director of Community Development at Accenture | SolutionsIQ is moving on to become the Chief Product Owner for the Scrum Alliance.  

Hear about Sublett’s journey in the Agile industry and learn how he helped build the culture we all here at SolutionsIQ cherish. Sublett offers examples of the kinds of activities and tools we’ve implemented to keep our community engaged.  

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Roxi Ozolins hosts.  

To reach our guest:

Twitter @howardsublett https://twitter.com/howardsublett  

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFacebook: www.facebook.com/agileampedInstagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

Richard Kasperowski is the author of "The Core Protocols: A Guide to Greatness", a book in which he describes how to use the Core protocols developed by Jim and Michele McCarthy, an Agile mindset and practices, and Open Space Technology to create high-performance teams. In this podcast, Kasperowski defines for us what he means by "high-performance teams" thus: "High-performance team is a team that gets objectively better results than other teams doing similar work. It's something you can observe and something you can measure." To achieve this end many times over with different clients and customers, Kasperowski has over time devised what he calls a "protocol stack" whose four layers - Positive Bias, Autonomy, Self-Awareness and Connections - he argues is foundational to all high-performance teams.

Howard Sublett hosts at Agile Arizona 2017 in Phoenix, Arizona.

To receive real-time updates: Podcast library: www.agileamped.com Subscribe to our newsletter: www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Connect on Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFollow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped

SolutionsIQ Business Agility Lead Kat Conner and CTO Evan Campbell discuss the rise of business agility, the challenges and opportunities before today's organizations, and some advanced topics like adaptive management, Agile portfolio management, and innovation as organizational capabilities.

Notable quotes:"Annual budgeting is irritating and wasteful and not very efficient in the things that we use it for. The hard part is coming up with more effective substitutes for the various purposes that we use annual budgeting."

"Instead of thinking of projects as the primary means of asset allocation and organization of people, we look at the critical streams of value that are flowing from technology to business leaders or customers, and we create long-lived, persistent, capable delivery units."

"One of the things that makes innovation safe and cheap and ultimately more efficient is taking an experimental mindset towards what you're doing."

To receive real-time updates: Podcast library: www.agileamped.com Subscribe to our newsletter: www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Connect on Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFollow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileampedFind us on Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

Transformation consultant and SAFe Fellow Eric Willeke shares his deep Lean-Agile experience with Agile Amped, focusing on the importance of ensuring organizations are guided by key results and outcomes. He points out that while many organizations are great at getting Agile Release Trains (ARTs) up and running, people doing the work have a hard time articulating how their work maps back to the bigger business strategy. Eric also highlights for us the need to clearly distinguish business strategy and transformation strategy and act accordingly. The topic of Eric's session at SAFe Summit 2017 was "Aligning Business Strategy and Execution with the SAFe Portfolio Level."

Hosted by SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse at SAFe Summit 2017 in San Antonio, Texas.

To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com.Subscribe: bit.ly/SIQYouTube, bit.ly/SIQiTunes, www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/Follow: bit.ly/SIQTwitterLike: bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Jorgen Hesselberg, cofounder of Comparative Agility, and Steven Wolff, partner in Group Emotional Intelligence Partners, sat down with us to talk about their Agile2018 presentation on "Emotional Intelligence as a Performance Multiplier."

Emotional intelligence has a profound affect not just on team dynamics but also on organizational culture. In his research Hesselberg has found that culture is often on the list of factors for team performance - but what is culture? Says Wolff, "When you can affect the rules of behavior - the norms - you can change the patterns of behavior that you see and feel - which is the culture."

Howard Sublett hosts at Agile2018 in San Diego.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFacebook: www.facebook.com/agileampedInstagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

What do the Brazilian dance Bossa Nova and company-wide agility have in common? According to Jutta Eckstein and John Buck, both are created from a combination of different elements. While the dance is a synthesis of samba and jazz, company-wide agility can be created using the following elements: Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy and Agile - BOSSA nova for short.

Jutta is a coach, consultant and trainer with a M.A. in Business Coaching and Change Management. John Buck is a Certified Sociocratic Organizational Consultant. Listen to how they encourage organizations to use these time-tested concepts to begin experimenting at your company to become Agile, and how sociocracy can ensure that the power structure of an organization will uphold company-wide agility, not hinder it.

This episode of Agile Amped is part of a series in partnership with the Business Agility Institute.

Register for the Business Agility Conference in New York March 14-15 and use code solutionsiq-founding-member to save 25% off registration:businessagilityconf.com/

To find out more about Jutta & John’s book in progress, visit: leanpub.com/bossanova

Follow our guests on Twitter: @JuttaEckstein@johnabuckAnd find our podcast host:@howardsublett

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com Subscribe to our newsletter: www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Submit a topic idea: www.solutionsiq.com/submit-a-topic/

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San Diego based April Wensel is the founder of Compassionate Coding. After a decade in software, she noticed that there was a lot of suffering in the industry. Rather than just assuming that that can't be changed, Wensel decided compassion was the answer. In this podcast, Wensel shares her experiences helping businesses to be more compassionate in not just business matters but also in their own interpersonal conduct. She also gives a useful definition of what compassion is (recognizing suffering and acting to end it) and is not (pity, or just faking niceness). And because all businesses are made up of people, anyone can get started being more compassionate. Individuals can get in touch with their core values and businesses can take a cultural retrospective.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse hosts at Agile2018 in San Diego.

Reach our guest:Twitter @aprilwenselcompassionatecoding.com/

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFacebook: www.facebook.com/agileampedInstagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

James Couball and Ashley Wolf share their experience with a massive Continuous Delivery initiative at Oath Inc. - a division of Verizon composed of Yahoo, AOL, and HuffPost. Thousands of systems not doing CD were involved, which was a great forcing function for implementing best practices for technical excellence. Over the years of using an open source approach and mindset to development, they stumbled on inner source (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_source), which applies source principles of code (collaboration, sharing, transparency, etc.) to business practices. Says Wolf, "We didn't try to make inner source, we tried to make better engineering," and inner source helped greatly with that. Couball provides example practices and stories from the trenches, both championing the importance of culture.

Greg Bledsoe hosts at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018 in Las Vegas.

Reach our guests:

James Couball on Twitter @jcouball

Ashley Wolf on LinkedIn

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFacebook: www.facebook.com/agileampedInstagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

SAFe Fellow, black belt-holder and father of two sets of twins Inbar Oren chats with Accenture's Daniel McGlynn on several topics concerning Continuously Delivery and technical excellence, what's next with SAFe, common challenges and myths preventing mindset shifts about Agile and development, and more!

Hosted by SolutionsIQ's Leslie Morse at SAFe Summit 2017 in San Antonio, Texas.

To receive real-time updates: Podcast library: www.agileamped.com Subscribe to our newsletter: www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Connect on Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFollow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped

CSG started out in cable billing and over time has transformed into a media company. With the industry moving so quickly, they couldn’t wait 12-18 months to deliver value to the customers. They needed to ramp up their delivery agility. 

Jill Edmunson, Enterprise Portfolio Management leader at CSG, and her colleague Lesa Phillips, an Agile coach and RTE, sat down with Agile Amped to share some fascinating insights into this Agile journey. CSG’s vision statement “make work visible, connect people to our strategy and driving engagement and excitement” is baked into everything they do. Edmunson and Phillips describe some unique forums they’ve implemented to connect strategy to execution in the form of Shark Tanks, Think Tanks and Do Tanks.  

You’ll also learn more about engaging all levels of the organization through showcases at PI Planning, CSG Café used for agility training, and how to build connections and partnerships.  

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Leslie Morse hosts at the Business Agility Conference in New York City.  

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media!  Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped  Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped  Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

Michael Hamman helps organizations grow their inner capacity for leadership agility. He joined us for this “geek fest” of an episode on the topic of agility and transformation. Hamman delves deep into a discussion on how people must shift their mindset in order to deal with the complexity surrounding them, before a company can reach “outer agility” – the agile practices. He describes his method of working on a perceived problem as a trojan horse for introducing agile concepts into their work processes.  

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s William Rowden hosts.  

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: solutionsiq.com/podcast

Connect with us on social media!Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

Melissa Boggs and Howard Sublett, the Chief Scrum Master and Chief Product Owner respectively at the Scrum Alliance, return to tell us about their own organizational transformation. Throughout 2019, the pair completely restructured the organization into cross-functional and community-centric teams that are empowered to deliver on the needs of their specific community. 

Hear practical examples of how these changes were implemented, as well as success stories that are emerging as a result of the ongoing transformation.  

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Emilia Breton hosts.  

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped

Richard Knaster of Scaled Agile, Inc., touches on what makes SAFe so effective, DevOps as a key enabler of innovation, and first-mover advantage.

Hosted by SolutionsIQ's Scott Frost live from the second annual SAFe Summit in San Antonio, Texas.

To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com.Subscribe: bit.ly/SIQYouTube, bit.ly/SIQiTunes, www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/Follow: bit.ly/SIQTwitterLike: bit.ly/SIQFacebook

The major security breach at Equifax in 2017 should have been a wakeup call for many – but how much have dev and security practices changed since to ensure it doesn’t happen again? How vulnerable are the open source components you are using? How quickly can you identify and deploy security fixes?

This was the topic of our discussion with Derek Weeks, the Vice President at Sonatype, to talk about why security should be included in DevOps, the difficultly of compliance for open source usage and what may be in store for organizations that don’t take security seriously.

“If you don’t think you’re consuming a lot of open source, you really have to look at the reality of how software is built today… There are only six million JavaScript developers on the planet and they’re downloading 6 billion components a week.” Weeks offers small changes that developers– pressed for time – can make to make software products safer.

Greg Bledsoe hosts at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas.

Reach out to our guest: - Twitter @weekstweets - Linkedin www.linkedin.com/in/derekeweeks/ - All Day DevOps: www.alldaydevops.com/

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

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As CEO and Product Owner of Scrum.org, Dave West has collected some awesome stories and he regales us with a few in this episode of Agile Amped.

Too often companies attempt to scale agility without a clear purpose and fail both to see true agility and to inspire employees with a compelling purpose. And, West reminds us, “purpose is actionable,” not just something in the mission statement or plastered on the office wall. 

The conversations covers frameworks, the American education system, and even conscious capitalism. 

“At the heart of everything we’re doing is trying to untap the potential of humanity to deliver amazing value and solve problems – and I think that’s super exciting.” 

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Leslie Morse hosts from 2019 Southern Fried Agile. 

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

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Sarah Traynor is a transformation lead at one of the largest banks in Australia, which has followed the lead of ING in executing a big bang Agile transformation. The scaling effort – involving 9,000 people – was staggered, but the vision and leadership have been clear from the very beginning. Traynor says “engaging people in the story from the onset and being transparent” is very important.

Another major shift for the bank was ensuring everyone was aligned and shared the same values around what it means to lead from where they are in the organization. The bank set 5 new behavioral expectations about leading people:

• Be curious
• Create shared clarity
• Empower others
• Develop people selflessly
• Connect with empathy

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Adam Asch hosts at Agile Australia in Sydney.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped

Jason Gaulden is the Vice President of Partnerships at America Succeeds and co-author of the groundbreaking report, “The Age of Agility: Education Pathways for the Future of Work.” In his work, Gaulden strives to embed agility into the learning process, both in terms of the technical skillset and the lifelong learning mindset that students need “to succeed in the global economy but contribute to their local community.”

The need for this paradigm shift in education is epitomized in the rapid decline of the value of a college degree, which used to serve as a good proxy for proving that you had the knowledge to get ahead. Going forward, we need to address three major obstacles:

1. Students do not enter the workforce of today with all of the technical skillsets and Agile mindset they need to succeed.
2. Teachers cannot “relay knowledge they don’t have themselves.”
3. The education system needs to be more customized to different learning paths and learning journeys.

These problems are reflected in America Succeeds’ three tenets – Agile students, Agile teachers and Agile education systems.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Leslie Morse hosts at the Business Agility Conference in New York City.

Learn More:

• Download “The Age of Agility” report (free)
• About America Succeeds
• One Stone School

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

Have you ever regretted sending an email while angry? Lorraine Aguilar is a certified trainer in Non-Violent Communication (NVC) who teaches us emotional self-management and radical leadership through empathy for yourself and others. “Empathy so that the best ideas rise to the surface and not the strong and dominating personalities.”

Aguilar walks us through her 4 steps of the empathy dojo and uses poignant stories from her own life as examples of applying “radical acts of kindness” to demonstrate leadership.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Leslie Morse hosts at Agile2019 in Washington, D.C.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

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Robert Woods, Founder of MindOverProcess, has found that one of the places we should start when bringing Agile change to the entire organization is revising corporate hiring practices.

Woods shares insights about how to improve hiring strategies to onboard the right people who are engaged and more likely to stay. He warns that if you do not have a good onboarding process, “within the first 45 days you could lose up to 20% of your new hires.” This has a large impact on building the persistent high-preforming teams needed to implement lasting change.

Woods also believes that we can experience larger cultural change by starting with “small conscientious adjustments over time” and to be prepared for the long-haul: “like a lifestyle change, cultural changes often take 3-5 years within a company… we don’t want to get into the position where we think a few structural changes are going to make everything all better.”

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Chris Murman hosts at Agile2019 in Washington, D.C.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! 


Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped 


Facebook: facebook.com/agileamped 


Instagram: instagram.com/agileamped/

“In this Agile space,” says a familiar voice, “we’ve been talking for years about pair programming and pair coaching; basically, this is pair leadership.” The voice belongs to former long-time host of Agile Amped, Howard Sublett, who left his position as Community Lead at Accenture | SolutionsIQ to become the first ever Chief Product Owner of the Scrum Alliance. In this episode, Sublett talks about his experience sharing the responsibility of leading the Scrum Alliance with Chief Scrum Master Melissa Boggs.

“We have a shared responsibility to lead the organization. Neither can be successful without the other.” Sublett and Boggs are “legally co-CEOs” for the non-profit organization so familiar to agilists around the world. The pair is out to experiment and lead in ways never before seen. “Yes, we’re going to make some mistakes but by God we don’t want to make brand new mistakes; we want to make mistakes that no one else have ever made before, because we had the courage to try.” Howard shares his perspective of the future for the Scrum Gathering, including the many global events they are sponsoring.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Roxi Ozolins reprises her role as host on this special episode, after recording “Building an Agile Culture” with Sublett at the beginning of his tenure at the Scrum Alliance.

Learn more:1. Scrum Alliance (www.scrumalliance.org)2. Scrum Gathering Austin (events.scrumalliance.org/austin-2019)

Stacey Ackerman, founder of Agilify Coaching & Training, got her start in marketing and is now blending the two. Like so many, marketers used to think of agile as “a software thing” and lived in a world where, as Ackerman puts it, “everything was an emergency” and there was no prioritization. This is what she calls “hair-on-fire marketing.”

Today, marketers and marketing teams can take small yet purposeful steps toward agility. Ackerman offers traditional antipatterns – blasting all users, sticking to the plan – as well as some enticing marketing takes on agile classics, including:

– Minimally viable persona “to understand our customers in a faster way so this doesn’t become a stage gate and hold up our marketing efforts.”

– Brief briefs

– Customer stories, instead of user stories

– And (above all) prioritization – “if there was anything I would recommend, it would be just that.”

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Leslie Morse hosts.

Resources:

– Martech Today (blogs by Ackerman on agile marketing available)

– “The Agile Marketing Experience” podcast with Alan Annis

– “The Agile Marketer” by Roland Smart

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped

How important is transformative innovation to your company and are you willing to invest in it? John Carter, a product development expert and inventor, shares his advice for how to nurture innovation within an organization.  

He believes a governance structure that includes the following is a key to success: 

1. Governance: Get the right leaders to the table and give them oversight of fragile innovations. They allocate capital from the pool of venture funds. 
2. Process: Establish a process for receiving and selecting ideas; identify how to transfer ideas into development using clear entrance and exit criteria. 
3. Finance: Create a specific investment for the strategic innovation portfolio and approve it in the budget year. Make it large enough to start at least three projects.  

Carter emphasizes that for true innovation to happen, the employees focused on the project should be moved out of the organization into a protected space, away from everyday distractions and tasks such as Slack, email etc. “The biggest place where innovations fail is transferring out of this protected zone and into the company.” 

Accenture | SolutionsIQ Alalia Lundy hosts.  

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media!Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

Even government agencies experience FOMO. It took the turnaround from an 80-million-dollar big bang failure into an initiation of a couple successful, smaller pilot agile programs within the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) for other federal programs to realize that they were missing out.

Richard Cheng has been working on helping the US Government understand and implement the value of Agile. In the many years of working with the government, he’s noticed that the conversation has gone past the point of if Agile is right for government and is on to how do they do Agile better to create more value. He shares his experience and insights with OPM and UCIS and the rest of the federal government.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Leslie Morse hosts at Agile2019 in Washington, D.C.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media!  Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/agileamped Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/

We chat with SolutionsIQ's Dave Wylie, a seasoned consultant, manager and developer with 35 years of experience. Wylie wants to make sure that, while Agile has expanded beyond IT, people especially in IT remember that good engineering practices are foundational for a successful Agile transformation. Agile software development approaches, techniques and mindsets are drivers for business value and make it possible for Product Owners to ship when they're ready to ship.

Dave argues that foundational development practices - writing tests as well as reviewing, integrating and continuously improving code - are important for everybody. Unfortunately, according to Wylie, ”There's lots and lots of people in the software development world that [have] had zero formal training or informal training or mentorship on these practices.”

Howard Sublett hosts. Get in touch with our guest: david.wylie@accenture.comAnd find our podcast host on Twitter: @howardsublett

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

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Imagine a world where the same approaches that successful startups follow also worked for Fortune 500 companies. With the right organizational structures, it can be a dream come true.

However, IT organizations tend to think that innovation is one install away and the path is littered with failed agile transformations. Changing from a project- to a product-centric approach may address some the major obstacles preventing the nimble startup-like success larger enterprises crave.

Join us as we speak with Dr. Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop and author of “Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework”, as he talks with us about a critical disconnect between business leaders and technologists and how enabling a shift from project to product can make all the difference.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Skip Angel Hosts

Find Skip’s infograph on Twitter.

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media!  Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped  Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped  Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

When it comes to procurement in a Lean-Agile context, according to Mirko Kleiner, "It's not rocket science" – but it does deliver compelling business value. Kleiner wears many hats: a thought leader in Lean-Agile procurement, author, co-founder of Flowdays and the list goes on. Lean Agile Procurement, he says, has some simple tenants that any agilist would recognize:

- Bring everyone together for alignment from legal to procurement to the supplier and the business users to form a cross-functional team.- Accept uncertainty.- Empower the team.

The outcomes include a client with a better understanding of what it wants, less re-work or misunderstanding about requirements, and - get this - an average increase of 400% in time-to-market.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Leslie Morse hosts at the 2019 Business Agility Conference in New York City.

Learn more: 

- Lean Agile Procurement Alliance - https://www.lean-agile-procurement.com/ 

- Lean Procurement Canvas – available for free https://www.lean-agile-procurement.com/lean-agile-procurement-approach#lean-procurement-canvas 

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media!  Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped  Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped  Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/