Shows
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsBusiness agility: where we are and where we’re goingAgile began in software but has evolved to impact every part of the business. Now business agility is seen as a way for organizations not just to create better products but also to run more effectively overall — regardless of what comes their way. Our guests discuss the evolution to business agility as we see it today. Jason Novack is the global lead of the Accenture Business Agility practice (formerly Accenture | SolutionsIQ), and Evan Leybourn is the founder and CEO of the Business Agility Institute. They share what they are seeing in the world both from a business pe...
2022-05-1656 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsPersonal Agility: Integrity, Empiricism and Change FluencyAccenture | 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...
2021-11-2241 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsCloud Breaks Barriers to AgilityAdam Burden is Accenture’s Chief Software Engineer and a senior managing director leading Technology services for Accenture in North America. In this episode, Burden shares how Cloud helps break barriers to agility. One barrier is legacy systems. While package solutions have become popular in the last few years, Burden says that the “renaissance of custom” today may make it more practical for businesses to customize their legacy systems. The result often is greater agility. “If I want to get more out of Agile, I have to change my culture. And Cloud is … the catalyst that helps to make that happe...
2021-04-0536 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsFrom Chasing Empty Goals to a Life of FulfillmentIn 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 the...
2020-11-0947 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsHow to Be Forever EmployableJeff 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 car...
2020-11-0220 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsA Venture Capital Model for Innovation | Business Agility SeriesHow 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: Governance: Get the right leaders to the table and give them oversight of fragile innovations. They allocate capital from the pool of venture funds. Process: Establish a process for receiving and selecting ideas; identify how to transfer ideas into development using clear entrance and exit criteri...
2020-10-0829 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring Conversations9 Things Wildly Successful Agile Coaches DoAlicia 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....
2020-10-0124 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring Conversations2020 Business Agility Report Key InsightsEvan 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. “T...
2020-09-2430 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsEmerging From Crisis By Putting People Above Profits | Business Agility SeriesBruce 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 compe...
2020-09-1725 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsStructural Agility to Enable Flow | Business Agility SeriesJardena 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 inn...
2020-09-1025 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsUsing a Trojan Horse to Introduce AgilityMichael 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 communi...
2020-09-0350 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsIntroduction to Agile Portfolio ManagementIn 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: Introduction to agile portfolio management The supply side The demand side Matching and governance Funding and budgeting This is a deep dive into the topic and it’s the full-length story behi...
2020-07-2354 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsOur Systems Are Failing! Resilience for the Rest of UsComplex 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 comp...
2020-07-1628 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsThe Best Virtual Teams Do These 3 Things | Business Agility SeriesThe 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 | Solu...
2020-07-0926 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsMeaningful Metrics are Simpler than You ThinkHow 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 progres...
2020-07-0237 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsSAFe in a Virtual WorldHow 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 w...
2020-05-2129 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsYour Board of Directors Needs Agile | Business Agility SeriesSandra 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 an...
2020-05-1430 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsBringing Agile to Non-Software TeamsGil 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 host...
2020-05-0625 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsAdult Developmental Stages and LeadershipWilliam 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 p...
2020-04-3048 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsDojo Goes RemoteJessica 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 tru...
2020-04-1626 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsOnce Upon an Agile Organization | Business Agility SeriesMelissa 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 compelli...
2020-04-0936 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsRemote Agile CoachingIn 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 pe...
2020-03-2631 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsLeading Authentic Change at Western DigitalAgile 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...
2020-03-1232 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsStrangling Monoliths: Modernizing Legacy SystemsHow 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 c...
2020-03-0520 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsBaking Privacy and Security into the Technical ArchitectureRob 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 Les...
2020-02-2731 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsHalf the Fire Drills with Agile Marketing | Business Agility SeriesStacey 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 cu...
2020-02-2032 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsInfluencing Business Strategy with OKRsMark 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...
2020-02-1330 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsMobbing for Business ValueJason 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....
2020-02-0638 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsTransformation Case Study of a Major Australian BankSarah 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 expectat...
2020-01-3021 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsToo Much WIP? Destroy Your BacklogThe 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...
2020-01-2325 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsDefining the Product-Focused ModelRoss 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.
2020-01-1630 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsThe US Government is not a UnicornThe US government is notorious for being a slow-moving bureaucracy that is crazy about controlling every minor detail. Internally, there are often musings that agile will never work within the public sector because the government is a unicorn incompatible with agile principles and values. But if you get down to it, the government struggles with many of the same issues that private corporations do. This includes things like obtaining leadership buy-in, acquiring funding in a big batch project mindset, maintaining low WIP. Sound familiar? Ron MacKenzie, an agile coach for the USDA, talks to us...
2020-01-0127 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsTesting Business Ideas with David BlandDavid J. Bland is a co-author of the newly published “Testing Business Ideas,” and founder of Precoil where he helps companies find product-market fit using lean startup, design thinking and business model innovation practices. Bland walks us through the book which is a field guide for rapid experimentation in order to reduce risk and increase the likelihood of success for any new venture or business project. In addition to experimentation, the publication also tackles team design from three different angles: Configuration of cross-functional teams Team behaviors such as questioning assumptions and entrepreneurial spirit Environment the leaders need to provid...
2019-12-2640 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsWhy Do Efforts to Change Organizations Often Fail?Mik Kersten, author of “Projects to Products” and CEO of Tasktop, has seen a reoccurring theme. We go to conferences; we hear about all these fantastic things that can happen when we incorporate lean practices, continuous flow, and feedback. We come back pumped to start changing the way we work because we know it will improve our lives for the better. Then suddenly, the motivation gets drained out of us by all the internal systems in place that effectively prohibit change.
Mik has boiled the reasons we face in these situations down to three things:
Language diff...
2019-12-1900 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsTechnical Debt: A Force for Good or Evil?Technical debt can be an emotionally charged topic of discussion between the debt-adverse and the debt-tolerant. Is it an evil that must be eradicated or an unavoidable occurrence that can be leveraged for good? How to handle technical debt can become a point of contention within a team or even across an entire organization. According to David Brown, an agilist within the innovation center for a 100+-year-old American electric power company, people use the term “technical debt” when they start experiencing bugs or can’t push to production, but by then it’s already too late. Brown suggests that the business an...
2019-12-0526 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsOpen Source Code Security and Your EnterpriseThe average enterprise is relying upon about 3,500 open source projects to support faster software development. Unfortunately, external suppliers of the code are often chosen based on popularity or familiarity rather than code quality. Vice President at Sonatype and the co-founder of All Day DevOpsDerek Weeks sat down with us to discuss open source as well as the main findings in the 2019 State of the Software Supply Chain Report. The report details the following: Where open source components are used in software development and how many of them What percentage of components have known security vulnerabilities The policies and regulations on...
2019-11-2831 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsThe Truth About Burnout with Dr. Christina MaslachDr. Christina Maslach is a Professor of Psychology and a researcher at the Healthy Workplaces Center at the University of California, Berkeley. She is one of the pioneering researchers on job burnout and is the author of “The Truth About Burnout”. In this episode, you'll learn the difference between being merely stressed out and the symptoms of burnout: exhaustion, cynicism, and a negative sense of oneself. Dr. Maslach also walks us through the core psychological needs that promote worker motivation and psychological well-being. You’ll also hear how closely they correlate to an Agile workplace. “It’s a lot ab...
2019-11-2133 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsInnovation is Everyone’s ResponsibilityKatherine Radeka is the founder and executive director of the Rapid Learning Cycles Institute and author of the new book “High Velocity Innovation: How to Get Your Best Ideas to Market Faster”. Radeka shares with us some highlights from her book, like organizations need to create “a path of least resistance to innovation” and that innovation is everyone’s responsibility. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Jeff Steinberg 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 libra...
2019-11-1427 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsTeam Topologies: Organizing Teams for Flow of ValueCo-authors Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais just released their new book “Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow”. Skelton and Pais define four types of teams and they help achieve flow of change and reduce cognitive load for the team members. Stream-aligned: More traditionally considered “product teams” Enabling: Experts in a specific area Complicated-subsystem: Deep skills such as Ph.D. level expertise or years of experience in a niche technology Platform: Aiming to build the “thinnest viable platform” using Agile software practices “We’re not just talking about shapes of the teams and composition, and the structure of the organizati...
2019-11-0723 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsDirty Truths of ScalingAs 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 un...
2019-10-3142 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsPracticing Leadership Skills with David MarquetDavid Marquet, Inc. Magazine’s Top 100 leadership speaker and the bestselling author of “Turn the Ship Around”, discusses his keynote topic at this year’s Southern Fried Agile conference: “Move Your People Up the Ladder of Leadership”. Marquet emphasizes a “lean back” approach to leadership – giving people the room to lean in and make more decisions on their own. “What we want to do is push the authority for making decisions out to the people who have the information. You get a much more resilient, adaptive, agile organization.” He gives recommendations for how to hone our leadership skills in everyda...
2019-10-2432 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsAll Jokes Aside: How SNL Takes Agile SeriouslyMatt 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 A...
2019-10-1736 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsSupersizing SAFe at BoeingDebbie Brey has worked at Boeing for 35 years, where she is an internal SPCT and Enterprise Transformation Leader. She is currently leading an enterprise-wide initiative to incorporate an Agile way of working into the Boeing culture. Brey takes us behind the scenes on the massive undertaking of bringing digital transformation to the century-old enterprise. Her program, a subset of a 4,000-5,000 employee IT organization, consists of 234 Agile teams organized into 20 Agile Release Trains and two Solution Trains with a “Super Solution Train” around it. Hear some great insights into the company’s Agile journey as well as some predict...
2019-10-1027 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsHow to DojoCoaches Jessica Guistolise and Greg Adams-Woodford have been running Dojos at their client successfully for a few years. They explain the purpose and basics of a Dojo and share their experiences from the trenches. Dojo is a place where teams practice - a new physical space where they break down what they’ve done in the past and rebuilding their habits over a six-week period. Additionally, Dojo uses 2.5-day “hyper sprints” that enable teams to deliver real business value more quickly and understand where they’re failing without losing days or weeks. At its heart, Dojo is about building busi...
2019-10-0337 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsTransforming the Digital Experience at Australia PostPete Young played a key role in leading the transformation of Australia Post’s digital consumer experience. The journey to transformation at this 210-year-old institution began when they focused on fixing one specific problem: 15% of the customer base consistently missing first time delivery of a parcel. Young also shares how, in two years, focus a single metric resulted in a 7% increase in successful first-time deliveries – a significant impact for an organization with 5 million digital customer accounts. Learn how his team shifted focus from measuring outcomes instead of outputs, the importance of leadership support, and how Young works with the not-so-Agile...
2019-09-2623 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsBridging the Gap Between Traditional and Agile ManagementChris 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 intentio...
2019-09-1939 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsTransforming Healthcare with Business AgilityDan Scalfaro, a key stakeholder at a major healthcare provider, teamed up with Agile coach, Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Emilia Breton, to guide his organization through their transformation. They sat down to give us insights about the process and the major challenges they encountered. According to Scalfaro, “I thought the DevOps stuff was going to be my challenge. It wasn’t. It was the change management and the people.” Breton and Scalfaro put the focus on the customer ahead of anything else when improving the process of onboarding new providers, changing “one heart and mind at a time.”
2019-09-1226 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsFOMO in the Federal GovernmentEven 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...
2019-09-0529 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsEmotional Self-Management for Leaders 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 podc...
2019-08-2933 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsThe Power of Agile Digital Policy Author Kristina Podnar helps businesses get smarter, better and faster at creating digital policies and practices that unlock opportunity, liberate employees and increase the bottom line. While many people are intimidated by the word “policy,” Podnar encourages us to think of them as guardrails – “short statements that reflects the organization’s values … so we can create freedom, innovation and creativity.” Her book “The Power of Digital Policy” is actually a handbook that provides specific ways for people and businesses to balance risk with opportunity. And the best thing is it doesn’t have to be a long and grueling process...
2019-08-2224 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsExpanding Agile to Hiring and Beyond 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 c...
2019-08-1536 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsHyperfocus: Be More Productive in a World of DistractionSelf-described productivity geek Chris Bailey is the author of “Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction”, and his passion and research into productivity resonates with agilists: we are all working to improve how we work and live. Bailey’s message – bolstered by many statistics – is simple and profound: “The state of our attention reflects the state of our lives.” He offers practical advice for improving productivity at work while also invoking the deeper yearning that each of us feels to get more out of life in our relationships with others and with ourselves...
2019-08-0826 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsThe Invisible Brand: Hidden Influence of Marketing Powered by AIWilliam Ammerman’s background as an advertising executive, coupled with his post-graduate work in artificial intelligence, gives him a unique perspective on the subject of marketing in the age of AI. He is the author of “The Invisible Brand: Marketing in the Age of Automation, Big Data, and Machine Learning”. Ammerman wants to make people aware of the potential consequences of our constant connectivity and the emotional relationships we are now beginning to form with machines, and their influence over us. “An AI agent programmed with the science of persuasion, armed with the details of our personali...
2019-08-0127 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsHow Scaled Agile Uses SAFe to Run ItselfMichael Stump, SAFe fellow and VP of Global Partner Programs at Scaled Agile, advises that agile implementations are not a one-size-fits-all approach. It involves some thinking, and not a copy-paste system. He advocates for experiential learning, making mistakes and using that wisdom as guidance to do better, learning how to apply agile to different situations. He says, “Creating alignment, creating transparency and having those tough discussions and session points…is really powerful”. Stump subscribes to the belief that you can run the whole company using SAFe as the operating model. He discusses the effect of change management and us...
2019-07-2527 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsHow to Hire a CEO | Business Agility SeriesBusinesses have the long-established expectations of how people should work in development teams, but few know how to hire the right people. This is even more difficult when hiring new leadership to helm an Agile business. Geof Ellingham, Chair of the Agile Business Consortium, speaks with us about a refined, more collaborative approach to hiring business leaders. According to Ellingham, a change is required when hiring a CEO and implementing a co-creative process, removing the antiquated power dynamic, and introducing recruitment that is more genuine. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Leslie Morse hosts at the 2019 Business Agility Conference in Ne...
2019-07-1827 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsFrom Projects to ProductsImagine 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 th...
2019-07-1145 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsNext Level PI PlanningShane Harrison, business focused change agent specializing in enterprise-level digital Lean Agile transformations, takes PI planning to the next level. Harrison offers tips and tricks on how to execute with a higher success rate. He advocates for aligning PI objectives with solid plans; socialization is only successful when the teams understand the context and vision of the plan. He says, “I’m always looking for the teams to get into a state of flow…any interruption to the team disrupts the flow.” For leadership guests at PI planning, Harrison recommends an “eyes open, ears open, mouth shut...
2019-07-0428 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsPrivilege is Power Given to You | Women in AgileBrendon Hernandez remembers clearly when he realized his privilege of being a male, of being treated preferentially over the strong and capable women in his life. An Agile coach in business agility transformations today at Accenture | SolutionsIQ, Hernandez is a passionate ally for diversity and inclusion because of his personal experience. "As a gay male, I rely on heterosexual women to be an ally in the LGBT space, and in return I am an ally to women, because I have the privilege of being male." In this episode, our own Leslie Morse guides the discussion...
2019-06-2737 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsTechonomy CEO on the Impact of Technology on Business and SocietyIn a world of fake news, where automation is threatening jobs, Josh Kampel remains a techno-optimist. In this episode, the CEO of Techonomy Media shares his views on how organizations can get more value out of technological innovations and disruptions by taking time to understand deeply what they stand for as a company, and what value they provide to their customers and the world at large. Because legacy technological baggage isn’t the only thing keeping big organizations from reaping the benefits of new tech: “It’s [also] culture, people, it’s real estate, it’s infrastructure…” Kampel shares...
2019-06-2029 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsThis Transformation Is Not Your Baby | Business Agility SeriesAgile Transformation is a collective effort requiring much work and dedication from all levels of the business. It’s no wonder that some people become very attached to it, whether it’s a VP, a coach, a manager, or team member. Carlo Bucciarelli, senior manager at Accenture, reminds us that “this transformation is not your baby.” Further, he says leaders fall into the trap of forcing top-down changes on their reports, which can create resentment in individuals and team. Because the transformation belongs to everyone in the organization – as well as the trainers, coaches, and consultants providing guidance a...
2019-06-1320 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsThe Ultimate Metric: Identifying the Right Problems to SolveIdentifying the biggest pain points in your team can make all the difference in your organization. Janelle Klein, author of “Idea Flow,” discusses how to measure friction to connect managers and engineers using what she calls “the ultimate metric”: the frequency and duration of WTFs. Klein speaks about the importance of understanding and predictability to create alignment, taking into consideration the human factors in software development. “The hard part really isn’t solving the problems,” she reminds, “it’s identifying the right problems to solve.” This enables managers and engineers to translate the friction experienced during development into explicit risk m...
2019-06-0641 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring Conversations3 Key Capabilities for Agile Leaders | Business Agility SeriesClarity 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 a...
2019-05-3023 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsExploring Paired Leadership at Scrum Alliance with Howard Sublett“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 Bo...
2019-05-2336 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsTechnical Debt Is Killing Your BusinessTechnical debt can cause critical issues for organizations. Every year an organization does not address these issues brings them closer to ruin. Some businesses even have to shut their doors due to irreconcilable technical debt that conventional solutions alone cannot address. Arlo Belshee, full-stack Agile developer and technical coach, shares insightful knowledge on building better software, specifically as it pertains to what he calls safeguarding: “a simple, 22-minute practice that allows you to find, fund, and then execute real changes to your process and product.” One of the things that makes fixing technical debt so difficult is that...
2019-05-1620 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsWhat is Agile Portfolio Management?One of our most requested topics to cover recently has been Agile Portfolio Management. We invited Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Brent Barton and Ryn Melberg to explain what is portfolio management and how to use it in an Agile organization. Traditional portfolio management assumes an infinite supply of knowledge worker’s capacity. It also plans for 100% utilization (which is impossible) using full time equivalents, and part time people introduce a lot of context switching. These are two big problems. Instead, Barton recommends building teams of people as enduring corporate assets, and then focus on maximizing the retu...
2019-05-0937 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsHR Must Lead the Charge to Transformation | Business Agility SeriesWith our guests Pia-Maria Thorén and Shannon Ewan we dive into how HR – with strong support from leadership – need to be at the head of the change to business agility. Thorén is a thought leader in Agile HR and the author of “Agile People – A Radical Approach for HR and Managers (That Leads to Motivated Employees)”. Ewan is an experienced leader, Agile coach, and currently serves as the Managing Director for the International Consortium for Agile (ICAgile). Says Thorén, “HR has a very crucial role when it comes to changing organizations: they work with the d...
2019-05-0231 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsTransforming an Already Overburdened Organization | Business Agility SeriesStephen Parry is a business leader, strategist, change designer and author with a reputation for large-scale global business transformation. He sat down with us for a fascinating deep-dive into addressing transformation in organizations that are often already overburdened. According to Parry, during an org transformation, leadership tends to lose sight of the strategy, the org structures, and the investments in technology." Traditional leadership is just going down to the mid-management level and making sure they’re hitting the local numbers and trying harder, leaving the top decks with no captain. “ To resolve this problem, senior leaders h...
2019-04-2539 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsHow Unconscious Bias Hurts Innovation | Women in AgilePioneer in Lean-Agile People Operations (formally known as “HR”) and CEO of Just Leading Solutions LLC, Fabiola Eyholzer uses science and statistics to help level the playing field for women in the business world. The data is compelling and it supports overwhelmingly the truly human characteristics that agile leaders portray: collaboration, communication, transparency and more. In other words, Agile leadership qualities could be described in words that are generally considered “feminine” or things that women excel at. This isn’t lost to Eyholzer, who believes that diversity of thought is what drives success, and the cross-functional team concept th...
2019-04-1826 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsCSG’s Mission-Driven Agile Journey | Business Agility SeriesCSG 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 desc...
2019-04-1128 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsGet to Market 400% Faster with Lean-Agile Procurement | Business Agility SeriesWhen 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...
2019-04-0426 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsEmbedding Agility into Education | Business Agility SeriesJason 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...
2019-03-2829 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsMeasuring Business Agility OutcomesSally Elatta is the president of Agile Transformation, Inc., and founder of AgilityHealth. Elatta shares her story of the growth of her company, what they have on their “culture wall” and the current state of business agility, as well as a taste of the future. The 2018 Business Agility Report revealed that, while team agility and what Elatta calls “team-of-teams agility,” companies are doing really well. But in terms of business agility – particularly as applies to culture, leadership and support functions like HR, finance, marketing and others – the respondents of the 166 organizations who participated in the report collectively rated themselves at the crawl...
2019-03-2133 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsBeyond Scaling and Onto Descaling with XSCALE | Business Agility SeriesPeter 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 be...
2019-03-1433 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsGetting to Equal: Gender Parity in the Workplace | Women in AgileIn honor of International Women’s Day 2019 and Women’s History Month, today’s episode features a female leader we’re proud to call our own. Neville Poole is a woman of color, wife, mother, and a managing director at Accenture | SolutionsIQ. She remembers a time when, while working as a bank teller, people would stand in line to wait for her white, male colleague to attend to them. One customer even told her manager, “I'm not comfortable sharing my financials with the black girl.” Neville took it in stride, determined not to let anyone stop her from achievi...
2019-03-0739 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsHolacracy: A Complete System for Self-Organization | Business Agility SeriesSandy Mamoli is an Agile consultant and coach with a focus on organizational culture and leadership. She is also a former Olympian, an international keynote speaker and author of “Creating Great Teams – How Self-Selection Lets People Excel”. Sandy sat down to explain holacracy, which is a way to create a truly self-organizing organization, and shares examples of the method in action. This episode of Agile Amped is part of a series in partnership with the Business Agility Institute. businessagility.institute/ Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Ryn Melberg hosts. Reach our guest: Email: Sandy@nomad8.com...
2019-02-2823 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsInnovation AccountingJoe Vallone, a senior consultant at Scaled Agile and an experienced Agile Coach and Trainer, sits down with us to talk innovation accounting. "All companies want to be innovative, but nobody wants to pay for it." The cost, he reminds us, is steep and measured in time not money. After comparing innovations and heavy investments from the past (Post-WWII and the SR21 Blackbird) and the present (Tesla and self-driving cars), Vallone touches on how innovation accounting fits into SAFe 4.6 and emphasizes the importance of leading indicators over traditional lagging indicators like net-present value, which were invented in a time...
2019-01-1734 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsScaling Continuous Delivery at WalmartBryan and Dana Finster share their experiences helping deploy Continuous Delivery pipelines at Walmart, drawing inspiration from CALMS. "One of the challenges [with things like DevSecOps]," Bryan points out, "is people not understanding what they're trying to do with CD. If they understand that, then security and quality is natural, because the CD pipeline is for delivering fixes to production really fast." Dana also shares, "You can't just tell people about the culture... The phrase I use is 'use the culture to teach the culture'." And she and Bryan both share ideas of how to...
2018-12-1329 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring Conversations“The Agile Marketer” Author Roland Smart | Business Agility SeriesWhat 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 a...
2018-11-2924 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsStack Overflow: "Technology is the Competitive Differentiator Now"Alex Miller is the General Manager for Stack Overflow, a website which has solved more than 10 billion problems for software developers over the last decade. Miller believes it is critical for IT leaders to empower developers to solve technical problems at the source, because they tend to have the best idea of how to solve it. From the shift in types of questions that Stack Overflow answers, Miller can see that the role of software developers is changing, which reflects the need for IT leaders to also evolve. “What we see in the data is a...
2018-11-0828 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsOpen Source and Agility at MicrosoftSam Guckenheimer is the author of “Software Engineering with Visual Studio” and the Product Owner of Microsoft Visual Studio Cloud Services. He paints a picture of how much Microsoft has changed in the last 15 years or more: where once patent processing was seen as a critical skill for junior engineers, now open source, Agile and DevOps are the foundational to the company culture. Guckenheimer points out that "now Microsoft is the largest contributor to open source on Github," with Google coming in second. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Greg Bledsoe hosts at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018 in Las Vegas. Me...
2018-11-0143 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsQ&A with The Phoenix Project Author Gene KimWe were excited to sit down with Gene Kim, CTO of IT Revolution and co-author of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook, and most recently Accelerate. We got to ask Kim some juicy questions including: What role do you play in the DevOps ecosystem? If you could go back in time and do it all over again, what would you do differently and why? How close are we to achieving all of the benefit of DevOps? And (drum roll) what is the functional definition of DevOps? Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Greg Bledsoe hosts at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018 in...
2018-10-2517 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsThe Journey to Agility at American ExpressDanielle Crop is the VP of Application Experience and Platforms at American Express. She shares her journey helping the 168-year-old financial services giant transition into an Agile organization. Amex is fundamentally a digital company – they’ve never had brick-and-mortar branches – and have always been customer-centric. Today the challenge they face are the new ways of working within the organization. Some teams, such as marketing, that have traditionally used project management within their own silo, now have visibility into and are dependent on product teams to drive value. Learn how Amex approaches scaling agility through a center...
2018-10-1123 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsSAFe 4.6 with Dean LeffingwellDean Leffingwell is just a "geek on a mission". Recognized as the one of the world’s foremost authorities on Lean-Agile best practices, his passion has always been improving the craft of software development. With the release of SAFe 4.6, he hopes to do just that. Leffingwell shares some of the most important updates to the framework including how to address the challenge of moving from a traditional to a Lean|Agile mindset, more guidance on XP, TDD and BDD, and how to scale a scaling framework—think 1000+ PI Planning participants. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Adam Mattis hosts...
2018-10-0422 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsMentoring a New Agile CoachAllison Pollard and Noreen Emanuel sat down for a chat with us about their mentor-mentee relationship. As an external Agile coach Pollard was able to act as a “super coach,” and through this symbiotic relationship Emanuel has now become a coach herself at her place of work. Pollard sees the relationship as a partnership: “For me it’s like I have a new colleague. I have a new person that has different ideas, their brain works differently, and they have all these great skills, so how do we tap into that together?” Hear concrete examples of how these two...
2018-09-2738 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsBuilding an Agile Culture with Howard SublettA 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 ...
2018-09-0633 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring Conversations“Personal Kanban” Author Jim Benson on the Agile ManifestoJim 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 ou...
2018-08-2335 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsCompassion in Tech and Business | Women in AgileSan 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 u...
2018-08-1623 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsUX in SpaceKrys Blackwood is a Senior Lead UX Designer at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. With her design team, she is creating a cultural change in an 80-year-old organization that's used to shipping things in a very waterfall way, "which makes sense when you're working with a billion dollar space craft." Blackwood has even gone so far as to travel to places like Spain and Australia to physically sit and work with the engineers who control space craft far out in space, to get a better understanding of their UX. "We are inserting a user-centered approach int...
2018-08-0930 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsOrganizational Change in an Agile ContextJason Little is an international speaker, Agile management consultant, and the author of Lean Change Management. He spoke with us about approaching organizational change based on Agile principles; how to sense and respond to change rather than to think of “transformation” as a linear path with an end date; and how to think outside the prescriptive box of frameworks. "Today we have everything from Agile digital strategy development to Agile marketing to Agile testing ...and it's completely missing the point. We're not trying to make each individual function more Agile, we're trying to get rid of the indi...
2018-08-0236 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsAlexa and Google Home: Agile for Voice TechnologyNowadays you can’t go anywhere without hearing about or interacting with voice recognition technology. Kari Ostevik of the Toronto-based Tribal Scale knows: she helped with the voice technology powering both Amazon Echo (i.e., “Alexa”) and Google Home. She provides 5 lessons for working in emerging technology: Humility – nobody knows yet so everybody needs to be curious and patient. Power of the Pair – Pair programming makes knowledge dissemination fast and seamless. Ruthless Prioritization – Tech is changing all the time, so you have to be clear about priorities. Test Late – In additional to testing early, with emerging tech, it’s important to h...
2018-07-2629 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsBehind the Scenes of an Acquisition: SolutionsIQ at AccentureOne 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 va...
2018-07-1931 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsEmpathy and Emotional Intelligence in Organizational TransformationAlicia 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...
2018-07-1223 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsAgile Leadership: What You Don’t Know Might Hurt YouPete Behrens is a Leadership Agility Coach, Certified Enterprise Coach, and a CST. He sat down with us to shed light on the Certified Agile Leadership Program by the Scrum Alliance which, according to Behrens, was the number one requested education that wasn’t being provided by the community.“The purpose of this program is not to make leaders experts at Scrum, but to help them adapt an Agile mindset. Being a Certified Agile Leader is not the point coming out of a two-day class, but to introduce them to a mindset they should be aware of.” Accent...
2018-07-0533 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsThe Agile Mindset | Gil BrozaMindset is the gray matter between why we do our work and how we get it done. Gil Broza, a much sought-after speaker, Agile coach, and author of The Human Side of Agile and The Agile Mind-Set, sat down with us for a deep dive into the Agile mindset. According to Broza, the Agile mindset is made up for 3 things:• Values: What we care about.• Beliefs: What we assume or hold to be true.• Principles: The standards that guide how we act. He goes on to explain why Agile transformations fail when we focus on behavi...
2018-06-2838 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsLeaning into Sustainable Pace with Women in AgileAgile Amped producer Hanna Gnann attended the Women in Agile Lunch & Learn at Keep Austin Agile 2018, where the topic was sustainable pace. She was impacted by the speaker Tamara Nation, so we invited her to chat with us about sustainability, how to measure it and ultimately how to achieve it. Nation shares her tips, with Gnann providing color commentary, including: - Balance and boundaries - making intentional choices about what thing you do not do. (Nation has stopped looking at her phone first thing in the morning)- Connect with nature daily - simple as stepping outside a...
2018-06-2127 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsTo TDD or Not to TDD, That is the QuestionFirst 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...
2018-06-1427 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsPreparing the Next Generation for the New Agile WorldAre 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 Ho...
2018-06-0725 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring Conversations4 Steps to Change with the ITC MapDrawing from the work of Lisa Lahey and Robert Kegan, Henry Dittmer shares his experience using the Immunity to Change (ITC) map to help participants of his session identify what is keeping them from achieving a desired change. Dittmer used the four-step ITC map to demonstrate why - paradoxically - he doesn't like presenting at conferences. The four steps are: 1. What One Big Thing do you want to commit to changing? 2. What are you doing or not doing that's keeping you from doing this thing? 3. What worries and fears (hidden competing commitments) arise w...
2018-05-3129 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsRound Table Roulette - Keep Austin Agile 2018Round 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...
2018-05-2527 min
Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring ConversationsTeams of Heroic Learners | Diana LarsenDiana Larsen is the Chief Relationship Builder at the Agile Fluency Project and she has a simple compelling message: software development is learning work. Knowledge work is what everyone is talking about - but Larsen argues that learning is really what we need to be doing today. She talks about "heroic learners" - people who have the courage, compassion and confidence to learn everywhere and all the time, because as Larsen puts it, "We have to get good and learning - or we get left behind." And this goes beyond just individuals - she discusses how teams need to l...
2018-05-2234 min