LeadingAgile SoundNotes: an Agile Podcast

For this episode of SoundNotes, we reached out to some of the students who have taken CSM and CSPO classes over the last few months. We got a lot of great questions and will be responding to them over the next few weeks. This week, Derek Huether and Dave Prior respond to these two questions:

Question 1:

My team seems to have a problem with estimating and understanding the estimating concepts.  The team members are accustomed to traditional waterfall projects and estimating everything in units of time.  How can I help them understand estimating, but continue to complete the sprints with no pbis rolling over to the next sprint?

Question 2:

I have a team lead who is skeptical of scrum, especially metrics related to the process. He doesn’t think carryover matters from sprint to sprint as long as we’re “creating value” and getting the program priorities completed. Any advice on how to convince him that metrics can be a tool for good, and that the sanctity of the sprint commitment matters?

Links from the Podcast

If you’d like to check out the Multiple Team Throughput Forecasting Tool that Troy Magennis has created for use with multiple teams who have different ways of estimating work, you can find it (and his other tools) here: http://focusedobjective.com/free-tools-resources/

For an audio only version of the podcast click here.

Contacting Derek

If you’d like to contact Derek you can reach him at:

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/derek-huether/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derekhuether/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/derekhuether
• Email: derek@leadingagile.com

Contacting Dave

If you’d like to contact Dave you can reach him at:

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrsungo
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/mrsungo
• Email: dave.prior@leadingagile.com

If you have a question you’d like to submit for an upcoming podcast, please send them to dave.prior@leadingagile.com

And if you are interested in taking one of our upcoming Certified Scrum Master or Certified Scrum Product Owner classes, you can find all the details at https://www.leadingagile.com/our-gear/training/

If you have ever considered moving into consulting, this podcast is for you.In this podcast, In this interview, Rick Austin, John Tanner and Dave Prior talk about what it is like working as a traveling consultant for LeadingAgile. They discuss how it changes the focus of your work, what it takes to be good at it, how it impacts your personal life and some of the things you have to do to maintain your sanity when you spend most of your life on the road.

SHOW NOTES

• 1:13 Podcast Begins - Overview of Topic
• 2:35 What consulting did to Rick’s world when he started at LeadingAgile
• 3:08 How John got started with consulting and then got back into it
• 3:31 How being a traveling consultant impacts your personal and professional life
• 4:52 Shaping your life around how you work
• 5:23 Being intentional about your life when you are back home
• 6:10 How long each of us can spend on the road before having to take a break
• 7:11 Building relationships and maintaining objectivity on site
• 9:29 The importance of gaining permission to consult and coach
• 11:34 How do you entice people to invite you to coach once you get onsite
• 13:30 Learning how to get people to want you to be there
• 14:40 Why you should not immediately try to solve the problem
• 15;51 Developing better communication skills
• 17:42 How Dave coped with being introverted when building connections
• 18:27 When you meet people you just can’t connect with no matter how hard you try
• 19:46 Taking responsibility for the communication issues you face (It’s on the sender/communicator)
• 22:26 Things you should know about consulting before they start
• 23:57 Taking ownership of the room and holding your space
• 26:36 Engaging with authority
• 27:10 Developing mastery of the subject  and never being caught off guard
• 29:09 Being humble and maintaining confidence
• 30:10 The value of hard knocks
• 30:49 Finding the right people to partner with
• 31:18 Why you need to find a mentor to help you when you are learning how to work this way
• 32:29 What makes consulting difficult and the importance of maintaining personal connections outside of work
• 33:21 When you leave the house time stops for you, but not for the other people in your life
• 33:47 Creating clear space between work and non work
• 34:59 Finding the right company to consult for
• 35:26 How LeadingAgile makes it easy for us to work as consultants
• 36:18 Finding the things you need to do to recharge when you get burnt out from work
• 38:38 Getting in touch with John and Rick

LINKS FROM THE PODCAST

Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help 

CONTACTING JOHN

• Email: john.tanner@leadingagile.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/tannerjs
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tannerjs
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tannerjs/

CONTACTING RICK

• Email: rick@leadingagile.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/rickaustin
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickdaustin/

This is a explaination of the new tool I introduced at the 2017 Digital PM Summit. The session I led was called Hacking Agile for Digital Agencies and the canvas tool I built for the session is intended to help Digital Agencies understand more about why they want to use Agile practices in the first place, how they are expected to help and what they are willing to risk in order to achieve some level of agility.

If you'd like to check out the slides from the actual presentation, you can find them here.

If you'd like to download a PDF of the DPM Agility Canvas you can find that here.

And if you have any feedback or questions, please email me at dave.prior@leadingagile.com

Scott Sehlhorst, SVP and Executive Consultant at Leading Agile, goes deep on Personas in this episode of SoundNotes. During the interview Scott and Dave discuss the difference between Proto-Personas and actual Personas, the importance of empathy maps and how to help management understand that making the investment in developing personas is a great way to reduce risk.
This is the first of several podcasts we are going to be posting on Personas, how to create them and why they are so valuable.

Show Notes

• 00:08 Podcast begins


• 00:56 Scott’s background


• 03:00 Why Scott is so focused on understanding the customer


• 07:10 Scott explains what a proto-persona is


• 10:51 Why we need to understand the customer’s problem at a deeper level than they do


• 13:00 The difference between a proto-persona and an actual persona


• 19:08 Making the case for taking the time to do personas


• 20:20 Why we start by making assumptions


• 24:35 Using empathy maps as a tool to help us test our assumptions


• 26:48 Personas are an investment in understanding the customer and reducing risk


• 28:52 Helping executives understand why they need to make this investment


• 30:34 “You put together a plan and you remove risk and uncertainty from that plan”


• 31:54 Can you stop at the empathy map and how do you move past it into something more data driven


• 36:00 Getting the data we need to get to actual personas


• 39:25 Accepting the risk of not moving all the way to actual personas


• 43:54 What are the most effective ways to collect the data we need


• 49:39 Once you have all the data, then what?


• 52:36 What we’ll focus on in future podcasts about personas


• 53:25 Contacting Scott

Links from the Interview

Dave Gray’s updated Empathy Map
https://medium.com/the-xplane-collection/updated-empathy-map-canvas-46df22df3c8a

Contacting Scott

When you think of the annual Agile conference, you usually think about speakers and content. However, Paul Hammond wants to augment the content at the conference with the answers to your questions and one-on-one time with experts from around the industry. That’s why, this year, the conference includes Agile Therapy. Learn more in this video with Paul and Chris Li.

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Here are some of the links mentioned in the interview:

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

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

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