Podcasts about agile amped

In this episode of our Agile Amped podcast, we introduce the exciting program planned as a part of the Enterprise Agility Roundtable. Our esteemed speakers, Alexander Birke, Enterprise Agility Coach at Accenture, and Silke Eggert, Head of Lean Portfolio Management & Transformation at Vodafone, along with guests from several prominent German corporate organizations, are here to kick things off. The program begins with an opening keynote from John Smart, founder of Sooner, Safer, and Happier, discussing ‘Optimizing for Outcomes'. The second keynote, part of the Atlassian-Vodafone collaboration, explores how GenAI will enhance workforce efficiency. Tune in to hear how synergies were created through the exchange of best practices, ideas, and stories with other Lean Agile leaders.

In this insightful episode of our Agile Amped podcast, we delve into the potential of GenAI to accelerate new ways of working and knowledge sharing. We discover why the foundations of Agility remain crucial for establishing AI effectively. Jonathan Smart, a business agility practitioner, thought leader, coach, and author of the book “Sooner, Safer and Happier” shares his insights with Alex Birke, Enterprise Agility Coach at Accenture, discussing why GenAI is not a silver bullet for cost reduction. He emphasizes what leaders should do to maximize incentives and minimize threats in the minds of their teams. Join us as we explore a holistic approach to change that nurtures humanity, experimentation, and engagement.

In the latest episode of Agile Amped, recorded at the SAFe Summit 2024, Peter Palmér, Senior Transformation Strategist at Scania, and Helena Westman, Lean-Agile Coach, discuss their lean-agile transformation journey within the TRATON group. This group includes four strong brands: MAN, Navistar, Scania, and VW Truck & Bus, each with its unique identity and culture. Peter Palmér, with extensive experience in production, engineering, and quality, and a prominent speaker on lean product development (LPD) and leadership, shares his insights. Helena Westman, a dedicated lean-agile coach with a rich background in IT operations and contract management, brings her expertise in motivating and leading teams. Tune in to hear their insights on the complexities of driving lean-agile transformation across diverse and successful brands.

In this episode of Agile Amped, we delve into the importance of change management in agile transformations. Under the title ‘Change Management in Agile Transformations', we discover why change management is not just a buzzword but crucial for the success of business agility. Ann-Kathrin Lachmann, Agile Consultant at Accenture, talks to our guest Ludvig Ahlin. As a passionate Agile Coach, he shares his insightful experiences and outlines key takeaways and practical steps to implement change management in organizations. Join us now to succeed with your agile transformations by using change management correctly.

In this exciting episode of our Agile Amped podcast, we explore the potential of Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) capabilities and how those contribute to the success of enterprises. Under the title ‘Next Level Lean Portfolio Management ‘, we will talk about the potential of Lean Portfolio Management and the implementation challenges when trying to establish LPM capabilities. Together with our guests Saahil Panikar, SAFe Practice Consultant-T (SPCT) and certified Enterprise Business Agility Strategist with Arif Nasiruddin, a Business Agility Advisor, we will focus on how to successfully implement LPM, how to overcome challenges and which potentials can be tapped in complex enterprises, which integrate hardware and software and how GenAI can leverage LPM activities. Join us as we uncover the key learnings and insights of implementing LPM in various industries!

In this riveting episode of our Agile Amped podcast, we embark on an in-depth exploration of the path to becoming an SPCT. Titled ‘Journey to Become an SPCT', we sit down with two esteemed SPCTs who generously share invaluable insights gleaned from their journeys. Asuri Srivathsan Triplicane, SPCT6, shares insights as a SAFe® Practice Consultant Transformation Architect and Trainer. At the same time, Susan Roy Balummel, with her decade of Agile expertise, conducts the interviews, and Mahesh Varadharajan, a Business Transformation Leader, and Enterprise Coach, offers valuable perspectives on achieving Business Agility. Join us as we uncover the origins of their journeys, the routes they navigated, and the heights they have attained, inspiring listeners with tales of dedication and achievement.

In this exciting episode of our Agile Amped podcast, we explore the introduction and evolution of agility in BVA's PNR (Passenger Name Record) process: Where have we come from, where are we now and where do we want to go in the future? Under the title ‘AgileMind@BVA', we will start with the introduction of agility and look at the current status. Together with our guests Michael Mengel, Head of Policy Division at the Federal Office of Administration (BVA) and Ann-Kathrin Lachmann, Product Owner in accordance with SAFe®(PO) at Accenture, we will focus on the successes and challenges of the initial and continuous integration of agility in a public authority context. Finally, we will take a look into the future and discuss our goals and visions for agility. Join us as we uncover the key learnings and synergies for introducing, maintaining and evolving agility in large-scale government projects.

In this exciting episode of our Agile Amped podcast, we take a deep dive into the topic of enablement. Under the title ‘AgileMind@DBInfraGo', we shed light on how collaboration needs to be organised in order to work in a truly agile way. We will discuss what knowledge is required and how effective objectives can contribute to leadership. Our guests, Sarah Hagemann, Release Train Engineer (RTE) according to SAFe® at DB InfraGO AG, Benjamin Schmücker, Product Manager according to SAFe® at DB InfraGO AG, Christian Seltsam, RTE and SAFe® Practice Consultant (SPC) at DB InfraGO AG, and Holger Wiese, also RTE and SAFe® Practice Consultant (SPC) at DB InfraGO AG, share their valuable insights and experiences. Listen in and learn first-hand how DB InfraGO AG successfully integrates agile principles and enables effective collaboration.

Welcome to a new episode of Agile Amped! Broadcasting live from the SAFe Summit 2024. Our host, Alexander Birke from Accenture Leadership, is joined by special guest Dr. Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop Technologies and visionary behind the task-focused interface. Dr. Kersten's expertise in software development tools and productivity is unparalleled, making him a key figure in the Eclipse community. Today, we dive into the potential of AI within the SAFe framework, tapping into Dr. Kersten's deep understanding of application lifecycle management, agile methodologies, and effective management practices. Join us as we explore how AI can revolutionize change management, with Dr. Mik Kersten guiding the way.

In this Agile Amped episode we want to explore how our guest, Andreas, has introduced the QBR in Swiss Re and why it is a vital meeting in aligning strategy and execution. Our guest, Andreas Hüttmeir is passionate about agile ways of working, large-scale technology implementations and strategy development & execution on a global scale, especially in the context of financial markets for many years. Andreas will explain what a QBR is, how Swiss Re has started with it, what challenges they faced, how they manage to match capacity and demand on a global scale and what they have learned on dependency management.

Willkommen zu einer neuen Ausgabe von Agile Amped live vom CFD Summit 2023 mit dem Motto “Better Together”. In dieser Folge von Agile Amped sprechen Alexander Birke (Accenture Leadership) und Mira Schwarz (Accenture Leadership) über die Welt des Change Managements und werfen einen Blick auf die Entwicklung im Laufe der Jahre. Früher war Change Management oft eine rein strategische Angelegenheit, doch heute wissen wir aus Erfahrung, dass es viel mehr ist als das. Der Erfolg von Veränderungsprozessen hängt maßgeblich von der Einbindung und Unterstützung der Mitarbeiter ab. Wir müssen Change Management populärer machen, da es oft auf der Strecke bleibt. Leadership spielt hierbei eine entscheidende Rolle, indem es das Thema aktiv vorantreibt und uneingeschränkt unterstützt. Denn nur wenn wir gemeinsam handeln und uns mit Herz und Verstand dem Wandel verschreiben, können wir nachhaltigen Erfolg erzielen.

The world is facing many ecological, social and governance challenges and the United Nations indicate that we are far from reaching our global “sustainability development goals”. Governments, NGOs, interest groups, companies and individuals are all looking to increase their impact of sustainability. In particular, the use of information & communication technologies is projected to rise significantly over the next years, increasingly impacting global energy consumption & greenhouse gas emissions and thus in need for more and more to become a focus area for sustainability strategies and measures. Accenture has identified this need and set “sustainability” as one of the company´s key strategic targets. On Accenture's Cloud First Design Summit in Kronberg, Anselm Ringleben and Patrick Niesel from Accenture's Cloud Department are talking with our [Agile Amped] host Katrin Wellmann. They discuss challenges but also different solution potential technologies and in particular, which role cloud or Artificial Intelligence can play.

Willkommen zu einer weiteren Ausgabe von Agile Amped! In dieser Epiode spricht unser Host Tania Rebuzzi mit Philipp Noser(CST). Phillip erzählt zu Beginn, was genau Cargo Sous Terrain (CST) ist und was ihre Rolle genau in der Logistikbranche und im nachhaltigen Transport ist. Weiter wird über den Zweck von CST welcher nach aussen wie auch nach innen getragen wird gesprochen. Als nächstes wird das Thema Digitalisierung und welche Rolle diese in einer Tunnelinfrastruktur spielt diskutiert. Letztlich wird darüber gesprochen mit welchen Herausforderungen das junge Unternehmen beim Aufbau der Firma und dem dazu parallelen Aufbau einer neuen IT-Infrastruktur konfrontiert ist.

Unser Host Steffen Göbel, begrüßt euch herzlich zu einer weiteren aufregenden Episode von Agile Amped. Heute widmen wir uns den neuesten Entwicklungen von SAFe 6.0! Unser besonderer Gast für diese Folge ist Michele, ein angesehener Experte im Bereich Agilität und SAFe Strategic Advisor bei Scaled Agile, Inc. Michele wird uns Einblicke in die jüngsten Innovationen von SAFe 6.0 geben und wie die Integration von Business Agility darin umgesetzt wurde. Bleibt dran, während wir gemeinsam erkunden, wie diese aufregenden Neuerungen Unternehmen dabei unterstützen, ihre Agilität zu optimieren und sich an die sich ständig ändernde Geschäftswelt anzupassen.

In this episode of Agile Amped, Tania Rebuzzi (Managing Director at Accenture) and Jochen Malinowski (Cloud First Lead at Accenture) spoke to Alex Birke (Head of CIE-Accenture Business Agility) about their published article RESET, a POV that outlines their thinking on how to set up organizations and their IT systems in the context of continuous change. Tune in and find out why they think this is necessary, how organizations and IT systems have been designed and operated in the past – and how deconstructing towards more nimble teams and systems benefits businesses, people, and leads to value creation.

In this episode of Agile Amped, our colleague and Agile Coach Sabrina Tratsch interviews Jendrik Kretschmann, DevOps department lead at Accenture ASG. Focus of the interview is the Objectives and Key Results implementation (OKRs) at Accenture DevOps. Tune in and find more about the journey of one department in a global company and their path on how to implement OKRs. From the idea, through challenges, to the concrete way of implementation and their lessons learned.

Diese Woche bei Agile Amped interviewt unser Gastgeber Murat Erdogan unserem Gast Ari Byland Agile Coach bei Finnova. Das Hauptthema, wie können wertvolle Value Streams gemappt werden? Sie diskutieren über die Vorteile, aber auch die Herausforderungen, die ein Value Stream Mapping mit sich bringt. Höre rein und finde heraus, wie eine Value Stream Analyse Unternehmen und Organisationen unterstützen kann.

This week in Agile Amped we are hosting Dr. Alexander Osterwalder who is known for inventing the Business Model Canvas and simplifying the strategy development process, and turning complex concepts into digestible visual models. Together with our host Jochen Malinowski, they talk about Alex's new book “The Invincible Company” and debate the question of how companies can become invincible. Alex states that companies become invincible as they constantly reinvent themselves while being successful, and in a leading position. Continuous innovation culture is what is needed to become invincible. Alex focuses on different obstacles that companies face when reinventing themselves, for instance, the lack of understanding of how innovation works. He points out the different types of innovations, such as efficiency, sustaining, and transformative innovation. Tune in, and find out more about these obstacles and how companies need different organizational measures to overcome them.

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/ 

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.

Von mechanischem Scrum und wechselnden Perspektiven: In dieser Folge von Agile Amped geben die Autoren Peter Götz und Uwe M. Schirmer unserer Moderatorin Magdalena wertvolle Einblicke, wie man ein professionelles Scrum Team verbessern kann. Was ist Zombie Scrum und wie kann man mit einem Growth Mindset einer Situation wie einer globalen Pandemie begegnen? Hört rein und lass euch inspirieren von Ideen und Denkanstößen, wie man Veränderungen umsetzen kann.

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.  Marc 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. Sources: - https://issuu.com/growmagazine5/docs/_grow_vol_18/16 Music credits: Cosmos by From The Dust | https://soundcloud.com/ftdmusic Spoken by IvPem | https://soundcloud.com/ivpemofficial Daylight by Jay Someday | https://soundcloud.com/jaysomeday Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en_US

In der heutigen Episode bekommen wir einen Einblick in die Teal Organisation von Mobile Basel. Zusammen mit unserem Host Jerome Grimm nimmt Stefan Eugster Stamm uns mit auf die Reise zu einem kollegial geführten Unternehmen und dem dynamischen und erfolgreichen Transformationsprozess. Als Stephan als Co Geschäftsführer die Idee vorstellt, die Organisation von einer Kultur der «verschlossenen Türen» hin zu einer Teal Organisation radikal zu öffnen, stößt er damit intern auf allen Ebenen auf Interesse. Welchen Herausforderungen er und die Organisation auf dem Weg meistern mussten und welche Erfolgsfaktoren er rückblickend als Schlüssel zu einer erfolgreichen Transformation sieht, hört ihr bei Agile Amped!

Corey Post is a Lean-Agile transformation management consultant with 20+ years of leadership experience developing large solutions, new products, and complex systems. Recently he authored two talks for the Agile2020 conference: ·       Use Product Value Streams to Rapidly Deliver Customer Value and Create a Learning Machine ·       What You Need to Know About Human-Centered Design and Hearing the Voice of the Customer Since the conference was canceled, we wanted to invite Post to discuss some key points from his talks including value streams and the importance of customer-centric organizations. 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.  

Esther Derby has four decades of experience with organizational change and she’s a well-known author and thought leader in the agile space. Derby chats with us about her latest book: “7 Rules for Positive, Productive Change: Micro Shifts, Macro Results” While you’ll hear her 7-step guide to problem solving, we particularly dig into her guidance on attending to networks. Accumulating network drama due to widespread layoffs and stress that are affecting our peers is making people less resilient and less supportive of each other. Derby shares her tips for allowing for unstructured conversations and maintenance of our connections in our virtual work environments of today. 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 

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 differences between business and technology groups Change metrics are non-existent, broken or not relevant between groups Projects are considered cost centers Mik also takes a closer look at the concepts behind his book, including the value of product value streams, persistent teams, and organizing with the intention of reducing the number of dependencies. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Mirco Hering hosts at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 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

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.

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/ 

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/  

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/

Dieses Jahr war anders als erwartet. Wie kann man ein zentrales Planungsevent organisieren, wenn die Teams in verschiedenen Ecken der Welt verteilt sind und physisch nicht zusammenkommen können? Unser Host Alexander Böser spricht mit Kirsten Lange, Release Train Engineer bei einem großen Transformationsprojekt im Rahmen des Scaled Agile Framework. Im Unternehmen stand man vor der großen Herausforderung, eine Woche nach dem Lockdown ein virtuelles PI-Planning mit mehr als 550 Personen in drei verschiedenen Zeitzonen zu koordinieren. Obwohl virtuelles arbeiten und Konferenzen zum daily business gehörten, ist diese Veranstaltung eine besondere Herausforderung. Was für Tools nutzt man? Wie geht man mit Abhängigkeiten zwischen 30 Teams um? Best practices, Tipps und Erfahrungen hört ihr in der neuen Folge von Agile Amped!

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/

Cultura é o conjunto de comportamentos e hábitos diários, e inovação, de acordo com Silvio Meira, é a criatividade emitindo nota fiscal. Mas quais são os hábitos que devemos desenvolver para nos inserirmos em uma cultura de inovação? Neste episódio Fabio Pereira nos mostra seu ponto de vista em relação à cultura de inovação, como é construída e sua relação com a agilidade. Fábio é lider da área de Open Innovation Labs da Red Hat na America latina, autor do livro "Consciência Digital" e palestrante internacional. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Renato Wu realizou essa conversa com o Fábio de forma remota. LinkedIn entrevistado: - Fabio Pereira: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fabiopereirame/ LinkedIn host: - Renato Wu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renatowu/ O podcast Agile Amped é a voz da comunidade ágil impulsionada por histórias fascinantes, pessoas apaixonadas e ideias inovadoras. Juntos, estamos acelerando o impacto do business agility. Podcast library: www.agileamped.com/br Conecte-se conosco através de nossas redes sociais! BR LinkedIn: linkedin.com/showcase/accenture-solutionsiq-brasil US Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped Facebook: facebook.com/agileamped Instagram: instagram.com/agileamped

Hanna Gnann is the brand strategist behind Accenture | SolutionsIQ, and the producer of both this and the Agile Amped podcast. In a time of shaky economy and layoffs, standing out from the crowd in the job market is top of mind for many of us. Gnann shares some of her expertise on how to apply branding into your professional life, and especially how to apply it to social media.  “At the end of the day, it’s really your interactions with people, whether it’s online or in person, that matter.” Leslie Morse hosts.   The Women in Agile community champions inclusion and diversity of thought, regardless of gender, and this podcast is a platform to share new voices and stories with the Agile community and the business world, because we believe that everyone is better off when more, diverse ideas are shared.Podcast Library: www.solutionsiq.com/womeninagile Women in Agile website: https://womeninagile.org/Connect with us on social media! LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/womeninagile/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/womeninagile/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/womeninagileorg   

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. 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 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!  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped

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

Introduzido na Intel algumas décadas atrás e adotado por diversas empresas do Vale do Silício ao longo dos últimos anos, o framework OKR vem conquistando, cada vez mais, a agenda de executivos e times que estão à frente de transformações digitais. Neste episódio, conversamos com o Felipe Castro, especialista em OKR com diversas experiências em implementações deste framework ao longo dos últimos anos. Formado em Engenharia da Computação pela Puc-Rio, o Felipe criou o Ciclo OKR, um método simples para evitar os erros mais comuns na aplicação e utilização de Objective and Key Results. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Daniel de Amaral realizou essa conversa com o Felipe de forma remota. Para conhecer mais sobre o trabalho do Felipe, acesse: https://felipecastro.com/pt-br/ LinkedIn entrevistado: - Felipe Castro: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meetfelipe/ LinkedIn host: - Daniel de Amaral: www.linkedin.com/in/amaraldn/ O podcast Agile Amped é a voz da comunidade ágil impulsionada por histórias fascinantes, pessoas apaixonadas e ideias inovadoras. Juntos, estamos acelerando o impacto do business agility. Podcast library: www.agileamped.com/br Conecte-se conosco através de nossas redes sociais! BR LinkedIn: linkedin.com/showcase/accenture-solutionsiq-brasil US Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped Facebook: facebook.com/agileamped Instagram: instagram.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 Connect with us on social media!  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped  

A Concrete é uma empresa parte da Accenture e especializada em desenvolvimento de soluções digitais com forte cultura de Gestão de Produtos, Lean-Agile e DevOps. Nessa segunda parte do episódio, Fernando de La Riva e Alexandre Bairos compartilharam um pouco da relação da Concrete com os OKR's, como isso conectou a história da empresa com Produtos Digitais, e alguns dos grandes aprendizados dessa jornada. Fernando é co-fundador da Concrete e atualmente líder de vendas da Accenture Technology para a indústria de Financial Services para a América Latina. Alexandre é head de Web e APIs, também responsável pelas entregas da Concrete. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Daniel de Amaral realizou essa conversa de forma remota com Fernando e Alexandre. Saiba mais sobre a Concrete em www.concrete.com.br LinkedIn entrevistados: - Alexandre Bairos: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandre-bairos-de-medeiros-a482081/ - Fernando de La Riva: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fernandoasdelariva/ LinkedIn host - Daniel de Amaral: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amaraldn/ O podcast Agile Amped é a voz da comunidade ágil impulsionada por histórias fascinantes, pessoas apaixonadas e ideias inovadoras. Juntos, estamos acelerando o impacto do business agility. Podcast library: www.agileamped.com/br Conecte-se conosco através de nossas redes sociais! BR LinkedIn: linkedin.com/showcase/accenture-solutionsiq-brasil US Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped Facebook: facebook.com/agileamped Instagram: instagram.com/agileamped

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

A Concrete é uma empresa parte da Accenture e especializada em desenvolvimento de soluções digitais com forte cultura de Gestão de Produtos, Lean-Agile e DevOps. Nesse episódio, conversamos com Fernando de La Riva e Alexandre Bairos, que nos contaram um pouco da história da Concrete e compartilharam seus aprendizados à luz da gestão e da liderança. Fernando é co-fundador da Concrete e atualmente líder de vendas da Accenture Technology para a indústria de Financial Services para a América Latina. Alexandre é head de Web e APIs, também responsável pelas entregas da Concrete. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Daniel de Amaral realizou essa conversa com Fernando e Alexandre no escritório da Accenture, em São Paulo. Referências: Vídeo Festa de Criança ágil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Miwb92eZaJg Saiba mais sobre a Concrete em www.concrete.com.br LinkedIn entrevistados: - Alexandre Bairos: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandre-bairos-de-medeiros-a482081/ - Fernando de La Riva: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fernandoasdelariva/ LinkedIn host - Daniel de Amaral: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amaraldn/ O podcast Agile Amped é a voz da comunidade ágil impulsionada por histórias fascinantes, pessoas apaixonadas e ideias inovadoras. Juntos, estamos acelerando o impacto do business agility. Podcast library: www.agileamped.com/br Conecte-se conosco através de nossas redes sociais! BR LinkedIn: linkedin.com/showcase/accenture-solutionsiq-brasil US Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped Facebook: facebook.com/agileamped Instagram: instagram.com/agileamped

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/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped

Arquitetura técnica é um habilitador para atingir a agilidade de negócios? Sem dúvida! Nesse episódio, Renato Wu e Luiz Toscano, arquitetos de software da Accenture | SolutionsIQ Brasil, conversam sobre uma estratégia para implementar diversos habilitadores técnicos de arquitetura: o Digital Decoupling. Pegue sua cartela e prepare-se para um "Bingo" de termos técnicos, mas que são muito importantes para destravar a agilidade de negócio. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Daniel de Amaral realizou essa conversa com Wu e Toscano no escritório da Accenture, em São Paulo. LinkedIn convidados: Luiz Toscano: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luiz-toscano-menezes-b0a7b320/ Renato Wu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renatowu/ LinkedIn Host: Daniel de Amaral: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amaraldn/ O podcast Agile Amped é a voz da comunidade ágil impulsionada por histórias fascinantes, pessoas apaixonadas e ideias inovadoras. Juntos, estamos acelerando o impacto do business agility. Podcast library: www.agileamped.com/br Conecte-se conosco através de nossas redes sociais! BR LinkedIn: linkedin.com/showcase/accenture-solutionsiq-brasil US Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped Facebook: facebook.com/agileamped Instagram: 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 Connect with us on social media!  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/ Twitter: https://twitter.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 Connect with us on social media!  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped  

O relatório “State of DevOps” nos ajuda, há oito anos, à entender melhor como as organizações começam com o DevOps e o escalam com sucesso. Nesse episódio, o time de DevOps da Accenture|SolutionsIQ Brasil conversou sobre os principais resultados apresentados pelo relatório na edição de 2019, dando destaque na relação entre as práticas de DevOps e a Segurança de Dados: qual a relação entre os temas e como isso afeta a cultura da organização. Estevan Corsini é Engenheiro DevOps e líder do time de DevOps da Accenture| SolutionsIQ Brasil; Guilherme Silva e Rodrigo Cezaro são gerentes de Arquitetura especializados em DevOps. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Renato Wu realizou essa conversa com o Corsini, Guilherme e Cezaro no escritório da Accenture, em São Paulo. Relatório State of DevOps (em inglês): https://puppet.com/resources/report/state-of-devops-report/ LinkedIn convidados: Estevan Corsini: https://www.linkedin.com/in/estevan-corsini-78734914a/ Guilherme Silva: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guilherme-silva-77a68212b/ Rodrigo Cezaro: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rodrigocezaro/ LinkedIn Host: Renato Wu: linkedin.com/in/renatowu/ O podcast Agile Amped é a voz da comunidade ágil impulsionada por histórias fascinantes, pessoas apaixonadas e ideias inovadoras. Juntos, estamos acelerando o impacto do business agility. Podcast library: www.agileamped.com/br Conecte-se conosco através de nossas redes sociais! BR LinkedIn: linkedin.com/showcase/accenture-solutionsiq-brasil US Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped Facebook: facebook.com/agileamped Instagram: instagram.com/agileamped

Binary thinking can be found everywhere – regardless of industry or organization. Julia Wester explains, that we tend to quickly choose between two extremes, when we are confronted with decision-making. Julia is a co-founder of 55 Degrees AB, an outcome focused consulting company in southern Sweden. She explains that exactly this mechanism is a great challenge that we need to overcome to be able to work Agile. The Agile way means to take a position only if we gathered enough information instead of deciding on binary extremes early. Host of this Agile Amped episode is Stephan Lange from Accenture | SolutionsIQ. Recording location was the DevOpsCon 2019 in Munich. #AgileAmped #BusinessAgility #BinaryThinking #JuliaWester #StephanLange

O Business Agility tem o objetivo de transformar a forma como estabelecemos, lideramos e gerenciamos as organizações, mudando para uma mentalidade Ágil, promovendo uma cultura de aprendizagem organizacional e adotando operações ágeis em toda a organização. Na segunda parte da discussão do artigo "A Terceira Onda do Ágil", nossos executivos Fabio Branquinho e Daniel de Amaral trouxeram histórias, opiniões e importantes referências sobre a terceira onda. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Nathy Lahat realizou essa conversa com Branquinho e Daniel no escritório da Accenture, em São Paulo. O podcast Agile Amped é a voz da comunidade ágil impulsionada por histórias fascinantes, pessoas apaixonadas e ideias inovadoras. Juntos, estamos acelerando o impacto do business agility. Podcast library: www.agileamped.com/br Conecte-se conosco através de nossas redes sociais! BR LinkedIn: linkedin.com/showcase/accenture-solutionsiq-brasil US Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped Facebook: facebook.com/agileamped Instagram: instagram.com/agileamped

Dimitar Karaivanov on Agile Atelier, Claire Lew on The Product Experience, Eric Willeke on Agile Amped, Mike Bugembe on The Product Experience, Colleen Esposito on Hired Thought I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting February 17, 2020. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. DIMITAR KARAIVANOV ON AGILE ATELIER The Agile Atelier podcast featured Dimitar Karaivanov with host Rahul Bhattacharya. Dimitar is an expert on scaling Kanban. Dimitar thinks of Agile as a company sport rather than a team sport. At the team level, scaling is horizontal. The more interesting kind of scaling to Dimitar is vertical scaling. If you have a hundred or a thousand teams, the real challenge is the coordination piece on top of those teams and the strategic piece on top of that. If you don’t have an optimized coordination layer that reduces the number of things the organization is working on, your organization is spread too thin. He explained the importance of teamwork and coordination using the metaphor of a band of musicians. Scaling Kanban starts with a single team. What Dimitar likes about Kanban is that if you follow the basic rules, it always results in some kind of improvement. Next, we want to connect the teams to a management layer that performs the coordination activities. People often perceive Kanban as a visual board with some sticky notes on it. Actually, if you go horizontally, then vertically, it is more of an instrumentation facility for your organization. Like a performance profiling tool, you connect Kanban to your organization and it provides entry points with time stamps and starts collecting data. With this profiler, you can dig in and find out what the slowest part of your organization is. Rahul asked about roles in scaled Kanban. Dimitar says there are only two specialized roles called out in Kanban: the service delivery manager and the service request manager. Because one of the principles of Kanban is to start where you are, you do not have to change a lot about roles when you start using Kanban. The service request manager role just means having someone who is responsible for requesting work, such as product manager. The service delivery manager just needs to be someone who is responsible for ensuring the work gets done. This could be a Scrum Master or maybe just a team lead. If the organization is adopting Kanban as a whole, you will need someone on the strategic level that is connected to the Kanban system and has a say in what gets done and when. Rahul asked about failures Dimitar has seen. Dimitar has seen problems in which training just the teams and expecting this to lead to business agility failed. Another route to failure was relying on tools to do all of the work of creating agility. He says you need people with personal agility. You need to find these people or stimulate your existing people to grow themselves so that they become agile in their mindset. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-19-scaling-kanban-with-dimitar-karaivanov/id1459098259?i=1000464007645 Website link: https://rahul-bhattacharya.com/2020/01/29/episode-19-scaling-kanban-with-dimitar-karaivanov/ CLAIRE LEW ON THE PRODUCT EXPERIENCE The Product Experience featured Claire Lew with hosts Randy Silver and Lily Smith. Randy started by asking Claire if she’s ever accidentally been anybody’s worst boss. This was the question that Claire herself had asked at the Business of Software conference in her talk, “The Accidental Bad Manager.” She says that, based on her data, the answer is “probably.” She says that 85% of the time companies are choosing the wrong manager or promoting the wrong people into the role. They’re choosing for a manager those individuals who were showing excellent skills and outcomes as an individual contributor, but those skills don’t transfer over when they become a manager. Claire cited a Gallup study that found that there are five to seven traits that characterize the best managers and, yet, only one in ten managers possesses these traits inherently. Claire created Know Your Team because she herself had a really bad boss and he had no idea. The first thing that made this boss so bad was that he didn’t follow through on his commitments. Looking back, she sees this as a classic case of failing to build trust because he made promises and didn’t deliver. When leaders think about trust, oftentimes their minds go to likability, team-building, and images of trust falls and happy hours. None of those things have to do with real trust, which is the ability to show people that you will do what you say. A second thing that made this boss so bad was that he lacked an ability to communicate and share vision. This is a common problem because most of us get the definition of vision wrong. Claire says that vision is not what you do and it’s not how you do it; it is where you’re going. Vision is the strongest motivating force in a team and the most clarifying force for decision-making. Neither motivation nor decision-making were tenable under her bad boss because the vision wasn’t clear. Lily asked how Claire designed Know Your Team. Claire says that the number of conceptions of leadership is as large as the number of people who have attempted to define the term. She believes the reason there are so many definitions of leadership and the reason that there is no agreed upon best approach to leadership is because, most of the time, the right thing to do is highly dependent on many factors: your own disposition, the team’s disposition, team dynamics, the market, the task at hand, etc. So the best thing to do is to compile as much data as possible and determine the two or three best things to focus on. The best managers, she says, tend to focus on three things. First is trust. Second is honesty. Third is being able to create context in a team, that is, being able to understand and share where you are trying to go and what progress is being made along the way. Lily asked how these areas of focus compare with the traits in the Gallup study Claire mentioned earlier. Claire says that the Gallup study identified temperamental characteristics like positive thinking, good judgment, and empathy, and Claire’s areas of focus represent the skills you can build and the things that you can do to make your team run better. But there are connections between the Gallup characteristics and Claire’s areas of focus: you need empathy to build trust, and you need good judgement to create context. Randy asks why managers are the last to know that they are bad at this. Claire says the psychological reason is that we create a narrative for ourselves that fits with a coherent positive self-image. More practically, we are complicit in being the last to know for several reasons, including the fact that we don’t create an environment for people to tell us. As a result, people don’t speak up in the workplace and this is because of fear and a sense of futility; they believe that nothing would change. To resolve this, we need to be able to ask for feedback in the right way and we have to act on that feedback. To ask for feedback in the right way, we need to be vulnerable. Tell people you are struggling. When you go first and you come from a place of vulnerability, you give the other person permission to be vulnerable themselves and you defuse the element of fear. You also need to be specific. You can’t ask, “How’s it going?” Instead, ask something like, “What is one thing that we could have done better in the past quarter?” or “When is the last time you felt frustrated with your work?” or “Have you observed any micro-managing tendencies from me in the past few months?” or “Have we been all talk and no action on anything lately?” Next, you need to act on the feedback. If asking questions is all about defusing fear, acting on the feedback is all about defusing futility. When you show people that their feedback is not in vain, that helps people to speak up. Some people think this means having to implement every single piece of feedback. Not at all. Acting on feedback can be as simple as thanking someone for their feedback or explaining why you are not doing something. As leaders, we often explain why we are doing something but we forget to share why we are not doing something. The best way to modulate and calibrate the other person’s expectations so that they don’t think speaking up is futile is to say, “You’re not likely to see a ton of progress on this in the beginning but I will give you regular updates on the progress.” And then make sure you give those updates. Another best practice for creating an environment where you are not the last to know is to ask people what their preferences are around feedback. They may want an email, a slack message, or a phone call. Another preference we often forget to ask about is how quickly to give feedback. They may want it right away, or scheduled for the next day or the next week. A third preference is their orientation toward conflict. Do they believe that conflict is healthy and necessary to be productive in a team or do they much prefer a low-conflict environment? A manager should not just be looking to be a great manager or leader but to be the best manager or leader for each particular person and to know that this is going to require customizing your approach to every individual. Randy asked what lessons people can learn about leadership if they don’t have direct reports but need to be able to influence without power. Claire says leadership is not about your title or the number of direct reports you have. At its most core form, leadership is about modeling the behavior that you want to be true of your team. Say you are so annoyed that your entire team is always late for meetings and late on deadlines. Instead of thinking you need to speak to someone or to manage up, one effective way of exhibiting leadership is to turn to yourself and ask, “To what degree can I model the behavior I would like to be true of the team?” A second way to exhibit leadership is to consider how you, as a teammate, can create an environment for those around you to do their best work. Apple Podcasts link:  Website link:  ERIC WILLEKE ON AGILE AMPED The Agile Amped podcast featured Eric Willeke with host Leslie Morse. The first and most critical thing Eric learned about WIP, or work in process, is to pay attention to how WIP cascades and multiplies in an organization. A single piece of strategic WIP equals hundreds to thousands of pieces of individual WIP. A lot of good work comes from corporate strategies, but there is too much of it. Eric gave an example of a VP of product management whose work he helped visualize. They discovered that he had 38 initiatives that he had to report on for his eight teams. When you look at that kind of flood, there is little wonder that we are creating an inability to focus and limit work in process. Eric no longer looks at the executive ranks and says they are to blame. He owns up to it and says that we are all to blame. He now feels empathy for the powerlessness that senior leaders feel in spite of their titles and maybe even because of their titles since those titles carry with them a kind of trap. Eric has three strategies that he uses at organizations to reduce their WIP problems: 1) Start with alignment. Make sure people understand intent and purpose. Eliminate the excess WIP that comes from the “Am I in the right direction?” question. 2) Practice reduction in depth. According to Michael Porter, the essence of a good strategy is what you’re not doing. Help people learn what is not part of the strategy and generate focus. You may have to repeat yourself because, as Patrick Lencioni says, “You only get one message per quarter and you need to say that message hundreds of times.” 3) Create permission and safety as part of how you decentralize. When you decentralize, people need to have all the permission to take responsibility and the safety to try things, learn, and experience the associated failures that come with learning. The conversation with leaders to get them to limit WIP is difficult. The leader starts with the best of intentions. If you come in too strongly with a message that they are doing it wrong, you are saying, “You were trying really hard in the best way you know how and you failed.” They didn’t. They were not responsible, necessarily, for all of the different pieces of WIP or how it cascaded, yet they have to take responsibility for helping people set things down. One leader Eric is working with understands this and uses a quarterly message that says, “You may put things down, but you need to put them down gently.” A lot of people look at WIP and say, “We just need to throw away half the items in process.” But that hurts people, hurts initiatives, and hurts business leaders. So we need to know how to carefully set down the things we’re not going to do yet and bring everybody else along. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/too-much-wip-destroy-your-backlog/id992128516?i=1000463449566 Website link: https://solutionsiq.podbean.com/e/too-much-wip-destroy-your-backlog/ MIKE BUGEMBE ON THE PRODUCT EXPERIENCE The Product Experience podcast featured Mike Bugembe with hosts Randy Silver and Lily Smith. Mike is the former Chief Analytics Officer for justgiving.com, which uses machine learning to try to increase generosity in the UK. When Mike joined, the company had in excess of ten years of data on people raising and giving money for causes they cared about. They used their technology to get a signal about what people were passionate about and used this to match people to causes. They started by using a collaborative filter approach like Amazon’s “people who purchased your item also tend to purchase these items”, but charitable giving is so personal that collaborative filtering doesn’t work. Instead, using Nicholas Christakis’ research, they could see that connections between individuals could help them understand the flow of generosity and the flow of the things that are important to people. Mike says that a lot of large companies talk about the fancy things they do with machine learning and data science like Facebook’s EdgeRank or Amazon’s and Netflix’s recommendation engines, but sometimes there are use cases that are unsexy but deliver a huge amount of value. For example, when people put a fundraising page on JustGiving, they have the option to specify a target. Only 30% of fundraisers were specifying such a target, but Mike found that this behavior led to much more money raised. So Mike created a machine learning system that predicted how much a fundraiser was likely to raise and pre-populated the target field. This was a lot of work to deliver one number on a screen, but this feature delivered an additional 7% on a 400 million pound business.  His approach to understanding where AI can deliver business value is to look at every business as a system of people making decisions, whether it’s marketers, product teams, or users. When you look at a product this way, the machine learning use cases float to the surface. You see where machine learning can make a decision more efficient, more automated, or more predictable. You then add a metric to each decision and see how decisions relate to each other or how they relate to key metrics you are trying to move. Your data is quite unique to your business and your product. It acts like a fingerprint. One of the risks of data science is that it is an experiment every time you do it. Even if somebody else has done it before, you have no guarantee that when you do it you will get a successful result. Product management teams that work with data science teams need to be aware that data science is not the same as delivering a feature with a software development team. It is an experiment. You have a question in mind and you have no idea whether or not the research will produce the result you’re expecting. Lily asked Mike how he recommends people hire a data scientist. Mike says he is very much against the idea of hiring a data scientist just because they have a PhD. That’s a massive risk. You could get a PhD-holding job candidate who only understands regression and is not numerate enough to try a lot of the different algorithms that data scientists use. Mike himself looks for data scientists who have real life experience. This doesn’t mean they’ve worked in a lot of companies before. It means they’ve got things that they’ve produced. You can read and study, he says, but if you’ve never done it, you won’t know the gotchas and foibles that come with working with data. Randy asked if there any guidelines or cheat sheets for people to educate themselves about bias in data collection, in algorithms, in assumptions, and in interpretation. Mike created a non-technical course for executives, product managers, and founders because they know their business better than the data scientists, in most cases. They add a layer of domain knowledge that helps reduce risk due to bias. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/cracking-data-code-mike-bugembe-on-product-experience/id1447100407?i=1000463981779 Website link: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/cracking-the-data-code-mike-bugembe-on-the-product-experience/ COLLEEN ESPOSITO ON HIRED THOUGHT The Hired Thought podcast featured Colleen Esposito with host Ben Mosior. Colleen loves helping teams get started, helping them understand that Agile is about uncovering better ways of developing software, and helping them identify what Agile means for them. She also loves helping the managers, directors, and VPs to interact better with the teams so that the teams become empowered. Colleen is a fan of invitation-based coaching and making sure the people understand the whys behind the change, what it looks like in the anticipated end state, and what steps the team may take to move towards that vision they’ve identified. Colleen says that the first thing she does when she comes into a brand new organization is she tries to understand the whys behind their decisions. “Why did you choose to use Agile?” If what she hears is, “Twice the work in half the time,” then she knows that she might have to reset expectations. Before starting an Agile adoption, Colleen gets everyone to think about the answers to some common questions like, “Why are we doing this? What’s in our way? What’s in our favor?” She says that if the leadership makes changes without involvement of the people, they are going to miss out on a valuable perspective. Colleen says that the people who hire her often think that she is going to come into their organization and make huge, sweeping changes. Instead, in the very beginning, it is often small changes like connecting what a development team is doing with what an operations team is doing. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/5-building-bridges/id1479303584?i=1000464455334 Website link: https://hiredthought.com/2020/02/03/5-building-bridges/ LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website: