Podcast appearances and mentions of dean leffingwell

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 28, 2024 52:32

Bio Darren, as the European Managing Director of Cprime, spearheads transformation initiatives in EMEA, leveraging over two decades of experience in banking and IT leadership. As a SAFe Fellow and renowned author, he drives strategic growth by defining innovative go-to-market strategies and deepening client relationships. Darren is responsible for overseeing Cprime's consultancy services, implementing complex programs, and negotiating multi-million pound contracts, positioning the company as a leader in organisational efficiency and performance optimisation. He co-authored the BCS Book “Agile Foundations – Principles Practices and Frameworks” and "SAFe Coaches Handbook". A contributor to the SAFe Reference Guide 4.5 and "The ART of avoiding a Train Wreck". Finally a reviewer of "Valuing Agile; the financial management of agile projects" and "Directing Agile Change” Interview Highlights 01:30 Pandemic impacts 04:00 Cprime 08:00 Wooing clients 09:15 Using the right language 11:00 Doing your research 12:30 Mistakes leaders make 15:30 Changing mindsets 16:00 Ingredients for change 17:30 Reading for knowledge 26:00 Three thirds 28:30 Disruption 31:30 SAFe Coaches Handbook 37:50 SAFe frameworks 40:20 Enterprise strategy Connecting LinkedIn: Darren Wilmshurst on LinkedIn Books & Resources - Strategic Leadership: How to Think and Plan Strategically and Provide Direction, John Adair - Tribal Unity Book, Em Campbell-Pretty, - Drive, Daniel H. Pink - SAFe® Coaches Handbook: Proven tips and techniques for launching and running SAFe® Teams, ARTs, and Portfolios in an Agile Enterprise, Darren Wilmshurst & Lindy Quick - Agile Foundations: Principles, practices and frameworks, Peter Measey - The ART of Avoiding a Train Wreck: Practical Tips and Tricks for Launching and Operating SAFe Agile Release Trains, Em Campbell-Pretty, Adrienne L. Wilson, Dean Leffingwell - Industrial Devops: Build Better Systems Faster Dr. Johnson, Robin Yeman, Mik Kersten, Dean Leffingwell - Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results: Christina R Wodtke - Who Does What By How Much | Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden (okr-book.com) Episode Transcript Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. Ula Ojiaku It's a huge honour and privilege to have again with me as my guest on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast none other than Darren Wilmshurst, Managing Director at Cprime. Darren is an SPCT and a SAFe fellow. So for some context to the audience, Daz was one of the very first people I interviewed for the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast and this was about five years ago or so, and I actually wanted to have a way of speaking with Daz, and I didn't know how to, so I said, hey, can I interview you for a podcast? And long story short, I ended up heading on a plane to Oman, but that's a different story. So, Daz, what have you been up to since then? Because when we recorded the first one, you were not yet a SAFe fellow, it was afterwards that you became a SAFe fellow and lots of other things must have happened. Darren Wilmshurst Well then the pandemic started, and I think that that changed life for all of us, most of our consultancy work stopped because it was discretionary spend, people were in retreat in terms of trying to buckle down and understand, try and reduce costs as much as possible. I think the biggest impact was then training, because obviously we couldn't do training in person. We weren't allowed by the certificating bodies to train online, so they had to give us permission to do that, which they did, and then we had to think about, well, how are we going to do this online? You know, what conference facilities are we going to use? What collaborative tools are we going to use? And how do we deliver this experience to make it still interactive and engaging? So I think that was a major challenge for us as well, and if I'm honest, whilst we're still doing stuff online, we're starting to see some training, at least moving back in person, but my preference is still in person because it's a different experience. The theatrics in me, the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd is still really important as well. So I think that's the first thing I think has changed is that we had that period where everything was remote, I think we're back into a world now where we're more hybrid, which I enjoy the in person stuff, but I think we'll probably never go back to pre-pandemic where everything was in person, both consulting and training. So I think that was the major change, I think for us as well. During that time as well, our major founder wanted to retire, so we sold Radtac to Cprime and that all happened during the early days of the pandemic as well. We had a number of suitors, about six suitors, we decided on Cprime for, for me, two critical reasons and this is quite important, I think as well. Number one is that Radtac felt like a really family firm. We had a set of values and principles, there's a DNA to Radtac and we wanted someone that matched our DNA, I think it was so important for us. We could have gone to some other organisations, but we might have ended up selling our soul to the devil in some respects. Cprime, acquired a company in the US called Blue Agility a few years earlier, almost similar size to Radtac, very similar what they did as well, and what was key for me was that all the people in Blue Agility were still in Cprime. In fact, two had left and come back, so that was a good sign to me that we were aligned in terms of values and principles. So that was number one. The second reason was that Radtac had a heritage of all this training, you know, we're back to 1998. We had all this good training, we'd build up the consulting part of our business, so we're really good in terms of training and consultancy, but we were very agnostic about tooling and technology, because we didn't have the capabilities, or the brand awareness around that part of our business, and it used to frustrate me because, we'd go in, we'd do a great job in terms of way of working, somebody else would go in and maybe do the tooling set up, configure it in a way that wasn't aligned, that wasn't working and that was frustrating. Now we could see opportunities to improve the continuous delivery pipeline, but we didn't have the capability to sort it out as well, whereas Cprime had all of that heritage. So for me, it completed that puzzle where now we can do the training, the consultancy, the tooling to visualise the work, configure the ways of working as well, and also really help with that continuous delivery pipeline as well. So that was the defining decision. We completed that acquisition in February 2021, so literally 12 months after the pandemic. Cprime was at the time owned by a French company called Alten, massive company, not well known, but massive company. Cprime probably wasn't really core to Alten, they were a project management engineering company and Alten sold Cprime January 2023 to Goldman Sachs and Everstone Capital, so that's been a change. So again, we've had the pandemic, we've gone through the acquisition, and now we're owned by a private equity as well, which brings different challenges to the organisation as well, and actually the reality was that after the acquisition, after the earn out, I was looking to maybe semi-retire, spending a bit more time in Spain, fishing and playing golf, but actually this next phase is really exciting, so a testament to Cprime and Goldman Sachs as well, that I want to be part of the next part of the journey as well. So, I'm still here Ula. Ula Ojiaku Well, I am glad you are, and it sounds like it's been a rollercoaster ride and a journey, but part of it is the thrills as well. Darren Wilmshurst Look, we're very privileged, aren't we Ula, because I work with great people, I say that genuinely. I work with great clients, I'm very fortunate in that. And although, you know, if I don't want to work with a client, I don't have to do that, but actually all the clients I work with, I really enjoy working with and I love the work that we do. So it's almost like the Holy Trinity, great people, great clients, great work. Why wouldn't I want to carry on doing what I do? So I always think that we're very privileged in what we do. So, I'm very grateful. Ula Ojiaku And I'll say that the little I've worked with you, what I know is you are a genuine person and you're a great person as well. I can't remember who this quote is attributed to, but people tend to be mirrors. So if you're good, people mirror what you show to them. And I'll say that based on my experience with you, I've learned a lot in terms of how to treat people, being genuine and caring genuinely about their welfare, not necessarily about what you get from them, and that's key. So, that's the sort of person you are, that's who you are. Darren Wilmshurst That's very kind. Ula Ojiaku I want say thank you for that, because there are times when I'm in situations and I'm thinking about maybe somebody or potential someone, colleague or clients, and I'll be like, what would Daz do? How would he probably think about this situation? Now, part of what you do as director involves also wooing, wooing and winning the client and the customer. So, what would you say are your go to principles when pitching, to communicate the value you could bring before an engagement and maybe later on, we can talk about during and after the engagements? Darren Wilmshurst Yeah, I'm still Officer of the company, so I'm still Director of Cprime, the UK entity and also the European entity, so I have some corporate responsibilities as well. I'm still a practicing consultant trainer, so I still have to earn my supper every night as well, and that's the bit that I really enjoy. I'm also responsible for developing the capability of our people, and the products or the value propositions that we take to market as well. So that's part of it, but you're right, I do get involved in what we'd probably call pre-sale as well, so pitching as well. And I think the one thing I think I've learned over the last two, maybe three years as well is, is that I'm very conscious of the language that I use. What do I mean by that? We see a lot of stuff on social media about ‘is Agile dead', stuff like that. It's not dead, but actually if I am talking to a client and I use the Agile word or the ‘A word' it can create an allergic reaction, it can trigger them and in the same way that, just talking about a framework, SAFe, as well that can create a same reaction as well. So for me, it's not about Agile, it's not about SAFe, it's about actually what are we trying to do? What is the problem? What are the challenges that you're having as an organisation? And how can we help you overcome those challenges and create value in what you do? Now, what we will do is we will use ways of working, Agile ways of working, lean ways of working, stuff like that to help them, but what I try and do is try and avoid the triggering word, because I've seen it so often where they, well, we've been in agile for ages, well have you? Or we tried agile, it didn't really work, or we spent millions of pounds on agile transformation and we haven't seen the benefit. So sometimes you have to be careful in terms of the context you're going to. So for me, stop talking about frameworks, stop talking about words that might trigger, talk about their problems and their challenges and how you can help them overcome it, and the value that you bring to their organisation to help them overcome that as well. And that's really key for me as well. Ula Ojiaku That suggests to me that there would be some sort of background work to at least understand who you are pitching to, understand what their experience had been in the past, to know what those trigger words are. Is that something you could share about? Darren Wilmshurst It's an interesting question, because I interview a lot of people to want to come and join our organisation, and the first thing I say to them, can you tell me what you know about Cprime? And if they haven't done the research, it's like, so you've come on here, you want a job at this organisation and you have no idea who we are, and what we've done, and that just really frustrates me. So in return, if I was going on to talk to a client, then of course I'm going to try and understand what they do - what's your core business, there's lots of information on their website. If they're publicly listed, then go get their annual accounts because again, that would talk very much about their last training year and some of their issues as well. Having said all of that, we're still seeing the same problems and the same challenges across all organisations, regardless of the industry they're in. Every organisation, we have more demand than we have capacity. Fact. Everyone has that. We don't know how to prioritise our work. We need to reduce our costs, particularly now. That's becoming more prevalent now, certainly in this last six months than previously as well. Our time to market is too slow. Our ability to turn our ideas into actions needs to be faster. So they're the common problems we're seeing is again, too much demand, not knowing how to prioritise, reduce our costs, and we need to be able to be more adaptive and bring our ideas to the market or to fruition quicker as well. Ula Ojiaku What would you then say are the common mistakes leaders spearheading a transformation make? Darren Wilmshurst Yeah, it's interesting because again, a lot of the work that we're doing now, if we think about the Law of Diffusion of Innovation, and that's a product life cycle as well. If I take that model and apply it to organisations and their adoption, let's call it ‘of modern ways of working' rather than agile, I think we're probably in that late majority. Those large legacy, traditional organisations that maybe even tried the agile transformation years ago, but still haven't mastered it or conquered it, and I'm talking about large banks still, telecoms, pharmaceuticals, automotive, and I really fret for the automotive industry, not just here, but in Europe and across America as well, their time to market from design to launch can be anywhere between five and seven years, and yet the Chinese are doing it in two. Ula Ojiaku Could it be, because you've mentioned financial services, telecoms, pharmaceuticals, and the common thread is that they tend to be highly regulated. So could that be one of the reasons? Darren Wilmshurst I don't think it's regulation. I think they're just such large organisations, the hierarchy within that organisation, is huge, so this is why I come back to the leadership piece as well. Actually, and what happens is the leaders are too far away, they're not connected enough to the organisation systemic changes that they need to make in that organisation to make that organisation more effective. And they need to wake up and smell the coffee because Chinese are coming, they're coming in terms of automotive, they're coming in terms of pharma. True story, my daughter went to university a few years back. She'd been with HSBC for donkey's years as a student, a youth account, and she said, I'm going to university, can I upgrade my account to a university account? And the response from HSBC was yes, you can, but you need to make an appointment, and the next appointment is in six weeks time. And so my son, who's a bit older, he said, just get Monzo or Revolt, just go online, and if they don't wake up, they will just find that the whole generation will go ‘I will not wait'. Now, she waited six weeks, she did it, but a lot of them won't do that, so I think it's a real threat and I think the organisations are so big that, just trying to get into that leadership space so that we can start to work with them to help understand what they need to do. So back to your original question, I think there's three things, and this is hard. We need to move that leadership from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. They will be of a generation age of mine, so now they would have been schooled back in the eighties and nineties in ways of working, and they will have seen those ways of working as being successful because that allowed them to progress to the senior positions that they're in now, so I understand that, but those ways of working are not appropriate for the complex, adaptive, changing organisations that we now need to be in.We need to get them to move from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, and that's easier said than done. However, I was inspired, this was one of the most senior guys in the government organisation and he was having lunch with the CEO of HSBC Bank and they're talking about change, and they agreed that there were three core ingredients to change organisations. Number one, a transformed approach to partnerships, and he said the language is really important here as well. Again, I didn't call them suppliers, I call them partners. If we call them suppliers, they will behave as suppliers. The reality is that we call them partners, because we don't have the capability or the capacity, but sometimes when we bring them in, third parties, we treat them as an alien organisation. They wear different badges. They have different privileges. They can't do this, they can't go here, they have to be accompanied, things like that. So he said, we need, a transformed approach to partners. We need to bring them in, they need to be part of our ecosystem, number one. Secondly, he said an agile approach to problem solving, giving power and capability to those closer to the issue, and we talk a lot about decentralised decision making as well. Now, you need to know those that have the information need to make the decision in a timely manner as well. But this is the one that really, really got me. Most importantly, a learning culture, including their leadership, where those with the most influence must do as much or more learning than anybody else. Now that's unusual, because normally, I'm a senior person, I've got to where I am because I know a lot of information, and I wouldn't be where I am, but we need to understand that that information was schooled in a different generation. So what we can't do, we can't say to you, well, okay, you need to come on one of my training events, they say, seriously, you've not read my badge, I'm an important person, I have not got time to go on a two day training event, and we need to recognise that as well, these are senior executives, and their time is precious, and trying to find two days in a diary is difficult, so we need to, I think, as agents of change for organisations, and to bring leadership on the journey in order to move them from a fixed to a growth mindset, not to put them on a two day training event, but find a way of educating them in a in a smaller, bitesize way, almost like a series of small, interactive workshops that happen over a series of weeks, that sort of stuff as well, and we need to make sure that the content tackles their problems and their challenges, and we mustn't get into too much of our, again, the words that might trigger them as well. So that's the first thing. So we need them to understand that they need to go on an educational journey, but we need to find an educational journey that will meet their needs in terms of content and their time. Number one. Once we do that, then they need to lead by example, and it's all very well educating them. One of my colleagues was saying, would I go on a plane with a pilot that's read a book? No, they need to be able to practice their skill and hone their skills. Now that might be difficult, again, because their team members, their employees might be well schooled in this and they might feel uncomfortable practicing a craft that they're not that familiar with as well. So what we try and do is get them to practice in a safe environment, i.e. let's work as an agile team, as a leadership team, as a leadership group. Let's think about having a backlog of work that we need to do as a leadership team. Let's think about how we prioritise that work. Let's work in a small group and then review that work on a cadence and then just retrospective and maybe have someone that steps up and be a Scrum Master or Product Owner for that as well. So again, getting them to operate and start to learn by experiencing within their own environment is a great way, because if we can do that, now they're educated, and they practice their craft in a safe environment, they are better empowered to lead the change. This is what we need to do, and this is what I'm finding is that we need the leadership to step up and lead the change, because if we're going to make fundamental changes to organisations, systemic changes, organisational changes, the leaders need to be able to do that as well. And this is what I find – it's great having teams working at a great way, but without that support from leadership, the impact that they will be able to make will be limited. Ula Ojiaku Yes, I resonate with the last statement you made about the limitation to the impact teams can have if the leadership isn't bought in and if they are not walking the talk. It's not like, go ye and be agile whilst we still do what we've always done. There was something you said about moving from fixed mindset to growth mindset and the need for the leaders to have that continuous learning as in really that continuous learning culture is that they need to learn as much, if not much more than other employees, and that reminds me of this book by John Adair, Strategic Leadership, and in his book, he was saying that the origin of the word strategy comes from the military, and typically people who rise to the ranks are people who have been there, done that. And if people have the confidence that you know the stuff and you've been there, done that, if not better than everyone else, you'd have more respect you'd have more buy in, it's less friction getting the troops and kind of corralling the troops towards that vision. Darren Wilmshurst Yeah, it's interesting because again, at school, I was definitely not a reader. I was into numbers, I was a maths person. I went to university, did a maths degree, stuff like that as well. So I was one of those kids at primary school where I'd be given a book at the beginning of the week, and at the end of the week, I'd hand it back to my teacher and she would say to me, have you read the book, Darren? I go, yes, I have. I hadn't actually read the book. She'd give me another book and I'd move up the ladders that you did back in the day. Never read. It's interesting now, I read now more than I've ever read in the past. And I think what happened was it almost became a bit of a bug. I think going on the SPCT program, there were certain books that you had to read, but the more I read, the more I wanted to learn. So I think that got me into that habit as well. Secondly, I think that if I'm teaching this stuff, then I need to understand the provenance of what I'm teaching as well, and I can't do that without reading. So again, you can't be leader, a strategy leader without having been there and done it. So for me, reading is really important to understand some of the provenance of what we're doing and also giving some of the narrative as well. Ula Ojiaku So what would you say changed? Although you've just painted a picture of you before, back in school, and after, what's changed? Darren Wilmshurst I don't know I think I just started reading, it's a bit sad really, because I go on holiday and then I take business books with me and then I'm sitting around the pool reading these books and people say what are you reading, and I'm reading this book thinking that's a bit sad. And I remember one holiday I was sat in on a lilo in a pool reading a business book and my daughter took a picture of me saying dad what are you doing, you're on a holiday and there you are reading Tribal Unity by Em Campbell-Pretty on holiday as well. I don't know, I think when I started this, I wouldn't say it was an addiction, but it was like now i need to learn more now, I need to learn more and more, and so once you started then you don't stop and I'm still an avid reader Ula Ojiaku It reminds me of this book by what you've just said, Daniel Pink's book Drive. So for me, it sounds like the intrinsic motivation, you knew what you stood to gain by doing it and you didn't need to have your teacher asking you, did you read it and you'd say yes when you didn't, but you knew there was something at stake if you didn't. Darren Wilmshurst Yes, I think it was definitely the SPCT program I had to read, but then once I learned stuff, I wanted to learn more stuff, and so you're right, that intrinsic motivation, you know, I think in the video they talk about, people want to play the piano or guitar and just want to get better at it. I just wanted to really become better as an SPCT and then eventually as a fellow just to understand the wonderful thought leadership that has occurred over the last 20 and 30 years that has informed the way that we think and act and work now. Ula Ojiaku Wow. You've kind of nailed it, because Daniel Pink's book says mastery, autonomy, and purpose. So, the mastery bits, but going back to the original question, and thank you for sharing your experience, there is this saying that you can lead a horse to the water, but you can't force it to drink. So, we could have the edict where, okay, all the leaders can make space for those bite-sized workshops or sessions, but once that ends, is there a way we could encourage them to keep at it, because a two day training or maybe six workshop sessions spread over six months probably wouldn't cut it, or wouldn't be sustainable. So is there something or any tips on how to tap into that intrinsic motivation? Darren Wilmshurst I think Dean Leffingwell said to me, he talked about the third, the third and the third, and I'll talk about that as well, he said, in an organisation, there'll be a third of people that get it and want to do it. He said, there'll be a third that I would call my sceptics, not sure, need to be convinced, and there's the third that say, no, I'm very happy with the way I'm looking at it, I don't want to do anything else as well. He said, I don't care about the first third. He said, I actually I care about the second third, those sceptics, if I can convince one of them to lead the charge, he said, that's great because then the others then will come along as well, and if I can get that sceptic to change in terms of, I understand it, I want it, they're almost like a reformed smoker, they become the greatest advocates of change because they say, I get it now. And he said, now I've got two thirds, now I've got a majority, he said, and that's the tipping point that allows me to make that change as well. And what happens is, he said, there are some in that final third will go, okay, I've seen enough social proof that I will make that change, I need you to convince me, I'll do that as well, he said, but there'll be some that go, I'm not happy with that, and they are the people that will either ride off into the sunset with either retirement or a different career or different organisation as well. So you've got to find someone in that leadership group that's going to be an advocate. You've got to find that one or two that are happy to lead the charge as well, and someone in the sceptic face is great because they become the reformed smoker as well, but you've got to find it and hope that they will then corral and cajole some of the leadership into doing this as well, but without that it's hard, even though the leadership understand the challenges, sometimes they're just reluctant to make that change, and I find that difficult to understand and sometimes quite frustrating as well, because, for me, there are some iconic British brands that I still worry about going forward as well. You know, we've just seen it recently, Body Shop, an iconic brand, again, just lost their way. I mean, retail is just so hard at the moment, with the stuff online, but we'll see it with automotive as well, we'll see it in some other industries as well, where if we don't wake up and smell that coffee, then I do fear for some real British brands. Ula Ojiaku I don't think it's only British brands, I think it's a global phenomenon and the fact is the olden perception of having different sectors or industries is being blurred. So think about brands like Apple. Now they started off building computers, but really they've cut across multiple industries, so before the watch industry, you think about Swiss-made watches with the mechanical things, but the Apple watch, they have this music streaming industry, and one of the things in the strategy course I did from the Cambridge Business School is this, they said, it's really about developing a platform. So if you have a platform where you can get your customers to depend on, it's easy to branch into multiple industries. So Apple, they make watches and their watches serve as healthcare monitoring devices and different other things, there are rumours they're building their own self-driving cars and everything is on that iOS platform, which allows them to branch into anything, they could go into pharmaceuticals, medical. So it's no longer about traditional sectors or segments, and the disruption in life is real and no sector, no country is spared, so it's really about moving from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset and saying, what are the things we're missing, and how can we think differently? How can we reposition ourselves? How do we build a platform that has a fort? Darren Wilmshurst Yeah, I think you're right. Apple has disrupted so many industries, in terms of, you know, who buys a torch anymore, who buys a map anymore, other things as well, I just go on. I think at the last count, there was like 24 different industries disrupted as well, and I think about Jeffrey Moore, who I remember presenting with on stage in Washington, I think that was 2019. And he said, what you can do, as an organisation, you can sit here and wait to be disrupted, and hopefully that you can be a fast follower, providing you're nimble enough and adaptive enough, you might be able to make that change. He said, but what might be better is, rather than we wait to be disrupted, be the disruptor. My worry is that some of these large legacy organisations, they are being disrupted, and I just fear that they are not nimble and active enough to be able to respond, they're so ingrained in the way they have done things for the last 10, 20, 30, 40 years that I just fear for them and you're right, it's not UK, obviously I care about the UK because I'm a UK citizen, but I think it's a global phenomenon. I know my colleagues in North America and their industries are having the same challenges as well, right. It's not just a UK issue, it's definitely a global issue. Ula Ojiaku I'd really like to just touch on your latest book, the SAFe Coaches Handbook. So before we go into some of the contents, could you share what led to your co-authoring this with Lindy Quick? Darren Wilmshurst So it's one of those itches I had to scratch, I suppose is the phrase that you use. I was a very small author of the BCS book called Agile Foundations. Peter Measey was a lead author and there were a number of smaller authors that contributed to that as well, and then I ended up reviewing two books. So again, a recognised review of a couple of books, Agile books as well, one around Agile financial management, one around Agile governance as well, the Em Campbell-Pretty, a fellow SAFe fellow wrote The ART of Avoiding a Train Wreck, which I reviewed and contributed to, so again, I was contributing to that as well, and actually Em's updating that book because that book's five years old as well, so I'm reviewing that as well. And having reviewed a few books, contributed to a few books, being a part author, I suppose I wanted to write my own book. I think that was it as well. That was part of it. The other part was that I've delivered a number of Implementing SAFe courses since 2017, and for me, it's not just about delivering the education, for me doing that course is about, what are the tips and tricks, what's the stories, what's the narrative, how's the best way to do this, and all those things that I deliver in that course that goes way beyond the slideware what I wanted to do was capture all of that stuff that I deliver in those courses in a book. So I got approached by some publishers at Packt, saying, would you fancy being an author, write a SAFe book? And I thought, yes, I would. Then, we've got another author that's also interested in doing it as well. I'd never met Lindy before, we met and, yeah, we wrote the book. We started October 2022, and it got published June last year. It took a bit longer than we thought, but again, I learned in terms of task switching and refactoring, trying to write a chapter during a working day when you've got meetings and stuff like that and messages coming in, couldn't do that, because in the end I needed that concentrated effort to write. I can't do it with interruptions. So task switching was not great for me, so in the end I said, right, if I'm going to do it, everything has to go off, I just have to concentrate on this as well. So writing the chapter was really straightforward, it didn't take that long in reality. What I found was though, the cost of refactoring took a lot longer, as we talk about as well, you know, doing it right first time, doing the rework is a lot harder, and both Lindy and I wanted to make the book as best we probably can. So I reviewed her chapters, she reviewed mine, her reviews were great. Again, we have some other reviewers as well that are listed in the book as well, and all those reviewers really contributed to making the book better, but having to incorporate and refactor the chapter took me longer than writing the chapter in the first place. So it ended up taking a bit longer than we thought as well. So two valuable lessons. Task switching is real and refactoring takes longer than doing it right the first time as well. Ula Ojiaku So with this realisation, would you do anything differently in terms of how you approached writing the book? Darren Wilmshurst I don't think so. We were pretty good because again, we'd write a chapter and we'd get it reviewed, and the chapters are not particularly long, so that was pretty okay as well, and then what we found there, even though we had a high level design of the book and the chapters and the content, as we went through there as well, we realised there was some stuff missing as well, so again, there was no concluding chapter, there was no preface, we realised that we split the chapter into part one, part two, part three, part one was all about the team stuff, part two is all about the art level stuff, and part three was all about the portfolio stuff. Ula Ojiaku Well it sounds to me like you were following the agile principles, breaking it in small chunks, getting the review, and to be honest, having spoken with other authors that you started, writing in October 2022 and got published in June 2023, that was speedy, maybe not by your standards, that was fast. Typically it takes them like three, five years, and it's just them writing the book with everything else going on. Darren Wilmshurst Yeah, I don't think I could cope with that. I think it's great that the publisher had quite a forcing function, if it dragged on that long, I think you lose that motivation and I was on a roll and when you're on a roll, you want to get it done and dusted. Ula Ojiaku And I think the key thing, and what I noticed is, like you said, that the chapters are kind of not too long and easily digestible and it's easy to write, but it's about refining it in such a way that is to the point and, packed with lots of invaluable insights, that's an art and it does take time to refine from just having a mass of words to something that's simple. Darren Wilmshurst We didn't want to make it a reference guide, the framework is the reference. You go on the website, that's the reference guide. I suppose our target audience was SPCs that are newly qualified, if you're thinking about training this, here's some tips and tricks, here's some narrative, here's some stories you can use here's some support, and some of the things that we have made mistakes and learnt from as well. So it really is trying to be a practical guide to newly minted SPCs in terms of those that want to be able to train or implement a scaling framework. Ula Ojiaku It's definitely something I wish I had after I'd attended your training. So in the preface, you and Lindy were saying you can't implement SAFe to the letter you don't implement it like a rulebook, it's something you implement with your brain switched on and I was like, yes. Can you expand on that please? Darren Wilmshurst I get very frustrated. You see it on social media about SAFe is bureaucratic, it's a prescription, it's overly governed, stuff like that as well, and it's a framework, not prescription. For me, it's a wonderful toolbox, and every organisation we go into is different. They're not the same. They have different project and product, different risk profiles and budgets to plug different people, to create different things. So how can you have something that is an ABC guide, a recipe book, it can't be that as well. So I always say that if I'm putting a picture on a wall, I'll use a hammer and a nail. I won't use a chainsaw, but a chainsaw in the wrong hands can be very dangerous. So for me, it's a framework. So there are some fundaments in there, but you have to understand the context, you have to understand the appetite for change and how much disruption you want to bring, because if you bring too much disruption, you could end up traumatising the organisation. We don't want to do that as well. So, but, and then you think about, okay, what would be the most appropriate tools that I need to bring to change the organisation as well? And then I remember Dean saying this word that then, if you implement SAFe, or the appropriate tools out of the framework as well, and you're doing the same thing a year later, you're doing it wrong because you're not inspecting adapting about how you could then improve on that, and the way that the framework has improved since 1.0 back in 2011 to 6.0 last year as well, is through practitioners and organisations implementing SAFe, finding new ways, and experimenting with new ways and things as well, and bringing that back to the party and that being part of the evolution of the framework as well. And that includes myself, again, this is myself as a fellow, is part of it is bringing my thoughts in terms of what I've done with organisations back to the framework as well. So for me, it's a framework, not a prescription. In terms of scaling, there's some fundaments in there, there are always some fundaments as well, but you have to implement it with your brain switched on and every time I've implemented it, all the validation has always been different, with some underlying principles that support me in that ways of working. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for that, Daz. And there is a chapter in your book on enterprise strategy, which I think is interesting, but I have a question for you, which one would come first, enterprise strategy, or the adoption of skilled at being SAFe, which one comes first and why? Darren Wilmshurst Look, you've got to have a strategy. One of the things we say as SPCs and even probably SPCTs to some extent, we're not strategy experts. The framework is not there to talk about how you create strategy. There is some guidance on what we expect to see in a strategy but as we go into an organisation, we expect there to be some sort of strategy in place. If not, then we'd highly recommend that a strategy is created, and there are great organisations out there that can help organisations create that strategy as well, because we need to know what's the strategy of the organisation, and then from that, we can then think about how then we align what we're doing to deliver that strategy, and then when we talk about alignment and scaling the organisation, that is right from the top of the portfolio, through to maybe the teams of teams and the team as well. So that strategy and that works to a point where a person at the team level can understand how the work they're doing is connected all the way back up in delivering that strategy as well. So we need that strategy in place. Ula Ojiaku Definitely. I agree, and there are some SPCs who have that training and background in strategy, so it helps if that's there. Darren Wilmshurst Yeah. Yeah. Again, as an SPC, if you've got that, that's great. It's just that SAFe as a framework, that's not what we're looking to, but we expect it to be in place. Ula Ojiaku Exactly. So what are the key things then, in terms of the enterprise strategy and making sure that the teams are aligned with the strategy, what are some things when you are consulting with the leadership and saying, okay, giving them the guidelines of what the framework is saying, what are some key pointers for them to look out for and to be mindful in how they make sure the strategies align with the adoption and the rollout of the framework or the sustained implementation of SAFe? Darren Wilmshurst I hear a lot from execs that we have no idea what our team are doing, we have no visibility, we have no transparency what they're doing, so I think there's a couple of things that we need to talk about here as well. We need to make sure that the work that the teams are doing is visible in a way that is consumable by the executives as well. So we need to create the right dashboard. We go into organisations and the number of tool chains that exist in organisations that are not connected, there is no one version of the truth as well, is disconcerting. In a world where we're trying to reduce costs as well, the money spent on licensing stuff like that is phenomenal. So I think for me, having the right tool set that allows that work to be visible from the team all the way up to executive is really important, and so we need to make that work visible, but then also the leadership needs to come to the party as well. I think it's a two way thing, so we can make the work visible, but part of it is that one, we start doing our reviews of the work that we're doing, either a team level or at a team of teams level or at a large solution level, we need to be able to make sure that the leadership are involved in those reviews, and also in terms of prioritising and directing the direction of travel for the next cadence of work as well. I think that that's important. Ula Ojiaku Well said, Daz, I couldn't say it any better than you, you're the expert here. Dare I say that it's also important that the leadership would make the strategy visible to the organisation and in a way that can be consumed at the appropriate layers. So, this for this time frame, this is what we are trying to achieve, and that would help, so it's kind of almost like a virtuous cycle and complimentary, they are making their priorities visible and well in advance, whilst the team also work to make their work visible. Darren Wilmshurst You're right. It's bi-directional, isn't it, and we see it so often where a firm will go and create a strategy and then it's locked away in a drawer, no one ever sees it, and that strategy is a direction of travel. So then we think about, okay, what do we need to do to deliver that strategy, but you've got to make that visible and you need the support of the leaders, next leaders down to almost decompose that work into smaller chunks that that can be delivered, that then deliver that strategy as well. But you're right, we need to make sure that that strategy is communicated, again, in a way that inspires the people in the organisation. That's important as well, because you want to be, again, once you're inspired by the organisation and the work that you're doing, and you understand the work you're doing is connected to that strategy, I mean, how motivating is that? Ula Ojiaku Thanks for that, Daz. So in addition to your fantastic book, SAFe Coaches Handbook, which I would highly recommend to RTEs, coaches, business owners, what other books have you found yourself recently recommending to people? Darren Wilmshurst So the one that I'm really quite passionate about at the moment, we talked at the beginning about that agile and SAFe can create allergic reactions, become trigger words as well, and increasingly, I'm working in organisations that, and Agile is a small part of what we do, Agile ways of working, yeah, it's important, but it's a small part. When you think about, if we're working with automotive, lean manufacturing, something I call cyber physical DevOps as well, we have cyber physical machines building cyber physical products as well. How do we automate more of that as well? And then there's the whole thing around system thinking and all that stuff as well. So, two of my colleagues from the SAFe world, Suzette Johnson and Robin Yeman, have written a book called Industrial DevOps, and that for me is gold dust. I like the rebranding, it's about industrial DevOps, so it's how do we take all our learning from lean manufacturing, Agile ways of working, cyberphysical DevOps, and bring it together to help those big organisations be more effective. So if I was to recommend one book at the moment, how do we build better, complex, industrial systems faster, then Industrial DevOps, Dr. Suzette Johnson and Robin Yeman, for me, is the book. Ula Ojiaku Thank you for that. Any other book? Darren Wilmshurst There's a lot of people talking about OKRs, objectives and key results, and on CVs people saying I'm an OKR consultant. I think, okay, well, okay, well that's great, but it's almost like they're saying OKRs, if we go in and implement OKRs, it is the panacea, it will solve all your ills. Look, it's just, it's another tool in the toolbox as well. One I read last year was Radical Focus, really good, talks about yes, it's great creating OKRs, but there's so much more to that than just creating the OKRs. People think if I create the OKRs, then the world would change, no, it doesn't. Ula Ojiaku Oh, wow. Thank you for that, and I guess I agree, OKRs is a is a tool, and it's really a great tool for connecting strategy with the implementation, and back to what you said about the transparency of strategy and the work of the teams OKR is a good way of actually helping with measuring, okay, is the work we're doing moving the needle for the enterprise and vice versa. How do we as the leadership team clearly communicate in a digestible way what our priorities are, what the strategy is over a time frame. So, yeah. Another one on that note I would recommend would be, well it's in the pre-release, but Jeff Gothelf, actually he and his co-author Josh Seiden have gone to do what you've just done with the SAFe Coaches Handbook, which is, okay, yes, there's all this buzzword about OKRs, but actually, what does it mean in practical terms, Who Does What By How Much: A Practical Guide to Customer- Centric OKRs, it's highly recommended. Just like yourself, I respect Jeff and the sense it's practical and actionable. And any final words for the audience? Darren Wilmshurst Well I think it's tough at the moment, we're seeing a lot of the big organisations, big SIs, laying off a lot of people as well, we're seeing a lot of the consultancy work is discretionary spend, and I think we're seeing a lot of people in the market that have not been engaged, but what I would say is that all these things are cyclical. We've seen it before where, certainly with the pandemic, no one was for six months, things stopped, but then the thing came back a vengeance as well, but if we focus on trying to solve the organisational challenges, if we focus on making sure that we are helping them solve those challenges, and we can demonstrate the value of what we're doing, then we'll be in a good place. Ula Ojiaku Thank you for those wise words Daz. And on that note, where can the audience find you if they want to get in touch with you? Darren Wilmshurst Darren Wilmshurst on LinkedIn is the easiest way to find it, always reach out to me on there as well, message me on LinkedIn as well. Normally what I do is I ask people to convert to email because I'm a bit old fashioned, email is my inbox is my to do list as well, so yeah, Darren Wilmshurst on LinkedIn. I think I've got a profile picture up there, so if you see this picture here, hopefully my profile picture looks something like this, what you're seeing here as well. Ula Ojiaku And if you're listening to the audio version only, the picture on the podcast art cover for this episode, that's the Daz you should be looking for. Well, thank you so much Daz for your time. It's always a great honour and I always learn a lot whenever I speak with you. So thank you for making the time for today's conversation. My pleasure. That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless!

(S4) E039 Luke Hohmann on Creating Sustainably Profitable Software-Enabled Solutions

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 28, 2024 70:50

Bio Luke Hohmann is Chief Innovation Officer of Applied Frameworks. Applied Frameworks helps companies create more profitable software-enabled solutions. A serial entrepreneur, Luke founded, bootstrapped, and sold the SaaS B2B collaboration software company Conteneo to Scaled Agile, Inc. Conteneo's Weave platform is now part of SAFe Studio. A SAFe® Fellow, prolific author, and trailblazing innovator, Luke's contributions to the global agile community include contributing to SAFe, five books, Profit Streams™, Innovation Games®, Participatory Budgeting at enterprise scale, and a pattern language for market-driven roadmapping. Luke is also co-founder of Every Voice Engaged Foundation, where he partnered with The Kettering Foundation to create Common Ground for Action, the world's first scalable platform for deliberative decision-making. Luke is a former National Junior Pairs Figure Skating Champion and has an M.S.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan. Luke loves his wife and four kids, his wife's cooking, and long runs in the California sunshine and Santa Cruz mountains. Interview Highlights 01:30 Organisational Behaviour & Cognitive Psychology 06:10 Serendipity 09:30 Entrepreneurship 16:15 Applied Frameworks 20:00 Sustainability 20:45 Software Profit Streams 23:00 Business Model Canvas 24:00 Value Proposition Canvas 24:45 Setting the Price 28:45 Customer Benefit Analysis 34:00 Participatory Budgeting 36:00 Value Stream Funding 37:30 The Color of Money 42:00 Private v Public Sector 49:00 ROI Analysis 51:00 Innovation Accounting Connecting LinkedIn: Luke Hohmann on LinkedIn Company Website: Applied Frameworks Books & Resources · Software Profit Streams(TM): A Guide to Designing a Sustainably Profitable Business: Jason Tanner, Luke Hohmann, Federico González · Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (The Strategyzer series): Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur · Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want (The Strategyzer Series): Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, Alan Smith, Trish Papadakos · Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play: Luke Hohmann · The ‘Color of Money' Problem: Additional Guidance on Participatory Budgeting - Scaled Agile Framework · The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, Eric Ries · Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change 2, Kent Beck, Cynthia Andres · The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering: Brooks, Frederick Phillips · Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud · Ponyboy: A Novel, Eliot Duncan · Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel, Bonnie Garmus, Miranda Raison, Bonnie Garmus, Pandora Sykes · What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing, Oprah Winfrey, Bruce D. Perry · Training | Applied Frameworks Episode Transcript Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. Ula Ojiaku So I have with me Luke Hohmann, who is a four time author, three time founder, serial entrepreneur if I say, a SAFe fellow, so that's a Skilled Agile Framework fellow, keynote speaker and an internationally recognised expert in Agile software development. He is also a proud husband and a father of four. So, Luke, I am very honoured to have you on the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. Thank you for making the time. Luke Hohmann Thank you so much for having me, I'm very happy to be here, and hi everyone who's listening. Ula Ojiaku Yes, I'm sure they're waving back at you as well. I always start my conversations with my guests to find out about them as individuals, you know, so who is Luke? You have a BSc in Computer Science and an MSc in Computer Science and Engineering, but you also studied Cognitive Psychology and Organisational Behaviour in addition to Data Structures and Artificial Intelligence. AI is now making waves and is kind of at the forefront, which is interesting, you had the foresight to also look into these. So my question is, what took you down this path? Luke Hohmann Sure. I had a humble beginning in the world of technology. I worked for a large company, Electronic Data Systems, and it was founded in the mid 60s by a gentleman named Ross Perot, and it became a very, very large company. So my first job at Electronic Data Systems was working in a data centre, and we know what data centres are, but back then, data centres were different because they were predominantly mainframe-based data centres, and I would crawl underneath the floor, cabling the computers and cabling networking equipment. Now, when we think networking, we're really thinking one of two kinds of networking. We think of wireless networking or we think of some form of internet networking, but back in those days, there were varieties of network protocols, literally the standards that we use now weren't invented yet. So it was mainframe networking protocols and dial ups and other forms of networking protocols. From there, I worked my way from beneath the ground up. I had some great managers who saw someone who was worthy of opportunity and they gave me opportunity and it was great. And then eventually I started working in electronic data systems and there was, the first wave of AI came in the mid 80s and that's when we were doing things like building expert systems, and I managed to create with a colleague of mine, who's emerged as my best friend, a very successful implementation of an expert system, an AI-based expert system at EDS, and that motivated me to finish off my college degree, I didn't have my college degree at the time. So EDS supported me in going to the University of Michigan, where as you said, I picked up my Bachelor's and Master's degree, and my advisor at the time was Elliot Soloway, and he was doing research in how programmers program, what are the knowledge structures, what are the ways in which we think when we're programming, and I picked up that research and built programming environments, along with educational material, trying to understand how programmers program and trying to build educational material to teach programming more effectively. That's important because it ignited a lifelong passion for developing education materials, etc. Now the cognitive psychology part was handled through that vein of work, the organisational behaviour work came as I was a student at Michigan. As many of us are when we're in college, we don't make a lot of money, or at university we're not wealthy and I needed a job and so the School of Organisational Behaviour had published some job postings and they needed programmers to program software for their organisational behaviour research, and I answered those ads and I became friends and did the research for many ground-breaking aspects of organisational behaviour and I programmed, and in the process of programming for the professors who were in the School of Organisational Behaviour they would teach me about organisational behaviour and I learned many things that at the time were not entirely clear to me, but then when I graduated from university and I became a manager and I also became more involved in the Agile movement, I had a very deep foundation that has served me very well in terms of what do we mean when we say culture, or what do we mean when we talk about organisational structures, both in the small and in the large, how do we organise effectively, when should we scale, when should we not scale, etc. So that's a bit about my history that I think in terms of the early days helped inform who I am today. Ula Ojiaku Wow, who would have thought, it just reminds me of the word serendipity, you know, I guess a happy coincidence, quote unquote, and would there be examples of where the cognitive psychology part of it also helped you work-wise? Luke Hohmann Yeah, a way to think about cognitive psychology and the branch that, I mean there's, psychology is a huge branch of study, right? So cognitive psychology tends to relate to how do we solve problems, and it tends to focus on problem solving where n = 1 and what I mean by n is the number of participants, and where n is just me as an individual, how do I solve the problems that I'm facing? How do I engage in de-compositional activities or refinement or sense making? Organisational behaviour deals with n > 1. So it can deal with a team of, a para-bond, two people solving problems. It can deal with a small team, and we know through many, many, many decades of research that optimal team structures are eight people or less. I mean, we've known this for, when I say decades I mean millennia. When you look at military structure and military strategy, we know that people need to be organised into much smaller groups to be effective in problem solving and to move quickly. And then in any organisational structure, there's some notion of a team of teams or team engagement. So cognitive psychology, I think, helps leaders understand individuals and their place within the team. And now we talk about, you know, in the Agile community, we talk about things like, I want T-shaped people, I want people with common skills and their area of expertise and by organising enough of the T's, I can create a whole and complete team. I often say I don't want my database designer designing my user interface and I don't want my user interface designer optimising my back end database queries, they're different skills. They're very educated people, they're very sophisticated, but there's also the natural feeling that you and I have about how do I gain a sense of self, how do I gain a sense of accomplishment, a sense of mastery? Part of gaining a sense of mastery is understanding who you are as a person, what you're good at. In Japanese, they would call that Ikigai, right, what are the intersections of, you know, what do I love, what am I good at, what can I make a living at and what do people need, right? All of these intersections occur on an individual level, and then by understanding that we can create more effective teams. Ula Ojiaku Thank you. I've really learned something key here, the relationship between cognitive psychology and organisational behaviour, so thanks for breaking it down. Now, can we go quickly to your entrepreneurship? So there must be three times you started three times a company and you've been successful in that area. What exactly drives you when it comes to establishing businesses and then knowing when to move on? Luke Hohmann Sure. I think it's a combination of reflecting on my childhood and then looking at how that informs someone when they're older, and then opportunities, like you said, serendipity, I think that's a really powerful word that you introduced and it's a really powerful concept because sometimes the serendipity is associated with just allowing yourself to pursue something that presents itself. But when I was young, my father died and my mum had to raise six kids on her own, so my dad died when I was four, my mum raised six kids on her own. We were not a wealthy family, and she was a school teacher and one of the things that happened was, even though she was a very skilled school teacher, there were budget cuts and it was a unionised structure, and even though she was ranked very highly, she lost her job because she was low on the hiring totem pole in terms of how the union worked. It was very hard and of course, it's always hard to make budget cuts and firing but I remember when I was very young making one of those choices saying, I want to work in a field where we are more oriented towards someone's performance and not oriented on when they were hired, or the colour of their skin, or their gender or other things that to me didn't make sense that people were making decisions against. And while it's not a perfect field for sure, and we've got lots of improvement, engineering in general, and of course software engineering and software development spoke to me because I could meet people who were diverse or more diverse than in other fields and I thought that was really good. In terms of being an entrepreneur, that happened serendipitously. I was at the time, before I became an entrepreneur in my last job, was working for an Israeli security firm, and years and years ago, I used to do software anti-piracy and software security through physical dongles. This was made by a company called Aladdin Knowledge Systems in Israel, and I was the head of Engineering and Product Management for the dongle group and then I moved into a role of Business Development for the company. I had a couple of great bosses, but I also learned how to do international management because I had development teams in Israel, I had development teams in Munich, I had development teams in Portland, Oregon, and in the Bay Area, and this was in the 2000s. This is kind of pre-Agile, pre-Salt Lake City, pre-Agile Manifesto, but we were figuring things out and blending and working together. I thought things were going pretty well and I enjoyed working for the Israelis and what we were doing, but then we had the first Gulf War and my wife and I felt that maybe traveling as I was, we weren't sure what was going to happen in the war, I should choose something different. Unfortunately, by that time, we had been through the dot-bomb crisis in Silicon Valley. So it's about 2002 at the time that this was going on, and there really weren't jobs, it was a very weird time in Silicon Valley. So in late 2002, I sent an email to a bunch of friends and I said, hey, I'm going to be a consultant, who wants to hire me, that was my marketing plan, not very clever, and someone called me and said, hey, I've got a problem and this is the kind of thing that you can fix, come consult with us. And I said, great. So I did that, and that started the cleverly named Luke Hohmann Consulting, but then one thing led to another and consulting led to opportunities and growth and I've never looked back. So I think that there is a myth about people who start companies where sometimes you have a plan and you go execute your plan. Sometimes you find the problem and you're solving a problem. Sometimes the problem is your own problem, as in my case I had two small kids and a mortgage and I needed to provide for my family, and so the best way to do that at the time was to become a consultant. Since then I have engaged in building companies, sometimes some with more planning, some with more business tools and of course as you grow as an entrepreneur you learn skills that they didn't teach you in school, like marketing and pricing and business planning etc. And so that's kind of how I got started, and now I have kind of come full circle. The last company, the second last company I started was Conteneo and we ended up selling that to Scaled Agile, and that's how I joined the Scaled Agile team and that was lovely, moving from a position of being a CEO and being responsible for certain things, to being able to be part of a team again, joining the framework team, working with Dean Leffingwell and other members of the framework team to evolve the SAFe framework, that was really lovely. And then of course you get this entrepreneurial itch and you want to do something else, and so I think it comes and goes and you kind of allow yourself those opportunities. Ula Ojiaku Wow, yours is an inspiring story. And so what are you now, so you've talked about your first two Startups which you sold, what are you doing now? Luke Hohmann Yeah, so where I'm at right now is I am the Chief Innovation Officer for a company, Applied Frameworks. Applied Frameworks is a boutique consulting firm that's in a transition to a product company. So if this arm represents our product revenue and this arm represents our services revenue, we're expanding our product and eventually we'll become a product company. And so then the question is, well, what is the product that we're working on? Well, if you look at the Agile community, we've spent a lot of time creating and delivering value, and that's really great. We have had, if you look at the Agile community, we've had amazing support from our business counterparts. They've shovelled literally millions and millions of dollars into Agile training and Agile tooling and Agile transformations, and we've seen a lot of benefit from the Agile community. And when I say Agile, I don't mean SAFe or Scrum or some particular flavour of Agile, I just mean Agile in general. There's been hundreds of millions of dollars to billions of dollars shoved into Agile and we've created a lot of value for that investment. We've got fewer bugs in our software because we've got so many teams doing XP driven practices like Test Driven Development, we've got faster response times because we've learned that we can create smaller releases and we've created infrastructure that lets us do deployments automatically, even if you're doing embedded systems, we figured out how to do over the air updates, we've figured out how to create infrastructure where the cars we're driving are now getting software updates. So we've created for our business leaders lots of value, but there's a problem in that value. Our business leaders now need us to create a profit, and creating value and creating a profit are two different things. And so in the pursuit of value, we have allowed our Agile community to avoid and or atrophy on skills that are vital to product management, and I'm a classically trained Product Manager, so I've done market segmentation and market valuation and market sizing, I've done pricing, I've done licensing, I've done acquisitions, I've done compliance. But when you look at the traditional definition of a Product Owner, it's a very small subset of that, especially in certain Agile methods where Product Owners are team centric, they're internal centric. That's okay, I'm not criticising that structure, but what's happened is we've got people who no longer know how to price, how to package, how to license products, and we're seeing companies fail, investor money wasted, too much time trying to figure things out when if we had simply approached the problem with an analysis of not just what am I providing to you in terms of value, but what is that value worth, and how do I structure an exchange where I give you value and you give me money? And that's how businesses survive, and I think what's really interesting about this in terms of Agile is Agile is very intimately tied to sustainability. One of the drivers of the Agile Movement was way back in the 2000s, we were having very unsustainable practices. People would be working 60, 80, death march weeks of grinding out programmers and grinding out people, and part of the Agile Movement was saying, wait a minute, this isn't sustainable, and even the notion of what is a sustainable pace is really vital, but a company cannot sustain itself without a profit, and if we don't actually evolve the Agile community from value streams into profit streams, we can't help our businesses survive. I sometimes ask developers, I say, raise your hand if you're really embracing the idea that your job is to make more money for your company than they pay you, that's called a profit, and if that's not happening, your company's going to fail. Ula Ojiaku They'll be out of a job. Luke Hohmann You'll be out of a job. So if you want to be self-interested about your future, help your company be successful, help them make a profit, and so where I'm at right now is Applied Frameworks has, with my co-author, Jason Tanner, we have published a bold and breakthrough new book called Software Profit Streams, and it's a book that describes how to do pricing and packaging for software enabled solutions. When we say software enabled solution, we mean a solution that has software in it somehow, could be embedded software in your microwave oven, it could be a hosted solution, it could be an API for a payment processor, it could be the software in your car that I talked about earlier. So software enabled solutions are the foundation, the fabric of our modern lives. As Mark Andreessen says software is eating the world, software is going to be in everything, and we need to know how to take the value that we are creating as engineers, as developers, and convert that into pricing and licensing choices that create sustainable profits. Ula Ojiaku Wow. It's as if you read my mind because I was going to ask you about your book, Software Profit Streams, A Guide to Designing a Sustainably Profitable Business. I also noticed that, you know, there is the Profit Stream Canvas that you and your co-author created. So let's assume I am a Product Manager and I've used this, let's assume I went down the path of using the Business Model Canvas and there is the Customer Value Proposition. So how do they complement? Luke Hohmann How do they all work together? I'm glad you asked that, I think that's a very insightful question and the reason it's so helpful is because, well partly because I'm also friends with Alex Osterwalder, I think he's a dear, he's a wonderful human, he's a dear friend. So let's look at the different elements of the different canvases, if you will, and why we think that this is needed. The Business Model Canvas is kind of how am I structuring my business itself, like what are my partners, my suppliers, my relationships, my channel strategy, my brand strategy with respect to my customer segments, and it includes elements of cost, which we're pretty good at. We're pretty good at knowing our costs and elements of revenue, but the key assumption of revenue, of course, is the selling price and the number of units sold. So, but if you look at the book, Business Model Generation, where the Business Model Canvas comes from, it doesn't actually talk about how to set the price. Is the video game going to be $49? Is it going to be $59, or £49 or £59? Well, there's a lot of thought that goes into that. Then we have the Value Proposition Canvas, which highlights what are the pains the customer is facing? What are the gains that the customer is facing? What are the jobs to be done of the customer? How does my solution relate to the jobs? How does it help solve the pain the customer is feeling? How does it create gain for the customer? But if you read those books, and both of those books are on my shelf because they're fantastic books, it doesn't talk about pricing. So let's say I create a gain for you. Well, how much can I charge you for the gain that I've created? How do I structure that relationship? And how do I know, going back to my Business Model Canvas, that I've got the right market segment, I've got the right investment strategy, I might need to make an investment in the first one or two releases of my software or my product before I start to make a per unit profit because I'm evolving, it's called the J curve and the J curve is how much money am I investing before I well, I have to be able to forecast that, I have to be able to model that, but the key input to that is what is the price, what is the mechanism of packaging that you're using, is it, for example, is it per user in a SAS environment or is it per company in a SAS environment? Is it a meter? Is it like an API transaction using Stripe or a payment processor, Adyen or Stripe or Paypal or any of the others that are out there? Or is it an API call where I'm charging a fraction of a penny for any API call? All of those elements have to be put into an economic model and a forecast has to be created. Now, what's missing about this is that the Business Model Canvas and the Value Proposition Canvas don't give you the insight on how to set the price, they just say there is a price and we're going to use it in our equations. So what we've done is we've said, look, setting the price is itself a complex system, and what I mean by a complex system is that, let's say that I wanted to do an annual license for a new SAS offering, but I offer that in Europe and now my solution is influenced or governed by GDPR compliance, where I have data retention and data privacy laws. So my technical architecture that has to enforce the license, also has to comply with something in terms of the market in which I'm selling. This complex system needs to be organised, and so what canvases do is in all of these cases, they let us take a complex system and put some structure behind the choices that we're making in that complex system so that we can make better choices in terms of system design. I know how I want this to work, I know how I want this to be structured, and therefore I can make system choices so the system is working in a way that benefits the stakeholders. Not just me, right, I'm not the only stakeholder, my customers are in this system, my suppliers are in this system, society itself might be in the system, depending on the system I'm building or the solution I'm building. So the canvases enable us to make system level choices that are hopefully more effective in achieving our goals. And like I said, the Business Model Canvas, the Value Proposition Canvas are fantastic, highly recommended, but they don't cover pricing. So we needed something to cover the actual pricing and packaging and licensing. Ula Ojiaku Well, that's awesome. So it's really more about going, taking a deeper dive into thoughtfully and structurally, if I may use that word, assessing the pricing. Luke Hohmann Yeah, absolutely. Ula Ojiaku Would you say that in doing this there would be some elements of, you know, testing and getting feedback from actual customers to know what price point makes sense? Luke Hohmann Absolutely. There's a number of ways in which customer engagement or customer testing is involved. The very first step that we advocate is a Customer Benefit Analysis, which is what are the actual benefits you're creating and how are your customers experiencing those benefits. Those experiences are both tangible and intangible and that's another one of the challenges that we face in the Agile community. In general, the Agile community spends a little bit more time on tangible or functional value than intangible value. So we, in terms of if I were to look at it in terms of a computer, we used to say speeds and feeds. How fast is the processor? How fast is the network? How much storage is on my disk space? Those are all functional elements. Over time as our computers have become plenty fast or plenty storage wise for most of our personal computing needs, we see elements of design come into play, elements of usability, elements of brand, and we see this in other areas. Cars have improved in quality so much that many of us, the durability of the car is no longer a significant attribute because all cars are pretty durable, they're pretty good, they're pretty well made. So now we look at brand, we look at style, we look at aesthetics, we look at even paying more for a car that aligns with our values in terms of the environment. I want to get an EV, why, because I want to be more environmentally conscious. That's a value driven, that's an intangible factor. And so our first step starts with Customer Benefit Analysis looking at both functional or tangible value and intangible value, and you can't do that, as you can imagine, you can't do that without having customer interaction and awareness with your stakeholders and your customers, and that also feeds throughout the whole pricing process. Eventually, you're going to put your product in a market, and that's a form itself of market research. Did customers buy, and if they didn't buy, why did they not buy? Is it poorly packaged or is it poorly priced? These are all elements that involve customers throughout the process. Ula Ojiaku If I may, I know we've been on the topic of your latest book Software Profit Streams. I'm just wondering, because I can't help but try to connect the dots and I'm wondering if there might be a connection to one of your books, Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play, something like buy a feature in your book, that kind of came to mind, could there be a way of using that as part of the engagement with customers in setting a pricing strategy? I may be wrong, I'm just asking a question. Luke Hohmann I think you're making a great connection. There's two forms of relationship that Innovation Games and the Innovation Games book have with Software Profit Streams. One is, as you correctly noted, just the basics of market research, where do key people have pains or gains and what it might be worth. That work is also included in Alex Osterwalder's books, Value Proposition Design for example, when I've been doing Value Proposition Design and I'm trying to figure out the customer pains, you can use the Innovation Games Speed Boat. And when I want to figure out the gains, I can use the Innovation Game Product Box. Similarly, when I'm figuring out pricing and licensing, a way, and it's a very astute idea, a way to understand price points of individual features is to do certain kinds of market research. One form of market research you can do is Buy-a-Feature, which gives a gauge of what people are willing or might be willing to pay for a feature. It can be a little tricky because the normal construction of Buy-a-Feature is based on cost. However, your insight is correct, you can extend Buy-a-Feature such that you're testing value as opposed to cost, and seeing what, if you take a feature that costs X, but inflate that cost by Y and a Buy-a-Feature game, if people still buy it, it's a strong signal strength that first they want it, and second it may be a feature that you can, when delivered, would motivate you to raise the price of your offering and create a better profit for your company. Ula Ojiaku Okay, well, thank you. I wasn't sure if I was on the right lines. Luke Hohmann It's a great connection. Ula Ojiaku Thanks again. I mean, it's not original. I'm just piggybacking on your ideas. So with respect to, if we, if you don't mind, let's shift gears a bit because I know that, or I'm aware that whilst you were with Scaled Agile Incorporated, you know, you played a key part in developing some of their courses, like the Product POPM, and I think the Portfolio Management, and there was the concept about Participatory Budgeting. Can we talk about that, please? Luke Hohmann I'd love to talk about that, I mean it's a huge passion of mine, absolutely. So in February of 2018, I started working with the framework team and in December of 2018, we talked about the possibility of what an acquisition might look like and the benefits it would create, which would be many. That closed in May of 2019, and in that timeframe, we were working on SAFe 5.0 and so there were a couple of areas in which I was able to make some contributions. One was in Agile product delivery competency, the other was in lean portfolio management. I had a significant hand in restructuring or adding the POPM, APM, and LPM courses, adding things like solutions by horizons to SAFe, taking the existing content on guardrails, expanding it a little bit, and of course, adding Participatory Budgeting, which is just a huge passion of mine. I've done Participatory Budgeting now for 20 years, I've helped organisations make more than five billions of dollars of investment spending choices at all levels of companies, myself and my colleagues at Applied Frameworks, and it just is a better way to make a shared decision. If you think about one of the examples they use about Participatory Budgeting, is my preferred form of fitness is I'm a runner and so, and my wife is also a fit person. So if she goes and buys a new pair of shoes or trainers and I go and buy a new pair of trainers, we don't care, because it's a small purchase. It's frequently made and it's within the pattern of our normal behaviour. However, if I were to go out and buy a new car without involving her, that feels different, right, it's a significant purchase, it requires budgeting and care, and is this car going to meet our needs? Our kids are older than your kids, so we have different needs and different requirements, and so I would be losing trust in my pair bond with my wife if I made a substantial purchase without her involvement. Well, corporations work the same way, because we're still people. So if I'm funding a value stream, I'm funding the consistent and reliable flow of valuable items, that's what value stream funding is supposed to do. However, if there is a significant investment to be made, even if the value stream can afford it, it should be introduced to the portfolio for no other reason than the social structure of healthy organisations says that we do better when we're talking about these things, that we don't go off on our own and make significant decisions without the input of others. That lowers transparency, that lowers trust. So I am a huge advocate of Participatory Budgeting, I'm very happy that it's included in SAFe as a recommended practice, both for market research and Buy-a-Feature in APM, but also more significantly, if you will, at the portfolio level for making investment decisions. And I'm really excited to share that we've just published an article a few weeks ago about Participatory Budgeting and what's called The Color of Money, and The Color of Money is sometimes when you have constraints on how you can spend money, and an example of a constraint is let's say that a government raised taxes to improve transportation infrastructure. Well, the money that they took in is constrained in a certain way. You can't spend it, for example, on education, and so we have to show how Participatory Budgeting can be adapted to have relationships between items like this item requires this item as a precedent or The Color of Money, constraints of funding items, but I'm a big believer, we just published that article and you can get that at the Scaled Agile website, I'm a big believer in the social power of making these financial decisions and the benefits that accrue to people and organisations when they collaborate in this manner. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for going into that, Luke. So, would there be, in your experience, any type of organisation that's participatory? It's not a leading question, it's just genuine, there are typically outliers and I'm wondering in your experience, and in your opinion, if there would be organisations that it might not work for? Luke Hohmann Surprisingly, no, but I want to add a few qualifications to the effective design of a Participatory Budgeting session. When people hear Participatory Budgeting, there's different ways that you would apply Participatory Budgeting in the public and private sector. So I've done citywide Participatory Budgeting in cities and if you're a citizen of a city and you meet the qualifications for voting within that jurisdiction, in the United States, it's typically that you're 18 years old, in some places you have to be a little older, in some places you might have other qualifications, but if you're qualified to participate as a citizen in democratic processes, then you should be able to participate in Participatory Budgeting sessions that are associated with things like how do we spend taxes or how do we make certain investments. In corporations it's not quite the same way. Just because you work at a company doesn't mean you should be included in portfolio management decisions that affect the entire company. You may not have the background, you may not have the training, you may be what my friends sometimes call a fresher. So I do a lot of work overseas, so freshers, they just may not have the experience to participate. So one thing that we look at in Participatory Budgeting and SAFe is who should be involved in the sessions, and that doesn't mean that every single employee should always be included, because their background, I mean, they may be a technical topic and maybe they don't have the right technical background. So we work a little bit harder in corporations to make sure the right people are there. Now, of course, if we're going to make a mistake, we tend to make the mistake of including more people than excluding, partly because in SAFe Participatory Budgeting, it's a group of people who are making a decision, not a one person, one vote, and that's really profoundly important because in a corporation, just like in a para-bond, your opinion matters to me, I want to know what you're thinking. If I'm looking in, I'll use SAFe terminology, if I'm looking at three epics that could advance our portfolio, and I'm a little unsure about two of those epics, like one of those epics, I'm like, yeah, this is a really good thing, I know a little bit about it, this matters, I'm going to fund this, but the other two I'm not so sure about, well, there's no way I can learn through reading alone what the opinions of other people are, because, again, there's these intangible factors. There's these elements that may not be included in an ROI analysis, it's kind of hard to talk about brand and an ROI analysis - we can, but it's hard, so I want to listen to how other people are talking about things, and through that, I can go, yeah, I can see the value, I didn't see it before, I'm going to join you in funding this. So that's among the ways in which Participatory Budgeting is a little different within the private sector and the public sector and within a company. The only other element that I would add is that Participatory Budgeting gives people the permission to stop funding items that are no longer likely to meet the investment or objectives of the company, or to change minds, and so one of the, again, this is a bit of an overhang in the Agile community, Agile teams are optimised for doing things that are small, things that can fit within a two or three week Sprint. That's great, no criticism there, but our customers and our stakeholders want big things that move the market needle, and the big things that move the market needle don't get done in two or three weeks, in general, and they rarely, like they require multiple teams working multiple weeks to create a really profoundly new important thing. And so what happens though, is that we need to make in a sense funding commitments for these big things, but we also have to have a way to change our mind, and so traditional funding processes, they let us make this big commitment, but they're not good at letting us change our mind, meaning they're not Agile. Participatory Budgeting gives us the best of both worlds. I can sit at the table with you and with our colleagues, we can commit to funding something that's big, but six months later, which is the recommended cadence from SAFe, I can come back to that table and reassess and we can all look at each other, because you know those moments, right, you've had that experience in visiting, because you're like looking around the table and you're like, yeah, this isn't working. And then in traditional funding, we keep funding what's not working because there's no built-in mechanism to easily change it, but in SAFe Participatory Budgeting, you and I can sit at the table and we can look at each other with our colleagues and say, yeah, you know, that initiative just, it's not working, well, let's change our mind, okay, what is the new thing that we can fund? What is the new epic? And that permission is so powerful within a corporation. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for sharing that, and whilst you were speaking, because again, me trying to connect the dots and thinking, for an organisation that has adopted SAFe or it's trying to scale Agility, because like you mentioned, Agile teams are optimised to iteratively develop or deliver, you know, small chunks over time, usually two to three weeks, but, like you said, there is a longer time horizon spanning months, even years into the future, sometimes for those worthwhile, meaty things to be delivered that moves the strategic needle if I may use that buzzword. So, let's say we at that lean portfolio level, we're looking at epics, right, and Participatory Budgeting, we are looking at initiatives on an epic to epic basis per se, where would the Lean Startup Cycle come in here? So is it that Participatory Budgeting could be a mechanism that is used for assessing, okay, this is the MVP features that have been developed and all that, the leading indicators we've gotten, that's presented to the group, and on that basis, we make that pivot or persevere or stop decision, would that fit in? Luke Hohmann Yeah, so let's, I mean, you're close, but let me make a few turns and then it'll click better. First, let's acknowledge that the SAFe approach to the Lean Startup Cycle is not the Eric Ries approach, there are some differences, but let's separate how I fund something from how I evaluate something. So if I'm going to engage in the SAFe Lean Startup Cycle, part of that engagement is to fund an MVP, which is going to prove or disprove a given hypothesis. So that's an expenditure of money. Now there's, if you think about the expenditure of money, there's minimally two steps in this process - there's spending enough money to conduct the experiments, and if those experiments are true, making another commitment to spend money again, that I want to spend it. The reason this is important is, let's say I had three experiments running in parallel and I'm going to use easy round numbers for a large corporation. Let's say I want to run three experiments in parallel, and each experiment costs me a million pounds. Okay. So now let's say that the commercialisation of each of those is an additional amount of money. So the portfolio team sits around the table and says, we have the money, we're going to fund all three. Okay, great. Well, it's an unlikely circumstance, but let's say all three are successful. Well, this is like a venture capitalist, and I have a talk that I give that relates the funding cycle of a venture capitalist to the funding cycle of an LPM team. While it's unlikely, you could have all three become successful, and this is what I call an oversubscribed portfolio. I've got three great initiatives, but I can still only fund one or two of them, I still have to make the choice. Now, of course, I'm going to look at my economics and let's say out of the three initiatives that were successfully proven through their hypothesis, let's say one of them is just clearly not as economically attractive, for whatever reason. Okay, we get rid of that one, now, I've got two, and if I can only fund one of them, and the ROI, the hard ROI is roughly the same, that's when Participatory Budgeting really shines, because we can have those leaders come back into the room, and they can say, which choice do we want to make now? So the evaluative aspect of the MVP is the leading indicators and the results of the proving or disproving of the hypotheses. We separate that from the funding choices, which is where Participatory Budgeting and LPM kick in. Ula Ojiaku Okay. So you've separated the proving or disproving the hypothesis of the feature, some of the features that will probably make up an epic. And you're saying the funding, the decision to fund the epic in the first place is a different conversation. And you've likened it to Venture Capital funding rounds. Where do they connect? Because if they're separate, what's the connecting thread between the two? Luke Hohmann The connected thread is the portfolio process, right? The actual process is the mechanism where we're connecting these things. Ula Ojiaku OK, no, thanks for the portfolio process. But there is something you mentioned, ROI - Return On Investment. And sometimes when you're developing new products, you don't know, you have assumptions. And any ROI, sorry to put it this way, but you're really plucking figures from the air, you know, you're modelling, but there is no certainty because you could hit the mark or you could go way off the mark. So where does that innovation accounting coming into place, especially if it's a product that's yet to make contact with, you know, real life users, the customers. Luke Hohmann Well, let's go back to something you said earlier, and what you talked earlier about was the relationship that you have in market researching customer interaction. In making a forecast, let's go ahead and look at the notion of building a new product within a company, and this is again where the Agile community sometimes doesn't want to look at numbers or quote, unquote get dirty, but we have to, because if I'm going to look at building a new idea, or taking a new idea into a product, I have to have a forecast of its viability. Is it economically viable? Is it a good choice? So innovation accounting is a way to look at certain data, but before, I'm going to steal a page, a quote, from one of my friends, Jeff Patton. The most expensive way to figure this out is to actually build the product. So what can I do that's less expensive than building the product itself? I can still do market research, but maybe I wouldn't do an innovation game, maybe I'd do a formal survey and I use a price point testing mechanism like Van Westendorp Price Point Analysis, which is a series of questions that you ask to triangulate on acceptable price ranges. I can do competitive benchmarking for similar products and services. What are people offering right now in the market? Now that again, if the product is completely novel, doing competitive benchmarking can be really hard. Right now, there's so many people doing streaming that we look at the competitive market, but when Netflix first offered streaming and it was the first one, their best approach was what we call reference pricing, which is, I have a reference price for how much I pay for my DVDs that I'm getting in the mail, I'm going to base my streaming service kind of on the reference pricing of entertainment, although that's not entirely clear that that was the best way to go, because you could also base the reference price on what you're paying for a movie ticket and how many, but then you look at consumption, right, because movie tickets are expensive, so I only go to a movie maybe once every other month, whereas streaming is cheap and so I can change my demand curve by lowering my price. But this is why it's such a hard science is because we have this notion of these swirling factors. Getting specifically back to your question about the price point, I do have to do some market research before I go into the market to get some forecasting and some confidence, and research gives me more confidence, and of course, once I'm in the market, I'll know how effective my research matched the market reality. Maybe my research was misleading, and of course, there's some skill in designing research, as you know, to get answers that have high quality signal strength. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for clarifying. That makes perfect sense to me. Luke Hohmann It's kind of like a forecast saying, like there's a group of Agile people who will say, like, you shouldn't make forecasts. Well, I don't understand that because that's like saying, and people will say, well, I can't predict the future. Well, okay, I can't predict when I'm going to retire, but I'm planning to retire. I don't know the date of my exact retirement, but my wife and I are planning our retirement, and we're saving, we're making certain investment choices for our future, because we expect to have a future together. Now our kids are older than yours. My kids are now in university, and so we're closer to retirement. So what I dislike about the Agile community is people will sometimes say, well, I don't know the certainty of the event, therefore, I can't plan for it. But that's really daft, because there are many places in like, you may not for the listeners, her daughter is a little younger than my kids, but they will be going to university one day, and depending on where they go, that's a financial choice. So you could say, well, I don't know when she's going to university, and I can't predict what university she's going to go to, therefore I'm not going to save any money. Really? That doesn't make no sense. So I really get very upset when you have people in the agile community will say things like road mapping or forecasting is not Agile. It's entirely Agile. How you treat it is Agile or not Agile. Like when my child comes up to me and says, hey, you know about that going to university thing, I was thinking of taking a gap year. Okay, wait a minute, that's a change. That doesn't mean no, it means you're laughing, right? But that's a change. And so we respond to change, but we still have a plan. Ula Ojiaku It makes sense. So the reason, and I completely resonate with everything you said, the reason I raised that ROI and it not being known is that in some situations, people might be tempted to use it to game the budget allocation decision making process. That's why I said you would pluck the ROI. Luke Hohmann Okay, let's talk about that. We actually address this in our recent paper, but I'll give you my personal experience. You are vastly more likely to get bad behaviour on ROI analysis when you do not do Participatory Budgeting, because there's no social construct to prevent bad behaviour. If I'm sitting down at a table and that's virtual or physical, it doesn't matter, but let's take a perfect optimum size for a Participatory Budgeting group. Six people, let's say I'm a Director or a Senior Director in a company, and I'm sitting at a table and there's another Senior Director who's a peer, maybe there's a VP, maybe there's a person from engineering, maybe there's a person from sales and we've got this mix of people and I'm sitting at that table. I am not incented to come in with an inflated ROI because those people are really intelligent and given enough time, they're not going to support my initiative because I'm fibbing, I'm lying. And I have a phrase for this, it's when ROI becomes RO-lie that it's dangerous. And so when I'm sitting at that table, what we find consistently, and one of the clients that we did a fair amount of Participatory Budgeting for years ago with Cisco, what we found was the leaders at Cisco were creating tighter, more believable, and more defensible economic projections, precisely because they knew that they were going to be sitting with their peers, and it didn't matter. It can go both ways. Sometimes people will overestimate the ROI or they underestimate the cost. Same outcome, right? I'm going to overestimate the benefit, and people would be like, yeah, I don't think you can build that product with three teams. You're going to need five or six teams and people go, oh, I can get it done with, you know, 20 people. Yeah, I don't think so, because two years ago, we built this product. It's very similar, and, you know, we thought we could get it done with 20 people and we couldn't. We really needed, you know, a bigger group. So you see the social construct creating a more believable set of results because people come to the Participatory Budgeting session knowing that their peers are in the room. And of course, we think we're smart, so our peers are as smart as we are, we're all smart people, and therefore, the social construct of Participatory Budgeting quite literally creates a better input, which creates a better output. Ula Ojiaku That makes sense, definitely. Thanks for sharing that. I've found that very, very insightful and something I can easily apply. The reasoning behind it, the social pressure, quote unquote, knowing that you're not just going to put the paper forward but you'd have to defend it in a credible, believable way make sense. So just to wrap up now, what books have you found yourself recommending to people the most, and why? Luke Hohmann It's so funny, I get yelled at by my wife for how many books I buy. She'll go like “It's Amazon again. Another book. You know, there's this thing called the library.” Ula Ojiaku You should do Participatory Budgeting for your books then sounds like, sorry. Luke Hohmann No, no, I don't, I'd lose. Gosh, I love so many books. So there's a few books that I consider to be my go-to references and my go-to classics, but I also recommend that people re-read books and sometimes I recommend re-reading books is because you're a different person, and as you age and as you grow and you see things differently and in fact, I'm right now re-reading and of course it goes faster, but I'm re-reading the original Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck, a fantastic book. I just finished reading a few new books, but let me let me give you a couple of classics that I think everyone in our field should read and why they should read them. I think everyone should read The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks because he really covers some very profound truths that haven't changed, things like Brooks Law, which is adding programmers to a late project, makes it later. He talks about the structure of teams and how to scale before scaling was big and important and cool. He talks about communication and conceptual integrity and the role of the architect. The other book that I'm going to give, which I hope is different than any book that anyone has ever given you, because it's one of my absolute favourite books and I give them away, is a book called Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Comics or graphic novels are an important medium for communication, and when we talk about storytelling and we talk about how to frame information and how to present information, understanding comics is profoundly insightful in terms of how to present, share, show information. A lot of times I think we make things harder than they should be. So when I'm working with executives and some of the clients that I work with personally, when we talk about our epics, we actually will tell stories about the hero's journey and we actually hire comic book artists to help the executives tell their story in a comic form or in a graphic novel form. So I absolutely love understanding comics. I think that that's really a profound book. Of course you mentioned Alex Osterwalder's books, Business Model Generation, Business Model Canvas. Those are fantastic books for Product Managers. I also, just looking at my own bookshelves, of course, Innovation Games for PMs, of course Software Profit Streams because we have to figure out how to create sustainability, but in reality there's so many books that we love and that we share and that we grow together when we're sharing books and I'll add one thing. Please don't only limit your books to technical books. We're humans too. I recently, this week and what I mean recent I mean literally this weekend I was visiting one of my kids in Vermont all the way across the country, and so on the plane ride I finished two books, one was a very profound and deeply written book called Ponyboy. And then another one was a very famous book on a woman protagonist who's successful in the 60s, Lessons in Chemistry, which is a new book that's out, and it was a super fun light read, some interesting lessons of course, because there's always lessons in books, and now if it's okay if I'm not overstepping my boundaries, what would be a book that you'd like me to read? I love to add books to my list. Ula Ojiaku Oh my gosh, I didn't know. You are the first guest ever who's twisted this on me, but I tend to read multiple books at a time. Luke Hohmann Only two. Ula Ojiaku Yeah, so, and I kind of switch, maybe put some on my bedside and you know there's some on my Kindle and in the car, just depending. So I'm reading multiple books at a time, but based on what you've said the one that comes to mind is the new book by Oprah Winfrey and it's titled What Happened to You? Understanding Trauma, because like you said, it's not just about reading technical books and we're human beings and we find out that people behave probably sometimes in ways that are different to us, and it's not about saying what's wrong with you, because there is a story that we might not have been privy to, you know, in terms of their childhood, how they grew up, which affected their worldview and how they are acting, so things don't just suddenly happen. And the question that we have been asked and we sometimes ask of people, and for me, I'm reading it from a parent's perspective because I understand that even more so that my actions, my choices, they play a huge, you know, part in shaping my children. So it's not saying what's wrong with you? You say, you know, what happened to you? And it traces back to, based on research, because she wrote it with a renowned psychologist, I don't know his field but a renowned psychologist, so neuroscience-based psychological research on human beings, attachment theory and all that, just showing how early childhood experiences, even as early as maybe a few months old, tend to affect people well into adulthood. So that would be my recommendation. Luke Hohmann Thank you so much. That's a gift. Ula Ojiaku Thank you. You're the first person to ask me. So, my pleasure. So, before we go to the final words, where can the audience find you, because you have a wealth of knowledge, a wealth of experience, and I am sure that people would want to get in touch with you, so how can they do this please? Luke Hohmann Yeah, well, they can get me on LinkedIn and they can find me at Applied Frameworks. I tell you, I teach classes that are known to be very profound because we always reserve, myself and the instructors at Applied Frameworks, we have very strong commitments to reserving class time for what we call the parking lot or the ask me anything question, which are many times after I've covered the core material in the class, having the opportunity to really frame how to apply something is really important. So I would definitely encourage people to take one of my classes because you'll not get the material, you'll get the reasons behind the material, which means you can apply it, but you'll also be able to ask us questions and our commitment as a company is you can ask us anything and if we don't know the answer, we'll help you find it. We'll help you find the expert or the person that you need talk to, to help you out and be successful. And then, and I think in terms of final words, I will simply ask people to remember that we get to work in the most amazing field building things for other people and it's joyful work, and we, one of my phrases is you're not doing Agile, if you're not having fun at work, there's something really wrong, there's something missing, yeah we need to retrospect and we need to improve and we need to reflect and all those important things, absolutely, but we should allow ourselves to experience the joy of serving others and being of service and building things that matter. Ula Ojiaku I love the concept of joyful Agile and getting joy in building things that matter, serving people and may I add also working together with amazing people, and for me it's been a joyful conversation with you, Luke, I really appreciate you making the time, I am definitely richer and more enlightened as a result of this conversation, so thank you so much once more. Luke Hohmann Thank you so much for having me here, thank you everyone for listening with us. Ula Ojiaku My pleasure. That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless!

united states god ceo director university amazon netflix california money europe israel business conversations master ai school leadership healing guide lessons action michigan innovation trauma price entrepreneurship oregon safe bachelor startups resilience portland color artificial intelligence silicon valley oprah winfrey mvp sustainability software private engineering cars dvd comics roi paypal designing israelis bay area vermont game changers business development senior director chemistry salt lake city kindle feature ev profitable munich computer science sprint api agile venture capital cisco santa cruz msc gdpr pms product managers product management ro sas stripe agility bsc ikigai scrum serendipity common ground chief innovation officer gulf war xp enabled public sector eds weave visionaries sustainably product owners portfolio management organisational apm eric ries ross perot cognitive psychology business model canvas adyen alan smith bonnie garmus agile manifesto ail ponyboy scott mccloud organisational behaviour hohmann test driven development alexander osterwalder in japanese lpm kent beck saas b2b participatory budgeting understanding comics data structures alex osterwalder roi return on investment entrepreneurs use continuous innovation business model generation create products scaled agile create radically successful businesses interview highlights yves pigneur jeff patton value proposition canvas value proposition design federico gonz lean innovation mythical man month electronic data systems conteneo extreme programming explained jason tanner dean leffingwell innovation games safe fellow

SAFe 6.0 Roundtable with the Framework Team

Play Episode Listen Later May 10, 2023 46:33

On today's episode, Adam sits down (face-to-face!) with three Scaled Agile framework team members—Rebecca Davis, Andrew Sales, and Dean Leffingwell—to discuss all things SAFe 6.0 and what excites them most about this release (hint: it might have something to do with flow). They acknowledge that change is hard and it's easy to want to resist. But they take a deeper look at what really goes into Framework changes and assure us that the tweaks and changes are more than just shower thoughts—even if they maybe start out that way.

safe roundtable framework agile business agility rebecca davis scaled agile dean leffingwell

Conversations from the 2022 SAFe Summit: Mik Kersten and Dean Leffingwell take a deep dive into FLOW.

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 25, 2022 23:09

Welcome to this special edition of the SAFe Business Agility podcast featuring in-person conversations captured at the 2022 SAFe Summit. In today's episode, find out how what started out as a personal mission turned into a business friendship and a hot topic. Listen as Dean Leffingwell, co-founder and chief methodologist at Scaled Agile, and Mik Kersten, CTO of Planview and author of Project to Product, take a deep-dive into Flow. We hope you enjoy the show!

conversations project safe product deep dive summit cto customer experience agile kersten scaled agile planview dean leffingwell

Productivity should not be the only focus of Scaling frameworks, the missing ingredient | Jurgen Appelo

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 15, 2022 13:43

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. This week Jurgen is with us to talk about his latest project: unFIX.work.In this episode we talk about productivity in teams and organizations. Jurgen shares with us how he sees the current productivity paradigm, and what the productivity paradigms are missing: community. We explore why community, not only productivity, should be the focus of Agile and the frameworks around Agile adoption. In this episode we refer to The Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker, Chris Smith from Redgate Software, the book Shift from Product to People by Pete Oliver-Krueger, and Michael Dougherty, LeSS and SAFe, which have both been covered here on the podcast with their respective creators: Bas Vodde and Dean Leffingwell. How can Angela (the Agile Coach) quickly build healthy relationships with the teams she's supposed to help? What were the steps she followed to help the Breeze App team fight off the competition? Find out how Angela helped Naomi and the team go from “behind” to being ahead of Intuition Bank, by focusing on the people! Download the first 4 chapters of the BOOK for FREE while it is in Beta! About Jurgen Appelo Jurgen Appelo is an entrepreneur, an author, and keynote speaker who applies Agile to his life and his businesses. He's also prolific writer on all topics business and agile. He wrote Management 3.0, How to Change the World, Managing for Happiness and his latest book about entrepreneurship and product development: Startup, Scale up, Screw up. You can link with Jurgen Appelo on LinkedIn and connect with Jurgen Appelo on Twitter.

world change happiness management managing safe startups shift product productivity scale scaling beta ingredients agile screw frameworks scrum chris smith jurgen missing ingredient agile coach michael dougherty toyota way jurgen appelo unfix dean leffingwell scrum master toolbox podcast bas vodde

(S2)E014: Ian Spence on Better Practices Through Essence and Agile Leadership

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 14, 2021 42:50

Bio Ian Spence is the Chief Scientist at Ivar Jacobson International. He spends his time coaching the teams working on some of the world's largest and most technically challenging endeavours - such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project, building the world's largest radio telescope to explore the Universe - and working with industry thought leaders such as Dean Leffingwell, Dr Jeff Sutherland and Dr Ivar Jacobson to improve the art of software development. He led the creation of the OMG's Essence Kernel and many of the most popular Essence Practices. He has many certifications the most prestigious of which is SAFe Fellow. Social Media/ Website: LinkedIn https://uk.linkedin.com/in/ian-spence-agile1 IJI website: ivarjacobson.com Resources/ Books Learn more about Essence https://essence.ivarjacobson.com/ Location to get the Essence game cards (and others) – pdf: http://www.ivarjacobson.com/cards To browse the cards electronically https://pex.ivarjacobson.com/sites/default/files/practice/scrum_at_scale_2020_11.html Link for ‘Better Scrum Through Essence' Nov 2021 course: https://www.ivarjacobson.com/training-courses/better-scrum-through-essence-remote-nov-2021/tue-2021-11-23-0900 Book: Training from the Back of the Room by Sharon Bowman https://www.amazon.co.uk/Training-Back-Room-Aside-Learn/dp/0787996629/ Book: Turn the Ship Around! by David Marquet https://www.amazon.co.uk/Turn-Ship-Around-Building-Breaking/dp/0241250943 Video: David Marquet on Leadership in a Submarine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYXH2XUfhfo Article: Google's 10 Traits of the Best Managers https://www.businessinsider.com/google-discovered-traits-of-the-very-best-managers-2019-6?r=US&IR=T#6-have-a-clear-vision-for-the-team-6 Interview Transcript Ula Ojiaku: My guest today is Ian Spence. He is the Chief Scientist at Ivar Jacobson International and amongst his impressive string of achievements and accomplishments, he is a SAFe Fellow and an SPCT. Ian in this episode talks about Essence in more detail. And before we move on to the conversation, Ian will be running a Better Scrum through Essence course this November, 2021. And for you, our Agile Innovation Leaders podcast listeners, they are offering a 5% discount if you use the code AILP5OFF. Just go to ivarjacobson.com and search for the training. On to my conversation with Ian Thank you so much, Ian, for joining us on the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. Ian Spence: Thank you for having me. Ula Ojiaku: I've been looking forward to having this conversation with you. I've been to a couple of your courses, you know, the Agile Contracting course, as well as the alpha version of the Better Scrum through Essence. And each instance I had lots of aha moments and lots of learnings. But before we get to that, could you tell us a bit about yourself Ian? Ian Spence: I'm Ian Spence. (I'm an) Agile coach and consultant, I've written some books, I've done various things. I'm a SAFe Fellow. I've worked with quite a few of the main figures. Jeff Sutherland, Dean Leffingwell. And I was with David Anderson, (Kanban man) last week. And of course Ivar. Over the years, I've spent as a coach trying to help people - sharing knowledge and getting good practice into people's hands so that they can master the basics of the agile practices and then use that as a foundation to then innovate and develop, themselves and their workforce. My job is to make others successful. That's what I like to do, Ula Ojiaku: And how did you get onto this path? Ian Spence: When I got around to the age of sort of going to university, at one point I was going to be a Civil Engineer, but then I discovered that very few of them actually get to build bridges. So that took the fun out of that. So I thought I'd like to know how to build robots. And this is a long time ago and there was one course on robotics in the UK. But robots are computers and control systems. So I did a degree in Computer Science and Control Systems Engineering thinking this would be computer controlled, but they're actually two discrete subjects in different buildings. I ended up with a degree in Computer Science and Control Engineering and I got a job as a COBOL programmer in Sheffield. My job existed to fund my musical endeavors at that time. And then I got too old for musical endeavors. So I wondered what would happen if I actually paid some attention to my career. And since then I've had some books published, become a conference speaker, worked on some of the largest, most complex projects in the world. I mean the Square Kilometer Array. I like to talk about them because one I'm allowed to. Most of the exciting things I work on - some of them nano medical technology I was involved in. I can't even talk up. I don't understand what it did and I'm not allowed to tell you, but the Square Kilometer Array is the world's biggest science facility ever built. It's a big radio telescope. It's in Wikipedia. They have a lovely public website and I'd been coaching them probably for three years now. So they're developing the software for that using the Scaled Agile Framework and agile techniques. And that's the kind of software you build super computers for. Ula Ojiaku: I wouldn't have guessed you had, any musical endeavors. And I'd love to know more about it. If that's something you're comfortable with sharing. Ian Spence: Oh! That's all in the shady past now. The keyboard player in my band has gone on to be quite a successful electronic musician and producer, but it's all very niche market stuff. So, it was fun for a bit, but that's oh, years ago now. Ula Ojiaku: So, am I right in the understanding you were part of a band and did it involve, lots of tours and did you release any records? Ian Spence: If anyone wants to do some archeology on the internet, you may possibly be able to find out the name of the band, but there's no music available. We were okay , we were pretty good, but we didn't have that magic ingredient you need to be successful. Ula Ojiaku: And what sort of instrument did you play Ian or were you the lead vocalist? Ian Spence: Oh no. I was the guitarist - that's what I played Ula Ojiaku: So how did you, arrive at IJI (Ivar Jacobson International) as the Chief Scientist? Ian Spence: Well, I was a software engineer for many years, and I was one of the first people in the UK to learn Java. I wrote the first commercially available Java course in the UK. I was doing small talk programming. Got a job with a, consultancy, started doing a little bit of consulting and then unfortunately that company – the owner decided to shut it down. So we went and had some interviews and I had job offers to go and be a serious Java programmer, or to join Rational as a consultant. So I started doing a lot of work or consulting around the Rational Unified Process. Met people like Dean Leffingwell when I was working at, Rational Software. Rational was a good place, but that got purchased by IBM. So, me and some of my colleagues decided this was an opportunity to leave. And then we sort of merged. Ivar was also leaving Rational and setting up a consultancy at the same time. So we came together then. So I ended up as Chief Scientist at IJI. Ula Ojiaku: So let's go on to, Better Scrum with Essence. Could you tell us about the course and your involvement with the Essence standard? Ian Spence: So a long, long time ago in a land far, far away, a group of people had started a new company and they had been doing a lot of work with the rational unified process. Not surprising as Ivar was one of them. And we were looking at how can we, what can we do to make this more agile? So we started looking at, is there any way we can have the practice be the first class citizen? So if you look at, Practices say like use cases as a practice, Ivar came up with that. It was the foundation for the Objectory process. It was in the Rational Unified Process. It was in lots of other processes. Most of those have gone, but use cases is still one of the most popular ways for people to capture requirements. I mean, the term use cases actually entered the English language. So practices last a lot longer. Many of the agile practices, people think they're discovering as shiny new things have been around 50 years or more. What we wanted to do was free the practices. So we did, something we called the essential unified process, which actually was made out of practices. And he thought this is a good idea, how can we make this more popular? So Ivar founded this organization CEMA, other luminaries, Tom Gilb, Hollister Coburn was there. They had set some introductory meetings. They were quite successful and, donated the underlying language. Right? So maybe more people could do practices. Ivar loves to talk about the method, prisons and method wars, but (Essence is a way to) basically free the practices. So the owners, the people who come up with a practice don't have to see their work rewritten, rebranded, recast every time someone built a method. So that teams can put together and plug their own way of working. And we've just been working on that ever since, so we've been trying to get a healthy, vibrant practice community. And one of the biggest things that's happened for Essence in the last few years is Jeff Sutherland's involvement. So scrum is described in the scrum guide as you know, 19 pages or something, maybe a few (pages) less in the last version, very succinct, very accessible, very good. Lots of good scrum training. And Scrum is in SAFe. Scrum is in LeSS, Scrum is in Scrum at Scale. People use Scrum in software, they use it everywhere. But if you look at the numbers over 50% of the people who say they're doing scrum are failing or doing it badly. So Jeff is very keen to find any way that can help people do better Scrum. Ivar and I went out to Amsterdam, met Jeff introduced him to the idea of Essence and he got the idea very quickly. He liked the idea. And I worked with him to create the first set of scrum essential cards. And these have been around; they've escaped into the ether. Lots of people have them and use them. But Jeff really liked the cards. He started using them in his training courses and he found that just as a simple, an active glossary, you can engage with, you can do lots of exercises. He likes to play a game he calls build your own Scrum. So he gives people the cards, but no context, and they have to assemble Scrum and a lot of the time, somebody on one of Jeff's course that he learned more in the hour, they spent doing that than he had in the last three years doing scrum. The idea is to bring practices to life and make them more accessible and actionable to people. You know, having things on cards, isn't a new idea. People have done that for years, but there's a language and semantics behind these cards that allow you to compose practices together. You can actually execute the language so you can generate the task. It's possible to generate the tasks from the Essence definition. If you want it to go down that route, there are checklists to help with quality. There's also the other thing we have, which we call the kernel, which is… ( holding a little card up to the camera). This defines what it entails to do software engineering, not how to do it, just the what, and that defines the methods space for software engineering. So when you load up practices into the kernel, you can see where you haven't got anything where there's things missing. You can use it to try and get balanced between the seven key aspects identified in the kernel. So, you know, as you're building your solution, are you keeping your stakeholders on board? Do you know what the requirements are? Have you got a healthy team? So much can be done with it. The Scrum Essentials are literally a hundred percent aligned with the Scrum guide, but they bring it to life. You can interact, you can play games and you can say which bits you like, and you don't like. You can look at the connection. So a really good aid for teams starting out, or just to refresh the Scrum - revisit what you're doing. A lot of people are using them and coming up with new games and ways to play them. And the, the goal is there to be a viable set of practices. And then, you can pull them together. You know, a lot of teams mix Scrum and Kanban together. Wouldn't it be great if you could take David Anderson's Kanban practice and Jeff's scum practice and have the pieces there. so you could, you could see how they fit together, where they reflect, you could merge items together. You know, I don't really care what you call the person who facilitates the agile team. You call it a scrum master. Do you call it a flow master? Do you call it a team coach, an agile coach? I don't care. What's important is that someone is playing that- has those accountabilities. Agile teams really benefit from someone who's looking, being the conscience of the team, helping them to improve. Recently I ran some workshops at the SKA. Like I say, they're very nice, cause I'm allowed to talk about them. We used Scrum Essentials - one of the scrum practices we've developed with Jeff called the scrum accelerator to help their scrum teams within a safe environment, get better at Scrum. Right? So you can take things from different places and mix them together and benefit from that knowledge. And that's, that's really what it's all about. It's a kind of Ivar's 'change the world' mission. We don't make a lot of money from the cards - we give them away for free, but hopefully it's helping people get better. And that the idea of Essence will spread and every team will be able to pick up and play with the right practices and organizations will be able to establish the kind of common operating model they need. So they have a local vocabulary within their organization, but the teams can then pick up whatever practices are going to help them the most. And even organizations, if they want to, they could mandate some practices. Most companies mandate some financial and accounting practices, because if you don't, you might well not be a legal entity and things like that. Safety critical you have standards. So we can do all kinds of great stuff. Quality checks, checklists, build life cycles. But the idea is to stop having these big descriptions of everything, which will never last because you know, which practices are improving change in new ideas all the time and have something where the way of working for the organization is as agile and as flexible and learning as much as the people in the organization as a whole. And that's the end game. It fits very well with scrum, because to use a scrum practice, you've got to pick a load of other practices. You don't have to do user stories, you could do use cases or other stuff. And it works really well with Kanban because it's all based on the idea of evolution. Ula Ojiaku: I'd have to say, having used the scrum cards that you've talked about, they are really very helpful and it does, I can testify in the sessions I've run, you know, with the teams, I support. It kind of brings things to life and it just helps. They're not wondering, 'oh, what's a daily stand up. Oh, what's a retrospective', because the definition is there you know, it's clear for them to just read and do the exercises. And one of the things I'm also in the process of trying out is designing an exercise for a team that wants to maybe start adopting some scrum practices, but they are Kanban. kind of build your own scrum, you know, pull what practices you want and don't take anything else - no more, no unnecessary overheads. I know that you have a (Better Scrum with Essence) course coming up. Do you want to tell us about this and what the, audience might expect to experience on your course? Ian Spence: Well, as you mentioned, you went on the alpha course. Ula Ojiaku: I was and I thoroughly enjoyed it Ian Spence: So it's covers quite a lot, but I did one with Jeff Sutherland on Better Scrum with Essence. You (Ula) are one of the very select few who got to go on the course and the course is, basically it doesn't teach you Scrum and it's not an alternative scrum master course. It teaches you how to use the scrum practices to play games. It covers sort of learning games, things you could use just to learn about Scrum. It covers, uh, how you can use the kernel to understand where you are. It covers the scrum accelerator and other games you can play to improve Scrum and it does cover some scaling stuff, how you can use some of Jeff's Scrum at Scale ideas, just to assess and play around with things. , you can use Scrum Essentials, you can use this with teams using SAFe -anyone, any scrum team, whether they're doing software can benefit. One of my colleagues is working at the Royal Navy, 30,000 people learning about Scrum and he's been using the cards an awful lot too. And they're not doing software development. And a lot of it is hands-on because you start playing the games. Actually, the one we're going to deliver in November is going to be a bit longer so it's very much playing games, exploring things in your groups rather than being lectured. And a lot of the games are transferable to any practice, but it's particularly useful, given that we have the access to the Scrum practices that Jeff helped us develop. So a great course for any coach, any scrum master, or any, we used to call people, call them process freaks. So if you're really interested in the ideas of Essence, this is a great way to, to learn the practicalities and how Essence would help you before you start going into the language and how to write things in Essence, but you know, people can produce their own practices. There are companies out there who are using these ideas to document their own ways of working. And it's interesting because the course would have been so much better if we'd been able to be face-to-face we'd have had so much fun playing the game. There would have been things stuck on the walls everywhere. It would have been great, but it works well online. We use Mural boards and stuff. So when people leave the course, they've got the cards, they've got the templates. You can literally, the next day I've known people go and start using the stuff that they've learned so that that's great, but you can sit down and very simple in an unobtrusive way with a team, find out which bits of scrum they like which bits they don't like, which bits they're doing, which bits they're not doing and get those conversations started. Um, I did it with a team recently. They didn't have any Sprint goals. And they didn't know anything about product goal, which was introduced in the latest scrum guide. So that uncovered that in a way that was sort of non-judgmental. And then we could talk about, well, you know, how do you think it would be useful? Well, why don't you try having some things like that? You know? And if, if we say daily, stand up, we hate it. Well, there you go. There's a, there's a, that's straight away. You've got something to think about how to improve and it gets you away from all of the ‘mad, sad, glad' and all of that. And you could be proactive. One of my favorite things is just, uh, in a retro pick a card and say, ‘well, how's this one going?' So you don't have to look at everything just randomly pick one and have a discussion about it and see if we're doing it well, if we could improve. If you were a new team, and you're coming together for the first time, Scrum is a great way to start building that team working. Right. But scrum does not give you all the processes and practices you need, but some of them you'll have in your heads. Some of them, you can pull it and as you go forward, you might move away from Scrum that's fine. But if you start, if you don't do all of the essential things, then you're not doing Scrum - we're doing something else, but that's fine. It's Scrum-like as opposed to Scrum but at least everyone will know you've got this different. We can start to share those values and we can start to have stuff to build, to build out on that. And it's the same with, with other practices. Essence is quite big in the academic community. There's a whole community of university lecturers, building courses, based on essence to teach software engineering and to be able to teach software engineering in a way that's independent of the practices, some of the management practices. So they can teach software engineering and they can use scrum as a tool, but they get that nice separation so that people know what's going on. Ula Ojiaku: There's something you said earlier on about, teams being able to choose their practices and evolve. And you said something that some people might find heretic, which is that, you know, as they evolve they might move away from scrum practices. Could you expand on that? Ian Spence: Uh, well, there's two sides to this. If you, if you're doing scrum, you should be doing scrum. Well, there's a lot of people out there blaming scrum and saying it's not working and they're not, they've never done it properly. They've always done some spray, you know… water, scrum, fall, or whatever. so it's nice if we can actually have meaning behind the words we use and the practices. A lot of the time people say they're doing one thing as an excuse not to do another, right? But software development should be a profession. People should be professional. We should maintain certain standards. And if we say we're doing X, we should be doing X. But a lot of agile coaches are familiar with Shu Ha Ri. . This comes from martial arts and in martial arts Shu - you are studying the standard forms and you're doing them by the letter. And that's how you build your muscle memory. That's how you build your basics. And then when you get to Ri - you start to be able to mix and match the forms and adapt them a bit. When you get to Ri - you have transcended. If you're starting out as agile, basic forms, you need to learn as a team, Scrum and Kanban. I think every Agile coach should have their Scrum and Kanban experience. They should have the experience of doing it. Right? And, um, the cards are to help the teams get that, get that muscle memory. And then when you go up the levels, at some point, you might get to the Ri level and transcend that's when you, uh, that's when you can really invent new forms, that's when you can pick up the existing forms and put a twist on them, but it takes many years to get there. And seriously, I don't believe there are any, any shortcuts. Right. And a lot of people seem to forget how they got where they are. Practices and frameworks are where you start even things like the Scaled Agile Framework. But for me, that's not an end point it's a starting point because if you're Agile, you're inspecting and adapting. So you have to inspect and adapt your way of working, right? Now, the problem is with anything that's popular, many people have inspected and adapted it and broken it. One of my SAFe training courses, I did, someone came along from this major company and they said, well, the team have told me they're doing SAFe and she listened and she enjoyed the course and she went back and said, ‘you're not doing SAFe but you ought to be doing SAFe. So we're going to get these people to come in and help us.' So I went in to do some coaching. Now, let's say I was told that there were eight agile teams . Now, the person who was like the lead agile person in the technical side of the organization. ‘What teams have you got?' By the time they've got to team number 15, which is two testers working alone. They, they were so agile. They had self organized themselves out of agility. to get them go back again, they got put back into scrum teams and then we did the PI planning and they went and they actually delivered the MVP that they'd missed a date for three times before. So it was a very successful adoption. But what the practices do is they keep you on the straight and narrow. So master the form and then as you go up from Shu to Ha to Ri, you will be able to start adapting and inventing new practices. But you don't get to that state without going through the hard work of learning, the basic forms and the basics. I have delivered, SAFe training with Dean Leffingwell. And I delivered Scrum at Scale training with Jeff Sutherland. And I've had some very, uh, interesting experiences where people on Scrum at Scale are trying to bash SAFe; they're more similar than they are different. Your job, as a coach, isn't to rip the foundation out and say to people ‘you're not agile, you're doing SAFe. You're not Agile, you're doing that.' What your job is, is to say, ‘Ah, you're doing great. What could we do better?' And if we bring some ideas, what are the other frameworks in… Lots of great ideas in SAFe, lots of great ideas in Scrum at Scale, lots of great ideas in LeSS - you're looking to improve. And, you know, if you are still doing those essential things from that framework from that practice at least you've got the commonality that people need to work as a large organization. You can start to evolve and play around and then practices can move about . I see all the frameworks as a starting point. SAFe is brilliant for lifting and shifting large numbers of traditional people and making them all agile. Ula Ojiaku: This brings me to a question really. You mentioned earlier on, , that organizations, potentially can build their own Agile framework from the ground. Ian Spence: Um, well we have to be careful when we say Agile framework. An agile framework is a pre-constructed set of practices and a reference model to help organizations create their own operating model. So every organization needs, their own operating model and that could include mandating frameworks and practices, but everyone, you know, you get your competitive advantage by having your own way of working. All right. So as organizations evolve from that standard model, that's useful in many contexts and create the one that's working specifically, uh, you know, optimized for ourselves. And reflects our learning and our skills and our recruitment policies and all those things that are part of a healthy organization. Ula Ojiaku: Thank you for clarifying Ian, however, would I be right in the understanding that what you're saying is for it to work, that has to be a shared language across the board as a fundamental… Ian Spence: I'm going to do a conference talk in Russia called, um, Agile Horror Stories. About how things go wrong. And one of the ways things go wrong is people take a challenge and blow it up and they start blaming other parts of the organizational structure. They'd start blaming all kinds of things for their inability to achieve the goals and outcomes that they had, you know. You don't have to change HR to go agile, but if you go agile, you can change HR to benefit things. So you've got to look across what, you know, what's the scope, what, what's the challenge, what commonality you need. No organization needs to have everything defined in the same way, but there are, if you want to do, you know, effectively portfolio management across the piece, you need some things that roll up and down across the backlogs and stuff like that. Then if you're going to go and talk to people, you need some consistent positions in the organization. So you know who you should be talking to, right? You shouldn't have to redefine the positions every time you changed the practice right. I did a talk at the SAFe summit a few weeks ago on the idea of the dual operating system. Now, a lot of agile people - I've seen a lot of articles - they said, ‘oh, we don't need any dual operating systems.' And what their people are showing is they haven't understood what it is. We want the agile, the value streams, which flow across our organization to work like a dynamic network. Self-organizing, self-determining we want that right now. Every organization, every human social structure will have a hierarchy in it. If you don't have a dual operating system where you separate the functional hierarchy or position in the organization, from the value streams on the network, the value is never going to have that beautiful unimpeded flow. Ula Ojiaku: Yes Ian Spence: What people are doing is they are not creating a network. They're creating a new hierarchy, right? And again, all these opposition are in pointless fights about stuff right. Now in the latest scrum guide they deliberately said, Scrum Master is not a role. It's a set of accountabilities. Basically, it's a card that someone picks up and goes, oh, I'm going to be the scrum master. I know people who act as scrum masters, who are, very senior in an organization because they run their leadership team. They run their lean portfolio management group as a Scrum. I worked at the, Gibraltar financial services commission where they did scrum all across. This is the business of regulations. They're not software. The first scrum team was the leadership team. And they were great. Every day, you'd see the CEO running to the daily stand up. It was brilliant. All right. And they were leading from the front, but you know, the person who was the, Product Owner for that group was the CEO and that's their position and that's their title. And they took on the accountability of Product Owner for the leadership team. And they had someone who was a senior coach who took on the role of the scrum master for that. But she was mainly coaching all the other people in Scrum. She was a scrum master for that particular group. So, you know, no, no changes of job titles. No, disenfranchising of people to start with, but yes, as you become more agile, you will improve everything, including the hierarchy. So yes, a lean hierarchy is better, but the big mistake too many people make is they create these sort of agile hierarchies and they do it and they haven't even dislodged the old one. So now they've got two hierarchies. So it's like, we don't need a dual operating system. We've got four hierarchies already. It's just crazy stuff. Ula Ojiaku: Some of the pitfalls you've mentioned, most recently being the one about agile hierarchy and multiple hierarchies instead of adopting the concept of dual operating systems in the spirit that it's meant to be, how can leaders in organizations, that have gone through transformations, recognize this sort of pitfalls and avoid them or remedy them if they've already kind of fallen into a rut. Ian Spence: I mean, the whole leadership question is an interesting one, particularly with some of the political leadership we're seeing in the world today. Um, but the, the idea of the leader that serves , of, uh, leaders who are empowering and delegating and stuff like that, um, is incredibly, incredibly powerful. So what leaders need is the agile mindset. Now, when you're looking at practices, right, there are millions of scrum teams in the world. So the higher up as a leader, the more it's about your mindset, your personal skill, you're not following practices. You're not doing routine type work in the same way. So what you've got to do is have that lean and agile mindset. Now, if you are leading a change, symbolic leadership is incredibly important. So you've got to lead by example. Um, you've got to understand the, the mindset and the principles. You've got to focus on outcomes, the real business outcomes, not output. You've got to learn how to use metrics and stuff like that, but you've got to go on a journey with your teams. You've got to do that kind of stuff. Um, And, you know, I've coached quite a lot of that. The biggest challenge I find when teaching, you know, leadership is something that you see at all levels of an organization as well. So every agile team will benefit from some agile leadership. Coaching is not something that's only done by coaches. Every good leader will… certainly a good agile leader will have coaching capabilities… will be developing their people. So you've got to learn about, about that kind of stuff. But the biggest problem I found when teaching, when coaching senior people say portfolio managers and stuff was basically just never turn up. they're too busy and that's not good. Don't be so busy that you haven't got time to get better. So take time to learn, take time to do experiments, do new practices. You've got to get into that. I mean, delegating authority is doing that. Doesn't mean I'm neglecting your own accountability and responsibility. So transparency and empowerment. Agility is there to empower leaders as much as the people being, led. And that's important. So all of these things can help you as an agile leader in agile, organization, you can be a better leader because you can really decrease the decision latency. You can spend much more of your time. Um, looking forwards, planning, forecasting, steering, creating the buzz, the vision and less time looking backwards. If you're learning to be an agile leader, don't get caught up in all the framework wars and all of that. It's about the mindset and about empowerment, autonomy, purpose, and all those, all those good things. I highly recommend... there's a video they use in the Scaled Agile course. David Marquee, a model of leadership, the nuclear submarine. Yeah. Yeah. So if you don't mind, um, all male or military type examples. It's a great about that leadership by intent and serves the those things. So as a leader, let's become about leading rather than chastising and administering. And management is incredibly important. Um, Google did some experiments where they tried to take a, we don't need no managers. They tried to get rid of the managers. Nobody was happy. So they bought them back. What they discovered was people like good managers. And I would assert, and I'm probably not the first person to assert this, but I can't attribute other assert anyway. Um, it's better to work for a good manager in a bad organization than a bad manager in a good one. And if you've ever worked there, I know people who have their whole career has just been moving, following a good manager anywhere. They went, wherever I go and stuff like that. And often they've gone to a bad company, but you know, you will be looked after because they have a good manager. So good managers develop the people and skills for sustainable organizations. They set the vision, they make the decisions quickly. Um, they involve more people in that decision making, but they keep their accountability, they keep their responsibilities. They don't pass the buck… Ula Ojiaku: If it goes well, it's the team. If it goes badly, the manager takes the bullets. Ian Spence: Yeah. The best managers to work for barely take that much credit. they get the credit because they've created that environment for everyone else to thrive. And, and, you know, the agile mindset, if you look at the qualities that Google said, a good manager needs, and if you compare it to the, you know, agile mindset, agile values, stuff like that, very closely aligned, they haven't normalized the vocabulary. People use the sport analogy and I'm a big arsenal fan. And I'm a big Arsene Venga fan. He would empower his players and send them out to play. He didn't have rigid systems. Jose Marino was the opposite kind of manager, right. The opposite kind of coach. But they were both fairly successful. Agile leadership is not the only style of leadership. Right? Many, many big things have been achieved by bad leaders, doing things I personally would consider unethical and stuff like that. Ula Ojiaku: But the question is how sustainable is it? People don't remember what you do per se, but they will always remember how you made them feel when they worked with you. Ian Spence: Yeah. There's stuff like that. But, um, I talked to David last week and he said that the, um, the longest living successful organization is the Roman Catholic church. Right. They go back thousands of years, and this is still the same organization and they have changed, changed considerably. But I wouldn't say necessarily of a particularly agile organization, they have quite rigid rules, but their leadership has, has, has learned and developed and listened to people and changed markets and all kinds of stuff over the years. So lean and agile leadership… it's what a lot of our organizations benefit from and need. So in basic learn about it and hopefully you're going to very successful. Ula Ojiaku: Where can the audience reach you if they want to get in touch with you? Ian Spence: well, I'm on LinkedIn. And that's the best way to contact me personally. If you want to investigate the Essence stuff, or get a hold of the scrum cards or the other cards. Then the Ivar Jacobson website. is the place to go. You can freely download that stuff and has articles about that, um, as well… Ula Ojiaku: Okay. All right, many thanks. And could you remind us the date of your Better Scrum through Essence course? Ian Spence: Possibly it's, uh, the 23rd of November. And it's a online course and it will start at nine o'clock each day, UK time. Ula Ojiaku: Okay. We'll have the Beatles and the show notes. So thank you so much again, Ian, for this. Do you have any final words of advice for the audience before we close this out? Ian Spence: The only final word of advice is stay be a lifelong learner, relentless improvement. That's something you should be looking at. So be, be curious, explore new things. Don't get you to let yourself get trapped in any of these, any of these boxes. And, uh, my other bit for the agile leaders is. If you are investigating agile, don't just allow it to clutter up what you say with more meaningless management speak. Okay. Keep it, think about it's about getting good outcomes, creating healthy, sustainable team environments, getting the flow of value, watch out for the buzzword bingo. Ula Ojiaku: Thank you so much, Ian. I've really enjoyed this conversation and I hope we'll get, to have you back on this, show some other time. That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. I'd love to hear from you so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com. Take care and God bless!

god ceo english google uk leadership coaching russia universe safe safety mvp beatles scale amsterdam practices wikipedia ibm location essence pi traits computer science sprint omg agile sheffield java submarines ska ri spence rational agility roman catholic scrum gibraltar mural chief scientist royal navy kanban product owners civil engineers ivar scrum masters shu david anderson cobol ship around david marquet agile leadership jeff sutherland cema scaled agile scaled agile framework shu ha ri us ir t square kilometer array square kilometre array ska iji rational software dean leffingwell rational unified process tom gilb ivar jacobson safe fellow

Optimising Product Planning with the Quartz Open Framework (with Steve Johnson, consultant & co-founder @ Product Growth Leaders)

One Knight in Product

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 13, 2021 42:33

An interview with Steve Johnson. Steve is a product coach who has trained thousands of product teams across dozens of countries across 15 years. He's co-founder of Product Growth Leaders, a consortium of product consultancies & also co-author of the Quartz Open Framework which aims to help you build products your customers will love. We speak about a lot, including: How his consultancy got started, the problems he solves & how he aims to get people working on real products that resonate with their business, not toy examples Why he decided to help create Product Growth Leaders to solve the problems he can't, by creating a consortium of product consultancies that can get the job done Whether the proliferation of product owners as glorified business analysts is a positive trend, and the challenges of having at least three specific jobs that are all called product manager The problem with Purple Squirrel product manager job descriptions with impossible requirements and how there aren't many unicorn product managers around How he was once trained in SAFe by Dean Leffingwell, the creator of the framework, and whether SAFe is the solution to any of the problems in dysfunctional companies Why it's all about agility not agile, but the trouble of trying to sell this message to people who have never seen agile done right The origins of the Quartz Open Framework and how it enables you to take an idea through planning and into market, and why it was important to release it for free under Creative Commons Some of the issues with working with Sales, and why it's not good enough to put all the blame on them when we could do better to support them Check out Steve's music Steve's a published musician! Check his work out on Spotify. Contact Steve You can find Steve on Twitter or LinkedIn. His consultancy website is https://www.under10consulting.com/.

spotify co founders sales leaders safe consultants framework quartz optimising steve johnson product growth product planning dean leffingwell

Navigate the Future with a Business Agility Value Stream

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 12, 2021 16:22

Three technology trends—artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and cloud—are converging to provide new ways of understanding, managing, and transforming products and services. What does that mean for enterprises now and in the future? In this episode, Dean Leffingwell, Scaled Agile co-founder and SAFe chief methodologist shares highlights from his 2021 Global SAFe Summit talk. He discusses the concept of the business agility value stream in applying SAFe to accelerate time-to-market and effectively compete in the second digital age.

ai safe navigate business agility scaled agile value stream dean leffingwell

A Lifelong Pursuit of Better with Dean Leffingwell

(Re)Learning Leadership

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 20, 2021 24:05 Transcription Available

Dean Leffingwell, a business innovator and founder of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), has dedicated his work life in pursuit of a better way forward, both as a leader himself, and in building companies helping others to be better. Pete goes behind the curtain with Dean, not to explore his latest creation, but rather to explore the leader behind it. As a leadership mentor and advisor to Pete personally over the years, Dean shares his own leadership journey so we may learn from his experience.Explore more about Dean and my discussion with him on our website.

explore pursuit lifelong scaled agile framework safe dean leffingwell

S1E002 Darren Wilmshurst on Digital Disruption and Applying the Agile Manifesto and SAFe Principles to Transform Organisations

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 7, 2021 37:57

Bio: Darren has a background in commercial management, being an Associate of the Chartered Institute of Bankers following sixteen years in Retail Banking. This culminated as a Senior Personal Banking Manager within the Guildford Group of Branches, which was comprised of 9 branches and 140 staff. A career change into IT in the late 1990s has led to a number of roles within IT including three Head of Department positions covering the complete spectrum of IT. Also, as an accomplished Project Manager and a Prince2 Practitioner he has a phenomenal record in delivering complex programmes and business transformations and an impressive record of negotiating and implementing multi-million pound contracts including Outsourcing, Off-shoring and ERP systems. He is also a Chartered IT Professional. Darren is now a Director of Radtac, a Global Agile Consultancy Business based in London. In addition, he is DSDM Atern Agile PM Practitioner, APMG Facilitation Practitioner, PRINCE2 Agile Practitioner, Certified Scrum Master, Kanban Practitioner. Darren is an active agile practitioner and coach and delivers training courses in Leading SAFe and more recently, Darren is now a SAFe Fellow, one of about 30 worldwide. He is also a SAFe Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT), contributor to the SAFe Reference Guide 4.5 and founder of the London SAFe Meet-up Group. Finally, he is the Treasurer of BCS Kent Branch and co-founder of the Kent Scrum User Group. Also a co-author of the BCS Book “Agile Foundations – Principles Practices and Frameworks”, a reviewer of "Valuing Agile; the financial management of agile projects". Books/ Resources: Tribal Unity by Em Campbell-Pretty Leading Change by John P. Kotter The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organisations by Gene Kim et al Agile Foundations – Principles, Practices and Frameworks y Peter Measey, Darren Wilmshurst and Radtac SAFe Reference Guide 4.5 by Dean Leffingwell SAFe 5.0 Distilled; Achieving Business Agility with the Scaled Agile Framework by Richard Knaster and Dean Leffingwell * NOTE: * As of the time of publishing this episode, the most-current version of SAFe is 5.0 and so I would recommend getting this version. Websites: The Agile Manifesto: https://agilemanifesto.org/ SAFe Principles: https://www.scaledagileframework.com/safe-lean-agile-principles/ Darren's social media profiles: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darren-wilmshurst-89b0931/ Twitter handle (for fellow Arsenal fans!): @dazzawilmshurst Interview Transcript: Ula Ojiaku: [00:27] My guest for this episode is Darren Wilmshurst. He is the director and head of consulting at Radtac. Darren is a Scaled Agile Framework Fellow, an achievement realized by less than 30 people globally. He's also an SPCT - that is, a SAFe Program Consultant Trainer. Darren trained me as an SPC, and I am honored to call him my mentor as well. This episode, be aware, was recorded before the COVID-19 pandemic so parts of our conversation about travel around the world, conducting a big room planning with all team members physically in the same space might not reflect the current pandemic situation as people aren't traveling as much. And of course, there's social distancing in place, and people are working more remotely than ever. The release of this episode coincides with the 20th anniversary of the Agile Manifesto. Darren and I talked about the Agile Manifesto. And in my opinion, the pearls of wisdom that he shared about applying the values and principles are as valid as ever. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, my conversation with Darren Wilmshurst. Enjoy! Main Interview Ula Ojiaku: [01:51] Thank you so much, Darren, for making the time for this conversation. Darren: [01:55] Real pleasure to join you today. Thank you for inviting me. Ula Ojiaku: [01:58] Darren, why don't you start off by telling us a bit about yourself? Darren: [02:02] Oh, yeah that will be good, I have a probably interesting background. Because I spent 16 years in retail banking, I was a bank manager. And banking was all good until the first week of November 1997. Not that I remember the (exact) date. But that was the date that the bank decided to automate my job. So, some bank managers were really good at lending. Some bank managers are really bad at lending. And they wanted to manage the credit risk to 1% of the portfolio. And they can't do that with individual discretion. So, on that date, everything was credit scored. If you wanted an overdraft, (a) personal loan or mortgage, everything was credit scored. I went from being a bank manager of nine branches and 140 staff to being a sales manager, selling financial products, and not something I really wanted to do. So, I made the entirely logical leap from being a bank manager into IT, because that's where my job got (absorbed). I started off as a business analyst, I did some testing, test management, did project management, and then I joined an outfit called, P&O Ferries. And I did a number of ‘Head of …' roles: Head of Programme Management, Head of Development, Head of Delivery as well as Head of Operations, Infrastructure Networks and that sort of stuff. As well, I was just really fortunate to work with some really inspired CIOs during that time, who introduced me to agile probably back in 2003, 2004. And I was just given the environment to experiment with lots of adoption to patterns and practices as well, some that went well, some didn't, we learnt loads as well. But I found it was really hard initially. I think we did our first sort of agile project about 2004. And I'd gone away and read a book and gone to a conference and got inspired by this new way of working. But I came back to the office and (it appeared) my colleagues had read a different book! And we ended up in almost like these ‘agile wars', you know, where we're arguing about whether we all call it a sprint and iteration increments a time box, and I got really fed up with that. So, I got an outfit called Radtac to help me; a guy called Peter Measey. I just need to help us to get to a common foundation. And the first thing we did was just an education event where we got all the guys in the rooms, ‘look, this is the way we're going to work, this is what we're gonna call stuff, we're gonna at least get a common taxonomy in terms of what we mean by these things.' And that made a difference as well, then, you know, implementing it was still hard. So again, got Radtac to help with some of the practices and help them refine those as well. And then I got to a point, I don't know, about seven years ago, where I'd spent almost 30 years in the corporate world and just wanted to do something a bit different, wanted to go and explore my passion a bit more, not about agile, but more about trying to make organizations more effective. And funnily enough, I spoke to Peter Measey again at Radtac, and joined them back in 2012, as a director, and to grow their consultancy practice. So, I went from the corporate role to the dark side of consulting, and that was quite a change. For me, personally, I'd lived, about 25 minutes from my work. And that was right from the time I left my house to when I had coffee on my desk in my office. And now suddenly, I was traveling around the country and around the world. And my children were quite young that time (11 & 13) and that was quite hard in the first six months. I wasn't quite sure this was for me, but I just wanted to explore that passion for that change was hard for me. And then I think I was working with a client down in Bristol, and they started talking about this thing called SAFe. And this guy called Dean Leffingwell. And I hadn't really heard much about it and what it was as well. And then almost coincidentally, I heard that Dean was running an SPC course in London in October 2013. And I thought, okay, I want to go to that. So, I went to that course - I was not convinced. I always remember Dean talking about this two-day PI planning event and he'd said, ‘we can get everybody in the room together.' And I said, ‘what, everybody?' And he looked at me quizzically ‘Yes, everybody, that's everybody that wants to know; not just the developers - Scrum Master, Product Owners…' ‘All of them coordinating live - the planning was with everyone in the room together?' ‘Yes.' So, two days, I think you'll never get that, you know, the conversations that you will need to have, in order to get two days to where people get together for planning out will never happen. So, I sort of remained skeptical. I started running some training courses in 2014. But the interest in the UK was quite low, to be honest. 2015 first off, much the same. And I think towards the end of 2015 people started saying ‘Actually, I'm really interested in the SAFe stuff.' So, we did more training courses. And then I did my first (SAFe ART) launch and that's where my skepticism turned into ‘Oh my - this is an amazing event!' because you know, getting all those people in the room together, when you create those social bonds, that networking, that alignment and where you resolve difficult problems together is huge. I became an advocate so much so I got asked to join the SAFe Program Consultant Trainer program. Ula Ojiaku: [07:07] You said that you were skeptical about bringing everybody in the room for two days. How did you get to convince your first clients to do that? Well, how was it for you? Darren: [07:20] I think I was lucky because my first client was coming, over to my public courses. I think it was like April, this delegation of about four of them. They said ‘we love this. We want to do it'. And they said, ‘we're going to start small, we're not going to start with no massive teams.' I think we started with four teams. And just on the tipping point, really just say, we want to prove it out. So, I need to start with four teams. And two teams were in India and two teams were in the UK. So, my first one was distributed, which was fine, but yes, I think for them, it was like they were sold on it. And they wanted to start small. I think it was easier for me in terms of they were already bought into it. And they wanted to run it and have smaller teams make it an interesting first planning event. But, you know, we had some issues running it distributed. I think it should have taken two and a half days. And it ended up taking three and a half days. Ula Ojiaku: [08:08] Oh, okay. Well, it was a first wasn't it? Darren: [08:13] Yeah. I think the issues with that one there was a couple of things was, first of all with, because it was my first PI planning, I think that's a real red line for me when we try to do asynchronous planning. Number one, you need to have a co facilitator in each location. I didn't, I was in the UK. I wasn't in India, and it was all new to them. And they really struggled as well. Secondly, we tried to do what I call asynchronous planning. So, in the morning, we did all the briefings. And we got to lunchtime. And then we started out in the UK, we started off draft plan in the afternoon, by which time they (the teams in India) had gone home. So, they came back in the morning, and they did their draft plans. And then we tried to bring them together. It just didn't work. I mean, the whole point of the planning is to understand the tensions and the dependencies between the teams. Of course, we're doing that asynchronously. So not only did they weren't sure what they were doing, when we tried to bring the draft plan together, they didn't work. So effectively, we lost that first round of planning. So, we said, okay, we need to find a way of overlapping. So, on day three, the UK guys came in a lot earlier. And we asked the guys in India to stay a little bit later to share the pain. And then we've got an overlap. And we've got our plans together. But we effectively lost that first round of panning because there was no support. And it wasn't synchronous. Ula Ojiaku: [09:26] So, on the third day, did you manage to find someone who would facilitate on your behalf in India or you still had to do that yourself? Darren: [09:35] Yeah, I did it myself. We had video links and stuff like that (to connect with the people in India). But I recognised that they were struggling. The second time around, we made sure that we had facilitators in both locations - really important. Ula Ojiaku: [09:58] That's quite interesting. If you don't mind, I'm just going to go back a bit to the point where you said your tipping point was after about 30 years in industry. You wanted a change, which was when you made the leap into consulting. There might be some people listening who are considering making that same leap. So, what made you decide to go for it? And what was the last straw that broke the camel's back (if there was any such thing)? Darren: [10:27] I don't think it was a midlife crisis. I wanted a new challenge. And it was at that time, I'm like, well, if I didn't do it now, it would never happen. I think I'd gone through, you know, so many organizational reorganizations and restructuring. I just, I couldn't face another one of those. (I thought to myself) ‘well, if I'm going to make the break, this is the time to do it as well.' And I had the opportunity with Radtac to join them and help grow that particular organization as well. So, I think it was an alignment of moons - I needed to change. I'd spent 30 years and in the corporate world and didn't really want to go through another reorganization. And this opportunity presents itself as ‘Okay, well, let's give it a go and see how it goes.' Ula Ojiaku: [11:04] Would you say there was an element of you know, wanting to be a bit more in control of your destiny and not just being at the whim of maybe reorganizations that tend to happen in larger organizations more having some sort of direct say in the direction of things with your career? Darren: [11:20] Probably not, I think because again, I was very senior manager at P&O Ferries. I reported the Board Director. I helped shape a lot the restructuring that happened within P&O Ferries as well. I had a lot of influence and with that organization, I just think it was just about really just exploring my passion and just trying to do something different. I always thought there's just something there's one more thing left in me and I thought this was it. Ula Ojiaku: [11:43] Okay. You said your children were young and the first six months you weren't sure in consulting whether it was for you. So, what made you change your mind? It's definitely evident that you're doing something you're passionate about. What made you decide, ‘Right! It is for me'? Darren: [12:00] Again, my children were like 11 and 13. Both of them are serious swimmers. My son was a national swimmer, he was training about 17 hours a week. So that's four mornings at five in the morning (and evenings as well). My wife was working full time as well. So, it's just it was just again, with me being away traveling and not knowing what time I'll be home. That was the bit that was difficult because at least at P&O Ferries, I know what time I left for work and what time I got home. I could be quite predictable, (but in the consulting situation) I was less predictable. So, we had a long conversation, and my wife decided to temporarily give up her job. And she's a teacher, in order to support me and the children as well. That was a life changing decision that we had to make as a family. So, I'm really grateful for my wife saying, ‘Okay, I'll take a little sabbatical to get us through this.' And we tried to get some normality back to our lives as well. Ula Ojiaku: [12:50] It's really refreshing to hear this because it almost seems like - looking outwardly - everyone has it all, you know. You have to make some sacrifices, compromises to be able to achieve a goal. Darren: [13:03] It's a good question. Because a lot of people say to me, I'd love to become a consultant. And I talk to them about that. ‘Well, you need to recognize that, you know, you could be anywhere now - what's your flexibility?' I could be in the UK, I could be overseas, if it's (my client appointment is) on a Monday, I'm probably flying on a Saturday or Sunday to get to locations. So, I'm there on Monday morning as well, it sounds so glamorous that you know, I travel the world and people see you know that you travel all the time. But funny story was I was due to go to Dubai. And my wife was teaching at the time. And it was the last week of the school term. And my wife was going to finish on the 13th. I was going to Dubai the following Monday. So, I texted her at work and said, ‘Look, you know, I'm going to Dubai next week, do you fancy coming with me?' And she texts back to me saying ‘No, I want a new kitchen!' Okay. About 15 minutes later, she gets back saying ‘No, no, no, no, no, I'm coming!' She came home and said ‘I was in the staff room when I got your text. And I laughed. And when my colleagues asked why, I told them you'd asked if I wanted to go to Dubai next week, and they said, ‘what did you say?' She said, ‘I'd said I wanted a new kitchen?' Yeah. (Long story short) She came with me (to Dubai). We flew out on the Monday -arrived in the afternoon for a two-day training event. I went into the office that Monday afternoon, just to check the office. And then I got up at seven. I was in the office at eight again, I forget how many hours I had three or four hours behind. So, it's like quite early in the morning - training from eight to six before going back to the hotel. And Jo goes, ‘wow, is that what you do?' Yeah, yeah (I say). ‘So, you got really early in the office training all day. So, what do you do now?' I'll have a meal for one in a restaurant, then I'll come back to my room. I do my emails. And I go to bed. Yeah. And I get up the following morning, exactly the same - finish at six, got home, pack my bag, have a meal, go to the airport, fly home ... And that's what you do. I said that's exactly what I did. It looks glamorous, but it's literally planes, hotels, offices. I hate eating on my own. If I'm on my own, I'm not a great explorer either. So, I know some of my colleagues are really good at going out and seeing the sights. So, if you're training all day, you've still got other responsibilities that you need to catch up with as well. So… Ula Ojiaku: [15:17] I can imagine as a head of consulting, it's not just the training, you still have to attend to other official type things. Yeah. Darren: [15:25] Good work for the company that I have to do stuff like that. Ula Ojiaku: [15:28] Oh, wow, I get the impression you are someone who's always out to learn to improve yourself. So, you're not resting on your oars even though you are at this level. Have you at any point in time felt like ‘I think I've learnt enough'? Darren: [15:41] It's also the reverse. I was never a reader. I've always been a numbers person. So, I went to university to study maths. I was one of those kids at primary school where you'd be given a book at the beginning of the week to go away and read it. I get to the end of the week; I'd hand back my book to Miss (his teacher) who'd ask ‘have you read the book Darren?' And I'd go, ‘Yes, Miss…' - I hadn't. And I've never been a great reader. I just wasn't. What I do is probably over the last six years now I've read more than I've ever read. And even so, when I go on holiday, my daughter teases me because, you know, I don't take fiction books on holiday or biography books. I take business books on holiday. Ula Ojiaku: [16:21] I do that as well (laughs) Darren: [16:22] I have a picture my daughter took of me lying in a pool reading a business book. And every time I go on a course, someone will always recommend a new book I haven't read; so I have a backlog of books that I still need to buy and read as well. And there's a couple of books I'm rereading at the moment because… Some of my colleagues are good at the audiobooks; I need to see it. I'm a real visual reader. Ula Ojiaku: [16:46] Okay, okay. Darren: [16:47] …(still on his preference for physical books) …I'm getting down. I'm just highlighting, you know, the bits that character. This is a nugget as well. So, I can flick through that book and, and use those quotes as anecdotes during the trainings that I do as well, so. Ula Ojiaku: [16:58] Okay, so when you mean the visual, would an Amazon Kindle do for you or not? It has to be like a physical book, right? I like physical books; I mean and given that I tend to commute a bit, as well listening to audiobooks. But yeah, I've learned to blend all of them in depending on where I find myself. If you were to gift a book to someone who's aspiring to develop as a lean agile professional, which one would you, one or two, would you gift to the person or recommend to the person? Darren: [17:40] There's essentially a part of them beyond the roadblock is you sometimes just don't get chance to take time out and reflect and write. And I'm a bit frustrated at the moment that I haven't written a blog for a while and stuff like that. So, at the end of April, I'm going to do like a little mini retreat, I'm going off to Finland with Virpi, a fellow SPCT. And we're gonna have a little SAFe retreat, and we want to go away and write a couple of blogs and stuff like that as well. And one of the blogs I want to write is my top three books, top three videos, top three white papers. I think I'm almost there. One (of my top books) is the Tribal Unity by Em Pretty-Campbell. It's about how to get to how to go about forming teams and get them self-organizing. It's a short book. So, it's a really good brief read. Leading Change by Kotter, I think is another book that's just so critical. I think he wrote the book in 1995. I may have got that wrong. But he's rewritten the preface, because he's saying although this book was written over 20 years ago, it's still relevant. Now I find it amazing that the same challenge is still appearing now, even though they haven't learned from 20 years ago. And I think my favorite book of last year was The DevOps Handbook by Jez Humble and that was interesting for me, because for, two reasons. One, it's quite a thick book. Not, it's not small, but it's quite daunting to look at it. And also, you think, oh, I'm not particularly technical, but someone really encouraged me to say, ‘no, read it and actually read it in small batches, reach 25 pages a day.' What a good idea! And what I found was that it was just there was so much goodness in there in terms of there's some technical stuff that you can, you can skim over. But in terms of how to adopt it, some real stories about organizations that have done this as well. And for me understanding that actually, it's not just about automation, there's so much other stuff that you need to do in terms of re architecting and telemetry and stuff like that. Well, for me, that was my book next year. And if we're going to get to this organization where there needs to be more responsive, and they need to get their products to market quicker, they need to find a way to be able to do that without being on very slow, manual downstream processes and practices. Ula Ojiaku: [19:43] We're going to put the links to them (the books mentioned) in the show notes. And it's worth mentioning as well: I mean, you're a co-author of the BCS Agile Foundations book. Darren: [19:51] I think it was them BCS (who) approached us to run an effectively agnostic agile foundations course. We created the course and the exam materials for that. And then they said, ‘well, can you create a companion book for it as well?' As Radtac, a small group of three to nine people that we were at a time, we wrote a book together. And again, we tried to follow our agile principles. So, we had a Trello board. And we agreed and we broke it down into chapters, and then and into sections and who wrote each of those sections. And it was an enlightening experience to do that. I was quite privileged to be one of the co-authors of that as well, I reviewed a book on Agile financial management which was quite cool as well, again, that was in an agile way, you can check it out every two weeks, we were spending every two weeks to do that, as well. And also, I was one of the accredited contributors to the SAFe Reference guide as well, of which I'm really proud of as well. Ula Ojiaku: [20:36] Your last response actually nicely segues into the second part of this conversation, which is to talk about one or two lean agile related topics. You said (something about) the importance of applying agile ways to businesses to make sure that they are delivering value to customers in the shortest possible time; you know, on a consistent and predictable basis. Could you elaborate on that? Why is it important in this day and age for businesses to be agile? Darren: [21:07] I think for me now we're seeing a lot of digital disruption. The one I want to talk about is Blockbuster. That's an old story now, I think Netflix came knocking on their door over 10 years ago and said ‘look, you know, you've got a great high street presence. We've got this idea about streaming videos online. Do you fancy buying us for some silly amount of money? Really small amount of money', and Blockbuster said ‘No, no, we're okay. We're doing great in the high street.' ‘The broadband speeds won't be big enough to stream videos that will never work. We're fine.' ‘Netflix came back a year later and (made the same offer to Blockbuster who refused). And Netflix well… amazing; Blockbuster is not around anymore. I've probably had two or three more recent examples of different digital disruption: HMV - they got placed out of bankruptcy five years ago, someone bailed them out. It looks like they're gonna fold again, and they went on to the high street and said, well, why don't you go into HMV and buy videos and CDs? And the answer was, ‘well, we stream it, we download it. We don't need to do this (buy physical CDs and DVDs) anymore.' My daughter's just doing a level a moment and she's gonna go off with some friends to Magaluf with her girlfriends - much to my horror. Oh, well. Ula Ojiaku: [22:13] Oh well, ‘bank of daddy' (laughing). Darren: [22:15] No, no she's paying for herself. So, traveling, she went on to a well-known high street travel agent and said, we want to go here, this is what we're gonna do and stuff like that. And they said that that's going to be about 750 pounds per person. ‘Thank you very much.' She came home, good girl, went online, got exactly the same deal same hotel, same flights, all inclusive. Plus, airport transfers, which wasn't included, plus some club tickets for 350 pounds per person. Ula Ojiaku: [22:42] Wow! Darren: [22:43] Wow. And then the final one is that we were thinking about selling our house. And we moved about nine years ago – it was the last time we had moved. So, we got a guy around to evaluate our house. So, we asked him ‘what's your fees?' expecting him to say, you know, it's about 2% plus VAT, and then we'll get into that haggling situation where I try and beat him down so we're at 1.75%. And he said to me, it's 1% Darren. That was it. Why is it 1%? He said, ‘Purple Bricks'. So, you know, I think you know, what we get into a situation where, you know, there's a lot of disruption. And these guys are firing up stuff much, much quicker, we need to be able to get out our products and our services to market faster. And also, to get that feedback. And we don't want to create, you know, work on a ‘great' product for three or four years, get the market and find out that it's not required. that people won't buy or sell isn't already limited as well. And we need to find a way of having a hypothesis about our product or services and testing and getting feedback on it as quickly as possible. And potentially as well getting the value as soon as possible before someone else does. So, for me it's about that improvement process of making our work transparent getting inspected, if it's okay, we carry on if not we pivot without mercy or guilt. And having that short feedback cycle, as well try to shorten that feedback cycle as much as we can. Ula Ojiaku: [24:02] Am I right in the understanding that the feedback cycle would include the customer as early as possible in the process? Darren: [24:11] Most of the time that might be a proxy for the customer. But if we get to the real customer, then that's so much the better because that's the real acid test of ‘would you use this? Would you buy this? What would you pay for it? Oh, am I doing the right thing?' Ula Ojiaku: [24:24] Very interesting! The International Consortium for Agile maintain that there's a difference between being agile, and doing agile. In your view, which one should come first? Darren: [24:36] I think there is difference. I go into organization and say there are no we're using JIRA. So, we must be agile. Okay, you know, it's a tool. There are lots of tools out there that can help, but I'm not sure in terms of agile, okay, well, then we're doing this practice of doing a stand up every day, just as a practice. And as some of those practices will certainly help you in terms of ways of working. But for me, and I think those things, though, about doing agile, you know, the tooling and the practices, I think they're starting points, they're very visible, because you can see those things, you see that tooling to see those practices. But in terms of being agile, or adopting agile, they're less powerful. For me the values, the principles, and the mindsets, which are less visible, are more powerful in terms of the overall adoption as well. I've seen too many people that just use the tooling and feel like they're just cranking the handle with the practices, really understanding why they're doing it, that they're doing it not being it, I think it's not a case of one or the other, I think the two need go hand in hand. But you need to explain, okay, these are great ways of helping you in your ways of working. But you need to understand some of the other things that need to go without the values and principles and the mindset changes as well. Ula Ojiaku: [25:50] Okay. And when you talk about the values of principles, are you referring back to the one that originated from the Agile Manifesto in 2001, or is there any other…? Darren: [26:00] Yeah, I think you're right when I started out, they were the ones I used to reference the most. And they were written in 2001. They're still relevant today. I wish they would just turn off some of the software language a bit more. And I think it's much more applicable to the wider organization, not just software development, I recognize that these guys came from the software industry as well -so, I get that but it'd be nice to do that (tone down the software language of the Agile Manifesto). I'm a big fan of the SAFe principles. And when I go in now (to client meetings) to be exact, I don't really talk about agile, because a lot of them will have a preconception of what they think it is and what they've heard. So, I talk about the principles that we need to base our decisions on economics. And they go ‘Yeah, we do'. So now what are the best positioned to be able to evaluate lead, we think about the whole system end-to-end; system thinking rather than optimizing individual teams or departments, because that can sub optimize the whole system. When you think about systems as well, we're working in a very complex environment. So, we can't assume that we know everything upfront. So, we need to assume variability and some way to preserve options. But there's a cost of doing that as well. And we don't want to have too much work in our system, we need to make sure that you know that we've got good flow for our system, by putting too much work into our system, it clogs it all up. So, we do that as well. And then we'll talk about, you know, we still need to plan. So, we know, we need an arrangement as a working at scale, and how we do that. So, we need a, sort of, big planning event. We need to make sure that we invest a huge amount of money and time and to help people. And we need to make sure that we find a way that they are sufficiently motivated. They have enough purpose, autonomy and mastery in their job that they go, ‘this is a great place to work, I don't want to go anywhere else as well.' And part of that comes with, you know, empowering them and decentralizing control so that people have the freedom to make decisions. So that's this little narrative that I have, and that's very much aligned to those same principles that you and I did last December. (Darren was referring to the SPC course he'd taught in Dec 2018 which I, Ula had attended). Ula Ojiaku: [27:57] Yes. This segues nicely into my next question. So, you said when you speak to executives, and I would assume large scale enterprises, about SAFe, you talk about the value and the principles. Now, even in the name SAFe, which is Scaled Agile Framework, it's more about applying agile principles and methodologies and tools at scale. Darren: [28:20] Yeah. Ula Ojiaku: [28:21] Question now is, ‘can a small enterprise apply SAFe?' Darren: [28:27] Can you describe it? What do you mean by small enterprise? Ula Ojiaku: [28:30] An organization that has up to maybe 10s, or a 100s of employees and wouldn't have as large a scale of operations as multinationals? Darren: [28:39] I think the key thing is, what we need to consider is that we're, we're moving away from a project-based organization to a value stream-based organization. So, in the old world, again, again, my heritage was project/ programme management. But those are temporary organizations, so and we fund them accordingly as well. And that's a bit of a nightmare for me as well, because trying to understand how much money we need for a project is difficult to work out. Most projects of that traditional era, tend to be over budget, by almost 200%, I think, standard report, last one was about 188%, over budget over time, as well. So that's always difficult as well. And then you've tried to merge in multiple projects at the same time. And if a project is late, once you finally start this project over here, but you've got people over there that need to be over here. So, you end up with this, this constant trying to align your people to the right project all the time. So all I found I was doing with project was that I was cosntantly trying to move the people to the work and doing that all the time - just shuffling around all the time and the amount of task switching and the amount of overhead trying to do that as well was difficult. The project would be late, trying to get the funding was always difficult. So, we moved to a much more value stream-based approach where we said actually, what we're going to do is create stable teams, and we're going to align our teams to a product or service. So, there will be long lived teams. And effectively what we do is fund that team, which is actually the capital cost of those people. And all that we have to do is we bring the work to the people rather than the other way around. And all I have to do or I have to coach is how to prioritize that work. And it's much easier to prioritize that work than anything else… That was a long prelude to the answer. (Laughs). Ula Ojiaku: [30:17] So useful; it is useful. Darren: [30:19] So, first of all, though, we're going to align teams to our products. Now, if we got a product that only requires another three to nine people, then we don't need a scaling framework. Actually, if you've got two or three teams all working on the same product, and probably we don't need a scaling framework. There are probably tools and techniques that we can take from SAFe but they can probably find a way to collaborate and align without a formal framework. The Tipping Point is once you get to 4-5 teams all working on the same thing, how do we make sure that they can collaborate and align (are going) in the same direction? And I think for me, that's the tipping point, it's not so much the size of the organization, have we got at least five teams all working on the same thing, a product or service that requires alignment? That's the tipping point for SAFe as well. So, it doesn't have to be in a large organization or small. That's the tipping point. And what I sometimes see is that okay, well, we've got 10 teams, we're going to use SAFe to help coordinate them. But they're all working on different things. If they're all working on different things, have different teams. Just have individual teams working on those individual projects. You don't need to coordinate them (if) there's no coupling or no dependencies, then why would you want to do that? And I sometimes see organizations using SAFe as a framework for organizational design. It's not (an organizational design framework). It's a framework to get alignment across multiple teams all working on the same value stream. Ula Ojiaku: [31:40] That's nicely put, and I believe it would clarify the false notion for some people in terms of using SAFe for uses that it wasn't intended for. It's more about delivering value and creating alignment across all levels in an enterprise. Radtac is a lean company from what I could see of the organization. However, for the size of your company, you are making a lot of impact in this sector. What would you say is your secret? Darren: [32:10] That's a great question! I suppose it's, ‘you're only as good as your last engagement.' I'd like to think that actually it's our reputation precedes us as well. A lot of work comes to us, we don't go to it. We don't have a business development function, because most of the work will come to us through our reputation. So, I think if we try to live by our own values, and both as, in terms of how we run our company, and how we work with our engagements; we try to deliver agile in an agile way. And if we're not adding value to an organization, then we don't need to be there anymore, as well. And also, the fact that we have a really odd business model in terms of my role in organizations to make myself redundant in the organisation because I need to make sure that I transfer the capability and knowledge to organization. The last thing I want to be is their ‘agile crutch' where you know, if I walk away, everything falls over. So, I think that's probably an unusual for organizations. That said, I have a business model to make myself redundant; I have a business model to work in small batches; I have a business model to try and create value. If I'm not adding value, then I won't be here anymore. And I think that really resonates with organizations, and most of our business comes through referrals and direct recommendations as well. So yes, that's the secret. It doesn't seem like much but it feels like it's working! Ula Ojiaku: [33:31] No, it does say a lot, because I have worked in consulting as well – a while ago. And it's not what I, the impression I have of the consulting industry, which is more about you know, find more work, make yourself indispensable, weave yourself into, you know, the client's organization such that they can't do without you. So, it's liberating to see a different approach where your aim is to empower the organization so they can get on and continue without you. Darren: [34:01] And I think you're right, yeah, it's almost the opposite. I don't want to make myself indispensable. I want to be able to walk, well, allow them to grow and explore themselves as well. Yeah. But I find it that clients that I started working out with around September 2012 – they still come back and say, look Darren, we tried, it didn't work. So, I go back down and do some little check or audit check, or health check. And, say Okay, we'll try this and try that. So, I'm really privileged that over the last seven years, not only have I worked with some great companies, but I've worked with some really great people that I know. Even though I would say that they are clients, they are friends, as well. Ula Ojiaku: [34:36] So now that's fantastic. And which brings me to… in terms of delivering client work, what I'm getting from you is that it's also important to cultivate good working relationships with them. Because it's not just about the work, it's about, you know, the people are trying to understand them, and making sure you're adapting yourself to them and making the whole engagement work for them on their terms. Darren: [34:59] You and I were both on the other side of the fence, you know, we worked in the corporate world. You know, I worked with lots of third parties and stuff like that, as well. And yeah, you know, you bought that capability. But you ‘bought' the people. People buy people and for me that that relationship with my client is really important as well. It needs to be open; it needs to be transparent, and be honest. And sometimes you can have difficult conversations as well. But for me, it's ‘people buy people' at the end of the day. Ula Ojiaku: [35:22] Thank you. That's something I definitely take to heart. So, a few more things than just to wrap up. Do you have any ask of the audience? You know, how? How can they get in touch with you if they want to say hello? Darren: [35:37] And I will say that the easiest way to get hold of me is on LinkedIn. I always used to say there's only one Darren Wilmshurst on LinkedIn. I'm not entirely sure that's true anymore. But there's only two or three of us anyway. So, Darren Wilmshurst, LinkedIn, just connect with me. That'd be really good to getting feedback on this today. That'd be great. Any questions do that as well just ping me in the links as well. If it gets too complicated, I might revert to email that might be easier sometimes. But yeah, just find me on LinkedIn. That's where I tend to be most active. So that's where I publish my blogs and stuff like that as well. Ula Ojiaku: [36:09] Fantastic. So, you're not on Twitter or any other social media? Darren: [36:13] I am on Twitter. I'm gonna ask others my age. I don't tweet as much. But eh, @dazzawilmshurst (is my Twitter handle) but generally speaking, LinkedIn, is your best bet to probably get through to me. I think you've got an option to publish right through to Twitter as well. So, I tend to use Twitter to follow my other passion, which is Arsenal. Ula Ojiaku: [36:38] So, while there might be other Arsenal fans listening, you will never know, we wouldn't know until we do that. So, we will put the links in the show notes. So, thank you for that. It's really been a pleasure speaking with you and you know, learning from you, as usual. And thank you so much for making the time. Darren: [37:03] And thanks for inviting me. It's been great chatting to you, this morning as well. Thanks for coming on my course last year as well. It's great to have you on the course as well. Ula Ojiaku: [37:11] That (attending Darren's SAFe Program Consultant (SPC) course) was one of the best decisions I made last year. So, thank you!

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A Conversation with Dean Leffingwell and Geoffrey Moore

The Best of Agile and Scrum Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 5, 2021 18:32

In 1995, author and advisor Geoffrey Moore released Inside the Tornado, the second book in his popular three-part marketing series that offers strategies to get products into the mainstream market. Twenty-five years later, is the guidance in the book still relevant? In this episode, Dean Leffingwell takes over the mic to find out from the author himself—and to ask some other burning questions.

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SAFe 5.0 and remote SAFe with Dean Leffingwell, Cofounder and Chief Methodologist of Scaled Agile, Inc.

Play Episode Listen Later May 28, 2020 21:38

We sat down with Dean Leffingwell to talk about some of the biggest changes in SAFe 5.0 and the impact of COVID-19 and remote working on those using SAFe. Dean shares a couple of great insights in this episode and sheds more light on Business Agility, the need to measure and the importance of mindset and behavior.

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Episode 8: Mik Kersten + Dean Leffingwell

Mik + One

Play Episode Listen Later May 11, 2020 58:34

In the eighth episode of Mik + One, the official Project to Product podcast, Mik's guest is Dean Leffingwell, Co-founder and Chief Methodologist at Scaled Agile. In this episode, Mik and Dean cover: - SAFe 5.0 and the importance of having business agility in addition to technical agility - The different types of customers and understanding why internal customers are just as valuable and important as external ones - Abandoning organizational hierarchies to become more agile and survive digital disruption, as well as other paths for organizations to take to achieve business agility - Why teams must have autonomy but not be autonomous to successfully work within an organization that is scaling. - Why establishing a common taxonomy is critical to get people to think in terms of outcomes and delivering business value. - Advice to help organizations ensure a successful SAFe transformation by focusing on outcome-based metrics and an end-to-end feedback loop. Subscribe to the Mik + One podcast today so you never miss an episode and don't forget to leave your review. Follow Mik on Twitter: @mik_kersten #MikPlusOne www.tasktop.com For more information about Dean Leffingwell, visit: https://projecttoproduct.org/podcast/dean-leffingwell/

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Team Topology

Play Episode Listen Later May 5, 2020 18:30

In this deep-dive episode of the SAFe Business Agility podcast, Melissa Reeve, SPC and Dean Leffingwell, Chief Methodologist for the Scaled Agile Framework, explore the correlation between the structure of business and technology teams in delivering value faster to improve business outcomes.

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Business Agility with Dean Leffingwell

Agile Uprising Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 26, 2020 51:40

In our newest episode of "Business Agility" Creator of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) Dean Leffingwell joins Chris Murman, Troy Lightfoot, and Andrew Leff to discuss Business Agility, SAFe 5.0, and address some of the criticisms in various Forbes, Medium, and online articles of SAFe.

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The Evolving Role of the PMO in the Enterprise

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 21, 2020 20:58

On today's show, listeners will learn how the PMO is evolving in the face of business agility, hear about Dean Leffingwell’s new white paper on Enterprise Strategy, and learn how to create feedback loops between strategy and execution when implementing SAFe.

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BONUS: Global Summit - Dean Leffingwell and Melissa Reeve discuss the release of SAFe 5.0

LeadingAgile SoundNotes: an Agile Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 14, 2020 17:07

Dean Leffingwell highlights changes to the Big Picture on 5.0, including design thinking, continuous learning culture and organizational agility.

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Agile 2019: Day 2 The Evolution of Business Agility w/ Dean Leffingwell

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 20, 2019 14:21

Last week, the biggest conference in the Agile industry took place in Washington DC at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center. We were proud to be a sponsor of this event and we were even more excited about catching up with friends—both old and new. For those of you who couldn't make it to the conference, we wanted to give you a little taste of what it's all about, so we decided to live-stream our podcast out of our booth in the Prince George Exhibitor Hall. We had a chance to talk to a lot of really smart and interesting people while we were there; some who were speaking at the conference, others who were simply attending, and even a few who were involved in turning this event into a reality. Here are some of the highlights from day two. In this live talk with Dean Leffingwell, creator of SAFe, we discuss his Agile 2019 talk focus: increasing people’s understanding of what Business Agility really encompasses, and the evolution of its tenets.

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2019 European SAFe Summit Recap, Part 2 - Welcome to the Age of Software!

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 2, 2019 16:43

Hear about Dean Leffingwell's keynote presentation at the 2019 European SAFe Summit - Digital Disruption is Dead: Welcome to the Age of Software!

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Podcast#5 - SAFe og Scrum@Scale

Den Agile Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 4, 2019 72:51

Så er det blevet tid til et nyt afsnit af Den Agile Podcast og denne gang kaster vi os ud i en af de absolut mest diskuterede emner inden for agile kredse: Skalering! Nærmere betegnet begiver vi ud i en sammenligning mellem to ret forskellige tilgange til at opnå agilitet i større skala, henholdsvis Scaled Agile Framework af Dean Leffingwell og Scrum@Scale af Jeff Sutherland. Vi kaster kritiske øjne på fordele, ulemper og potentielle faldgruber ved begge rammeværk, i den, efterhånden, etablerede ”Den Agile Podcast-stil”, hvor Tore tager tjansen som SAFe repræsentant og Martin indtager Scrum@Scale perspektivet. 00:00: Intro 02:18: Gennemgang af SAFe og S@S 09:58: Pros & cons ved SAFe 38:50: Pros @ cons ved S@S 01:05:05: Opsummering

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SAFe 4.6 with Dean Leffingwell

LeadingAgile SoundNotes: an Agile Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 4, 2018 22:14

Dean 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 at SAFe Summit 2018 in Washington D.C. To find out more about SAFe 4.6, visit www.scaledagileframework.com/ and follow Scaled Agile on Twitter twitter.com/ScaledAgile Reach our host: twitter.com/adammattis13 The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility. Podcast library: www.agileamped.com Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFacebook: www.facebook.com/agileampedInstagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

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Live from Agile 2018 w/ Dean Leffingwell

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 6, 2018 19:30

Dean and Dave sat down, at Agile 2018, to talk about how you can use SAFe to drive enterprise-scale innovation. Dean's also led a session at the conference called: Driving Enterprise-Scale Innovation with Scaled Agile Framework For more on the 2018 SAFe Summit (October 1-2, 2018): http://safesummit.com Contact Info: https://www.scaledagileframework.com/ https://twitter.com/Deanleffingwell

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Agile 2017: SAFE 4.5 Updates w/ Dean Leffingwell

LeadingAgile SoundNotes: an Agile Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 18, 2017 31:35

Dean Leffingwell stopped by to chat with Dave Prior about some of the changes introduced to Scaled Agile Framework with the SAFe 4.5 update, including the reasons for including the Implementation Roadmap, DevOps and Lean Startup. For more information about Dean or Scaled Agile Framework, please visit: http://www.scaledagileframework.com For information on the SAFe Summit, please visit: http://www.safesummit.com

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Dean Leffingwell - Agile2017

Agile Toolkit Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 18, 2017 16:21

Since SAFe 4.5 was just recently released, I decided to ask the creator what's new. Listen to us talk new configurations, better integration of DevOps, and continuous improvement with SAFe creator Dean Leffingwell. Enjoy Bob Payne

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Scaling Agile Methods

Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Podcast Series

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 3, 2017 24:27

All major defense contractors in the market can tell you about their approaches to implementing the values and principles found in the Agile Manifesto. Published frameworks and methodologies are rapidly maturing, and a wave of associated terminology is part of the modern lexicon. We are seeing consultants feuding on Internet forums as well, each claiming to have the “true” answer for what Agile is and how to make it work in your organization. The challenge now is to scale Agile to work in complex settings with larger teams, larger systems, longer timelines, diverse operating environments, and multiple engineering disciplines. In this podcast, Will Hayes and Eileen Wrubel present five perspectives on scaling Agile from leading thinkers in the field, including Scott Ambler, Steve Messenger, Craig Larman, Jeff Sutherland, and Dean Leffingwell. Listen on Apple Podcasts.

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Ten Essential Scaling Patterns with Dean Leffingwell

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 2, 2017 28:11

Dean Leffingwell, author, serial entrepreneur, and creator of the Scaled Agile Framework, discusses the "Ten Essential Scaling Patterns We Can (Probably) All Agree On," his keynote presentation for Mile High Agile 2017. The Agile Amped podcast series brings Agile news and events to life. Fueled by inspiring conversations, innovative ideas, and in-depth analysis of enterprise agility, Agile Amped provides on-the-go learning – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com.Subscribe: bit.ly/SIQYouTube, bit.ly/SIQiTunes, www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/Follow: bit.ly/SIQTwitterLike: bit.ly/SIQFacebook

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How Drew Jemilo's Caffeine-Driven "Brilliant Moment" Turned Into Portfolio Management in SAFe 4.0

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 20, 2016 7:56

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention and so it was that, in 2009, SAFe Fellow Drew Jemilo invented the starter material for portfolio management approach now found in SAFe 4.0. With only one night and "lots of coffee", Drew managed to piece together a workshop based on Dean Leffingwell's architectural portfolio management material. Over the years, Drew and his colleagues at Scaled Agile have much opportunity and learnings with which to improve the material, and today he provides a rough sketch of it to Agile Amped and you, our viewers! SolutionsIQ SAFe consultant Steve Davis hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado. Steve and Drew even recount a shared memory of a workshop the duo did together. About Agile AmpedThe Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe!Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook Caffeine-Induced "Brilliant Moment" Made it Into SAFe 4.0

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025 - Dean Leffingwell - Episode 25 - 20161201 AgileNEXT

AgileNEXT

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 30, 2016 35:14

In this episode of AgileNEXT, Dean Leffingwell, joins Daniel and Stephen and talks to us about Scaling Agile and the SAFe methodology he founded. Some topics include: Lean, Kanban, Scrum, FLOW, and the move toward unbranded Agility The origins of and evolution of SAFe Startups Indiana Jones ride at Disney AgileNEXT

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CEO Fabiola Eyholzer Says Lean-Agile HR are Key to Enterprise Agility - at SAFe Summit 2016

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 4, 2016 13:05

"HR is the key to bringing Agility to an enterprise level. If we don't fix our HR approach, we cannot a truly Agile organization." That's what Fabiola Eyholzer, CEO of Just Leading Solutions, shares with Agile Amped at the SAFe Summit 2016. Fabiola has 16 years of experience in human resources and applies her expertise and passion to the task of "bringing HR into the 21st century". How? With Lean-Agile practices and values. According to Fabiola, performance management needs to be rebooted to address today's concerns, such as "How do we recruit for Agile teams? How do we build careers in Agile organizations?" Recently, Fabiola collaborated with SAFe founder Dean Leffingwell to pen a white paper called "Agile HR with SAFe". With Agile Amped, she touches on the first of the 6 key themes for Agile HR, which are: 1. Embrace the new talent contract 2. Foster continuous engagement 3. Hire for attitude and cultural fit 4. Move to iterative performance flow 5. Take the issue of money off the table 6. Support impactful learning and growth Source: scaledagileframework SolutionsIQ SAFe consultant Scott Frost hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

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Dean Leffingwell on Value Streams and the Challenge of Building Big Systems at Agile2016

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 12, 2016 14:47

Author and Scaled Agile founder Dean Leffingwell sits down with Agile Amped to talk about releasing SAFe 4.0, the challenge of building big systems and how value streams are now an integral part of portfolio management in SAFe 4.0. Dean also uses Scaled Agile as an example to describe in depth how the value stream and portfolio management works, before answering some burning questions like "How is SAFe 4.0 being received?" and "What's next for SAFe?" SolutionsIQ's Barry Gavril hosts at Agile2016 in Atlanta, GA. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

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Episode 108 – SAFe from the Source with Dean Leffingwell

The Agile Revolution

Play Episode Listen Later May 17, 2016 30:42

Renee, Craig and Tony (with a lurking Em Campbell-Pretty) in a very busy corridor with random bells ringing, catch up with Dean Leffingwell, author of numerous books including “Agile Software Requirements” and “Scaling Software Agility” and the creator of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) in a very candid discussion: the journey to SAFe included as a developer … Continue reading →

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Dean Leffingwell Discusses SAFe 3.0, Agile 2015 and Beyond

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 20, 2015 10:57

Widely recognized as a leading authority on software development, Dean Leffingwell is an author, serial entrepreneur, and software development methodologist. He is the creator of the Scaled Agile Framework, and author of five books on software development. His most recent books Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs, and the Enterprise, and Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises, form much of the basis of modern thinking on Lean-Agile software development principles and practices. Catch up with him has he discusses his Agile 2015 experience, the Future of SAFe and trends in the industry.

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Dean Leffingwell Talks About SAFe 3.0 at Agile 2014