Podcast appearances and mentions of mark kilby

Greetings, my spectral spectators!

Greetings, my spectral spectators!

Greetings, my spectral spectators!

How do you navigate a bumpy job market with an agile mindset? Join Brian and leadership coach Mark Kilby as they explore practical strategies for staying prepared, leveraging your network, and taking ownership of your career during uncertain times. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors podcast, Brian Milner and Mark Kilby explore how to approach the challenges of today’s unpredictable job market with an agile mindset. Drawing on insights from Mark’s extensive career as a leadership and career coach, they discuss how preparation, adaptability, and proactive networking are essential to staying ahead. Mark emphasizes the importance of treating your career like a product, continuously iterating and inspecting trends to navigate change effectively. The conversation also delves into the power of maintaining strong professional relationships, keeping your resume and LinkedIn profile up to date, and using experimentation to explore new career paths. Whether you're facing a career transition, considering your next step, or simply looking to stay prepared, this episode offers actionable advice to help you take ownership of your professional journey. References and resources mentioned in the show: Mark Kilby From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver by Johanna Rothman & Mark Kilby Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner® Advanced Certified ScrumMaster® Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule Join the Agile Mentors Community Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Mark Kilby is a leadership and career coach specializing in helping leaders and teams thrive in complexity. Passionate about building more inclusive and effective organizations, he draws on years of experience guiding professionals through organizational change, remote work transitions, and sustainable growth, all with a focus on fostering trust, collaboration, and long-term success. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back and this is another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm with you as always Brian Milner and today I've got a friend that I have seen talk several times at conferences, we were talking, I don't think I've actually crossed paths with him personally yet, but Mr. Mark Kilby is here. Welcome in Mark. Mark Kilby (00:21) Thank you, Brian, and glad that we finally had a chance to meet virtually face to face at least. Brian (00:26) Right? Right? Yeah. And today's world, you know, that's actually saying a lot. You know, that's kind of the default. Mark is a leadership and career coach and has been, you know, a speaker at multiple Agile conferences over the years. He has a book that he co-authored called From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams. And he has spoken on lots of different topics. Mark Kilby (00:31) Yes it is. Brian (00:51) But when we talked about having him on, we talked about a topic that I know is very topical here. For some of you, maybe, know, kind of right in the meat of where you are at the moment, but really starting to think about this bumpy job market a little bit and how to navigate that with an agile mindset. You know, this agile stuff is not just stuff we talk about in working with a team, but it actually is a way of thinking about you know, doing anything. give me kind of your description there, Mark. When you think about, you know, navigating a bumpy job market with an agile mindset, how does that look different from others? Mark Kilby (01:27) So, well, it. The best way to think about this is whether you get this out of college at career placement or you're working with a career coach later on, it's always plan out your route and just follow the steps. Well, it's kind of hard over the last couple of years to say what the right steps are because so much has happened. And you and I were talking just before we hit the record button about one of the things that gets a little bumpy here in Florida, and we call those hurricanes. And I've learned over the many years living in Florida that you can prepare for hurricanes, but you can't prepare for exactly what happens. And so it's kind of the same way these days with our careers. You can maybe get certain certifications, you may get the right resume, the right LinkedIn profile, but if... If you're not paying attention to how the market shifts, and I think many people have been caught off guard with the latest market shifts, you can be in a world of hurt. how do do the prep to weather that storm? So that's kind what I'm focusing on these days. Brian (02:42) That's awesome. That's awesome way to look at it. Cause I think you're right. know, like I know I personally have gone through a couple of, you know, layoff periods in my career and, you know, it's never something when it hits, well, at least I shouldn't say this in my experience, I absolutely were completely prepared for, they were a little bit of a shock when they happened and Mark Kilby (02:51) yeah. Brian (03:05) first one much more so than the second one. I think you learn something from each time something like that happens. But you mentioned kind of the way the market is shifting and the way things are changing a little bit and trying to be prepared. So I wanna follow that for a little. So when you talk about navigating kind of a bumpy job market and the shifts and being prepared, how do you prepare for the unknown? For things that you don't really know what's coming or you don't really know how things are shifting. How do we do that? Mark Kilby (03:38) Yeah. Well, it's paying attention to some of the longer term trends. mean, 100 years ago, know, kind of fall into the hurricane example. We had no way to predict these. And now we've got a little better way. have models to kind of guess and it's still guessing. So, but at least we have a sense of, OK, how big is it going to be? You know, how big is the change that's going to happen? How do we prepare for it? Do we stay in place? Where we're at? Is it time to move and do something else? So it's kind of the same way with our careers these days. I'm gonna guess, not everyone's gonna have the visual, but with the amount of gray on the podcast right now, you could probably relate to this. Our parents probably stuck in the same job. most of their life. I learned early on, especially in tech, the changes that happen rapidly. Matter of fact, the place where I went as a summer intern shut down the next year. The whole plant went poof. But my parents were like, how can you? It's such a great place. This company's been around for decades. But I could tell that the winds were changing. Something was shifting there. So I learned to look at, right, how is the business doing? How is the market doing for the business? And what does that mean for me? So it really helps that we kind of build up our own little model to predict, you know, how is my job going to be here in the next year or so? Even five years ago, I saw early indicators that Azure coaches, scrum masters, we're going to be at risk. But the job market was going to turn. think several people could tell that. But I mean, we had so many that were going into that, that the set of roles and we were also, you we we were seeing some failures as well as successes with transformation. And I remember, so I actually had Ken Schwaber in my, as my my Scrum instructor, I remember him saying, know, Scrum will not solve your problems. It'll make them highly visible. But guess who gets blamed? The person who made it visible. you know, as, as agile coaches and Scrum masters, you know, were the, those folks in particular are always navigating a tightrope. You know, what, what do you, you know, what do you make visible, both the good and the bad? And if, if you're dealing, Brian (05:55) Yeah. Right. Mark Kilby (06:17) with cultures that are more focused on short-term kind of improvements and not looking at the longer term. How are people staying engaged? How are the steam aligned so they can do to deliver business value? You know, if that's not a focus of the organization, then it's that job, that role is going to be probably misunderstood and was. And so when things start going bad, fingers start getting pointed. It's like, okay, maybe we don't need these folks. And we've seen that for the last couple of years in particular, but we were getting early indicators well before that, well before the pandemic hit. So that shift was gonna happen. So we can model some of this is my point. Brian (07:01) Yeah. I like that. Go ahead. Well, I was going to go straight to that. I I like the comparison there with the hurricane. And I was thinking as you were talking about that, why are we better at it now? I would kind of presuppose it's because of the amount of data. But the more data we have, over the years, the better we are. And that if we've suddenly, magically, for whatever reason, lost all our historical data of hurricanes and what they do, then I would imagine we'd be back to square one of not really being able to predict very well about where they go. So translating that over into our careers, I love that comparison. And I love what you're pointing to to say, you can see indicators, can look at the trends, you can see how's the business doing. So that's kind of one of the things I want to ask you about a little bit is, especially here in this agile world, I know there's, I've heard lots of talk about, is this overall an agile thing that is on a decline or is this really more driven as an economy at large that's going through problems. And so we're kind of trickling down from that and feeling that. if I'm an employee for a company, what I'm trying to navigate then and figure out is I want to see trends for our business on the whole, but I also am trying to... Mark Kilby (08:38) Mm-hmm. Brian (08:40) fit that in with what the overall economy is and the market out there to see, is this just an overall thing for all of businesses right now and for the full economy or is this specifically something to do with our business that is kind of a, I would think a bigger warning sign than to start to get more prepared. Mark Kilby (08:59) Well, going back to the hurricane metaphor again, there's multiple things that impact that. It's the same thing for our jobs. So it's what data do you need to gather? And you pointed out to some of that. So what's happening with the company? What are you seeing in press releases? What are you seeing in commentary on your organization? I'll give an example of a company that no longer exists. So can safely speak about this company. So a company I was at early in my career and was well known in the Java programming space. They actually hosted a lot of Java sites at the time. They were also at the top of the, not the AI boom, but what was called the internet boom, know, dot com boom way back. And they went through the same Friends that a lot of companies did spending a lot of money Not pulling not pulling in revenue and it was very public how much they were spending When it became obvious that they bought like very expensive real estate office real estate in in Boston Harbor area and they bought very expensive real estate elsewhere You don't have to be a financial wizard to figure out like all right if they're spending all this money and and we're seeing pundits in other news sources say, yeah, we're not sure about this company. And you're seeing a lot of that. You might start to wonder as an employee, like, I wonder if I am really safe here. Is it time to hunker down or is it time to move? So you've got to gather your own data about your company, your industry, and even the broader economy. If you ignore that, you kind of ignore it at your own peril. We have to be the product owners of our own career. Brian (10:47) Mm, I love that. Yeah, that's a great way to look at it. Well, so shifting gears a little bit, because I think we obviously are not going to, we're soothsayers or anything. We can't foretell the future exactly. And there's always going to be things that kind of catch us off guard. There's the unknowns and that's Mark Kilby (10:48) Yeah. Yeah. Brian (11:10) Partly what we talk about a lot in Agile is just the idea that you can't know everything upfront. So you got to be prepared. You got to have a system that works for you that kind of allows for those unknowns to come along and then allows you to adjust as you're going through. So that's kind of where I want to go next then is if we accept the fact that, we have indicators and they can give us an indication about the job market or about our company. And we have to kind of assess those independently to see if it's time to move or we should be ready for something to happen or not. Once that threshold is crossed, once we make that decision, or it's made for us, then we're into a whole other world. And we talk about this being a bumpy job market. Well, it's bumpy on both sides of that threshold. So how would that apply to you? After you've crossed that threshold, how do we use Agile and an Agile mindset to navigate the task and the hardships of trying to find the next thing? Mark Kilby (12:16) Well, there's even a little bit before that. So that's OK, but a great question. And I'll come back around to it. So just as you're starting any agile project or program, there's some setup. There's some prep that you have to put in place. And I'm going to tie back to the hurricane metaphor here also. There are seasons for that prep sometimes. So think about the season you're in. Brian (12:18) Okay, sorry. Mark Kilby (12:41) month to month, quarter to quarter, and maybe you're wrapping up a big program, that would be a great time to update your resume and your LinkedIn. Not waiting until you're out of a job, but go ahead and just like, you know, I think I'm going to update. And people will say, but I don't want other people to know that I've updated my LinkedIn profile. There's an option for that. You can shut that off so that doesn't happen. But you want to get in that, that there's prep seasons like, okay, if something were to happen, what do I need to do? What do I, what, what I need to have ready? So keeping that resume up to date, keeping that LinkedIn profile up to date, then looking at, okay, I I've kind of doing these, these cycles of, of prep and also reflection on past work. Maybe I want to think about what was the work I enjoyed that I want to amplify through. LinkedIn, resume, and maybe even talk about a LinkedIn and kind of be broadcasting a little bit. I really enjoyed this project we just finished up. That gets you a little bit out there. And I can already hear the introverts cringing. But if you talk about the ideas, what you learned as an introvert, that works for me. Brian (13:47) Hahaha. Mark Kilby (13:56) I mean, that's how I got into remote work because I found interesting ideas and concepts to talk about. And that's how I got known by that. I looking to make a job switch? No. But I was broadcasting, hey, this is the kind of stuff I really enjoy doing, hoping to attract others who are also interested in that. And yes, it did lead to new job opportunities. So I got hired in 2014 because of the stuff I posted in LinkedIn around those times. So it's kind of doing that inspect and adapt, inspecting, where am I currently as I wrap up a big significant chunk of work? How do I capture some of that? What do I want to reflect? And what do I want to kind of make transparent about what I liked about that? Then let's say the winds turn and things get a little bumpy. Well, if you've... If you've been kind of connecting people, connecting with people online, if you've been kind of talking about, this is kind of things I do, it's much easier to go out there and say, hey, I'm looking for a new opportunity. You've seen what I've talked about online. What ideas, what do you have network? What do you have community? So it makes it much easier if you do some of that prep work and kind of reflect and inspect into that. Brian (15:20) Yeah, I'm getting a connection there too. I don't know if this is intentional or not, but I'm getting kind of a connection because I know in the agile world, we're all about how teams work together and just kind of that whole mindset of the best architectures, designs, right? The best stuff comes from a group of people working alongside each other. And I'm connecting that a little bit to what you just said, because you're talking a lot about how you're reaching out to the community through your LinkedIn profile and through post and other things. And that feels a little like you're kind of teaming, like you're teaming up with the network that you've made to try to solve this big problem that you have. Mark Kilby (16:05) And from a career standpoint, we team in different ways. mean, how many of us have been to courses, conferences, we've met people that we've kind of connected with, or we've talked about some great ideas, like, yeah, let's stay connected, let's talk more about that. How often do you follow up with those people? Do you like forget until the next conference? Do you maybe check in every six months? Maybe a little sooner? Maybe say, hey, what kind of projects are you working on based on that idea we talked about? Reach out to those connections that you made. of just not to keep them warm, but just to say, hey, what are you working on? How does it compare to what I'm working on? Let's just talk about that. Let's do some more reflection on that. Brian (16:49) I think that's great advice because I hear what you were saying earlier and agree. It's kind of a struggle when you're working at a company and you're not really sure yet whether you're moving on or you're not and no one has told you anything. But you're starting to feel the signs and you're starting to look around and say, maybe it's time, but it's not right for me to just blast it. It's not right for me to go to LinkedIn and... Mark Kilby (17:02) Mm hmm. Yeah. Brian (17:15) Because you don't want the boss or coworker to see that and say, what's going on? You don't want that to happen. But I think you're right. There's more subtle ways you can do that by just starting to connect to key people in your network. And I like that phrase. I like being able to say, hey, what's going on in this area? Or what have you done in this area that we talked about when we last connected? I think that's a great approach to that. Mark Kilby (17:40) because it's so much easier to ask for help when you need it then, rather than if you haven't talked to that person in five years since you saw them in a conference. But if you stayed in touch and just talked about, hey, here's some things I'm dealing with at work, how about you? What are you coming across? What are you learning? What are you trying? Or what are you struggling with? And if they know you're struggling, then they might say, hey, you know, I heard of this opportunity. And that's where the network helps you. That's where the team helps you out. Brian (18:12) Yeah. They always say that, you know, like that's the, that's your strongest avenue to, to another job is, is, you know, a personal connection and inroad, to the company. Cause you bypass all the, you know, all the silly AI stuff of scanning through resumes and do you have the right keywords and all that stuff? which, know, that's a whole other thing. but, you know, if you do, I think you're right. If you can make that personal connection. Mark Kilby (18:34) Mm-hmm. Brian (18:39) your resume can go to the top of the pile. You skip the initial vetting, you go to the interview, and once you get the interview, then you're golden from that point forward. Yeah, I love that. That's a great approach and I like the idea of continuing to maintain that network. But I will tell you, from my first layoff to my second layoff and how I kind of approach things was very, very different. And I'm kind of curious how this fits in with what you advise people as well, because I know my first layoff, I got a little snowed by certain people where I started to make strong connections. I started to go through energy process with people and they're in the full recruitment mode at that point, because they don't know if it's going to be you or somebody else. if you get to be... you know, one of the finalists, they're interviewing you, but they're also recruiting you. And I know I made that mistake early in my career of just thinking, well, I'm close. I'm close with these things. So I don't need to worry about continuing to do the day-to-day hard work of reaching out and making new connections and starting the process new. Because I don't want to lead them on. I don't want anybody to think that I'm, you know, interested when I'm so close with this other one over here. Mark Kilby (19:45) yeah. Brian (19:54) And yeah, I learned pretty quickly that's a mistake. know, those things, there's no promises. And you know, you gotta keep turning that crank every day of sending things out. So how does that fit in a little bit with the strategy? Mark Kilby (19:58) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well. Well. mean, to map it back to Azure concepts, you never prepped just one thing on the backlog. You're looking at what are some things that might pop up in this next sprint or this next phase of work? What is it that we might consider, but we're gonna make the final decision when it's time to make that decision? So you can't be in that stage as you talk about those final conversations and you're still doing the dance with them. It's like. You're confirming is this the right place and they're confirming are you the right one to bring in? That's not the decision point. The decision point is when the offer is made. So you've got to get some other things. You got to keep some other things going in the backlog. Keep it going, keep it going. And I would say even once you've accepted that offer, you might wait a week. because I've had some colleagues where they've gone in, they've gone through those interviews and maybe everything wasn't as advertised in the position. I think some of us have been in that where you go and it's like, this is not the job I signed up for. So keep those other connections warm for a week or two, just in case, just in case. Brian (21:24) Yeah, that's great advice. I tell a story sometimes to people in the classes about how there was a job I went to that's interviewed and they were asking me all sorts of agile questions. They wanted me to come in because of my agile expertise. I get in and unfortunately for me, it took a few months before it became clear that they were actually hearing the word agile from their division leader. And the division leader was not using capital A Agile. They were using small a Agile and saying, we just need to be faster. But he would throw out the word Agile. And so they heard Agile and thought, well, we need to know about this Agile thing. And yeah, that was not a good fit. That was not as advertised. I wish I had found that out earlier. But you make the decisions when you cross that threshold. Well, this is good advice. And I'm kind of curious then as well, you know, maybe taking it back a higher step because, you know, maybe I'm not in the place where I'm trying to decide, is it time to leave? But, you know, part of navigating a job market is also navigating a career and trying to understand what's the right next path for me or what's the right next step to get to the next level of where I think I should be in my career. How would you kind of apply an agile mindset to that kind of a process? Mark Kilby (22:44) So I will say, since I started with extreme programming, I'll bring in another concept, the spike. How do you set up an experiment where you can explore, is this possible or not? So let's say you're an individual contributor and you're wondering, should I take on a management? Brian (22:51) Okay. Mark Kilby (23:04) How can you experiment with that? So are you a member of any volunteer organizations? Can you lead an effort and see what that looks like to coordinate people? To actually maybe plan a budget to get some event going? What would that look like for you? What does it look like when not everybody's cooperating? Because when you deal with volunteer teams, it gets way more interesting than it works sometimes. Because you're really trying to appeal to their motivation. You can't fire them if they're a volunteer usually. So if you look for how can I experiment with what's next? And is there some way I can lean into some of the same activities? And then when I go and apply for that management position, say, yeah, I've run some of these things at my church or at this community center, and I've organized this, I've set the budgets for that. So you're already demonstrating some of the possibilities. You're trying to decide, this something that I enjoy, that I will benefit from, that I can lean into that next phase of my career? Brian (24:12) Yeah, yeah, I love that. That's really great. Well, this topic is, I think, so topical for a lot of people and, well, just about everyone. Because we're all at some stage of our career, and we're all at some stage of our relationship with the place we're at at the moment. I think we all have to be aware. I think we have to keep our eyes open and ears open. And like you said, try to find those sources of data that can clue me in as to what my situation is and maybe what I need to be prepared for. Is the hurricane coming my way or has it turned? Mark Kilby (24:44) Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Brian (24:48) Before I let you go though, I do want to take just a second here before we wrap things up. Because I mentioned your book earlier, the book From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams. And I know you've done lots of talks and research on distributed agile teams far before COVID happened. So I guess I'll ask you what What do you think has changed today in the years since COVID, when things now things have started to settle a little bit more? How has the nature of distributed teams shifted in just the past few years? Mark Kilby (25:25) Well, I think we're seeing some of those shifts even in the last couple months with the call away from hybrid to fully back in the office. We've seen it with Amazon, we saw it with Dell, we're seeing it with others. So I think we're seeing the companies and the management that was looking at what's next, what's possible, and those that are like, no, we like things the way they work. I assume that we're going to see many existing hybrid setups go away. I see, I think there's very few that are going to survive. There have been some other companies that have gone fully remote, but I think we're going to see a lot more of return fully to the office because it's really hard to live in both spaces at once to be in the office and be remote. It's, it's just too difficult. We probably didn't amplify that enough in the book. That's the one thing that Johanna and I, we've talked many times about updating the book and it's like, no, not yet. It's not quite time. Let's let this phase pass. But I think we're going to see things go back to almost 2018 where there's some companies that are doing well remote. And it's not just startups because there's companies, thousand, 2000 employees that are functioning well, fully remote, but it takes a different mindset. Brian (26:29) Yeah. Mark Kilby (26:49) around how do you connect, do you keep people engaged, how do you keep them motivated. So all those things that we were all forced to answer during the pandemic, some of these companies have been answering that a little bit more, I would say thoughtfully rather than being forced to answer them. Brian (27:09) That's a nice way to look at it. Yeah, I agree with that. Well, mean, so much road has passed our tires from when you guys started that. I mean, you wrote that prior to COVID, right? Yeah. Yeah, talk about a great timing. mean, you guys were really visionary looking ahead there. I'm sure there's no way you could have known there was going to be a massive pandemic, but yeah. Mark Kilby (27:20) Yeah, yeah, it came out late 2018. No, no. Brian (27:32) It was very timely when that happened to have that knowledge available for folks. Mark Kilby (27:36) Yeah, were, well, I want to add, we were never in the mindset that every organization should go remote. That was never ever our intention. But for those who wanted to go remote, that's what that book was for. Brian (27:44) Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. And you know, I know that's not our, not really what we, we focused on the, the podcast here, but I did want to just kind of dip into that a little bit for folks, just in case that is a topic that's of interest to anyone here listening as well. If you're really looking for information in that area, strongly encourage that book for, for you again, from chaos to successful distributed agile teams. And we'll put a link to it in the show notes so people can find it so they can, you know, find your work and. to follow up and any last thoughts here before we close it out? Mark Kilby (28:26) Yeah, so I would say whatever you're struggling with, step back from that. I don't care if it's remote work. I don't care if it's a career challenge, but step back and look at what are the patterns that you're seeing and how can you inspect and adapt for those patterns. That's an agile mindset. Brian (28:47) I love that. Yeah, it tends to follow that if we put to practice these things we're teaching, you know, and talking about and trying to do in our organizations now and kind of apply that to other areas of our life that, you know, we're going to see similar results. So, I really appreciate you coming on. this has been a great conversation. And, and, as I said, I know, Mark, there's going to be lots of people listening who are just going to eat this up because, you know, if you're in that position, You know, you're looking for any kind of help that you can get. So I hope this is really helpful to folks and I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge in this area. Mark Kilby (29:22) Thanks, Brian, for having me on. Brian (29:25) Absolutely.

Greetings, my spectral spectators!

Greetings, my spectral spectators!

In this episode of Collaborwocky, Diana Larsen, a renowned expert in leadership and organizational development, shared her insights on the concept of "Learning Leaders." This paradigm shift in leadership thinking is particularly relevant in today's evolving work environments, especially in the software industry. The Collaborwocky Team: Jim Benson, Dave Prior, Tonianne DeMaria, Thushyanthan Amirthalingam and Mark Kilby. The Collaborwocky Mother Ship: Collaborwocky is produced by the faculty at Modus Institute and brings fresh perspectives on making work more enjoyable, effective and humane. Come join the community. The Collaborwocky Promise: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we will bring you interviews, conversations and new ideas... often.

In this thought-provoking discussion on Collaborwocky, the panelists explore a paradigm shift in leadership, moving away from traditional notions of charisma and authority vested in a few individuals. Instead, they advocate for a more inclusive and collaborative approach, where leadership is viewed as a collective endeavor.  The Collaborwocky Team: Jim Benson, Dave Prior, Tonianne DeMaria, Thushyanthan Amirthalingam and Mark Kilby. The Collaborwocky Mother Ship: Collaborwocky is produced by the faculty at Modus Institute and brings fresh perspectives on making work more enjoyable, effective and humane. Come join the community. The Collaborwocky Promise: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we will bring you interviews, conversations and new ideas... often.

In today's episode, Pilar Orti welcomes regular guest Mark Kilby onto the show, to find out how he's using generative AI. They share their personal experiences, preferences, and cautionary tales surrounding various AI tools. Plus, they have plenty of reading, listening and tool recommendations for you this month! Recorded on 24 April 2024, so some of the tools have evolved since then. For the show notes, check out: https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/may-recommendations You can connect with Mark Kilby on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/mkilby/ Or message him through his website: www.markkilby.com And if you'd like to keep up with his thoughts and work, subscribe to Differability https://differability.works/ Connect with Pilar over at https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/contact-us 

Join Brian for the 100th episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast as he dives into the future of Agile with fan favorites Scott Dunn and Lance Dacy. Listen in as they explore the evolving role of AI, the continuous need for leadership innovation, and the Agile community's journey towards greater accountability and effectiveness. Overview In the 100th episode, our expert panel celebrates by examining the latest trends and enduring challenges in the Agile industry. They discuss the critical need for organizations to adapt and innovate, particularly through leadership and management strategies that foster high-performing teams. This episode is a deep dive into how embracing change and technological advancement can propel the Agile industry forward, ensuring that organizations not only survive but thrive in an ever-evolving business landscape. Listen Now to Discover: [1:10] - Join Brian in a special celebration of the 100th episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, featuring a look forward to future innovations in Agile! [1:43] - Brian kicks off the landmark 100th episode with a forward-looking panel on Agile and Scrum's future, featuring experts Scott Dunn and Lance Dacy. [4:01] - Listen in as Brian asks the panel to share their insights on emerging trends within Agile and Scrum, setting the stage for a thought-provoking conversation. [4:15] - Lance highlights key trends including solutions for scaling challenges, the integration of AI in Scrum, and innovations in leadership and management. [6:54] - Scott emphasizes the enduring impact of Agile and Scrum in driving organizational enhancements. [11:36] - Lance underscores the critical need for leadership and management to adopt innovative approaches and acknowledge generational changes to effectively engage and support their teams. [13:30] - Addressing the provocative statement that 'Agile is dead,' Brian explores its implications on the real-world demand for Agile compared to its perceived necessity. [14:50] - Brian, along with Scott and Lance, urges the Agile community to recognize its shortcomings and learning experiences, which they believe may be contributing to negative perceptions of Agile, and how the community could approach it differently. [24:10] - Brian encourages you to try out Goat Bot, Mountain Goat software’s Scrum & Agile AI tool. This free tool is trained to handle all your Agile and Scrum queries—start asking your questions today! [25:58] - The panel explores the impact of AI on enhancing agility in organizational practices in estimating, development, and so much more. [32:20] - Brian stresses the importance of using AI as a tool to support, not supplant, discussing ways it can improve rather than replace human efforts. [43:23] - Brian shares a big thank you to Scott and Lance for joining him on the 100th episode of the show. [43:44] - Brian thanks you, the listeners, for your support and shares his excitement for the future of the show, inviting you to send us your feedback or share your great ideas for episodes of the show. Just send us an email. [44:57] - We invite you to like and subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast. [45:16] - If you’d like to continue this discussion, join the Agile Mentors Community. You get a year of free membership into that site by taking any class with Mountain Goat Software, such as CSM, or CSPO, or Better User Stories Course. We also have Advanced Certified ScrumMaster® and Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner®, where we get right into the good stuff and have some deep discussions. We'd love to see you in one of Mountain Goat Software's classes, you can find the schedule here. References and resources mentioned in the show: Scott Dunn Lance Dacy Goat Bot Certified ScrumMaster® Training and Scrum Certification Certified Scrum Product Owner® Training Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner® Advanced Certified ScrumMaster® Mike Cohn’s Better User Stories Course Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule Join the Agile Mentors Community Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Scott Dunn is a Certified Enterprise Coach and Scrum Trainer with over 20 years of experience coaching and training companies like NASA, EMC/Dell Technologies, Yahoo!, Technicolor, and eBay to transition to an agile approach using Scrum. Lance Dacy is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®. Lance brings a great personality and servant's heart to his workshops. He loves seeing people walk away with tangible and practical things they can do with their teams straight away. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian (00:00) Agile Mentors, welcome. This is our 100th episode. Can you believe it? We've been doing this for 100 episodes now. So first, before we even get into today's episode, I just wanna say huge, huge thank you to you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for giving us feedback. Thank you for giving us suggestions. We would not have made it to 100 without you, so. Huge thanks to you. And to celebrate, we're trying to do something different here for the 100th and not just let it go by and not mark this occasion. So what I wanted to do was to have some of our regulars, our favorites on together so that we could really kind of look ahead. So let me introduce our panel for today. First of all, I've got Mr. Scott done with us. So Scott, welcome. Scott Dunn (01:00) Thank you, Brian. Glad to be here. This is awesome. Congratulations. That's so cool. Brian (01:04) That, thank you, thank you, thank you very much. And then another favorite that we have on quite frequently is Lance Dacey is with us as well. Lance Dacy (01:13) Hey Brian, congratulations once again. I remember us just talking about this when you were starting out with podcasts and you look at 100. You do this every week, right? Is it a, has it been a hundred weeks? Wow. Brian (01:22) Yeah. Yeah, we do this every week. We missed a couple. Our listeners probably know there's been a couple of times in there we've taken some small breaks around holidays and other things. But yeah, this is going on just about every week since then. Lance Dacy (01:38) Well, congratulations. That's amazing. Brian (01:40) Thank you, thank you. Yeah, I'm amazed and as I said, very, very grateful. And it really hit home to me when I went to my first conference after doing this and people would come up and say, hey, I listen. That was really a cool moment. And I always tell people, hey, I'm speaking to other conferences, come and say hi. Come and say hi to me this year. So as I said, I wanted to have a panel so that we could talk about, we've been... Scott Dunn (01:40) Amazing. Brian (02:10) doing this for 100 episodes and lots has changed, lots have changed over the past year and a half, almost two years now that we've been doing this. We kicked off on, I think it was May 18th, 2022. So we're coming up on two years of doing this. And my thought was, what's gonna happen over the next 100 episodes? Like, where are we gonna be in the next two years? Where are we gonna be in the next five years? What kind of things are changing? What are we going to think about stuff over that time period? So I wanted to have a panel to kind of comment and discuss this with us and Where I wanted to start is maybe not where I think most people are going to think I'm going to go But I want to start with kind of the agile industry kind of the way things are going now for Coaches consultants scrum masters product owners So I'm gonna throw this as an open question and whichever of you wants to go first, go first. But what do you think we're seeing right now? What kind of trends are you seeing in that realm? And where do you think it's gonna, where do you think it's going? Scott Dunn (03:26) I nominate Lance to go first. Lance Dacy (03:28) Okay, here, obviously they're thinking about Scott. It looks like he's got something to say. Okay, well, that's a tough question because I think it still depends on the industry and the organization. It's all made up of people still. So there's still a lot of variables, I think, that affect the way that we do our jobs as transition coaches or business agility coaches or agile coaches, whatever you wanna call us. I think... Brian (03:29) Hahaha Lance Dacy (03:59) You know, I think there's still plenty of organizations out there that are struggling to bring their people together to deliver great products. And it's not because they don't want to, it's just lacking the skills and the frameworks and things to do that. So I still think that there's some organizations out there that benefit from saying, hey, let's just start from what we know and start doing this and then adapt to it as it changes. But I think a lot of times organizations, I think scaling is one of those big. problem child out there that people have kind of learned how to do this with smaller teams and smaller parts of the organization, but getting the whole organization to collaborate together. And of course, they look to another framework for that. And I'm kind of framework agnostic, especially when it comes to scaling, because I think at the end of the day, if you can't do it well in the small environment, it's going to be very difficult to do it well in the large environment. So the best thing you can do is kind of analyze your own situation. with like value stream mappings and cross-functional teams and things like that, and try to make sure that you're organizing yourselves and preventing waste as much as possible, I think is one of the big things. But I've also seen a kind of an uptick in, of course, these practices in agile being distributed over non-software domains. We've seen that for a long time, that's not necessarily a new thing, but I think it's gravitating more. to that. But I think the biggest one is really what we're talking about today is how is this AI stuff or what we have been talking about, how is that affecting this? And I think it's here quicker than we really think, or already here. And so trying to figure out how to handle, you know, data driven decision making based on that and, you know, using these tools to integrate. And then I think the last one that I would talk about is leadership and management. I think There's a specific type of environment and culture required for these people to thrive and collaborate and leadership and management has not seen a lot of innovation in the last 150 years. So, I find myself spending a lot of time coaching executives and mid-level managers on how to foster an environment that we can know how we practice psychological safety, empowering people and making it a great place to work, especially in this remote distributed environment. So I don't know if it's... All that's fairly new, but I think it's more prevalent than it was in the past. So I don't know, Scott, go ahead. Scott Dunn (06:28) No, that's good stuff. And I've only got 35 points I want to walk through. So one, I think we had all agreed that this idea of agile seems to be the common experience we're seeing as we're still coaching out there in organizations. They think that they've already done that. That's in the past. What's next? Or they settled in like, we're just hybrid. And it's not a. So help us move forward. It's like, no, we weren't done that. Here's this other thing. But the other things they're needing. And I like it, Lance. You kind of mentioned a couple of other words that people use, like organizational improvement, organizational chiasm, these ideas, like, hey, we're trying to get better. And I almost rather use those words because if I use a word they think they know, then we've kind of lost the fact that, you know, we're there. It strikes me, it's a little bit like marketing. They're just like, nope, marketing's done. And now we're doing this. And like, no, marketing's always learning, moving forward, growing. And I think we're gonna see this idea they realize, like, oh. Agile wasn't like a destination we check the boxes now they're on Scrum team. So that's one thing we're continuing to see. And the reason I'm saying that is the problems are still the same problems. We're talking earlier about capacity management, visibility, clear, you know, can execs see where we are in these larger initiatives? And the answer is like, no, they're still not doing those well. That speaks to whole org. And two quick stories on that is one, we're working with a company that decided like, yes, we're going to take this whole org approach. Lance Dacy (07:27) Yeah. Scott Dunn (07:45) And once they, within a few months, they'd gone from cycle time of 100 days down to 10. They had tripled their productivity. They went from one release every two weeks to seven in a day, right? But that's because the whole org is represented as they're rolling out, actually holistically. Let's contract that with a company we're just talking to this week. I was trying to describe getting a group together, it's representatives across other departments who have people who have authority, who have influence, finances, et cetera. they could not grasp the idea that there'd be a team working on improvement items across the org. It took several explanations, like I'm not talking at the team level. I'm talking about the team that's working across the org level. And what part of this comes back to is I think of the idea of I'm a manager. This is my own like awakening recently. If I'm a manager, let's say I'm the software engineering manager, I'm the director, my concern, this is my mistake earlier, my concern is not, are we doing ads all right? My concern is, is my boss getting what they want? If my boss wants clear reporting on where we're at the features, I don't care if it's Agile, waterfall hybrid doesn't matter. Did you show me a nice pretty report that gives them what they need? That's what I, that's what I do not wanna be called into her office on Friday about, right? So I keep mistaken, like they wanna do Agile, right? No, they wanna check the box and what they're accountable for and meet those expectations. And I know the higher up the or we go, the less they probably understand about Agile. At least that's the surveys that I'm running is like a... a 20, 30, 50% gap between what these people say their managers think they understand about Agile and what the people actually do in the work know that they understand Agile or not, which is always a large gap. A good example of that is remote. I'm not trying to kick a dead horse when it's down or whatever the saying is, but we've talked about remote a lot, but here's what we're seeing is, I think the basis of a lot of this return to office is simply, I don't know my people are working or not, I just need to see them. Brian (09:30) Hahaha. Scott Dunn (09:41) I can't tell, and I can't see them, I can't tell, and I get nervous, which really means I don't really have an understanding of fundamental aspects of how work is done using transparency, inspect and adapt, all that, right? And because I can't really, I don't really have mastery over that, I'm gonna need you in the office at least three times a week. Because I don't, I'm not really watching the work anyways, but at least I know you're showing up, and I'm accountable to make sure people are busy and working. That's, you know, I draw it down to its most rudimentary level. To me, it's a reflection of the capability of management. You mentioned that, Lance, about leadership. I think we're starting to see Lance Dacy (09:41) Right. Brian (09:52) Yeah. Scott Dunn (10:11) What we probably will see is this real cutting line of those who get it and trust their people and they work. And we've seen, you know, 10X, 100X on, on experts really let loose to do their best work and those who are simply like, you know, managed in that traditional sense and all the drawbacks and your loss of talent, all that. I think the companies will have to pay the price eventually. Thinking back to the time when people didn't really want to go ad drug because they thought it was a fad. And it didn't take but a few years, like, um, I could be wrong. Brian (10:35) Yep. Scott Dunn (10:38) maybe that is a thing we need to do, right? And then everyone gets on board, but there was a lot of kicking and screaming and doubting the early years. I think we're gonna see that with remote work is made like the proving ground of do you really work this way or not as a manager? Do you get this or not? So those are some of the trends I see. I still see a lot of people still in the very fundamentals because they think these things are already understood and known and we're moving on to something next. There is no next. I think the pace of change out there is if you're not working this way as an organization, you're losing ground already. Like... while they're listening to the podcast. Lance Dacy (11:08) It's like the remote, you know, what you were just saying is like the remote is the automated test for your operating system at work is like, if it works like that, then we're likely doing some really good things. But you know, I remember, um, I'm going to show my age here though, but prior to my technology career, I worked at FedEx and I was in leadership and management, managing their third largest hub here in Fort Worth, Texas, uh, the air hub, you know, and FedEx did a great job teaching leadership and management and all that kind of stuff. Brian (11:08) Yeah. Scott Dunn (11:14) Thank you. Lance Dacy (11:36) And I remember them focusing on the idea that you cannot lead and manage people currently how you are going to in the future because they were talking about how the new generation is coming on board and they just won't tolerate certain things. And I think you hit it on the head with that, Scott, that if these managers don't learn how to lead and manage with this newer generation, two or three removed from what I'm talking about. you're not going to have any employees because they will not tolerate it. They do not work that way. They work radically different. You know, I'm going to categorize money as a gen X person. And I'm going to say we were taught to be very individualistic, climb the corporate ladder, you know, keep your pain to yourself, just grin and bear it, fight through it, do the best you can and be autonomous and don't rely on a lot of people. And, you know, don't trust anybody. You know, the latchkey kids, we just were independent. We learned how to do it all. And that's not necessarily bad. We needed to be managed a different way than these people now. I, and I've got four kids, so I see it. It's like, they're not going to tolerate this stuff. So you hit it on the head with that leadership. I mean, coverage, a broad spectrum, but, um, Mike gave a talk in Oh nine. I'll never forget this. When I first went to the scrum gathering in Orlando and Oh nine, and he was on a panel and he said it really succinctly. He said, I hope we don't call it agile or scrum anymore. It's just the way that we work. Brian (12:36) Yeah. Lance Dacy (12:54) And he was referencing object oriented programming. You know, he said, we don't call it object oriented programming anymore, it's just programming, you know, object one. And so it's like, yeah, we're not going to, let's not have this debate. We want to build the highest business value things as early as possible with the least amount of costs who can argue that that's not the right way to run an organization. So let's not debate it. Let's not use the buzzwords. Let's just do it. Brian (13:01) Right. Scott Dunn (13:12) Yes. Brian (13:18) Yeah, I agree. And it's, you know, kind of back to what Scott said, too, there is a marketing issue here, right? There is this kind of idea of people are so saturated with the terms that they've experienced them and they feel like, hey, I know that I know what that is, I don't need to be I don't need to learn any more about that. And now I'm just kind of moving forward when they don't really. And that's what drives all the people out there that are saying Agile is dead and all the Agile is dead speakers and all that stuff. It's not dead. And if you listen to them, they don't say it's dead. They just say, people don't understand what it is. And so they're doing it wrong. I think there's kind of this interesting dynamic going on. Right, because on one hand, I think we're at a time when Scott Dunn (13:54) Mm-hmm. Brian (14:03) businesses could benefit the most from doing things like Agile because they're gonna get the most with less by doing these kinds of approaches. However, at the same time, we're hearing stories of entire Agile departments being let go in different organizations. And we're seeing people who struggle after coming through classes and stuff finding work as a scrum master, even though there's a demand. There's high demand still for these kinds of things. So there's sort of this dichotomy that's going on of, I think there's a slump going on in the agile demand when the need for it is high. And maybe that's a marketing, right. Maybe that's a marketing thing that we haven't done a good job, but I wanna propose one other thing here and I wanna get your guys take on this. Lance Dacy (14:51) than ever. Brian (15:02) The people who say Agile is dead and they say that, we shouldn't be doing this because we should call it something else. Because no one understands what it is anymore. And that's why they say it's dead. I have generally thought of those, and I think many of us sometimes fault the leadership a little bit in this to say, they didn't invest enough to understand it. They didn't really support it, right? Kind of that mentality. But I think that as an Agile community, that we need to own up. Like, I think we just need to step forward and say, you know what, we have not always done it right. And there's been plenty, you know, I talked about this in the Scrum Master class. There's plenty of Scrum Masters out there who think that the job of being a Scrum Master is to schedule meetings. And that is it. And... Scott Dunn (15:55) Oh. Brian (15:58) You know, those people, you can understand why a company would say, I don't need that person. I don't need a person to do that. And then all of a sudden they're letting go all of their Scrum Masters because they think that's what a Scrum Master is. So I think we have to own up a little bit to say, we're partly responsible for this, right? We're partly responsible for the bad impression that Agile has and we just gotta own it and say, yes, that's true, but that's because we've made mistakes as well and we're learning. Lance Dacy (16:17) Thank you. Brian (16:28) And now we know better, right? Now we know what we're supposed to do. But the pretense that we maybe came into it with, saying, hey, we know everything and we know how to do this stuff, was what caused the downfall, I think. What do you think? Scott Dunn (16:32) Hmm. Lance Dacy (16:44) It's like the overlay though of saying here, here's how you do it, right? I think what we got wrong or not necessarily wrong, just we didn't know any better at the time is, I've worked with 20 companies and this way work, let's try it. And then if it doesn't work, we'll adapt it. Cause I think it's always been about that. But you know, just like any approach, you know, the effectiveness of that approach depends a lot on how it's implemented, supported, adapted, taught. And I feel like what we should just start focusing on, you know, it's hard to put this in one term, Maybe it's just like helping and facilitating the creation of high performing teams. Like that's an unarguable thing that you would want to have. What's happening is the organizations either whether they misunderstand the role or have a bad experience in the past with it because you can't say their experience is invalid, right? Everybody has their different experience and opinion and what they went through. And I acknowledge that. But if you think of any professional sports teams, what's happening in the organizations in this world? Brian (17:20) Yeah. Lance Dacy (17:43) is they're getting rid of the coach of the team. And what we have to do is start recognizing what does the coach really do is trying to make the team high performing. You know, in professional sports, it's to score points and win the game, right? Well, kind of trying to do the same thing here, you would never get rid of the coaching position saying, well, all they do is watch film and tell the team what they're doing wrong. No, I mean, Andy Reid, you know, the Kansas City Chiefs, they won the Super Bowl, arguably the best football team in the world, if that's what you're using as a bar. And... Scott Dunn (17:46) Thank you. Brian (17:55) No. Scott Dunn (18:03) Thank you. Lance Dacy (18:12) And so they've arrived, they're the best. Do we get rid of Andy Reid? No, they need him even more because they get complacent and they get this idea that we don't need to change anything. And I see plenty of teams like that. It's like, no, the coach has one of the hardest jobs in the world is to tell the best performing team in the world they can get better. And the organization sometimes is the wet blanket and suffocating the environment for which that team can perform. Scott Dunn (18:16) Thank you. Lance Dacy (18:37) And I feel like, you know, instead of whether you want to call it a scrum master and agile codes or whatever, it's almost hard to use those terms. Some of these people anymore, because they'll just sit there and argue with you about it, but let's just say I'm trying to coach a high performing team and how can you argue with that, you know? Brian (18:50) Yeah. Yeah, I don't think you can. Scott, what do you think? Scott Dunn (18:53) If I was to ask you, well, if I was to ask both of you, do traditional management, whoever's making hiring decisions, do they know what an agile coach is and what's in telling them that they're doing well or not? And I would argue the most don't. And I think that's why we see a lot of people, I mean, in the end, people follow the money. I don't call people for work and their own self-interest. So if I can just update my LinkedIn profile and change it to agile coach. and whoever interviews me can't tell a difference. And that means I get a salary bump and of course, or let's just tell it like it is. And I think your listeners, I know you to be good with this. If I can just take a two day class and I'm gonna get a 25% salary increase, whether or not I get it or not, let's not even go there. Like I passed the test, I've got the certification. And unfortunately, I think that's more the dynamics of any given market is like, oh, it jumps to the solution, right? I just, you know. hire these scrum masters and I've done the agile thing. And even though any of us would say like, that's much bigger than that, this agile coaching involved is much more than the two day class that you need, et cetera. But think about that. I'd look at the people that I've trained, which, you know, is thousands. How many companies actually came back and said, we need help as an agile coach? 20, 22 dozen, right? That we actually went in and did real transformation work. So that's them not asking. That's them like, no, we got it. I think that simplicity of understanding Do I take a solution or do I go through a mindset change? Well, taking the solutions is going to be easier. So I'm going to jump to that rather than like reflect, like, I think we need to change. Change is hard, we agree. So back to the point of like, are we to blame? I see some of that market dynamics, but we do that with diets. We do that with the career. Also Greg, we wouldn't just grab something easier than actually go through the change. So I do agree with you, but I think it's a good point. How we try to re-message that when the world already thinks I understand it. I think we're watching this happen. When I look at companies in that space, Brian (20:30) Yep. Scott Dunn (20:42) They are using different terms and phrases. I think that moves us away from, maybe that's an aspect of like, where to blame. The other interesting thing, Lance, you mentioned about the coach and we don't fire the coach. And I think that's the best example I go to is, look, I'm a business owner of a professional sports team. I'm watching the dollars and I don't wanna have to pay Andy Reid millions, but I know it gets results. And I don't wanna coach for the offensive line. I don't wanna coach for defensive, but the results are clear whether that works or not. Brian (21:03) Yeah. Scott Dunn (21:08) The other thing that's interesting is you watch some of these coaches, like when it changed in college football with name engine, name engine and likeness in terms of attracting students for different reasons. Like I can make money during college. I don't have to hope I make the pros. And how that changed the game significantly to where some coaches like, forget it. I don't want to play this game where they're now empowered to make their own decisions on where they want to go and not just sit on the bench. If I want to sit on the bench, the transfer portal. So you're watching dynamics play out on what does that mean to bring that change in? I do think in the end, there's probably a simple split on, there's an organization that needs to continuously improve and look for ways to do that. Not as one-off projects of, hey, let's do an improvement project here. But as a feeder backlog, but simply there's always ways to improve and stuff's always coming in and we're always working that as a layer of the way the organization runs. When I see a chief agility officer, some of these other roles, I think they get it. I think manufacturing systems get that with like lean thinking and like, That's just what we do. We're always looking for that. I don't think software engineering. And this organization get it. And to be honest, my friends, you can tell me if I'm off. I don't know if they got sold that truth of this is always going. It is not put all your engineers on the teams, hire a scrum master, change someone's title of product owner and you're good, right? But I think that's what they kind of thought it was. And then they're done, but that's a team level. It's not organization level and it just sits there. So I guess there is someone with the blame because maybe that's what they were taught and not the bigger picture as well. Brian (22:25) Yeah. Yeah. Scott Dunn (22:35) Perhaps. Lance Dacy (22:36) The rebranding is interesting the way you said that. I don't, you know, let's call it something other than Agilent or Scrum, whatever you were talking about. And that's what organizations do when things are broken, is they reorg. We're gonna just change the name of it. It's like following a diet plan and going, well, I don't like that it doesn't let me have sugar, so I'm just gonna call it something different. The constraint. Brian (22:48) Hmm. Yep, you're right. Scott Dunn (22:50) Yes, yes Lance Dacy (23:02) You know, the constraint is there to make you better. And I think that's what a lot of people don't get about, let's say the Scrum framework has a lot of constraints built in not to make it harder to do your work. And I will argue it's harder. Like I tell people all the time, this is a harder way to work. It's not an easier way because it requires all of us to come together. But you just said it so eloquently, Scott, I just thought about that, that they just, who cares what we call it. Brian (23:03) Yeah. Scott Dunn (23:16) Yes, for sure. Lance Dacy (23:26) the organization and the leadership is stuck by saying that at their level, all they gotta do is call it something different and now it's solved. All I gotta do is change the org chart on a spreadsheet. And I can't tell you how many organizations I work with where I'll get a note and say, well, we're going through a reorg right now, so we gotta hold off on this training or do this or do that. It's like, well, you just went through one, I've worked with companies that have been their coach for a very long time. It's like, how many of these are we gonna go through? What's the purpose? When are we going to start realizing that it's not who reports to who, it's who's doing the work and what's the environment and culture we've created for them. And I feel like leadership and management, I don't even care if it's software. Like Scott, you're saying software, we really don't get it. I'm not sure any company really, there's a few out there that I would say their leadership and management's working really well, but the operating system for the culture is broken. And, you know, we know that for a long time as agile coaches, but it's like, there's some benefits to be gained even while that's happening. Brian (23:54) Yeah. Lance Dacy (24:24) that we can get some efficiencies going here and they're still better off. But we've hit that next level, the problems are more complex now. People and it's leadership and it's hard to change those because they've been doing it for 150 years this way. You know? Scott Dunn (24:34) Yes. Brian (24:34) Yeah. Scott Dunn (24:40) Yes. Yeah. Brian (24:41) Yeah. Well, we can't leave the episode without talking about AI, at least a little bit, because I know you brought that up already. But yeah, we definitely need to think about AI in the future. And yeah, yeah. Because I know we talked about that a little bit when we were meeting here before we started to record. But just curious. Scott Dunn (24:46) Hahaha! Lance Dacy (24:52) leaders and managers. Scott Dunn (24:54) Yes. Brian (25:06) Where do you think that whole thing is going? What I should say is, how do you think it's going to affect agility? That's the big question. Lance Dacy (25:17) You want me to go again first, Scott, or is he going to flip flop? Scott Dunn (25:20) No, no, we're not flip-flopping. It's you, man. You got it. I'm not changing. Brian (25:23) Hahaha Lance Dacy (25:23) Okay. He has some reason to do this. You know, I feel like I'm walking into a trap here. Um, the way he's going to trap me. Um, well, and you know, we were kind of talking before we even, you know, started the podcast, but I was mentioning, you know, project management wise, you know, that I believe AI can bring a lot to just helping teams become more efficient and productive just at a superficial level by simply Scott Dunn (25:28) With pretty... Brian (25:29) No, that's a wrong answer, Lance. Lance Dacy (25:50) if we're talking about Scrum, let's say, because a lot of us practice Scrum and we teach it, you think about a sprint planning exercise and how often it's very difficult to just simply explain how to come up with your capacity for the next two weeks, and based on your skillset and the work needing to be done, are we sure and confident that the work we've committed in this next one, two, three, or four week period that we can actually get it done? as a cross-functional team within the constraint of getting something usable to the end user. I think a lot of people forget that as well. So I feel like automating things like sprint planning where you can feed in a profile of all of your different skill sets and their capacity. We no longer languish over this big spreadsheet that I used to use back 10, 12 years ago. There's a lot of better ways to do it nowadays, but I think eventually you just say, based on this team and what they've given me, here's how much work we can do. feed in the work and say here's the best sequence of the work. You know, the harder part is fitting, you know, utilization is not really a topic I want to get into because I think it's always misunderstood. But once you account for all of the slack time that you need to, you want to be as utilized as possible. I think using AI to help figure out what's the best path. Like I do an exercise in my class where I give them 10 backlog items and based on the different skills, capacity, and things that need to be done, what's the best fit? Right, so in data science, we talk about fitting the model. Why not use AI to help us be the best sequencing of the work with the highest value and the best way to use our capacity? So automatic task assignment, just like we do with calendars now, where people can feed in the work they need to do and it'll create the best calendar fit to maximize your workload. Automated code is coming, you know, we're already here. You know, automated. backlog creation, chat bots, AI driven testing. I think all of that is, if not here already around the corner, that's gonna affect, hopefully in a good way, the way that teams do that. Now, we can have a whole nother topic of how that affects product and marketing, because I think the biggest issue we have is getting closer to the user, and understanding and having empathy for them, because too often we get caught up in our own world that we're just... Brian (28:03) Yep. Lance Dacy (28:10) languishing through trying to get the work out. Well, why are we doing the work is the real reason and what's the best way we can get that work to the user that solves their problem. So I'll pause there. There's a hundred things I could go in. I had 35 bullet points. I have about 110, because I love this stuff, AI and data science and all that stuff. But Scott, I'd like to hear you had some good ideas in our pre-talk as well. Scott Dunn (28:14) Thank you. Thank you. Well, I appreciate you inviting me out to the Lance Dacey podcast. I just want to say thank you for that. Right when he drank his water too. Brian (28:37) Hahaha! Weird. Lance Dacy (28:44) Right. I can't respond. Let me take a scotch now that I can respond. Brian (28:46) Yeah. Scott Dunn (28:49) Yeah, he just needs to take a drink. He's ready to go. I know I love it. I love all the ideas in the Thoughtsland. So on my particular view, when we look at the companies we're helping, so we're Atlassian partners, so I'm watching what they're doing. And I mentioned about the fact that it can automatically do like acceptance criteria, you can ask. Anything about, take all the, what we used to call it, the tribal knowledge. It's gonna do that for you. I don't need to track down who's Lucy whomever. I'm just gonna ask it and it knows. I can say, give me a spreadsheet of the people involved with this. What's the background of this project? Any of that tribal knowledge is like, it's already there now. All that data sitting in Confluence, and Jira, et cetera, ability to create tickets. I'm not going and manually creating tickets anymore. I just say, create a ticket for this thing. So all those add up to lots of saving, time savings, all the manual stuff, anything that you just already know. And everyone hates making the tickets and doing so. it's going to take care of that stuff for you automatically. On the dev and engineering side, I'm seeing a lot around what seems to be promising, impossible, certainly code reviews, like there's a template of things that you know you're checking for in code reviews, readiness to go to production. Can it create these models and things? I think we'll wait to see. We're talking about the case tools, but I believe it will because it's not limitless on when we're creating basic applications. If you take your simplest thing like hello world, you know. or a basic screen that's only got five things or a login screen, there's only so many permutations what's gonna happen with that. And it can learn those things and do those things. Software engineering is your biggest cost for software companies, these engineers, and they're hard to find, and you got time zone issues and all these other things. Everyone's looking for ways to reduce cost right now. We've got issues of just getting the talent and the source, and you got parts of these engineers' work that they do not wanna be doing anyways. So I think you're gonna see a lot of those things put pressure on figuring that stuff out. But between the computing power that we're talking about, how much can be handled by those graphics chips and how much information is out there, I think you're gonna see real wins of measurable significance that's gonna be proven out and certainly driven by the business leaders themselves trying to find where can we reduce the cost with the promise of some of these things. But those are some that I've already seen. We're definitely watching, as I mentioned, Brian (30:43) Yeah. Scott Dunn (31:12) on the Scrum developer side, just saying like, what's happening out there? And just take a look and see what we can do. But you're gonna start finding the simpler solutions that are gonna be chipped away at first. I think about the self-driving cars. I remember thinking there's no way the car can handle all these, you know, what felt like limitless situations. It really isn't. There's only so many things happening on the roads and they have slowly learned to do that. I think it's gonna be the same on the engineering side as well. Brian (31:31) Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I agree with both of you. I kind of think that I've taken a stance on it, like in the past, I just see it as a tool. It's a more advanced tool and it can do some things better than we can right now. There's some things that does really well and there's some things that right now it's not very good at. And I think it's important to try to understand that, right? I'm not gonna, you know. I think I've come to a place where I would never say, I don't think it could do X, Y, Z, because I think that eventually it can. I think that there's gonna be things it can do. And it's just a matter of time before it can do pretty much anything that we could be doing right now. Even right now, one of the things it's really, really bad at is having ideas. It doesn't really... Scott Dunn (32:10) Right. Brian (32:30) brainstorm or it can give you ways of, it can give you some little tidbits and things that you can build upon. But having used it to help try to write a blog post or anything like that, well, here's an experiment, right? Go to any, your favorite AI and ask it for 10 business ideas based on whatever, just, Uh... Lance Dacy (33:01) Of course it's not going to be good at that. Brian (33:03) Well, no, it'll give you, it'll give you 10. Scott Dunn (33:03) There's a creativity problem right there. We have a problem with creativity. I see it. Lance Dacy (33:07) I'm just kidding, bro. Brian (33:08) Yeah, it'll give you 10, but then go back and ask it and do a new chat, ask it again. Do a new chat, ask it a third time. Compare the answers you got across all three. And what you'll see is it's a lot of reused stuff, right? And the reason that it's recycling it, the reason it's reusing it is because this is a large language model. This is pulling from what it's been trained on, right? It doesn't invent a new thing itself. Lance Dacy (33:33) Mm-hmm. Create new you Brian (33:38) Right, now again, I'm not saying that it can't do that in the future, but what we have today is not a creative source in that way. It has to have the training data, even image, kind of AI image generators, that's built on what it's trained on. So you can't train it to a point to say, give me a picture of something that you haven't been trained on, right? weird picture that you have nothing in your database to go back to and use as a reference. It can't do that because it can't imagine, right? Yeah. Scott Dunn (34:18) Yes, that's the key. Lance Dacy (34:22) I was working with a company, they do ads, helping people come up with ads. So a lot of marketing spend money out there, right? You can tell it what kind of market you want to go into, what your competitors are doing, and very quickly feed it some images, feed it a few websites, and it'll give you 100 different ads with the words and everything you want to take on it, and already give it a conversion score. Like... Brian (34:44) Yeah. Lance Dacy (34:45) this ad should get this amount. And it was amazing to me, because I kind of struggle with that anyway, as a business owner, creatively coming up with content and ads and things like that. Like we were talking about earlier, I don't think on this podcast, but like being a co-pilot, having the AI stuff be a co-pilot where we kind of use it as a tool. I think eventually it'll be vice versa, ironically, where we'll be the co-pilots. I think... You like personalized user experience, creativity type things like, you know, how we do AB testing and stuff. Why not let AI do a lot of that user research and spin up the code very easily and figure out click patterns and things like that. Like I could say, I need nine different designs for this one screen. I mean, that used to take weeks, if not months for a designer to sit and attend, I'm not trying to bash their field. I love working with them. And. They're very creative people, but I feel like that's going to be the next step with this AI is, hey, give me nine options. And then that designer spends less time creatively. They get better ideas sometimes. Maybe some of them don't like that. I don't know. I'm not a creative person like that. But I can see that helping me in saying, hey, I don't have to hire these nine marketing people or five marketing people. I can just say, hey, let's look at those things. So I think that user, that creativity, Brian, is what you were hitting on imagining things. Brian (36:02) Yeah. Lance Dacy (36:03) Yeah, give it a lot of data can give you options and then you can take that and come up with the ideas as a human, but yeah, eventually that'll all be taken over too, I think it's all taken over the world. T1000, here we come. Brian (36:15) I think you've got to have one of the concepts that's out there is referring to these as agents and having multiple agents that will carry out a different task for you. And I really think that's when I think about the future of this kind of stuff and how this would affect a typical software development team, that's what I see. We have hierarchies in our organizations that exist. And those are essentially different layers of agents, right? Lance Dacy (36:23) Yeah. Brian (36:43) And I think that that's what we're going to see with software development teams and other things is we'll have a deployed network of agents and these, these AI agents will speak to each other and they'll, they'll refine what each other do. Uh, right. And it makes it easier for us, but again, we've got to have the idea to generate it, to start it, right? It just, it can't do that on its own right now. Lance Dacy (36:57) make it easier for us. Scott Dunn (37:03) Cheers. There's definitely a few things where I've just been popping in, where I had to do some legal docs and I just went there and had it write them. They were great. Just fill in the blanks. I was waiting to get content back from someone about a speaker, maybe somebody to go about Mark Kilby on remote and waiting and waiting. I'm like, dog gone. I just wouldn't ask, you know, chat GPT tell me about Mark Kilby, what he does and grab that. And it did a great job. Put that out there. I didn't need, I didn't need someone else to do it. I didn't need to wait for that. Brian (37:31) Yeah. Scott Dunn (37:34) And I don't even look for creative art anymore. I simply say, give me this art. I do it in Creative Cloud. Give me that, and then you know, good enough's good enough. I move, because it's like you're touching on the delays on some of the things that can be the killer of that. I think in the same way back in the day, Sudhnyalanshi said that you're dating yourself. And I remember when I was younger, we just had electricity for the first, I'm just kidding. But think about the first time when you're telling people like, no, the computer could do that for you. Lance Dacy (37:35) I'll see you later. Scott Dunn (38:02) I feel like we're becoming a lot of companies now like, no, AI could do that for you because they just don't know. If they're working a certain way and they've been in that company for 20 years, they think, no, my job is to create the new insurance for them and then send that, no, you don't have to do all that. So I think it'll be a redistribution because for all of us to see here right now and say, I've let go of thinking there's limits to this and that's where I've come to last few weeks. And we're, and we're. Lance Dacy (38:23) Yeah. Scott Dunn (38:26) Well, I'm going to, I feel, I feel we're cutting edge. Your audience may say differently, Brian, but I feel like we're cutting. I feel like we're cutting edge. And if we're just coming to realization, there's not limits. Think about your traditional worker who's not necessarily a knowledge worker, they're just in the office. They have a certain role. It's been not too different over the last 10, 20 years. They have no idea. I probably could cut that. You mentioned Lance about the ads and I was seeing something recently that said that those AI ads can cut, can cut the design time by 90%. Brian (38:31) Yeah Lance Dacy (38:46) Yeah. I would totally agree. I mean, I tried it and you just like you were saying, waiting on delays to me is my biggest thing. Like the best thing we can do for an organization is a value stream mapping of some sort and say, where does the cycle times killing us? There's so much low hanging fruit there that you could turn that into millions of dollars. And if we were just quit articulating words for that, let's just go do it. I feel like that's what AI is gonna do for us. We were talking about the, Mike's Brian (38:55) now. Lance Dacy (39:22) written a book on user stories and all that. So I'm going to use that as an example, as a product backlog entry point to getting work done. And I think we were talking about this before the podcast. And I feel like eventually we're just going to have a user say, as a user, I need to be able to pay by MasterCard on this screen and make sure the error message says this. And if it is successful, do that. And we won't need programmers. The computer will take that. And it'll write the code for that. It'll deploy the code and it'll say, what do you think about that? And so when you talk about this with agile, but I don't know what we're gonna have these, we're just gonna have users that can now have software created for them. Just like I can an ad, you know, it's like, I'm gonna have this design created, but I speak to it in natural language. Who cares if it's C++, COBOL or JavaScript or Python or whatever, it doesn't matter anymore. The computer will decide. and write it, deploy it, and manage it, and take all the complexity out of it. That's eventually where I think we're headed. Brian (40:23) OK, I just want to state this out there for all the listeners. Make sure you at the right person on this. It's Lance Dacey who said that all the programmers are losing their jobs. All right, just make sure you get it right. That's who said it. Uh. Lance Dacy (40:36) Oh my gosh. Scott Dunn (40:40) Here's to seeing you all again. Lance Dacy (40:41) Did I really say all? I just said it's going to be a disruptor. I thought, but you know, I'm sorry. So just like I think you like your next designers, I think software programmers are just highly creative and great people. So I mean, no, uh, you know, no, just be on the lookout, find a way to contribute to the fact that your job. Scott Dunn (40:45) I heard everyone within the year. I think that's what I heard. Brian (41:03) Yeah. No, I mean, all teasing aside, I think that the developers who are using it now within their IDEs and locked into some of these tools that are available to have AI help them with code, they're ahead of the game. And people who are afraid of that stuff and saying, no, I'm not going to keep that at arm's length, we've seen this movie a million times. Right. Scott Dunn (41:03) Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Lance Dacy (41:19) Yeah. Yeah, played out over and over. It's like, you know what, Brian, two weeks ago, I don't know what the time is, I'm just being facetious right now, but a while ago, I would say that not true about programs because I say you will always need somebody programming the computer, but I've since now changed my mind thinking because I'm highly agile and I learned in that space and I drink my own champagne. That's not really true because I can go into chat, you know, I took, I'm a programmer myself, so I mean, no disdain about that, I remember in school, the first program I had to write was C++ about calculating the Easter Sunday date for a given year. And I had to write code to do that. And I tested that with my son over my shoulder, saying, I'm going to show you what ChatGPT can do. I said, write me a C++ program that calculates Easter Sunday for a given year. And I swear to you, in under a minute, all the code was there. Now, it didn't run. I had to take it and put it into an IDE and compile it and do all that stuff. But it worked. And it took me months to do that. So all I'm trying to say is it can help us be better. The creative side will always be there, but can you imagine not having to worry about code anymore? And you do more of prompting the computer instead of coding. That's really what I mean. I don't want to say their jobs are going away. I just think their jobs are going to be changed. They're going to be the next disruptor, just like I was talking about real estate agents and banking and all of us have been disrupted. But we gotta welcome it. Take it. Brian (42:37) Yeah. Scott Dunn (42:40) Yes. Brian (42:49) Yep. Yeah, right. Welcome to the party, pal. Yeah, no, I agree. Lance Dacy (42:57) Right! Scott Dunn (42:59) I feel like saying at this point, we should let all the listeners know that actually this podcast is AI generated and these are not actual people here. Lance Dacy (43:07) I'm not really sure. Brian (43:10) Yeah, this was done with the approval of these three people, but written by written by AI agents. No, no, it's absolutely not. These are real human beings. Well, guys, this has been a really interesting discussion. And I know we've gone a little bit long. But hey, it's the hundredth episode. Come on, cut us some slack, right? We got three of us here. We obviously are going to kind of diverge a little bit. So Lance Dacy (43:15) Good. Brian (43:35) Thank you guys so much for coming on and helping us to celebrate this 100th episode. I really appreciate it. So just want, you know, Scott, thank you. Scott Dunn (43:45) Thank you. Brian (43:46) And Lance, thank you as well. Lance Dacy (43:48) I'm about to say Lance, no thanks. Thank you, Greg and Brian. I always love being on here and Scott, great to see you. It's been too long. Scott Dunn (43:49) Yeah. Hahaha. Good job. Brian (43:52) Right. Scott Dunn (43:56) These two, yes, really enjoyed it. Brian (43:57) Awesome.

Join the Collaborwocky team and special guest Diana Larsen as they discuss Diana's new book, "Agile Retrospectives, Second Edition." Dive into the updates, challenges, and differences in the latest edition of this classic work on retrospectives. Diana also shares insights from her book "Lead Without Blame" and her experiences facilitating leader circles. Show Notes: Introduction to Diana Larsen and her books What's new in the second edition of "Agile Retrospectives" Importance of the five stages of retrospectives Impact of the pandemic on the writing process Comparison with writing "Lead Without Blame" Remote and hybrid retrospectives Connect with Diana Larsen The Collaborwocky Team: Jim Benson, Dave Prior, Tonianne DeMaria, Thushyanthan Amirthalingam and Mark Kilby. The Collaborwocky Mother Ship: Collaborwocky is produced by the faculty at Modus Institute and brings fresh perspectives on making work more enjoyable, effective and humane. Come join the community. The Collaborwocky Promise: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we will bring you interviews, conversations and new ideas... often.

In the latest episode of the Collaborwocky podcast, the hosts delve into the intricate relationship between structure, understanding, and work effectiveness. The Collaborwocky Team: Jim Benson, Dave Prior, Tonianne DeMaria, Thushyanthan Amirthalingam and Mark Kilby. The Collaborwocky Mother Ship: Collaborwocky is produced by the faculty at Modus Institute and brings fresh perspectives on making work more enjoyable, effective and humane. Come join the community. The Collaborwocky Promise: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we will bring you interviews, conversations and new ideas... often.

In the world of continuous improvement, A3 thinking is a powerful tool that transcends its traditional application in operational problem-solving. Originating at Toyota, the A3 process involves using a single sheet of paper (typically A3 size or 11 by 17 inches) to define a problem, analyze its root causes, propose solutions, and conduct experiments. While it's commonly used for operational issues, we often overlook its potential for strategic alignment. The Collaborwocky Team: Jim Benson, Dave Prior, Tonianne DeMaria, Thushyanthan Amirthalingam and Mark Kilby. The Collaborwocky Mother Ship: Collaborwocky is produced by the faculty at Modus Institute and brings fresh perspectives on making work more enjoyable, effective and humane. Come join the community. The Collaborwocky Promise: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we will bring you interviews, conversations and new ideas... often.

Collaborwocky 007 - Toxic Work Environments In this episode of Collaborwocky, Jim Benson, Thushyanthan A., and Mark Kilby delve into the complexities of toxic work environments caused by individuals. They explore two distinct patterns: self-hostility and self-overload. The Collaborwocky Team: Jim Benson, Dave Prior, Tonianne DeMaria, Thushyanthan Amirthalingam and Mark Kilby. The Collaborwocky Mother Ship: Collaborwocky is produced by the faculty at Modus Institute and brings fresh perspectives on making work more enjoyable, effective and humane. Come join the community. The Collaborwocky Promise: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we will bring you interviews, conversations and new ideas... often.

Collaborwocky 006 - Meetings & Collaboration In this episode, we delve into the world of meetings and collaboration.. Our hosts, Jim Benson, Dave Prior, Tonianne DeMaria, Thushyanthan Amirthalingam and Mark Kilby discuss the nuances of meetings, their purpose, and how to navigate them effectively. What You'll Learn: When meetings are valuable Building rapport and trust - Even if not directly collaborative, meetings allow colleagues to share personal stories, build rapport, and understand each other better. Detoxifying work environments - Jim emphasizes that detoxifying work environments requires systematic change. Instead of blaming individuals, focus on altering systems. The Collaborwocky Team: Jim Benson, Dave Prior, Tonianne DeMaria, Thushyanthan Amirthalingam and Mark Kilby. The Collaborwocky Mother Ship: Collaborwocky is produced by the faculty at Modus Institute and brings fresh perspectives on making work more enjoyable, effective and humane. Come join the community. The Collaborwocky Promise: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we will bring you interviews, conversations and new ideas... often.

Collaborwocky 005 - Victory Conditions In this episode, we set the context in homeschooling and explore the concept of victory conditions. Our hosts, Jim Benson, Dave Prior, Tonianne DeMaria, Thushyanthan Amirthalingam and Mark Kilby share personal experiences and insights on how to create a successful learning environment. Initially set for children but broadened within the conversations to teams that can lead to better outcomes. What You'll Learn: Victory conditions are essential for any endeavor, including homeschooling. Explicitly define what success looks like. Building rapport and trust within the team enhances collaboration and communication. The Collaborwocky Team: Jim Benson, Dave Prior, Tonianne DeMaria, Thushyanthan Amirthalingam and Mark Kilby. The Collaborwocky Mother Ship: Collaborwocky is produced by the faculty at Modus Institute and brings fresh perspectives on making work more enjoyable, effective and humane. Come join the community. The Collaborwocky Promise: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we will bring you interviews, conversations and new ideas... often.

Collaborwocky 004 - Realms of "Done" In this special one-on-one episode of Collaborwocky, host Jim Benson sits down with Andrew Sanyal, a Modus Institute student with a rich background in semiconductor projects and applied physics. They delve into the nuanced concept of "done" within Agile methodologies, exploring its implications beyond software development into the realms of quantum computing and product management. Drawing from Andrew's experience, the conversation illuminates how definitions of completion evolve through different project stages and the significance of interdisciplinary system thinking. What You'll Learn: Insights into systems thinking across various disciplines and its impact on project management. The complexity of defining "done" in Agile and how it extends to broader organizational contexts. The challenges and strategies of implementing Agile methodologies in hardware and software integration. Reflections on collaborative work and the dynamic nature of project completion. Featured Guest: Andrew Sanyal, Student at Modus Institute with expertise in semiconductor projects, quantum computing, and applied physics. The Collaborwocky Team: Jim Benson, Dave Prior, Tonianne DeMaria, Thushyanthan Amirthalingam and Mark Kilby. The Collaborwocky Mother Ship: Collaborwocky is produced by the faculty at Modus Institute and brings fresh perspectives on making work more enjoyable, effective and humane. Come join the community. The Collaborwocky Promise: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we will bring you interviews, conversations and new ideas... often.

At the Modus Institute, Jim Benson and Mark Kilby have created a new offering called Successful Distributed Teams. This new course focuses on how to build strong remote teams, how to create a humane, healthy balance of productivity and accountability, and what tools you can use to make it all work. In this interview, Jim and Mark join me to discuss what happened when they combined the many years of experience they each have in shaping remote teams that work. We cover how the idea of remote work has changed over the past few years, what makes it so challenging, and things you can start doing to foster a thriving collaborative remote team.  This podcast was originally recorded in video. You can find that version here: https://youtu.be/TnFzQr80tBg To learn more about Successful Distributed Teams https://modusinstitute.com/course/successful-remote-work-teams To check out Mark Kilby and Johanna Rothman's book From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams https://tinyurl.com/5fbnynxe Contacting Jim Web: https://modusinstitute.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jimbenson Email: jim@moduscooperandi.com Contacting Mark Web: MarkKilby.com Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@mkilby LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkilby/ Email: mark@markkilby.com

Collaborwocky 001x - Building an Obeya This episode is best watched as a video episode. View it here: https://youtu.be/m8Y2OIN-9Uo. In this episode of Collaborwocky, Dave Prior and Jeffrey White explore the integration of personal Kanban and Obeya within team environments, emphasizing collaboration and efficiency in career and life design at Hollins University. They discuss the significance of visual management tools in fostering a cohesive and productive team dynamic, sharing insights on utilizing these methodologies to prioritize and manage work effectively. The conversation also touches on career development, the importance of connections over resume submissions, and the innovative application of these methods in educational settings. The Collaborwocky Team: Jim Benson, Dave Prior, Tonianne DeMaria, Thushyanthan Amirthalingam and Mark Kilby. The Collaborwocky Mother Ship: Collaborwocky is produced by the faculty at Modus Institute and brings fresh perspectives on making work more enjoyable, effective and humane. Come join the community. The Collaborwocky Promise: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we will bring you interviews, conversations and new ideas... often.

Collaborwocky 002 - From "MIT" to "MIM" Productivity strategies vary daily, influenced by personal priorities and external demands. Achieving your MIT (Most Important Thing) requires breaking down daunting tasks into manageable parts and using momentum and motivation techniques like the Pomodoro method. The episode underscores personal growth through self-awareness and the continuous refinement of productivity techniques to balance work, creativity (MIM aka "Most Important Moment"), and personal life. The Collaborwocky Team: Jim Benson, Dave Prior, Tonianne DeMaria, Thushyanthan Amirthalingam and Mark Kilby. The Collaborwocky Mother Ship: Collaborwocky is produced by the faculty at Modus Institute and brings fresh perspectives on making work more enjoyable, effective and humane. Come join the community. The Collaborwocky Promise: Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and we will bring you interviews, conversations and new ideas... often.

It's the last episode of the year, and it's very hard to break tradition! Maya and Pilar talk through some of the recent stories around remote work and the world of work and try to make up their minds as to whether we're moving forward or backwards… Just as they've been doing over the last three months, Maya and Pilar comment on this month's guest, Valentina Thörner the Empress of Remote! What was particularly memorable was her tiara story (of course!) and the way in which she continues to advocate for experimentation at every level in the organisation. (To hear Valentina talking about the two axis of remote work (location and schedule), check out episode 342.) 09.25 MINS There is a danger of organisations being seen to be discriminating against certain employees if they make them go back to the office. Legally things are not that clear cut. This article from October showed the need for organisations to understand the implications fully: Case update: employers must do their homework before making ‘back to the office' decisions. 12.52 MINS One example of the world of work moving backwards is this guidance by the UK government against a four-day work week in local authorities. Note the lack of evidence to support it: “it does not believe that it delivers local taxpayers' value for money.” At 16.00 MINS, Pilar brings in an example of the voiceover industry, which makes it clear that being able to work remotely might continue to perpetuate an “always on” culture. This might all sound like our hosts are in a negative state of mind, but maybe this is something that also applies to listeners? Maybe they are seeking information to navigate the more difficult facets of the modern work environment. The most popular episodes have focused on terminations (333), conflict (331), The upside and downsides of creativity and productivity (330)… But also some more uplifting ones like Effective Manager Mindset for Global Virtual Teams (315) and one on visibility and transparency in leadership with Mark Kilby (321). On the moving forwards side… 21.12 MINS Discussing Buffer's "State of Remote Work 2023" report, Pilar and Maya note a surprising trend: more remote workers now feel that working remotely has a positive impact on their career growth. This contradicts the common belief that remote work might hinder career advancement. 27.00 MINS We couldn't end our reflections on 2023 without talking about Generative AI. We already did an episode on AI in November 2019 (https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/artificial-intelligence ), so it's something we've always kept an eye out on. Now that Generative AI is being integrated into everyday tools and is more accessible, what's going on in organisations? Check out Salesforce's recent research which shows that More than Half of Generative AI Adopters Use Unapproved Tools at Work. (Does it remind you of how remote teams in organisations often use Shadow IT?) Generative AI is being used widely by all sorts of professionals, and a few months ago, Amazon had to cap the number of books that authors could upload daily, as GenAI was being used to crank up books. Speaking of which… Pilar has co-written a book with Chat GPT. “The Remote Worker's Guide to Time Management” will be out in all formats in January, but the Kindle version is already out for pre-order. 40.10 MINS If you don't want to read a book co-created with a bot, then maybe you'd like to chat to humans? The doors to the brand new community of Remote Work Europe are now open! There's been a rise in closed online communities as social media has become noisy and unreliable. Maya embraces this and has set up Remote Work Europe Connected for remote workers of all kinds who are looking for a space to seek help, connection and inspiration. That's it from us this year, we hope you enjoyed our 2023 What's Going On episodes!

On Friday, December 8, The Agile Alliance is hosting a MiniCon on the Future of Artificial Intelligence. During the event, Mark Kilby will be hosting a roundtable discussion with the speakers to explore the ways AI is poised to impact how we work and what it will take to utilize it in an ethical and responsible way. Mark joins me in this episode of the podcast to discuss why he made a conscious decision to get schooled up on AI, how he's going about doing it, some of the key learnings he has had along the way, and his take on what the future of AI has to offer those of us work in the agile space and project management. The Future of AI MiniCon If you'd like to learn more about the Agile Alliance's Future of AI MiniCon: https://tinyurl.com/mw5ww3w2 Contacting Mark If you'd like to contact Mark: https://www.markkilby.com/ Distributed Teams And if you need some help with distributed teams, you should pick up a copy of From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams which Mark co-authored with Johanna Rothman. I cannot recommend this book highly enough! https://tinyurl.com/22vvnyjx

Agile 2023 is almost here! Mark Kilby, Tim Nolan, and I are putting the final touches on our session Tuning Your Distributed Team with a Right Environment Exercise. We are looking forward to sharing some of the things we learned in Modus Cooperandi's Lean Agile Visual Management Certification program. The workshop will be held at Agile 2023 on Tuesday, July 25th from 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM. This video gives an overview of our workshop and some of the key concepts we will be covering with the participants. If you are attending the conference for the first time, it can be a rough week so we've also got tips for how to get the most out of the conference and how to best survive the week. This was originally recorded in video. You can find that version here:https://youtu.be/FKwIETj0xzM

Welcome to the fifth and final episode of this first season of Conversations in Fetal Medicine, where we talk to Professor Mark Kilby. In his present role, Professor Kilby works within the Medical Genomics Research Group within Illumina with members both within Cambridge and San Diego.  The Group Leader is Dr David Bentley, Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer, who was one of the principal researchers involved in using next generation sequencing to unlock information of the human genome and then to apply this to the 100,000 genome project in the UK.Prof Kilby's role, is to work with many of these clinical scientists, who are experts in sequencing technology and applying whole genome sequencing in medicine but also working on the evaluation and understanding of the information obtained from these technologies by bioinformatic assessment, sorting and classification.  His principle area of work within this group is focusing upon the roles of whole genome sequencing in prenatal diagnosis (including carrier status analysis) and also newborn screening.In addition to his role within Illumina, he still works as a Clinical Consultant at Birmingham Women's and Children's Foundation trust (for 2 sessions a month) and continues research within the University of Birmingham, as an Emeritus Professor. He is Chair of the RCOG Genomics Taskforce and works with other Royal Colleges, as well as NHS England and Genomics England.We have not included any patient identifiable information, and this podcast is intended for professional education rather than patient information. Please get in touch with feedback or suggestions for future guests or topics: conversationsinfetalmed@gmail.com. Music by Crowander ('Acoustic romance') used under creative commons licence. Podcast created, hosted and edited by Dr Jane Currie.  

Pilar talks to returning guest Mark Kilby about the different ways in which leaders can gain visibility in remote organisations, the need for pervasive and transparent communication, as well as the benefits of visualising our work. Check out Mark's book: From Chaos To Successfully Distributed Agile Teams . You can find Mark over at markkilby.com and modusinstittute.com  .   For the full show notes, go to https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/visible-leadership  

Thanks to everyone who commented on our 300th episode! You can now find all the interviews over at the new podcast Work Life Changes and Remote Work in Organisations. We kick off looking at “what might be going on”. Maya has written “Virtual e-residency, a future in the metaverse?”, a piece looking at the potential of emerging technologies, and how we might make use of them as part of work in the future. Will “hybrid” mean we use both the metaverse and the office? Will there be a place online where all Estonian e-residents and businesses can meet? And how will taxation work? 12.45 mins We bring in the voices of two of our guests from episode 300, for this section on asynchronous communication. (We like to practice what we preach!) Mark Kilby tells us about a new experiment he's set up using asynchronous video. He's using the app Volley to bring people together who are reading his book and have questions and comments. It was not feasible to set up online meetings to bring everyone together, as readers are spread all over the world. Following episode 294, where we covered a couple of articles on emojis, Ross Winter, our own “podcast polisher” has some further questions on the use of emojis: Why do we only have a handful of emojis? Should we ditch them? Are they harming the quality of our communication? What about predictive replies? Or is it just a matter of sending a quick reply vs no reply at all? 31.16 mins John Hopkins, has recently completed some research on hybrid work in Australia. It outlines the three main hybrid work structures, and how happy workers are with them. Pretty happy by the way. Back in the UK, two government politicians are determined to get everyone back in the office. One of our listeners asked for commentary on the news that an unnamed politician (we don't want to give him the space here in our blog, but we name him in the episode) has been leaving notes on civil servants' desks telling them they are much missed at the office. He wants everyone back and one of the reasons is that the tax payer is paying for the buildings. (Yes, you read right.) One of our listeners sent us coverage of this story, with his own thoughts about how the different departments in the civil service are still recovering from the pandemic backlog, are at different points in their “digitalisation” and how some jobs can be done remotely while others can't. 46.08 mins Finally, if you are looking for an activity for your team, check out these online puzzles from Google Arts and Culture. And let us know if you try them yourself! (Pilar heard about this in the After Hours podcast.) 47.30mins We have some things to report from our network, but before that, Maya is hosting a new podcast: The Future is Freelance ! Thanks to everyone who commented on the 300th episode! And remember we now have a new show: Work Life Changes and Remote Work in Organisations. Many thanks to Hans Gaertner for sharing episode 298 with Laurel Farrer, all about biases in the hybrid workplace, and to Zahra for letting us know that our work resonates at her end too. Nancy Settle-Murphy recommends remove.bg to remove backgrounds from profile photos and make quick edits, and there is still time to get a 10% discount on Penny Pullan's book Virtual Leadership, Practical Strategies for Success with Remote or Hybrid Work and Teams when you get it directly from the publisher's site. (But you need to listen to the episode!) Let us know what you think over at virtualnotdistant.com 

Distributed Teams are never easy. It doesn't matter if you are separated by one flight of stairs or 12 time zones. Forming and maintaining a cohesive, collaborative team that can support one another, consistently deliver, and continuously improve is always just a little bit tougher when you are not in the same physical space. The pandemic has offered all of us plenty of “opportunities” to find ways to improve how we form and function in a distributed way. But here's the thing, even when you've been doing this stuff for years, it is tough. Experience can help guide you and show you some things to try to avoid, but each team is its own puzzle. In this episode of the podcast, Mark Kilby has joined me to utilize the Five Lenses of Humane Management to talk about distributed teams. There are three important things you need to know before you listen. 1. Mark Kilby and Johanna Rothman wrote the book “From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver”. If you are looking for a tips on what makes distributed teams work, this book is an amazing resource. 2. Mark and I are on a distributed team together with two other people. Collectively, we bring over 70 years of experience of not only working on teams, but in coaching others on how to do it well. 3. We are struggling mightily During the interview, Mark and I unpack some of the things we're experiencing in the forming storming stages of our distributed team. We share some of the insights and struggles we've had along the way. This interview is intended to offer a kind of retrospective/case study on challenges that even seasoned pros have when working remotely. For those of you who are having similar challenges, we want you to know that you are not alone and hopefully, one of the takeaways you'll get from this interview is that even when you and your distributed team are struggling, there are probably some amazing things happening, you just need to keep an eye out for them and appreciate them. Links from the interview From Chaos to Successfully Distributed Agile Teams by Mark Kilby and Johanna Rothman
 https://amzn.to/3bPVDkT The Five Lenses of Humane Management Interview with Jim Benson https://bit.ly/3a2FBIe Lean Agile Visual Management https://www.modusinstitute.com/lavm Contacting Mark:
 Web: www.markkilby.com
 Twitter: twitter.com/mkilby
 LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/mkilby/

Mark Kilby, author, and remote agile guide shares the challenges of leading globally distributed agile teams. Mark then offers practical advice such as respecting time zones, embracing cultural differences, and enabling team collaboration. Book LinkedIn Website Twitter Kanban  

In this episode, we focus on the 21st Century Work Life podcast: how it's evolved and what it could cover in the future. And our guests have come wise words for you, our listeners. 00.00 mins Pilar shares how the show has evolved over the last 100 episodes. Some of the episodes she mentions are: episode 209 The Journey of the Remote Leader, episode 263 “Remote” is not the Only Challenge, episode 282 Asynchronous Facilitation and Online Collaboration, episode 286 The Challenges of Adopting Asynchronous Communication. 09.05 mins Bree and Pilar talk about the Connection and Disconnection in Remote Teams series and how the conversations around remote work in general changed during the pandemic. 15.39 mins We hear some general suggestions from guests about what they'd like a podcast like ours to cover in the future. Tim Burgess is first, he's been leading a distributed company for a few years - he would like to hear more “secrets” from people who are in the remote space. Then we hear from Theresa Sigillito Hollema, who as a guest has talked about leading global teams, her speciality. She's interested in the psychology of working away from each other. Theresa refers to My Pocket Psych, so its from its host, Dr. Richard MacKinnon, who we hear from next. He's also appeared on this show as guest, and as part of the Connection and Disconnection series. He would like the show to cover the “how to” for those new to the space (especially if it's evidence-based). He's followed by Mark Kilby, who's also been on this show a lot, (and who Pilar got to meet in person, in London!) and would like a mix of the “how” and the “why”. Then we hear from Pinar Akkaya, it's the first time she's guested on this show. She's looking for inspiration and “what if” scenarios. 24.49 mins Other guests have more specific suggestions. Simon Wilson kicks this bit off. He'd like to hear more - and be involved in conversations - about what asynchronous communication looks like in those teams embracing it, plus deep conversations about organisational culture. We then hear from Ross Winter, our podcast polisher, who would like to hear answers to questions like, Why are we spending so much time looking for connection online? Eva Rimbau Gilabert suggest we cover the transition to hybrid (of which there are many versions), especially when we can back it up with academic research, while Bree encourages us to continue with the diversity of perspectives and deepening the conversation about the future of work. 31.32 mins Finally, the guests have some final words for listeners of the show, and Pilar. We hear from Maya, Simon, Eva, Pinar, Richard, Tim, Ross (and cat!), Bree, Mark, and Theresa, who leaves us with an inspiring aspiration. And thanks to Anish Hindocha, for contributing to the two other parts of this episode! (By the way, Pilar has “podcastinitis” and hosts many shows!) And we have some outtakes from 40.03mins for your amusement after our MANY THANKS to all of you!

Today's guest is Mark Kilby, “remote work guy” and co-author of From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams. You can find out more about him over at markkilby.com Find out more about the company behind this show over at virtualnotdistant.com And don't forget to check out the 21st Century Work Life podcast.

Mark Kilby joins Dan, Prateek and Nisha to talk about remote Scrum, hybrid teams and the future of remote work.

This podcast is brought to you by Virtual Not Distant in London, where we help teams work better together wherever they are: https://virtualnotdistant.com. In today's episode Pilar Orti interviews Mark Kilby, Mark has a course in the Lucid Meetings platform, How to Discover, Interview, and Hire Amazing Remote People, The discussion includes points of difference between remote and face-to-face recruitment and hiring, and highlights lots of positive potential created by the remote environment. Learn more about Mark at MarkKilby.com, and check out his former appearances in this podcast, especially episode 219 for more on onboarding/integration.

Robby speaks with Mark Kilby, Distributed Agile Guide and Founder at K5 Labs. They discuss the benefits of healthy and reliable automated tests, symptoms of when things are not working, challenges that teams may face in different types of remote working scenarios, and what effective communication looks like amongst team members. Mark also gives advice on things to consider as an Agile coach and how to build your Agile toolbox.Helpful LinksMark's WebsiteMark on Twitter[Book Recommendation] The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey[Book Recommendation] From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver, Johanna Rothman and Mark Kilby[Article] Is hybrid-remote going backward or forward? Subscribe to Maintainable on:Apple PodcastsOvercastSpotifyOr search "Maintainable" wherever you stream your podcasts.

Brought to you by Virtual Not Distant in London, today's episode explores mindset issues for new remote managers, and some changes which people new to this role may need to explore. (https://virtualnotdistant.com)  The episode is structured around Pilar’s article Key mindset changes for the new remote manager  and covers the need to: (4.09) 1. Adopt a coaching mindset (8.09) 2. Embrace delegation and avoid interference (10.04) 3. Make friends with your technology (Including an interview with agile coach Mark Kilby (at 18.24), about how data visualisation can help explore issues of disengagement in remote teams) (44.13) 4: Get Intentional (47.14) Finally, 5: Don't make yourself indispensable  

Joe Krebs speaks with Mark Kilby about the experiences of distribution during the pandemic and what we have learned and can use for the future. Mark is the co-author of the book “From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver” released in 2018. Mark also shares some insights on his next book with the working title “Exploring the Open Space Mindset” which will include stories and experiences from practitioners like him about the Open Space Technology.

Cue the music . . . Happy Birthday, Software Process and Measurement Cast!  Today we begin year 15 with a visit from Johanna Rothman.  We talked about her THREE new books: Practical Ways to Manage Yourself: Modern Management Made Easy, Book 1 https://amzn.to/2LXKkiQ Practical Ways to Lead & Serve (Manage) Others: Modern Management Made Easy, Book 2 - https://amzn.to/39Viwnj  Practical Ways to Lead an Innovative Organization: Modern Management Made Easy, Book 3 - https://amzn.to/3qS90Z3  We of course covered more ground.  For example about 2/3rds of the way through we talked about why the word experiment is a dirty word in most organizations. This is a longer interview, but when I grow up I want to be just like Johanna (I am serious).  Here is her bio: Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” offers frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams do reasonable things that work. Equipped with that knowledge, they can decide how to adapt their product development. With her trademark practicality and humor, Johanna is the author of 18 books about many aspects of product development. Her most recent books are the Modern Management Made Easy series, From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams (with Mark Kilby) and Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver. See all her books, blog, and other resources at jrothman.com and createadaptablelife.com. The Software Process and Measurement Cast is a proud media sponsor of the DevOps Online Summit.  Not to put too fine a point on it, one of the best ways to get your message heard is to speak.  The crew at the DevOps Online Summit provides a phenomenal platform to network with fellow practitioners from all over the world. Start the journey to speaking at the DevOps Online Summit 2021 by submitting at https://bit.ly/3syp2c5    https://bit.ly/3syp2c5 Re-Read Saturday News  Today we take on Chapter 7 of Great Big Agile, An OS for Agile Leaders by Jeff Dalton. In three more weeks, we will begin Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions to Common Scrum Problems (it is time to buy a copy). Remember, buy a copy and read along.  This week’s installment can be found at www.tomcagley.com/blog Previous installments: Week 1: Re-read Logistics and Front Matters - https://bit.ly/3mgz9P6  Week 2: The API Is Broken - https://bit.ly/2JGpe7l Week 3: Performance Circle: Leading - https://bit.ly/2K3poWy  Week 4: Performance Circle: Providing - http://bit.ly/3mNJJN7  Week 5: Performance Circle: Envisioning - https://bit.ly/2JEVXdt  Week 6: Performance Circle: Crafting - https://bit.ly/3ntsX69  Week 7: Performance Circle: Affirming - http://bit.ly/35OvFgC  Week 8: Performance Circle: Teaming - http://bit.ly/366CYk0  Next SPaMCAST User Stories and Tony Timbol will take center stage. User stories are ubiquitous in agile.  Getting them right is really important. Tony gives us some ideas to move the ball forward. 

Going the whole Nine Yards - How to Make Distributed teams work......Are you Colocated? Distributed? A dispersed Nebula? Mark Kilby helps us understand the difference and how to work together (apart).Mark started as a software engineer and gracefully immersed himself into the world of agile/ light methods that seemed so crazy they might actually work! He has acquired a deep understanding of both agile and distributed working over the decades, working with some of the very best practitioners in the world.Together with Johana Rothman, he has written the excellent 'From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver' the practical and accessible handbook for Managers of, Facilitators to, and Distributed teams themselves.We begin to fully understand the real constraints of Distributed working and how to deal with them, for example using empathy and structuring remote time and practice correctly. Mark's insights on how scrum will not work for distributed teams without the right amount of time overlap is based on working with 100s of teams in this area. Each time the importance of connection and relationship is key to success. And as for tools? They're great but there is always a constraint to deal with.Despite his experience, Mark is never prescriptive. Rather he gives teams and organizations the tools and helps to find their own path: to inspect and adapt.Mark Kilby https://www.markkilby.com (a great resource)Book: (Co-Authored with Johanna Rothman) From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliverhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/mkilby/Twitter @mkilby - https://twitter.com/mkilbyCompass Activity to grow empathy on distributed teams https://www.markkilby.com/resources/compass-activity/Mark's new book on Open Mindset is forecast to be released …. The second half of next year. Judy Rees - Mark collaborates with Judy who has deep experience in using Clean Language and distributed teamshttps://reesmccann.com/?s=clean+languageDr Karen Lojeski: https://virtualdistance.comThe Power of Virtual Distance: A Guide to Productivity and Happiness in the Age of Remote Work 2nd Edition (her 3rd book, released April 2020 and the most recommended by Mark)Leading the Virtual Workforce: How Great Leaders Transform Organizations in the 21st CenturyUniting the Virtual Workforce: Transforming Leadership and Innovation in the Globally Integrated Enterprise (co-author with Richard Reilly)Ward Cunningham. C2.comKent Beck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Beck#Books#agility #agilitybynature #agilehttps://agilitybynature.com/contact-us/ Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way we work and communicate, some people expected remote work to become more popular. The thought was, however, that the transition will be done by choice, not by force!  Today we talk with Johanna Rothmann, a management consultant, speaker, and author of over a dozen reference books on management, agile, team-building, and software development. Just a year before the first lockdown orders descended on the cities around the world, Johanna published with Mark Kilby a fantastic guide on managing remote teams: From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver*. Johanna is our dear guest and a great friend of the show. We invited her today to celebrate together the fifth anniversary of our community. But we couldn't miss the opportunity to pick her brain and seek some advice on remote working and how to manage it.  When you finish listening to the episode, connect with Johanna on Twitter and LinkedIn, check out her website, and read From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams* and other Johanna's books*.  Mentioned in this episode: Johanna on Twitter at https://twitter.com/johannarothman  Johanna on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/johannarothman/  Johanna’s website at https://www.jrothman.com  From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver at https://amzn.to/2K11SJO*  Johanna’s books at https://amzn.to/3nlcfGR* Legacy Code Rocks: Project Management with Johanna Rothman at https://www.legacycode.rocks/podcast-1/episode/faf2a514/project-management-with-johanna-rothman * Heads up! If you purchase the book through the link above, we will get a small commission which helps us continue to bring quality content to our Legacy Code Rocks! community. You won’t pay a penny more, we receive a small kickback, and you’re supporting our friends who wrote the book. Everybody wins!

In this episode, Richard interviews Mark Kilby, a coach, and mentor to distributed teams. Mark co-authored the book From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams with Johanna Rothman, and he designed many online courses on the subject. We talk about finding a shared vision even when being miles apart, and how to build a better virtual workspace. When you finish listening to the episode, connect with Mark on Twitter https://twitter.com/mkilby at and LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkilby/, and visit his website at https://www.markkilby.com. Read the full transcript at kasperowski.com/podcast-47-mark-kilby/

There is probably nothing in the last 20 years that has had as comprehensive an impact on how we work as Covid-19. Yes, there were team members who worked remote before or maybe your team was distributed around the globe, but we've never been in a situation where EVERYONE was working from home. That is a completely different thing. It comes with unique challenges that we are only starting to adjust to. For me personally, moving my work online has been incredibly challenging, and while the challenges are not always easily solved, and they are not always challenges I want to deal with, they are always rewarding. Along with the things I've learned how to do right, there are many things I have learned to do wrong. The exploration of how to get better at online facilitation and teaching led me to a point where I knew I needed to check in with an expert. As luck would have it, Mark Kilby happened to be in an online training I took recently on how to facilitate large online collaboration. Mark is the co-author, along with Johanna Rothman, of the book From Chaos to Successfully Distributed Agile Teams. If you work with distributed teams and you are looking for practical answers to struggles you are facing, YOU NEED THIS BOOK. After the class, I asked Mark if he'd be open to talking about what it has been like for him since Corona hit and what he's discovered in the way of best practices and antipatterns for online facilitation. So if you are looking for some tips on what to do and what to not do when you are working with your teams online, you'll find a lot of valuable ideas shared in this interview. Mark's Book From Chaos to Successfully Distributed Agile Teams https://amzn.to/3bPVDkT Contacting Mark: Web: https://www.markkilby.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/mkilby LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkilby/

In this episode, we have special guests Johanna and Mark talk about lessons learned for teams going quickly #Remote. ------- Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.  Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” provides frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams see problems and resolve risks and manage their product development. Johanna is the author of fourteen books and hundreds of articles. Find the Pragmatic Manager, a monthly email newsletter, and her blogs at jrothman.com and createadaptablelife.com As an agile coach, Mark Kilby has cultivated more distributed and dispersed teams than collocated teams. He’s coached as a consultant, an internal coach, and as a facilitator of distributed professional communities. His easy-going style helps teams learn to collaborate and discover their path to success and sustainability. See markkilby.com for his blog and articles. You can find Johanna’s and Mark’s book on Amazon and LeanPub.

In this podcast recorded at Agile 2019, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Johanna Rothman & Mark Kilby about their book From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams Why listen to this podcast: • There are important mindset shifts that are needed to help enable distributed teams to be effective • You can’t take practices and approaches that are designed for co-located teams and apply them to distributed teams without adapting them to the new context • Distributed teams need to identify and align on their hours of overlap • Transparency and experimentation are important for a distributed team to build their culture • Communication needs to include personal context, not just focusing on the work but get to know the people • Let the teams identify and evolve their own ways of working, do not impose it from above More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ bit.ly/2Jwg9u5 You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8 Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq Check the landing page on InfoQ: bit.ly/2Jwg9u5

Cesar Abeid talks with authors Johanna Rothman and Mark Kilby on managing distributed agile teams.

In this episode we focus on sudden remote retrospectives. What if you were used to physical retrospective and now your office is all remote? What are some tips for setting up an effective remote retrospectives? That’s the focus of this interview with Mark Kilby. thisisretrospectivefacilitation.com/e/19

Earlier this week we convened a panel of dislocated/distributed/remote work experts to discuss the impacts of the Coronavirus on the world of work, and to offer up some tips, tricks, and hints for those who are new to remote work.  Join Lisette Sutherland, Mark Kilby, and Johanna Rothman as they sat down with Jay Hrcsko to have a fun and insightful conversation about this new paradigm, and maybe pick up some ideas along the way!   Lisette Sutherland Lisette's Website Collaboration Superpowers Website Work Together Anywhere: A Handbook on Working Remotely Mark Kilby Mark's Website From Chaos to Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver Johanna Rothman Johanna's Website Johanna's Books on Amazon  

This month I was lucky enough to sit down and talk with Johanna Rothman and Mark Kilby , the authors of the book “From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver”. Distributed agile teams have a terrible reputation. They don't deliver “on time,” and too often, they don't deliver what the customer needs. However, most agile teams have at least one remote team member. And, agile approaches are here to stay. Why is this important? Distributed teams are becoming more normal. With the global nature of business and the recent need to be remote because of pandemic, businesses need to be remote friendly to survive and attract the best talent. Distributed teams need to be intentional. Sometimes culture and work practices evolve organically in an organisation, but in distributed teams it needs to be intentional and maintained to avoid isolation and misalignment. Here is What You Will Learn How important collaboration and communication is to any team. Making a team distributed will amplify the collaboration and communication skills of the team, so understand how well your team has formed first. The eight principles of distributed agile teams. Drive clarity and communication by seeing the main pitfalls that Agile distributed teams fall into and how they can be avoided. Sign Up Now You can get your free Comparative Agility account today and begin on your team's journey of Inspired Team --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/comparativeagility/message

Hello and welcome to this multi-guest episode, where we delve into the world of online communities in the context of remote work.  This podcast is brought to you by Virtual Not Distant Ltd.  Please see full shownotes at https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/online-communities-remote-work. Guest interviews: 7.48 Lisette Sutherland - Collaboration Superpowers 28.58 Alex Hearst: Hoxby 48.13 Mark Kilby, Agile Florida 1.06.34 Martin Gilbraith Chair of IAF England Wales    

Hello and welcome to the first episode of 2020!  This podcast is brought to you by Virtual Not Distant Ltd.  Please see full shownotes at https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/onboarding-integration 02.40 Marcus Wermuth Engineering Manager for the Mobile Team at Buffer. You can with Marcus on LinkedIn, Twitter, and via his website.  7 Ways to Set Up a New Hire for Success,” by Michael D. Watkins. 27.43 Mandy Garner, managing editor of Working Mums and Working Wise 33.30 The Role of Bots in Onboarding How to Improve New Hire Engagement and Onboarding for Technical Employees Using AI and Chatbots. 38:05 Mark Kilby, Agile Coach You can hear more from Mark in Episodes 95, 175, 197, on twitter, and his website. We want to answer YOUR big questions about work/remote work in 2020, so please contact us. Or you can tweet Virtual Not Distant, or Pilar and Maya directly, with any of your thoughts and ideas

In this SoundNotes live with Mark Kilby, we talk about social tokens. What’s a social token? We’ll define them and expand on how they can be a shared way to create trust and create connections in distributed teams.

Joining Dan Neumann today are Johanna Rothman and Mark Kilby! In case you don’t already know them, Johanna Rothman is known as the “Pragmatic Manager” and is the author of 14 books (and counting)! Through her management consulting, she helps managers and leaders create projects, teams, and organizations that work. Mark Kilby is an agile mentor and coach, playing many roles on the software and product lifecycle stage. His passions include serving servant leaders and building sustainable organizations that bring value to the people inside and outside the organization.   Recently, Mark and Johanna have collaborated on the book, From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams, that teaches how to create a successful distributed agile team and leave the chaos of virtual teams behind. This fascinating book will also be today’s topic of discussion! Johanna and Mark outline the differences between co-located, distributed, and dispersed teams; why the distinction between all three is important for agile teams; what is an agile team; key principles for these different types of agile teams; and nuggets of wisdom for managers of these teams.   Key Takeaways The distinction between colocated, distributed, and dispersed teams; and why it’s important: A co-located team is one that is collaborating and communicating in person (one that you can simply walk up to and have a discussion with) A distributed team is a group of individuals collaborating and communicating via communication technology (AKA a virtual team) A dispersed team is where some team members are in one space together while the rest are in another Mark has a simple way of distinguishing between these types through space analogies: A Satelite team: where the bulk of the team is located but you’ve got a small number of the team that is not co-located with each other The Clusters: where the organization has several clusters of people in different locations (i.e. co-located teams that have to coordinate the work) The Nebula: where everybody is distributed and works from different locations to collaborate as a team What is a team? And what is key specifically for agile teams? A team has a single goal (and one that is small enough to be able to actually collaborate together with) and has interdependent work The team has the capability and the hours of overlap to communicate and check-in with each other so that they have the right understanding of their collective progress and goal The team watches out for each other to make sure they’re collectively working towards their goal Key principles that will help your distributed team move towards better agility: Hours of overlap are crucial in allowing the teams to truly collaborate Flow efficiency for agile teams The team needs to create tighter bonds with each other Self-organizing and self-managing teams Critical for the teams to decide when the meetings occur and to outline their own working agreements Nuggets of wisdom and important qualities to uphold for managers that are leading distributed agile teams: The three important mindset shifts for managers (outlined in their book) are: manage for change, emphasize communication and collaboration, and use agile principles (not practices) Great managers have organizational expertise and understand how to get things done in the organization in order to set up the right environment for the teams Managers support teams in their continued growth Experimentation is key to managing for change What is Value Stream Mapping (VSM) and how is it an important tool? VSM is a lean management tool that helps visualize the steps needed to take from product creation to delivering it to the end-customer It’s especially useful for nebula teams that are completely separated from each other (to be able to see where the work is and how much wait time there is)   Mentioned in this Episode: Johanna Rothman Mark Kilby From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver, by Johanna Rothman and Mark Kilby “Dispersed vs. Distributed Teams,” by Johanna Rothman Agile Coaches’ Corner Ep.5: “Exploring an Experimental Mindset with Adam Ulery” Value Stream Mapping (VSM)   Johanna and Mark’s Book (and TV Show) Picks: The Man in the High Castle (Amazon Prime Series) Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, by Caitlin Rosenthal Educated: A Memoir, by Tara Westover   Want to Learn More or Get in Touch? Visit the website and catch up with all the episodes on AgileThought.com! Email your thoughts or suggestions to Podcast@AgileThought.com or Tweet @AgileThought using #AgileThoughtPodcast!

MARK KILBY and JOHANNA ROTHMAN have written a book called "From Chaos To Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate To Deliver". In this interview we dive into why they wrote this book and how distributed teams can be agile and successful. For more stories, visit https://www.collaborationsuperpowers.com. 

Mark Kilby is a seasoned agile coach, and co-founder of several North-American Agile communities. Johanna Rothman is a prolific author, management expert, and teacher of best management practices. Both are experienced software engineers, and by their powers combined, they are the co-authors of the newest book about remote agile: “From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams.” In this episode, we go through their experience with writing the book, and take a long, hard look at the common pitfalls that remote teams face – and where adopting Agile principles might help. We discuss how to promote cross-functionality; how to “sell” management and employees on Agile practices; how to preserve the health and sanity of remote managers; the importance of timezone overlap; and much, much more!

We have reached episode 200! We are celebrating… and we invite you to celebrate with us. Many of our listeners and guests responded to our call for contributions for this episode, and it’s wonderful to reflect the diversity of teams and people working in various ways virtually and remotely and flexibly, as expressed in the variety of ways we celebrate together. Because 21st Century Work Life is about choice and the way you want to do things. Maya and Pilar may have celebrated this milestone by connecting with listeners and how they celebrate. Sometimes it’s the smallest things - like the way emojis can convey so much emotion, in so few pixels.  (And if you’d like to communicate more with fewer words, send us your favourite emoji as a celebration of this episode!) Larger teams might create more formal ways of using their regular communications channels to celebrate in a slightly more structured way, such as Morgan Legge (interviewed in Episode 146) at Convert.com who sent us a screenshot of their Slack, where they have created channels for #humblebrag #gratitude and so on - things that are outside of the everyday work but weave the recognition and acknowledgement of each other throughout the working day. Gant Laborde (Episode 174) at Infinite Red have a #kudos channel for similar effect, and also have internal ‘ask me anything’ sessions to wrap up successful projects - which often take on a celebratory tone. Tim Burgess from ShieldGeo share that they go further and prompt all team members to contribute to a weekly round-up of shout-outs for colleagues - a lovely way to encourage people to reflect on who has helped them and how, and all interesting uses of asynchronous communications from all these teams: you don’t need to be in a special meeting or conversation, to recognise a job well done. When new people join a team that is also a cause for celebration, and Marcus Wermuth from Buffer (Episodes 188, 195 and more to come!) shared how they have a GIF party in their Slack to welcome new arrivals (because if an emoji speaks a thousand words, how about one that moves..?) Marcus also shared he likes to celebrate work things with his wife, do something out of the routine in the working week, it doesn’t have to be with his team to be a celebration. Jamon Holgrem ( Episode 183) from Infinite Red does something similar, ‘pelting’ new hires with GIFs in a special channel, while at Buffer they use an app called thread.com for calling out more business-related achievements for specific recognition and attention. Employees who are around long term can be acknowledged in other ways: 17.57 Teresa Douglas (Episode 193) from Kaplan (author of Secrets of the Online Workforce) On their 10 year anniversary with the company they celebrate with a professional caricature portrait of their team-mate, reflecting aspects of their interests and personality in a unique way - Teresa got hers last year. They also celebrate in more ad-hoc ways, including ‘secret’ team happy hours over video where all of the Canadian team got together to celebrate with one another, on the day that all their US colleagues were enjoying Memorial Day - being a multicultural team means you can enjoy each other’s local holidays in creative ways. Meetings are often the focus of team celebration of course Alison Jones (Episode 173) of practical inspiration reminded us to look beyond the work in hand, and they have a quarterly team meeting in which they ask each person to reflect on their high spots for sharing and validation - bringing a great positive energy into the meeting from the opening. (Talking of books - Maya and Pilar’s book Thinking Remote: Inspiration for Leaders of Distributed Teams is now available in audiobook. Message us for your FREE copy before the 1st July 2019, so you can celebrate with us!) 22.09 Vladimir Smolyakov Vivify Ideas As an Agile company Vivify Ideas use their cyclical retrospectives to present their projects to the wider organisation, in the presence of refreshments and a celebratory atmosphere which also helps share information within the larger group They also celebrate personal achievements and accomplishments, which is really motivating, to feel that a team of 100 people is behind you and encouraging your work. 25.00 Mark Kilby, Agile coach at Sonatype, (and veteran guest of episodes 73, 95, 175, 197... ) On Mark’s teams they use celebrations to maintain connections and also to reflect the characters of different team members - not everyone is comfortable being called out directly, or indeed doing that calling-out themselves. Some retrospectives might be very celebratory and full of appreciation, and we have to be sure to loop in the right people if they’re not in the room so they are included in the acknowledgement. Mark also shared with us how their teams all went out for, or stayed in, for lunch - including a colleague who joined them from a restaurant via webcam! In global teams, practicalities can prevent some kinds of celebration In hybrid teams it’s important that celebrations don’t take on a ‘them and us’ quality, also to acknowledge that not everyone can easily get themselves to a central location even for an epic party, so those at the greatest physical distance could feel excluded. But it does take a lot of planning to celebrate well together in a dispersed team. Jane Hatton (Episode 180) from Evenbreak used to buy donuts and icecream when their colleagues were colocated, and recognises that this is harder to replicate in remote. Their work meetings online tend to be about work - but, as they’re all friends too, they connect more informally on social media as well, reminding us that we can use the whole internet to support our teamwork relationships! 40:13 Luis Magalhaes at the DistantJob podcast Luis shared that they use Zoom calls to celebrate birthdays, which felt a bit awkward at first, but with the founder’s determination and persistence some flow was instigated (including a flow of liquid refreshment), and the team now looks forward to these friendly gatherings. ____ 42.34 And finally we had to celebrate with Ross and Maya, just getting the whole Virtual not distant team on one call for once - complete with outtakes and rustling! And we also happened to be recording on Maya’s birthday. We all enjoy doing different things on the anniversary of the day we are born, including recording podcasts.  Ross prefers to get away offline and go camping, but is planning a party this year for his birthday, and Pilar recently celebrated going out to eat with friends. We wrap up with some quick celebrations from even more previous guests, including Paul Read’s new online course, Robert Glazer making team-member’s dreams come true, Richard Mackinnon’s 40th podcast episode (featuring Pilar), and let’s remember to celebrate Pilar’s other shows Management Cafe and Wordmaze, and Maya’s Crypto Confidence show. Finally from Pilar, Maya and Ross - from our three different countries - we’re celebrating all that podcasting means to us, and celebrating each one of you wonderful people who listen to us every week. Thank you!

Listen in as Johanna Rothman @johannarothman and Mark Kilby @mkilby discuss their new book "From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams" with @AgileUprising hosts Collen Johnson @scrumhive and Andy Cleff @justsitthere. Distributed work is not the same as collocated work. But agile principles can be adapted and applied to distributed teams. Contact Information Johanna Rothman www.jrothman.com https://twitter.com/johannarothman https://www.linkedin.com/in/johannarothman/ Mark Kilby AgileOrlando.com / Lean Coffee Orlando / AgileFlorida.com / AgileOpenFlorida.com Agile Alliance Community Group Support Initiative / VirtualTeamTalk.com / remotelyagile.info https://twitter.com/mkilby https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkilby/ mark@markkilby.com Books Topic of this ‘cast: https://leanpub.com/geographicallydistributedagileteams/ Other books: https://www.jrothman.com/books/ Influential Agile Leader: https://www.influentialagileleader.com/ Events Mile High Agile 2019 Agile2019 ---- Please continue to support the Agile Uprising by subscribing to our podcast Also consider giving us a review on iTunes, Stitcher or your podcasting platform of choice. Ratings and comments really help others find us. And join the discourse by sharing your experiments around chaos, successful, and yes, failure with distributed agile teams via Coalition.agileuprising.com Support the Agile Uprising by making a contribution via patreon.com/agileuprising

Welcome, from the team at VirtualNotDistant.com Can you contribute to our 200-episode anniversary show? We’d like to hear about your celebrations, within your team/community… Please send your words or even audio to Pilar so we can celebrate celebrations together!  We love to hear from our listeners and bring multiple voices and points of view onto the show whenever we can. We have some great conversations on Twitter too, like this one where we discussed changes in Microsoft Teams, some of which concerned us - like the introduction of ‘ethical walls’, to separate people in different teams and prevent them from using the platform to collaborate. What do you think?  We were thrilled to get a reply from Justin Morris who helps people professionally with adoption of Microsoft Teams, and he even made a video reply - which definitely helped us to understand the potential compliance and conflict of interest issues. Pilar has also been guesting on the Distant Job podcast with Luis Magalhaes, where we had a great conversation about visible teamwork - and feedback you might not have expected. Do check it out for a great listen.  And thank you for recommending us Bart Van de Rooy on LinkedIn (as part of a very interesting conversation about the pros and cons of distributed working). We’re keeping an eye on Google Podcasts and their transcript creation ideas (as discussed on the Libsyn podcast The Feed), anything which brings us to a wider audience - do tell us how you catch our show (or if there’s anywhere else we should be). And don’t miss our monthly newsletter, and our new free email coaching sequence, exploring and developing the ideas in Thinking Remote 16.48 The voices behind the book: Mark Kilby and Johanna Rothman, authors of From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams We have been waiting for this one to be published for a long time, and you definitely don’t need to be an Agile practitioner to benefit greatly from it. Mark is an Agile coach and long term friend of this show, Johanna’s background is in product development, where she consults and writes prolifically.  Software development is often seen as challenging for online collaboration, but the authors felt strongly that there were lots of strategies worth considering, and case studies that many could learn from. Practical industry issues include timezone overlap, or lack of - and balancing the iteration of the work with the cadence of the regular checkpoints and milestones. Scrum is all about fixed timeboxing and needs some flexible thinking to apply to a team who cannot all work at the same time, it can be done. The Agile approach of experimenting and exploring and keeping what works, applies well to optimising these rhythms. They’ve also written a great article about how they wrote the book as remote collaborators, “You Have to Say More There: Effective Communication in a Distributed Agile Team”, which resonated significantly for the Virtual Not Distant team, and is a highly worthwhile read on its own. This approach led to a really close collaborative process mostly writing and editing synchronously in real-time, producing a very consistent and unified tone of voice for the book as a whole even though they brought different stories and experiences to each element of the content. They also delve into the feedback and consultation process, and the LeanPub approach for writing and getting feedback fast - an Agile approach to creating content, that helped ensure the book truly reflected the needs and truths of its audience. And the conversation on tools leads into the bigger one we’re continually having about the tech ecosystem itself - and to another great article from Mark and Johanna For Distributed Agile Teams, It’s Not All about the Tools (because it’s more about the why behind the tool than the what). The Agile mindset clearly has a great deal to offer to remote teams on so many levels. Do check out the book, available from all the usual places, and of course keep up with Mark and Johanna via their respective websites, where you can also sign up for the newsletter.  1.08.46 Oh no, my teams gone remote! And how will I rally the troops! We all have different mental models of the typical leader. (Pilar mentions one she observed in the TV series Bad Banks.) One leadership archetype we often think of is the ‘hero’. The charismatic, inspiring orator, delivering team-talks which get everybody enthused to action - but this might not easily translate to the online space. If we rely on that group energy to pump up the motivation with our personal passion, it just won’t work so well (though there are routes to this, for example, high-quality video). A mindset shift to being an enabler within the team and a champion of the team, relating to our colleagues as individuals rather than a mass to be moved collectively. We have to make use of all the channels and tools we have at our disposal to connect effectively and tap into what motivates each person, as part of our leadership role, and our management practice. See you next time!

How can remote teams be Agile? Are there any tips, tools, strategies that can help communicate the Agile principles and implement them in distributed teams? There are. Many. And that’s a good thing, because no single one applies to all teams. Authors Mark Kilby and Johanna Rothman explain how their latest book is meant to pave the way for a new age of distributed work. Welcome to the DistantJob Podcast, a show where we interview the most successful remote leaders, picking their brains on how to build and lead remote teams who win.Mark Kilby is a seasoned agile coach, and co-founder of several North-American Agile communities. Johanna Rothman is a prolific author, management expert, and teacher of best management practices. Both are experienced software engineers, and by their powers combined, they are the co-authors of the newest book about remote agile: “From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams.”In this episode, we go through their experience with writing the book, and take a long, hard look at the common pitfalls that remote teams face - and where adopting Agile principles might help. We discuss how to promote cross-functionality; how to “sell” management and employees on Agile practices; how to preserve the health and sanity of remote managers; the importance of timezone overlap; and much, much more!————————Want to continue the conversation with Mark and Johanna? Find them on Twitter and LinkedIn: Mark Kilby (@mkilby) on Twitter (https://twitter.com/mkilby)https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkilby/Johanna Rothman (@johannarothman) on Twitter (https://twitter.com/johannarothman)https://www.linkedin.com/in/johannarothman/ Johanna’s Books, Blogs, Newsletter and services:https://www.jrothman.com Everything Mark Kilby (Blogs, Talks, Podcasts):https://www.markkilby.com Recommended Books:From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver (https://amzn.to/2GpLMDE)This is Lean: Resolving the Efficiency Paradox (https://amzn.to/2GzfYg3)Project Retrospectives: A Handbook for Team Reviews (https://amzn.to/2GldfXp) Recommended Tools:A Good Webcam (https://amzn.to/2Gsi41c)Jabra Speak 510 (http://bit.ly/2UKZATe)DIODER LED 4-piece light strip set (http://bit.ly/2Gqxt1V)————————As always, if you enjoy the podcast, we humbly ask that you leave a review on iTunes or your podcast syndication service of choice – and if you could share it, that would be even better!Need that one incredible employee to bolster your team?  Get in touch at https://distantjob.com/contact/  and we’ll find you who you need.

This podcast features an interview with Johanna Rothman and Mark Kilby about their new book "From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver" (https://tinyurl.com/yyrbhcrz). Distributed Teams present challenges for any group of people trying to work together. This is true in a traditional approach to project work, but maybe even more so in an Agile approach, where many of the frameworks are based on the idea of co-location. The challenges distributed teams face are present regardless of whether you are separated by 12 time zones or by a single flight of stairs. It can absolutely work, and there can be many benefits to working distributed. The big question is how? In their new book “From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver" (https://tinyurl.com/yyrbhcrz), Johanna Rothman and Mark Kilby deliver the practical answers we all need to help our distributed teams succeed. During the interview Mark and Johanna explain who they wrote the book for and how it can help. We also walk through a few of the most critical practices that help distributed teams work well together, and the authors share some tips that they did not include in the final version of the book. Now... I generally try to remain objective in this blog/podcast, but... GO BUY THIS BOOK! YOU NEED THIS BOOK! As someone who works with and on distributed teams, I have questions of my own with respect to steps that can be taken to foster a distributed team's success. This book had answers/strategies for all my questions and it is sure to be an invaluable resource for anyone working on or with distributed teams. Links mentioned in the podcast: "From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver" can be purchased on: Amazon https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07PRYM1TF/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i0 LeanPub https://leanpub.com/geographicallydistributedagileteams Dave interviews Johanna and Mark about writing as a Distributed Team at Agile 2018 https://youtu.be/JMxEeeCtK2I Johanna and Mark will be speaking at Agile 2019 https://www.agilealliance.org/agile2019/ Mark will be speaking at Mile High Agile https://www.milehighagile.org Contacting Johanna Web: https://www.jrothman.com Create an Adaptable Life: http://www.createadaptablelife.com Johanna's Fiction: https://www.jrothman.com/johannas-fiction/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/johannarothman?lang=en LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johannarothman/ Johanna on Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/y244gf35 Contacting Mark Web: https://www.markkilby.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/mkilby LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkilby/

SPaMCAST 540 features our interview Mark Kilby and Johanna Rothman. Johanna, Mark, and I discussed their new book, From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams, Collaborate to Deliver (Buy your copy here: https://amzn.to/2Omur23). Distributed agile teams are a fact of life; Johanna and Mark provide an extraordinary amount of wisdom for making distributed teams exceptional.    Johanna’s Bio Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” provides frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams see problems, resolve risks, and manage their product development. Johanna was the Agile 2009 conference chair and was the co-chair of the first edition of the Agile Practice Guide. Johanna is the author of 14 books that range from hiring, to project management, program management, project portfolio management, and management. Her most recent books are From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams (with Mark Kilby) and Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver. Read her blogs, email newsletter, and more information about her books at www.jrothman.com  Mark Kilby Bio With over two decades of experience in agile principles and practices, Mark Kilby has cultivated more distributed and dispersed teams than collocated teams.  He has consulted with organizations across many industries and coached teams, leaders, and organizations internally. Mark also co-founded a number of professional learning organizations such as Agile Orlando, Agile Florida, Virtual Team Talk, and the Agile Alliance Community Group Support Initiative among others.  His easy-going style helps teams learn to collaborate and discover their path to success and sustainability. Mark shares his insights on distributed and agile teams in dozens of articles in multiple publications. Most of his latest ideas and developments can be found on www.markkilby.com Re-Read Saturday News We have been re-reading Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point over the past 10 weeks.  When considering how I would wrap up the re-read I had to fight the urge to parrot back the findings Gladwell identified in the conclusion: a few people are critical and that people’s biases matter. Real life intervened and I applied the ideas in the book! We need to choose the next book in the Re-read Saturday Series. Steven Adams has requested a referendum on the next book.  Mr. Adams has always provided sage advice, therefore, a poll we will have! The poll will be open for two weeks. Vote for your two favorites. Next SPaMCAST SPaMCAST 541 will feature our essay on guardrails.  We will discuss using guardrails in decision making.  Guardrails are a tool to ensure alignment with the organization’s goals and objectives and to keep people on the right path.  Well-formed guardrails conform to five attributes that help teams and individuals make decisions. We will also have a visit from John M Quigley who brings his Alpha and Omega of Product Development column to the podcast.

SPaMCAST 539 features our essay titled, Assessment and Continuous Process Improvement. Assessments and continuous process improvement are intertwined. Assessments being both a source of ideas and a tool to validate change and other experiments.  Other essays that have appeared on the SPaMCAST blog on agile assessments include: Assessment and Continuous Process Improvement - https://bit.ly/2UU8mdI Components Of A Solid Assessment Plan https://bit.ly/2YsHqnM Assessments: Being or DOing https://bit.ly/2HGOEiK An Assessment: A Mall Map For Change https://bit.ly/2TX8BbJ We will also have part 2 of Susan Parente’s discussions on distributed agile.  This week we will focus on tools. Susan reminds us that unless you spend time building trust and learning how to communicate, a tool won’t solve a communication problem. Re-Read Saturday News This week we conclude the re-read portion our tour through Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point by tackling both the conclusion and the afterword. The Tipping Point is a theory that viral change—epidemics, in Gladwell’s word—can be caused and shaped by few actions and people. The Law of the Few tells us that connectors, mavens and salespeople can affect whether or not a concept, idea or movement moves across the tipping point and becomes an epidemic. Check out the current entry of Re-Read Saturday at www.tcagley.wordpress.com I have had several excellent suggestions for what to read next, right now the leader in the clubhouse is The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.  Thoughts? Next SPaMCAST SPaMCAST 540 will be a TREAT.  My interview with Mark Kilby and Johanna Rothman will be featured!   We discussed their new book, From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams, Collaborate to Deliver (Buy your copy https://amzn.to/2Omur23). Distributed agile teams are a fact of life, Johanna and Mark provide an extraordinary amount of wisdom for making distributed teams exceptional.

Joe Krebs speaks with Johanna Rothman and Mark Kilby about working with distributed teams.We touched on self-organization, working agreements, celebrations, virtual water coolers, tools and Scrum Master facilitation techniques in an distributed or dispersed environment.

In this episode Johanna, Mark and I talk about their new book called "From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver" which is available on Amazon and LeanPub. This book contains a ton of useful guidance when working with distributed teams in an agile project. We touched on self-organization, working agreements, celebrations, virtual water coolers, tools and Scrum Master facilitation techniques in an distributed or dispersed environment. Although we covered a lot of ground in the podcast, the book will provide more insights and additional points to consider.

BJOG Associate Editor Daniel Stott interviews BJOG author Mark Kilby about his 2 recently published papers: - Prognosis of the co-twin following spontaneous single intrauterine fetal death in twin pregnancies: a systematic review and meta-analysis https://obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1471-0528.15530 - Falling perinatal and neonatal mortality in twins in the United Kingdom: organisational success or chance? https://obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1471-0528.15517

Mark and Johanna Co-Presented a talk at Agile 2018 entitled: You have to Say More There: Effective Communication in a Distributed Agile Team Their book is called From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teamsit can be purchased on LeanPub Johanna led another session at Agile 2018: Agile and Lean Roadmapping Mark also led an additional session at Agile 2018: Agile Distributed Teams—Oxymoron or Option? Contact InfoJohanna: jrothman.com/TwitterMark: markkilby.com /Twitter

SPaMCAST 506 features our interview with Mark Kilby.  Mark and I explored distributed agile teams. Agile in distributed environments is doable, but it isn’t easy. Mark provides guidance and advice. Mark recently co-authored From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams with Johanna Rothman (LeanPub). Mark’s bio and contact information: MARK KILBY has cultivated more distributed, dispersed, and virtual teams than colocated teams for more than two decades. Currently, Mark serves as an agile coach with Sonatype, a “remote first” software development company focusing on automation of software supply chains. Previously, Mark led agile transformations, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Mark also cultivates dispersed communities, such as Agile Orlando, Agile Florida, VirtualTeamTalk.com, and the Agile Alliance Community Group Support initiative.  Mark’s book, From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams, is co-authored with Johanna Rothman and is available now via http://markkilby.com  and https://leanpub.com/geographicallydistributedagileteams Twitter: @mkilby Linked In: linkedin.com/in/mkilby   Re-Read Saturday News Week 2 of our re-read of The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande (use the link and buy a copy so you can read along). Chapter 1 builds the case that the world we live in and the work that we do is very complex. Complexity creates the possibility for errors. Checklists are a tool to help avoid errors in complicated and complex environments.   Current Installment: Current Installment: Week 2 – The Problem With Extreme Complexity - https://bit.ly/2AGZQZX  Previous Installments: Week 1 - Approach and Introduction - https://bit.ly/2LYi9Lv Next SPaMCAST SPaMCAST 507 features our essay exploring consensus decision making. One of the primary decision-making techniques used in teams is consensus decision making. The power of consensus decision making is that it yields decisions that are the output of a process in which a team or group finds a solution that everyone can either actively support or live with.  The process of getting to a decision or solution that the whole team can at least live will make sure that everyone on the team has a seat at the table and that team builds both majority and minority views into the deliberation process.  Sounds simple, right? We will also have columns from Susan Parente (I Am Not a Scrumdamentalist) and Jeremy Berriault (QA Corner).

SPaMCAST 505 features our recent essay titled, Coaching: Six Modes of Operation. On the surface, coaching is a fairly simple role. A coach has six basic modes of operation.  But…if you peel back the layers just a little bit you will find that coaching is part art and part science. In the second spot of this week's magazine have the penultimate session of our read of Steve Tendon and Wolfram Müller’s Hyper-Productive Knowledge Work Performance, The TameFlow Approach.   I have moved things around a bit and complete this edition of the SPaMCAST with an essay on servant leadership from the Software Sensei, Kim Pries.  Regardless of how you define servant leadership, I think we would all agree that good leadership is critical. Re-Read Saturday News This week we begin the read of The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande (use the link and buy a copy so you can read along). The version of the book we are reading is published by Metropolitan Books, 2009 and is the 22nd printing. The book has nine chapters and with acknowledgments has 209 pages. My reading plan is one chapter per week, therefore, the re-read will span 11 weeks.   Current Installment: Week 1 - Approach and Introduction - https://bit.ly/2LYi9Lv   Next SPaMCAST SPaMCAST 506 will feature our interview with Mark Kilby.  Mark and I discussed agile in distributed environments. Agile in distributed environments is doable but it isn’t easy, Mark provides guidance and advice.

Jochen (Joe) Krebs speaks with Mark Kilby about his role as an agile coach in a fully distributed company and his work as an agile community cultivator in Florida.

Jochen (Joe) Krebs speaks with Mark Kilby about his role as an agile coach in a fully distributed company and his work as an agile community cultivator in Florida.

Craig is at Agile 2016 in Atlanta and catches up with Mark Kilby, an Agile Coach at Sonatype and co-founder of Agile Orlando and Agile Florida. Along the way they discuss: “Extreme Programming Explained” by Kent Beck (the white book) Memories of Jean Tabaka and her book “Collaboration Explained” We should be collaborating with leaders … Continue reading →

What contributes to team members trusting each other in virtual teams? In today's episode, we present a range of thoughts, questions and suggestions to help maintain trust in virtual teams. visit www.virtualnotdistant.com “If we don’t have the trust, eventually you don’t have a team, you have a bunch of individuals that are sort of working together, but not really working together towards the same purpose.” (Mark Kilby) History of Virtual Team Talk and this project 06:50mins "What level of trust does my team need, right now, to be effective?" Calculated Trust: You follow the rules because the cost of not doing so is greater then the value of breaking the rule. How Trust Emerges 13:10mins Self-Awareness: What helps us to build trust, how does my behaviour impact how others trust me You can read the blog post about the first meeting we had in virtualteamtalk.com In this episode you will hear the voices of Mark Kilby, who’s an agile coach working in a company called Sonatype, which is 95% distributed. They have developers all the way from Thailand to Alaska, working from home. And Melanie Pürschel who is developing software for remote teams and she’s currently working on the Team Mood Tracker. As a psychologist in IT she’s interested in how to support teams through technology. And thanks to Terrance, Jochen, Kayt and Kevin for their thoughts and contributions to this project too.  16:34 mins Individual behaviours that help us trust someone or distrust them   06:50mins "What level of trust does my team need, right now, to be effective?" Calculated Trust: You follow the rules because the cost of not doing so is greater then the value of breaking the rule. How Trust Emerges 13:10mins Self-Awareness: What helps us to build trust, how does my behaviour impact how others trust me You can read the blog post about the first meeting we had in virtualteamtalk.com In this episode you will hear the voices of Mark Kilby, who’s an agile coach working in a company called Sonatype, which is 95% distributed. They have developers all the way from Thailand to Alaska, working from home. And Melanie Pürschel who is developing software for remote teams and she’s currently working on the Team Mood Tracker. As a psychologist in IT she’s interested in how to support teams through technology. And thanks to Terrance, Jochen, Kayt and Kevin for their thoughts and contributions to this project too.  16:34 mins Indiv   Trust and conflict. Can you be yourself? Can you trust others to call out unsuitable behaviour? Managers who want harmony all the time. Do we trust/distrust certain professions more than others? How is trust built in cross-functional teams? 27:04minsBuilding trust in new teams and the question of control 36:33mins Designing pairing opportunities to “do” something, the sense of camaraderie, purpose, alignment, can be brought out. 38:49mins  Norm formation and trust emergence. Trust as a broad corridor. 41:18mins Reliability  “Is there anything else we should be talking about?” is a really important question. That can be turned into a process, something that we integrate into our meeting processes. Trust is about understanding people’s behaviour when it doesn’t match our own. 48:10 Traits of people working remotely.  Work life and Home life To screen or not to screen? Some of the resources we talked about: Blog post on discussion on trust https://virtualteamtalk.com/2016/11/05/trust-in-teams-1/ Live broadcast of this topic: https://virtualteamtalk.com/2017/02/14/we-continue-talking-about-trust/ http://www.retrospectives.com/pages/Anatomy.html and search the page for "Making the magic happen" Drexler/Sibbet Team Performance Modelhttp://community.fansshare.com/pic118/w/high-performance-teams/1200/14499_drexler_sibbet_team_performance_model.jpg (104KB) https://runbook.freistil.it/operations/ https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-neuroscience-of-trust http://www.leadershipnow.com/leadingblog/2016/09/the_10_laws_of_trust.html NOBL newsletter http://us9.campaign-archive2.com/?u=e80c7e00182317ea114b75362&id=997a473a8c&e http://ldslights.org/brene-browns-formula-for-trust/

Join Pilar and 18 guests to reflect on how the world of work and our attitudes to work are changing.  visit www.virtualnotdistant.com Thank you to everyone who has ever appeared on this podcast and a special thanks to all those involved in this special episode: Michael Herman  www.michaelherman.com    Episode 95 Vanessa Shaw www.thehumansideoftech.org    Episode 45 Ryan Behrman Episode 44 Mandy Garner www.workingmums.co.uk   Episode 74 Kristin Messina  www.yonderwork.com    Episode 97 Pilar mentions this article: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/nov/18/daily-commute-of-two-hours-reality-for-37m-uk-workers Michele Bonazza  www.sketchtogether.com   Episode 57 Mandy Garner www.workingmums.co.uk   Episode 74 Melanie Purschel www.teammoodtracker.com Episode 88 Jurgen Appelo http://jurgenappelo.com/ Episode 4 Lisette Sutherland www.collaborationsuperpowers.com every other episode!!!!  Craig Wealand www.inglespodcast.com Episode 66 Mariano Tufró www.leadershipminds.co.uk Episode 18 Lindsay Price www.theatrefolk.com Episode 28  and http://www.theatrefolk.com/podcast/devising-physical-theatre/ Craig Wealand www.inglespodcast.com  and www.enclavedepodcast.com Episode 66 Phil Hayes www.managementfutures.co.uk/books Episode 8 Marta Texidor https://twitter.com/martatmdv Episode 12 Dave Blum aka Dr.Clue www.drclue.com  Episode 94 Richard A. Mackinnon www.futureworkcentre.com Episode 81 Mark Kilby www.markkilby.com Episodes 73 and 95 Andy Cleff www.andycleff.com  Episode 99 Share your thoughts through our Contact Form.

If you're interested in running sessions which are completely relevant to the people attending them, this is the episode for you. Pilar talks to facilitators Michael Herman and Mark Kilby about their experience working together. Introduction Loads of announcements today: Open course on leading remote teams: http://virtualnotdistant.com/training/leading-remote-teams-course/ Join Virtual Team Talk. https://virtualteamtalk.com/ 8th December workshop in London on Managing Remote and Virtual Teams. http://www.thehubevents.com/events/managing-remote-and-virtual-teams-141/ Remember you can listen also to Management Café podcast, about leading teams. https://managementcafepodcast.com/ The Art of Podcasting - a masterclass on finding your voice and podcast format. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-art-of-podcasting-tickets-28290435454   This podcast is sponsored by Saros Research. If you want to give your opinion and get paid for it. https://www.sarosresearch.com/participate/join-saros-research/?id=100243   The Conversation with Michael Herman and Mark Kilby 12:10mins A virtual Openspace on Openspace: http://openspaceworld.org/wp2/osonos/ How Mike and Michael's Co-Facilitation Partnership came about. Agile meets OpenSpace Creating an event to encourage deep conversation, not creating best practice presentations. We're working more and more in a distributed way: What does this mean for the world of work. OpenSpace is if nothing else responsing to change and customer collaboration in creating the agenda about what's going to happen. You can listen to people's experiences of the audacious salon here: http://virtualnotdistant.com/audacious-salon/ http://virtualnotdistant.com/hybrid-teams/ Practicing the Back and Forth. Some people who were there in person on day 1 wanted to join in remotely over day 2. How much preparation do you need to run an open-space event? Intentional choices about technology, shifting expectations around technology. A bit of a summary of Open Space Technology. What happens if nothing happens? Are agile and openspace the same thing? Sometimes we only need to point out to people what they could do. Find Mark on Twitter @mkilby and remotelyagile.info markkilby.com Find Michael here: michaelherman.com His wiki: http://www.michaelherman.com/cgi/wiki.cgi?WorkSpace If you would like to join Virtual Team Talk, go here: https://virtualteamtalk.com/

Technology is built by people all over the world.  Keeping them working as a team is one of Mark's specialties.  Mark really knows distributed agile, with over 30 yrs in the software and coaching space. He has spent nearly the last 3 in a 100% distributed environment.  On this InDepth distributed podcast, Mark talks about the different types of distributed teams, and offers tips for keeping people engaged.  We talk a bit on the Agile Manifesto and how it still applies, plus he does give some sage advise on the tools we use to connect.  If you have people working in multiple locations, this is the interview you should not miss.  The 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 at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQ YouTube, http://bit.ly/ SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Mark Kilby thinks it's time to rethink what face-to-face means for Agility, especially in today's increasingly global economy. In his Agile2016 session "Distributed Agile: Evolution or Delusion?" Mark emphasized that collaboration and connection between team members is what's important, and that collocation doesn't automatically imply face-to-face communication. While tools like Sococo and telepresence robots are great for enhancing team connections, Mark advocates for more human patterns, namely: the buddy system, pairing/copiloting and backchanneling. SolutionsIQ's Josh Fruit 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

In today's episode, Pilar and Lisette talk about what factors affect motivation in virtual teams - and indeed most teams.    Introduction It's a short one today. Maybe this mentoring group for managers of virtual teams is for you...  http://virtualnotdistant.com/virtual-not-distant-mentoring-group/ Would you like to join Virtual Team Talk? And, of course, many thanks to Saros Research. If you'd like to share your opinion and get paid for it (and you're based in the UK or Ireland), follow this link. https://www.sarosresearch.com/participate/join-saros-research/?id=100243   Virtual Coffee with Lisette: Motivation in Virtual Teams 07:00 mins Our Updates Lisette is going to be on Entrepreneur on Fire!!!! (Yes, you read right!) Meanwhile, Pilar is getting ready to launch two podcasts in August: En clave de podcast with Craig Wealand and 21st Century Management Some stuff that's happening in the Virtual Team Talk Group. (Wink to Mark Kilby and the Sketchtogether guys.) Lisette mentions this popular interview on her Collaboration Superpowers podcast: Leslie Truex's interview on Be a Work at Home Success 27:40 mins Our Conversation This is the article by Liz Ryan (@humanworkplace on Twitter) that inspired today's episode: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-kill-your-teams-motivation-without-really-trying-liz-ryan "Management should be a profession, not a promotion." Should managers be responsible for motivating their team members or should they just get out of the way? You need to know the individual. Self-determination theory and Daniel Pink's adaptation of it. What is at the heart of what motivates us to do a good job? "Motivation is a function of your environment." Technology plays an important part in motivation, as it is a key component of your environment. The role of leadership and management in being visible. Our own relationship with hierarchy. Managers beware... If you want to find out more about Dan Ariely's work on motivation. https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_what_makes_us_feel_good_about_our_work?language=en Visibility of our work in organisations. Barriers to making decisions and how to ask others for help.

He’s an Agile coach working with an international distributed software development team. Inc: how to control the information flow; how to optimise meetings; Agile vs waterfall methods in distributed teams.

Hosts Ryan Ripley, Mark Kilby, David Horowitz Discussion Mark Kilby (@mkilby) and David Horowitz (@ds_horowitz) – CEO of Retrium (@RetriumHQ) – joined me (@RyanRipley) for a discussion about continuous improvement, retrospectives, and remote teams. Agile for Humans is brought to you by audible.com – get one FREE audiobook download and 30 day free trial at www.audibletrial.com/agile Resources, Plugs, and More Ryan – https://ryanripley.com No plugs this week. Just a big thank you to the listeners for continuing to spread the work about the podcast and for your feedback and support. Mark – http://markkilby.com/ Paper – Can you be remotely agile? Slides – Can you be remotely agile? More on how Sonatype works 100% distributed and agile More on distributed facilitation I also work with distributed volunteer teams as well. I’m not only the co-founder of Agile Orlando, but I’m the co-founder of Agile Florida, a network of multiple user groups in the state of Florida. We collaborate on events, share information on speakers, and help other user groups through our efforts. You can read our Agile2015 experience report on how we work as a distributed team at…. User group dying? Time to build a state-wide learning network! by Mark Kilby, Stephanie Davis and Alex Kanaan. David – https://www.retrium.com/ Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen Why Group Brainstorming is a Waste of Time The post AFH 023: Remote Teams with Mark Kilby and David Horowitz [PODCAST] appeared first on Ryan Ripley.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Can you mix distribute open source culture with agile and lean principles? Sonatype is a unique company of open source leaders that produces software development support tools for companies that are struggling to keep track of their usage and risks of open source software components. Mark discusses how this startup has successfully used Scrum with completely distributed teams spread across multiple time zones. Find out what pre-conditions exist, principles we’re discovering, practices we use and continuing challenges we face as we coordinate the work of multiple teams across an open source product line with everyone working from a home-based office.

This week I’m excited to share episode one of the “Agile for Humans” podcast. This is a regular podcast hosted by a rotating group of agilists who take on various topics and issues. I’m working on getting a site setup for the podcast, but for now you can find the episodes here and eventually on iTunes. Hosts Don Gray, Mark Kilby, Aaron Kopel, Ryan Ripley Discussion On our inaugural episode the team started off by trying to name this new podcast, however, they eventually moved on. First we discussed Hala Saleh's talk at Agile Indy 2015 title: My Agile is Better Than Your Agile. Overall the group agreed that empathy and kindness are key ingredients when talking about agile topics. Next the team moved on to the caring and feeding of user groups. Aaron and Mark shared their experiences in this area and provided cautionary tales and solid advice to Ryan, who is looking to start and agile user group in Fort Wayne, IN. Ryan discussed his recent talk at Agile Indy 2015 – Help!!! The Scrum Master IS the Impediment – and talked about the need for scrum masters to inspect and adapt their behaviors to avoid becoming impediments to their team's success. The team wrapped up with a some light talk about “change” and decided to table that large discussion for next time. Ryan completely butchered the word “cynefin”, Don started a book club, and then we called it a night Resources, Plugs, and More Don – http://www.donaldegray.com/ Coaching Beyond the Team – Workshop co-taught with Esther Derby Humble Inquiry Mindful Coaching Leadership Agility Mark – http://markkilby.com AgileOrlando.com – agile user community in Orlando AgileFlorida.com　- network of agile user groups in Florida AgileOpenFlorida.com　- Open Space for agile practitioners, June 26, St. Petersburg, FL Agile Transformation Summit 2015 – May 28, Ft. Lauderdale Aaron – http://www.projectbrilliant.com Urban Dictionary: Silver Alert Agile Indy Ryan – http://agileanswerman.com Help!!! The Scrum Master IS the Impediment Hala Saleh's “My Agile is Better than Your Agile” The post AFH 001: My Agile is Better Than Your Agile [PODCAST] appeared first on Ryan Ripley.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mark Kilby's specialties include Agile retrospectives, organizational change, and coaching distributed teams and stakeholders on continuous collaboration. I talk to him about Agile and remote teams, virtual facilitation techniques, productivity, management, and more! For more stories, visit www.collaborationsuperpowers.com.

Mark Kilby will discuss Agile Values and the role they play in an organization.