Podcasts about rational software

In this episode, Avanish and Mike discuss:Mike's journey from his early tech roots in Silicon Valley to his role as CRO at Zscaler, including his transformative work growing ServiceNow from $500M to $6B in the Americas regionThe importance of always viewing platform strategy through the customer's lens - helping them achieve outcomes rather than managing multiple point solutionsHow a successful platform requires breaking down silos not just within your own organization, but often within your customer's organizationThe "one team" concept of the three-legged stool: customer, vendor, and partner, all working together toward shared successWhy ecosystem partners are mission-critical, providing industry expertise and customer insights that vendors can't replicateThe role of security in enabling productive AI adoption, with Zscaler helping customers leverage generative AI safely at scaleHow to develop meaningful metrics with partners beyond just pipeline generation, focusing on mutual success plans and regular reviewsThe importance of playing the long game with partners - "It's not how you behave when things are going great, it's how you behave when things hit the fan"Host: Avanish SahaiAvanish Sahai is a Tidemark Fellow and has served as a Board Member of Hubspot since April 2018 and of Birdie.ai since April 2022. Previously, Avanish served as the vice president, ISV and Apps partner ecosystem of Google from 2019 until 2021. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the global vice president, ISV and Technology alliances at ServiceNow.  From 2014 to 2015, he was the senior vice president and chief product officer at Demandbase.  Prior to Demandbase, Avanish built and led the Appexchange platform ecosystem team at Salesforce, and was an executive at Oracle and McKinsey & Company, as well as various early-to-mid stage startups in Silicon Valley.About Mike RichMike Rich is a highly accomplished technology sales professional with a career spanning more than 30 years.During his tenure as President, Americas at ServiceNow from 2011–2023, Mike played a pivotal role in the company's success. Under his leadership, the AMS region experienced unprecedented revenue growth, catapulting from $500 million to $6 billion+.Mike focused on initiatives like vertical industries that enabled customer-facing teams to partner closely with customers. During his time, the company's overall growth skyrocketed from $80 million to $8 billion. Throughout his career, Mike has kept customer satisfaction as the north star, ensuring that every business decision aligns with the goal of providing unparalleled value to clients and career advancement for employees.Before ServiceNow, Mike held leadership roles at enterprise software companies Borland, Rational Software, and Kana.Mike's leadership philosophy revolves around building diverse teams that prioritize achieving desired mutual outcomes. His passion is fostering environments where collaboration, mutual respect, and teamwork are paramount.About TidemarkTidemark is a venture capital firm, foundation, and community built to serve category-leading technology companies as they scale.  Tidemark was founded in 2021 by David Yuan, who has been investing, advising, and building technology companies for over 20 years.  Learn more at www.tidemarkcap.com.LinksFollow our guest, Mike RichFollow our host, Avanish SahaiLearn more about Tidemark

In this episode, Gene Fay interviews Ed Adams, President and CEO at Security Innovation, about his journey into cybersecurity and his work in advancing software security practices. Ed shares his story of transitioning from quality assurance in software at Rational Software to founding Security Innovation, a company focused on application security and training. Ed also dives into his book, See Yourself in Cybersecurity Careers Beyond Hacking, which highlights the many career paths available in the cybersecurity industry beyond hands-on keyboard roles. He discusses the cybersecurity talent shortage, particularly how it affects underrepresented groups, and the need for organizations to rethink how they hire and retain talent.Takeaways:There are many ways to start a career in cybersecurity, even from non-technical backgrounds.Security is an integral part of software quality can help developers and organizations create more secure, reliable applications.The book, See Yourself in Cybersecurity Careers Beyond Hacking, focuses on educating the next generation of cybersecurity professionals and promoting diversity in the field.The cybersecurity talent shortage is not about the lack of skilled individuals, but about outdated hiring practices and insufficient investment in talent development.

Seth Earley and Chris Featherstone are joined by special guest Bob Levy. Bob Levy, Founder and CEO of Immersion Analytics, brings a wealth of experience in technology and data visualization, having worked with top companies such as IBM, Rational Software, and Mathworks. He shares his profound insights on integrating multidimensional visualization technology using virtual and augmented reality to tackle complex data challenges.Bob Levy is Founder & CEO of Immersion Analytics. With extensive experience in R&D and product management at companies like IBM and Rational Software. Bob is an expert in AI and data visualization. He's been a speaker at prestigious events like MIT Technology Review's EmTech Caribbean and Reilly Strata Data Conference, and has won competitions like MIT's Reality Virtually hackathon and Tableau's DataDev Competition.Key Takeaways:- Examples of how visualization tools help investors make more informed decisions based on a multitude of data attributes.- The transformative potential of VR and AR in business settings and educational environments, backed by partnerships with tech giants like Microsoft and Apple.- Visualization technology as a tool for simplifying the understanding of AI-related compliance and emerging standards.- The discussion on the lack of global compliance standards and the need for potential new standards or refinement of existing ones.- Use cases in derivatives trading, financial performance metrics, and real-time pricing data for detecting anomalies and opportunities.- Innovative ways to visualize artificial neural networks and understand the training processes via VR.- Visualization tools for web and enterprise-level applications, including programming languages and hardware requirements.- The crucial role of visualization in making AI systems comprehensible to non-technical stakeholders like regulators.Quote of the Show:"Seeing all the data points and complexity is crucial for understanding the true nature of the data and avoiding misinterpretation." - Bob LevyLinks:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boblevy/Website: https://www.immersionanalytics.com/Ways to Tune In:Earley AI Podcast: https://www.earley.com/earley-ai-podcast-homeApple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1586654770Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5nkcZvVYjHHj6wtBABqLbE?si=73cd5d5fc89f4781iHeart Radio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-earley-ai-podcast-87108370/Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/earley-ai-podcastAmazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/18524b67-09cf-433f-82db-07b6213ad3ba/earley-ai-podcastBuzzsprout: https://earleyai.buzzsprout.com/ Thanks to our sponsors: CMSWire Earley Information Science AI Powered Enterprise Book

Bio Dave West is the Product Owner and CEO at Scrum.org. In this capacity, he engages with partners, and the community to drive Scrum.org's strategy and the overall market position of Scrum. Prior to joining Ken Schwaber and the team at Scrum.org he was Chief Product Officer at Tasktop where he was responsible for product management, engineering and architecture. As a member of the company's executive management team was also instrumental in growing Tasktop from a services business into a VC backed product business with a team of almost 100. As one of the foremost industry experts on software development and deployment, West has helped advance many modern software development processes, including the Unified process and Agile methods. He is a frequent keynote at major industry conferences and is a widely published author of articles and research reports. He also is the co-author of two books, The Nexus Framework For Scaling Scrum and Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. He led the development of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) for IBM/Rational. After IBM/Rational, West returned to consulting and managed Ivar Jacobson Consulting for North America. Then he served as vice president, research director at Forrester Research, where he worked with leading IT organisations and solutions providers to define, drive and advance Agile-based methodology and tool breakthroughs in the enterprise. Email –  Dave.west@scrum.org Twitter - @davidjwest LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidjustinwest   Interview Highlights Growing up with dyslexia 03:10 & 10:20 Water-Scrum-Fall 07:40 Psychological safety 15:40 Lilian the rockstar - 'who have you helped today?' 18:55 Is 'project' a taboo word? 21:53 'Humble and Kind' - not just for country music 44:30 Books ·         Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design by Dave West, Brett McLaughlin and Gary Pollice https://www.amazon.co.uk/Head-First-Object-Oriented-Analysis-Design/dp/0596008678/ ·         The Nexus Framework for Scaling Scrum by Dave West, Kurt Bittner and Patricia Kong https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nexus-Framework-Scaling-Scrum-Continuously/dp/0134682661 ·         ARTICLE: Why Kindness Matters by Dave West https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/why-kindness-matters ·         Thank You for Being Late by Thomas L Friedman https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thank-You-Being-Late-Accelerations/dp/0141985755 ·         Scrum: A Pocket Guide by Gunther Verheyen https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scrum-Pocket-Companion-Practice-Publishing/dp/9087537204 ·         The Professional Scrum Series by various authors https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=the+professional+scrum+series&crid=1WVNY1VHR0QAQ&sprefix=professional+scrum+series ·         Zombie Scrum by Christiaan Verijs, Johannes Schartau and Barry Overeem https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zombie-Scrum-Survival-Guide-Professional/dp/0136523269 ·         The Professional Agile Leader: The Leader's Journey Toward Growing Mature Agile Teams and Organizations (The Professional Scrum Series) by Ron Eringa, Kurt Bittner, Laurens Bonnema, foreword by Dave West https://www.amazon.com/Professional-Agile-Leader-Growing-Organizations-dp-0137591519/dp/0137591519/ Episode Transcript Ula Ojiaku (Guest Intro): Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. It's my honour to introduce my guest for this episode. He is Dave West. Dave is the CEO of Scrum.org and prior to joining Scrum.org as CEO, he led the development of the Rational Unified Process, also known as RUP with IBM. He was also Chief Product Officer for Tasktop Technologies and Managing Director of the Americas at Ivar Jacobson Consulting. He is a widely published author of several articles and research reports, as well as the books The Nexus Framework for Scaling Scrum and Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. In this conversation, Dave talked about growing up in the council estates, being raised by his grandparents who were of great positive influence in his life, especially his grandmother. He also talked about navigating the challenges of being dyslexic, especially as a student in secondary school with the silver lining being that he got introduced to computers. Dave also gave his perspective on one of the ongoing “agile wars” quote unquote, on the concept of projects and whether they still have a place in agile or not. Without further ado ladies and gentlemen, my conversation with Dave, I am sure you would find it very, very interesting, relevant and insightful. Thanks again for listening. Ula Ojiaku So we have on this episode of the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast, Dave West, who is the CEO of Scrum.org. Dave, it's a pleasure to have you on this show, thank you for making the time. Dave West Oh, well, thank you for inviting me. I'm glad we've finally managed to make the time to do this. It's great to talk to you. Ula Ojiaku Yes, well, the honour is mine. Let's start by talking about, you know, getting to know about the man, Dave. Can you, you know, tell us a bit about that? Dave West Yeah, I'll try not to bore your audience. So I was brought up on a council estate in a little town called Market Harborough, just outside Leicester. I lived with my grandparents, and which has definitely, my grandmother's definitely shaped who I am, I think, which is fantastic. So I got into computers, sort of a little bit by accident. I'm dyslexic and I found school, particularly secondary school, very challenging. I don't know if any of your audiences had a similar experience, but, you know, I went from a very protected environment and secondary school is a, oh my gosh, it's like an experience that could scare any human being. And so my dyslexia really was a challenge there and there was a teacher at secondary school called Phil Smith. He drove a sports car, he was sort of like that young, you know those teachers that you remember from school that are the good looking young ones. And he ran a computer lab and it had, you know, RS236, it had these really old computers, well, now we would look at them, they were brand new at the time, computers and some BBC model As and some other things. And I helped him and he gave me a lot of time in the lab and it was my sort of like escape. So I got very into computing and helped him and helped other teachers who were rubbish, I'm not going to lie, with computing. So that allowed me then, you know, I went through, managed to survive school, went to a further education college called Charles Keene where I studied, well I did a computing course, so not traditional A'levels and all of that. And then got into Huddersfield that was a poly at the time, became a University whilst I was there. And I think that that gave me a great opportunity, it was a fantastic university, it was a very practical course. My dyslexia became less of an issue because of, you know, word processing and I'd be honest and, you know, the ability for it to read back, even though it was an awful read back, it was like listening to say, you know, to like an old fashioned Stephen Hawking, you know, sort of, and then got me a job at Commercial Union, which then led to me doing a Masters, which then led me to move to London, all this sort of stuff. The adventure was great. The thing about, I guess, my journey is that it, I was driven at a certain point, I became very driven by the need to improve the way in which we delivered software development at that time, and that led me through my Masters and, you know, Object-Oriented and then to a company called Rational Software where I became the Product Manager for RUP, the Rational Unified Process. Now for the agilists listening, they're probably like, oh, boo hiss, and that's totally legit. It was in fact, that's when I first met Ken Schwaber and he told me I was an idiot, which turns out he was right. Ken Schwaber the creator (of Scrum), who I work for now. Anyways. Ula Ojiaku I mean, who wouldn't know Ken Schwaber if you're a self-respecting agilist.  Sorry, go on please. Dave West Yeah, he's an interesting character for sure. Anyway, so I was the RUP Product Manager and I realised I went to this large insurance company in the Midwest and it's a huge organisation and I met this lady and she said, I'm a use case. I said, what do you do? She said, I'm a use case specifier, and meet my friend, she's a use case realiser and I'm like, oh, no, that's not the intent. And so I realised that there was this process that I loved, and I still definitely love elements of it, but was fundamentally flawed in terms of helping actually people to work together to work on complex problems and solve them. So that, you know, and I'd written a book and I'd done some other things on the way to this point, but this point really did make me realise that I was going wrong, which was a little scary because RUP was incredibly popular at that time, and so then that led me to work with Ivar Jacobson, tried to bring in Scrum to the unified process, spent more time with Ken Schwaber who'd finally realised I may still be an idiot, but I was an idiot that was willing to listen to him. Then I ended up at Forrester Research, running the application development practice, I became a research director there, which was super interesting, because I spent a lot of time looking at organisations, and I realised a really fundamental problem that I think probably will resonate with many that are listening to this podcast, that people were doing Scrum yeah, Scrum was incredibly popular and people were doing Scrum, but they were doing it in an industrial context. It was more like Water-Scrum-Fall. And I coined that term in a research document, which got picked up by the, InfoQ and all these magazines, it became this sort of ‘thing' – Water-Scrum-Fall. You know, they were doing Scrum, but they only liked to plan once a year, and there's a huge planning sort of routine that they did. They were doing Scrum, but they rarely released because the customers really don't want it - it's incredibly hard and dangerous and things can go horribly wrong. And so they were doing Scrum, but they weren't really doing Scrum, you know. And so that was super interesting. And I got an opportunity to do a number of workshops and presentations on the, sort of like the solution to this Water-Scrum-Fall problem with Ken, I invited him and we did this very entertaining roadshow, which I'm surprised we weren't arrested during it, but we were, it was a really interesting experience. I then decided like any good practitioner, I had to do a Startup. So I went to Tasktop working with Mik Kersten and the gang at Tasktop, and the great thing about Tasktop was it was a massive fire hose of doing Scrum, trying to make payroll, learning about everything around delivering a product in a market that wasn't really there and that we had to build. And it was just fantastic working with a lot of OEMs, a lot of partners and looking at, and then we got funding. We grew to five teams. I was running product and engineering. And Ken was continually talking to me through this time, and mentoring me, coaching me, but I realised he was also interviewing me. So he then said to me, one day, Dave, I don't want to be the CEO of Scrum.org anymore. I'd like you to be, when can you start? Ken doesn't take no for an answer, and I think that's part of the success of Scrum. I think that his persistence, his tenacity, his, you know, sort of energy around this, was the reason why Scrum, part of the reason him and Jeff, you know, had different skills, but definitely both had that in common, was successful. So I then came and joined about seven years ago Scrum.org, to run Scrum.org and it's an amazing organisation Ula Ojiaku And if I may just go back a bit to what you said about your time in secondary school, you said you were dyslexic and apart from the fact that you discovered computers, you had a horrible experience. What made it horrible for you? Dave West I think it was, you know, there's no support network, there's nobody checking in on you, particularly at secondary school. At primary school, you have a teacher that you're in the same room, you've sort of got that, you're with the same kids, but you go, you know, you, you go from one lesson to another lesson, to another lesson and if you're a little bit, well for me, you know, reading and writing was incredibly difficult. I could read and write at that point. I was about nine and a half, 10 when I finally broke through, thanks to an amazing teacher that worked with my primary school. And, but I was way, way behind. I was slower. I, you know, and teachers didn't really, it was almost as though, and I'm sure education's very different now, and both my children are dyslexic and they go to a special school that's designed around this, so I know that it's different for them, but the teaching was very much delivery without inspection and adaption of the outcome, you know, just to make it a bit agile for a second. So you go through all this stuff and I wasn't able to write all the stuff down fast enough. I certainly wasn't able to process it, so because of that, it was pretty awful. I always felt that I was stupid, I was, you know, and obviously I relied on humour and I was a big lad, so I didn't have any bullying issues, but it was very, very challenging. And I found that I could be good at something with computers. And I sort of got it, I understood how to write, you know, BASIC very quickly and maybe even a little Assembly. I knew how to configure machines, it just seemed natural, it certainly helped my confidence, which, you know, maybe I'm a little too confident now, but definitely had an impact on my future life. Ula Ojiaku That's awesome, and I'm sure there are people who would be encouraged by what you've just said, so I wanted to begin there. Thanks for sharing. Now, what about, what do you do when you're not working? Dave West What do I do when I'm not working? Well, I'm a, that's a hard question. Gosh. So I have a nine year old and a six year old, and two boys, so, you know, sometimes I'm refereeing wrestling matches, you know, I'm definitely dealing with having children, I was late to life having children. I'm 52 and I have a nine year old and a six year old. I thought that, you know, a single lifestyle, a bachelor lifestyle in Boston and, you know, loving my work, writing books, you know, doing this traveling the world was going to be survive, and then I met the most amazing girl and, who persuaded me that I needed to have children, and I thought, well, I really like you, so I'd better. And it's been an incredible adventure with these children. They've taught me so much, the most important thing I think they've taught me is patience. And it's making me a better human being, and many of those traits, just to bring it back to Agile for a second, are things that we need to build better into the way that we turn up at work because you know, the project, I think it was called Aristotle, the Google big project where they looked at the successful teams, they found a number of traits, but one of those traits that was so important was psychological safety, right? And that requires you to attend every interaction with a mindfulness, not of doing things that you want to do to yourself, which is that sort of golden rule, but that platinum rule, do unto others as they want be done unto. And, and I think that is so, so important and crucial, and it's something that I aspire to, I don't always succeed every day as a human being, you know, whether it's at the checkout at the supermarket or whether it's waiting in line, particularly at the moment in an airport, and it's just, you know, something that I think in an agile team is so important because that safety is so, so required to create that environment where transparency happens, to create that environment where you can have those honest conversations about what's happening next, or what's happened previously where you're running those retrospectives, where you're trying to really plan when there is not enough knowledge to plan. You know, those sort of things require that kind of environment to be successful. So, you know, though, yes, I spend my life either working or really spending it with my children at the moment because of the age they're at, I think it's helping me, the time I'm spending with my children is helping me be a better human being and be a better Agilist.  Ula Ojiaku There's something you said, you know, about psychological safety and being kind, it just reminded me that, you know, of that, the need for also to be respectful of people, because when you are kind and you're showing people respect, they would, that brings down the barriers and makes them, you know, more inclined to be open and to participate. What do you think about that? Would you say there's a link between respect and kindness, I know we're being philosophical right now… Dave West Well actually, yes, but no, it's incredibly practical as well. I think that kindness, so I've written quite a lot about kindness, because it's a trait that we, as a community, our professional Scrum trainer community, manifests and lives. It's something that we actually interview for when you join our community, and the reason why we do that, isn't because we're a bunch of hippies that just like kumbaya, want everybody to hold hands and be nice to each other, I mean, that would be great as well and who doesn't like a good rendition of kumbaya, it's a great song, but it's because we believe that kindness, ultimately, is beneficial to both parties, particularly the person that's being kind, because it creates, not only does it create levels of karma, but it creates that transparency, it creates that opportunity to learn that you may not get, if you go in in a very confrontational way and people don't intentionally be confrontational, but it's so easy for it to happen. You know, it's so easy for you to question, because, you know, somebody says something you're like, well, I don't agree with that, and that instantly creates an environment or a connection that is, you know, confrontational, you're in this position, it spirals, blah, blah, blah. So, but you can, instead of saying, I don't agree with that say, hey, well, that's interesting, let me have a look into that, and you're inquisitive. And if you try to approach everything with that sort of like kindness model, and I don't mean always being nice. Nice is different to kind, nice is like faking, I think, sometimes, you know, it's funny, you don't have to be kind to be nice, but you have to be nice to be kind if you understand what I mean. So you can fake niceness, niceness is part of being kind. So, you know, if you approach it in the right way, where you care about people and you care about what they're bringing to the table and you care about the environment that they're in, whether it's just simple things like checking in more frequently, you know, whether it's actually making time in this very scheduled life that we live now with zoom call after zoom call, to check in with the team, or the person that you're talking to, to see how are they turning up today? How has their day been? And I think that's, you know, super, super important. The other important element of kindness that comes out is this helping others element, you know, my gran, God rest her soul, Lilian, she was a rockstar on so many levels. And she used to say to me, when I came home from school, particularly from elementary school or primary school, I think we call it in England, right? She'd say things like, not what have you done today, I mean, sometimes she said that, but she'd say, who have you helped? Who have you helped? I'd be like uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, and she said it enough that I realised it's important, you know, it's important that you spend time with others, help them in their tasks, you know, because I think you can learn so much and build those relationships, build that safety that is so, so important to really develop. We work in complex environments, right, that's the whole point of agility. Complex environments require people to collaborate, they require people to look at things in different ways. They really benefit from diversity, diversity of mind, diversity of experience, diversity of skill. And you bring that together, but you can only bring all these different parts together when you have an environment that allows for it, and traditional project management techniques, fabulous as they were for building bridges and tunnels and everything like that, didn't allow that, they don't encourage that. They encourage people to be focused, to be efficient, to be managing to that model. And I think we have to step away from that and work in a slightly different way where kindness, psychological safety, trust, respect, use the word respect. And I think it's, you know, obviously it's a Scrum value, but it's crucial to effectively allowing independent people with diverse perspectives to work together in an effective way. And to be honest society doesn't have enough of that in general. I think we've definitely moved away from respect and trust. We don't trust in our governments, we don't trust in our institutions, we don't trust in our fellow human beings and we've become very much focused on ourselves and our individual needs. And the reality is there's no such thing as a self-made person, you're only there because of the success of previous generations. As you drive to work on a car, on a road that has been built by others, that's been funded by others, you know, so this idea that you are in it alone, you know, is completely wrong, and I think sometimes we bring that to the work and it creates an environment that is not as successful. Ula Ojiaku True, true. No, thanks for that, Dave. I completely agree. Now there are people back to this project program that feel like, you know, the word project in agile is a taboo, almost a swear word. What's your perspective on this? Dave West I don't think it's a swear word, I don't think it's taboo. I think, you know, Mik's book is a fabulous book and he's a fabulous person, but he was using it to emphasise the fact that, you know, that we have become too focused on this, you know, investment paradigm, this organisation paradigm, this structural paradigm of the project and that, ultimately, the idea of a product, this idea of a cohesive set of capabilities that's packaged in some way that has a clear boundary, that has a clear set of customers, that has some clear value, is a much better way of aligning your people and your investments. And so he was emphasising that, and obviously he emphasised the idea of value streams being the mechanism that we deliver value in this construct to these people in this packaging of products, and it's a great book and I recommend everybody should read it. Ula Ojiaku I have mine here. Dave West No, that's good. Yeah. I was fortunate enough to be involved in the development of the book a little, working with Mik, providing a lot of feedback and I think it's a great book. However, the idea of a project doesn't go away and all of that work that we did, that organisations that I respect deeply like the PMI and, you know, that even, dare I say, things like Prince2, all of that work, isn't wrong. It's just, we need to look at it from a different lens. The idea that complex work is there changes certain things, the fact that requirements and understandings and appreciation of what we're doing emerges over time, that is just a truth, and that was true of projects as well. We just need to build in the mechanisms to be better able to deal with that. The fact that we would invest hundreds, if not thousands of hours planning things that ultimately fell apart when some underlying assumption changed and then we'd create a change order to deal with the chaos that that created need to be, we need to step away from those ideas. Do we still have projects? I think yes, sometimes you will have something that has a, you know, put a man on, or hopefully it's not a man, hopefully it's a woman, but a woman on Mars. I don't trust men on, I think it'd be much more successful if it was a woman, but, anyway, or person. Men get old, they don't grow up, right? Isn't that the saying, but anyway, so putting that person on Mars is a project, right? It has a definitive, you know, plan, it has an end goal that's very clearly underside. It's very likely that we're going to build a series of products to support that, you know, there is, I don't think we need to get tied up so much on the words, project and product. However, we really need to step back a little bit and look at, okay, you know, like treating people as resources, breaking up teams and reforming teams continuously, treating people as fungible or whatever that is, they're just unrealistic. It's not nothing to do with project or product, they're just silly, you just can't deal with this. The fact that teams take time to form, you know, the fact that, you know, the most successful agile teams I've ever seen are teams that have a clear line of sight to the customer, clear understanding of what they're trying to do for that customer, have guardrails, have an enabling management structure that provides support to deliver that value to that customer. As long as you think about those things and you don't get so tied up with the dance or the routine of project management that you forget that, then I'm not concerned. You know, there's this big thing about, oh, should project managers be Scrum masters? I don't know, it depends on the project manager. Sometimes project managers make very good product owners because they take real clear ownership of the outcomes and the value that's trying to be delivered. Sometimes, you know, they make great Scrum masters because they care very much about the flow of work, the team dynamics, the service to the organisation, the service to the business, and they want to act in that way. And sometimes you just want to get stuff done and work in a team, as a developer on that increment. You know, I don't know, you know, people are like, oh, because, and I think this is the fundamental problem, and you've got me onto my soapbox here and I apologise, but the thing that I see over and over again is the use of agile in an industrial, mass production oil and mass production way of thinking about the world. So what they do is that it isn't agile or project management that's at fault. It's the paradigm that's driving the use of agile or the use of project management. You can do agile in a very waterfall way, don't get me wrong or a very industrial way, I almost don't want to use the word waterfall, but this idea of, you know, maximizing efficiency. I mean, gosh, the word velocity has been as synonymous of agile forever when ultimately it's got nothing to do with agility, you know, it's a useful mechanism for a team to help them run a retrospective sometimes. But it isn't a mechanism that you use to plan, you know, the capacity of your organisation and all this sort of idea,  what they're trying to do always is use an industrial, you know, sort of mindset in an agile context, in a context that doesn't support an industrial mindset or a traditional mindset. And that drives me mad because I see agility being used to deliver work rather than value, I see agility basically being missed, sort of like, almost jimmied in with a crowbar into these massive projects and programs where you've got fixed scope, fixed budgets at the start. They don't actually know what they're trying to achieve, but you've got all these contracts in place that describe all this stuff, very detailed up front. And then they say, we're going to use agile to do it, and you're like, okay, what are we, you know, what happens if the first sprint uncovers the fact that the product goal was fundamentally flawed? Oh well, we can't change that because the contract says, well, hang on a minute, what are we in this business for? Are we actually trying to deliver value to customers and help them solve a particular problem to deliver? Or are we trying to do something else? And they're like, no, we're trying to deliver on the contract. Oh, but isn't the contract a mechanism that describes that? Maybe, but that's not why we're here. And that's when it starts getting, going wrong, I think,  that industrial mindset that I just want, tell me what to do, give me a job, let me sit down, just give me that change order and I will start work. It's just wrong. And for certain types of project, and certain types of product and certain types of problem, you know, it probably works really well if we're building the 17th bridge or we're, you know, doing those sort of things. But the reality is in the digital age, that most knowledge workers, who are the people that really benefit from agile the most, that aren't working in that way, they're working with very changeable environments, very changeable customer understanding very, you know, it's a little bit more complex. Ula Ojiaku True, true. And what you're saying reminds me of my conversation with Dave Snowden, he's known for his work on complexity theory, Cynefin, and if it's in a complex adaptive environment, you know, you need to be agile, but if it's a complicated problem or a simple problem, so complicated is really about, you know, breaking it down into a series of simple problems but it's still sequential and predictable, you could use, you know, the traditional waterfall method, because nothing is going to change, it's really putting all those pieces together to get to a known end state, and so I am of the same mindset as you, in terms of it's all about the context and understanding what exactly are you trying to achieve, what's of value to the customer and how much of it do we know and how much learning do we have to do as we get there. Dave West Exactly. I'm obviously not anywhere near as smart as somebody like a Dave Snowden who just, I think he has forgotten more things than I've ever understood, but yeah, I mean he's an amazing thought leader in this space, but the challenge and he talks a little bit about this sometimes, or I think he does, is that we don't always know what's complicated or complex or the amount of unknown. And this is, you know, this is the classic sort of entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs aren't necessarily working in complexity, they're working in unknown. But the nature of complex unknown is really tricky because you may discover that something that you thought was known is not known, and then you then have to change how you approach it. So the reason in Scrum, what we do is we deliver frequently and that, ultimately, and we deliver the most valuable things or the things that will give us the most value, thus that uncovers those misunderstandings early in the process. Ula Ojiaku Yeah, completely true. And just to build on what you said in terms of understanding or realising that your product goal was wrong, you're working on the wrong thing. Sometimes you might have to also kind of say goodbye to the project or pull the plug. It depends. Dave West Yeah. And that's incredibly hard, sorry, just to lean into that. It's very hard because you've got people that are there and you've invested time, you know, there's the sort of classic fallacy of sunk costs, all that stuff, but the reality is it's not a fallacy of psychological sort of like sunk energy. You've invested all this time and money and effort and motion to get where you're at and then you're realising it's wrong. It's incredibly hard to step away from that. And so what you do, and you see this with startups all the time is, you know, you pivot, you pivot, you pivot, you pivot, you pivot, but you don't really pivot, what you're doing actually is trying to find a way to get all that investment that you've spent to be useful to deliver some value, you know, and whether it's repackaging or whatever, so that you can say, oh, that's okay when actually, and you can spend as much time doing that as you did the original thing, and now you are even worse, in a worse situation and it's hard. Ula Ojiaku Yes. Completely agree. So there's something you said about, you know, you gave an example of people doing, if I will use your term, Water-Scrum-Fall, in their delivery. And sometimes, you know, they go into detailed requirements, you know, specification, and this is, and they write an iron-clad contract that would, you know, kind of specify all these requirements have to be met, and whilst from the delivery perspective, in terms of the teams who actually do the work, it's they are, they get it, they want to be agile, but it's always these constraints. And whenever we, as an agile coach, you know, you go into the root of the matter. It's the typical root causes of why there is this inflexibility it's either, you know, the leadership and/or, you know, the business or their clients not wanting, you know, having that traditional expectations, any advice on how to effectively deal with this sort of blocker? Dave West I think it's very difficult, particularly when it's like outsourced or you've got, you know, that sort of it's contract-based as opposed to internal in terms of commitments. So it's not budgeted it's actually contracted. And when, when that happens it's very difficult, because you know, you've got the deal because you know how to do stuff and you've done it before, and you've got all that experience with the customer of course, so it's well, because you've done it before and you've invested all this experience, you must tell us exactly what it is that we are going to do. And the reality is the customer themselves doesn't know what they want, really. And until you actually get into the process, it's very difficult. I think one of the big things that's going to happen over the next few years, and we're starting to see some of this with things like Beyond Budgeting, the new procurement contract models that the US is, is perpetuating with 18F and the work of the central government. It would sort of stop during the previous administration, but it's now back, you know, how do you do agile contract management, what does it mean? Speaking from personal use, you know, of external companies to do work for Scrum.org, we pay for sprints. We define a clear product goal that we evaluate continuously, that's measurable. We, you know, we have a product owner from Scrum.org embedded in the Scrum team, even if the Scrum team or in the Scrum team, so of course, if the product owner, they are part of the Scrum team, but even if the Scrum team is predominantly a third party. So we do things like that to, and because you can't just fund one sprint at a time. It's very, you know, these people have got to pay mortgages and you know, they've got payroll to hit, so you have to negotiate a number of sprints that you would do it that allows them the flexibility to manage those constraints whilst being realistic, that at the end of a sprint review, you may discover so much stuff, or even during a sprint, that questions everything, and requires a fundamentally, you know, shifting of the backlog, maybe a change to the backlog, assuming that the objective and the product goal is still valid. You know, so putting those things in place, having those honest conversations and partnership conversations with the client is crucial. And the, you know, service companies that serve Scrum.org are a little bit luckier because we actually come at that from a, we know that we don't know what we want, whereas most clients, it's a lot harder to get them to say that. We know what we'd like to achieve, so the other thing that's important and I think that OKRs are maybe part of this, we have a thing called EBM, Evidence Based Management, which is a sort of like an agile version of OKRs. The OKRs and if defining the outcomes that you're trying to achieve and how you're going to measure them up front, validating them continuously, because it's possible you're wrong, but it's a much less of a scary prospect than not describing anything at all, or just having some very highfaluting goal. So getting very clear and precise in what you're trying to achieve and actually investing the time up front to work out what that means, and getting everybody on the same page around that can really help solve those problems long term, because you build to that, and that ultimately becomes the true north that everybody's working to. So when you have those moments of oh, that's not what we thought then, you know, that's okay, because you are validating against at least something, you have some level of structure in all of this. Ula Ojiaku So let's get to some other questions. What books have you, you know, read that you would say have kind of impacted the way your outlook on, or view on the subject of agile agility or anything else, what would you recommend to the audience? Dave West So the books that really changed my life around thinking about this in a different way, there was a few. The one that actually has nothing to do with agile that made me step back from the way I was looking at the world was Thank You for Being Late by Thomas Friedman. That book really sort of like reinforced the fact that the world is incredibly complex and is, you know, he's famous for The World is Flat, you know, the sort of like global supply chain thing, which we are all very aware of and it's fundamentally having a huge impact now on prices and inflation and the like because of, you know, it's been such a mess over the last two and a half years. So that changed my outlook with respect to the world that I'm living in, which I thought was quite interesting. In terms of straight agility, you know, I'll be honest, there's Scrum – A Pocket Guide that taught me professional Scrum, that's Gunther Verheyen's book that I'd never really thought about Scrum in that way. And then I have to plug the series, The Professional Scrum Series from Addison, well, it's Pearson now, sorry. There are some great books in there, Zombie Scrum is absolutely fabulous. And actually, coming out on the 17th of June is a new book about leadership, The Professional Agile Leader: The Leader's Journey Toward Growing Mature Agile Teams and Organizations. I just read that, so I did not remember it, but it's by three people I adore, Ron Eringa, Kurt Bittner and Laurens Bonnema. They're awesome, you know, had lots of leadership positions, written a great book. I wrote an inspired forward just in case anybody's checking that, you know, that confidence thing certainly came back after middle school, right. But that's a really interesting book that talks about the issue that you highlighted earlier, that leadership needs, we've spent a lot, we've spent 25 years teaching Scrum to teams. We need to spend the next, probably 60 years, teaching Scrum to leaders and trying to help, and it's not just Scrum, it's agile, hence the reason why this isn't just about Scrum, you know, whether it's Kanban, whether it's Flow, whether it's Spotify Model, whether it's whatever, but the essence of that, you know, empiricism, self-management, you know, the continuous improvement, the importance of discipline, the importance of being customer centric, the value of outcomes and measures against outcomes, the value of community and support networks, you know, all of this stuff is crucial and we need to start putting that thing, you know, whether it's business agility, whether you call it business agility, you know, all organisations, I think the pandemic proved this, need to be more agile in responding to their market, to their customers, to their employers and to the society that they contribute to. We get that. Leadership needs to change, and that's not a, you're wrong and awful, now sort of old leadership bad. No, it's just the reality is the world has changed and the more mindful leaders step back and say, oh, what do I have to do differently? Now, my entire team is remote, my, you know, my work is hard to plan, the fact that we, you know, our funding cycles have changed, our investment models have changed, you know, stepping back a little bit. So this professional, agile leader book I do recommend. Obviously I had the benefit of reading it before it became a book and it's very, very good and fun to read. Ula Ojiaku Awesome, we will put the list of books and links to them in the show notes, so thank you for that. Now, is there anything you'd like to ask you know, of the audience? Dave West Oh gosh, I don't know. I mean, my only sort of like, if it's sort of closing, if we've unfortunately come to the end of our time together and I, you know, I did waffle on, so I apologise for using far too much of it. But I guess the question I, and we talked a little bit about this, but you know, this sort of, there is a propensity in our industry, like every industry, and every moment, and every movement to become very inward looking, to become very like my way is better than every other way, you know. And obviously I'm very into Scrum and I apologise, I accept that I am. But I'm not arrogant enough to believe that it is the only way of solving complex problems. I'm also not arrogant to believe that it is sufficient. You know, I love the work of the Lean UX, Agile UX, we loved it so much we worked with Jeff and Josh to build a class together. I love the work of Daniel Vacanti and in professional Kanban and the Kanban community in general, I love, you know, I love the work of the professional coaching organisations and what they're really doing to help me be a better human being dare I say. You know, the point is, as you sit at this moment in time, you as an agile practitioner, have the opportunity to draw on many different disciplines and many different experts to really help to create that environment. That can allow agility to thrive and value to be delivered. And I think the only thing that's getting in the way of you doing that, or the only thing that was getting in the way of me doing that, and it still does sometimes is uberous arrogance and just a lack of, I don't know, not willing, not being willing to step out of my comfort zone and accept that my predefined ideas and my experience, my diversity that I bring isn't necessarily always right and to be more humble and to be more kind. I know it's a country song, you know, humble and kind, right, which I'm, you know, obviously I live in America, so I have to like country music, it's mandatory, but if you can be a little bit kinder and to do what my gran asks, right? Not what did you do today, but who did you help? What did you learn? How are you going to be better tomorrow? If we can do all of those things, then not only are our projects and teams and products better, but our lives better, and maybe society could be a little bit better. Ula Ojiaku Those are great words, Dave, thank you so much for those. One last thing, are you on social media? How can people get in touch with you? Dave West Well you could always dave.west@scrum.org if you want to ping me on this thing called email. If you are under 30, it's this thing that old people like, it's called email. If you're younger and cooler, I do not have a TikTok account, I don't totally know what it is. My son says we need it. I'm not a totally sure that we do, but it's not about clocks as well, who knew that, what was all that about? Ula Ojiaku Well, just like Apple isn't the fruit… Dave West Isn't about fruit, how annoying is that as well? Anyway, and so many misconceptions in the world, right. Anyway, but, and M&Ms aren't Smarties, I know I get it. But anyway, sorry, David J. West is my Twitter handle, you know, but, you know, whatever, LinkedIn, you can always find me on LinkedIn, just do Dave West Scrum.org and you will find me on LinkedIn. Love connecting, love talking about this stuff, maybe a little too much. You know another saying that my gran used to say, “you've got two ears and one mouth, shame you never used it like that, David”. I was like, yes, gran, I know, yeah. She also didn't by the way, just for the record anyway. Ula Ojiaku Oh gosh, your grandma Lilian sounds like she was one awesome woman. Dave West Rockstar, rockstar. Ula Ojiaku Well, thank you so much, Dave. It's been a pleasure and I thoroughly enjoyed having this conversation with you, actually more learning from you and I hope sometime you'll be back again for another conversation. Dave West I would love that. Thank you for your audience. Thank you for taking the time today. I appreciate it. Let's stay in touch and I hope that we'll see maybe in person again soon. Ula Ojiaku Yeah, that will be wonderful.

Program Notes: My recent conversation with Nancy Delain offered up a wealth of information for women around protecting our intellectual property. From helping women to pull unrecognized golden nuggets out of their minds to assembling the structures to monetize their inventions, Nancy has mastered all the steps necessary. And if building a franchise is the dream, she is able to apply her skills to help women rise and thrive. A fascinating conversation for any woman ready to launch into a new level of business and industry. Bio: Nancy Baum Delain, Esq. is a solo lawyer who concentrates her practice in intellectual property, business law and bankruptcy matters. She owns and runs Delain Law Office, PLLC as a virtual law practice with a physical presence in Schenectady New York. She is admitted as an attorney in New York and as a patent attorney before the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Before studying law, Nancy was a technical documentation specialist (writer, editor, and manager) for over 20 years, working as an independent consultant or W-2 employee with such companies as 3M, CSC, Rational Software, General Electric Company, NYS Higher Education Services Corporation (HESC), and KeyBank. She brings those skills to bear as she works with clients to document invention, protect business goodwill, and negotiate and develop contracts and deals. Nancy is a Mensan. Nancy has been an adjunct faculty member at the University of Phoenix, teaching technical writing and first-year writing courses online. She was also an adjunct faculty member at The Sage Colleges for one semester, teaching business law to undergraduates in a classroom setting. When she's not working or volunteering, Nancy enjoys swimming, walking, reading, writing, and playing with her many cats.

Happy New Year to all here in 2023. It's going to be a great year. It's a great time to be a programmer. A great time to be building with .NET; you are going to do great things this year. You have what it takes. You are smart, you have great tools, and you have a great team. You are a great leader. This episode is going to be all about remembering what happened this past year at the podcast.   Topics of Discussion:  [1:15] Jeffrey talks about the architect forums he's hosting and facilitating in 2023. You can register here. [1:46] Huge announcement in Microsoft Developer news including: - Android apps on Windows 11 - ARM processors getting big investments - Microsoft Dev Box — in preview — dev workstation in the cloud - Power Pages websites - Large SKU app service; up to 256GB RAM available for those who need it - Azure Arc, the new name of Hybrid Azure. And a single-node Azure Stack for remote locations but the programming model of Azure — looking forward to testing it at the right time. - Azure Container Apps tooling got better, and it became ready for prime time. Every team should be looking at this. - .NET 7 released. [4:11] What might the default application stacks and environments look like on the platform in 2023? - Windows 11 - Visual Studio 2022 w/ ReSharper - .NET 7 - Onion Architecture - Blazor for interactive applications - .NET service workers for back-end jobs and queue listeners - Entity Framework with Azure SQL — add on other storage services as per application. - Azure App Service for hosting while prototyping Azure Container Apps. - Application Insights with the Open Telemetry NuGet packages. - Azure Pipelines paired with Octopus Deploy (keep an eye on GitHub Actions as they fill out support for scenarios you need). - NordVPN for developer workstation work-from-home or remote Wi-Fi. [9:11] When it comes to developer workstations, desktop computers are still giving the most bang for the buck with power, and only a few laptops do the job really well. I have not reviewed all computers, and there are a lot out there. I can vouch for Alienware R series desktops. Liquid-cooled, so they are really quiet, even under full load. Dell Precision laptops are amazing for software engineers. I really wanted to love the Lenovo P1, but the fan was just too loud when it was under load. And we all know that cooling is so important in laptops. When a laptop gets too hot, your BIOS will slow down the processor to keep it from burning up. Then you no longer have a fast processor. And video calls use a good deal of processor, surprisingly — or not. For super mobile laptops that you can use for programming, I really do like the Microsoft Surface Laptop. I wanted to like the Surface Studio laptop, but they inverted the cooling and the battery placement, so it's very uncomfortable on my lap and my wrists unfortunately under load. The wrist wrest gets really hot. Normally the battery is under the wrist rest, but Microsoft swapped it on this one, so it's not fun using it as a laptop on your lap or even on a desk while hot and under load. [13:11] Highlighting some past episodes that will be interesting:  - Highlighting some past episodes over the year that might be interesting. - With Microsoft Orleans providing a new implementation of the Actor design pattern, we have a two-part series interview with Aaron Stannard, the creator of Akka.NET, episodes 172 and 173. - On the IoT front, Wilderness Labs has been trucking along creating system-on-a-chip options that run .NET natively and easily. I interviewed founder and CEO Bryan Costanich. - For those educating themselves for a career in software engineering, my interview with Henry Quillin might be useful. He talks about a programming internship and his education journey, his work earning his Eagle Scout, and how he became a working programmer even as he is just starting university. - More on embedded. Kevin Kirkus was with us in episode 186. He runs a testing team at Intel doing automated testing for their Xeon processor line. The design necessary for testing in this specialized environment gives us all plenty to think about. - For team leaders out there, I interviewed Mark Seemann. He wrote a recent book, Code That Fits In Your Head. He talks about the principles that are in the book. I subsequently bought and read the book, and I wish I had this book earlier in my career. Would have saved me a great deal of time. - On distributed systems, Udi Dahan is always a fascinating gentleman to listen to. Check out episode 192. As the founder and CEO of Particular Software, and the creator of NServiceBus, he is one of the world's leading experts on distributed systems, microservices, and messaging architectures. - Time-tested ideas are continually useful. I had the pleasure of interviewing Philippe Kruchten. He worked at Rational Software back when they were at the forefront of the software process in the 1990s. He published a paper outlining a framework for emergent, agile architecture. He didn't call it that. He called it the 4+1 Architecture, but only because it predated the agile manifesto. If you are an architect, and you aren't aware of this approach to architecture, give episode 195 a listen. - For the Blazor developers, I had Steve Sanderson on in episode 202. Steve is the original designer of Blazor, which has become the new default web application on .NET. He shared about the future of Blazor and WebAssembly. - Because there is so much going on in this space, Daniel Roth also joined me to discuss more Blazor Futures. - GitHub Actions is being talked about quite a bit. While loads of people are using it for builds, people are scratching their heads about where it fits in regarding deployments. Damian Brady, on the GitHub team and a former employee of Octopus Deploy, sheds light on this in episode 206. - Scott Hunter joined me in episode 211. He announced his new role at Microsoft running more of Azure development and .NET. He shared quite a bit behind the scenes regarding Microsoft's strategy there. - For the UX people. Mark Miller is the Chief Architect of DevExpress, the big UI components company. He has a brilliant user experience mind, and I was able to get him talking in episode 212. - Telemetry. We all need it to keep our software stable in production. The Serilog and AutoFac maintainer, Nicholas Blumhardt, joined me to discuss the fundamentals of modern logging and telemetry. Check out episode 217 for that. - More on the testing front, Eduardo Maltez, a software engineer doing some really interesting full system test work shares his thoughts on what makes tests reliable, stable, and fast — and how to fight brittle tests. Episode 224. - We closed out the year on the security front. With LastPass getting hacked and now Rackspace having a hacking-induced major outage, we all need to take action. Troy Vinson, a multi-certified security professional and certified ethical hacker, gave his perspective on the Rackspace breach and what every .NET team should learn from it.   Mentioned in this Episode: Architect Tips — New video podcast! Azure DevOps Clear Measure (Sponsor) .NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon! Jeffrey Palermo's YouTube Jeffrey Palermo's Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events! Programming with Palermo programming@palermo.network   Want to Learn More? Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.

Courtney has found success by living her life as a leader. Notable achievements include her nine years of service as a Marine Corps officer, managing a top-notch sales team for Rational Software, earning her law degree at William & Mary, practicing at one of the nation's leading law firms, and creating Lead Star (www.leadstar.us) -- a premier leadership development consulting firm that works globally with leading organizations. She has also served as an elected official and recently spent time living in the UK during which she served as Chief Operating Officer of a rapidly scaling technology company. Beyond Courtney's government and corporate accomplishments, she is a business owner, thought leader, and New York Times best-selling author of Spark, Bet on You, and Leading from the Front. Her success has been recognized throughout her professional career, but most recently she was awarded the National Stevie Award for Best Female Entrepreneur and BusinessWeek profiled her achievements as a leadership expert. A dynamic guest on CNBC, FOX News, and CNN, Courtney's efforts with Lead Star have been noted in publications ranging from Harvard Business Review and Fast Company to The Financial Times. Courtney is married to Patrick Lynch and is the proud mother of three children. She resides in the Washington, DC area. In this podcast we discuss: Courtney's seemingly unusual path to the Marines and her start in her career (7:12) The importance of authenticity and the origins of the theming in Courtney's book (12:37) The social influence that comes with a leadership role and how finance is not the only factor. (19:10) And the correlation between risk-taking and leadership. (32:32) Books: Spark, Bet on You, and Leading from the Front Website: Leadstar.us As we get started, why not hit subscribe to be sure you never miss an episode? And remember to leave a review – it helps others find us!

Get the full transcipt, PDF, animated summary and infographic on our free app: https://www.getstoryshots.com Storyshots Book Summary And Analysis Of No Rules Rules: Netflix and The Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings and Erin MeyerDisclaimer: This is an unofficial summary and analysis. Reed Hastings's Perspective Reed Hastings co-founded Netflix in 1997. The company develops, licenses, and delivers video entertainment across various genres and languages. By 2022, the platform served more than 200 million people in 190 countries. In 1991, he founded Pure Software, which creates tools for software developers. After a 1995 IPO and several acquisitions, Rational Software purchased Pure in 1997. Hastings is an active educational philanthropist. He served on the California State Board of Education from 2000 to 2004. He is on the board of several educational organizations, including DreamBox Learning, KIPP, and Pahara. He's also a board member of Facebook and was on the board of Microsoft from 2007 to 2012. Erin Meyer's Perspective Erin Meyer is a professor at INSEAD, a leading international business school. Her work focuses on how the world's most successful managers work with cultural differences in a global environment. She has helped executives in five continents to work with cross-cultural complexities. Erin frequently publishes in Harvard Business Review. In 2019, Erin accepted an award from Thinkers50 for the second time. They labeled her one of the fifty most impactful business writers globally. In 2018, she was one of the top 30 most influential HR thinkers of the year in HR magazine. Introduction When it comes to working at Netflix, there are no rules, and that's what No Rules Rules is about. Reed Hastings, Netflix's co-founder, outlines how he cultivated a unique work environment. Netflix values both individual and collective initiatives.

Pamela serves as Senior Advisor to Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship. She began working with social entrepreneurs twelve years ago as a mentor for Miller Center's programs while she continued her career as a software executive. Prior to joining the Center eight years ago, she worked with and for early-stage software companies as a business and marketing strategy leader, helping founders create, refine, and execute their business strategy and go-to-market plans. She has over 25 years of experience growing teams and delivering products for both large and start-up software companies, working in various managerial capacities such as business unit manager, vice president of marketing, COO, and CEO. Some of the companies Pamela has worked with include: Amdahl, Pure Software, Rational Software, Consera, Zend, and AppFirst. Pamela currently serves on the board of Innovation Works, whose focus is building sustainable neighborhood economies in Baltimore. Pamela also serves as board chair for LivelyHoods, an organization that creates jobs for youth and women in slums across Kenya. To connect with Pamela you can do so via her LinkedIn or Twitter. https://www.millersocent.org/ https://www.iwbmore.org/ https://www.livelyhoods.org/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/pamelaroussos/ https://twitter.com/PamelaRoussos A good place to get inspiration on figuring out the big problems you want to tackle is by looking at the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). There you will find 17 interlocking goals that are a blueprint to achieve a just and sustainable world for all. Under each goal, you'll find targets and indicators to be achieved by 2030. What big, hairy problem do you want to put your time and talent towards achieving? https://sdgs.un.org/goals Once you have a direction you'll find there are overarching organizations in many of the issue areas, for example GOGLA, the global association for off-grid solar energy Global Distributors Collective for last-mile distributors The Water Network, a knowledge-sharing platform for water professionals Clean Cooking Alliance, a global network of partners to make clean cooking accessible https://www.gogla.org/ https://globaldistributorscollective.org/ https://thewaternetwork.com/ https://cleancooking.org/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/thinkfuture/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thinkfuture/support

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

Interview video available on the Agile Innovation Leaders Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/FYFKaJoagTc Guest Bio: Dr. Ivar Jacobson is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Ivar Jacobson International. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, was awarded the Gustaf Dalén medal from Chalmers in 2003, and made an honorary doctor at San Martin de Porres University, Peru, in 2009. Ivar has a flourishing career in both academia and business. He has authored ten books, published more than a hundred papers and is a frequent keynote speaker at conferences around the world. Ivar is a father of components and component architecture - work that was adopted by Ericsson and resulted in the greatest commercial success story ever in the history of Sweden, and it still is. He is the father of use cases and Objectory, which, after the acquisition of Rational Software in 1995, resulted in the Rational Unified Process, a widely adopted method. He is also one of the three original developers of the Unified Modelling Language. But all this is history. Ivar founded his current company, Ivar Jacobson International, which since 2004 has been focused on using methods and tools in a smart, super light and agile way. This work resulted in Ivar becoming a founder and a leader of a worldwide network, SEMAT, which has the mission to revolutionize software development based on a kernel of software engineering. The kernel has been realized as a formal OMG standard called Essence.   Contact/ Social Media Email: ivar@ivarjacobson.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivarjacobson Twitter: @ivarjacobson Books The Essentials of Modern Software Engineering by Ivar Jacobson et al https://www.amazon.co.uk/Essence-Software-Engineering-Applying-Kernel/dp/0321885953 Denotational Semantics by Joseph E Stoy https://www.amazon.co.uk/Denotational-Semantics-Computer-Science-Scott-Strachey/dp/0262690764 Resources/ Websites Essence for Agility Meetup https://meetup.com/essence-for-agility Essence Education Forum https://forum.essenceineducation.org    Ivar Jacobson International https://ivarjacobson.com   Interview Highlights: Timestamp 02:59 – Growing up in Sweden 07:05 – Coming up with concept for component-based software development and architecture 15:14 – On Essence OMG Standard as a unifying platform for methods 24:22 – Special offer announcement (Better Scrum Through Essence course) 29:41 – “Shy Boys Don't Kiss Beautiful Girls” – Swedish proverb 32:34 – “Doing it smarter…”   Interview Transcript Ula Ojiaku: 0:04 Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. Hello everyone! Welcome to Season 2 of the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast! I'm honoured to have Dr Ivar Jacobson – Founder, Chairman and CEO of Ivar Jacobson International (IJI - a global consulting and training organisation) as my guest on this episode. Known as one of the fathers of modern software engineering, he has many accomplishments under his belt including developing the concept of Use Cases and Use Case modelling. In this episode, Dr Jacobson shares his experience growing up in Sweden; how he came up with the concept for components and component architecture whist at Ericsson (which helped Ericsson with its remarkable commercial success) and his current focus on Essence, an Object Management Group (OMG) standard revolutionising the world of Software Development. Quick sidebar: Ivar Jacobson International Chief Scientist, Ian Spence will be delivering a training on ‘Better Scrum Through Essence' this November, 2021. Make sure you listen to the very end for details on offers available to AILP listeners. You won't want to miss this! Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, my conversation with Dr Ivar Jacobson – enjoy! Ula Ojiaku: 02:28 Thank you so much Ivar for joining us on the Agile Innovation Leaders' podcast. It's a great pleasure to have you. Ivar Jacobson: 02:35 Thank you. Thank you. I'm looking forward to it. Ula Ojiaku: 02:40 Well, I've been very excited right from when I got your response saying “yes”, the honor is definitely mine. Now, with I know that our audience would be, you know, keen to know, who is Ivar, you know, can you tell us about yourself? Ivar Jacobson: 02:59 Yes, I can. I was born in a very nice family in a small city, in Sweden, in the very south of Sweden, very close to Denmark. And, I was an ordinary kid. Nobody in my family had ever studied, so to speak. My father had six years in school, and my mother, maybe one year more. And he was an entrepreneur, quite successful. And, I hated by the way when I was older, the idea that I would be an entrepreneur, but it always a seed in the blood. So, I was not very good at school, clear. And I remember my mother, when I had passed Junior High School. And I suggested, maybe I should go to high school, I have very low grades. And so, but I can work hard, I said. And my mother said, it's good if you can just pass junior high school. You know, you don't have a head for studies. So, I don't know what happened. But I really got the interest and succeeded to get up to high school. But in high school, I was not very good either. I was more interested in sports, I played handball, handball is similar to soccer, but you play with the hands instead of the feet and it's very popular in Europe, probably gets popular in US too, but it takes time. And I was passionate about it. But even if I worked harder than anyone else, I never really became the star. I was okay. But instead, I became a coach and now I found passion. I really worked hard as a coach, my team became the best team in the city, we had many handball teams, and not only in the city - in the province. And then what I started to know I loved to coach, I loved to feel that I could help people to become better and they became much better. I was a coach both for boys and ladies. So that made me popular. And so, I was very well treated and had a very hard time to imagine moving away from my small city. I went out High School and then I wanted to stay in the city, to be electrician. But my aunt decided differently - she applied to Chalmers which is an Institute of Technology. And, I actually was accepted as the last student, had so low grades, so last student (to be accepted to study) to Electric engineering. Ula Ojiaku: 06:28 Wow! Ivar Jacobson: 06:29 And yeah, I did quite well. I found it so fascinating - engineering, mathematics and so on, but became very different. So, I was the first one in my whole big family that ever passed junior high school, high school, and becoming a bachelor of electrical engineering or almost the master. It was unthinkable in my family. Ula : 07:04 Wow! Ivar Jacobson: 07:05 And then I was absolutely sure I should continue to do research. But I was smart enough, to say you need to know what it means to work in the industry. So, I took the most boring work I could imagine at Ericsson, working with old fashioned systems, not digital, it was a electromechanical. And I was sure after one year, I will go back to Chalmers to get the doctor (my doctorate degree). But after one year, I felt, “this is life!” Projects, people, collaborating, is very different from doing a research at Chalmers. So, it was not in my mind to go back. Instead I learned something absolutely fundamental, that impacted me for the rest of my life, namely, how to build systems. And in hardware, you build with components. So, after a couple of years, I was actually working with hardware system. And they had, the managers had seen something in Ivar. And so, they actually offered him to become project manager for the most mission critical system, which was based on computing. And that was absolutely unbelievable - I knew nothing at that time about computing. And I didn't, I've never written a code. (At the time) I never really understood how a computer works. But I was now Project Manager, and the reason was, they probably felt like I could manage a project and you don't need so deep knowledge, you're probably more difficult if you know too much. But to me, it was unthinkable to be a project manager without knowing how we work and what it was. So, I studied very hard every night. And at that time, there were no books, really, But after three months, I felt well, this was not so hard and now I became difficult. Because I couldn't see that the product we're building would ever be successful. Because Ericsson was selling to the whole world. But every country wanted their own market adaptation. And the way we built software - the standard way of building the software at that time, was not easy to change. Modularity was only in the code-oriented data structures. So, you separate the code and data and this separation meant, if you made a change, it could result in changes anywhere. Anyway, so that's how I came up with component-based development, which was the biggest fight I've ever had in my life. It was when I was 28 plus, and, no one did component-based development at that time, as we heard about Bell Labs, the other competitors did it the same way as Ericsson did. But for some reason, there was one guy ‘up there' who said, “Ivar is right. Let's do it”. And that resulted after some years in the greatest commercial success story in the history of Sweden. And it still is, it's even more successful than ABBA and Spotify – so you can imagine. I was rewarded, I got after 10 years people said, “oh, God that was so good”. And so, I could study, get the PhD during work hours. Ula Ojiaku: 11:34 Wow. Ivar Jacobson: 11:35 So, I think I leave it a little for you now. Ula Ojiaku: 11:40 Know this yours is a very fascinating story. So, there were lots I could pick on (to ask more questions) but the first one you said about, you know, playing handball, and despite how hard you worked, you didn't quite make it as a superstar you wanted to be in handball, but you found out that you did great at coaching. I think there's a parallel to that and coaching in real life as well. A coach doesn't necessarily have to be the expert in the area, but it's really about being able to draw out the best in people. Would you say… Ivar Jacobson: 12:18 And show a path forward… Actually, girls at that time were playing handball in a way that was very girlish, you know, balls like this and not like shooting it . I mean, very softballs. Whereas my girls were trained with my boys. So, I put together guys and girls in the same team and made two teams. And the girls started to play like boys, and that made them superior other teams because they didn't do it. So, I mean, I invented a new method, let's say that. Ula Ojiaku: 13:00 You definitely are an innovative inspiration. It seemed like everyone in your family knew you were barely getting by in Junior High school, High school. I'm wondering, what was it that your aunt saw that made her despite all the indications she went and registered you at Chalmers? Did you ask her? Ivar Jacobson: 13:25 No, I felt, I really didn't think about it. I felt I understood her. I mean, I had showed her that I was not very good at school. So… But then what really happened was that I was fed up by school in the last semester (of) Junior High and wanted to leave. Then she said to me, “No, no, you should at least go get the junior high school graduation”. Because we celebrated it in Sweden at that time, not anymore but at that time. But now when I relaxed and didn't study, didn't prepare for mathematics or anything like that. Really, I tried. I had private lessons in mathematics. I mean, it's hard to believe I had it. And the reason was that the way I had learned was by learning rules. I mean, not thinking. “This is the rule you use when you see this problem” and that limits you. So now for the first time, I had no rules to apply. I start to think, and I remember very well, after one exam that the teacher came in with a book and he had all the books in a package and then he put it on the desk and he says, one of you have (has) decided to change his life; Ivar Jacobson - best in class. And you know, I was flabbergasted and not only me, the whole class. So, and then I understood that was something I could do. So, everything all my grades went up. Ula Ojiaku: 15:14 That's just amazing. So, you are currently, you are credited with you know, developing the used cases, components, the RUP rather the Rapid Unified Process, which is, you know, one of the ‘fore bringers' of Agile Methodologies. And currently you are working or you've been working most recently on Essence, can you tell us a bit more about Essence, what it is and you know, what's the story behind it? Ivar Jacobson: 15:52 Now we were around year 2000. And then, I was a rock star traveling around the world, talking about the UML and Rational Unified Process. And everyone wanted to have… use these things. They misused both UML and they misused RUP (Rational Unified Process), but they were wanted to have it. It's very similar situation with SAFe today. So anyway, at that time, it was very popular. But I… now Agile came. And I remember very well when I was at the OOPSLA (Object-oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications) conference, the biggest conference at that time. And I was on a panel of 2000 people in the audience, and I was there with agilisters really great guys - people I'm very good friends with today. And the audience basically booed every time I was about to talk. Ula Ojiaku: 16:49 Why? Ivar Jacobson: 16:50 Because we're talking about the we enemy, the Empire, the old Empire, that the audience wanted to kill. And I listened very carefully, and then I went home and studied more about XP, it was about XP. And I said, “Okay, this will dramatically change the future”. I tried to convince my company at that time Rational, with the top stars in the company, many famous people. But it took a while; there was nothing new in XP is what I heard. But it was a lot of new (it had lots that were new) particularly about social engineering. So, and then a couple of years later Rational was acquired by IBM and I had a chance to be with IBM in a very interesting position. But I decided no, IBM is too big for me, I want to do my own business. So, but I also was thinking this is not sustainable. The world is ridiculous. Here you have gurus like me, and we play such an important role. And still, the guru is just a methodology salesperson. You can be an expert on a few things, but you're never an expert on all things you need to do when you develop software, or develop anything for that matter. Hardware systems… and anything. So I wanted to get rid of (this attitude). I felt this is stupid. And I use the word foolish because it's a little nicer. But having gurus that develop methods and ideas in the methods cannot be used in another method without rewriting it. So, for instance, Scrum has been used in SAFe, but it doesn't fit into SAFe without rewriting it. And that means with the original authors of Scrum are diminished, instead it moves into something else. So, we get no collaboration between these top guys. They don't like one another. And I'm not talking about any particular person, but that's the general problem. Instead, we want the top guys to collaborate and help to work. So, I came to the conclusion we need to do something dramatically different. Instead of having all these different methods and with nothing in common, nothing in common and that is visible and still a lot is common. It's just hidden, because everyone hides it without the purpose to hide, but it becomes hidden in a particular method. So, what I said is that every method has a number of ideas - you can call them practices or method precepts. They are in a precept guarded by a guru. Isn't this foolish? At least I think so. So, in 2005 we decided in my company to do something different and we started to identify a common ground between all methods. What is it that is essential… that we always do always produce, always have in terms of competences, for instance, and so on. And it created, let me call it the kernel. It's very small, it's very powerful. And it works as a platform to describe methods. So, instead of it (being that) every methodology has its own way of describing everything: its own language, its own terminology, its own isolated island, we created a common ground which has actually become a standard and on top of this standard, people now can describe their own method. So, Scrum, for instance, has become Scrum Essentials. (It) is described on top of this kernel, which is called Essence. A standard is very important, because… first of all, nothing should be standard without being such that everybody can accept it. If there is any, really controversial stuff, throw it out and keep it at such a small level. So, but big enough to be useful, and as useful for everybody. So, now many companies are using Essence to describe their own methods. We are working with Jeff Sutherland (co-creator of Scrum) - he has  ‘Essentialised' as we call it, both Scrum, and his Scrum at Scale. We're also working with Scott Ambler (co-creator of Disciplined Agile Delivery, DAD) who has essentialised some of his practice. He has so many practices. So, he has to wait till we build a bigger library of practice. So, we have it today in my company, we have 100 practices, this guide; 50 of them are published and available. But there are many other people around the world, that develop practices. And we can put them in an ecosystem, which we are trying to do. So, people can go there and select the practices. And they (could) say, ‘I want user stories, I want to Scrum, I want test driven development..', compose, these three practices, and I have my method. And then you can add more and more as you become more and more competent, you scale up, you don't scale down, but you have to do with big frameworks, like RUP and SAFe. So, the idea is that we in this way by collecting knowledge and making it available at one place or many places - similar places can grow competency instead of having (this) so fragmented. You know, in one single company today, you may have 10 different ways of using use cases for instance. Ula Ojiaku: 24:07 True, true… Ivar Jacobson: 24:08 If they don't learn for one. Okay? Ula Ojiaku: 24:13 Because they work in silos, so everyone is just doing their own thing. Ivar Jacobson: 24:18 Yeah, they have their own methodology and everything you know. So… Interlude/ Announcement (Ula Ojiaku) 24:22 Hi again listeners. Quick message before we continue with Ivar Jacobson's interview. Did you know, according to Scrum Inc., 58% of Scrum implementations fail. Dr Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum says their investigation revealed that, of the 21 components of Scrum, an average Scrum team implements one-third well, one-third poorly and the last one-third not at all! Dr Sutherland also acknowledged that Essence ‘is the key to success…' As mentioned earlier, Ian Spence, Chief Scientist at IJI will be running a 3-day, live virtual training on ‘Better Scrum Through Essence with Essence Games Master certification' this November 2021. If you want proven ideas on how to address failed Scrum implementations, this course is for you! I know - because I'd attended the alpha version of the course earlier on in the year. Register on the website www.ivarjacobson.com  at least 2 weeks before the training to take advantage of the early bird pricing. As a valued Agile Innovation Leaders podcast listener, you can also get an exclusive 5% off when you use the code AILP5OFF. That's AILP5OFF. Back to my conversation with Ivar Jacobson… Ula Ojiaku: 26:32 Wow, well, it does sound like Essence is going to be a game changer. Where do you see it? What's your ideal state for Essence, in terms of adoption? Ivar Jacobson: 26:44 Okay. So, the roadmap is we now have developed tools that we are using with clients and they're tools we never had before - the kind of tools we never had in the software engineering discipline before. And we are using web client learning, and we take, we work with one client after the other. We expect to, at the end of the year, have verified and vetted the work. Then the approach is that we make it more widely available. Okay, and we are looking more for volume than for big accounts. Ula Ojiaku: 27:34 Right, right. Ivar Jacobson: 27:35 So now we are extremely optimistic. There are as, you know, we have a forum … two forums…. One is a meetup called Essence for Agility, which has now in just a couple of months got 2000 members. And next time, we will get my good friend Grady Booch to speak together with (a) couple of other people about Architecture and Agile Methods. We also have created a forum in the academic world called Essence Education Forum; where more than 50 university professors are collaborating to create a material for training and so on, and also do projects and basically anything on top of Essence. So, it's… no I'm very bullish. I've never seen so much progress as now You know, if I look back on the things I have contributed to, and I can say basically all of them have been by first identifying a problem but no one else has identified. And then sell that problem, so other people think it is a problem. And that's not trivial, that's absolutely the hardest thing and once I have succeeded to sell it, then of course the solution is not so far away. Ula Ojiaku: 29:14 Wow. Now that is just fascinating. So, it seemed like in selling your idea, it wasn't really about the technical skill, it was more about what's … quote, unquote, you'd call the you know, “soft skills” of selling, marketing. That you had to…” Ivar Jacobson: 29:27 Yeah, that's it was the most important I mean, you can be the best technical guy had best ideas, but if you cannot sell them, you won't have them. Ula Ojiaku: 29:41 Okay, now it is kind of ties in with, you know one of your favourite (Swedish) quotes that you shared with me that “Shy boys don't kiss beautiful girls”, do you want to expand on that? Ivar Jacobson: 29:59 This is a Swedish expression. There is nothing similar that I know in English that you can say that is strong enough, probably similar but not strong enough. It means basically, that even if you have an idea that is controversial, you have to express it, because it will never … otherwise it will never happen. I remember a situation when I was in South (of) France and at the conference, for it was a conference for executives. And they I had a company with 10 employees and I was CEO. So, I was an executive. It happened that Bill Gates was also there. And he had a company with 10,000 employees. So, we were colleagues. And I was out jogging and came back after half an hour sweating and maybe smelling too. And I saw crowd standing beside the pool. And in the middle of that crowd was Bill Gates. Now is the chance. So, I ran up and I don't know, for what reason… if I was… I was not really rude in any way, but they moved around, they opened - the crowd… and I stood face to face with Bill Gates and I did my elevator pitch. And then we talked a little and when he said he welcomed me to Microsoft, he gave me his business card and said you have to come and talk about the engineering in software. So that's an example of that, shy boys may not kiss beautiful girls. So don't be shy. Ula Ojiaku: 32:09 It reminds me of the saying in English that Fortune favours the brave. So maybe that's the closest saying to that, but it's really about being bold and seizing the moment. Ivar Jacobson: 32:24 Yeah. That is exactly what it is. And by way it's valid in the other direction too. It's not the only boys you're talking about. It can be anything. Ula Ojiaku: 32:34 Well said Ivar. Well said. You also have another quote that you like… or that you use a lot in your organization, “Can we do it smarter?” What do you mean by that? Ivar Jacobson: 32:49 Basically in every situation where you meet difficulties, and you may come up with a solution, that is very straightforward. Most uncontroversial story, solution, but it's really not fantastic. It just is a solution. In this situation, I ask all.. almost always, “can we do it smarter?” And the interesting thing is but if people start to think like that, can we do it smarter? They often come up with smarter solutions. And I have my own experience has been exactly that. Ula Ojiaku: 33:43 Would you tell us about the book you're writing for your son? You said you have a five-year-old son, and you're writing a book for him that's titled “What They Don't Teach You in School?” Ivar Jacobson: 33:58 Yes, I am a very lucky man. I have a five-year-old son. My name is Ivar in Swedish. And his name is Ivar Theodor, which becomes IT. And the thing was not on purpose. It just happened. We like to name; my wife liked the name Ivar Theodor. Ivar is a Viking name. Theodor means God's gift. And then you know, I am not 20 years old. So, (to) get the son is really God's gift if I may use these words. So I want to write the book for him that he can read when, when I don't know where I will be. I'm certain if I will be somewhere else, than on this planet, it will be in heaven, that's for sure. So, he will get the book. And this book is about smart cases. So, I describe situations in life, when you can do something smart or not so smart. I mean, first of all, there is a huge difference between being intelligent and being smart. I have a lot of friends that are extremely intelligent, analytical, and so on, but I wouldn't say they are smart. I have written about the 100 pages, it takes quite a lot of time. And it must be funny or entertaining, otherwise, he will not read it. Ula Ojiaku: 35:44 Now, what books have you found yourself recommending to people, or giving as a gift to people the most and why? Ivar Jacobson: 35:59 Yes, I think two books I would mention and this is also where I could recommend others. One of the most influential books on my career was about the denotation semantics as it's called. It's a way to mathematically describe, for instance, a language. And, I have used it to describe several languages. Ula Ojiaku: 36:35 Denotational Semantics. Okay. Do you know … what was the name of the author, please? I can always (look this up) ... Ivar Jacobson: 36:43 First book I learned was pure mathematics. It was Discrete Mathematics in computer science. And when it comes to Denotational Semantics, I read a book about the Vienna Development Method. The Vienna Development Methods, it was developed by a Dines Bjorner, and Chris, Chris Jones, I think, and a couple of our people at IBM. But then there are later versions on Denotational Semantics that may be that I don't know that. But this is a book I read. Ula Ojiaku: 37:21 It's been a fascinating conversation Ivar, and I really appreciate your time, where can the audience find you, if they you know, want to learn more, or if they want to contact you? Ivar Jacobson: 37:34 They can always contact me via email. And they are welcome to do that. And also, I get a lot of emails, so it may take a couple of days. But I always respond, even if I had to work many hours to do it. But I think attending this Essence for Agility meet up a there will be a lot related to what we have been talking about. And if you're an academic, I would recommend (you) join Essence Education Forum. Ula Ojiaku: 38:20 Okay. And we will put all the links and you know, the resources you mentioned in this, in the show notes. So just to wrap up, then do you have any final word of advice for the audience? What would you like to leave us with, as we end this conversation? Ivar Jacobson: 38:42 Yeah, in some way, the books I mentioned, and the quotes about, the shy boys becoming smarter. But I think what really has helped me has been that if I have an idea, and I believe in it, I don't give up. So, perseverance is probably a very important property. And some people when things were not so good, after introduce components, people will replace perseverance with stubbornness. So, the difference is: if it's good, it's perseverance; if it's bad, it's stubbornness. So, I may be a little stubborn, but I think it's more being persevere. Ula Ojiaku: 39:48 Depends on who you ask. Ivar Jacobson: 39:52 Yeah. So don't give up. Push your ideas. And also, I'm very lucky, I think what I'm doing is fun. I don't do anything for money. I do it for fun. But of course, it's very important to have money. So, I do my best to help my company to make a profit so we can invest in doing these things. It's not money for me, it's money for the company. Ula Ojiaku: 40:29 Thank you for sharing those wise words. Ivar, thank you so much for your time. Ivar Jacobson: 40:35 Thank you. It was a pleasure. Ula Ojiaku: 40:38 The pleasure is mine. Thanks again. That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com.  I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com

Guest Name: Pratima Amonkar, Microsoft's APAC Leader for Cloud and AI business strategy. Language: English, Publication date: Aug, 24. 2021 As Microsoft's APAC Leader for Cloud and AI business strategy, Pratima spearheads the work Microsoft does to empower customers, partners, governments, and citizens to digitally transform their businesses and lives with the power of Cloud and AI. In this role, she is focused on supporting countries' s sustainable economic growth through digital transformation. She leads the strategy, planning and programs to collaborate with customers, governments, industries, and communities to leverage the world's largest and most trusted cloud infrastructure network. Over the past 20 years, Pratima has held leadership and P&L responsibilities at various technology companies like Rational Software, IBM, and Sun Microsystems. She has built and led technical teams that have delivered high growth cloud revenues at emerging and developed global markets. Pratima an active technology mentor to some promising APAC startups, social entrepreneurships, and women founders. She chairs the APAC Microsoft Diversity and Inclusion Council for Accessibility and Assistive Technology. ——— Some of the highlights of questions from the podcast including: Could you please tell us about Microsoft's commitment to diversity & inclusion? How does diversity & inclusion drive business value? More specifically in the tech industry. What advice can you offer to the business leader on how to make the tech sector more inclusive? Some other key takeaways. Get a full script of this podcast by accessing this link --- https://www.vcare.international/post/dibdti Connect her on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pratima-amonkar-a8a2283/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/bicarasupplychain/message

Sunny Gupta, CEO, and founder at Apptio knows a thing or two about perseverance — and it started with immigrating from India and creating his own self-funded pathway to higher education in the United States. After earning Computer Science and Math degrees, Sunny pursued software and framework development at the forefront of innovation. At 26, he started his first company and 18 months later sold it to Rational Software (now part of IBM). In this Net Effects Podcast episode, Sunny shares his vision about grit, determination, and digital transformation with co-hosts Mark Bavisotto and Les Ottolenghi. Topics range from new and digital-first business models to Sunny's organization-building with the Technology Business Management Council. This episode offers a pragmatic look at some of the most pressing issues facing CIOs today. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/neteffectspodcast/message

14. Semper Fi Leadership: Faithfulness and Loyalty“Once you understand the essence of leadership is service, Semper Fi/Always Faithful means you’re always looking to be of value to others.”Guest Info:As the founding partner of Lead Star, a leadership development consulting firm, Courtney works closely with all levels of leaders — from CEO’s to frontline team members. She designs and delivers development programs that drive immediate results.Courtney is also the New York Times and USA Today best-selling author of SPARK: HOW TO LEAD YOURSELF AND OTHERS TO GREATER SUCCESS and LEADING FROM THE FRONT and has written numerous articles on behavior-based leadership and organizational excellence. She’s been a dynamic guest on CNBC, FOX News, and CNN. Courtney’s efforts with Lead Star have been noted in publications ranging from Fast Company, and Inc., to The New York Times.In addition to her work with consulting clients, Courtney served as the Director of the Center for Creative Leadership’s Partner Network, convening and connecting leading consultancies with the Center’s innovative thought leadership, research and development solutions.Prior to starting Lead Star, Courtney’s professional experiences included service as a Captain in the United States Marine Corps, an attorney at one of the nation’s largest law firms and as a sales manager for Rational Software. She holds a law degree from William & Mary, an undergraduate degree from North Carolina State University and completed intensive studies at Cambridge University. Courtney lives with her husband and three children in Northern California.Favorite Quote: "Lead as you are, it works!"Resources:Lead StarContact Courtney LynchCourtney Lynch - LinkedIn"Spark: How to Lead Yourself and Others to Greater Success" BookShannon Cassidy on YouTubeFor more information about R.O.G. Return on Generosity and host Shannon Cassidy, visit bridgebetween.com.Credits:Courtney Lynch, Lead Star. Production team: Nani Shin, Sheep Jam Productions, qodpod

Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple? Reach out to us at [almartintalksdata@gmail.com] and tell us why you should be next. AbstractHosted by Al Martin, VP, Data and AI Expert Services and Learning at IBM, Making Data Simple provides the latest thinking on big data, A.I., and the implications for the enterprise from a range of experts.This week on Making Data Simple, we have Kathy Parks. Kathy worked at IBM and is now an owner and independent Angel Investor. Kathy started her career in publishing and then transitioned over to Kurzweil Computer Products working on reading machine for the blind. Kathy then moved to Interleaf working on publishing products, then to QA and Project Management. Kathy then moved to Rational Software and in 2003 Rational was bought by IBM. Show Notes2:10 - How do you go from publishing to project management?3:15 - How did you transition to Angel Investing?5:58 - What’s at the core7:06 - What is Angel Investing12:40 - Is there a formula that you use?17:24 - How are pitches made?18:37 - Other forms of capital22:43 - How many investments have you made?29:21 - What data to you use?30:42 - Why are we not seeing the investments?31:58 - What are the KPIs in a pitch?33:20 - How long does the process take?Angel Capital Association KJParks - LinkedinAngel Investing - Venture DealsAge of Surveillance Capitalism Connect with the TeamProducer Kate Brown - LinkedIn. Producer Steve Templeton - LinkedIn. Host Al Martin - LinkedIn and Twitter.

Want to be featured as a guest on Making Data Simple? Reach out to us at [almartintalksdata@gmail.com] and tell us why you should be next. AbstractHosted by Al Martin, VP, Data and AI Expert Services and Learning at IBM, Making Data Simple provides the latest thinking on big data, A.I., and the implications for the enterprise from a range of experts.This week on Making Data Simple, we have Kathy Parks. Kathy worked at IBM and is now an owner and independent Angel Investor. Kathy started her career in publishing and then transitioned over to Kurzweil Computer Products working on reading machine for the blind. Kathy then moved to Interleaf working on publishing products, then to QA and Project Management. Kathy then moved to Rational Software and in 2003 Rational was bought by IBM. Show Notes2:10 - How do you go from publishing to project management?3:15 - How did you transition to Angel Investing?5:58 - What’s at the core7:06 - What is Angel Investing12:40 - Is there a formula that you use?17:24 - How are pitches made?18:37 - Other forms of capital22:43 - How many investments have you made?29:21 - What data to you use?30:42 - Why are we not seeing the investments?31:58 - What are the KPIs in a pitch?33:20 - How long does the process take?Angel Capital Association KJParks - LinkedinAngel Investing - Venture DealsAge of Surveillance Capitalism Connect with the TeamProducer Kate Brown - LinkedIn. Producer Steve Templeton - LinkedIn. Host Al Martin - LinkedIn and Twitter.

Today we're going to cover what many of you do with your evenings: Netflix. Now, the story of Netflix comes in a few stages that I like to call the founding and pivot, the Blockbuster killer,  the streaming evolution, and where we are today: the new era of content. Today Netflix sits at more than a 187 billion dollar market cap. And they have become one of the best known brands in the world. But this story has some pretty stellar layers to it. And one of the most important in an era of eroding (or straight up excavated) consumer confidence is this thought. The IPOs that the dot com buildup created made fast millionaires. But those from the Web 2.0 era made billionaires. And you can see that in the successes of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. Prelude Hastings founded Pure Software in 1991. They made software that helped other people make… software. They went public in 1995 and merged with Atria, and were acquired the next year by Rational Software - making he and Netflix founder Marc Randolph, well, obsolete. Hastings made investors and himself a lot of money. Which at that point was millions and millions of dollars. So he went on to sit on the State Board of Education and get involved in education. Act I: The Founding and Pivot He and Marc Randolph had carpooled to worked while at Pure Atria and had tossed around a lot of ideas for startups. Randolph landed on renting DVDs by mail. Using the still somewhat new Internet. Randolph would become CEO and Hastings would invest the money to get started. Randolph brought in a talented team from Pure Atria and they got to work using an initial investment of two and a half million dollars in 1997.  But taking the brick and mortar concept that video stores had been successfully using wasn't working. They had figured out how to ship DVDs cheaply, how to sell them (until Amazon basically took that part of the business away), and even how to market the service by inking deals with DVD player manufacturers. The video stores had been slow to adopt DVDs after the disaster they found with laser disk and so the people who made the DVDs saw it as a way to get more people to buy the players. And it was mostly working. But the retention numbers sucked and they were losing money.  So they tinkered with the business model, relentlessly testing every idea. And Hastings came back to take the role of CEO and Randolph stepped into the role of president. One of those tests had been to pivot from renting DVDs to a subscription model. And it worked. They gave customers a free month trial. The subscription and the trial are now all too common. But at the time it was a wildly innovative approach. And people loved it. Especially those who could get a DVD the next day. They also gave Netflix huge word of mouth. In 1999 they were at 110,000 subscribers. Which is how I first got introduced to them in 2000, when they were finally up to 300,000 subscribers. I had no clue, but they were already thinking about streaming all the way back then.  But they had to survive this era. And as is often the case when there's a free month that comes at a steep cost, Netflix was bleeding money. And running out of cash. They planned to go IPO. But because the dot com bubble had burst, cash was becoming hard to come by. They had been well funded, taking a hundred million dollars by the time they got to a series E. And they were poised for greatness. But there was that cash crunch. And a big company to contend with: Blockbuster. With 9,000 stores, $6b in revenue, tens of thousands of employees, and millions of rentals being processed a month, Blockbuster was the king of the video rental market.  The story goes that Hastings got the Netflix idea from a late fee. So they would do subscriptions. But they had sold DVDs and done rentals first. And really, they found success because of the pivot, wherever that pivot came from. And in fact, Hastings and Randolph had flown to Texas to try and sell Netflix to Blockbuster. Pretty sure Blockbuster wishes they'd jumped on that.  Which brings us to Act II: The Blockbuster Killer.  Managing to keep enough cash to make it through the growth, they managed to go public in 2002 and finally got profitable in 2003. Soon they would be shipping over a million DVDs every single day. They quickly rose through word of mouth. That one day shipping was certainly a thing. They pumped money into advertising and marketing. And they continued a meteoric growth.  They employed growth hacks and they researched a lot of options for the future, knowing that technology changes were afoot. Randolf investigated opening kiosks with Mitch Lowe. Netflix wouldn't really be interested in doing so, and Randolph would leave the company in 2002 on good terms. Wealthy after the companies successful IPO. And Lowe took the Video Droid concept of a VHS rental vending machine to DVDs after Netflix abandoned it, and went to Redbox, which had been initially started by McDonalds in 2003. Many of the ideas he and Randolf tested in Vegas as a part of Netflix would be used and by 2005 Redbox would try to sell to Netflix and Blockbuster.  But again, Blockbuster failed to modernize. They didn't have just one shot at buying Netflix, Reed Hastings flew out there four times to try and sell the company to Blockbuster. Blockbuster launched their own subscription service in 2004 but it was flawed and there was bad press around late fees and other silly missteps. Meanwhile Netflix was growing fast.  Netflix shipped the billionth DVD in 2007. And by 2007, there were more Reboxes than Blockbusters and by 2011 the kiosks accounted for half of the rental market. Blockbuster was finally forced to file for bankruptcy in 2010, after being a major name brand for 25 years.  Netflix was modernizing though. Not with Kiosks but they were already beginning to plan for streaming. And a key to their success, as in the early days was relentless self improvement and testing every little thing, all the time. They took their time and did it right.  Broadband was on the rise. People had more bandwidth and were experimenting with streaming music at work. Netflix posted earnings of over a hundred million dollars in 2009. But they were about to do something special.  And so Act III: The Streaming Revolution The streaming world came online in the early days of the Internet when Severe Tire Damage streamed the first song out of Xerox PARC in 1993. But it wasn't really until YouTube came along in 2005 that streaming video was getting viable. By 2006 Google would acquire YouTube, which was struggling with over a million dollars a month in bandwidth fees and huge legal issues with copywritten content. This was a signal to the world that streaming was ready. I mean, Saturday Night Live was in, so it must be real!  Netflix first experimented with making their own content in 2006 with a film production division they called Red Envelope Films. They made over a dozen movies but ultimately shut down, giving Netflix a little focus on another initiative before they came back to making their own content. Netflix would finally launch streaming media in 2007, right around the time they shipped that billionth DVD. This was the same year Hulu launched out of AOL, Comcast, Facebook, MSN, and Yahoo. But Netflix had a card up it's sleeve. Or a House of Cards, the first show they produced, which launched in 2013. Suddenly, Netflix was much, much more than a DVD service. They were streaming movies, and creating content. Wildly popular content. They've produced hundreds of shows now in well over a dozen languages. 2013 also brought us Orange is the New Black, another huge success. They started off with a whole Marvel universe in 2015 with Daredevil, followed by Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and tied that up with The Defenders. But along the way we got The Crown, Narcos and the almost iconic at this point Stranger Things. Not to mention Bojack Horseman, Voltron, and the list just goes on and on.  That era of expansion would include more than just streaming. They would finally expand into Canada in 2010, finally going international. They would hit 20 million subscribers in 2011. By 2012 they would be over 25 million subscribers. By 2013 they would exceed 33 million. In 2014 they hit 50 million. By the end of 2015 they were at almost 70 million. 2016 was huge, as they announced an expansion into 130 new international territories at CES. And the growth continued. Explosively. At this point, despite competition popping up everywhere Netflix does over 20 billion a year in revenue and has been as instrumental in revolutionizing the world as anyone.  That competition now includes Disney Plus, Apple, Hulu, Google, and thousands of thousands of podcasts and home spun streamers, even on Twitch. All battling to produce the most polarizing, touching, beautiful, terrifying, or mesmerizing content.  Oh and there's still regular tv I guess…  Epilogue So Y2K. The dot com bubble burst. And the overnight millionaires were about to give way to something new. Something different. Something on an entirely different scale.  As with many of the pre-crash dot com companies, Netflix had initially begun with a pretty simple idea. Take the video store concept, where you payed per-rental. And take it out of brick and mortar and onto the internets. And if they had stuck with that, we probably wouldn't know who they are today. We would probably be getting our content from a blue and yellow box called Blockbuster. But they went far beyond that, and in the process, they changed how we think of that model. And that subscription model is how you now pay for almost everything, including software like Microsoft Office.  And Netflix continued to innovate. They made streaming media mainstream. They made producing content a natural adjacency to a streaming service. And they let millions cut the cord from cable and get into traditional media. They became a poster child for the fact that out of the dot com bubble and Great Recession, big tech companies would go from making fast millionaires to a different scale, fast billionaires! As we move into a new post COVID-19 era, a new round of change is about to come. Nationalism is regrettably becoming more of a thing. Further automation and adoptions of new currencies may start to disrupt existing models even further. We have so much content we have to rethink how search works. And our interpersonal relationships will be forever changed from these months in isolation. Many companies are about to go the way of Blockbuster. Including plenty that have been around much, much longer than they were. But luckily, companies like Netflix are there for us to remind us that any company can innovate like in a multi-act play.  And we owe them our thanks, for that. - and because what the heck else would we do stuck in quarantine, right?!?! So to the nearly 9,000 people that work at Netflix we 167 million plus subscribers thank you. For revolutionizing content distribution, revolutionizing business models, and for the machine learning and other technological advancements we didn't even cover in this episode. You are lovely.  And thank you listeners, for abandoning binge watching Tiger King long enough to listen to this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We are so lucky to have you. Now get back to it!  

Read the complete transcript on The Sales Game Changers Podcast. EDWARD'S' FINAL TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: "Pay attention to your family. Eat healthy. Be sure that you exercise." Edward Hughes is a Senior Vice President for Worldwide Sales and Operations at Appian Corporation. Prior to coming to Appian, he also held sales leadership positions at Compuware, Pegasystems and Rational Software. Find Edward on LinkedIn!

This episode, Jeffrey Palermo welcomes his guest Sam Guckenheimer, to the podcast! Sam is the Product Owner for the Azure DevOps product line at Microsoft, and has been with the Microsoft team for the last 15 years. He has 30 years of experience as an architect, developer, tester, product Manager, project manager, and general manager in the software industry worldwide. His first book, Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, was translated into 7 languages and recognized as a de facto guide for teams adopting Agile practices. He’s also a frequent speaker at industry conferences.   Sam explains the exciting new offer around Azure Pipelines for open source teams, changes he has seen in the industry from his many years of working at Microsoft, and some of the biggest changes in how users work with Azure DevOps. He also provides tons of key insights into the findings and research around predicting the impact Microsoft’s changes will make on user interactions, good practices around gathering live site telemetry and data collection, architectural (or design decisions or patterns) that help or hurt the live site supportability of a complex system, and key takeaways from his own internal learnings and the State of DevOps Report.   Topics of Discussion: [:50] About today’s topic and guest. [2:00] What is Sam focusing on now? [3:11] With many years at Microsoft, IBM, and Rational Software, what changes stand out in the industry in Sam’s mind? [5:51] What’s the most exciting part of the Azure DevOps release for Sam? The open source capabilities of course! [9:29] Why Sam loves open source frameworks. [11:05] What makes Azure DevOps so successful? And the biggest changes in how engineers work with it. [15:15] A word from Azure DevOps sponsor: Clear Measure. [15:43] The findings and research around predicting the impact Microsoft’s changes will make on user interactions, their feedback cycle, and applying the “rule of thirds” to make data-informed decisions. [19:42] Good practices around gathering live site telemetry and data collection through Azure Log Analytics and Azure Application Insights. [22:42] Other internal learnings: the notion of a production first mindset, designated responsible individual (DRI), and repair items. [26:56] Has Sam found any architectural or design decisions or patterns that help or hurt the live site supportability of a complex system? [30:42] Sam’s take on APM software and traditional monitoring tools. [32:36] Sam speaks about the State of DevOps Report and why it is so important. [36:39] Key takeaways from Sam on the State of DevOps Report and his own internal learnings.   Mentioned in this Episode: Azure DevOps Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, by Juan J. Perez and Sam Guckenheimer Azure Pipelines Agile Github Git Node Golang .NET Framework 4 Clear Measure (Sponsor) Azure Log Analytics Azure Application Insights AKA.MS/DevOps Buck Hodges APM Tools The State of DevOps Report   Want to Learn More? Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.   Follow Up with Our Guest: Sam Guckenheimer’s LinkedIn Sam Guckenheimer’s Amazon Book Page

Tom Bogan is the CEO of Adaptive Insights, the company that proves a new generation of business planning software for finance and beyond. Prior to their reported $1.55Bn acquisition to WorkDay, Adaptive Insights raised over $175m in VC funding from the likes of Bessemer, Salesforce Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and many more incredible investors. Prior to Adaptive Insights, Tom was a partner at Greylock Partners where he focused on enterprise software investments. He was also president and COO at Rational Software until its acquisition by IBM. Before Rational, Tom served as CEO at Avatar Technologies and Pacific Data. He began his career as a financial officer in both public and private companies, serving as CFO at SQA and Orange Nassau, Inc., as well as vice president of finance at SCA Services. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Tom made his way into the world of SaaS, came to be a Partner with Greylock and then made the move back into operations with Adaptive Insights? Elad Gil has previously said the role of CEO is to “find product market fit, ensure the company does not run out of money and ensure the team does not implode”, how does Tom define his role as CEO of a $100m+ SaaS company? How does the role of CEo fundamentally change over time? What aspect of the role does Tom find most challenging?   What core role of CEO is constant throughout the lifecycle of the company? From seeing many of the world’s best SaaS CEOs, what are the commonalities in how the very best CEOs hire the very best execs? How does Tom think about the debate of hiring externally or promoting from within? How does Tom look to reduce internal discontent when hiring externally rather than promoting? At $100m Jyoti Bansal said on the show, this stage is about “creating and sustaining operational efficiency”. What have been Tom’s biggest learnings on the creation and maintenance of operational efficiency? What has worked? What has not worked? How does Tom think about internal asset allocation? Why does Tom believe that ultimately, ARR growth is the metric to rule them all? How does Tom think about and prioritise the metric stack in SaaS? How does he approach payback period vs CAC/LTV? In terms of services components of businesses, does Tom believe these should be baked into the CAC? What should the financial targets be for these services businesses?   Tom’s 60 Second SaaStr What does Tom know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? Tom’s favourite business reading material and why? What would Tom most like to change in the world of SaaS today? Read the full transcript on our blog. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr

More and more utilities are recognizing the need for transforming their business processes and technical solutions, such as smart meter data management, simultaneously, in order to achieve their new business goals. Leveraging Rationals integrated solution, utilities can realistically transform their processes and technologies with little disruption, and minimized risk. Irv Badr, speaker.

EGL Community Edition is a free Eclipse-based tool that simplifies the development of rich Web 2.0 style applications. Learn more from Will Smythe, Product manager, how EGL CE dramatically accelerates development of JavaScript and Java-based, rich Internet applications without needing to learn or program the intricacies of Ajax, JavaScript, REST, HTML, or XML.

Hear from Rick Slade, Rational enterprise modernization community of practice leader, on how this new service offering enables you to evaluate and analyze existing application software to determine modernization strategies that resolve very specific and targeted business problems today with minimal risk and with clearly identified value.

In this podcast we'll take a quick look at the benefits of using open source software, along with some of the potential risks to help you determine whether an open source or a commercial application is right for your company.

randy howie scott hebnerSmall businesses that rely on software to drive revenue may have only one chance to get it right. Success is a balancing act between driving revenue and consistently delivering the right features, on time for a fixed cost. Join Randy Howie, CEO, Black Diamond Software, and Scott Hebner, VP Marketing, Rational software to learn how Presto can provide a complete software development environment for your whole team for a fraction of the risk, time and cost needed to implement on your own.

In a podcast with eg3's Jason McDonald, Greg Sikes, Director of Enterprise Architecture and Systems Modeling for IBM Rational, discusses new product strategy from IBM Rational to help organizations create better embedded software faster and with fewer errors. Some of the new product developments discussed include Doors, Webtop, Change, Synergy, and Rational Rhapsody. All help software teams create better complex software for sophisticated embedded systems.

Terry Quatrani, Rational technical events content lead, gives us a look ahead to the Rational Software Conference 2009, running May 31 through June 4 in Orlando, Florida.

Beth Friday, Rational VP of Worldwide Client Support, talks about the first year of Rational RFE Community activity -- products included, feedback received, lessons learned and changes made, and what next.

The role of the business analyst is rapidly changing in today's challenging economic environment. As it becomes more critical for organizations to increase business value while using the same or fewer resources, innovation is key for BA's to provide this value. Join Ashok Reddy, a Director of Product Delivery Organization at IBM Rational, to examine the changing role of business analyst at IBM and discuss how this pivotal role is helping to drive more effective product and project delivery and keeping teams aligned to the business outcomes. Ashok Reddy is responsible for product delivery in areas consisting of Security, Jazz Platform, Process Automation, Reporting and Process Products and to bring an outside in customer/market view to deliver products that help customers achieve their business outcomes.

Rational Software Analyzer Developer Edition is a static analysis solution that enables developer level static analysis code reviews and bug identification very early in the development cycle. In this podcast we'll learn about one of the newest offerings from IBM Rational from Mike O'Rourke, the Vice President of Rational Product Development.

Miss the action? This 3 minute clip of Grady Booch, IBM Fellow and IBM Rational co-founder and Theresa Quatrani, IBM Rational Evangelist. summarizes the celebration on CODESTATION in Second Life of the evolution of Rational. It's the 5th Anniversary of Rational Software joining the IBM team.

Show 28 features Part Two of an interview with Ivar Jacobson, author, pundit and one of the creators of UML.  The discussion covered topics ranging from methodologies to his new concept, practices.   If process improvement and methodology are important to you, this is an important interview full of new concepts. An abridged version of Mr. Jacobson’s Wikipedia biography notes that he is a Swedish computer scientist he holds a Masters of Electrical Engineering at Chalmers Institute of Technology in Gothenburg and a Ph.D. from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. In 1967 he proposed the use of software components in the development of the new generation of software controlled telephone switches Ericsson was developing. In doing this he invented sequence diagrams, and developed collaboration diagrams. He also applied state transition diagrams to describe the message flow between the components. At Ericsson he also invented use cases as a way to specify functional software requirements. In April 1987 he quit Ericsson and started Objective Systems. A majority stake of the company was acquired by Ericsson in 1991 (you can run but  . . .), and the company was renamed to Objectory AB. In October 1995 Ericsson divested Objectory to Rational Software [1] and Ivar started working with Grady Booch and James Rumbaugh to first create the UML, and later develop the Rational Unified Process. In mid 2003 Ivar formed Ivar Jacobson International (IJI) which is an umbrella company for Ivar Jacobson Consulting (IJC) which operates across 4 continents with offices in the UK, US (West and East Coast), Scandinavia, China, Korea, Singapore and Australia. In November 2005, Jacobson announced the Essential Unified Process or “EssUP" for short. EssUP is a new “Practice" centric software development process that stands on the shoulders of modern but established software development best practice. It is a fresh new start integrating successful practices sourced from the three leading process camps: the unified process camp, the agile methods camp and the process maturity camp. Each one of them contributes different capabilities: structure, agility and process improvement. Ivar has described EssUP as a "super light and agile" RUP and IJC have integrated EssUP into Microsoft Visual Studio Team System and Eclipse. Check out http://www.ivarjacobson.com   and http://www.ivarblog.com/  The essay for this cast is titled “Social Media and Process Improvement."  The essay discusses the impact of social media on the practice of process improvement.  The text of the essay can be found at www.tcagley.wordpress.com.  Comments and corrections are welcome. There are a number of ways to share your thoughts . . Email SPaMCAST at spamcastinfo@gmail.com Voice messages can be left at 1-206-888-6111 Twitter – www.twitter.com/tcagley BLOG – www.tcagley.wordpress.com   Future Events and the next . . . I have a couple of free webinars coming up in early 2008.  The first is “Getting Performance Improvement Out of Your Software Process Improvement" on Wednesday, April 23, 2008 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM EDT And the second is titled “A Cost Effective Approach to Enterprise Wide Software Process Improvement" May 22nd, 2008 at 10:00 am - 11:30 am Eastern Time More information and registration information can be found at http://www.itmpi.org/webinars/ Next Software Process and Measurement Cast: The Software Process and Measurement Cast 29 will feature an interview with Murali Chemuturi on estimation.  Murali’s take on estimation is razor sharp and will be a valuable addition to your knowledge base.  Your thoughts and comments would be a welcome addition . . .

Show 27 features part one of an interview with Ivar Jacobson, author, pundit and one of the creators of UML.  The discussion covered topics ranging from methodologies to his new concept, practices.   If process improvement and methodology are important to you, this is an important interview full of new concepts. An abridged version of Mr. Jacobson’s Wikipedia biography notes that he is a Swedish computer scientist he holds a Masters of Electrical Engineering at Chalmers Institute of Technology in Gothenburg and a Ph.D. from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. In 1967 he proposed the use of software components in the development of the new generation of software controlled telephone switches Ericsson was developing. In doing this he invented sequence diagrams, and developed collaboration diagrams. He also applied state transition diagrams to describe the message flow between the components. At Ericsson he also invented use cases as a way to specify functional software requirements. In April 1987 he quit Ericsson and started Objective Systems. A majority stake of the company was acquired by Ericsson in 1991 (you can run but  . . .) , and the company was renamed to Objectory AB. In October 1995 Ericsson divested Objectory to Rational Software [1] and Ivar started working with Grady Booch and James Rumbaugh to first create the UML, and later develop the Rational Unified Process. In mid 2003 Ivar formed Ivar Jacobson International (IJI) which is an umbrella company for Ivar Jacobson Consulting (IJC) which operates across 4 continents with offices in the UK, US (West and East Coast), Scandinavia, China, Korea, Singapore and Australia. In November 2005, Jacobson announced the Essential Unified Process or “EssUP" for short. EssUP is a new “Practice" centric software development process that stands on the shoulders of modern but established software development best practice. It is a fresh new start integrating successful practices sourced from the three leading process camps: the unified process camp, the agile methods camp and the process maturity camp. Each one of them contributes different capabilities: structure, agility and process improvement. Ivar has described EssUP as a "super light and agile" RUP and IJC have integrated EssUP into Microsoft Visual Studio Team System and Eclipse. Check out http://www.ivarjacobson.com   and http://www.ivarblog.com/   The essay for this cast is titled “We Are All Futurists."  The essay discusses the basis for predicting the future (can you say estimation) and why some people shy away from being a futurist.  The text of the essay can be found at www.tcagley.wordpress.com.  Comments and corrections are welcome. There are a number of ways to share your thoughts . . Email SPaMCAST at spamcastinfo@gmail.com Voice messages can be left at 1-206-888-6111 Twitter – www.twitter.com/tcagley BLOG – www.tcagley.wordpress.com   Future Events and the next . . . I have a couple of free webinars coming up in early 2008.  The first is “Getting Performance Improvement Out of Your Software Process Improvement" on Wednesday, April 23, 2008 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM EDT And the second is titled “A Cost Effective Approach to Enterprise Wide Software Process Improvement" May 22nd, 2008 at 10:00 am - 11:30 am Eastern Time More information and registration information can be found at http://www.itmpi.org/webinars/ Next Software Process and Measurement Cast: The next Software Process and Measurement Cast will be a special show.  Cast 28 will feature part two of the interview with Ivar Jacobson.  Your thoughts and comments would be a welcome addition . . .   Technorati Profile

SPaMCAST 24 - Edelson, Coaching, Specialization ** Note – Traceability paper will be out on the feed this week. ** Show 24 features an interview with Marilyn Edelson, a Principal at IT Decisions Coaching LLC.  The interview covers project management, leadership, the similarities, differences and how coaching can make both better.  This was a wide ranging interview with lots of tips and take “aways"! Marilyn Edelson, cofounder, is a Master Certified Coach, entrepreneur and certified Best Year Yet® program leader with over 25 years experience in behavioral management. She has has been coaching executives, managers and corporate teams for the past 10 years and was voted 'Top 10 Coach 2007' by Women's Business Boston (a division of The Boston Herald). She has a strong behavioral background and easily integrates the principals of emotional and social intelligence with the structured, measurable results oriented approach provided by the Best Year Yet® system and DiSC behavioral and values assessment tools. She teaches, mentors and trains professional coaches, and is the coaching consultant for the first National Institute of Health study on the efficacy of coaching in healthcare. She holds a Master of Science degree from Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts.   Here are the links for ITDC and Marilyn! IT Decisions Coaching - www.itdecisionscoaching.com/ ITDC email:  info@itdecisionscoaching.com Marilyn’s email:  m.edelson@itdecisionscoaching.com The essay this week is titled “Specialization: Making It Work For You!" The essay seeks to answer the question, “when did process, documentation and certifications become the goal rather than a path for attaining project success?"   This frightening question caused me to relate two seemingly different concepts during quite times of contemplation over the past few weeks.  The first was the impact of hyper-specialization in the process improvement world (and by extension anywhere it is used) and the second was a need to refocus process improvement groups on helping organizations deliver project results.  This could be scary stuff but solvable and solvable in a way that won’t break the bank.  The text of the essay can be found at www.tcagley.wordpress.com.  Comments and corrections are welcome. There are a number of ways to share your thoughts . . Email SPaMCAST at spamcastinfo@gmail.com Voice messages can be left at 1-206-888-6111 Twitter – www.twitter.com/tcagley BLOG – www.tcagley.wordpress.com  Future Events and the next . . . I have a couple of free webinars coming up in early 2008.  The first is “Getting Performance Improvement Out of Your Software Process Improvement" on Wednesday, April 23, 2008 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM EDT And the second is titled “A Cost Effective Approach to Enterprise Wide Software Process Improvement" May 22nd, 2008 at 10:00 am - 11:30 am Eastern Time More information and registration information can be found at http://www.itmpi.org/webinars/ Next Software Process and Measurement Cast: The next Software Process and Measurement Cast features an interview with Grady Booch chief scientist of Rational Software (now a part of IBM).  We will discuss structure, design, architecture, agility and discipline amongst other things.  This is another of those interviews where you will want to take notes!