In Defense of Frederick Taylor with Christine Li

In this episode, I am joined by a very special guest, Christine Li, for a conversation I have been waiting to record for quite a while now. 

I am closing in on 30 years of work in Project Management and for most of that time, I, like many of you, have been talking smack about Frederick Taylor. My opinions were based on the things I learned from others along the way and were (obviously) deeply informed by moving from traditional PM over to Agile. As far as I was concerned, this guy was the birth of work misery. But, I had never actually taken the time to read The Principles of Scientific Management... so I did. I was amazed at how completely off the mark I was. Yes, there are some obvious glaring issues with how he separates the workers from the thinkers, but there is also a ton of really good stuff in there and a lot that comes pretty close to an agile mindset.

After reading it, I was at a lunch and happened to mention my newfound Taylor Fanboy-ness and Christine Li showed up like Yoda, deep with the PM history geek. She took me to school and that is where this conversation starts. 

FLY EAGLES FLY!

My hope is that even if you think Frederick Taylor is the Sauron of Project Management, you’ll give this a listen. Maybe it will challenge your understanding of him and his work. Maybe it will (I hope) entice you to read his work. And even if you’ve read his work and can see the good in it, the things Christine shares will level up your understanding as well. 

You can find the podcast here.

Story Points are Good AND Evil with Ryan Ripley

 A few weeks ago Ryan Ripley posted a tweet about Story Points...

And as soon as I saw it I reached out to him to ask if we could do a podcast discussing his post. I come to this topic as someone for fought against Story Points for about four years when I started working on Agile teams. Now, I can't imagine not using them.  I  teach Story Points in my CSM classes because I think that when used effectively they can be incredibly valuable to a Scrum Team. I also agree with Ryan's views on this topic

This podcast is the two of us debating the value of Story Points, when and how they can be used for good, and when, as Ryan often says, Story Points are trash.

Video version

Audio version

Value Stream Management with Derek Huether

Derek Huether is back for this episode and we’re focusing on Value Stream Management. Value Stream Mapping is about understanding all the steps from the inception of an idea to putting something valuable in a customer's hands, and using that information to optimize the flow of value through the system. But, within a business, you will have many value streams and we need to understand how best to coordinate those streams to optimize the overall value generated by the company across multiple value streams. If your brain is wired for traditional project management, you could think of this as creating a system that optimizes a portfolio management level view of all the value streams in the org.

• Video version: https://youtu.be/nxGvpnWgoIM
• Audio version: https://on.soundcloud.com/dAVHR

Improving Value Delivery In Your Organization with Gil Broza

Gil Broza joins me to provide a walkthru of Square, a new tool he has developed that will help you assess product development in your organization and determine what improvements will have the biggest impact on your ability to deliver value. 

You can find the interview here.