Fixing PI Planning with Alan Dayley

 SAFe Program Consultant, Alan Dayley, is back to join me for a conversation about how PI Planning (or quarterly planning) is supposed to work, why so many organizations keep sabotaging their ability to make it work, and how they can fix it. 

Developers are not batteries.

You can find the interview here https://tinyurl.com/2eu5yucw

Fixing Your Quarterly Planning with Nigel Baker

Nigel Baker joins me in this podcast to explore why so many organizations that are doing quarter planning are making such a mess of it. (Hint, if your teams regularly carry work from Sprint to Sprint and quarter to quarter, then you definitely fall into the "making a mess of it" category.)

During the interview Nigel and I talk through some of the totally valid reasons to do quarterly planning, some risks that come with it, why so many are doing it so poorly and how to fix it. 

You can find the video version of the podcast here.

You can find the audio version of the podcast here.

Sprint Goals and Sprint Planning with Chris Li

Chris Li is back for a conversation about Sprint Goals. While Chris and I both agree they are critical, we approach creating them very differently. If you are trying to get your head around when and how to create a Sprint Goal that can work for your team, you'll get plenty of ideas from this conversation.

Video Version

Audio Version

Planning Sprints and Releases

My colleague, Jeff Howey and I respond to a question I got from a student in one of my classes:

"I would like to know how long should milestones typically be and how many sprints should we break it down to. We have a goal of what we want to achieve and a rough timeline but we don’t log too many feature tickets ahead of time thinking that the task might become stale or pollute the board with an everlasting list of things to do and most of the time we were just closing the tickets. As a result, I feel we become short-sighted and optimize for the current sprint but not for the milestone."

You can find out response here.

Business Planning for Agile AND Traditional Time Horizons with Ross Beurmann

 In this interview with Ross Beurmann we dig into the topic of how to handle business planning when you've got both traditional (waterfall) and Agile work happening concurrently within the organization. 

Here is the interview -> Business Planning for Agile AND Traditional Time Horizons with Ross Beurmann

You can also hear an update on how Ross's son Tom is doing with his effort to enact lasting social change within his local government. If you missed that interview, you can find that one here.

Are Stretch Goals OK? w/ Tim Wise from LeadingAgile

This week's LeadingAgile SoundNotes features a conversation between myself and Tim Wise on Stretch Goals. I had a student ask about them in class last week and did not have time to get back to it before class ended.

Even if you have formed an opinion about Stretch Goals, I'd encourage you to check this podcast out. I tend to be pretty anti-stretch goals, but during the interview Tim suggested a type of stretch goal that would actually be a very positive thing for a team to commit to.

You can find the podcast here.