Mike McCalla, President, and Founder of Lean Agile Intelligence joins me in this episode to discuss why taking an Object-Oriented Data-Driven approach to change is critical to your enterprise-wide agile transformation.
If you are curious about how Lean Agile Intelligence can help you and your organization continually assess how you are progressing in your transformation journey and what next steps are likely to help the most.
In every class I teach, there are people who tasked with being ScrumMaster AND Product Owner at the same time for one team working on one product.
I have very strong feelings about this, and realizing that my responses to this situation are maybe not so flexible and not practical for everyone, I reached out on the Agile Uprising Discord channel if there were people who had succeeded in being SM and PO at the same time, AND if they would be willing to join me for a podcast and share some of their experiences around making the SM/PO gig work.
This episode of the podcast features Andrew Leff, Chris Murman, and Mike Caddell. Over the course of the interview, we discuss the reasons why trying to be SM and PO at the same time is not advised, ways they found to survive it, and it some cases, actually make it work well.
Finding a way to scale Agile within the Enterprise has been a very popular topic in Agile for the past several years. With options like SAFe, LeSS, DAD and many others, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that your organization may simply not be structured in a way that can truly support the introduction of Agile.
In this interview, James Gifford took some time away from coaching and his work on the Agile Uprising to talk about why the conversation should really be about how “Descaling the Enterprise”.
SHOW NOTES
00:10 Podcast Begins
00:44 The work James is doing now
01:45 Finding a job that provides you with a lab where you can run experiments
04:05 When you are coaching, how do you maintain the “child mind” when you walk in the door
06:10 Do you need to be technical to be a good Agile Coach?
07:41 What’s new at The Agile Uprising
12:50 Descaling the Enterprise
14:30 Making the argument for changing the dynamic of how we look at and structure companies
19:11 Have you ever seen anyone tasked with creating flow through the entire organization?
23:17 Making the case for descaling OVER simply buying a scaling solution
25:10 How long does it take to implement the cultural and organizational change a descaling approach requires?
27:27 How do you convince the “C” level to buy into the upheaval a descaling approach will involve (over just buying the promise of a scaling solution.)
29:51 Two leverage points: 1. Scaling didn’t work, but we want what it was supposed to give us, 2. your business is threatened and you need a better response
30:50 How do you measure progress while you are descaling?
36:36 If you want more on this topic, please let us know!
Summary: You don’t have to be a developer to use Test Driven Development and Mob Programming. Last week on Twitch Amitai Schlier & Troy Lightfoot led Dave Prior and Rachel Gertz (neither of who can program) through an exercise in remote pairing with TDD.
If you come from a PM background, you’ve probably heard developers talk about Test Driven Development and you may even get the basic idea behind it - build the test to prove something works, then build the thing that passes the test.
You may also have heard about Mob Programming - the set of practices put together by Woody Zuill that takes the idea of pairing and extends it to the whole team. In mobbing, an entire team builds everything together. They share one keyboard and rotate the person typing at timed intervals. This allows them to develop cross-functionality, to learn from each other and, basically, QA as they go.
These are both topics I’ve been interested in for awhile, but I’ve never had an opportunity arise that gave me a chance to actually try them.
But, last week I had the opportunity to participate in a unique experiment that not only let me learn more about each of these sets of practices, but gave me a Troy Lightfoot, from Agile Uprising set up a TDD & Mobbing workshop in Twitch. Myself and Rachel Gertz from Louder Than Ten were guided by Amitai Schleier, the creator of Agile in 3 Minutes Podcast and Schmonz.com, who led us through an exercise in remote mobbing using TDD.
The entire experience was a blast and I’ve developed a new found appreciation for the entire though process and discipline that goes into using Test Driven Development and trying to mob with a team.
I’d encourage you to check out the video on your own, or with your team and maybe even try to replicate the experiment. I think this would work great as a team building exercise as well. Most of the time I felt like I was playing a board game with a bunch of friends.
