Louder Than Ten Goes Full CoOp!

Louder Than Ten is a Vancouver-based Project Management Training and Consulting company. L>10 was founded by Rachel and Travis Gertz, and for the past 14 years, everything they have done has been centered around fostering healthy and humane ways of working together and managing projects. There aren’t many organizations in the digital agency space that have taken the time to develop their own project management manifesto. It is truly a unique place and now, as they do, Rachel and Travis have cranked up the volume just a scosche higher by converting their company into a Worker Owned Cooperative. This means that new employees who join Louder than Ten will have an option to purchase a stake in the company and become an equal partner. This is a far cry from the sweatshop grind-it-out approach that many agencies take and it is definitely unique in the context of what is happening in the field of project management today. 

In this episode, Rachel and Travis join me to explain why they took this step to completely transform their company and how they went about doing it. 

You can find the video version of the interview here.

You can find the audio version of the interview here.

Also, as you can see from the picture above, they have some totally badass merch. If there is a project manager in your life, remember, the holidays are right around the corner.

Making Agile Work at HUGE Inc. w/ Lance Hammond and Robert Sfeir

In preparing for my How to Hack Agile for Digital Agencies at the 2017 Digital PM Summit I did a lot of  research and conducted a lot of interview. This conversation, with Lance Hammond and Robert Sfeir from HUGE Atlanta was the last one I did before the Summit. During this discussion Lance and Robert share many of the lessons they’ve learned in bringing Agile to HUGE and they provide clarity on what it takes to make Agile work in a Digital Agency.

SHOW NOTES

• 00:08 Podcast Begins
• 01:42 Some background on Robert and Lance
• 03:17 How long HUGE has been working on introducing Agile
• 04:40 Resistance from Design when switching to an Agile approach
• 06:08 Why Kanban may be a better approach for Design
• 07:39 How the Designers at HUGE approach their work without having all the requirements up front
• 09:30 Establishing Vision up front with the client and prioritizing options with them
• 10:33 The client needs to own the delivery from the very beginning and become part of the process
• 11:50 Making the client your partner in the workflow and decision making process
• 14:17 Why teaching the client how to work in Agile has to be an accepted cost 
• 16:07 Why those with experience in Agile transformation can be so beneficial for Digital Agencies and what you need to watch out for
• 17:52 Changing how the work gets funded 
• 20:22 How to change your Statement of Work to support Agile practices
• 21:47 Tips for convincing your client to want to use Agile to manage the work
• 24:11 Caring and feeding of the client during an Agile project at a Digital Agency
• 27:53 Should you include the client in the retrospective?
• 28:46 Do you need to have cross-functional, stable teams that are each working on only one project?
• 32:04 How long did it take HUGE to get to stable teams
• 34:02 Use Lean metrics to find and remove waste
• 34:20 How critical is it to move to a retainer (fund the team) model
• 35:30 You have to know why you want Agile, which approach you’ll take, and what you want from it
• 37:05 Scrum may have you thrashing for a bit before you switch to Kanban… and there is value in that
• 37:49 Why you need to switch the entire Digital Agency over to an Agile approach (including sales)
• 39:22: What is the hardest part about implementing/working with Agile in a Digital Agency
• 42:32 Defining what you are willing (and not willing) to try changing, when you switch to an Agile approach
• 44:30 How HUGE approaches estimating work
• 48:40 Why it is so important to watch and learn (inspect) before you start trying to change things (adapt)
• 50:45 Why Robert and Lance do not believe Scrum can work in a Digital Agency that wants Agile,  but why you need to try it first to unlock the value of Kanban
• 53:00 Contacting Lance and Robert
• 54:06 Podcast Ends

LINKS FROM THE PODCAST

HUGE
http://www.hugeinc.com/
Agile in Digital Agencies - Dave and Lance from the Atlanta Scrum User Group Meeting
https://www.pscp.tv/leadingagile/1YqxomWqrwMGv
(there is some static that persists until the interview begins at about 1 minute in)

CONTACTING LANCE

• Twitter:  https://twitter.com/lance5684
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lance-hammond-7288914/

CONTACTING ROBERT

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/robertsfeir
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertsfeir/

Edward Kay - Making Agile work in Digital

Edward Kay, the Founder of Tall Projects, has been managing software and digital projects for over 14 years. A few months ago Edward posted an article on The Digital Project Manager called “Agency Agile: 10 Agile Methods for Agencies”. In this interview, Edward and I discuss his article, some of the key things you need to do in order to get agile to work in digital, and why Scrum may be the one thing that just won’t work in an agency model.

SHOW NOTES 

04:04 - Interview Begins
04:48 - Background on Edward and Tall Projects
05:55 - How Edward got started doing agile
06:31 - How Edward’s clients develop a desire to try Agile
09:11 - Are the clients who want to “Go Agile” aware of what that will require and willing to take the steps needed to implement the change?
11:25 - Where in the organization is agile getting started?
12:17 - Why the clients bring Edward in
13:34 - There is no one true way
14:50 - Critical challenges facing Digital Agencies trying to adopt Agile
16:32 - Understanding how to look at work across the portfolio
17:32 - Different ways of measuring work in agencies that are using Agile
20:07 - “Why don’t we just smoke crack at work?”
23:52  - Tracking Happiness
25:10 -  Quantifying value and limiting WIP
28:26 - What is the client actually paying you for?
30:50  - Determining value at the project deliverable level
32:40 - Having a conversation about limiting WIP
35:38 - Getting the client to trust the practices agile team’s employ
36:16  - Multitasking is bad and doesn’t work… but it is still expected
37:45 - What Agile practices just do not work in an Agency model
38:49 - “The on system that is not well suited for Digital Agencies in Scrum”
41:15 - Kanban as an alternative for Digital Agencies
42:10 - What Agile tool/technique is the key to making it work in an Agency model?
43:17 - What is the piece that is missing when trying to make Agile fit in an Agency model?
44:18 - How to get in touch with Edward

CONTACTING EDWARD

Website - https://www.tallprojects.co.uk/
Email: edward@tallprojects.co.uk
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwardkay/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/edwardkay or https://twitter.com/tallprojects
Edward’s article on The Digital Project Manager: Agency Agile: 10 Agile Methods For Agencies 

CSM Training and the 2017 Digital PM Summit

For information on the Certified Scrum Master class being held right before the 2017 Digital PM Summit, click here. Special Discounts are available for conference attendees. Contact training@leadingagile.com for more information.

For information on the 2017 Digital PM Summit, click here.

Having Empathy for your Project - with Patrice Colancecco Embry

This summer Patrice Colancecco Embry posted an article on The Digital Project Manager suggesting that project managers needed to show empathy not just towards team members and stakeholders, but towards the project itself.

In this interview Patrice and I dig in a little deeper on the idea of showing empathy for your project, why and how you'd go about doing that. They also get into the how important it is for the PM to show empathy for him/herself and when it is okay to totally hate the project.



If you'd like to check out Patrice's original article, you can find it here: http://www.thedigitalprojectmanager.com/managing-project-empathy/

If you'd like to get in touch with Patrice, you can reach her via:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/patrice108
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patriceembry 
Her website http://www.patrice-embry.com

DrunkenPM Radio Ep. 4 - Gender Bias in Project Management

Gender Bias in Project Management

Episode 4 of DrunkenPM focuses on the impact of Gender Bias in the Project Management space. This episode consists of two interviews. The first is with a group of women who work in Digital Project Management (Larissa Scordato, Tera Caldwell Simon and Patrice Colancecco Embry). The second interview features Agile Coach Natalie Warnert






Show Notes:
Interview 1 : Gender Bias in Digital Project Management - with Patrice Colancecco Embry, Tera Caldwell Simon and Larissa Scordato
00:05 Intro
01:18 Women in Digital Project management Interview start and guest introductions
04:42 Meet the Dexters
05:25 Being a PM comes with challenges, does being a female PM carry additional challenges
9:38 Reaching out to your team for validation and support
12:08 Getting support may not fix the actual problem
13:50 How much does experience factor in
14:35 Does having a commanding presence only come with experience and how does gender impact your ability to take the room
16:46 Larissa is not sorry for interrupting
17:41 Letting your team take the floor
18:28 Note Taking
20:20 Generational gender bias
22:50 An apology is nice, a public apology is better
23:00 Advice for young women who are new to Project Management
24:05 Having difficult conversations and owning your role
24:40 The power of being knowledgable about your topic
26:00 The importance of assigning a notetaker
26:45 Getting a mentor
27:19 Know that you are good at what you do
27:35 How gender bias has an impact on your use of the phrase “I don’t know.”
29:30 When you get caught now knowing
30:09 Pretending to be brave enough / Imposter Syndrome
32:00 Taking care when you act “As if…”
33:30 “You’re either emotional, or your’e a bitch…”
35:20 Putting on the dominant female role and protecting your team
38:00 The “Sorry” thing
44:20 Advice for Men
46:10 Contacting Tera, Larissa and Patrice
46:40 Closing

All the participants in the above interview are "on the Twitter"
Larissa Scordato: twitter.com/larissascordato
Patrice Colancecco Embry : twitter.com/patrice108
Tera Caldwell Simon: twitter.com/tcaldsimon

Interview 2 - Gender Bias in Agile - with Natalie Warnert
47:07 Intro to the Interview with Agile Coach Natalie Warnert
47:50 Natalie’s involvement with Women in Agile
48:42 Women in Agile events are not just for women
49:27 Is it more difficult for a young woman to break into Agile
50:40 Behavior at a conferences
51:33 An example of differing standards
52:27 Gender bias, age bias and the Agile Coach
53:30 Women attendees at conferences
54:06 Advice for women entering the Agile space
55:35 Carrying yourself with confidence and owning it
56:00 Being more mindful of gender bias
57:31 What is an Aspiring Feminist?
60:10 Is the bias as significant in Agile as it is in waterfall?
61:20 Proving yourself
62:30 Support among women in Agile and at Agile conferences
65:00 Fighting over the slice of pie
65:39 Not tracking gender at conferences
66:00 Tracking down Natalie

Natalie can be reached via her website at nataliewarnert.com

DrunkenPM Radio 3: How to Cope with Coaching Burnout - with Lyssa Adkins

Lyssa Adkins is one of the leading voices in Agile coaching. A founder of the Agile Coaching Institute, her book “Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition”  set the bar for what it means to be an Agile Coach. In this interview Lyssa and I talk about what’s happening with the Agile Institute, coaching middle management and how to deal with coaching burnout.


Show Notes
The Super Nervous Interview Begins 2:10
Focused Listening 4:05
Four essential skill sets of coaching 6:00
The difference between “coaching” and being a professional coach 6:30
Big things going on at Agile Coaching Institute 7:45
Coaching Middle Management 8:40
The impact of the cultural change Agile brings 11:40
Is there a limit to how much change we can handle and where are the boundaries 12:30
Background on the burnt out coach14:30
Burn out is on the rise with Agile Coaches 15:00
Finding a path you can be on with heart 15:45
Finding the heart in letting the org become what it wants to become 16:40
Checking your own ambition 18:20
Goal setting and knowing when to walk away 19:00
What to do with the organizations on Life Support 19:15
Hospicing the death of old systems 20:20
Trying to reach people who don’t want to take your hand 21:30
Meeting confusion with curiosity 22:20
Agile coaches are agents of human evolution 24:00
How Agile Coaching Institute helps organizations 24:30
Developing a coaching capability that is in sync with where the organization’s goals 25:45
How to find and develop the coaches in an organization 27:45
How to help a burnt out coach/change agent 31:25
The importance of self-care if you want to be present and help others 32:50
Exposing why people avoid self-care35:00
Ways Lyssa practices self-care 35:30
The job is to “allow” 37:05
You can’t let go because it’s the tension that holds it together 38:18
What happens when you do let go 38:50
Lyssa Reads Poetry 40:25
All of us in the Agile community are part of evolving our capacity for complexity 41:45
We are in the time of organizations being living thing 43:05
How to contact Lyssa 43:25
Lyssa’s advice for the coaches who are feeling burned out 43:55
Lyssa’s Coaching Agile Teams book is 6 years old 44:45
Thanking Lyssa for making me uncomfortable (in a good way) 45:50
Upcoming Events for Lyssa 46:00
Links Mentioned in the Podcast
Lyssa in Twitter https://twitter.com/lyssaadkins
The Agile Coaching Institute
http://www.agilecoachinginstitute.com/coaches/
2016 Scrum Gathering Agenda http://bit.ly/1Upsg9W

Perseverance - Meg Wheatley http://amzn.to/1W4PSmM
Little Guide to Empathetic Technical Leadership - Alex Harms https://leanpub.com/littleguide
Agile Base Patterns, a Cross-Quadrant Conversation - a conversation between Lyssa Adkins and Dan Greening http://www.infoq.com/articles/agile-base-patterns
Iawake.com http://www.iawaketechnologies.com
The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America - David Whyte http://amzn.to/1NtifV7

What happened to October?

October got away from me. There were grand plans for blog posts and podcasts.

It’s good to plan things out. That’s how you know what isn’t going to happen.

At the beginning of this month I had the pleasure of speaking at the Digital PM Summit 2014. It was an inspiring two days that left me feeling more excited about the work I do than I have in a long time.

If you weren’t able to attend, you can check out the presentations here: http://dpm2014.com/speaker-slides/

I was at the conference to give a talk called Personal Kanban - Less Guilt, More Finishing. The presentation was based on my Personal Kanban experiments. The experiment was a success, but not the success I was aiming for.

I wanted to be good at Personal Kanban. What I ended up being was someone with a much deeper understanding of how completely of the rails his approach to work is. But, they say knowing you have a problem is the first step. 

In my classes I always say that learning about project management is something you can’t undo. It is etched onto your soul. I could no easier stop being a guy who grew up in an Irish Catholic home in Philly than I could stop seeing everything I do as a project with a measure of success and a WBS. (It just takes a few seconds for the Agile mods to kick in and turn it into a backlog now.)

And now, I’m finding that practicing Personal Kanban is changing the way I look at work on as deep a level as project management did. What I am learning is that no matter how I try to get better at it, I’m still not getting to a point where I’d feel okay saying I’m good at it. What is happening though is that I'm discovering that being good at it is not the point. In fact, getting the items into the Done column isn’t really the point for me right now either. The point is learning more about how and why I am working, and using that information to make conscious, responsible decisions about what to change and what experiments to run.

My favorite moment at the Digital PM Symposium was when Mike Monteiro gave his presentation on “What Your Client’s Don’t Know and Why It’s Your Fault”. Mike is a compelling speaker and even though he comes from a design background, his message is just as applicable for those of us who manage projects. We need to be aware of what we are doing, make conscious decisions and take ownership of the impact. I’ve run across a number of project management professionals over the past few months who have expressed frustration about all that is dumped on them and all the roadblocks placed in their path and (insert your excuses here). We all have this… me too. I think it is normal and completely okay to have moments where we each play the role of victim and have our little “woe is me” party. (Because let’s face it, no one is ever going to do that for a PM.) But when that part is over, we need to shake it off and dig in. So, when I say that I'm still not good at Personal Kanban, the important thing is to realize why I work the way I do and to be conscious and mindful about what choices I am making. If you are a PM Managing projects, when someone asks you to do something that is impossible, you've got a choice to make. Whether you say yes, or no, the two screenshots  below from Mike’s presentation apply.

...and I’ve got them tacked up on the wall next to my desk to remind me every day.

Should Project Managers Be Trained in Social Engineering? (with Rachel Gertz from LouderThanTen)

Click here to go straight to the podcast

In celebration of the fact that the 2014 Digital PM Summit is less than a week away... some DrunkenPM / LouderThanTen podcasty mashup goodness... Rachel Gertz and I discussing the question of whether or not project managers should go through social engineering training to better enable them to understand more of what people are sharing with them and also to help them be better able to tailor how they are messaging the information they are sharing.


Click here for the podcast

If you will be in Austin for the conference next week, Rachel is co-presenting with Carson Pierce on Monday, October 6 at 2 PM. Her session is called PM First Aid: Bring Your Projects Back From The Dead and my session on Personal Kanban will be on Tuesday at 11 AM.

The Aikido book referenced in the podcast is Aikido: Principles of Kata and Randori by Nick Lowry. You can pick it up here.

PhilaPM March Meetup Recap

Wednesday night @HappyCog in Philadelphia…

@brennaheaps kicks off the March PhilaPM Meetup by asking a room full of Digital PMs if any of them have had to overcome an overwhelming challenge with a team.

By traditional PM standards, this is an odd question.

Answering it requires admitting there are times when you don’t know what you are doing and are way out of your depth. This is not the way of the traditional PM. If you admit not knowing everything, you demonstrate WEAKNESS and might lose CONTROL. If you have no CONTROL, how can you MANAGE PEOPLE?

By Agile standards, it’s not an odd question. It’s an “it depends” question.

HELP! We have to overcome an overwhelming situation. What do we do? It depends… what does the team want to do?

But the team is not here. The PM is here. The PM is supposed to conduct the mayhem and find a way to create music.

Otherwise...

<throw pm="under bus">

Once the question has been laid down for the room, however, the sharing begins. Several of the PMs around the table offer stories of impossible situations they’ve faced. These aren’t the kind of challenges that can be addressed with a change to a contract or a revised scoping doc. These are the “we had it sorted and then the bottom fell out of the world” problems. The ones you couldn’t have seen coming and which leave you with no good options. These are the problems you give talks about at conferences for the next five years.

Only right now… some of these folks need solutions to test out.

The Digital PMs

As the PMs in the room begin examining the different situations, it’s a crowd-sourced triage of the situation and options. Some of the suggestions offered have already been tried. Some helped a little, some not so much. There are some new ones though and some of them might work... so at least, there is hope. At the very least, there is a supportive crowd of people who do the same type of work and share the same type of challenges.

RETROPOSTREMORTEMVIEWBLAMESPECTIVE

If you’ve been working in project management for any length of time, you’ve been involved with the meetings that take place at the end of projects. These project reviews or post mortems are generally a wee bit heavy on blame side and a bit light on the learning to improve side. That is, assuming you are actually doing them.

If you are working with Agile, hopefully you are doing retrospectives so that your team can get together to explore how to improve how they work together. Retrospectives are one of the best parts of Agile and a great thing for the team… but this is a little different.

This meeting, which is hosted by Happy Cog is none of the above. It is, however, one of the more interesting characteristics of this segment of the PM population. Digital PM has been around for a while, but only in the past few years has it begun to identify itself as a somewhat separate group. This meeting is full of PMs from different companies. What they have in common is that in one way or another, they all manage projects that are involved with digital media. Some of their projects are less than a month long. Some last more than a year. Some of their clients demand a traditional approach to managing the work. Some demand an Agile approach. The PMs working in these organizations are generally working with fairly small, design centric teams. Their hybrid model is evolving from needing to be able to work a variety of ways, but being able to fully lock into neither. Their agility is their flexibility and this sharing is part of their approach to continuous improvement.

Ten years ago, the project management that existed in this space was simple, basic and practiced by people who were just beginning to cut their teeth. Now it is led by experienced professional project managers and leaders who are schooled up in Agile and waterfall and are collaborating on hybrid tools and techniques that allow them to leverage the best of both. Their pragmatic, collaborative, framework agnostic approach to finding the best way to work with the team and deliver for the client is an exciting and emerging thing.

PhilaPM is organized by Brett Harned, Brenna Heaps, Sloan Miller, and Justin Handler. The group has evolved to the point where they are now working developing a new logo, name and website. Until that happens, you can find them here - http://philamade.com/

If you aren’t from Philly, but do work in digital media or if you are just a PM who could use a little inspiration, you may want to check out some of the following…

Conferences 

DPM2014 http://blog.dpm2013.com/2014/02/24/save-the-date-2014-digital-pm-summit/
DPMUK http://www.dpmuk.com/

Groups in the US and Canada 

Austin http://www.meetup.com/Digital-PM-Meetup-Austin/ 
Boston http://www.meetup.com/Digital-Project-Management-Boston/
Boulder http://www.meetup.com/Boulder-Web-Project-Managers/ 
Minneapolis: http://www.meetup.com/Twin-Cities-Interactive-Project-Management-Meetup/
NYC http://dpmconnect.com and http://www.meetup.com/projectmgmt-72/
Philadelphia http://philamade.com
Portland: http://pdxdigitalpm.com
Vancouver http://www.meetup.com/Vancouver-Digital-Project-Managers/

Groups in EMEA 

London, UK http://www.meetup.com/london-digital-project-managers/ 
Manchester, UK http://www.meetup.com/Northern-Digital-PM/
Oslo http://www.meetup.com/Oslo-Digital-Project-Managers/

Groups in ASIAPAC

Melbourne Digital Project Managers http://www.meetup.com/Melbourne-Digital-Project-Management/
Sydney Digital Project Managers http://www.meetup.com/Sydney-Digital-Project-Management/

Sam Barnes has turned to the Dark Side

Click here to go directly to the podcast

My favorite presentation at DigitalPM2013 was given by Sam Barnes. After years working as a PM in Digital, Sam turned to the DARK SIDE… he became a client. Suddenly, he was taking bids from all the companies he was used to competing against. Given his years of experience leading projects from the agency side of the table, he walked into it thinking it would be a bit of a cake walk. What he found was maybe not so much with the cake … or the walk.

In this podcast interview Sam and I talk about his experience being on the client side, his presentation at DigitalPM 2013, the challenges for those working in the Digital PM space who have to be able to work in both waterfall, and Agile, but find that neither really fits as well as one would hope and the upcoming DigitalPM UK conference

If you’d like to learn more about Sam:
He’s got him some blog
He’s on the twitter
And his presentation from Digital PM 2013 is here

Designing Together - Podcast Interview with Dan Brown

Click here to listen to the podcast

At DigitalPM 2013 I had the chance to meet Dan Brown, who is a founder and principal at Eight Shapes, a Washington D.C. based user experience consulting firm. Dan is also the author of Communicating Design and Designing Together and at the conference he facilitated a session using a game called Surviving Design Projects that he developed to help improve communication with design on projects where there is conflict.

In the interview we discuss Dan’s perspective on the value Design brings to the team and how we can improve our interaction with them. Dan also shares his thoughts on the challenges facing the role of project management in the digital space.

One of my lightbulb moments during this conversation was that in many ways, it seems as though the design side of the house and the agile software side of the house are headed down the street in the same direction, but on opposite sides of the street. It raises the question of when/how there will be a convergence in how the two sides approach their work.

If you’d like to learn more about Dan, here are some links that will help:
Eight Shapes
Twitter
Amazon