How to update Jira without using Jira

I did an interview with Preston Hunter from Lucid about using the Lucid tools with Jira. It has bidirectional sync, which I am sure is very helpful for those who struggle with Jira. The best part though is that in Lucidl you can look at the data any way you like - in a Kanban board OR a Gantt chart. This could make it so much easier to report to the people upstairs.

You can watch the podcast here:

https://www.projectmanagement.com/blog-post/78177/using-lucid-to-update-jira-with-preston-hunter

How to Read a Cumulative Flow Diagram with Colleen Johnson

Despite working in this field for over 20 years, I am embarrassed to say that I still can't make sense of a Cumulative Flow Diagram. Fortunately, ProKanban CEO Colleen Johnson is very patient and in this interview she gets me all sorted out on how to look at a CFD and understand what it is trying to say. 

You can find the video version here

You can find the audio version here

You can sign up for my new course The Art of War for Collaboration here

Did Coaching Kill Agile? with Sandra Cain and Jeff Leach

Is Agile dead? If so, whodunnit? 

Jeff Leach and Sandra Cain join me for a conversation about how "coaching" has impacted Agile and whether its actually dead or it really just needs a hug and a stern talking to and maybe a time-out.

You can find the interview here.

Links from the intro

Certified Scrum Product Owner July 1-2, 2024 (Use PRIOR50 to get $50 off the list price) https://tinyurl.com/2r8af3uk

Dave's upcoming classes: https://tinyurl.com/u2vh9zh8

The Art of War for Collaboration: https://modusinstitute.com/course/art-of-war-collaboration

Contacting Dave: https://linktr.ee/mrsungo

Successful Distributed Teams with Jim Benson and Mark Kilby

Jim Benson and Mark Kilby join me to discuss their new Successful Distributed Teams offering. This new course focuses on how to build strong remote teams, how to create a humane, healthy balance of productivity and accountability, and what tools you can use to make it all work. During the interview we cover how the idea of remote work has changed over the past few years, what makes it so challenging, and things you can start doing to foster a thriving collaborative remote team. 

You can watch the video version of the interview here: https://tinyurl.com/y5387jma

You can listen to the audio version of the interview here: https://on.soundcloud.com/rpdiR

Is this the Darkest Agile Timeline?

George Schlitz joins the podcast to discuss the current state of Agile, whether or not this is the darkest timeline, how we got here, how to make it better, and where to look for hope.

If you aren’t familiar with The Darkest Timeline, in the show Community there was a storyline where a random occurrence created multiple parallel timelines. A roll of the dice created six possible ways things could have gone… basically a six-sided multiverse. 

And one of the parallels created is THE DARKEST TIMELINE. It’s basically the Lemony Snicket timeline of worst case scenario where Captain Kirk is sporting his Van Dyke beard, Thomas Wayne is Batman instead of Bruce Wayne, it rains all the time, you miss every bus, never made that play in the big game, never asked that person to the prom, never got that promotion… you get the idea.

You can listen to the podcast here: http://tinyurl.com/ndkdkrxp

Letting Go of Pure Agile with Andy Jordan

After seeing yet another verbal Agilista beat down on LinkedIn, my friend Andy Jordan wrote an article on Project Management.com called Letting Go of Pure Agile. I reached out to Andy and asked if he'd let me interview him about his post to try and dig a little deeper on what he sees happening in the Agile space, how it intersects with traditional project management, and the impact it is having in the job market.

It was also just great to catch up with Andy. He, Mark Price Perry and I used to do workshops for PMI on Redefining Your PMO. You can find links to more on that, Andy's original post, and our interview here: https://tinyurl.com/mr2u9jxv

The Agile Coach's Dilemma with Alan Dayley

With each new round of layoffs, the existential crisis facing the agile coaching community deepens. Alan Dayley joins me to discuss how the community is retrospecting on this moment and whether or not it is asking the right questions. 

You can find the interview here: https://tinyurl.com/4ttkd7nz

Using Personal Kanban to Start Agile Transformation with Michael Grill

Michael Grill is a Product Owner and Head of Process and Methods in the Agile Practice at Knorr-Bremse, and they have taken steps to address this challenge of helping individuals adopt an agile mindset and practices in managing their day-to-day work by adopting Personal Kanban before they put them together on agile teams. In this interview, Michael joins me to share how Knorr-Bremse came to make this choice and how it is deeply impacting their agile practice. First, you begin working with Personal Kanban, then you and your team members begin working together using PK, and then you adopt practices from Scrum, Kanban, or other forms of agile, to get the work done. 

You can find the podcast and links to learn more here.

Tracking Flow Metrics w Atlassian Analytics

I've done a few podcasts recently on tracking flow metrics instead of velocity and why it is a better (but not perfect) way of estimating what will be done in the future.)

In this episode, Derek Huether and Sam Tsubota from Atlassian demonstrate how to pull that info straight from Atlassian Analytics.

The interview will work best in video

But there is an audio version too

PODCAST TEAM UP! A Couple of Coaches and DrunkenPM on Metrics

Christine Converse and Ross Beurmann, the hosts of the podcast A Couple of Coaches and I teamed up for some interviews.

I interviewed them on Agile Metrics. During the podcast, we discuss what metrics help create clarity for the team on how well they are performing and what metrics help highlight areas that could be improved. We weigh the pros and cons of standard Scrum metrics, Kanban metrics, and share the ones we each find most valuable.  

It was a great conversation and if you are looking for a deeper understanding of what metrics to focus on, there is a lot of good stuff in the podcast.

You can find that interview here.

And they interviewed me for their A Couple of Coaches podcast on what it is like to be part of the Scrum Alliance TAC and what it takes to become a Certified Scrum Trainer. You can find that interview here. I rarely get a chance to be the interviewee and it was a lot of fun. I highly recommend their podcast. They offer some great insights and listening to them banter back and forth is a lot of fun.

Kanban Metrics with Troy Lightfoot

Troy Lightfoot joins me to discuss basic differences between Scrum and Kanban, Kanban Metrics and his upcoming classes. The metrics we cover are: WIP, Throughput, Work Item Age, and Cycle Time. We also talk about his upcoming Professional Kanban 1 Certification and Applying Metrics for Predictability classes. 

You can find the interview here:  https://bit.ly/3Qjlczo

Troy’s Upcoming Classes

• Professional Kanban 1 (PK1) Certification June 23-24, 2022 https://bit.ly/3HmV1Ug
• Applying Metrics for Predictability (AMP) Certification July 21-22, 2022 https://bit.ly/3zxZOk2

ProKanban with Colleen Johnson

 

My interview with ProKanban CEO, Colleen Johnson on creating ProKanban.org, the ProKanban Guide, and why ProKanban Certification is something you need to seriously consider as you deepen your skills in working with Agile. 

You can find the interview here.

And if you want to check out the Kanban Guide, you can find that here.

Managing Work, Life, AND Your Band Using Personal Kanban with Mark Hodgdon

Mark Hodgdon is surrounded by Kanban boards. He uses Personal Kanban to manage his work, his life AND his band. This interview offers a kind of case study is how Mark uses Personal Kanban to keep everything sorted AND he's also started tracking his performance using generating reports to assess how he is doing. 

You can check out the interview here.

Insights from two days of Personal Kanban training w/ Amitai Schleier

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be able to take a Personal Kanban training with Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria. It was an incredibly insightful two days. 

Here is a post and podcast where Amitai Schleier and I talk about the class, what we learned from Jim and Tonianne, insights and takeaways from both the class and Personal Kanban in general,  and why we are both continually working on refining the systems we use to plan and manage our own work.

It was super cool to get to meet Amitai in person.  I had previously only met him virtually when he and Troy Lightfoot taught Rachel Gertz  and I how to do Mob Programming. If you'd like to check out that podcast, click here.

The Agile Heretic - An Interview with Jim Benson

Jim Benson has been involved with Agile since the very beginning. You may know him as creator of Personal Kanban,  as the co-creator of Lean Coffee, through his work as CEO of Modus Cooperandi, his books, or from the many awards he’s won for his work in applying Lean practices to knowledge work. 

After years watching Agile being misused, misunderstood, and seeing it “calcify and solidify because of commercialization”,  Jim’s new project The Agile Heretic is focused on calling attention to many of the things people are doing that are causing Agile to not work. In the videos and blog posts, Jim takes on a wide range of Agile related topics, he explores why things are off the rails and how to address them.

In this interview Jim and I talk through what led to him creating this series, his hopes for it and what he is looking forward to seeing in the future of Agile. We also touch on some specific topics (like why he doesn’t like Story Points) and he shares a bunch of great stories (like why a group of developers once passed the hat amongst themselves and smuggled him into their company after their organization deemed his ideas too dangerous to their way of working.

Note: During the podcast, Jim makes multiple references to the Kuhn Cycle, You can find some basic info on it here:  Kuhn Cycle: http://www.thwink.org/sustain/glossary/KuhnCycle.htm

Agile Heretic Links - here are two places to get started:

• YouTube: https://youtu.be/CmfZvdGWKv4
• Medium: https://medium.com/@ourfounder/the-agile-heretic-an-introduction-29992e52052c

Jim at Agile 2018

Jim will be leading a Stalwarts session at Agile 2018 called “Ask the Agile Heretic Almost Anything” You can find more about that here: https://agile2018.sched.com/event/EUEU/ask-the-agile-heretic-almost-anything-jim-benson-jim-benson

For more in Jim and his work:

• Modus Cooperandi http://moduscooperandi.com
• Jim on Twitter https://twitter.com/ourfounder
• Jim’s books on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2LWuhx1
• Personal Kanban http://personalkanban.com/pk/
• Lean Coffee http://leancoffee.org

Savannah Rayat - Enhancing your life with Personal Agility

During the 2017 Heart of Agile Conference in Pittsburgh, Savannah Rayat gave a presentation called “Enhancing your life with Personal Agility”. During the session she explained how she has applied some basic Agile practices from Scrum and Kanban to refine and focus her approach to life, deciding what is most important to her, and managing teams. Savannah has also applied Agile in other non-IT areas. During the interview, we talk about some of the Scrum practices she has applied in working with her team of Realtors.

Show Notes

00:10 - Interview Begins
00:52 - Background on Savannah
01:42 - How Day-Trading fits in with being a Realtor/IT Professional
02:15 - How Savannah defines Personal Agility
04:44 - Savannah’s approach to Personal Kanban and her issue with deadlines
05:31 - The important of setting and maintaining WIP Limits
07:06 - Reducing your WIP to 3-4
10:00 - Preventing the backlash of cutting stuff our of your life
12:15 - Having affection for your interests
12:42 - Deciding what you can live without
14:29 - Long term and short term road mapping
15:48 - Savannah’s  Day to Day practice of Agile
18:50 - The need for slack
21:35 - The benefits of self-reflection and coping with the guilt of doing unplanned stuff
23:16 - Making the time for Personal Kanban
24:19  - Accountability Partners
25:33 - How to get started with using Personal Agility
27:44 - How Savannah uses Scrum to support collaboration on her Real Estate team
32:38 - Getting in touch with Savannah
34:39  - Interview Ends

Contacting Savannah 

on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/savannah-rayat-8942b8120/
on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SavannahRayat
Savannah’s Realty site: http://rayatrealtygroup.com
Savannah’s Heart of Agile 2017 http://heartofagile.com/Session/enhancing-your-life-with-personal-agility/

The Value of Not Productive Time - a Retrospective on Vacations w/ Derek Huether

Derek meets the ocean.

A Retrospective on Vacations

If you love your work and are very driven, the idea of “vacation” can be a daunting thing. In this episode of SoundNotes, Derek Huether and Dave Prior hold a retrospective on how they each coped with the challenge of non-productivity time over the holiday. If you count yourself among the vacation challenged, this conversation may provide insight into why you need to take the time, why you need to protect the time BUT why your version of taking a break to restore yourself doesn’t have to fit the standard definition of “vacation”.
 

Show Notes

• 00:08 Podcast Begins
• 00:17 Topic Intro - a Retrospective on taking vacation
• 00:52 Derek explains why he took his first vacation in almost 2 years
• 02:07 Pre-vacation anxiety
• 03:12 If you get grumpy when you don’t have too much work to do “YOU NEED TO GET AWAY”
• 03:52 When your sustainable pace is an unsustainable pace
• 04:10 Some of us are wired a little weird and there is no “balance”
• 05:11 Sometimes having too much to do can be a positive
• 06:03 The dopamine rush of getting something done… how much sleep do you really need
• 07:33 Debating the argument for getting “enough” sleep
• 09:14 Derek’s Kanban board for vacation activities
• 11:06 What Derek reads on the beach for relaxation (feel free to roll your eyes)
• 12:00 How “the damn ocean and seagulls” prevented Derek from relaxing with his DevOps books on the beach and how the Beastie Boys saved the day
• 13:20 If you are reading work related books on the beach, aren’t you still at work?
• 14:10 When you take time off from work and your hobbies are work related
• 15:48 Finding your own way to satisfy the need to unplug, take a break and get refreshed
• 16:38 The restorative joy that comes from watching seagulls attack people
• 17:08 Pomodoro Timer
• 17:22 The weight of vacation guilt - for doing work, or for not really taking “vacation”
• 18:20 Why would you want to go on vacation and be remorseful when it is supposed to be a reward
• 19:14 Derek’s trick of reserving play time as a planned activity
• 20:15 Having intentionality and discipline to carve out time for creative fun stuff
• 20:48 Super not productive time may be recovery time and that is part of being productive
• 21:30 Giving yourself permission to be not productive and then protecting that time
• 21:55 What happens when YOU don’t respect your not productive time
• 22:20 “I have to respect it” and take the time without carrying the guilt
• 23:04 Dave’s resolution to get less done in 2017 and trying to create a small vacation every day
• 23:45 Derek’s quiet time (with coffee)
• 25:10 Meditation … it’s not about emptying your mind - it’s about not dancing with the thoughts that arise
• 26:20 Derek’s version of meditation - post-its and coffee
• 26:50 It’s a way of looking at your though and saying “yeah, but not right now”
• 27:02 Wrap up thoughts, it’s okay to suck at vacation, it’s okay to not do stuff, protect the time with discipline, acknowledge that you derive and need the time, and don’t let other people tell you how much time you should take
• 27:56 Podcast End

Links from the Podcast

Visible Ops Handbook http://amzn.to/2jzVqKM DevOps Handbook http://amzn.to/2iTX8FM Ariana Huffington "The Sleep Revolution" http://amzn.to/2k2ySik

Contacting Derek

You can reach Derek on the LeadingAgile site at https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/derek-huether/ On Twitter at https://twitter.com/derekhuether Or on his personal site at http://www.derekhuether.com

Contacting Dave

You can reach Dave on the LeadingAgile site at https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/ On Twitter at https://twitter.com/mrsungo Or on his personal site at: http://drunkenpm.net

Submitting Questions for Upcoming Coaching Q&A Podcasts

If you have Agile related questions you’d like us to discuss in an upcoming podcast, please send your question to Dave at dave.prior@leadingagile.com. You can send the question in the body of an email, or you can send an mp3 of wav of you asking the question and will include the recording in a podcast on your topic.

LeadingAgile CSM and CSPO Classes

For information on LeadingAgile’s upcoming public CSM and CSPO classes, please go to: www.leadingagile.com/our-gear/training/

Why Limit WIP (A Projects@Work Interview with Jim Benson)

Jim Benson and the folks at Modus Cooperandi have some great stuff going on. I had the chance to interview Jim recently about his new book "Why Limit WIP", some of the new offerings coming from Modus Cooperandi and (of course) Personal Kanban.

Follow the links below to check out parts 1-3 of the interview.

Interview Part 1
Interview Part 2
Interview Part 3

If you'd like to read a transcript of the interview, you can find it here.

Interview with David J Anderson

Click here for the interview

David J. Anderson is the leading voice in IT when it comes to taking the practices introduced in Lean Manufacturing’s kanban system and adjusting it to serve software development with Kanban (capital K). He’s also the driving force behind Lean Kanban University.

In this interview David shares the primary goals he had when beginning to work on his version of Kanban, how the practices have changed, and how they have evolved over time.

With respect to scaling Agile, David provides an update on Lean Kanban University’s new programing for advanced practitioners of Kanban who want to use it at an enterprise level. He also shares his thoughts on how some of the other popular approaches to scaling Agile are trying to make use of Kanban.

Here some of the links mentioned in the interview:

Alistair Cockburn’s article on the end of methodologies
Klaus Leopold's Flight Levels of Kanban
David J Anderson @ Associates
Lean Kanban University
David’s Books on Amazon
David on Twitter

Personal Kanban with Johanna Rothman

This interview was originally recorded in July 2013 and posted to Projects at Work.  The original blog post and posting of the recording were lost when P@W became part of Project Management.com.

BUT Johanna is brilliant and I learn a ton from her every time we talk. 

Also, Personal Kanban is REALLY important. So I found the original post and am reposting to fix the broken link on my index of Personal Kanban blog posts and podcast. (Which you can find here: https://drunkenpm.blogspot.com/2014/10/summary-of-personal-kanban-posts-for.html)

This conversation centers around one of the topics in Johanna's book Manage Your Job Search (https://leanpub.com/manageyourjobsearch) and her article on how to use Personal Kanban for your Job Hunt (https://www.jrothman.com/htp/agile-job-search/2013/04/personal-kanban-for-your-job-hunt/)

If you'd like to learn more about Johanna, her work and her writing: https://www.jrothman.com/

drunkenpmradio · Johanna Rothman - Using Personal Kanban to Manage Your Job Search - July 2013