When Your Leadership Can't Agree - Featuring Mike Vizdos

Mike Vizdos joins me for this conversation that focuses on what to do when you are competing for resources with other Product Owners in your organization and management will not (or can not) create clarity on what the company's strategic priorities are.

Mike and I also discuss his work coaching senior leadership, how Patrick Lencioni's First Team concept has become such a vital part of his approach, and the work Mike has been doing with ImplementingScrum.ai.

You can find the podcast here.

Scrum in School - A Case Study of Grandview Prep's Transformation

This podcast features an interview with two educators from Grandview Prep in Boca Raton, FL. Aileen Palmer and Susan Rose have been working with the Scrum Alliance, John Miller and Mike Vizdos to help the school implement Scrum for both the students and school administration. The interview explains how Scrum got started at Grandview, the impact it has had on the students, as well as the benefits and challenges they’ve experienced along the way.

Show Notes

01:16  Interview Begins

02:01 How Grandview Prep got interested in Scrum

04:59 Agile can be a lot easier for kids than adults

05:52 How Scrum has changed the way the students at Grandview collaborate

06:32 How the kids self-organize to make sure everyone is participating in the work

06:59 How teaching Scrum to a junior in high school impacts their ability to get work done and prepare for college

07:54 How visualizing the work is helping the students understand how to break work down into manageable pieces

08:35 Teaching students and teachers about how to break down the work and plan things out

10:20 Differences between how 1st graders and older kids are using Scrum at Grandview

11:17 The hardest parts of getting started with Scrum in school

13:17 Sometimes the transparency and seeing how much you have to do is overwhelming for adults

14:03 The struggle between Trello and Post-its

14:59 Student rankings and grading at Grandview - and how it has been impacted by Scrum

17:14 How using Scrum has improved the students and teachers ability to give and receive feedback

17:45 The reaction from parents/stakeholders to the introduction of Scrum at Grandview Prep

20:28 What Scrum means for the quiet kids who like to sit back and let others lead and drive the work

21:30 How will Grandview measure success to determine if/how Scrum is helping

22:33 The support Grandview Prep received from the Scrum Alliance 

23:14 Advice for educators who are interested in learning more or trying to implement it at their school 

24:39 How to get in touch with Susan and Aileen to learn more about Scrum at Grandview Prep

26:10 Wrap up

26:48 Podcast End

For more information

Grandview Prep Info and Contacts

Grandview Prep
http://Grandviewprep.net

Aileen Palmer 
apalmer@Grandviewprep.net 
Susan Rose
srose@Grandviewprep.net

Scrum Alliance Info and Contacts

Scrum Alliance
https://www.scrumalliance.org/
John Miller
agileclassrooms@gmail.com
Mike Vizdos
http://www.michaelvizdos.com/
Heather Leigh
hleigh@scrumalliance.org

Agile and Non-Violent Communication with Peter Green and Mike VIzdos

Click here for the podcast

I am extremely grateful to Peter and Mike for taking the time out to talk with me about NVC.

If you’d like to learn more about some of what we discussed on the podcast, here are some links:

Peter Green can be found on twitter at https://twitter.com/tptman or on his Agile blog at Adobe http://blogs.adobe.com/agile

Mike Vizdos can be found on twitter at https://twitter.com/mvizdos or via his website: http://www.michaelvizdos.com/

If you are looking for books on non-violent communication, try these:

• What We Say Matters by Judith and Ike Lasater  
• Non-Violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg 

And here are some of the other links we mentioned during the interview:

• One Shiny Object is here: http://www.oneshinyobject.com/
• Gangplank - The Future of Collaboration is here: http://gangplankhq.com/
• Center for Non-Violent Communication is here: http://www.cnvc.org/
• Core Protocols from the McCarthy Show can be found here: http://www.mccarthyshow.com/online/

An Interview with Mike Vizdos

I had the chance to interview Mke Vizdos for a podcast recently. You can find it here.

Even if you aren't familiar with Mike, there is still a good chance you are familiar with his work. Here is a list of some of the things he's been up to recently...

Mike Vizdos is  ____(please select from below)____________ 
 X  A Father of two great kids and Husband of an incredible wife
 X  A Certified Scrum Trainer
 X  An Agile thought leader / author who has been talking about enterprise level Agile adoption since before it even occurred to most of us
 X  All about Implementing Scrum
 X  Entrepreneur
 X  One of three guys in a shop working with Lean Startup 
 X  Co-founder and Community Builder of Gangplank RVA  
 X  Podcaster (will link to)
 X  Author of a children’s book illustrated by his son
 X  Founder of Real Scrum Jobs (will link to)
 X  A really nice guy
 X  Way busier than you…
 X  A walking example of how following your passion around certain areas of focus can help you establish an agile work life that is creative, experimental, invigorating, and of course, full of failure in the best possible way.
 X  Is working on applying what he learns daily using “this” cartoon as a reminder: