Agile for Humans with Ryan Ripley and Todd Miller

2: The Life of an Agile Consultant

May 31, 2015

59:36

Creator website

Agile for Humans is a podcast dedicated to the individuals and interactions that make agile work.

Hosts

George Dinwiddie, Ryan Ripley, Amitai Schlair

Discussion

First up was a lively discussion about the life of a consultant. Amitai and George represented the contractor side of the story, while Ryan talked about the full time employee side of the equation. We all agreed that life on the road may not the most glamorous, but the upside can be interesting. We had a quick follow on discussion about whether or not an agile coach needs to have a programming background to be effective.

Next the team moved on to the difficult art of facilitating retrospectives. A recent twitter exchange sparked a conversation about whether or not retrospectives were still needed or if teams should just fix issues in real time. We decided that retrospectives are critical to a teams success, but many of today’s retrospectives suck. We shared some thoughts on how to make retros better.

We then plugged back in to the management discussion and whether or not the agile community left middle management behind. The overall agile message can be overwhelming to management, but there is still a place for managers that we need to work on communicating in a more effective way.

Ryan proved incapable of saying Amitai’s name (AH-MEE-TY), we added more titles to Don’s book club, and then called it night.