Making Agile work in a Digital Agency w/ Darren Petersen

Darren Petersen is a Senior Technical Project Manager at Lullabot. He’s also incredibly knowledgeable about Agile. In this interview Darren and I discuss how Agile has been implemented at Lullabot. We dig into what works, what doesn’t, why he moved away from Story Points and all, and how Lullabot has been able to get dedicated teams in place. Note: During the interview Darren and I have a brief conversation about why it makes no sense to force yourself into the As a (some user) I want to (some action) so I can (some benefit) format just for the sake of using it. I promised to get him an official answer. You can find that here: SHOW NOTES 00:08 Interview Begins 00:47 Background on Lullabot 01:33 Managing 50 distributed team members 03:04 Using social media tools to stay connected with remote staff 05:57 Using Agile at Lullabot for client work 12:02 Making the case for some upfront planning, before using Agile during Development 12:50 Taking on the cost of teaching Agile to the client (who doesn’t care about Agile) 14:22 The way Lullabot sets up Teams to use Agile for client work 15:22 How can a digital agency maintain the business with dedicated teams 20:35 How dedicated teams impact the staff members morale and performance at Lullabot 23:27 Teaching customers to write decent User Stories 28:07 Should you force yourself into a User Story format when it doesn’t make sense? * 29:32 Why Darren doesn’t like using Story Points 33:00 How did Darren get so deep with Agile and what drives him to keep learning about it 36:19 Getting in touch with Darren 37:01 Interview Ends CONTACTING DARREN Twitter https://twitter.com/dsayswhat Email: darren.petersen@lullalbot.com About: https://www.lullabot.com/about/darren-petersen Lullabot https://www.lullabot.com LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST User Stories Applied by Mike Cohn http://amzn.to/2vKv4JI Troy Magennis & Focused Objective http://focusedobjective.com User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton http://amzn.to/2wckyOg Agile Manifesto http://agilemanifesto.org