Agile and Project Management - DrunkenPM Radio

This week in New York City the Lower East Side is host to the 3rd Annual LeSS Conference. I stopped by the conference today and had the chance to sit down with Bas Vodde to talk about Large Scale Scrum and the annual event they hold to bring the coaches, trainers and practitioners of LeSS together. The LeSS Conference is not like a standard IT Conference. During the interview Bas explains how their approach to setting up and running the event focuses on letting the on-site attendees drive the content and work together to develop new tools, games, and techniques to help the growth, adoption and practice of Large Scale Scrum. If you aren’t familiar with LeSS, this interview will help you get an understanding of how this approach to scaling has a philosophy that aims to simplify things as much as possible in order to create greater understanding of what is blocking an organization from being able to truly adopt an agile approach to work. During the conversation we dig into what happens to the traditional portfolio and program view when you adopt LeSS and take a more product focused approach to work. We also discuss the difference between LeSS and LeSS Huge, which is designed to help organizations running upwards of 8 teams create products using agile. If you’d like to learn more about Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), including case studies, please check: http://less.works If you are having trouble finding someone to help you implement LeSS, send an email to support@less.works And if you’d like to reach out to Bas directly, send an email to basv@odd-e.com

This is a frequent question in the CSPO classes I teach. Many organizations want the benefits of Agile. Sometimes they assign people to the role of Product Owner, and then continue with business as usual. For the role of PO to work effective, you need an individual filling the Product Owner role who is will and able to make decisions, even without all the information they would want to make the decisions. AND they need to be working in an organization that trust them to make those decisions.  
 If you don't have that, if you are in a PO role, but management is handing you products with deadlines and ever changing scope (cause it's agile #sarcasm), then you're in trouble.  So, how do you get started developing the skill and experience negotiating with stakeholders who may not view you as someone who has the gravitas to negotiate with them. 
 In this episode of drunkenPM radio, Steve Martin joins me to share his strategies and thoughts on how to cope with your need to develop negotiation skills. 
 Steve is the founder of Cottage Street Consulting (https://cottagestreetconsulting.com/) and you can also find him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/agilesteve/.

Emotional Science is a new book written by Audree and Michael Sahota that focuses on helping individuals discover and break through the blockers that are holding them back from becoming better leaders. It is often said that if you want to lead others, you first have to lead yourself. Many of us have the desire to be able to show up as better leaders, we read books, sign up for seminars and yet, when it comes down to doing the actual work, we struggle. The reason for this is often that, while we want the results, the work itself is often too daunting to take on. Emotional Science provides a set of tools you can begin to employ that will help you discover the blockers you have placed in your own path and work through how to remove those blockers. The book also explores how your own emotional history can impact your ability to gain clarity on how that history impacts your ability to lead yourself, and others. One of the most impactful things I have picked up from this book is the idea that emotions have no sense of time. Something from your past that is unresolved can sneak up and find it’s way into how you respond to something that is happening to you right now. This is true of humans, and, to an extent, to companies as well. In this interview Audree and Michael share what led them to writing this book and how their diverse backgrounds brought them together in a shared goal of helping us (and the organizations we work for) find a better way to show up and be clear about the work required to achieve the results we are looking for when it comes to transformation. If you’d like to learn more about Emotional Science, including the free exercises and downloads that are offered and links to where you can purchase the book, visit https://emotionalscience.com/ You can also find Michael via the links below: Twitter: https://twitter.com/michaelsahota LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/michaelsahota And if you’d like to find out more about Michael’s Certified upcoming Scrum and Certified Agile Leadership Classes, click here: https://bit.ly/2NXcEgN

Iain Fraser is a PMI Fellow, a former Chair of the PMI Board of Directors and the author of The Business of Portfolio Management. The book focuses on helping businesses deepen their perception of business portfolio management, and how strengthening their practices in that area can help them thrive in a business world where the only constant is change. In this episode of the podcast, I had the chance to speak with Iain about his book, how his experiences in working in Portfolio, Program and Project management have evolved over time. How business agility fits into the work he does and the great impact that volunteering has had on his career. When you are listening to this interview, one thing I hope you will take not of is how Iain talks about the various aspects of business agility. His use of traditional practices, Lean and agile practices are all aimed at helping organizations develop greater adaptability at the business portfolio level. These various practices are discussed (and employed) without a value judgement being placed on any of them. They are used as needed all in the service of helping organizations learn to cope with change. The Business of Portfolio Management Amazon https://amzn.to/2NzAe2S PMI https://bit.ly/2LesWol Fishpond https://bit.ly/2Li99V5 Contacting Iain LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/iain-fraser-8a42b1/ ProjectManagement.com https://www.projectmanagement.com/profile/iainfraser55 Email Iain.Fraser@jacobite.co.nz PMI 2018 Global Congress Workshop Business Change Management - Heading for the Future https://bit.ly/2JLrILY

We’ve reached a stage in the evolution of work where some of the folks now entering the workforce were raised by professional Agile practitioners. This might not seem like a big deal, but consider that this is a generation that will not have to go through the process of unlearning all the dysfunctional practices that most of us had to let go of. These are folks who have been working in an agile way their whole lives and, because it is native to them, they are free from the cognitive dissonance most of us face when we move to a more Agile state. In this interview I am joined by Bria Johnson and Blake Halvorson. Both of them were raised by seasoned Agile practitioners. Bria and Blake used Agile throughout their schooling and entered the workforce already deep with knowledge of how it works. During the interview, we explore how they came to Agile, how they employed it in school, and how they’ve used it since leaving school. For me, one of the most powerful parts of the interview was when Bria and Blake explained how they approached their schoolwork in college. Their seemingly simple approach is so massively different from the way I managed my work in school—it left me very envious. Contacting Bria and Blake If you’d like to reach out to Bria or Blake with follow up questions, here is how you can reach them: Bria Johnson https://www.linkedin.com/in/bria-johnson-csm-cspo-48175931/ Blake Halvorson https://www.linkedin.com/in/blake-halvorson-csm-cspo-6b401a90/

During the 2018 North American Global Scrum Gathering in Minneapolis, (https://bit.ly/2LOd5ZD) I had a chance to interview the Interim Co-CEOs of the Scrum Alliance: Shannon Carter, Renata Lerch, and Angie Stecovich. In addition to their new roles, they also serve as VP of Education, VP of Global Marketing and Communications, and Sr. Director of Finance, respectively. Shannon, Renata, and Angie explain how their roles have changed at the Scrum Alliance and how being part of an agile leadership team has prepared them for this. They also speak about all the new things happening at the Scrum Alliance. During the interview, they share details about a number of new initiatives at the Scrum Alliance (including how the certifications offered by the Scrum Alliance have changed over the last year and continue to evolve) as well as new benefits being offered to Certified Scrum Professionals (like free access to Comparative Agility (https://www.comparativeagility.com), an online assessment tool that can be used to help organizations develop their agile capabilities). By far, the biggest announcement the Scrum Alliance made during the 2018 North American Global Scrum Gathering was the partnership with Jeff Sutherland and Scrum Inc. to form a new organization called Scrum at Scale (https://www.scrumatscale.com) that is focused on helping large organizations transform to Agile. If you’d like to check out an interview with Jeff on the partnership, you can find it here: http://drunkenpm.blogspot.com/2018/04/jeff-sutherland-at-2018-global-scrum.html For more on the Scrum Alliance: https://www.scrumalliance.org

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: 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

David Hawks led two sessions at the 2018 North American Scrum Gathering. During the conference we had the chance to sit down and talk through some of the key ideas he was presenting in Minneapolis. David’s first session, “The Post Project Era: The Future of Agile,” looked at how a project-centric mindset can actually impede your ability to deliver value for your client.  In his second session, “Move Beyond User Stories: What’s Next,” David presented an approach to understanding requirements that goes beyond simply working with User Stories and involves forming hypotheses, designing and prioritizing experiments to test them, and then running the experiments to gain a deeper understanding of what the customer’s needs actually are and how to best solve them. David is the founder and CEO of Agile Velocity, as well as a Certified Enterprise Coach and a Certified Scrum Trainer. If you’d like to learn more about David, check out AgileVelocity.com. You can also find him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/austinagile And if you’d like to learn more about the Keep Austin Agile Conference, which took place on May 24, 2018, or Agile Austin, check out http://www.meetup.com/agileaustin/.

The 2018 North American Global Scrum Gathering kicked off with a keynote presentation that was incredibly unique and inspiring. Billy McLaughlin is a professional guitar player who spent his life working to reach a level of success most musicians only dream about. But just as he reached the top, the tools that got him there began working against him. Billy suffers from focal dystonia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_dystonia). You may not be familiar with this condition, but for a professional guitar player, it is one of the the worst things that could possibly happen because it means you can’t do the one thing you have spent your life mastering. While something like this might cause a lot of people to give up on their dreams and find something else to do, Billy found a different path. He learned to play the guitar left handed instead of right handed. (Just for frame of reference, imagine learning how to write again, using your opposite hand, but having to write everything backwards… what Billy had to do was harder than that.) In this interview you’ll hear Billy explain what focal dystonia is, how it impacted him and how he worked through relearning to play guitar all over again. The story is inspiring all on it’s own, but for me, there is something deeper in this story. In the interview you’ll hear Billy talk about the struggle of working through all the relearning and how he stayed motivated and kept at it. While it doesn’t touch the level of complexity that Billy had to work through, there are some parallels to what traditional PMs go through when they have to relearn how to do their jobs using Agile. For me, that journey felt like I was being forced to unlearn everything I had spent years trying to master, and then start over from scratch. Maintaining some level of motivation and not giving up hope was one of the hardest parts of the transformation. This is something Billy and I discuss in the interview, and for any of you who need inspiration from time to time, my hope is that his story will help. There is contact info for Billy below, but if you’d like to check out his keynote presentations from other events, you can find them here: http://www.billymclaughlin.com/keynote-speaking/keynote-videos/. Links from the Podcast Billy McLaughlin Web: http://www.billymclaughlin.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/billymclaughlinmusic Twitter: https://twitter.com/BillyMacMusic YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/BillyMacFan iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/billy-mclaughlin/537883 Focal Dystonia Dystonia Medical Research Foundation: https://www.dystonia-foundation.org/what-is-dystonia/forms-of-dystonia/musicians-dystonias/focal-hand-dystonia The Dystonia Society (UK): https://www.dystonia.org.uk/musicians-cramp

Christopher Avery is the author of The Responsibility Process and Teamwork Is an Individual Skill. He’s also one of the most inspiring and impactful people I’ve ever had a chance to interview. The Responsibility Process is an approach to understanding how each of us takes ownership of our understanding, and response to the challenges we face. It includes techniques that provide clarity on how the internal narrative we all create shows the extent to which we are able to realize our role in, and the level of responsibility we are taking with the things we face. In this interview Christopher and I talk about The Responsibility Process and how his online program The Leadership Gift, is designed to help people embrace the process and use it to ltransform themselves into more fully realized, present and engaged leaders. Over the last 20 years, there are very few things I’ve read which have had as significant an impact on me as The Responsibility Process. I can’t recommend it enough. But, one word of caution… this book is very likely going to completely strip away your ability to stay in the mindset of someone who has been totally victimized by external forces. In the next few weeks I am going to sign up to participate in The Leadership Gift and I’ll be posting periodically on how it is impacting me. If you’d like to check out an additional video where Christopher explains the The Leadership Git in greater detail, you can find it here: https://www.projectmanagement.com/videos/286574/Your-Agile-Leadership-Gift Links: To learn more about The Leadership Gift, go here: http://www.the.leadershipgift.com To find Christoper’s books on Amazon, go here: https://amzn.to/2rzj5h1 For more on Christopher: https://www.christopheravery.com For more on Noel Tichy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Tichy