LiminalArc SoundNotes

In this week’s episode of SoundNotes, LeadingAgile Senior Consultant Sara McClintock and Dave take on two topics submitted by students from our CSM and CSPO classes: 1. What can I do in an organization to grow and promote our Sprint Reviews? 2. Stakeholder demand for timelines or deadlines being an impediment for the team. Sara and Dave discuss different approaches to helping leadership understand...

At LeadingAgile we believe that the ability to realize the benefits of an Agile approach begins with there core things: stable teams, a well-formed backlog, and the ability to consistently deliver working tested software. In this episode of SoundNotes, LeadingAgile Managing Consultant, Jeff Howey, spends time talking with Dave about what a “well-formed backlog” actually is. Jeff and Dave discuss c...

When we develop products, we're responsible for maximizing the value we deliver to the customer. In order to do this, we have to understand who we're actually building the products for. We need to know who the customer is, what problem(s) we're trying to solve for them,  and any additional information we can gather that will give us more insight into their needs and how we can address them. We als...

When it comes to Agile Transformation, every organization has to deal with things in the system that are blocking them from developing an Agile System of Delivery. Impediments to Transformation exist at many levels: organizations, architectural, cultural, etc. Many of these impediments are common across companies and can be known and planned for ahead of time. In LeadingAgile's approach, there are...

Metrics are important. Tracking work is important.  “What gets measured gets done." But, if you don’t understand why you're measuring things, or what the problem you're trying to solve when you begin measuring things—no amount of metrics is going to help. In this episode of SoundNotes, LeadingAgile Senior Consultant, Jessica Wolfe and Dave Prior talk about metrics and how important it is to unders...

This week, on LeadingAgile’s SoundNotes, Staff Consultant Sarah Smith shares some tips to survive the role of ScrumMaster. During the interview, Sarah and Dave discuss how to create a stakeholder map that a ScrumMaster can use to understand the best approach to take when interacting with different stakeholders in the organization. They also talk about how to develop greater empathy for stakeholder...

Organizations embracing an Agile approach to their work value their ability to inspect and adapt. They value the ability to continually learn and deepen their understanding of what problems they are trying to solve so that they can inspect and adapt toward a better solution. The challenge is that just because we're Agile and we want to inspect and adapt our way to a better solution doesn't mean th...

In this week's SoundNotes we're focusing on one of the fundamental elements in Scrum: The Sprint Planning Meeting. During the podcast, Dave Prior reviews the key aspects of Sprint Planning: its purpose, how it works, who attends, what it produces, and tips to help you make sure yours are achieving the desired result. If you want to help protect your team from over (or under) committing during Spri...

When people talk about Agile, they often talk about the approach they are taking: Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming, SAFe, LeSS, DAD, Nexus, etc. These and the other frameworks and methodologies that could be considered to fall under the Agile umbrella are Systems of Delivery because they are techniques for delivering. There's often an assumption that if we adopt the System of Delivery, our organ...

This week, on SoundNotes, we're featuring another question from a student in one of our Certified Scrum classes. The question came from someone who's working in an organization that doesn't see value in the role of Product Owner and isn't convinced that it's needed as part of the Scrum Team. The question: What is the worth of a good P.O.? LeadingAgile Senior Consultant, Tim Wise spent some time wi...

In one of my recent Certified Scrum Master classes, I had a number of students who were working on projects involving migrating from a legacy data warehouse to new data warehouses. Figuring out how to apply Scrum to the work they were doing presented a number of challenges and left some open questions. Here are two examples of the data related topics that showed up in the Parking Lot: How do I app...

This week, on SoundNotes, we've got Part 3 of a trio of interviews with LeadingAgile Chief Methodologist and Co-Founder Dennis Stevens. The series focuses on how to build an organization that can embrace change. In the final episode of the series, Dennis and Dave cover how to prioritize work being done to maximize return. During the interview, they discuss how prioritization at all levels of the o...

In this episode of SoundNotes, LeadingAgile Senior Consultant AJ Sanford joins Dave to answer a student question that's frequently asked in Dave's CSM and CSPO classes. How do you use Scrum when you have to coordinate work between teams that are using both Waterfall and Agile all within one organization? During the interview, AJ and Dave touch on the following topics: What to expect from an Agile...

Mikkel Ladegaard is a Senior VP and Executive Consultant with LeadingAgile. This week, on SoundNotes, Mikkel and Dave Prior discuss Mikkel's focus on designing product-centric organizations in which the company's strategic prioritization of work is implicit and decision-making can be localized at the team level. During the conversation, they unpack a range of issues related to this topic, includin...

In this episode of SoundNotes, LeadingAgile's own Brandon Dudley—Senior Consultant—shares his experience making the shift from a Waterfall mindset to a more Agile way of thinking and working. Brandon got his start in traditional, PMI-centric, project management working in the auto industry in Detroit. His introduction to Agile didn't involve the hard break that many of us experience. For him, this...

When we try to explain Agile, many of us begin by trying to describe some of the characteristics of how we approach work. We often talk about things like: Limiting work in process Delivering smaller increments of work Reducing team size and empowering the teams to become cross-functional and self-organizing These are all things that, from an Agile point of view, are good because they help us to fo...

This episode of SoundNotes features, LeadingAgile Technical Consultant, Rich Dammkoehler in a conversation about why it is so important to make sure your organization is focused on improving their technical practices. If you're struggling with helping your organization understand why introducing technical practices like collective code ownership, refactoring, pair programming, and test-driven deve...

If your company is working on Agile Transformation, understanding how you can track the organization’s response to change and the impact it's having on business outcomes can be a bit daunting. It’s not so tough to track whether or not people have been trained and what practices they are using, but when it comes to understanding what people see, feel, believe, and desire, that can be harder to unde...

Estimating work in Agile is something many people struggle to understand. It's not that it's an especially complicated thing, but there is often confusion about things like why many people prefer to use story points instead of hours, why some people feel compelled to try and convert story points to hours (and why some of us find that so frightening), how t-shirt sizing works, and the eternal quest...

Iteration 2019 has begun and we’re starting off the year with an episode of SoundNotes where, LeadingAgile CEO and Founder, Mike Cottmeyer shares what's on his mind as we begin the new year. During the interview Mike talks about some of the trends he’s been paying attention to in and around the Agile space, the changes he sees coming down the pike, and how that's influencing his focus and expectat...

A few weeks ago, Dennis Stevens and I recorded a podcast called Building an Organizational System That Can Embrace Change . The podcast introduced three critical concepts which we are exploring at a deeper level in additional interviews. In this episode of SoundNotes, Dennis Stevens, LeadingAgile’s co-founder and Chief Methodologist, and Dave Prior, dig into one of those key concepts: How to desig...

While many organizations would like to adopt an Agile approach, there are certain types that—due to the nature of their work and their relationship with the client—are not an easy fit with a process like Scrum. In this episode of SoundNotes, LeadingAgile Senior Consultants AJ Sanford and Andrew Fuqua explore how Process Maps and Value Stream Maps can help you gain greater clarity on where there ar...

LeadingAgile has grown significantly over the past few years. Along the way, we’ve found that one of the most critical elements of growing successfully is how we introduce new folks to the company and how we approach helping organizations Transform. In this episode of SoundNotes, Dave is joined by Betsy Layman and Matt Smith—two of the latest additions to the LeadingAgile family. Both Betsy and Ma...

This episode of SoundNotes features LeadingAgile’s Chief Methodologist and Co-Founder, Dennis Stevens, and focuses on how to build an organization that can embrace change.  The interview provides an overview of some of the key capabilities an Agile organization needs to accelerate learning, increase optionality, and improve their decision making including: How to incorporate market sensing capabil...

One of the most important things you can do for your team is to make sure you have a clearly defined, and well-documented, Definition of Done. If you’ve ever seen footage of the flight control center when NASA launches a rocket you’ve seen a great example of a Definition of Done. Imagine what it would be like if NASA didn’t have all those stations that had to report in with “Go for launch” or “No...