Agile and Project Management - DrunkenPM Radio

Gil Broza has been a guest on this podcast a number of times in the past. He’s the author of several books that focus on Agile, including The Human Side of Agile and Agile for Non-Software Teams. Gil is a teacher, lecturer, and the founder of 3PVantage. He also helps organizations transform to Agile, and he’s developed a new tool called Square that can be used to assess your value delivery so that...

So you’ve made the decision that you want to get a job as a Scrum Master. Maybe you’re working on an agile team and want to switch roles, or maybe you’re moving from a field where agile has no presence. If you don’t already have experience working in an environment that has adopted Scrum, then the big question is… how do you land the gig. In this episode, I am joined by my good friend Richard Chen...

Ok, so you’re a newly minted Certified Scrum Master (or Certified Scrum Product Owner), now what? How do you get started applying what you learned in class? What if the organization you work in is still primarily waterfall? What if you were the one person sent to take a 2-day class so you can transform the rest of the company and teach them to “do agile”? What if you went for the certification as...

Despite the fact that Agile practices have been applied to just about every type of work you can imagine, there is still a pervasive assumption that it is just for software. In the CSM and CSPO classes I teach, people often ask for “real life examples” of how people not working directly on software teams are able to use agile and to what end. This week, Lee Lis, Chief of Staff at OnPay, joins me t...

In Carol Dwek’s book Mindset, she explains the difference between a Fixed Mindset and a Growth Mindset. Earlier this year, a colleague of mine, Mary Kaufman and I began recording a series of podcasts on the five stages of growth outlined in the book. Unfortunately, Mary moved on to a new gig before we got the fifth stage posted. So, we re-recorded the conversation and it’s going up live here at dr...

During this interview Zach Stone shares stories about what it has been like to be a remote Scrum Master working with a team based in Ukraine while it was being invaded by Russia. How do you engage with and support a team that is trying to build software in the middle of a war zone? What do you say to management when they want to know if you’ll make the release and you are just trying to figure out...

So much has been changing in how we work over the past few years that it can be tough to keep track of everything. There has been an increased focus on product management as companies move from a project-based approach to a product-based approach. Some organizations are still trying to get their feet with agile, while others have decided that their teams no longer need a Scrum Master (very bad ide...

NOTE: This podcast was originally recorded in video. You can find the video version here: https://youtu.be/h6hvltUPGHs Dan Eberle is a film maker AND and Agile Coach. He's been a guest of this podcast a few times in the past, but we've always centered the conversation around his work as an Agile Coach at the New York Times. This time, we're switching things up and Dan has joined me to discuss how...

(A video version of this interview can be found here: https://youtu.be/t86MzxadU_k) When a long-standing, traditional organization embarks on Agile Transformation, there can be a lot of things that impede the change. When a lot of those things are happening at once, it can seem even more daunting. The good news is that when that happens, some of the things blocking the change can be addressed fair...

Many people who are new to an agile way of working struggle to understand how practices like Scrum can be used if you are doing Research and Development. It can also be difficult to see how an agile approach can be applied if you are developing hardware. If you fall into either of those categories, this podcast should help get you sorted on how agile can be used in both R&D and the development of...

This podcast was originally recorded in video. You can find that version here: https://bit.ly/3p8YDB8 This episode of the podcast features an interview that I’m hoping will serve as an example of how collaborating in a distributed model can lead to great things. Malene Jacobsen and Mario Melo both became Certified Scrum Trainers during the 2022 Scrum Gathering in Denver this past spring. The story...

Christine Converse and Ross Beurmann (who host the podcast A Couple of Coaches) join me for a conversation/debate about metrics. During the podcast, we discuss what metrics help create clarity for the team on how well they are performing and what metrics help highlight areas that could be improved. We weigh the pros and cons of standard Scrum metrics, Kanban metrics, and share the ones we each fin...

In Elizabeth Harrin’s latest book Managing Multiple Projects: How project managers can balance priorities, manage expectations and increase productivity, she draws on her 20+ years providing training, education, and mentoring in the project management field to take on a problem all of us face. When you have too many projects on your plate, and all of them are high priority, how do you find you get...

When I have questions about product-related topics Scott Sehlhorst is always the first person I reach out to. He is a product management and strategy consultant that makes my head explode every time I talk to him and this interview is no exception. Scott joined me for this interview that builds on his recent blog post “How to Make Your Product Special” (https://bit.ly/3AciBBK). We dig into product...

This episode features Troy Lightfoot who is a Business Agility Coach and Consultant as well as a Professional Kanban Trainer. The interview starts with a discussion about the basic differences between Scrum and Kanban and then digs into four of the metrics recommended in the Kanban Guide. We cover WIP, Throughput, Work Item Age, and Cycle Time, talking through what each of these is, the value thes...

Distributed Teams are never easy. It doesn’t matter if you are separated by one flight of stairs or 12 time zones. Forming and maintaining a cohesive, collaborative team that can support one another, consistently deliver, and continuously improve is always just a little bit tougher when you are not in the same physical space. The pandemic has offered all of us plenty of “opportunities” to find way...

This podcast was originally recorded as a video interview. To view the video version, please go to: https://bit.ly/3a2FBIe This special video podcast features Jim Benson who is back to talk about the Five Lenses of Humane Management. When human beings work together they form a system. That system runs according to the culture created by the people who are gathering together and collaborating. That...

When people talk about Agile you’ll hear them talk about certain ideas, topics, or “laws” that are just mentioned as if they were universally known truths, almost like gravity. In “Agile Physics - the Math of Flow”, a new FREE course offered by Troy Magennis, you can start to learn the math behind some of these truths. The course focuses on a number of these ideas and breaks them down in a way tha...

This interview was originally recorded with video. If you'd like to check out that version you can find it here: https://bit.ly/3rtJEDd Jim Benson is finishing up work on a new book The Collaboration Equation and in this episode of the podcast, the creator of Personal Kanban joins me to talk all about why we often resist collaboration, and why it is a necessary element of everything each of us doe...

Jessica Katz is an Agile Coach and Trainer who is on a mission to help the community of Agile Coaches "...empower ourselves with better rates and more appropriate rates." When she became a freelance Agile Coach Jessica became aware of how difficult it was to understand how much an Agile Coach could expect to make as a full-time employee, how much they could charge as freelance, and how much those...

Dan Eberle is the Agile Coach at the New York Times. He’s been a guest on this podcast in the past to talk about coaching stances and what to do when your team members are working on more than one team. This week our focus is on an Agile Certification program Dan has been developing at the New York Times. While obtaining professional credential certification (like CSM or CSPO) is a great investmen...

Career Refactoring - Find the Gig that Sparks Joy w/ Luis Garcia The pandemic has been tough on everyone. Some have obviously felt the impact deeper than others. But there have also been positive things that came about as a result of the change Covid has brought to our lives. For some, it provided an opportunity to step back and reassess their goals, how they were spending their days and the way t...

In the book The Journey to Enterprise Agility - Systems Thinking and Organizational Legacy, Daryl Kulak and Hong Li focus on the disconnection that often occurs between various parts of the enterprise and how that creates challenges during Agile adoption. Taking a systems thinking approach, Kulak and Li make the case for re-orienting the enterprise in a way that is better suited to an agile way of...

When Mike McCalla, President, and Founder of Lean Agile Intelligence was looking for feedback on some ideas he had around enterprise agile transformation, he posted his thoughts on LinkedIn and asked if he was oversimplifying what he had started referring to as Object-Oriented Data-Driven Change. One great thing about agile folks who spend time on the interweb, if you ask them for feedback, they a...

This interview was originally recorded in video. You can find the video here: https://youtu.be/FGCiOhXYqwM In April 2014, Derek Huether started leading a monthly Lean Coffee meeting for Agile Baltimore. Early in 2022, the group will hold its 100th Lean Coffee! In celebration of that, Derek joined me for an interview all about Lean Coffee - what is it, how does it work, how to get set up to run one...