Agile and Project Management - DrunkenPM Radio

Change is difficult. Figuring out what to change is often the hardest part. Whether you are looking for different outcomes within your organization, or you are simply trying to create a change in how you live your life, one of the first steps you need to take is to determine what it is you actually need to change to see different results. Braden Cundiff has developed a method to FLIP old behaviors...

In this episode of the podcast Sustained Agility’s Eric Tucker, CST, joins Dave to talk about common sense and Agile. When it comes to adopting Agile practices and frameworks like Scrum, there are missteps people and organizations make that could be easily avoided if they would just use common sense. Eric has put together a talk highlighting some of the common sense mistakes that frequently occur...

Assumptions are often the Achilles heel of any development effort. These are the things we’ve unintentionally decided are true and unfortunately, far too often, our assumptions are wrong. If you’ve based the success of the work you are doing on incorrect assumptions… VERYBADTHINGS. But, if they are things we’ve unintentionally decided are true? How do we find them in the first place? And if we can...

In this episode of the podcast, Agile Coach Dan Eberle is back to help me respond to a student question that is complicated, confusing, and more common than it should be… Ivan (not the person’s real name) explained the situation like this… Six Product Owners/Developers oversee 20 reports within the org. Each of the reports has a specialized role. They are broken up into teams that range in size fr...

In June of 2020, I posted an interview with Karim Harbott about his Business Agility Canvas. During the interview, he mentioned that he was working on a book, The 6 Enablers of Business Agility: How to Thrive in an Uncertain World. The book was released earlier this year and I recently started reading it. Karim does an excellent job of breaking down the 6 different areas he has identified as being...

When all the testers have joined self-organizing, cross-functional Scrum Teams, do we actually still need a QA Manager? Joel Norman joins Dave for this episode of the Reluctant Agilist.

Adam Weisbart is back and this time we’re taking on a tragically common problem. Teams who do not have clarity on how the organization defines value. This can happen for a variety of reasons. In some organizations it is simply an oversight… management has achieved clarity and alignment around what is valuable to the organization, but they have not communicated it to the team. In other organization...

Before the pandemic hit, one of my favorite parts of the summer was going to the Agile Conference and doing podcast interviews with the speakers and thought leaders who were there. Each year, one of the very best moments of each Agile Conference was when I would get to sit down and talk with Troy Magennis. It’s been two summers. I miss talking to Troy. So I reached out and he was kind enough to sp...

In a class recently, a student asked a question that caught me by surprise. He asked if Scrum Master was a necessary role. If the team was fully engaged in approaching the work with an Agile mindset, inspecting, and adapting from one Sprint to the next both with respect to the deliverable AND the way they work together, AND they were self-organizing, then why would they need a Scrum Master? And, i...

This podcast is also available in video form. You can find it here: https://youtu.be/0-Mha3nv6G4 The Responsibility Process is a system that provides you with tools that enable you to develop leadership skills by leading yourself first. Christopher Avery is now offering a 20-week Responsibility Immersion program where a small group of individuals will work together to learn, and deepen their under...

In preparation for transforming the organization to Agile (or implementing some other significant organizational change), many companies will engage a third party to first assess how they are currently working, what the change would entail, and then they make recommendations on how to go about it. This can take anywhere from a few months to a few years. Once the recommendation on how to implement...

In this episode of the podcast Colleen Johnson, CEO of ProKanban joins me to talk all about ProKanban. During the interview we cover how this new organization came about, the ProKanban Guide, the community they have been fostering, and ProKanban Certification. If you aren’t familiar with Kanban, it is another approach to getting work done that fits under the Agile umbrella. It can look like Scrum,...

When your organization is getting started with Agile Transformation, one of the more challenging questions is how to track progress. For organizations that are accustomed to measuring things, it is easy to get lost in the swamp of distracting metrics that are interesting, but not particularly helpful, as opposed to ones that provide your organization with the information it needs to make choices a...

This week my guest is Scott Ambler. Scott is the Vice President and Chief Scientist of Disciplined Agile at the Project Management Institute. He’s is also the co-founder of Disciplined Agile (DA), the creator of the Agile Modeling method and Agile Data methods, and he is the author of a number of books that focus on software development and Agile. (See links below.) In this episode of the podcast,...

Changing behavior is never easy. Whether you are talking about changing a habit at an individual level, or organizationally, there is going to be a struggle and it is easy to get lost in the language of loss… I won’t eat dessert tonight. We won’t over-commit this Sprint. Committing yourself to introduce a new behavior that is a change from your normal habits can be even more daunting because it no...

How do I create change in my organization when I don’t have the authority to make it happen? Whether you are trying to kick off an Agile Transformation or introduce some other type of change that will impact your organization beyond your team and/or pay grade, creating change when you don’t feel empowered to do so is not an easy thing. My colleague Jeff Howey and I frequently get questions around...

In November of 2020, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland released an update to the Scrum Guide. One of the changes they introduced was the Product Goal. This is a change which, to me, seemed like a brilliant way to keep the Product Backlog focused on achieving a measurable outcome, but at the same time, it seemed at odds with how I had come to think about and work with a Product Backlog. For the past...

Sanjiv Augustine took a break from putting the finishing touches on his new book From PMO to VMO: Managing for Value Delivery to join me for an interview about Value Management Offices. “A Value Management Office is a cross-functional, cross-hierarchy and cross-silo team of teams.” This is a group with representation from across the organization. It is comprised of individuals who act as “linking...

TLDR - My podcast interview with Scrum.org CEO Dave West on the Product Goal - what is it, how do I work with it. In November 2020 Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber introduced a new version of the Scrum Guide. There are a number of changes they introduced to Scrum in the update, including the topic of Product Goal. Here is what the Scrum Guide says about Product Goal: “The Product Goal describes a...

From 2019 to 2021 Melissa Boggs served as Co-CEO and Chief ScrumMaster for the Scrum Alliance. Earlier this year she stepped down from her Chief SM role and took on the position of Vice President of Business Agility at Sauce Labs. AFAIK, Melissa was the Chief ScrumMaster ever so I wanted to check in with her and see what she learned during her time in the role, what advice she could share for thos...

This episode features an interview with Dan Eberle. Dan is an Agile Coach, working at the New York Times and leading a few Agile-centric communities of practice. I recently attended a presentation Dan gave on Agile Coaching as part of Access Agile's Agile 20Reflect Festival (https://agile20reflect.org). Dan hit on some very impactful topics during the session so, I asked him to join me for an inte...

If you’ve been working as a coach or a consultant for any length of time you have run into situations where you have to make a decision about what the “right” thing to do actually is. Sometimes, it is pretty obvious, sometimes, not so much. Some professional organizations have established standards that credentialed professionals promise to adhere to. The International Coaching Federation has the...

(You can find a video version of this interview here: https://youtu.be/MReNazZPvCc) Derek Huether is back to talk about his new book “Metrics Cookbook”. Organizations love collecting metrics and creating reports. Some of those metrics are critical to understanding what is happening in the organization, but a lot of them are not critical and waste a lot of time and effort. Derek’s new book offers r...

This interview was originally recorded in July 2013 and posted to Projects at Work. The original blog post and posting of the recording were lost when P@W became part of Project Management.com. BUT Johanna is brilliant and I learn a ton from her every time we talk. Also, Personal Kanban is REALLY important. So I found the original post and am reposting to fix the broken link on my index of Persona...

This is a completely unique version of the podcast. For the first time since 2008, I’m giving up control of the show and in this episode, Adam Weisbart interviews me about the session I’ll be leading at the Agile Virtual Summit [Bite-Size!], some of the changes in the new Scrum Guide, and iocane powder. The Agile Virtual Summit [Bite-Size!] takes place on March 31st. The event is Bite Size! becaus...