Agile and Project Management - DrunkenPM Radio

At the 2019 North American Global Scrum Gathering, I had a chance to sit down with Ilker Demirel to talk about his involvement with The Leadership Gift Program and how it has transformed his life and his work helping individuals, teams, and organizations become “free, powerful, and at choice” and move from a mindset of scarcity to a mindset of abundance. Ilker is a Certified Leadership Gift Coach...

The Daily Scrum is one of the simplest and most critical elements of Scrum. Unfortunately, for many, this event becomes a traditional status meeting that delivers little value. If your Development Team has lost its way with their Daily Scrum, this podcast is for you. Jason Tanner is the CEO and Co-Founder of Applied Frameworks, as well as a Certified Scrum Trainer and a Path to CSP Educator. Durin...

At the 2019 North America Global Scrum Gathering, I had the chance to sit down with Carol McEwan, CEO and Chief Product Owner of Scrum at Scale, to talk about her new role and what has happened since the Scrum Alliance and Scrum Inc. announced Scrum at Scale as a joint venture at last year’s Gathering.  Carol took on the role of CEO/CPO of Scrum at Scale in March, but she previously served as the...

Charlotte DiBartolomeo is the CEO and Founder of The Red Kite Project, an organization that provides resiliency training in high pressure industries. This work involves coaching, consulting, and training centered around how to dismantle dehumanizing systems, rebuild trusting relationships, and cope with burnout. As an example of this, The Red Kite Project worked with public transit bus drivers in...

Recorded live at the 2019 North American Global Scrum Gathering, this episode of The Reluctant Agilist features a conversation with Scrum Alliance Chief Product Owner Howard Sublett. During the course of the interview, Dave and Howard discuss Dan Pink’s opening keynote at the Scrum Gathering; the Scrum Alliance Labs and volunteer work that have been done to create a free library of material aimed...

Trying to figure out when you will be ready to ship is incredibly challenging. Many Scrum teams track historic velocity, or story points completed in a Sprint, and then use the average number of points completed per Sprint as a way of making an educated guess as to when they could deliver when they’d expect to deliver a certain number of story points in the future. There are, however, many who fee...

What does it take to be a great Product Owner? On Wednesday, May 22nd at the North American Global Scrum Gathering, Certified Scrum Trainer Richard Cheng will be leading a session called The Perfect Product Owner. In this interview Richard and I discuss some of the material he will be exploring in his session, some of the organizational conditions needed to enable a Product Owner to deliver value...

This podcast features an interview with Johanna Rothman and Mark Kilby about their new book "From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver" (https://tinyurl.com/yyrbhcrz). Distributed Teams present challenges for any group of people trying to work together. This is true in a traditional approach to project work, but maybe even more so in an Agile approach, where many of...

Insights from two days of Personal Kanban training w/ Amitai Schleier A few weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of taking a class put on by Modus Cooperandi called “Individual, Team, & Project Success: Personal Kanban" with Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria, authors of the book Personal Kanban. Even though personal kanban is a system I am very familiar with, I was psyched to be able to take the clas...

What we say matters. One of they keys to being a successful ScrumMaster is language. It’s not enough to just put the message out, you need to encode it in a way that allows it to be received and decoded in a way that will deliver the message you intended. Tyler Grant is a ScrumMaster who is concerned with how buzzwords and jargon can create divisions within teams, and is generally less precise tha...

In this episode of the Reluctant Agilist, Certified Scrum Trainer and Agile Coach, Eric Tucker, and I talk through two related questions that came from students in my classes: What is the best way to inject defects into a sprint? How do you reset expectations with stakeholders if you are going to fail a sprint? During the interview Eric and talk about why adding/removing work from a sprint is gene...

Last fall the Scrum Alliance took the bold step of changing their leadership structure from a traditional model to one that was based around a Chief Product Owner and Chief Scrum Master. Even for an organization whose mission is to “change the world of work” this was a brave experiment to run because it has never been done before. Howard Sublett returned to the Scrum Alliance as Chief Product Owne...

If you’ve achieved a certification through the Scrum Alliance one of the things you need to do to maintain your certification is to renew it every two years. In order to do this you will have to earn Scrum Educational Units (SEUs). Two of the most common questions I get at the end of each Certified Scrum Master or Certified Scrum Product Owner class are “How many SEUs do I need to renew?” and “How...

Jason Tanner is the CEO of Applied Frameworks. He has a widely ranging background that includes Project Management, Product Management, and professional IT training. He’s also a Certified Scrum Trainer who spends time working with individuals who are in the process of trying to become CSTs and he’s on a personal mission to save the Daily Scrum. During this episode of the podcast, Jason and I talk...

"Consistency is the junk food of management." As 2019 gets underway the Reluctant Agilist checks in with Jesse Fewell on his primary areas of focus heading into the New Year. During this episode of the podcast Dave and Jesse discuss the current state of traditional PM vs. Agile, the role of the PMO in an Agile organization and how both of these topics have evolved since they began trying to develo...

Agile is not easy. Many organizations struggle with trying to break free of their traditional work culture and finding their path to a different way of working. Along the way, many organizations give up, or slowly slide back into the old ways of working because making the transition is just too hard. If you happen to work at one of those organizations, this episode should offer you something speci...

“Agile is not something you become, Agile is something you become more of.” For organizations that are engaged in Agile Transformation, it is often very challenging to get a sense of where you are with respect to successfully adopting a new way of working. Comparative Agility is a tool that has been designed to help Agile coaches and organizations get a deeper understanding of their progress towar...

Earlier this fall at the 2018 Large Scale Scrum Conference in NYC, Ellen Gottesdiener and Andy Repton led a session called “What is Our Product” (https://less.works/sessions/2018-less-conference-new-york-what-is-our-product-88). During the course of their presentation they showcased many of the tools they use with clients to determine what the product they are building actually is. In this intervi...

The Scrum Alliance and Forbes Insights recently released a report called the “The Elusive Agile Enterprise” (https://www.scrumalliance.org/forbes/). The report presents the findings of a survey that involved over 1,000 C-level executives across the globe in a range of industries. In this interview, Scrum Alliance Vice President of Global Marketing and Communications, Renata Lerch (https://www.scru...

The Scrum Alliance recently made a very significant change in how the organization is run. After years of running with a traditional leadership model, the Scrum Alliance, whose mission is “Change the World of Work” has decided to shift to a model with a Chief Product Owner and a Chief Scrum Master. As you’ll hear in this podcast, it is a model that is already inspiring leaders from other organizat...

Last Spring, Martin Fowler gave a talk at Agile Australia called "The State of Agile Software in 2018." (A transcript of Fowler’s talk can be found using the link provided below.) During the talk, he mentions “post-agile.” It is a phrase I had previously heard mention of here and there by folks who tend to be pretty deep with agile and who are frustrated for one reason or another by how it is bein...

You go to conferences… and there are moments when you pick stuff up that can help you do your job. But, once and awhile, there are those special moments when people share things in sessions that permanently change how you look at the work you do. It’s rare… but it’s awesome.  That happened for me this September in Memphis at the 2018 Digital PM Summit. I attended a session led by Abby Fretz called...

Suzanna Haworth gave a talk at the 2018 Digital PM Summit called "Adapting Agile: How to Make a Blended Agile Approach Work For You". Agile and Digital can be an odd fit. In her talk Suze focused on how digital agencies can begin introducing agile practices into their workflow in order to realize some of the benefits that agility can provide. The talk was very popular. So popular in fact, that I w...

Patrice Embry gave a lightning talk called “Finessing a Retrospective to Get Results” at the 2018 Digital PM Summit. After her talk Patrice and I had a chance to sit down and talk through some of the ideas she shared that you can use to hep you get more value out of the moments where you and your team stop to inspect and adapt how things are working on your project. The tips Patrice shares in the...

A few weeks ago the 2018 Digital PM Summit was held in Memphis. This is the 6th year the conference has been held and the Bureau of Digital (https://bureauofdigital.com) put together another incredibly inspiring conference. The event focuses on helping PMs in who work in the Digital space amp up their ability to practice their craft. During the conference, Aaron Irizarry gave a presentation called...