Robert Mahler of Tata Consulting Services (TCS) shares with Agile Amped his thoughts on and experience with Agile transformations and SAFe. In his experience Robert has learned that grassroots transformations without executive buy in don't work. If the C level is not interested, your transformation is going to fail. TCS has integrated SAFe into their approach to effecting organizational change and transformations, using SAFe to help them transform to the SAFe model. Robert also commiserates with those working to effect change in highly regulated industries and with everyone who has problems getting financial and business buy-in from clients. SolutionsIQ's Howard Johnson hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Robert Mahler of Tata Consulting Services (TCS) shares with Agile Amped his thoughts on and experience with Agile transformations and SAFe. In his experience Robert has learned that grassroots transformations without executive buy in don't work. If the C level is not interested, your transformation is going to fail. TCS has integrated SAFe into their approach to effecting organizational change and transformations, using SAFe to help them transform to the SAFe model. Robert also commiserates with those working to effect change in highly regulated industries and with everyone who has problems getting financial and business buy-in from clients.

SolutionsIQ's Howard Johnson hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado.

About Agile Amped

The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe!

Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/

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Sandra Johnson is a Release Train Engineer in the healthcare-IT industry. She started as a waterfall PM a few years and jumped at the opportunity to become a ScrumMaster in her company's SAFe implementation when she realized "there needed to be an easier way to get things done." She is appreciative of the coaching and guidance that Agile Amped host and SolutionsIQ SAFe consultant Scott Frost provided her years ago. Today she attributes a large part of the success to having buy-in from the leadership level (from the VP level down). Executives attend team training sessions and happily finance the entire transformation. Susan also shares how she has brought the fun back into demos, which can get boring. Susan collaborated with other SMs to retool the entire demo experience, based on what POs decided were the most valuable outcomes from the ceremony. The working group tapped into their own talents (e.g., audio-visual experience) as well as the personalities of their team members to make it interesting, for example through role play or skits. If Susan had advice for new ScrumMasters, it would be to grow some thick skin and to encourage people bringing problems to also come ready with possible solutions. SolutionsIQ SAFe consultant Scott Frost hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Certification Program Manager Susan Farago is new to Scaled Agile, but she's been in the certification and credentialing industry for almost two decades. Susan works to create certification programs to train people and "also measure what they know", especially when it comes to new offerings like SAFe Release Train Engineer certification, a critical role in SAFe implementations. Certification often gets a bad rap because, at the onset, quality (e.g., depth of knowledge) isn't always a focus. But Susan argues, in recent years, "we've gotten a lot smarter about what we're testing, and how." Even so, training and certification for hardware and software are much easier to do -- not so with human behavior, which can be "squishy and messy". SolutionsIQ's Evan Campbell hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

SAFe Fellow and principal consultant Inbar Oren is excited to announce the new SAFe ScrumMaster course and certification. Of importance for SAFe ScrumMasters to understand are the 10 Essential Elements of SAFe. Miss these and you won't get your results and, Inbar reminds us, "the point isn't to do SAFe, the point is to get your business results." One of the most commonly overlooked elements of SAFe is PI Planning. Another one is leadership training. Inbar advocates for starting training of change agents, executives and leaders early in the transformation -- "otherwise they will hamper the transformation because they don't understand what is critical and what isn't." To this end, organizational change management is crucial for Agile transformations to work, and Inbar shares his thoughts on how to embed OCM in SAFe implementations. SolutionsIQ's Howard Johnson hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

"HR is the key to bringing Agility to an enterprise level. If we don't fix our HR approach, we cannot a truly Agile organization." That's what Fabiola Eyholzer, CEO of Just Leading Solutions, shares with Agile Amped at the SAFe Summit 2016. Fabiola has 16 years of experience in human resources and applies her expertise and passion to the task of "bringing HR into the 21st century". How? With Lean-Agile practices and values. According to Fabiola, performance management needs to be rebooted to address today's concerns, such as "How do we recruit for Agile teams? How do we build careers in Agile organizations?" Recently, Fabiola collaborated with SAFe founder Dean Leffingwell to pen a white paper called "Agile HR with SAFe". With Agile Amped, she touches on the first of the 6 key themes for Agile HR, which are: 1. Embrace the new talent contract 2. Foster continuous engagement 3. Hire for attitude and cultural fit 4. Move to iterative performance flow 5. Take the issue of money off the table 6. Support impactful learning and growth Source: scaledagileframework SolutionsIQ SAFe consultant Scott Frost hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Alex Yakyma, SAFe Fellow and principal consultant, stops by Agile Amped to talk about his three talks at this year's SAFe Summit: 1. "Advances in DevOps with SAFe" 2. "Applying SAFe to Large and Complex Value Streams" 3. "Lean-Agile Development for Large Enterprises: Adding Hardware to the Mix"  Alex also encourages organizations not to lock themselves down "to early decisions that will inevitably be wrong". Lean practices can help orgs "find the middle ground" between planning big upfront and no upfront thinking at all. The author discusses his book "The Rollout", a narrative that uses an Agile Release Train launch as a vehicle for understanding SAFe better, before sharing that they all already working on the next version of SAFe, 4.1--but don't freak out: it's meant to be "additive" rather than a full revamp. SolutionsIQ SAFe consultant Scott Frost hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado. About Agile Amped The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe! Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

Alex Yakyma, SAFe Fellow and principal consultant, stops by Agile Amped to talk about his three talks at this year's SAFe Summit:

1. "Advances in DevOps with SAFe"

2. "Applying SAFe to Large and Complex Value Streams"

3. "Lean-Agile Development for Large Enterprises: Adding Hardware to the Mix" 

Alex also encourages organizations not to lock themselves down "to early decisions that will inevitably be wrong". Lean practices can help orgs "find the middle ground" between planning big upfront and no upfront thinking at all. The author discusses his book "The Rollout", a narrative that uses an Agile Release Train launch as a vehicle for understanding SAFe better, before sharing that they all already working on the next version of SAFe, 4.1--but don't freak out: it's meant to be "additive" rather than a full revamp.

SolutionsIQ SAFe consultant Scott Frost hosts at SAFe Summit 2016 in Denver, Colorado.

About Agile Amped

The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thoughtleaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe!

Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQYouTube, http://bit.ly/SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/

Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter 

Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

How would our education system be different using agile principles and values?  In this InDepth edition, our conversation focuses around the American School in Leysin, Switzerland, and their experiments over the past 3 yrs in Agile in Education.  My guests are Paul Magnuson ( Director of Curriculum & Director of the Middle School) and Bill Tihen ( Director of IT, Teacher, and runs the Makers Space )  Empowering students, making learning visible, and creating life long learners are goals for Paul and Bill as they lead this movement at Leysin.  You can find Paul and Bill and the Leysin School at https://www.las.ch/  Special thanks to John Miller for introducing me, and making this conversation possible.  you can find John on Twitter at @agileschools  The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQ YouTube, http://bit.ly/ SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook

The journey to become a CST is a long and rewarding one.  In this episode, I get to discuss Karim Harbott's journey to becoming a CST just 2 days after  he found out he had received the certification.  Richard Cheng is a CST and a volunteer on the Trainer Approval Committee ( TAC) . He shares his side of the journey and what the TAC is looking for, some tips, and encouragement.  One story, two perspectives.  It should be interesting.  The Agile Amped podcast series connects the community through compelling stories, passionate people, shared knowledge, and innovative ideas. Fueled by inspiring conversations with industry thought leaders, Agile Amped offers valuable content – anytime, anywhere. To receive real-time updates, subscribe at YouTube, iTunes or SolutionsIQ.com. Subscribe: http://bit.ly/SIQ YouTube, http://bit.ly/ SIQiTunes, http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile-amped/ Follow: http://bit.ly/SIQTwitter  Like: http://bit.ly/SIQFacebook