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 does. Working through a number of real-life examples we discuss some of the ingredients you need to design a system that supports its participants and fosters a culture of collaboration.

This interview is going to challenge your understanding of collaboration, offer you a lens to see collaboration in a deeper, more lasting way, and offer you a sneak peek of what is coming up in Jim’s new book.

Links from the Podcast:

Personal Kanban: https://www.personalkanban.com/

Lean-Agile Visual Management on Modus Institute: https://www.modusinstitute.com/lavm

Jim’s Books on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3JQEEyX

Contacting Jim Benson:

Web: https://moduscooperandi.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimbenson/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ourfounder

Email: [email protected]

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 freelance coaches were paying themselves for the work they do.

The first edition of The Agile Coaching Report came out last year and she recently finished collecting data for the second version. Since then she's been hard at work sorting through the details she has collected. During the interview, she shares some of the key learnings she has had in working with the data. This includes things like which segments of the coaching demographic get paid more, how do race and gender impact your pay, who is better at negotiating salary, and factors that can influence the amount you can earn as a coach. She also shares stories about how individuals have been able to use this data to successfully negotiate being paid at a rate equal to their peers within the organization.

The audience for the report is anyone working in a coaching capacity within Agile Teams, on an Agile Transformation or Change Management project and it includes a variety of related information like how much people are getting paid for public speaking, as well as common attributes of those paid the most.

If you are trying to figure out whether the amount you are earning is in step with the rest of the coaching field, if you need help figuring out how to negotiate for a higher rate of pay, or if you want to know if you are paying your coaches enough, this interview with Jessica Katz on her Agile Coaching Income Report has the details you are looking for.

THE AGILE COACHING INCOME REPORT

You can download a copy of the 2021 Agile Coaching Income Report here:

https://bit.ly/3M6yE71

Keep an eye out for the 2022 Agile Coaching Income Report on Jessica's website https://liberatedelephant.com

LADIES GET PAID

During the interview Jessica mentions Ladies Get Paid (https://ladiesgetpaid.com), which can be a very valuable resource for anyone (not just women) who needs to get better at negotiating salary.

CONTACTING JESSICA

if you'd like to reach out to Jessica directly

Web: https://liberatedelephant.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeskatz

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ElephantTaming

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 investment to make in the people who work in your organization, those certs may not be right for everyone AND your organization may have developed its own approach to Agile by implementing practices from a number of different frameworks/methodologies. If that is the case, an internal training or certification program centered around your specific approach or one that is intended to offer participants enough learning to make intentional informed choices about what practices to adopt may be an ideal way to go.

During the interview, Dan explains why he developed the program, the different areas it focuses on, and how employees of the New York Times will evolve through the different levels of certification.

Contacting Dan

LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/3wGScbC

Twitter: https://bit.ly/3F6dkec

To sign up for Dave's in-person CSM/CSPO classes in Atlanta:

CSM (April 5-6, 2022) https://bit.ly/APR5CSMATL

CSPO (April 7-8, 2022) https://bit.ly/APR7CSPOATL

* Use the discount code DPM10 to get a 10% discount off the list price

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 they wanted to live and work. For many, this has meant leaving their jobs entirely. For others, like Luis Garcia, it’s meant taking stock, realizing what work sparks joy in your life, and Kondo-ing the rest of that noise right out of your system.

This podcast features an interview with a colleague of mine who started out as a project manager and spent years working his way up the ladder only to find it give way when he got laid off early in the pandemic. Rather than rush right back to work, Luis took advantage of the break, spent more time with his family, and reevaluated his career. He’d been successful at working his way up the food chain but realized that at some point, he’d left behind the parts of the job he enjoyed the most. Luis joins me in this episode to talk about that journey and how he’s made a deliberate choice to go back to being a Scrum Master so that he can spend his time doing what brings him joy - working with teams to build products that impact the lives of others.

Contacting Luis

Twitter: https://twitter.com/luisgarcia

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luisgarcia/

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 working. A big part of this is taking a more human-centric view and valuing the contribution individuals bring to this difficult journey.

In this interview, the two authors share stories about their experiences working with organizations that are on the journey towards agility and explain how this shift in approach works, why so many organizations fail at adopting agile, and how the changes they recommend impacts the way we think and work with people at all levels of the enterprise.

If you’d like to check out the book: The Journey to Enterprise Agility - Systems Thinking and Organizational Legacy https://amzn.to/3po4PGS

Contacting Daryl Kulak

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darylkulak/

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: https://twitter.com/darylkulak

Contacting Hong Li

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/honghli/

Email: [email protected]

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 are more than happy to provide… often more than you want, and often about things you weren’t asking for feedback on, but, they do respond. Mike’s post kicked off a very spirited conversation. In this episode of the podcast, he joins me to share his thoughts on why taking a data-driven approach to introducing sticky change in the enterprise is an important part of delivering on the promise of change in large organizations.

You can find Mike’s original LinkedIn post here: https://bit.ly/3GzuamW

If you are interested in learning more about Lean Agile Intelligence and how it can help you and your organization continually assess how you are progressing in your transformation journey and what next steps are likely to help the most.

https://leanagileintelligence.com

Contacting Mike

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelsmccalla/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MSMcCalla_1

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, and what are the benefits of leading a Lean Coffee.

If you aren’t familiar with Lean Coffee it is an agenda-less meeting format developed by Jim Benson and Jeremy Lightsmith that relies on the people who show up to collaborate on the agenda and then cover them together. Even if you are a seasoned Lean Coffee veteran you will probably find valuable ideas here. Both Derek and I came away from this conversation with new things to try out.

Also, at the end of the podcast, there is an additional brief conversation about Jira. Derek works for Atlassian and he shares a number of resources that you and your team can use to get answers to all your Jira questions.

1:00 Who is Derek Huether

2:10 What is a Lean Coffee

10:00 What do YOU get out of running a Lean Coffee

13:00 How does a Lean Coffee work

27:45 Using it to run meetings

35:15 How to Contact Derek

35:45 How to get Jira help

Links from the podcast

Agile Baltimore http://www.agilebaltimore.org

Lean Coffee Website https://leancoffee.org

Metrics Cookbook by Derek Huether https://amzn.to/3F3ragX

How to Have Great Meetings: A Lean Coffee Book by Adam Yuret https://amzn.to/33glCme

Lean Coffee Table (App to run Lean Coffee Meetings) https://www.leancoffeetable.com

Jira videos on YouTube: https://bit.ly/JiraVideos

Atlassian Community Site: https://community.atlassian.com

Atlassian University: https://www.atlassian.com/university

Contacting Derek

Web: https://www.derekhuether.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derekhuether/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/derekhuether

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/derekhuether/

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 and create new ones. The FLIP approach is defined in Braden’s book Flip: Projects to Products: A problem playbook (https://t.co/aQl3a5FY1z). This is the second in a series of podcasts where we are breaking down the steps in Braden’s approach and exploring how to make it work for you on a personal and organizational level.

In this interview, we explore how to find the problem, why you need to name that problem and create a definition around the scope of it, and then how to assess whether or not it is a problem you can, and should take on.

If you’d like to learn more about FLIP you can check out Braden’s book, Flip: Projects to Products: A problem playbook (https://t.co/aQl3a5FY1z), or you can check out the first podcast in this series, which gives an overview of the FLIP model for creating change, why it works, how it works, what the model is based on, and how you can get started using it, you can find that here: https://bit.ly/3IJpqMT

Contacting Braden

LinkedIn: bit.ly/3ck7t93

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 and during the interview, he and Dave unpack a few of the more common, common sense mistakes. They explore why they occur in the first place, and how two avoid them.

To check out a video of Eric’s Common Sense talk:

https://bit.ly/3duxvqw

If you’d like to contact Eric:

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericptucker/

Web: https://sustainedagility.com/

Email: [email protected]

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 find them, what do we do about them?

This episode is all about understanding the assumptions we are making when we develop new products and services. Precoil Founder David Bland has joined me to talk about why we need to pay attention to assumptions and how to use Assumptions Mapping to determine which of our assumptions present the biggest threat and need to be addressed first. During the interview, we review how to use the Assumptions Mapping approach that is included in Testing Business Ideas, the book David co-wrote with Alexander Osterwalder.

Links from the Podcast

Testing Business Ideas By David J. Bland and Alexander Osterwalder: https://amzn.to/3I1liYh

Strategyzer Virtual Masterclass in May: https://bit.ly/3FXjz4j

Contacting David

Precoil: https://www.precoil.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidjbland

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidjbland/