Definitely, Maybe Agile

If all you care about is rushing around, you'll miss learning opportunities that might make you more effective in your delivery. This week Peter and Dave talk about the impacts of innovation as a department.

This week's takeaways:

• Think of innovation as a culture across the organization.
• Innovation is everywhere.
• The psychological safety of making mistakes and learning from them is a foundational block in any learning organization.

We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: [email protected] 

This week Peter and Dave will deconstruct a quote from Tom DeMarco. "Quality takes time and reduces the quantity, so it makes you, in a sense, less efficient. The organization that optimizes efficiency recognizes quality as its enemy. That's why many corporate quality programs are actually quality reduction programs in disguise."

This week's takeaways:

• Technology is cheap today, but the impact is expensive. 
• Organizations that test at the end reinforce the loop. 
• We now have more integration abilities between systems. 

Resources:
The machine that changed the world- https://www.amazon.com/Machine-That-Changed-World-Revolutionizing/dp/0743299795

We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: [email protected] 

Some projects never seem to end. Big upfront design results in long execution phases and eventually it becomes difficult to believe it will ever be delivered. This week, Peter and Dave discuss how to approach these seemingly never-ending projects once they are well underway. Having started this way, how can you bring it under control and apply what we know of business agility to move forwards again? 

 This week's takeaways:

• Stakeholder communication.
• Identify and prioritize
• Do one thing at a time.
• Work on the thing that will help us create stability and move forward.
•  Meanwhile, have everybody else focus on improving the integrations, fixing defects, and removing technical debt. 

We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: [email protected] 

 Learning from failure is an essential part of building your resilience. In this week's episode, Peter and Dave discuss how failure gives us the ability to improve and continually create more resilient systems.

This week's takeaways:

• The importance of understanding the resiliency of each part of our system in context of the whole system.
• Failure allows us to learn, and then we can rebuild stronger.
• Recognize that we need to persevere through failures to gain the benefits.

We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: [email protected] 

We're so happy to have made it to episode 52! This year has been full of guests and conversations about agility. We've also had the opportunity to share our expertise, so thank you for joining us on these journeys together—it's not going unnoticed.
This week's episode is about addressing your team's needs and not just forcing agile processes on them. You'll learn what happens when an organization doesn't put people first.

This week takeaways:

• The hiring process is our first impression. If we make a mess there, we're always going to be on our back foot.
• Talk about what's happening. Don't lie.
• Lead by example.

References in this episode:
Leaders Eat Last- Simon Sinek https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16144853-leaders-eat-last.

We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: [email protected]

In this episode of the Definitely, Maybe Agile podcast, Dave and Peter have a special guest, Rob Hirschfeld, co-founder, and CEO of RackN, a collaborative platform for teams automating infrastructure as code. This time we'll have a slightly longer episode than normal as we dive into different aspects of complexity. This isn't one you'll want to miss. We had a lot of fun recording it and really liked the end result. We hope you do too.

This week takeaways:

• Stop trying to eliminate complexity and figure out how to manage it.
• Build systems focused on system effectiveness.
• Complexity problems are collaboration problems.

We love to hear feedback. If you have questions, want to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: [email protected]. 

What do you think of our services, and has it had the impact you were hoping to see? In today's episode of the Definitely Maybe Agile podcast, Peter and Dave talk about the importance of asking for feedback from our customers to prevent business agility from failing.

This week takeaways:

• Validate emergent needs with your customers
• Build a system that can respond to that.

We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: [email protected]

 Now we are going to talk about our second antipattern that came up in episode 43, being unable to say "no". This often presents itself as confusing speed with focus.
This week takeaways:

• Reducing delivery costs starts with saying no.
• Prioritize and concentrate efforts in one place.
• Limit work in progress
• Automation is essential.

  We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: [email protected] 

 In the last 5 episodes of the Definitely, Maybe Agile podcast, we presented 5 ways Business Agility can impact your bottom line. In today's episode, we start our 5-episode series of exploring antipatterns that prevent us from achieving these benefits.

The first antipattern we're going to explore is one from our discussion in episode 44 on How business agility increases revenue. While business agility can reduce the cost of delivery, you may not realize those benefits if you forget to look at the entire system and begin to build feedback loops that allow you to learn as you progress.´

This week takeaways: 

• Watch for the signal-to-noise ratio
• Consider the influence of how long your feedback loops are on the system
• Make your system visible and understand how you'll measure 

We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: [email protected] 

In today's episode of the Definitely Maybe Agile podcast, Peter and Dave talk about how resilient systems prevent you from losing money when things go awry.

This week takeaways:

• Risk management is the responsibility of the entire organization.
• Build a stronger system capable of learning and recovering.

We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: [email protected]