This week, on SoundNotes, we're featuring another question from a student in one of our Certified Scrum classes. The question came from someone who's working in an organization that doesn't see value in the role of Product Owner and isn't convinced that it's needed as part of the Scrum Team.

The question:

What is the worth of a good P.O.?

LeadingAgile Senior Consultant, Tim Wise spent some time with Dave talking through various aspects of the question. Together, Dave and Tim will explore the role of the P.O., the value a P.O. can add in an organization, and some contexts in which different aspects of the P.O. role might be solved through other means. Lastly, Dave and Tim will discuss how an organization that's focused on maximizing the value delivered to the customer might go about measuring the value of a Product Owner.

• Email: [email protected]

• Email: http://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/

If you have comments on the podcast or have questions for the LeadingAgile coaches that you’d like to have addressed in a future episode of LeadingAgile’s SoundNotes, you can reach Dave at [email protected]

For information on LeadingAgile’s upcoming public CSM and CSPO classes, please go to: http://www.leadingagile.com/our-gear/training/

Use the discount code: LA_Podcastto receive a 15% discount on the class.

In one of my recent Certified Scrum Master classes, I had a number of students who were working on projects involving migrating from a legacy data warehouse to new data warehouses. Figuring out how to apply Scrum to the work they were doing presented a number of challenges and left some open questions.

Here are two examples of the data related topics that showed up in the Parking Lot:

• How do I apply Scrum to data factory?

In talking with the students about the work they were doing, I was left with a question:

Is Scrum really the best option for this type of work?

While I'm able to understand the challenges they face—both with the work and applying Scum in this situation—my background does not include the necessary work experience to speak to this topic with any level of authority. Fortunately, at LeadingAgile I have many experts I can reach out to when I run into situations like this. LeadingAgile Senior Consultant, Dave Nicolette, was kind enough to spend some time digging into this topic with me.

If you are working on large scale data-related projects and trying to figure out how to use Agile to get the work done, this week’s SoundNotes should offer you some valuable tips.

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-nicolette/
  

If you’d like to contact Dave you can reach him at:

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/

This week, on SoundNotes, we've got Part 3 of a trio of interviews with LeadingAgile Chief Methodologist and Co-Founder Dennis Stevens. The series focuses on how to build an organization that can embrace change. In the final episode of the series, Dennis and Dave cover how to prioritize work being done to maximize return.

During the interview, they discuss how prioritization at all levels of the organization can support the ability to inspect and adapt and how some lingering traditional approaches to work, compensation, and prioritization can have a negative impact on your organization's ability to embrace change.

If you'd like to check out the first two parts of this interview:

• Building an Organizational System That Can Embrace Change 

Here are links to the two other podcasts mentioned during the interview:

• Designing an Organization that Manages Value w/ Mikkel Ladegaard

Here is a link to the article he co-authored for Harvard Business Review

• The Next Revolution in Productivity

• Web: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dennis-stevens/

In this episode of SoundNotes, LeadingAgile Senior Consultant AJ Sanford joins Dave to answer a student question that's frequently asked in Dave's CSM and CSPO classes.

How do you use Scrum when you have to coordinate work between teams that are using both Waterfall and Agile all within one organization?

During the interview, AJ and Dave touch on the following topics:

• What to expect from an Agile pilot project

• Web: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/aj-sanford/

Mikkel Ladegaard is a Senior VP and Executive Consultant with LeadingAgile. This week, on SoundNotes, Mikkel and Dave Prior discuss Mikkel's focus on designing product-centric organizations in which the company's strategic prioritization of work is implicit and decision-making can be localized at the team level. During the conversation, they unpack a range of issues related to this topic, including how favor-based economies work, what the value is in designing organizations where there is a separation between those who identify the problem and those who solve the problem, and what the benefits are in making sure your organization is managing value rather than resources.

If you’d like to contact Mikkel, you can reach him at:

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/mikkel-ladegaard/

In this episode of SoundNotes, LeadingAgile's own Brandon Dudley—Senior Consultant—shares his experience making the shift from a Waterfall mindset to a more Agile way of thinking and working. Brandon got his start in traditional, PMI-centric, project management working in the auto industry in Detroit. His introduction to Agile didn't involve the hard break that many of us experience. For him, this was just another set of tools to help him get work done. During the podcast, Dave and Brandon talk through his experience of transforming his way of thinking about people and work and his advice for those on a similar journey.

Outside of work, one of Brandon’s biggest interests is Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Mixed Martial Arts. The work he does there, both study and practice, have a significant impact on his view of work, how he interacts with people, and how he deals with challenging situations. This is a topic that Brandon and Dave dig into during the podcast as well.

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/brandon-dudley/

• Limiting work in process

• I can't have all the things I want

• Whitepaper: https://www.leadingagile.com/whitepaper/

If you’d like to contact Mike you can reach him at:

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/mike-cottmeyer/

This episode of SoundNotes features, LeadingAgile Technical Consultant, Rich Dammkoehler in a conversation about why it is so important to make sure your organization is focused on improving their technical practices.

If you're struggling with helping your organization understand why introducing technical practices like collective code ownership, refactoring, pair programming, and test-driven development is such a crucial part of attaining business Agility; this podcast will help you build the case. Rich is a deeply experienced developer who got his start doing development using Waterfall and then found his way to Agile. In the Agile Transformation work that Rich does now, he focuses on helping organizations understand why and how the techniques and tools that came from Extreme Programming make them more effective at solving business problems and bring greater business success to the organization.

Towards the end of the interview, Rich also explains what it is that keeps him excited about doing development work after all these years, what development-related topics he is currently following the closest, and why punk rock is better than stadium rock.

• The Cathedral and the Bazaar

If you’d like to contact Rich you can reach him at:

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/rich-dammkoehler/

If you’d like to contact Dave you can reach him at:

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/

If your company is working on Agile Transformation, understanding how you can track the organization’s response to change and the impact it's having on business outcomes can be a bit daunting. It’s not so tough to track whether or not people have been trained and what practices they are using, but when it comes to understanding what people see, feel, believe, and desire, that can be harder to understand.

In this episode of SoundNotes, LeadingAgile Managing Consultant, Jeff Howey and Dave Prior talk through some of the things you need to consider when trying to understand how change is taking root, how it's impacting what people think, how they work, and what they see, feel, believe, and desire.

If you’d like to contact Jeff you can reach him at:

Email: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffhowey/

If you’d like to contact Dave you can reach him at:

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/

Estimating work in Agile is something many people struggle to understand. It's not that it's an especially complicated thing, but there is often confusion about things like why many people prefer to use story points instead of hours, why some people feel compelled to try and convert story points to hours (and why some of us find that so frightening), how t-shirt sizing works, and the eternal question of how do I get my teams to estimate accurately.

Hint:

They're called estimates, not exactimates for a reason.

There's even a whole camp dedicated to the idea of notestimating work. So, if this is something you're struggling with, you're not alone.

This episode of SoundNotes is a brief tutorial on Agile Estimation and some of the ways you and your team could estimate work. The podcast offers some tips in general about Agile estimation, things to watch out for, how to estimate work using Story Points and Poker Planning, how to estimate work using T-shirt sizing, and–once you break your Product Backlog Items down into discrete tasks—how to estimate the using Ideal Hours. There are volumes that can be said about how to estimate work and a lot of fun "debates" to be had along the way, but if you're struggling to understand it, if you need to get a sense of whether your current approach makes sense, or if you just want a refresher on how to go about it, this podcast should give you plenty to start working with.

LeadingAgile's FieldNotes has a number of posts covering different aspects of how to estimate work in Agile. Two great posts to start with are:

• Agile Estimation Guidanceby Marty Bradley

To see in index of all our posts on estimation,click here.

If you’d like to contact Dave you can reach him at:

• LeadingAgile: https://www.leadingagile.com/guides/dave-prior/