The Agile Revolution

By The Agile Revolution

Join Craig, Tony and Renee on a journey through the world of Agile as they look at recent blogs related to Agile, investigate practices and techniques, look at tools and answer your questions. The rev... more

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FAQs about The Agile Revolution:

How many episodes does The Agile Revolution have?

The podcast currently has 259 episodes available.

The Agile Revolution episodes:

June 13, 2019Episode 164: Agile Australia 2017 Vox Pop #2
Craig and Tony are once again roaming the halls at Agile Australia in Sydney and finding random folks to talk to at the conference:
Sarah Romeyn from WorkCover Queensland – enjoyed Pete Steel talk “Developing an Experimentation Culture” and Sherif Monsour talk “The art of building a roadmap“
Rachel Slattery from Slatterys (organiser of Agile Australia) – 1,200 attendees (a sellout) at the conference, such a good level of goodwill in the Agile community, half of the conference are new people and 60% hear about it through word of mouth, all flavours of ice cream (even coconut apparently…), AgileAus hub for all things Agile in Australia
Melissa Perri keynote “The Build Trap“, teal organisations tend to form like that at inception, other organisations have the people but the process to get there is still hard
Adam Boas and Andy Kelk from Marketplacer – enjoying the deep dive sessions as a way to talk to speakers you normally don’t get the opportunity to talk to, outcomes over output is a key theme at the conference
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TheAgileRevolution-164 (19 minutes)
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20min
June 10, 2019Episode 163: Agile Australia 2017 Vox Pop #1
Tony and Craig are at Agile Australia 2017 in Sydney and wander the very busy hallways catching up with attendees and with old friends:
Sieger de Vries – enjoyed Matt Pancino talk “The future of Agile in the enterprise: has the war been lost?”, distributed Agile and use of partnering is here to stay
Mia Horrigan from Zen Ex Machina and Joseph Gard from Australian Taxation Office – lots of Agile interest in Canberra around scaling Agile and leading the change in government, enjoyed Barry O’Reilly keynote “Lessons deploying Lean Enterprise“
Venky Krishnamurthy from The Empirical Coach – LeSS is purely based on evidence from experiments that was created into a framework, enjoyed Jez Humble workshop and keynote “Continuous Delivery Sounds Great But It Won’t Work Here“
Steve Scotson from 4impact – enjoyed the high standard and breadth of subject matter around innovation and organisation change
Karyl Crick – more managers should come to these events to see how Agile can help rather than just listening to the people above them, enjoyed Esther Derby keynote “Leaders at all Levels” and Stuart Mitchell talk “Agile Governance: Evolution or Revolution“
Sally Greenwood – enjoyed Matt Pancino talk, the advocates at CommBank already existed they just needed to make it happen, “it’s not about scaling agile up, it about descaling the organisation”
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TheAgileRevolution-163 (27 minutes)
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28min
June 03, 2019Episode 162: Leadership and Coaching Beyond the Team with Esther Derby
Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Sydney and catch up with Esther Derby, co-author of numerous agile books including Agile Retrospectives and Behind Closed Doors. We also ask the question whether Tony is cool or not….
Agile Australia keynote “Leaders At All Levels“
Leadership is the ability to adapt the environment so that everyone is empowered to contribute creatively to solving the problem
Need to develop the people we are leading as well as the environment
Need a bigger overlap of the knowledge in organisations so that we can make better decisions
Systemic failure that we assume because you are good at something (like software development) you will be good at management / leadership – they are very different skills
Three C’s – clarity (people know what to work on and how it fits into the big picture), conditions (the means to do the work and access to resources required) and constraints (guidelines to know to act and decide) – things you need to consider if you want to move a complex, adaptive system and build empowered teams
Need to focus on the work that needs to be done not just on the little boxes or our job description
Ask the question to leadership – what are you willing to change?
Coaching Beyond the Team workshop with Don Grey
Whilst smaller organisations can focus on the team, bigger organisations have to focus on the systemic level to make any visible difference
People are interested in the allure of the Agile benefits and what to cherry pick in relation to practices, the same happened with TQM and Lean – need to ask what next shift will help you deliver value to your customers
The millenials will be a big disruptor to management practices
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TheAgileRevolution-162 (32 minutes)
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33min
May 07, 2019Episode 161: State of Agile in Singapore with Stanly Lau
Craig is at YOW! Singapore and catches up with Stanly Lau, organiser of the Agile Singapore conference and the Agile Singapore meetup:
Bas Vodde was one of the early advocates for Agile in Singapore
The state of Agile in Singapore has progressed from “doing a standup” in 2010 to now many companies thinking about how they develop software better
A lack of knowledge in design principles by new software developers seems to affect how they tackle problems
The art of being able to sit down and pair in a team is an art that is being lost in the Agile community
You can learn a lot about a team by looking at their codebase
Good agile development practices require know-how and habit – does not come by nature
https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/theagilerevolution-161.mp3
TheAgileRevolution-161 (26 minutes)
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27min
April 23, 2019Episode 160: Agile Lessons From My Younger Self with John Sullivan
Craig is at YOW! Hong Kong and has a chat with John Sullivan, the CEO at Elabor8, and they talk about his Agile journey in Australia from ThoughtWorks to Sensis to Qantas to MYOB and the challenges and learnings along the way
The Agile Revolution episode 159 “What Colour Agile Would You Like Today with Nigel Dalton”
“Extreme Programming Explained” by Kent Beck
Sensis was a very early corporate in Australia that adopted Agile from beginning to end, moved teams out of the building so they could work uninhibited in an Agile way
The technology teams almost always aren’t the problem with product delivery – it is the product team taking an idea from the top to the bottom of the organisation and getting it in a form that is fit for customers
Not happy Jan! – Sensis had their focus on print and was not willing to disrupt
You need sponsorship and objectives right from the top if you want to make change – otherwise there are reasons why you do what you do and you won’t change
Do the things that are the hardest to do because then that gives you the freedom to do the things you want to do
Need to stop thinking about Agile as an institutional process
You can’t focus on the practices, you have to become Agile and then adopt practices that are the right thing to do
In relation to feedback, you need to value people’s effort and return something of greater value than what they put in
A real Agile digital transformation is about the shift to provide something that people want to use and then we can monetise it, which means you need to build something people need not what you think they want
Need to put teams together for a customer journey as opposed to divisional handoffs – that is an Agile digital transformation
John Sullivan’s YOW! Hong Kong talk – “A Presentation to Myself on Organisational Agile Transformations”
The theory is that the twelve principles were written to be too strict to apply and too heavy to consume at the time – the manifesto was written to be flexible around those principles – now the manifesto gives people too much slack
The Agile Revolution episode 119 “Agile (Raccoon) is Dead with “Pragmatic” Dave Thomas”
John Sullivan’s YOW! CTO Summit talk “A Common Vision is a Matter of Principle” where he mentions that platform manifesto
We need to stop trading off doing the right thing because the shortcuts drag down the productivity and it becomes an anchor – do the right thing right now, pay the cost, take the ownership and don’t give in on the principles
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TheAgileRevolution-160 (51 minutes)
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52min
March 16, 2019Episode 159: What Colour Agile Would You Like Today with Nigel Dalton
Craig is at YOW! Hong Kong and is sitting with Nigel Dalton, Chief Inventor at REA Group and the Australian “Godfather of Agile” and they reminisce about:
Anita Sengupta’s YOW! Hong Kong keynote “The Future of Mars Exploration“
Akin’s Rules of Spacecraft Design – “don’t mess it up, there are people involved”
Nigel Dalton’s YOW! Hong Kong talk “Agile is the Last Thing You Need“
The two early experiments of Agile in Australia – Lonely Planet and Suncorp
The success of the REA technology teams today was the move into multidisciplinary teams where the influence comes from product – it was a difficult decision and chaos at the time
John Sullivan’s YOW! Hong Kong talk “A Presentation to Myself on Organisational Agile Transformations“
ANZ is disrupting the power base of senior management – Shayne Elliott video about their way of working and Bluenotes podcasts, inspired by ING
The wish for REA is for new hires turn up and say they came to work here “because I heard the managers are awesome”
Google Project Aristotle brought honour back to the role of manager
“The Mythical Man Month” – Frederick P. Brooks
Love Spotify for their humility, honesty and contribution to the industry, their high impact video series, “if you had a music streaming startup that was well funded based in New York and Stockholm with 700 people, then the Spotify model is perfect… If you don’t, you need to think about that for yourself.”
Data debt is going to be a huge issue in the future
Mark Hibberd’s YOW! Hong Kong talk “Lake, Swamp or Puddle: Data Quality at Scale“
REA solved scaled prioritisation across lines of business works via a product council that meets monthly, they prioritise the work and re-allocate teams
Guilds are an internal meetup, taking a senior level interest by turning up and sponsoring a small budget ($2,000) for pizza or to bring in speakers is essential for success
Building architecture is a hot topic – open plan versus the Fog Creek “office for every engineer” – have found that you need overhear the conversations as everything moves so rapidly, had to sacrifice flexible work spaces as the number of employees grew
It’s interesting to see how some of the early Agile success stories have declined – have a change in leadership and the organisation changes
“Change the habits and change the work process and you get culture change for free” – Deming
The REA culture is likely to survive a change in leadership because the ownership of the way of working has been spread to all areas of the business and people get tech
Transformation doesn’t happen overnight – REA is 5 years in and probably 20% of the way
“The Machine That Changed The World” blew the lid on the Toyota culture – Jim Womack reflected recently that he really wanted work and workplaces to be better
Reflected on why it was so hard to get meetups happening in the new REA Melbourne building and realised that no other professions have meetups, it’s a differentiator of working in tech, a healthy community of free sharing
“Extreme Programming Explained” – many of the early adopters were inspired by this book
Blend of Lean systems thinking and Agile is likely to come back around again – we need to cross the streams
The Agilista frameworks methodologies like Kanban, Scrum, SAFe will become LeSS important #dadjokes
Starting to get comfortable about having conversations about productivity – immense gain to be had across the whole flow
John Shook – “Learning to See: Value Stream Mapping” – need the technical brains to read that book
Diversity and Inclusion is the solution to the shortfall of people working in tech
Sir John Bagot Glubb – “The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival” – it explains everything!
It’s time for Australia to double down on science
How do we make our biggest companies be more innovative?
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TheAgileRevolution-159 (49 minutes)
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50min
February 11, 2019Episode 158: Jugaad Agility with Naresh Jain
Craig is at YOW! Lambda Jam in Sydney and speaks with Naresh Jain, co-founder of the Agile Software Community of India (organising body of Agile India), conference organiser of many other software conferences in India and creator of ConfEngine and they chat about:
The original Test Infected article
Cruise Control started as an idea to write a cron job to check out code, compile and run tests
Without good processes and tools the individuals and interactions become much harder
Agile India conference – running since 2005, one of the earliest Agile conferences
Agile is a given way to do things, but we are still not seeing the benefits – need to build capability in user first / product thinking, need autonomy to deliver end-to-end customer value (startups within a startup), need to build a learning culture and expert people / craftsmanship and need to focus on continuous delivery
Modern Agile (and Naresh’s input into the original article)
Indian Agile community – a lot of interesting work happening in the FinTech space and startup in spaces such as health and messaging, a move towards innovation centres from cost centres
YOW! West talk “Setting up Continuous Delivery Pipeline for a Large-Scale Mobile App“
Code is a liability, need to focus on the problem we are trying to solve rather than perfect code or an over-complicated safety net, allows you to throw away code more easily, frequently and willingly
Testing through dogfooding – want to be able to fix things faster rather than safeguard and guess what might break
As thought leaders it is our responsibility to challenge our own beliefs, otherwise we stagnate
Agility is how you think about the situation around you and be opportunistic about it
What is the least I can do to make some progress today – Indian word Jugaad (get away with it)
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TheAgileRevolution-158 (53 minutes)
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54min
February 02, 2019Episode 157: Transforming the UK Government Digital Service with James Stewart
Craig is at YOW! West in Perth and has a conversation with James Stewart, formerly Deputy CTO for the UK Government and co-founder of the Government Digital Service. In varying locations they talk about:
YOW! West keynote “Lessons Learned as a Government CTO“
UK government had some large IT failures in the last like the NHS National Program for IT (12 billion pound failure), but now lots of successes like Spine 2
Agile techniques have been successful in the UK government not just because other approaches have failed so badly but the cost of an IT project is only a fraction of the overall cost of a system
The Government Design Principles – start with user needs – successful projects start with clearly articulated principles, did not realise how much they would resonate
Worked around a number of government process early on, support from the Minister and investing time to find allies was essential
Design Principle posters – essential to invest in presentation, help people feel involved
Were never dogmatic about flavours of Agile, this presented challenges with vendors – can you make changes quickly, can you ship software faster, have you thought about quality?
The problem is not scaling frameworks, it’s that you tried to start big – need to start with a small team and seed the trust
Tackled the financials with the spending control process and an Agile business case (based around progressive funding) and align spending around Discovery, Alpha, Beta and Live stages and approval for later stages comes from what you have learnt from the previous stage
Genuine leadership requires openness – be self reflective, clearly articulate values and principles, the biggest risks you are concerned about and the outcomes you wish to achieve – then build trust with the team to achieve this
The strategy is delivery
Don’t start until somebody can express an outcome – once they do, turn something around quickly
Digital By Default Service Manual – good place to start, how to do delivery
UK Government Technology Code of Practice – underpinning of spending controls
https://theagilerevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/theagilerevolution-157.mp3
TheAgileRevolution-157 (43 minutes)
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44min
January 16, 2019Episode 156: LAST 2018 Brisbane Vox Pop
Craig and Tony are at LAST Brisbane 2018 in their home town of Brisbane and wander the lunch hall speaking with members from the local Agile community:
Craig and Tony’s keynote
Frank Valks, Paul Thornton and Felix Kiefer from AginicDS – the state of Agile in Brisbane versus the UK, James Hayes and Shannon Russell talk “Agile in Education: How agile is empowering teachers and principles in the Northern Territory“, there is no one recipe for Agility (start with a framework and adjust) and Agile BI
Ed Wong, co-founder of LAST Conference – the inspiration behind LAST Conference and the 10th anniversary of the Melbourne Agile and Scrum User Group and the challenge of getting more people to talk about Agility
Shannon Russell from the Department of Education Northern Territory – the state of the Northern Territory Agile community is small and growing, mainly around government initiatives, conference talk with James Hayes, Craig’s talk in Darwin “40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes“
Sarah Pollard from Tabcorp – Rytan Gribble’s talk “Levelling up from 1P to Co-op mode!“, Agile HR and Gantt charts!
Mervin Chiang from Procensol and Sharon Loder from Crime and Corruption Commission Queensland – Craig’s In Conversations interview with Mervin, the challenges of educating Agile upwards, their LAST talk “Business Agility – How do we bridge the gap when business wants to “go agile”“
Hayley Pepper and the crew from Sunsuper – trying new ideas and being open to failure, fixing the faux agile and agile in superannuation
Renae Craven from Innodev – the challenges of getting executives to understand Agile and change their behaviour, Renae’s LAST talk “10 ways to end up in the Agile Transformation Doghouse“
Being thrown into the deep end of Product Ownership and Agile, Nhia Chang’s talk “Practice what you preach“
Bernadette Greenock from Integral Technology Solutions and Priya Chander from Suncorp – good to know that people in the community experience similar issues
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TheAgileRevolution-156 (36 minutes)
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37min
January 09, 2019Episode 155: Continuous Delivery Culture at Pushpay with Ian Randall
Craig is at YOW! West in Perth and sits down with Ian Randall, Engineering Lead at Pushpay and co-organiser of the Codemania conference in New Zealand and they chat about:
The size of the New Zealand banking system and small number of banks makes it very easy to innovate in the payments space
YOW! West talk “From Inception to Production – A Continuous Delivery Story“
The more times you the do the things that are hard and hurt, opens up the opportunities for automation
Blameless Retrospective (John Allspaw, Etsy, 2012) – promise that there will be no retribution or consequence for decisions that anybody made during an incident, they made the best decisions that they knew at the time, they were operating in a system that allowed you to make that system in the moment – therefore means that people are not afraid to make decisions because they know they are not held to blame for making a mistake
Sidney Dekker “Just Culture“
5 Whys – don’t ask why until you reach the root cause analysis, because there are often moire contributing factors and also when you ask why you end up with who (which is blame)
WOMing – ensure it works on my machine before it leaves your laptop
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TheAgileRevolution-155 (19 minutes)
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20min

FAQs about The Agile Revolution:

How many episodes does The Agile Revolution have?

The podcast currently has 259 episodes available.