Troubleshooting Agile

This week on Troubleshooting Agile, we revisit one of our “Greatest Hits”

In this episode, we start describing our favourite trust-building technique: the Ladder of Inference. Our take this week is on using the Ladder to understand someone else's reasoning and align your stories, creating trust as a foundation for further improvement in your agile team. Surprisingly, the experience of using the Ladder in this way is similar to Test-Driven Development: careful, understandable, small steps with confidence, and meaningful signals from both success and failure.

SHOW LINKS:

- Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B003ELY7OW/re…ding=UTF8&btkr=1

- The Ladder of Inference (annotated by Jeffrey): troubleshootingagile.com/docs/TheLadd…nference.pdf

- Cognitive biases book and more: youarenotsosmart.com/

- Schwarz on unilateral control (again!): www.schwarzassociates.com/managing-per…tionships-2/

- TDD for people video: www.douglassquirrel.com/how-i-work.html

- Schwarz 8 behaviours (Paula/Ted are on page 4): www.csu.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf…arter-Teams-2.pdf

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Our book, Agile Conversations, is out now! See agileconversations.com where you can order your copy and get a free video when you join our mailing list!

We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show.

Email us at [email protected]

A listener asks, "how will we know it's working?" when considering changes of process or technology. Jeffrey and Squirrel discuss how to set "imperfect indicators" to measure your progress—or lack thereof!—along the J-shaped curve that takes you through learning to improvement.

SHOW LINKS:

- Tic-Tac Change: https://blog.jeffreyfredrick.com/2008/07/07/tic-tac-change-slides/

- J-Curve episode: https://soundcloud.com/troubleshootingagile/a-tale-of-two-change-models-part-ii-getting-better-by-getting-worse

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Our book, Agile Conversations, is out now! See https://agileconversations.com where you can order your copy and get a free video when you join our mailing list!

We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show.

Email us at [email protected]

Jeffrey remarks that he's working with a software team whose code is "done", that is, the organisation wants to keep using it but doesn't want to invest more in changing it. He and Squirrel reflect on when this make sense and how "software doneness" affects processes and measurements.

SHOW LINKS:

- Control Chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_chart

- Principles of Product Development Flow: https://www.pdma.org/page/review_principles_pr

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Our book, Agile Conversations, is out now! See https://agileconversations.com where you can order your copy and get a free video when you join our mailing list!

We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show.

Email us at [email protected]

It is easy to see our dominant organizational structure of teams divided by roles as natural. But Jon Smart, author of the book Sooner, Safer, Happier, points out that this goes against 1.9 million years of evolution. In this podcast Jon and Jeffrey discuss the link between the outcomes we’re getting and how we organize, and thus how changing our organization can change incentives, which in turn shape behaviors to get us better outcomes. Recorded live at DevOps Enterprise Summit 2022 in Las Vegas.

SHOW LINKS:

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathansmart/

- https://soonersaferhappier.com

- Dr Ron Westrum: A typology of organisational cultures: https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/qhc/13/suppl_2/ii22.full.pdf

- NUMMI : This American Life: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/403/nummi-2010

Do you find the yourself constantly fighting for making even small improvements? Randy Shoup has a way to avoid such “nickel and dime” conversations: agree with your peers on an innovation budget. In this episode Randy Shoup and Jeffrey discuss why these strategic conversations require learning how to speak executive, and why new engineering leaders often struggle to live up to their role in these conversations. Recorded live at DevOps Enterprise Summit 2022 in Las Vegas.

SHOW LINKS:

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/randyshoup/

- Twitter: https://twitter.com/randyshoup

- Communicating Effectively with Your Business Partners (video): https://www.infoq.com/presentations/communication-business-partners/

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Our book, Agile Conversations, is out now! See https://agileconversations.com where you can order your copy and get a free video when you join our mailing list!

We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show.

Email us at [email protected]

Dominica Degrandis is an expert on flow and helping companies get the benefits of using flow metrics to make systemic improvements. What does she find as the biggest obstacle to success? A proper investment in change. In this conversation Jeffrey and Dominica talk about the importance of a daily change budget, time you’d expect people to be working in the new way, with some advice for both leaders and practitioners. Recorded live at DevOps Enterprise Summit 2022 in Las Vegas.

SHOW LINKS:

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominicadeg/

- Dominica Degrandis: https://ddegrandis.com

- Making Work Visible, 2nd Edition: https://itrevolution.com/making-work-visible-by-dominica-degrandis/

- Dominica Degranids past episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/troubleshooting-agile/id1327456890?i=1000458010204

- Donald Reinertsen Principles of Product Development Flow: http://reinertsenassociates.com/books/

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Our book, Agile Conversations, is out now! See https://agileconversations.com where you can order your copy and get a free video when you join our mailing list!

We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show.

Email us at [email protected]

Audit, compliance, security, and governance: these words all carry the heavy weight of bureaucracy, the feeling of a burden to be overcome. In the recently published learning novel Investments Unlimited Bill Bensing and coauthors introduce the idea of automated governance, and in this conversation Bill and Jeffrey explore the difference between “governance theater”, automating away bullshit, and acting to get the real benefit.

SHOW LINKS:

- Investments Unlimited: https://itrevolution.com/investments-unlimited-book/

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billbensing/

- Twitter: https://twitter.com/BillBensing

- Bill Bensing: https://billbensing.com

- Jon Willis part 1: https://soundcloud.com/troubleshootingagile/john-willis-on-devops-past-present-and-future

- Jon Willis part 2: https://soundcloud.com/troubleshootingagile/john-willis-devops-past-present-future-part2

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Our book, Agile Conversations, is out now! See https://agileconversations.com where you can order your copy and get a free video when you join our mailing list!

We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show.

Email us at [email protected]

If you want to create a “value flywheel” where success breeds success, you need to start with clarity of purpose. Join Jeffrey and his guest David Anderson to learn how David uses the technique of Wardley Mapping to generate shared understanding. But don’t make the mistake of thinking the map is the point! David says throwing away the map is just as important as creating it in the first place.

SHOW LINKS:

- The Value Flywheel Effect: https://itrevolution.com/the-value-flywheel-effect/

- David Anderson @ The Serverless Edge: https://theserverlessedge.com

- Twitter: https://twitter.com/ServerlessEdge

- Wardley Mapping: https://learnwardleymapping.com

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Our book, Agile Conversations, is out now! See https://agileconversations.com where you can order your copy and get a free video when you join our mailing list!

We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show.

Email us at [email protected]

Want to know the agenda? We aren’t going to tell you! Join Jeffrey with guests Pascal Dufour & Ronald Doelen to talk about how the “tilted slider” applies to meetings just as much as other software development process. Recorded live at CITCON.

SHOW LINKS:

- Pascal Dufour: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pascaldufournl/

- Ronald Doelen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rdoelen/

- Episode: Tilted Slider: https://agileconversations.com/blog/dont-add-more-metrics/

- Open Space: https://citconf.com/openspace.php

- Lean Coffee: http://leancoffee.org

- Liberating Structures: TRIZ: https://www.liberatingstructures.com/6-making-space-with-triz/

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Our book, Agile Conversations, is out now! See https://agileconversations.com where you can order your copy and get a free video when you join our mailing list!

We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show.

Email us at [email protected]

Following last week's debate, Squirrel and Jeffrey share their different takes on the value of having estimated a tech team's planned work when it comes to a retrospective at the end of a cycle, like a sprint or a quarter: Jeffrey sees that checking what the team achieved against what they planned can lead to important lessons about dependencies, inefficiencies, and skills gaps, while Squirrel thinks the risk of the estimates "escaping" is too high, and that the team ought to be able to notice process failings as they go without the "crutch" of estimates.

SHOW LINKS:

- LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/dsquirrel_my-friends-at-cto-craft-are-45-right-about-activity-6983761206993899522-raHE

- Squirrel Tweet: https://twitter.com/douglassquirrel/status/1578315480472985602

- You’re Not So Smart : https://www.davidmcraney.com/new-page-1

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Our book, Agile Conversations, is out now! See https://agileconversations.com where you can order your copy and get a free video when you join our mailing list!

We'd love to hear any thoughts, ideas, or feedback you have about the show.

Email us at [email protected]