Agile-Lean Ireland (ALI) Podcast

Distilled from the brand new Scrum Anti-patterns Guide, Stefan Wolpers highlights the top twelve Agile anti-patterns jeopardizing project success. Join for a journey through common pitfalls like precise estimates, dogmatism, oversized backlogs, and the illusion of autonomy, and learn actionable insights for overcoming these challenges. Stefan Wolpers Speaker bio: Embarking on a Scrum career unintentionally in 2006, Stefan was initiated as a Scrum Master for a small German startup. Lacking initial knowledge but employing careful observation, note-taking, and dialogue, the author embraced the role and learned from the team’s experiences. Eighteen years into his Scrum journey, Stefan maintains an unwavering appetite for learning, humbled by the vast knowledge shared within the agile community. Recognizing newcomers’ overwhelming challenges in this field due to scarce formal education, he aspires to provide guidance, emphasizing a pragmatic, common-sense approach grounded in observing human interaction and collaboration. Since 2019, Stefan has served as a Professional Scrum Trainer for Scrum.org. Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Product owners often struggle to translate their big ideas into small user stories that the team can deliver in a sprint. When a user story is too big, it is harder to understand, estimate, and implement successfully. Some teams break the ‘business story’ into ‘technical stories’ but this doesn’t solve the problem because most or all of the technical stories need to be completed before there is anything meaningful for the stakeholders. This session will teach you 4 simple, yet powerful techniques to break big stories into smaller stories that are meaningful to stakeholders and deliver business value. About Chris Sims Chris Sims is a certified scrum trainer, agile coach, and recovering C++ developer who helps organizations improve their productivity and happiness. Chris is the founder and product owner of Agile Learning Labs and the co-author of two best-selling scrum books: The Elements of Scrum and Scrum: a Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction. More of their writing can be found on the Agile Learning Labs blog. Before starting Agile Learning Labs in 2007, Chris made a living in roles such as: scrum master, product owner, engineering manager, project manager, software engineer, musician, and auto mechanic. Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Gavin, a seasoned leader with 18 years of experience spearheading medical device development projects. Currently serving as the CTO at Bluedrop Medical, a cutting-edge start-up focused on revolutionizing healthcare, Gavin is at the forefront of developing an innovative solution to monitor the early signs of diabetic foot ulcers. Gavin's wealth of experience extends beyond Bluedrop Medical. As the former CTO of VASGARD Medical, a start-up specialized in electronic wound devices, and a former editor at Medgadget, Gavin brings a diverse perspective to the intersection of technology and healthcare. Gavin’s talk is titled “Incubating an agile organisation”. The talk provides an overview of how Bluedrop Medical have leveraged a team-oriented culture to evolve a growing agile organization. It illustrates how a relatively small organization effectively manages a variety of disparate programs across compliance, software development, systems engineering, manufacturing and fundamental research. Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Eric, a distinguished Army veteran whose remarkable career journey, beginning at West Point and culminating in brigade command in Army recruiting, has been characterized by leadership excellence. Eric's military service includes being the honour graduate of the Army Ranger School, leading infantry company and battalion commands in Afghanistan, and instilling a passion for developing leaders. In 2020, driven by his commitment to leadership development, Eric founded Arrowhead Leadership Consulting. His love for building relationships and nurturing personal and professional growth in leaders is at the core of Arrowhead's vision and values. Eric's goal is clear: to impact lives by empowering individuals to become better leaders. You can discover Eric's insights and leadership wisdom on his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@lopezonleadership1962 Eric’s talk “Mission Command 2.0" delves into the evolution of leadership philosophy within the army. Eric explores the necessity of modernizing the mission command leadership philosophy to align with the emotional intelligence paradigm and address the needs of new generations. Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Live music, parodies, and Agile. This is not your usual talk. In this wild mix of ingredients, we will explore together some very common challenges in the Agile world. How? From the perspective of a Scrum Master who is embarking on a wild journey, full of ups and downs, making mistakes and learning throughout the path. About the parodies? They will set the tone (pun intended) of each step of this journey. Fasten your seat belts and enjoy the ride in this mad session. This will be energetic, funny, and relevant. Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Join Fred Deichler as he recounts his transformative journey from Development Manager to Agile Coach, guided by a set of crucial competencies. Through the lens of the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel, Fred will demonstrate how these competencies align with common roles in the Agile landscape today. This interactive session will delve into key aspects of the 21 competencies, covering areas like Self Mastery, Foundational Skills, and Mindsets, among others. Learn how to create your own Growth Wheel and chart a focused path for your career development. Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

In the realm of team dynamics, understanding behavioural preference is paramount. Enter the world of personality colours: Red, Blue, Yellow, and Green. Each color provides a lens to view not just individual motivations and strengths, but also how they interplay in a team setting. Red personalities, with their assertiveness and drive, often lead the charge, setting the pace and direction. They thrive on challenges and are quick decision-makers. Blue personalities, meticulous and thoughtful, ensure that every detail is considered, making them invaluable in planning and execution phases. Their analytical nature complements the Reds by providing depth and structure. Yellow personalities infuse teams with creativity and enthusiasm. Their adaptability and spontaneous nature can spark innovation, making them crucial during brainstorming sessions or when a fresh perspective is needed. Meanwhile, Green personalities, with their nurturing and harmonious nature, play the role of team glue. They ensure cohesion, mediate conflicts, and provide the emotional support that teams often need during stressful times. We all have all four energies within us, simply in different orders of preference. By recognizing and valuing these colour personalities, teams can optimize collaboration. Leaders can assign roles that play to each member's strengths, ensuring not just task completion, but also team harmony. This talk will delve into the practical applications of personality colours in team settings, offering insights on building resilient, harmonious, and high-performing teams through the power of understanding. Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

The biggest challenge for anyone leading Agile change (or any change) is to successfully transform culture and change human behaviour, enabling team members to learn more efficient ways of working and collaborating so that they can deliver business value and ROI earlier. This is where managers and agile leaders may be missing a vital component... working on building their core coaching skills and competencies. Many people mistakenly believe that coaching is all about giving instruction, guidance, telling people what to do. That can be useful sometimes, but it doesn't encourage team members to be more self-sufficient, to problem-solve for themselves, to have more agency and empowerment when it comes to how they work. This is where real coaching can help. Join us for an interactive session to get a taste of the top 3 coaching skills that can help you become a more impactful leader and maximise your influence.... to ensure there's clarity, commitment and accountability. Whether you're a leader or team member, you'll take away some practical tips for having more impactful conversations with your colleagues and clients - and who doesn't want that?! Aimed at: Project & Programme Managers, Agile Leaders & Coaches, Agile Team members Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

In this enlightening episode of ALI shorts, inspired by Josh Seiden's acclaimed article, we embark on a metaphorical journey through a vast forest. Using the allegory of individual trees representing outputs and the entire forest signifying outcomes, we challenge listeners to consider the broader, interconnected impact of their efforts. Drawing parallels between planting a single tree and introducing a new business feature, we stress the importance of understanding and measuring the true value of our contributions. Beyond mere deliverables, the episode underscores the significance of holistic growth, sustainability, and adaptability in today's dynamic business landscape. Join us as we reflect on the question: Are we merely planting trees, or are we nurturing an entire forest? Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

In this episode of ALI Shorts, we dive deep into the world of agile HR practices. HR managers and leaders are facing a rapidly changing talent landscape, much like navigating through turbulent waters. Our host guides you through specific actions that HR managers can take to implement agile recruitment solutions. Imagine a river of skill demands, with unpredictable twists and turns. By 2030, 85% of today's jobs will be entirely new. To successfully navigate this dynamic terrain, HR managers must cultivate an agile culture within their organization, invest in cutting-edge technology, tailor recruitment models, integrate tech effectively, and balance it with personalized training. Discover how HR managers can enhance the candidate experience through AI-enabled applicant tracking systems and create structured roadmaps for technology adoption. Learn how fostering an agile learning culture and building high-touch relationships can help your organization thrive in the ever-evolving talent landscape. Tune in to this episode for actionable insights that will empower HR managers to steer their recruitment efforts in the right direction and adapt to the changing currents of the job market. Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Welcome to "ALI Shorts: Your Agile Art Gallery of Tech Transformation." In this episode, we step into the future of tech-powered artistry, envisioning a dynamic gallery where UI/UX and AI choreograph a mesmerizing dance of innovation. Picture a realm where AI breathes life into UI/UX, offering immersive experiences through VR and AR, transforming user engagement. Discover a world where AI animations and interactive characters respond to emotions, painting a truly alive digital experience. The future unfolds with voice commands, gestures, and seamless interactions, orchestrated by AI, akin to evolving art techniques. However, mastering this AI artistry requires continuous learning and adaptation, as designers refine their craft to create technological masterpieces. Join us as we embrace the evolving canvas of user experience, painting it with the bold strokes of AI-powered creativity in this vibrant digital gallery of tomorrow. Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Welcome to ALI Shorts, where we unravel the symphony of Artificial Intelligence in the orchestra of modern enterprise. In this episode, we explore the convergence of AI and IT operations through the powerful conductor, AIOps. AIOps, or Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations, is akin to the master conductor of a grand orchestra. It integrates AI, analytics, and machine learning to harmonize and optimize IT processes, ensuring a seamless performance. Imagine your enterprise as a musical masterpiece. The Agile methodology and Agile coaches act as the maestros, refining each section to adapt swiftly to changing notes. And AIOps? It's the conductor, synchronizing the orchestra, bringing order to the complexity. Through AIOps, businesses can automate event monitoring, ingest and analyze vast data streams, and filter out the noise, ensuring only the most relevant data is utilized. It's like conducting a seamless performance amidst a vast orchestra of IT processes. Join us as we dive deeper into this digital symphony. Stay tuned for more episodes where we explore the ever-evolving landscape of AI and its profound impact on enterprises. Until next time, keep orchestrating and embracing the agility of the digital melody. Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Welcome to "ALI Shorts," where we delve into the Agile landscape, navigating its complexities to unearth valuable insights. In this episode, we're setting our sights on user-story mapping, a potent tool for Agile teams. Traditional product development often feels like a dense forest of business documents, lacking a clear route. But fear not, user-story mapping is the Agile team's GPS through this wilderness. It offers a lightweight alternative to chart a digital product's interactions, akin to a GPS guiding through uncharted terrain. User-story mapping, also known as story maps, operates as our GPS in the Agile wilderness. This lean UX-mapping method employs sticky notes and sketches to plot the course users take within a digital product. Much like a GPS segments a journey, a user-story map segments a product's journey into activities, steps, and details. These represent high-level tasks, subtasks, and the nitty-gritty interactions, respectively. In the Agile world, user stories are our navigation waypoints. They describe features or tasks from the user's perspective, aiding efficient navigation. User-story mapping transforms these waypoints into a navigational route, allowing teams to discuss and elaborate on them, eventually adding them to the product backlog. Creating a user-story map is akin to planning a group road trip, a collaborative effort essential to ensure a smooth journey. It's about establishing context and constructing the map using physical or digital tools, assigning distinct colors for visual clarity. User-story mapping vs. customer-journey mapping offers distinct perspectives, focusing on the product and user, respectively. While they complement each other, they serve different navigational purposes, enabling Agile teams to choose the right tool for their specific journey. With user-story maps as our reliable GPS, we can embark on our Agile journey with confidence. They improve collaboration, aid backlog creation, guide minimum-viable-product slicing, and identify risky assumptions. User-story maps are the trusted GPS in the Agile wilderness, encouraging user-centered discussions and efficient prioritization. Thank you for joining us on this journey through the Agile landscape, exploring the power of user-story mapping. Just like a well-calibrated GPS, user-story mapping guides Agile teams through product development, ensuring a smooth and efficient journey. Until next time, keep mapping those stories and navigating towards success in the Agile wilderness. Stay Agile, stay innovative! Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Lean Inception is a framework that combines Design Thinking and Lean Startup, helping teams and organisations have breakthrough thinking and finding the MVP (Minimum Viable Product), to validate a hypothesis and be lean and fast on product development. It supports bringing people together, aligning their thoughts and understanding the problem that needs to be resolved. In this talk, I will cover the core of the methodology and why it has been so important to her and her customers, while building products. Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Let’s not fool ourselves, leading a business in today’s world is highly complex. The rate of change is exponential and this will more than likely only speed up. The world we operate in is complex with known unknowns as well as unknown unknowns. We are still extricating ourselves from the COVID-19 pandemic and now we are dealing with Russian invasion of Ukraine which is having an impact globally e.g. the price of fuel and power skyrocketing. Add into that mix the global supply chain challenges, global warming, extremism, nationalism, etc. and you have a perfect storm of uncertainty that leaders need to navigate their organisations through. To be successful in this world, organisations need to anticipate and adapt to change, learn and pivot and deliver at speed. Not only do they face the challenges highlighted above, in most organisations they also face employing outdated management techniques, growing talent shortages, broken value chains, inflexible operating models, etc. The changes in how we managed organisations has only changed logarithmically and is not a great deal different to how we managed 30 years ago, when the world we operated in was a different place. We have seen the rise of new ways of working and they have definitely assisted in modernising management practices. One only has to consider how many organisations have embraced agile to realise that we are trying new ways to keep up with the rate of change. There are challenges though, including still believing that there is a one-size fits all model for organising the work in the organisation; still using the thinking of the past to address the challenges of now; embracing ERP systems that limit our ability to be flexible; believing that automation is the panacea for success, etc. So how do we address these challenges in this highly complex world? I read and research a great deal and I could not find holistic solutions that addressed the challenges faced. I thus, together with my colleagues at Be Agile, developed The Elastic Organisation™ thinking framework. At its core, The Elastic Organisation™ enables an organisation to build a solid architecture designed to deliver optimum value to its customers, shareholders, employees and community. Whilst this architecture is solid enough to stand up to the rigours of operating in this complex world, it is also flexible enough to confidently meet any significant challenges that it will encounter such as COVID-19. Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

In this episode of "Agile Shorts," we join the thrilling relay race of Agile and DhevOps. Picture them as the dynamic duo of software development relay racing, passing the baton seamlessly. Agile sprints ahead, aligning products with customer needs, while DhevOps supports, promoting collaboration between development and IT operations. This synergy, known as Agile DhevOps, is like a relay team sprinting together to deliver value to customers faster. Discover how these runners, with distinct goals, create a perfect relay team, emphasizing testing and automation for stability. They draw inspiration from Lean philosophies, standardize communication, and enhance collaboration for improved product releases and higher customer satisfaction. Join us in exploring the relay race benefits and challenges of integrating Agile and DhevOps, and how this trend is transforming businesses. Stay tuned for more relay race insights in the world of Agile and DhevOps integration on "Agile Shorts." Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

In this episode, we dive deep into the lush and vibrant world of "The Blooming Garden of Opportunity." We explore the concept of a growth mindset through the enchanting analogy of gardening, revealing how nurturing this mindset can lead to bountiful personal and organizational growth. Join us as we plow through misconceptions, weed out fixed-mindset triggers, and provide the essential gardening tools to cultivate a mindset that truly blossoms. Tune in to discover the secrets of cultivating a thriving garden of opportunity in your life and work. Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

In this episode, we're diving into the art of prioritising product projects using the RICE framework. Imagine your product ideas as delectable dishes on a menu, each with its own flavor and appeal. Join us as we explore how to assess the reach, impact, confidence, and effort of your product initiatives, just like choosing the perfect dish from a restaurant menu. Discover the secret recipe to serving up successful projects that leave your customers craving for more. Whether you're a seasoned product manager or just getting started, this episode will help you make informed decisions and create a roadmap that satisfies all your stakeholders' appetites. Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Welcome to another episode of ALI Shorts, where we simplify Agile concepts. Today, we're exploring Value Stream Mapping. Imagine it as optimizing your Agile process like perfecting a recipe. Just like cooking, you identify bottlenecks in your process and make it more efficient. This ensures value delivery to customers is faster. So, whether in your kitchen or at work, Value Stream Mapping is your recipe for success. Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

As we all settle into the post-Covid era, it's clear that working from home, or WFH, has transformed into a marathon of endurance and adaptability. We'll discuss how employees are seeking the autonomy and flexibility that come with WFH and how organizations are embracing this marathon to attract top talent and avoid the pitfalls of the Turnover Tsunami and The Great Resignation. But how does this remote work marathon truly impact an employee's ability to perform effectively? Join us as we uncover the twists and turns in this journey. We'll share insights from Microsoft's experiment, which dove deep into the causal relationship between remote work and collaboration practices. Discover how remote work has changed the way employees interact, and why this marathon can be a challenge for organizations aiming to foster innovation. In this marathon, we'll also find solutions in intentional design, such as 'virtual water cooler' events. These informal, synchronous pit stops offer a refreshing break in the marathon of Zoom meetings and enhance collaboration without the fatigue of traditional meetings. We'll explore how HR professionals can play a role in orchestrating these pit stops, ensuring that the marathon of remote work remains balanced and innovative. So, lace up your running shoes and join us as we navigate the marathon of remote work, discovering the importance of endurance, balance, and collaboration in this evolving landscape. Don't forget to subscribe and share this episode with your fellow marathoners (colleagues) as we continue this exciting journey into the future of work. Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org