Interview with David Parker

Episode 46 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Stephen Parry (@LeanVoices), Managing Director of The Sense and Adapt Academy and author of the pivotal book, Sense and Respond (2005). Based out of the UK, Stephen has decades of experience helping organizations actually transform (go beyond an existing form) rather than just improve. He tells an amazing story about how he helped Fujitsu win a 10-year contract with a major airline, beating huge competitors, by focusing on business value rather than what the customer requested. Stephen describes how many organizations get stuck focusing on improving and fail to fundamentally change the organization by changing how the organization changes. He describes what Sense and Respond really means and why he changed the name to Sense and Adapt. Learn more about Stephen at https://www.lloydparry.com and http://leanvoices.com.

Episode 45 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Esther Derby, CEO of Esther Derby Associates, and the author of Behind Closed Doors, Agile Retrospectives and 7 Rules for Positive, Productive Change. Esther explains how well-intentioned management often achieves superficial change by rolling out packaged processes on top of existing organizational structures and management policies. She describes how micro changes offer a better starting point. Esther asks her clients questions that identify what exactly is contributing to negative patterns, and in turn exposes the system to the system. Her questions inspire people to naturally begin making improvements, a “change by attraction” approach, in which people are attracted to change rather than being forced into it. She points out how change rarely happens when people feel "downstatused" or defensive or when change is demanded via coercive or positional power. Micro-shifts are an alternative to “extreme disruption” and while some may think they are slow, Esther finds that such changes are the most effective way to achieve big results.

Episode 44 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Jeff “Cheezy” Morgan, a veteran agilist, lean practitioner, DevOps leader and co-founder of Industrial Logic Canada. Jeff describes the fabulous Lean/DevOps transformation he’s led with teams in a conservative Canadian bank. The teams used to only do 4-5 deployments per year. They now do 4-5 deployments per day! The teams used Scrum and had many QA people to help test software. Through Cheezy’s work, they eliminated all QA staff, got rid of all ScrumMasters and switched to a lightweight, Kanban approach. Cheezy describes the agility of his teams as they’ve had to release emergency features related to the Canadian government’s response to COVID-19. Allowing individuals who badly need money to survive during the crises to use a direct deposit service, rather than waiting for a check in the mail, is an example of a feature that Cheezy’s teams were able to get into production within 2-3 days of getting the requirements. This Lean/DevOps work has dramatically reduced the time from Concept to Cash, a particularly important metric during a pandemic. The improvements have also allowed the business to perform hundreds of feature experiments in production, gather data from those experiments and make better decisions about what will most help users. Cheezy discusses how risky traditional deployment is for most organizations and how modern practices reduce so much of the risk. Cheezy describes the technical safety his teams have put in place to allow for safe, continuous delivery of value to production. Finally, Cheezy describes how he’s been educating remote technical teams via effective, online training, with the help of Industrial Logic’s Agile eLearning.

Episode 43 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Maaret Pyhäjärvi (@maaretp), a Lead Quality Engineer at FSecure, an agile practitioner and the author of Strong Style Pair Programming, Mob Programming Guidebook and Exploratory Testing. Maaret describes the culture at FSecure and the benefits her team discovered when they experimented with removing the Product Owner from their team (though there is still a Product Management group in the company). Her team found that the benefits included far greater productivity, solving problems they hadn’t managed to solve in years and becoming far more data-driven. Maaret describes the “superpower” have having a “feature team” that works across three different technical stacks, and how #NoProductOwner, #NoEstimates and #NoJira are working nicely. She describes how her teams have shortened releases from every six months to every two weeks. Maaret’s team runs about 300,000 automated tests everyday on 14,000 virtual machines. Only a few of the FSecure developers use Test-Driven Development. The company also got rid of all Scrum Masters during a resizing. Coaching happens, yet it’s not an official title. Maaret is a fan of the Modern Agile principles and uses them in her work. You can learn more about Maaret and her work at https://maaretp.com/

Episode 42 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Ellen Gottesdiener, CEO of EBG Consulting (ebgconsulting.com) and the author of Discover to Deliver and Requirements by Collaboration. Ellen, an expert in product management and agile development, begins by noting that many agile teams pay more attention to user stories than to product discovery. They become optimized to deliver the wrong things faster rather than learning to cycle efficiently between discovery and delivery. Ellen talks about the importance of being product-led (not project-led) and customer-focused. She discusses the problems of having product management “throw requirements over the wall” to delivery people, rather than functioning as one, cross-functional team. Ellen believes that the agile community tends to miss the point on product management and that has caused a rift with the product management community and all of their strategic, non-tactical, work. Ellen describes her model for collaborative engagements, which she calls the 6Ps: Purpose, Participants, Place, Products, Principles and Process. Ellen describes her work as combining the principles of agile with the discipline of product management.

Episode 41 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Rich Sheridan (@menloprez), president of Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, Michigan and the author of Joy, Inc. and Chief Joy Officer. Rich describes some of the lessons he learned from the innovative entrepreneurs who run Zingermann’s Deli as well as the book, The Great Game Of Business. Such learnings include open book finance, great customer service, how to take care of people and how to collaborate with others in every aspect of a business. Rich describes his company’s mission, which is to end human suffering in the world as it relates to technology. He compares the work of human systems to flying an airplane, including the “lift” of human energy, the “thrust” of a purpose-driven mission to pull people forward, limiting the “weight” of bureaucracy and the “drag” of fear. We discuss the difference between how the Wright Brothers learned to fly as compared to the failed experiments of the well-funded, celebrated scientist and secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, Samuel Langley. Rich talks about how he created his company after first experiencing his “personal trough of disillusionment” during an earlier part of his career. We talk about how important safety is to human performance, how fragile safety can be and the importance of “pumping fear out of the room.” Rich describes why he calls himself a Chief Storyteller, the role of Joy in his company and the importance of being a purpose-driven organization.

Episode 40 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Elisabeth Hendrickson, a veteran tester, developer, agilist, trainer, author and former executive of Research and Development at Pivotal. We discuss how Elisabeth first got into agile development and what a paradigm shift Extreme Programming (XP) was for her. We discuss her definition of agile and how she has applied agile principles to her work. We discuss how the testing community first reacted to practices like Test-Driven Development. We also discuss Exploratory Testing, the impact it’s had on agile development and Elisabeth’s book on the subject, called Explore It!: Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing.

#ModernAgile 39 of the Modern Agile Show features my interview with David Parker, an experienced lean/agile coach. This interview is largely about David's excellent work to thoroughly improve the talent acquisition process of a major brand-name company. David used #lean principles to visualize the work, focus on value, help people collaborate, remove bottlenecks, parallelize work and ultimately produce a far more efficient and effective hiring process.

Episode 38 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with David Bland, a veteran lean and agile coach and co-author of the book, Testing Business Ideas. The book features a catalog of 44 experiments that help people learn faster whether their ideas are desirable, viable and feasible. David shares stories about how a small San Francisco startup and a large insurance company both used experiments described in the book to de-risk their ideas and quickly learn from the market. David and Josh discuss how intuition, vision and ethics relate to testing business ideas, how important it is to create an environment in which it is safe to experiment and learn rapidly and how ideas from David’s book relates to Modern Agile’s four principles. David explains the challenges that relate to adopting the ideas from his book and he talks about the importance of having a healthy skepticism about what to build, talking to users and aligning work with company vision. Finally, David talks about Assumption Mapping, and how it helps fill in the gap between canvases, like the Business Model Canvas, and the experiments you conduct.

Episode 37 of the Modern Agile Show features an interview with Diana Larsen, co-founder and chief connector of the Agile Fluency project, co-author of the books, Agile Retrospectives, Liftoff and Five Rules for Accelerated Learning. Diana is an expert in helping people learn. She and Joshua discuss the story of the learning that resulted from a large team’s end-of-project retrospective, including how HR’s 42-page individual performance review had choked productivity in the team. Diana discusses the vital practice of Chartering, she explains her Five Rules for Accelerated Learning and discusses how important learning is to being agile. Diana tells the story of how the Agile Fluency game helped a leadership team figure out how they needed to collaborate and understand each other better. Diana and Joshua discuss how to get to your edge in learning instead of staying in your comfort zone. Check out AgileFluency.org for more information and Diana and her work.