Podcast Get Agile

Todd Little, chairman of the Kanban University, calls himself an ‘accidental agilist’. He joins Tomasz Wykowski from ProCognita to discuss why the Agile movement is failing in a lot of companies, which often leads to ‘Agile is dead’ statements. They start by looking at how agile courses make people happy, but don’t deliver what they […]

In this episode of the Get Agile Podcast, Tomasz Wykowski from Procognita meets with Dragan to deep dive into the unrealised consequences of async code reviews. Dragan shows how developers are often forced to work in isolation, and instead of forming one team, they become N teams of one person. Often, with different engineering cultures and coding practices.

„The longer you put off talking to your colleagues, the more likely it is, that you’re going to have integration problems”, says Jim Benson in his conversation with Tomasz Wykowski.

“CI is developers’ behavior, it has nothing to do with running Jenkins,” says Tim Ottinger, XP coach from Industrial Logic.

Join Tomasz Wykowski from ProCognita as he sits down with Alexey Kryvitsky, Certified Scrum Trainer, Certified LeSS Trainer, and co-creator of Org Topologies. Together they discuss how to avoid making the implementation of the Agile framework as an organizational goal. Alexey introduces the concept of Org Topologies as a mapping technique to help companies discover where they are, where they want to be, and how to get there. He discusses two dimensions of the map, which are the scope of capabilities and the scope of work. Then he explains each of the four levels on both axis.

Intent-Based Leadership is a way of leading when we give control based on technical competencies and organizational clarity. Created by David Marquet, author of “Turn the Ship Around” it was popularized in the Agile community by Jenni Jepsen. Tomasz Wykowski from ProCognita interviews Jenni, on why Intent-Based Leadership works, and how to apply it.

„Musisz rozróżnić, w którym kierunku zmierzasz i co zamierzasz zrobić jako pierwszy krok” – mówi Viktor Grgic, Certyfikowany Trener LeSS.

“There’s no better or worse, there’s more awareness and choice,” says Pete, explaining the Leadership Agility model. He describes three main stages of self-awareness as a leader: Expert, Achiever, and Catalyst. Together, Tomasz and Pete look at each stage’s main characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses, analyzing how these leaders behave, make decisions, or create a strategy. Pete explains what hollow leadership is and how leaders shape culture. He also clarifies how reflections help leaders grow and how they can get feedback from peers, using systemic approaches such as 360 reviews, or informal feedback sessions.

Finally, they discuss leaders’ behaviors during stress and where the firefighting culture might be coming from.

Zuzi shares her story of becoming Scrum Master, what was her greatest challenge, and the biggest change she needed to make. She tells how coaching helped her on her path and how she now works with executives to help them find their dreams. They also discuss how confidence and courage are necessary for leaders to try new things, and how different types of leaders work with their teams.

„The biggest responsibility of leadership is to ensure that promises keep on working on time,” says Angel Diaz-Maroto, Certified Enterprise Coach, and Certified Scrum Trainer. During his recent visit to Warsaw, Poland, he joined Tomasz Wykowski from ProCognita to discuss the elements of reliable promises. Together, they look at building promises in a dynamic, agile environment, and how to create these on task, output, and outcome levels.

Angel explains how reliable promises build trust, which creates a culture of responsibility that leads to responding to customers’ needs and delivering results. He shares his thoughts on how promises work with the OKR method. Building on that, they discuss how different people react to challenging and stressful targets, and what can be the consequences of creating an unrealistic goal. Finally, Angel explains how the leader can move the organization from one that fails to deliver on promises to a company that creates (and deliver on) realistic goals.