AgileToolkit Podcast

I sat down with Amber King from CapitalOne Innovation Labs at the Agile DC Executive Conference.

Enjoy

Bob Payne

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George and I discuss the "Three Basic Things" that you need to understand to implement agile. The "Three" theme never gets old.

Much is said about agile but I think George says it best.

"Simple but not easy"

-bob

Modern Agile stickers everywhere are helping Modern Agile stick. Dean Chanter of Capital One recalls his Accidental Experiment with Modern Agile (cake for every release!). Bob and Dean talk through the power of the laptop sticker, evolving and “upskilling” ScrumMasters, and Lean roots.

Transcript

Bob Payne: [00:00:05] Hi I'm your host Bob Payne and i'm here with Dean Chanter and Dean you're from, You're at Cap One.

Dean Chanter: [00:00:11] Yeah, Currently at Cap One.

Bob Payne: [00:00:14] You're doing some work with scaled Agile and you're saying you sort of accidentally started applying Modern Agile. I'm super curious about that journey.

Dean Chanter: [00:00:25] I did it was very interesting so I joined Capital One about seven months ago, was with Intel for about 13 years before that, and when I first got to Capital One everybody had a Modern Agile sticker on their laptop there was actually a bunch on my desk. So I just slapped one on my laptop. I had heard about it before I got the Capital One but Intel was a big SAFehouse and so that was kind of how we did things there and made a lot of sense and so, maybe three or four months ago, my gallbladder decided that it no longer needed to be in my body and so's listening to Josh's podcast and listen to things and he and John Cutler were talking.

Bob Payne: [00:01:02] Okay, yeah I've had Josh on my podcast.

Dean Chanter: [00:01:04] Yeah. So Josh asked John -he's like What do you think about Modern Agile. What do you mean to you. And John was like you know what. It really makes me feel like we can try anything and we don't have to stick to one framework another. And I realized then that some of the things I have been doing it kept on with my teams was just that right. I had a lot of teams that were Scrum Teams and Kanban teams and we had ARTs so we had you know single teams but they needed... They were looking for a refresh right.

Dean Chanter: [00:01:37] You know some new ways of thinking about things that we brought in things like product discovery. We started looking at cycle time. Right. We just we started celebrating everything. Right. We had cake for every release we had you know just how.

Bob Payne: [00:01:54] Dangerous when you're a real DevOps...

Dean Chanter: [00:01:56] Exactly. Exactly. Well that was one of the things we went from releases that were on average and they say average because it wasn't a true cadence of about six to eight weeks. We're now releasing twice a week. OK. You know just because of trying to setting audacious goals right. Right. Using that we want to really use more frequently. Right. And once we set that goal we started working through the different things and different challenges that it takes to get through. We actually even if we don't have content for release on a particular day that we're supposed to be released, we'll still do the release. The reason is is because it allows us to go through those motions right and should identify more ways to we found things by doing that that maybe we should leave - blue green releases right. So maybe we should leave green up a little bit longer so we could fail back if we need to. Eventually, you know the goal there is eventually getting to where we could do continuous delivery if we wanted to.

Bob Payne: [00:02:56] Yeah. That's great. So I'm so curious how you got the big batch of stickers. Did Josh come to CapOne and.

Dean Chanter: [00:03:03] He did.

Bob Payne: [00:03:04] Okay.

Dean Chanter: [00:03:05] So Josh came to camp while he was a keynote speaker. CapOne does a technology agile conference internally once a year.

Bob Payne: [00:03:13] I've spoken that years back yeah.

Dean Chanter: [00:03:15] I wasn't there for that yet but that's how the stickers ended up on my desk. So.

Bob Payne: [00:03:21] Yeah I have been doing a series of of of talks using modern agile as a sort of framework to look at Lean and depending on where I go and how how I either call it. "No one gives a shit about your practices" or "disrupting the cult of the cult of practices". I'm a scrum trainer but fundamentally believe that scrum is a starting place and the goal is not to like do scrum. The goal is to get into this. You know this idea of experimentation learning and changing and and so you know I was an old XP extreme programmer guy. So you know I've known Josh for a long time and you know that talk really. It was actually that sticker was the deflowering force.. It's probably not appropriate to say but I had always had Virgin Macs with no stickers on them until that one made it on my last Mac.

Dean Chanter: [00:04:31] That was the first sticker I put on my cowpat on issue laptops. Have it if you have a habit of putting stickers on stuff for me is like yeah I'm fine. I agree. I agree. You know that's actually one of the things so I do manage a group of Scrum Masters right, and ...

Dot is the first practicioner of DSDM that I have spoken with on the Agile Toolkit Podcast. DSDM is one of the early Agile Metodologies that has taken hold in Europe and the UK but has not made the jump to the states yet.DSDM has a more formalized prioritization process that is refered to as the MoSCoW process. - Must Have- Should Have- Could Have - Won't HaveI enjoyed my talk with Dot and I hope you will also.-bob

I talked all things Lean Startup with Teague Hopkins of the Teague Hopkins Group at the Agile DC Executive Summit.

Enjoy

Bob Payne