Hello and welcome to the product agility podcast. I'm your host, Ben Maynard, and for the next few days, we have extra special episodes coming to you from scrum day London, 2024 this event is a beacon for agile enthusiasts and professionals, and I'm thrilled to bring you insights and new ideas from some of the brightest minds in the agile and product community. For those of you who are new to the podcast, the product agility Podcast is your go to resource for practical tips, strategies and stories from world class products and agile thought leaders. Our goal is to increase your knowledge and motivation to experiment so together we can create ever more successful products before we dive in, I'd like to thank our sponsor for this episode. She is my company, and we specialise in helping organisations simplify focus and align through embracing a product mindset and using agile as a means to drive success, whatever your product or agile challenge, learn about how sheave can help your organisation thrive or accelerate your own agile journey@www.sheev.co.uk that's S, H, E, E, V, and to get a whopping 15% off of all of our courses, use the code product agility 24 at the checkout. Now we have an exciting lineup of speakers from scrum day London, 2024 who'll be sharing valuable insights and practical tips for you to experiment with. So grab a pen and paper, perhaps a hot drink, and let's dive into a talking tent. We are here in scrum day, London, 2024 with our first episode of quite a few. It's an incredibly busy day. We've got ahead of us, and we're starting setting a very, very high bar, because the first person I'm talking to is I'm going to try and pronounce your name correctly and destroy if I mess it up. Irene dojo, very good, yes. And your talk is just such a fascinating premise, and I'm really pleased that we're starting with yours. Could you well, introduce yourself to the listeners and then give us an overview of what your talk's going to be about?
Sure. So my name is Irene donjo. I'm from the Netherlands, originally from Cameroon, so I've been lecturing for about 23 years now. I'm a senior lecturer, and I'm also a researcher on blockchain. So my talk today is about how can we use blockchain to improve inclusivity and diversity within the agile project management
and I can't tie that together in my mind. And this is why I found it so fascinating, because, and maybe this is just my ignorance, right of blockchain or something else, but I couldn't pull together the threads between blockchain and inclusivity and diversity. So can you help me out and help me understand, like, how do you pull those threads together? Correct?
Then you understand your concern, and that is a concern of many other people around here. So when I hear about blockchain and agile, they say, What? How can you do that? So listen, I'm going to start saying that, when did you know that integrating blockchain into agile process can improve and reduce fraud by 70% that's according to research. So because we know blockchain actually assure trust, transparency, traceability, we know that agile already provides flexibility, collaboration, a nice way of working. But if we were to incorporate blockchain into that, we have a much winning game. So if you were to ask me what blockchain is, I know many people, when they visit conferences about blockchain, they try to understand what blockchain is, they leave the conference even more confused. So simply put, Blockchain is a technology that assure that helps to share value. And value could be anything money, digital asset could be anything you can think of. It is secure. It is peer to peer. So that is what blockchain is. I can give you an example. So in Africa, for example, we have this problem of land registry. There are a lot of dispute in land because this is not properly register, if you were to use a platform where old land register, and then we can trust transparency, trustability and everything we can be sure that no more disputes. So that's what blockchain that's the power of blockchain. There are many other examples. So are
we talking about the uses of blockchain in the in the digital products, or the the things that Agile processes and agile teams are creating, or are we talking about it from the perspective of how the teams are actually working?
Definitely look in Agile. I'll give you a simple example. Suppose they are a project. We an agile project that include the company, the customer. Or the client and the employee. So we are three parties here. So this is already difficult to manage. If you were to use a software where we all share the same ledger, because blockchain is a common ledger, we all share the same data, we can see the data instantly, anytime, and then, using a smart contract of blockchain, we can be sure that the data are immutable. So if you falsify of change anything, we are going to see it. And not only that, blockchain will also have to reduce to assure the equal information access. Because if you have your clients, the company and employees, we want to be to know what is going on, we'll be on top of what is going on, and blockchain is the only technology that can assure that equal information access. See,
could you even then begin to use this for things like test data? Is that where you'll go with it? Or, of course,
because we know what is going on, we know what we're doing, so they're not more lies. So anything you put on a system where we are bound with a smart contract, it is revealed.
So I suppose, in that respect, it's almost, in my mind, I'm oversimplifying this. I'm probably getting it totally wrong, but it's almost like a form of version control. It
is control, but we all consent. Yeah, we all consent to using it. Because blockchain, when we go with a smart contract, we all consent so we know what's going on. Yeah, so awesome.
So how did you come upon this idea for the talk? Because, I mean, it's a little I'm guessing it's something to do with your day job, right? But to tell us, how did you come up with the
idea? I like crazy stuff. When I saw this, this agile conference, I saw all the talk. They were all related to Scrum, agile. And I said, No, I'm going to come up with something that at least will add value to the conference so and then I mentioned the idea of blockchain in Agile. Nana loved it. He said, Come please. So here we are. I'm actually writing a paper on this topic. I'm not happy with what I have. So far I've collected data. I'm not happy, though. I hope this conference then talking to people and then getting my survey around, I will get the data that I need to make this finalise. Okay,
so you're going to be issuing a survey at the conference to people that come for talk so you can get data for your paper. Yeah,
because I know people have they heard about blockchain, but they have no clue. How can blockchain be used in Agile so maybe with the survey, I'm going to go give around. We're going to get better view or another inside of this, which I don't know, you know, so I'm looking forward to that outcome. Do you
have an electronic copy of a survey? Could we share with our listeners? Yes,
I'm I'm still, I hope by today I will have the final version, because I'm still changing, talking to people, getting new ideas. I've changed, like 1000 times. So I hope by the end of the conference, I'm going to have the version so that I can share, but
we'll make our listeners aware of that, if you like, and if they can also then have a go at filling in that survey. Then please do wonderful.
That would be wonderful. So the more people, the better look, even though you're not into blockchain. And I mean, filling in the survey will give me another Mindset, no view of what normal people think. And I need those. I need to collect all those data. Yeah, awesome.
Okay, so we'll make that happen. We'll make sure that we get the link to your survey into the show notes at some point, and we'll put it on social media when the time is right. So, yeah, we will need to remember to do that. You send me the link, and we'll make it happen. And if there is one thing that you would love people to take away from your talk, like one thing in particular, what is it you'd like them to leave with? I
would say, Look, we are in the area of digital transformation. Data is everywhere, and artificial intelligence is coming to invade us. It's already invading us. We're all using chatgpt. I use chatgpt for this interview, if you didn't know. So we're all using that. So please be ready. Educate yourself. Get to know what's going on on digital transformation. Yes,
I love that of always saying that if we don't embrace what's coming, then at some point, we'll be in a tough position. I think people complain about AI, people complain about all kinds of modern technology, but if you just complained about it, you didn't do anything about it, you'll get to a point where you will be less relevant than the people that embraced it. So I love what you're saying.
Yeah, absolutely, Ben, absolutely. Look, Agile has been around for many, many years. Who knows, with the digital transformation, what Agile will be? Maybe we don't need it anymore, because everything's automated, and then you can do this. So you better know what's going on and then see how we can embrace or make it even better within the Agile process, right? So get yourself educated, learn, learn, learn. So
my last question for you is, in the process of writing the talk, was there anything that surprised you, or anything that you learned that was a really big light bulb moment for you personally,
yes, first when I started, and then when I tried to compare a job with blah. Chain and it looks similar. I'm like, okay, so what do I have to add here, if the oak looks similar? And I said to myself, there's something that that blockchain does that many others system cannot do, encrypted data, data are secure cryptographically. So that is something, and then the smart contract. So that is a input that I actually discover, and I really, really want to dive into that more to be able to come up with a good paper that all the agile and this scrum master can use. I lied when
I said last question. This is the last question. You mentioned smart contract a few times. What do you mean by smart contract?
Yeah, okay, smart contract. Just in other words, no traditional contract, a contract that are traditional, made sign, you know, and smart contract are automated, so digitally. Suppose you like football, do you? Yeah? Okay, Manchester is gonna play Chelsea tonight. You you support Manchester? I support Chelsea. If you were to make it bet, right, we're going to go to the agency and then register our bet and then pay some fee. But we using smart contract. It is peer to peer. We don't need the agency anymore. We just record all our information into a smart contract. It's going to be self regulated. So that's it. That's the power smart contract, peer to peer, self regulated.
There's a lot I can need to learn I think about this, so maybe I need to just grab you another day and we can you can educate me further. And maybe I need to find a way to because I'd love to come and see your talk, but we're so busy with interviews today, I need to learn some more about this. Thank you so much for taking this time. I know that it's early in the morning and doing yet to do the talk, so I really appreciate you taking this time of your day to come and share. It's amazing and really interesting insight of our listeners. If people wanted to find out more about you, I have put the link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Is there any where else that they can find out more information about you? Or is LinkedIn the best place? Yes,
I'm on LinkedIn, where I put all my publication on my update and I also just started Tiktok, where I share my views with people. So please just Google my name, Don Gio that you're going to get from the link, you can find me everywhere. Nice.
So we have to make sure we connect on Tiktok, because here we have a decent Tiktok following, actually,
yeah, I just started, but it's getting is getting better and better. And then, because I talk about hot topic, financial inclusion in Africa, for example, how to get more people in into financial inclusion? Because, you know, getting Europe for them. Sorry, we're going out of the topic. In Europe, we all have a bank account. You have maybe six bank account. If I open your wallet, I'm going to be surprised. Which is, we take it for granted. But in less developed countries, most in Africa, it is a luxury to have a bank account, because people are excluded from the financial inclusion. How can we use blockchain, again, to improve financial inclusion in Africa? So I started talking about that on my Tiktok, and I'm looking forward to talk more about that. Another
topic, another topic I'm really interested in. And thank you so much taking this time, everyone. Thank you so much listening. We'll be back again very soon. We have another talk in TED. So thank you very much listening. Thank you
so much. Ben. I appreciate this. Yeah.
