Scrum Day London is our second conference of the year, and we’re thrilled to bring you more exciting episodes from this renowned event!
As we continue our TalkInTen series, we have a special episode featuring Paul Anumudu, a release training engineer and agile coach, who delves into the topic of “Agile Agnostic Value Delivery: Optimising Desired Outcomes While Mitigating Agile Scepticism.”
"Agile is Dead” has become the dominating phrase in the Software delivery community. In recent times, criticising all things Agile has almost become trendy for developers, software/platform Engineers and other IT professionals. The labelling of agile as “uffy” is something that is slowly gaining popularity.
In a technological ecosystem that prioritizes building, testing, and deploying code over Agile methods and events, this paper explores how Agile professionals, senior leadership teams, and Lean-Agile Centres of Excellence can address challenges posed by Agile scepticism. Case studies show that focusing on empiricism's pillars—Transparency, Inspection, and Adaptation—improves end-to-end product delivery for developers, software, and DevOps engineers. This approach, termed agile agnosticism, emphasizes optimizing product delivery while avoiding Agile jargon, certifications, titles, and workplace politics.
Episode Highlights:
- Agile Agnosticism: Understand how to implement Agile practices without being tied to specific frameworks.
- Practical Applications: Learn how focusing on the pillars of empiricism can enhance product delivery.
- Overcoming Scepticism: Discover strategies to address and mitigate Agile scepticism within your teams.
If you enjoy the show, please leave a review!
Use code PRODUCTAGILITY24 for 15% off training courses at Sheev.
Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.
Scrum Day London is our second conference of the year, and we’re thrilled to bring you more exciting episodes from this renowned event!
As we continue our TalkInTen series, we have a special episode featuring Paul Anumudu, a release training engineer and agile coach, who delves into the topic of “Agile Agnostic Value Delivery: Optimising Desired Outcomes While Mitigating Agile Scepticism.”
"Agile is Dead” has become the dominating phrase in the Software delivery community. In recent times, criticising all things Agile has almost become trendy for developers, software/platform Engineers and other IT professionals. The labelling of agile as “uffy” is something that is slowly gaining popularity.
In a technological ecosystem that prioritizes building, testing, and deploying code over Agile methods and events, this paper explores how Agile professionals, senior leadership teams, and Lean-Agile Centres of Excellence can address challenges posed by Agile scepticism. Case studies show that focusing on empiricism's pillars—Transparency, Inspection, and Adaptation—improves end-to-end product delivery for developers, software, and DevOps engineers. This approach, termed agile agnosticism, emphasizes optimizing product delivery while avoiding Agile jargon, certifications, titles, and workplace politics.
Episode Highlights:
- Agile Agnosticism: Understand how to implement Agile practices without being tied to specific frameworks.
- Practical Applications: Learn how focusing on the pillars of empiricism can enhance product delivery.
- Overcoming Scepticism: Discover strategies to address and mitigate Agile scepticism within your teams.
If you enjoy the show, please leave a review!
Use code PRODUCTAGILITY24 for 15% off training courses at Sheev.
Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.
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, Sheave. Sheave is my company, and we specialize in helping organizations 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 extend out your own Agile journey at www .sheave .co .uk. That's S -H -E -E -V. And to get a whopping 15 % off of all of our courses, use the code PRODUCTAGILITY24 at the checkout. Now we have an exciting line of speakers from Scrum Day London 2024 who will 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 talk in 10. I'm here with Paul Anamudu, whose talk, talk slash workshop for today was Agile Agnostic Value Delivery, optimizing desired outcomes while mitigating agile skepticism. I mean, the words agnostic and skepticism are intriguing words to include in any of this, so it definitely piqued my interest because I think... Agile agnostic is not something I've heard for a while and it's nice to see that coming up. And agile skepticism, I think overcoming any form of skepticism when you're looking at some kind of organisational change initiative is really critical. So thank you very much for making this time at the end of Scrum Day London 2024 to spend some time with me to record this talk in 10. If you could introduce yourself and give our listeners an overview of what it was that you went through today, that'd be fantastic. Brilliant. Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity. So I'll start with introductions. My name is Paul Anamudu. I'm currently a release training engineer and agile coach. I work with software engineers and platform DevOps engineers. So, you know, I'm really passionate about this conversation because over the course of my career, which is going close to 10 years now. I've worked with multiple teams, men who were open to the ideas of introducing agile ways of working. I've also come across those who were quite skeptical, you know, wouldn't agree that agile is the best way forward. And so the core of my talk and presentation earlier today is to address that skepticism, to encourage scrum masters, agile delivery managers, agile coaches out there to... focus on what matters. So I gave lots of examples about multi-method delivery approach where you do not strictly restrict yourself to scrum ways of working or Kanban, but be open and apply elements from less, from safe, from scrum, from Kanban design thinking, anything that works and can be tailored to your specific organization, to be tailored to the specific team in order to deliver based on what works. for your team. Sounds good. So in your session, how did you structure it? Could you take us through the journey of what you took the attendees through? Absolutely. So I kicked off with one of the buzzwords that's going on these days that can be quite worrying for agile professionals, which is, you know, I'm sure other speakers have spoken about this. Agile is dead. We've come to the end of the road with agile. Agile regret, according to a report from Gartner. And all of that can be quite disconcerting for professionals who are wondering, do we still add value to this industry? So I kicked off with that, address the agile skepticism. And then I went into agile agnosticism, giving a lot of nod to the agile agnostic movement. Of course, the idea wasn't mine. I've come across this movement. It's online and it's a community. and they are very active and they've got that message that one size does not fit all. So based on this argument, I bring in all my audience into what matters in agile delivery, focusing on the three pillars of empiricism, which is transparency, inspection, adaptation. I talk about Little's law, how doing less actually leads to providing value faster. I go into the eight types of waste. I go into team topologies and the reduction of cognitive load, reducing context switching among developers, reducing juggling multiple activities at the same time, multitasking, and how reduction of, how the reduction of cognitive load actually helps the team focus and deliver value faster. And then I also conclude by suggesting being open to a multi -method. mode of delivery where you apply all elements from multiple frameworks that suits your organization and leads to product centricity but user centricity as well ensuring that what you deliver leads to happy customers and happy users. That sounds pretty comprehensive. I mean that and you squeezed over into how long was the talk? I think it was a 40 minutes talk and it was quite a... productive one because I got a lot of feedback from the audience. There were lots of good questions out there, lots of great comments and it was a wonderful experience. Here's a question for you now. I'm not sure if you can answer this or not but from the questions that you were asked by the audience, was there a particular question that had to make you think harder than the others? Yeah, actually that's a very good one. There was one actually. A member of the audience was saying... that he works in an environment that's quite strict. It's almost like the rules have already been laid. There is barely any room for flexibility. How could you possibly adopt this multi-method framework? What else can you do in such a restricted organization? And I gave him the wonderful example I've learned from liberating structures, which talks about your 15 % contribution. And this is bordered on the fact that there is always something we can do. faced with any challenge, you know, leadership isn't listening, there isn't money in the budget, there is barely any resources, there is always something to do. Your 15 % can help you move the needle and begin to provide value and make the lives of your colleagues, your staff, your tech teams slightly better in one way or form. Could you give our listeners a bit more information about the 15 % because maybe some of them haven't heard liberating structures? If you haven't heard of it, by the way, do go and Google it. There's a fantastic website with a whole compendium of different activities. But before you go and do that, Paul, would you mind explaining a little bit more about the 15 %? Right, so the 15 % is just one method. It's an activity within the liberating structures. In the liberating structures, you have many other activities like drawing together trees. I like 15 % because it tells you that every individual has something. You have that wiggle room. you're always empowered, there is always something you can do to change a very difficult situation. So it removes that idea of 100 % helplessness and empowers teams to say, let's start with something, let's start with the 15%. The journey of a thousand miles starts with taking that one step and this is what the 15 % solution is all about. Awesome. So, not a question I've asked anyone else actually today. But what I do like to ask every now and again is what was it that spurred you to create the talk and apply it to the talk at Scrum Day London? So yeah, one of the reasons I decided to give this talk is that it really speaks to my heart. And while I was opening my paper, when I was giving that talk today, I was telling everyone in the audience that I wanted it to be an honest conversation. This is a challenge I have faced. I asked in the room and I think most of the attendees were Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Agile Delivery Managers, and they all had that shared experience that you've walked in a team where no one wanted to listen to you, where they felt Scrum was failing, and you know, you took the flag for this, you were almost blamed for this methodology that doesn't seem to work. So it springs from my personal experience and I'm trying to tell people. that amidst the buzzwords of agile is dead, the end of agile, there is always something we can do. We should begin to think about evolving how we work in teams. And I talk about transformative change in which you kind of adopt a mindset of teaching, coaching and facilitating with your teams. Awesome. Awesome. Unfortunately, we are getting rapidly towards the end of our time. I did warn you that the 10 minutes seems to go quite quickly. I will be putting your LinkedIn profile link into the show notes. So if people do have any questions, are you happy for them to contact you and ask you? I'll be happy to, you know, engage with folks who would like to reach out to me. Let's get this conversation going. Let's begin to have that mindset of openness and, you know, embrace proper agility. which means working in ways that actually produce value for the team, focusing on what matters, happy customers, useful products, and yeah, a happy workplace in general. So as you're smiling, you say that, and this is a talk that came from your heart. I'm going to ask one bonus question, which is going to take us over the time. But in a sentence, if somebody's thinking about applying to talk at Scrum Day London next year or any other conference, What would you say to that person who's really unsure as to whether or not to submit a talk proposal? So based on my experience, what I would advise is to pick a topic that really resonates with you. Pick a topic that you find quite easy to talk about because it reduces that stress and the fear of rejection. Give it a go. You know, reach out to other people who have provided or given talks in conferences and learn, you know, this is... just one way of learning. We iterate, you could fall back a little bit due to fear of rejection. You can pick yourself up again and keep pushing forward is what I'll say. Awesome man, thank you so much for that. Great, great words. Motivational. I need to start submitting talks again. I stopped doing it when I started doing this. Paul, thank you so much for spending this time. I really appreciate it. I know it's been a long day for everyone and there's still a good couple of hours left of the conference. I think there's all kinds of things going to be rumbling on. Everyone, thank you for listening to this episode. It's been great to have you along with us. Do make sure that you're following the Product Agility podcast on LinkedIn or TikTok or Instagram to be made aware of when future episodes come out. And that's it. We'll call it a day. Paul, thank you very much, my friend, and everyone, thank you very much for listening.
