Summary In this conversation, Dave Prior interviews Chris Hadnagy and Dr. Abbie Maroño about social engineering and human hacking. They discuss the definition of social engineering and how it differs from human hacking. They emphasize the importance of intent in social engineering, with the goal being to influence someone's actions for their benefit rather than to cause harm. They also explore the concept of imposter syndrome and how it affects different generations and genders. The...

I’m testing out the AI Generated Summary… In this conversation, Dave Prior and Scott Sehlhorst discuss the importance of improving the product plan while executing it. They explore the common problem of companies jumping straight into execution without considering what they should build and why. Scott emphasizes the need to shift from a mindset of control to one of influence, where product managers focus on solving problems and creating value for customers and the business. They also discuss...

Alan Dayley is back to help me continue the quest of figuring out why so many companies are struggling with PI Planning or quarterly planning. During the interview, we discuss some of the reasons organizations struggle with this type of planning. We address the topic from the perspective of senior leadership, why they want it, how they often approach it, and the challenges that creates. We also explore the way the request is often interpreted by the Development Teams, how they often respond,...

You’ve decided to take a Scrum certification class. Now the question is, which one? If you are looking for something like Certified Scrum Master or Certified Scrum Product Owner, there are so many options to choose from that it can be overwhelming. All of them should result in certification and price is certainly a concern. But there are a number of other factors to consider when trying to find the Scrum training that is right for you. When you take a certification class, whether its focus...

Keeping up with what is happening in AI is no small task. You probably know some folks who spend a lot of free time learning how to bend (insert AI flavor of the week) to their will, there are folks who are preaching to anyone who will listen about all the amazing things that are right around the corner, and then there are the folks who just periodically peek over their shoulder and say “Yeah, um… let me know when you’ve got this bit actually working.” And then there are people like Snehal...

If you are on one of those teams that has made a habit of dragging unfinished work from one Sprint to the next... YOU NEED TO STOP!   When you get to the end of a Sprint and have work that isn't done, you can't show it to the stakeholders in the Sprint Review. If you don't show it to Stakeholders in the Sprint Review, you can't get feedback. And if you can't get feedback, you can't inspect and adapt, and you negate the entire point of working in a Sprint. This podcast offers five things...

At the Modus Institute, Jim Benson and Mark Kilby have created a new offering called Successful Distributed Teams. This new course focuses on how to build strong remote teams, how to create a humane, healthy balance of productivity and accountability, and what tools you can use to make it all work. In this interview, Jim and Mark join me to discuss what happened when they combined the many years of experience they each have in shaping remote teams that work. We cover how the idea of remote...

A few weeks ago I interviewed Gil Broza about his new book, “Deliver Better Results: How to Unlock Your Organization's Potential". The book was designed to quickly provide actionable practices that organizations can utilize to improve their value delivery system. It focuses on understanding the fitness for purpose of your system of delivery, and how to employ his ten strategies to improve your level of maturity. During my prep for the interview and during our conversation, there was one thing...

Gil Broza joins me for a podcast about his new book, “Deliver Better Results: How to Unlock Your Organization's Potential". During the interview, Gil and I discuss how he designed the book to quickly provide actionable practices that organizations can utilize to improve their value delivery system. Our conversation includes details on how to understand the fitness for purpose of your system of delivery, and how to employ his ten strategies to improve your level of maturity. The first...

With the state of Agile as it is today, I find myself frequently wondering, “Is this the Darkest Agile Timeline”? Things have been getting a bit bleak lately in the Agile space. With the layoffs, the job market, and the fact that the business world has change fatigue and is tired of not getting what they expected from a way of working they’ve mostly only kinda half-done... Where’s the hope? For this podcast (and to find some hope), I reached out to George Schlitz because 1. George is way...

There seems to be a current trend where organizations that say they are doing PI planning or quarterly planning are making a decision for the teams about what must be delivered in the time box. The teams just accept the commitment because they either feel they do not have the agency to push back and say no to some of it or are too busy trying to finish up their last overcommitment to look at new work. So, they begin the new time box already behind and then assess the new work only to...

What do you do when your Scrum Master’s understanding of their role seems to be less about acting as a servant leader to the Scrum Team and more about making the team to work in a way that is most convenient for them? In this episode of the podcast, Jeff Howey joins me to talk through the real-life case of a Scrum Master who seems to have lost their way. Here are some of the concerns shared in the podcast: - Dev Team is offshore and holds a Daily Scrum before 8 AM in Scrum Master’s time...

For the video version of this podcast: https://youtu.be/pnmbdAxskXo When an organization has taken the decision to switch an Agile way of working, they often get so caught up in trying to adopt the various practices and processes that they forget to stop and ask the question, “Is this providing the business outcome we need?” Remembering to keep that question top of mind is important. Knowing what to pay attention to and how to understand the answer is even more important. In this...

On Friday, December 8, The Agile Alliance is hosting a MiniCon on the Future of Artificial Intelligence. During the event, Mark Kilby will be hosting a roundtable discussion with the speakers to explore the ways AI is poised to impact how we work and what it will take to utilize it in an ethical and responsible way. Mark joins me in this episode of the podcast to discuss why he made a conscious decision to get schooled up on AI, how he’s going about doing it, some of the key learnings he...

Agile is going through a lot of changes right now. The changes aren’t so much in what it is and how it works - that seems to be a bit stable at the moment. The changes stem more from how adopters feel about it, their ideas about much agile they need, what they need to achieve it, and what kind of support they want getting there. As the space works through these growing pains, many Agilists respond to discomfort they way they (unfortunately) have since the very beginning, by pointing figures...

With each new round of layoffs, the existential crisis facing the agile coaching community deepens. Alan Dayley joins me to discuss how the community is retrospecting on this moment and whether or not it is asking the right questions. Over the past year, a number of high-profile organizations have made a decision to let go of their agile coaches. The impact of that choice on those organizations will become apparent in time. The impact on the coaches, however, has been more immediate. In...

Louder Than Ten is a Vancouver-based Project Management Training and Consulting company. L>10 was founded by Rachel and Travis Gertz, and for the past 14 years, everything they have done has been centered around fostering healthy and humane ways of working together and managing projects. There aren’t many organizations in the digital agency space that have taken the time to develop their own project management manifesto. It is truly a unique place and now, as they do, Rachel and Travis...

As long as there have been agile teams there has been the challenge of putting people together and getting them to actually be agile. You can send them off to a class and teach them Scrum or Kanban, or bring in team coaches, and that helps, but it doesn’t address one fundamental issue. Most people have not taken (or been given) the time they need to learn how to be agile in how they manage themselves as individuals. Michael Grill is a Product Owner and Head of Process and Methods in the...

Getting people to open up to one another and connect at work is not an easy thing. It wasn’t easy before the world went remote, and now that many of us are somewhere in the middle of being half remote and half in-person, it’s not getting any easier. But if we can get to know each other a little better and a little deeper, we will foster stronger connections. As we become more invested in one another, the work we do together will improve as a result. Together To Gather is a card game...

AI is everywhere now. You can’t have a conversation that involves the future of work without heading down the rabbit hole of how Chat GPT and tools like it are changing the workspace. For some, it is a very exciting time. For others, it is scary as hell because it is so hard to figure out how it will impact our work. In this interview, Zach Stone is back for a chat about the following questions: - What parts of the work we do on Scrum Teams will be augmented or replaced by AI? - How do...

Times are weird in the land of Agile. More and more big companies are letting go of the people they’ve brought on to help them adopt agile practices, or replacing their Scrum Masters with Technical Program Managers, or creating a homegrown version of Agile by taking an established framework and bailing on the practices they don’t like. Is this just business accepting that what they’ve been trying to do for the past 10+ years was just too hard, have they achieved a level of agility that they...

Jardena London is on a mission. After spending years helping organizations transform, adopt agile, and achieve business agility she realized there was something missing. Soul. Yes, change was happening, but at what expense? Were people any more able to bring their whole selves to work, authentically show up, rise to the challenge of the day, and fully contribute themselves to the work? Mostly, not so much. And that is what led her to shift her focus to helping create soulful transformation...

Agile 2023 is almost here! Mark Kilby, Tim Nolan, and I are putting the final touches on our session Tuning Your Distributed Team with a Right Environment Exercise. We are looking forward to sharing some of the things we learned in Modus Cooperandi’s Lean Agile Visual Management Certification program. The workshop will be held at Agile 2023 on Tuesday, July 25th from 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM. This video gives an overview of our workshop and some of the key concepts we will be covering with the...

Artificial Intelligence and its impact on the Agile and Project Management space has become a conversation most of us are now having daily. There are a number of products already on the market and more coming every hour. In the same way that several years ago everyone had an app, now everyone wants to have a product leveraging AI. Snehal Talati, the AI Agile guy, has an app he’s been working on, but he’s also working on something bigger… the question of how we will use AI, responsibly, to...