Agile-Lean Ireland (ALI) Podcast

Recorded on Wednesday, June 24, 2020We are delighted to invite you to our next virtual meetup on Organizational and HR Agility.Our guest speakers for this session are highly experienced Agile HR practitioners, leaders, and experts, who will share with us their experience and learnings, particularly with regard to organisational and HR agility in these Covid times - and beyond.Speakers:Niamh McNamara is currently an Enterprise Product Owner & Global Process Owner Performance Management at Novartis. Niamh was previously Head of People & Organization Novartis Global Service Centre. Niamh will discuss the Novartis journey with Organisational Agility and her own experience of leading the global reform and redesign of Performance Management for Novartis using Agile principles and practices.Fabiola Eyholzer is the CEO of Just Leading Solutions, a New York-based consultancy for Lean | Agile People Operations. Fabiola is an international consultant and leader in helping enterprises to accelerate their agile transformations and agile people operations. Fabiola is no stranger to the ALI community and will be giving a talk at ALI2020 later this year.We look forward to you joining us for what will be an engaging and insightful session.If you have any questions re. this session, please do not hesitate to contact Kevin Empey or Joanna Koprowicz (hosts). Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

In today's fast-paced and constantly changing business landscape, companies must be able to innovate quickly and adapt to new challenges. Agile methodologies are becoming increasingly popular as they offer a flexible and iterative delivery method. However, a growth mindset can be the missing link that elevates the effectiveness of Agile ways of working.A growth mindset is a belief that intelligence, skills, and abilities can be developed through hard work, dedication, and continuous learning. It contrasts with a fixed mindset that assumes that these qualities are innate and unchangeable. In an Agile environment, a growth mindset can empower individuals and teams to embrace challenges, experiment with new ideas, and learn from failures.This talk will explore the benefits of a growth mindset in an Agile ways of working. We will discuss how a growth mindset can foster innovation and creativity, promote collaboration and communication, and enhance the ability to respond to change. We will also provide practical tips and strategies for cultivating a growth mindset within teams, such as seeking feedback, embracing challenges, and celebrating progress.Joanna KoprowiczJoanna is a passionate Agile Enthusiast who has made it her mission to bring positive change to a wide range of organisations and sectors. With a strong background in business and technology, Joanna has developed an impressive career in consulting, coaching, and leadership development, helping start-ups and multinational corporations alike to reach new heights.Joanna's work has spanned many industries, including the Financial Sector, the Travel Industry, Aviation, E-learning, and Gaming. Her focus is always on helping teams to grow and improve, delivering work on the next level and creating sustainable, highly-efficient teams.In addition to her work as a consultant and coach, Joanna is a professional coach and one of the co-organizers of Agile-Lean Ireland Community. She has also helped to coordinate Agile-Lean events internationally, including the Global Scrum Gathering in Vienna.Joanna's academic background includes a Masters in Project Management from University College Dublin Michael Smurfit Business School. She has also earned numerous Agile certifications and is a provider of Agile and Lean training and consulting to clients of Enterprise Ireland, IDA, and the Local Enterprise Offices. She is authorized by the International Consortium for Agile to run the certified ICP-AHR (Agile HR) and ICP- LEA (Agile Leadership) trainings. Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

The effects of the shift to hybrid workEnabled by new technologies and informed by the experiences during COVID pandemic, many employees would like to continue working remotely. Many companies, on the contrary, would like to see their employees back to the office. In this context, hybrid work is often proposed as a solution that meets the interests of both employees and employers and captures the benefits of both remote and in-office work. But is it indeed “the best of both worlds”?In this talk, Dr. Andreeva (Maynooth University School of Business) will discuss her ongoing research on the effects of the mass-scale shift to hybrid work. For example, what happens in a team, when some of your team members work mostly from the office, while others work mostly from home? How do work arrangements of the employees – in the office, hybrid or remote - influence their experiences at work and their performance? How do organisations manage the shift to hybrid work? The talk will explore the emerging evidence on these issues and discuss implications for individual employees and organisations.The SpeakerDr. Tatiana Andreeva is an Associate Professor in Management and Organisational Behavior and Research Director at the School of Business, Maynooth University, Ireland. Her ongoing research projects explore how the shift to remote and hybrid work influences knowledge sharing and collaboration in organisations – what challenges companies face and how to address them. Tatiana’s work has been published in leading international academic journals such as Human Resource Management Journal, Human Resource Management and Journal of World Business, amongst others, as well as in the business media outlets. Prior to joining academia, Tatiana worked in management consulting and in HR.Her notes are here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1E5UACsLfviml2Zx92ohqs6d-3M9cZ-mw/view?usp=share_link Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

If Agile is a “Copernican revolution in management,” as Ed Denning suggests, is it also a “Copernican revolution in leadership? That question spawns more questions before we can answer it meaningfully. Is management (the quality of managing) different in leadership (the quality of leading)? Are managers (people who manage) also leaders (people who lead)? Who are the managers (which people manage)? Who are the leaders (which people lead)?In this workshop, we’ll address how to begin answering these questions for yourself, by introducing participants to “leadership models” and “how to build yours.” The session will be practical because we learn by doing; it will be interactive because we learn faster when interacting (doing) with others. The session will be thought-provoking because only you can develop a leadership model that’s your own.The first learning objective will be focused on revealing and reflecting back to you on what your assumptions and understandings of leadership might be. Some of these assumptions may be unconscious, based on biases, or both. This section will be interactive using real-time questions to solicit data and feedback to help open our thinking about leadership. At the end of this section, participants will have tools to reflect on their leadership assumptions and some of those assumptions explored and declared.The second learning objective will be focused on how we traditionally study and teach leadership, and why those established practices make no sense in the Agile/Lean organization. This section will be a short lecture, using a statistical model to expose the limited utility of our traditional approaches to understanding and developing leadership in the organization. At the end of this session, participants will have some tools for beginning to tease out what they think “leadership” is, what is “good” leadership, what is “bad” leadership, and who the leaders are in their organization – as well as some references to continue this reflection going forward.The third section will introduce leadership as a systems model, including a meta-model for defining and improving that model. This section will involve an interactive group breakout exercise. At the end of this session, participants will have a good start on their unique leadership model to help them “show up with leadership in the moment” or perhaps not – because the task at have may fall outside the boundary of our leadership system.Speaker: Christopher CurleyAn ICE-CE, Chapter Leader ("People Manager") at a global financial institution serving a team of Agile Coaches, a graduate of the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State, with degrees in political science and history, and a student of leadership for the past thirty years (James MacGreggor Burner, Barbara Kellerman, Ahmed Sidky, Bela Banathy, Chris Argyris, et al.) I introduced this topic on Marsha Acker's "Defining Moments of Leadership" podcast.Certified Agile Coaching expert (ICE-CE), Program (SPC 4, PMP), and Team (CSM) Leader with +15 year history of delivering quality products, improving the efficiency of processes, and developing performing teams, spanning Fortune 100 enterprises to mid-sized technology, manufacturing, and financial sectors. Led Agile/Lean transition and adoption across the enterprise, including hardware design teams, software development teams, infrastructure services, business operations teams, manufacturing, and marketing.https://www.linkedin.com/in/ccurley/ Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

In this session, we'll dive into the concept of a stress mindset and explore how it can impact our lives in profound ways. Drawing recent psychological research, we'll learn about the two different stress mindsets: the "threat" mindset and the "challenge" mindset. We'll also explore how each mindset can impact our bodies, our emotions, and our performance.Find Olesya here: https://www.olesyaluraschi.com/ Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

In this presentation, we will discuss our firsthand experiences of constructing agile testing methodologies through the utilization of BDD (Behavior Driven Development) and example mapping. Our aim is to minimize gaps and functional errors while enhancing lead time. Jorge Luis Castro Toribio Jorge is an agilist, Agility & Digital Transformation Lead Coach, QA Manager, DevOps Program Manager, and global speaker who feels passion for Testing Automation, Agile, DevOps and business agility. He enjoys research and learning about business agility and working with cutting-edge technologies. He has been learning continuously for more than 12 years and is still learning new ways to foster enterprise agility and team greatness. He has worked in several roles (developer, tester, IT program manager, Software engineering in Test manager, QA manager, agile coach) which helps him to see the big picture and operational and team members dynamics happening inside organizations. This experience lets him help teams design, build, and implement digital, DevOps and agile transformation strategies. He encourages focus on: People, Productivity, Continuous improvement, Innovation and having fun to enjoy success in our agile journeys.Jorge has been a speaker in Agile and DevOps events organized in Peru, Canada, UK, Netherlands, India, Germany, Mexico, Colombia, Nigeria, Panama, Azerbaijan, Australia, US among other countries. Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

SCRUM at WarInspection of how society, army, and business can survive and win by following basic SCRUM values and an Agile approach, with examples from the Russian war against Ukraine.Oleksandr BuratynskyiOleksandr Buratynskyi, Organizational Consultant & Certified Agile Professional (PAL-I, ACC) / Scrum Master (PSM) with 10+ years of international expertise of Embedding innovation into organizations, successful Agile implementation, facilitation, coaching, mentoring, teaching in Agile, SCRUM (LeSS), Kanban, startup pivot, culture creator with extensive Quality Assurance background (Slice, GlobalLogic, Luxoft, Credit-Suisse, UBS, tTravel, Slated, Competera, Innovecs, Emerge, agiledrive). Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Product Discovery is a mindset and a continuous process for validating hypotheses and gathering empirical evidence on the value of new product features BEFORE developing them. When applied properly it can reduce the risk of losing time, human talent, and money in functionalities that, when implemented, might not be as attractive, feasible, or profitable as expected.In this session, Ricardo Colusso will describe the key elements of Product Discovery, share some real-world examples and experiences,and then we will work in subteams for applying some key concepts and tools.Ricardo Colusso is a Senior Product Owner and Product Management coach with 25 years of experience working across Latin America, the United States and European countries. Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

We all know that great leaders have great networks. Most of us realize that we should be networking more. But so often we don't. In this Linkedin live you will learn what the key components are to creating an amazing network and what you have been missing in previous attempts at networking. This will allow you to stop wasting time engaging in networking that doesn't result in deep connections and instead foster connections that will be resilient and meaningful.Olesya is a Harvard-educated Leadership and High-Performance Coach. Her work lies in helping people achieve their full potential and utilizing psychological science to achieve their goals. Her areas of focus are optimal performance, motivation, neuropsychology, and stress optimization. Her clients are from Microsoft, Amazon, Accenture, as well as entrepreneurs and start-up founders. She was previously Head of Marketing at the Institute of Coaching, Harvard Medical School, and continues to serve as an advisor to Seattle area start-ups.https://www.olesyaluraschi.com/ & https://www.olesyaluraschi.com/mastermind/ Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

LeSS-Huge Adoption Case StudyJoin James Carpenter and his mysterious co-presenter as they present highlights from a LeSS-Huge adoption effort at a large multi-national networking and server hardware company. After a quick walk-through of the case study excerpts, James and Mitya will focus on participant questions inspired by the extensive diagrams available in the pre-read content.** PLEASE PREPARE BY READING PRE-READ CONTENT **Please skim the case study by reading the following:Synopsis sectionAll figures and associated captionsConclusion sectionhttps://less.works/case-studies/large-server-hardware-companyColourful information-rich context for the discussions is provided in the many graphics found in the pre-read content. Nuances regarding challenges from executive management changes, clever requirement area boundary definitions, complex engineering challenges, and the political dynamics of a multi-national engineering organization can all be seen in the figures and captions provided in the pre-read contentSpeakers:James Carpenter is a LeSS certified trainer, coach software engineer, and author who grew up on a Texas dairy farm. His coaching is grounded by the many years he spent as a hands-on software engineer and manager, along with a great deal of academic study, and in-the-trenches transformation work. He is focused on large LeSS and LeSS-Huge organizational transformations. His book "Forging Change: Agile Restructuring in Practice" is available in both e-book and print formats from most bookstores including Amazon (http://amzn.com/1732875111).Mitya is an extremely talented senior engineering manager. He has extensive hands-on experience as both a hardware and firmware engineer. He was a pivotal director-level manager involved in the LeSS-Huge adoption being discussed. More concrete and glowing details have been omitted in an effort to protect the anonymity of the end client being discussed. Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Have you continuously set a goal for yourself with the best intention but just can't seem to stick to it? Learn why we fail at goals and how to use our own psychology to achieve and stick to goals.Olesya is a Harvard-educated Leadership and High-Performance Coach. Her work lies in helping people achieve their full potential and utilizing psychological science to achieve their goals. Her areas of focus are optimal performance, motivation, neuropsychology, and stress optimization. Her clients are from Microsoft, Amazon, Accenture, as well as entrepreneurs and start-up founders. She was previously Head of Marketing at the Institute of Coaching, Harvard Medical School, and continues to serve as an advisor to Seattle area start-ups.https://www.olesyaluraschi.com/ Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

There is a better way to set goals that are backed by psychological science, the issue is most of us don't do this. Learn how to set better goals for 2023 in this video.Olesya is a Harvard-educated Leadership and High-Performance Coach. Her work lies in helping people achieve their full potential and utilizing psychological science to achieve their goals. Her areas of focus are optimal performance, motivation, neuropsychology, and stress optimization. Her clients are from Microsoft, Amazon, Accenture, as well as entrepreneurs and start-up founders. She was previously Head of Marketing at the Institute of Coaching, Harvard Medical School, and continues to serve as an advisor to Seattle area start-ups.https://www.olesyaluraschi.com/ Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Meet Madison Arnholt an experienced global project manager and now Intuitive Life Coach with over 500+ hours of experience coaching clients all over the world tap into their intuition and heal energy blocks so they can live a more aligned, fulfilling life.  Madison began her spiritual growth journey and self-healing 8 years ago. Her unique approach combines intuition, mindset, energetics, emotional release and manifestation all refined through her own transformation from sexual trauma, eating disorders, severe anxiety, chronic back pain, eczema, sleeping only 2 hours a night to thriving CEO, spiritual life coach and wife. She’s on a mission to help you overcome what’s holding you back so you can THRIVE in all areas of your life. Madison’s Certifications: Project Management Professional (PMP), Inner Voice Facilitator, NLP Practitioner, Life & Success Coach, Emotional Freedom Techniques Practitioner, TIME Techniques Practitioner, Clinical Hypnotherapist, Integrative Nutrition Health CoachWhat’s covered in the episode:- What is intuition?- What happens if we trust our intuition- Why should we follow our intuition?- The 4 most common ways your intuition will communicate with you- 6 ways to tap into your intuition and strengthen your connection- Ways to get out of your head and into your body- The power of releasing emotion stuck in the body (what Eckhart Tolle calls the “pain-body”)Find Madison here: madisonarnholt.com  Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Our friends at Lean Business Ireland have allowed us to share our very own Joanna's talk at the Lean Business Ireland conference about Methods & Systems. Stream Facilitator: Ciarán Crosbie - Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Speaker 1: Seamus Doran - Assistant Head of Economic Development & Enterprise - Carlow LEO Speaker 2: Dr. Eileen Diskin - Innovation Academy - UCD Speaker 3: Joanna Koprowicz – Founder - Agile Lean Ireland  Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Vessy Tasheva Founder & CEO of Vessy.com (global DEIB and Mental Health consultancy)  Originally Bulgarian and based out of Ireland, I work with clients across Europe and North America such as Soundcloud, Reward Gateway, Typeform and more, and now expanding in Latin America.   I authored two editions of my independent international Diversity in the Workplace Report (2019 edition featuring 10 companies from 10 countries: vessy.com/diversity and 2020 edition featuring 10 companies from 10 industries: vessy.com/2020), along with a whitepaper on How To Drive Measurable Results in D&I with OKRs.  I was named by Hive Learning as one of 2019’s most influential D&I Leaders globally and as one of the UK’s most influential D&I leaders in 2020. In 2021 I was listed by Onalytica in Top 50 D&I Influencers globally. In 2021, Vessy.com was featured in Top 10 of Emerging Diversity & Inclusion Companies in Europe by Manage HR Magazine.  In April 2020 I launched a video course on Inclusive Leadership on SocialTalent, learning platform, where the course ranked as #2 in the Most Watched course for the month of May.  In the last 11 years, prior to being a founder, I have worked as Chief Strategy Officer of a talent tech startup, as well as in various roles across product, marketing, and culture in companies between 4 and 800 employees.  Our team is growing - check out the careers page on Vessy.com  After completing a certified course in Psychotherapy & Counselling with PCI College in Ireland and authoring a paper on Intersectionality, Privilege, and Otherness in Psychotherapy, I am now studying in Trinity College in Dublin to complete a masters of science in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in order to examine D&I in the field of psychotherapy and to develop an intersectional approach to D&I through mental health as a unifying factor for all employees in an increasingly polarized world. Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) as a concept has been around for a while. Many companies set out to work with OKRs and implement the seemingly simple idea in their organization - often enough without a clear answer to the most important question: “To what ultimate end?”.So it’s time to dig a little deeper! In this meetup, Natalija will invite you to look at OKRs in the context of current business challenges and complexity and broaden your perspective around the “simple idea”!Through examples, case studies and discussions, we will explore;> OKRs in the context of complexity> Different development patterns of OKRs in organizations> how to link actual business problems to OKRs> Making an informed decision whether OKRs are worth pursuing for you > Designing an OKR System that works for your organizationAnd of course we will leave enough time at the end for all you Q&As.Speaker's Bio:Natalija is an organizational development coach and OKR expert. She supports companies wanting to increase focus, autonomy, and value creation to identify and prioritize their challenges, set valuable goals and continuously improve. She has been working within People Development and Transformation since 2010 before starting her own business offering an entire ecosystem of training and coaching focusing on Leadership &Responsibility, Objectives & Key Results and Agile HR & Learning.In 2020, she published the practical book “OKRs at the center: How to drive change with goals and create the organization you want” together with Sonja Mewes via Sense & Respond Press. Today the learning and development programs supporting organizations with OKRs and more are united in the OATC Academy! Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Talk Description:Adaptive/Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) is key to effectively becoming an agile organisation and can be considered one of the pillars of business agility. In this talk Shane introduces the key ideas around LPM, discusses the 12 principles of Lean Portfolio Management from ICAgile, how they translate into an adaptive strategy and from there into effective execution and some common pitfalls to avoid when shifting to an adaptive portfolio.Speaker's Bio:Over the last 35+ years Shane has been a practitioner and leader of developers, testers, trainers, project managers and business analysts, helping teams to deliver results that align with overall business objectives. He spent 20+ years as a professional trainer, coach and consultant specialising in Agile practices, business analysis, project management, requirements, testing methodologies in Australia, New Zealand and around the world. He has worked with large and small organisations, from individual teams to large transformations all around the world, across all levels of Information Technology and software intensive product development.Shane was a director of the Agile Alliance from 2011 to 2016 and was the founding Chair of Agile Alliance New Zealand. He is co-chair of the Agile Alliance Agile Coaching Ethics initiative, working to produce a code of ethical conduct for agile coaching. He is an ICF registered Professional Coach.He leads the Culture and Methods editorial team for InfoQ.com where he hosts the weekly InfoQ Culture Podcast. He is co-author of the recent book #noprojects - A Culture of Continuous Value, available on Amazon and from InfoQHe was the Director of Community Development for ICAgile from 2017 to 2022. He has re-joined SoftEd as the Head of Global Delivery from February 2022.“I firmly believe that humanistic way of working and the agile mindset are desperately needed in organisations all around the globe today. Taking agile values and principles beyond software is important and making sure they are properly embedded is absolutely crucial for success – we’re in an industry that touches every aspect of people’s lives and massively influences society as a whole and I want to be a part of making sure that industry is both ethical and sustainable.” Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

There are different levels of leaders, each of which require different tactics to influence. Jason will describe the differences he's seen between leaders at different levels (leaders of individual contributers, leaders of leaders, leaders of leaders of leaders) and then explore different tactics that seem to work better or worse for each level.Speaker's BioJason is a Staff Agile Coach at Spotify NYC and has been there since 2015 supporting Spotify Advertising, mostly around managing the effects of scaling and supporting leadership teams. Prior to Spotify, he was a Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks since 2001, mostly in Australia. While there, he supported and was a committer on the CruiseControl Open Source continuous integration server. He first encountered Extreme Programming in 1999.He mostly writes on Twitter (@jchyip) and Medium (https://jchyip.medium.com). His most popular writing seems to be "It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings" (https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/itsNotJustStandingUp.html) and "Why T-Shaped People" (https://jchyip.medium.com/why-t-shaped-people-e8706198e437) Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org

Every day, we make hundreds of decisions. With that in mind, even a minor improvement in your decision-making abilities can drastically alter your long-term trajectory. Despite this, the majority of people do not bother to develop those abilities.In this workshop, you will learn how to make better decisions and also feel better more sure in the decisions you make. We will engage in exercises to clarify any current decisions you are struggling with so come with a decision in mind you would like to work on.Speaker:Olesya is a Harvard-educated Leadership and High-Performance Coach. Her work lies in helping people achieve their full potential and utilizing psychological science to achieve their goals. Her areas of focus are optimal performance, motivation, neuropsychology, and stress optimization. Her clients are from Microsoft, Amazon, Accenture, as well as entrepreneurs and startup founders. She was previously Head of Marketing at the Institute of Coaching, Harvard Medical School, and continues to serve as an advisor to Seattle area startups. Find us here: www.agileleanireland.org