Waiting For The Dinosaurs To Leave Technology Leadership Podcast Review

Dimitar Karaivanov on Agile Atelier, Claire Lew on The Product Experience, Eric Willeke on Agile Amped, Mike Bugembe on The Product Experience, Colleen Esposito on Hired Thought
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This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting February 17, 2020. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers.
DIMITAR KARAIVANOV ON AGILE ATELIER
The Agile Atelier podcast featured Dimitar Karaivanov with host Rahul Bhattacharya. Dimitar is an expert on scaling Kanban. Dimitar thinks of Agile as a company sport rather than a team sport. At the team level, scaling is horizontal. The more interesting kind of scaling to Dimitar is vertical scaling. If you have a hundred or a thousand teams, the real challenge is the coordination piece on top of those teams and the strategic piece on top of that. If you don’t have an optimized coordination layer that reduces the number of things the organization is working on, your organization is spread too thin. He explained the importance of teamwork and coordination using the metaphor of a band of musicians.
Scaling Kanban starts with a single team. What Dimitar likes about Kanban is that if you follow the basic rules, it always results in some kind of improvement.
Next, we want to connect the teams to a management layer that performs the coordination activities. People often perceive Kanban as a visual board with some sticky notes on it. Actually, if you go horizontally, then vertically, it is more of an instrumentation facility for your organization. Like a performance profiling tool, you connect Kanban to your organization and it provides entry points with time stamps and starts collecting data. With this profiler, you can dig in and find out what the slowest part of your organization is.
Rahul asked about roles in scaled Kanban. Dimitar says there are only two specialized roles called out in Kanban: the service delivery manager and the service request manager. Because one of the principles of Kanban is to start where you are, you do not have to change a lot about roles when you start using Kanban. The service request manager role just means having someone who is responsible for requesting work, such as product manager. The service delivery manager just needs to be someone who is responsible for ensuring the work gets done. This could be a Scrum Master or maybe just a team lead. If the organization is adopting Kanban as a whole, you will need someone on the strategic level that is connected to the Kanban system and has a say in what gets done and when.
Rahul asked about failures Dimitar has seen. Dimitar has seen problems in which training just the teams and expecting this to lead to business agility failed. Another route to failure was relying on tools to do all of the work of creating agility. He says you need people with personal agility. You need to find these people or stimulate your existing people to grow themselves so that they become agile in their mindset.
Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-19-scaling-kanban-with-dimitar-karaivanov/id1459098259?i=1000464007645
Website link: https://rahul-bhattacharya.com/2020/01/29/episode-19-scaling-kanban-with-dimitar-karaivanov/
CLAIRE LEW ON THE PRODUCT EXPERIENCE
The Product Experience featured Claire Lew with hosts Randy Silver and Lily Smith. Randy started by asking Claire if she’s ever accidentally been anybody’s worst boss. This was the question that Claire herself had asked at the Business of Software