Self Managed – Steve Randall

Dirty Agile

The other morning I was a guest presenter (I really don’t like that word… I interacted with people) at a breakfast with Deloitte in Brisbane. The topic was, agile, how I’ve implemented it and the results achieved at my latest client.

Half way through this session I chuckled to myself and coined the phrase ‘dirty agile’ – agile from the trenches. Since then I have received a lot of interest in dirty agile.

The term dirty agile reflects scrum after many retrospectives. The flavor of agile that we now run throughout this program can be clearly traced back to the manifesto principles and you can see its roots are in SCRUM, however it fits the organisation, their risk tolerance and low project maturity very well.

Jeff Sutherland – the founder of SCRUM explains that SCRUM is ‘onboarding for agile’. It is a set of ‘rules’ to get you going, it is not Continue reading Dirty Agile

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The Human Side of Business – Minimize Management, Maximize Leadership.

Managing should be an invisible, yet a productive force.

So, how do you improve the efficiency of the human-side of Organizations needed for the future success of a business?

Everything to do with work can be changed for the better, if only Management today is comfortable with simply pointing out where the business needs to go and how it intends getting there. Then letting go, and being flexible enough to adapt and evolve as that future unfolds with all of its uncertainties.

We definitely, need another measure of people performance other than by their economic contribution, which is often not within the control of the individual. We need to measure their commitment and leadership to the well-being of the Organization.

To achieve this we need to make work something worth committing to.

Adequacy and monotony is not something that just happens; it is built into your system. It’s the result of thoughtless social engineering, which adds nothing to improve the human-side of the business, or the abilities of the individual, Continue reading The Human Side of Business – Minimize Management, Maximize Leadership.

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

How To Deliver Constant Change Without Burning Out Your Teams

As new beliefs clash with the old, ‘fast change’ has come to mean must change, and with it has come disposable skills, the loss of feeling valued and stable, and a lack of leadership and mentors. This has resulted in not only a knowledge deficiency within our Organizations but also, a shift in the centre of energy of these Organizations.

This disruption has become so much part of our lives (there is just too much to take in… so much to know, understand, think about and consider) that we are in danger of our minds suffering from sensory as well as information overload and burnout. Stress, bewilderment, helplessness, tension, anxiety disorder is on the increase, and it is showing up as unreasonable behavior and even mindlessness within our Organizations’. Its showing up through lower than expected results.

People no longer know how to behave, how they work is how they have always worked. Many don’t know how to change. Speed has turned into haste as organizations fight for a credible future.

Now is the time to be a leader.

Continue reading How To Deliver Constant Change Without Burning Out Your Teams

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

How Spotify Do It – Part 2 of 2

Everytime I watch this series… yep, I watch them regularly… hey why not learn from the very best(!) I learn something new.

As your level of agile maturity grows you will face issues. Architecture, design, fit into assurance frameworks in large organisations, skill set sharing etc. Spotify seem to have faced them all… and found sweet solutions.

Watch and enjoy!

Continue reading How Spotify Do It – Part 2 of 2

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

How Spotify Do It (Is this Agile at its best?) Part 1 of 2

Those of you who know me, know that I am a raving fan of Spotify and their Agile culture.

Spotify is an amazing free, legal online music streaming service check out their product here (https://www.spotify.com/au/)

You see spotify have engaged the Agile philosophy properly. Agile is about trying, measuring, then retrospectively looking at what worked well, didn’t work so well, and well… what totally ballsed up.

Lets be honest here… every project has its issues. Any project worth is weight has to solve a problem that hasn’t been solved before, so it will come across some stumbling block. People will make mistakes. That’s normal and that’s ok with me. Its how we learn, its how we innovate. If we never try anything new, we wont create anything new.

The video below, with a huge thanks to Spotify who made it available, explains their engineering philosophy so well that I thought I’d use it here.
Continue reading How Spotify Do It (Is this Agile at its best?) Part 1 of 2

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

Welcome To Agile Espresso For Highly Collaborative Meetings

Have you ever sat in a meeting and thought “OMG… when will this end?… I’ve gotta get out and get xyz done.” You didn’t feel engaged, you didn’t feel valued.

A silly question I know, of course you have!

Sadly meetings like this are common place. It’s how most meetings around the world are run… and they kill productivity and collaboration.

I’ll let you in on a secret… If I have to sit through another rambling meeting… one that I cant add any value too, I’ll lose the will to live.

Recently I was having a coffee with a friend and this topic came up. He started telling me about the Lean Coffee framework and how it had transformed his company. Ummm… no… it’s not a skinny coffee as the name might lead you to believe. It’s actually a framework for running lean meetings.

Driven by the fear of another life-sucking-meeting Continue reading Welcome To Agile Espresso For Highly Collaborative Meetings

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

How To Run A Company (or Team) With (Almost) No Rules

Here’s a thought… If Ricardo can run a successful multi-billion dollar group of companies using his version of Agile, then we should all be striving to instill this mindset into our teams and departments.

What’s exciting is that its not just us dev types who are rethinking better ways of working.

What do Ricardo’s principles and Agile have in common? Well, if I was to pick a commonality I would have to say this…

Continue reading How To Run A Company (or Team) With (Almost) No Rules

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

The Role of Project Manager On An Agile Project

I talk to a lot of project managers and they always have the same question for me…

“What is my role in an agile organization?”

They see the scrum roles of scrum master, product owner and scrum team member and they say, “Wait a second, there is no role for a project manager in there. Do I even have a place in an agile organization?”

Well the answer to that is an emphatic yes.

I think that most project managers have a skill set that transfers over very well to scrum, but the key is understanding which skills do transfer over well and which ones are going to have to adjust.

Continue reading The Role of Project Manager On An Agile Project

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

The $1,000,000 Hackathon – Watch!

A colleague just send me a link to this youtube video and I just had to share it.

Why did you share this with me Steve? What has this go to do with Agile?… a lot actually…

It is a good question tho. Well you see I started my career as a developer… creating software is in my blood and I think this type of event is really cool… and very Agile.

These guys pump out two weeks or more worth of work in two days. Sure they work like mad dogs, and have a great team around them, but this is very Agile… here’s why…

Continue reading The $1,000,000 Hackathon – Watch!

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.

Why Happiness Is The New Productivity

This is the best video I have watch in a long time. This is how all leaders should be striving to lead. It wont take you long to realise that I am a big fan of Vishen Lakhiani and his leadership ideas… they fit with Agile so well.

In 2009 Vishen Lakhiani was asked to speak at Engage Today in Calgary along with such luminaries as Sir Richard Branson, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Stephen Covey, Nobel Prize Winner F.W De Klerk, Tony Hsieh, the founder of

Continue reading Why Happiness Is The New Productivity

Steve: 0400 005 924 | 1300 851 861

#Leadership #HardButWorthIt.