9: Experimentation, Innovation, Managing Risk - Part 1 - Chuck Durfee

Agile and Beyond

In episode 1 of a 3 part conversation with Chuck Durfee, Scrum Master, Agile Denver Board Member Emeritus, recent MBA graduate, recovering developer, and friend of neon tapirs everywhere, we discuss the following.

• His 6 year history with Agile Denver, and the evolution of the Mile High Agile conference.
• His experience as a Scrum Master, and his first experiment with Agile Scrum.
• His early revelations with Agile.
• Startup like experiences and the evolutionary path of backlog refinement.
• War Rooms, Kanban style boards, tracking, and flow optimization.
• The invaluable practice of asking questions.
• Grassroots idea generation and dispersion.
• His intuitive way of uncovering motivations.
• Enticing people to apply their interests in new ways.
• Developing cross-functional teams and organizations.
• Leveraging transferrable skill sets, and cross-training.
• Enhancing empathy by getting developers to think from a customer's point of view.
• Developing a vocabulary from patterns, and how doing things empirically makes it difficult to name what you are doing.
• Collaboration, Paul Raynor, and the need to develop a ubiquitous (shared) language.
• Design Thinking. Domain Driven Design.
• Cross-training, and the development of multidisciplinary teams and organizations.
• Experimentation, Innovation, Managing Risk.

And now welcome to the first episode of a 3 part conversation with Chuck Durfee.