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In this episode of The Agile Coach Podcast, Vivek Khattri talks to Matt Philip, Senior Director, Agile Coaching and Kaizen Lead at Pfizer about the different Agile methodologies and practices, including XP (Extreme Programming), Kanban Method, Scrum, and Lean.
Matt particularly hones in on the Kanban method, and how it’s more than just the signal cards, but is actually more of the organizing principles that is typically not readily apparent.
With 20 years of global experience in digital-services consulting under his belt, Matt shares some profound insights on how applying Agile methodologies can help teams and enterprises optimize their flow and create value for their clients.
HIGHLIGHTS
QUOTES
Matt: "It's been really nice to see how different people are doing things and learning from other people and different places and pick up bits and pieces. For me, an agile mindset is one of learning and so picking up bits and pieces where people are doing some interesting things, trying interesting things, and that's what I've just done. Very little of what I've done is my own novel idea. It's really just incorporating other people's ideas and making it work."
Matt: "Kanban helps us to see how our work works. It's really making visible the work systems that we work in."
Matt: In knowledge work, where we are in, intangible goods, it's harder to see the work. It's stuff that lives in our computers and in the cloud, and so it's not quite as transparent and visible as in a physical goods environment.
Matt: "It's a way of, I talk about humanizing work. For me, seeing how actual people were doing work can be overburdened and stressed out by having too much work to work on, or not having a visibility into how things are working. And so it's about the work's sake, but also the worker's sake that I really find Kanban to be a helpful way of thinking really about our work."
Matt: "The Kanban Iceberg metaphor that I've used in the past is, that which is seen at the top of the iceberg, which is the sign cards or the cork boards. But there's so much of the Kanban method that's below the surface. Not quite as easily seen. I think about the other practices, the principles, and the values."
Matt: "In my experience, I've experienced lots of different places that say Agile and do Agile. My very first experience was doing XP extreme programming orientation. My main experience is initially doing Agile stuff from an XP standpoint. For me that's really valuable because I understood the importance of engineering excellence and technical excellence as opposed to just the organizing principles of some methods that are useful but don't necessarily speak to what code looks like and what deliverable work should look like."
Matt: "Make it okay to fail. We talk a lot about psychological safety. Making it clear that it’s okay that you're not gonna get it right the first time. And being resilient in that experience and to learn from those things."
Matt: "If doing something fast is important, there's tradeoffs obviously, maybe the quality suffers but sometimes the customer's okay with that. It takes a very important conversation to make them aware of the implications of taking some shortcuts with code. But one of the things that I find useful, for example, is predictability. Being able to be predictable in delivery, to the extent that we have control over some of these sources of variation and impact."
Learn more about Matt in the link below:
Here are some great episodes to start with!
