36. Modern Agile: It starts and ends with the people with Ardi Karaj

Any worthwhile developer or UX designer knows about the Agile Manifesto. Any worthwhile team is practicing (or at the very least attempting to practice) Agile methodologies to deliver great products. The ideas in the Agile Manifesto are sound. But how can we improve how we work to make working in an agile way easier and more sustainable?This week Derek and Jeremy sit down with Ardi Karaj, President of Industrial Logic Canada, to talk about Modern Agile and Business Agility. It’s time to think past simply continuous delivery for engineering teams. It’s time for us to think about how everyone involved with building software can be more agile. How can our marketing and UX teams be more agile? How can our budgets be more agile? How can leadership be more agile?Ardi offers some practical advice and some tips on how to hand more autonomy over to the engineering teams to enable faster and more practical results. Spoiler alert: It starts and ends with the people.Topics: • 01:52 – What is Modern Agile? • 03:12 – Make people awesome — Your employees and customers • 04:58 – Make psychological safety a pre-requisite • 06:19 – Experiment and learn rapidly • 09:03 – “Hypothesis” changes the mindset of the team • 09:36 – This is very hard for a lot of teams • 12:44 – Modern Agile requires Business Agility • 15:05 – How do we fund work this way? • 15:42 – We can use the data we collect to make decisions about our budget • 17:38 – Empower your people to make decisions • 18:51 – We should commit to building a thing, we don’t commit to solving a problem • 23:12 – Agile needs to expand beyond the engineering team • 26:10 – Organizational structure is one of the keys that enable agility • 29:58 – The best strategies encourage us to do as little as possible to solve problems • 33:18 – What can the UX team do to enable teams to be more agile? • 34:20 – The UX team can… • 43:10 – We often confuse collaboration with cooperation • 47:05 – The Learning Release • 47:32 – The Earning Release • 48:25 – Some tips for leadership • 51:30 – In the end, it’s all about the peopleHelpful Links: • agilemanifesto.org • industriallogic.com • modernbusinessagility.ca • The Learning Release by Ardi KarajAbout ArdiArdi is a passionate Agile coach, trainer, change agent, and consultant in the Toronto area. She brings more than 20 years of software development experience from different commercial and public organizations.Ardi’s passion for building awesome products has been combined with process improvement for organizations that are adopting Agile frameworks. Working with both management and development teams, she is well known for applying Agile and Lean techniques to help identify and remove barriers in order to streamline product delivery and release efforts. She is driven to creating sustainable change and has developed techniques that focus on building teams that have a culture of continuous improvement.Ardi is President of Industrial Logic Canada IndustrialLogic.ca, part of the Industrial Logic IndustrialLogic.com—– Thanks for listening! We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you liked what you heard, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts! If you enjoyed today’s episode,