Scott Ambler

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  00:26

It’s been 20 months since PMI purchase. What is one of the biggest things that you’ve learned since the acquisitions? What something that stands out?

Speaker: Scott Ambler  00:43

Yeah. So I think the probably the biggest thing I’ve learned is just the wealth of material that PMI already had. We’d already been leveraging the idea that a pinball guide and a few of the other standards in discipline agile, because DA is a hybrid. But what was interesting was, I hadn’t gone into any great detail and into some of the actually anti-standards from PMI, like the around governance and portfolio management, good stuff like that. And it’s pretty impressive, every time I initially dug into something, I was always a bit worried of, what’s going to be in this? And they’re all solid. And it was interesting that they’re often misinterpreted. And that, including by me, so my expectations were a bit off. But then I looked at the governance standard for example, and it was solid, really good stuff. I’m not convinced enough people are actually listening to it. But yeah, certainly, it’s really solid and well aligned with the governance message we already had DA. So it’s just really impressive. And just the wealth of the PMI network, the chapters are incredible. As incredible how hard they work, and how they’re all about helping their members to learn and to improve and get better. I’ve interacted with maybe 30 chapters so far since joining PMI, they’ve all been impressive. Just absolutely fantastic organizations. It’s incredible.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  02:18

Yeah. No, I can relate to that. Because I’ve been part of the PMI community for close to a decade, I have my PMP still. I was actually on the board of directors for PMI chapter here in Portland main, and board  of directors. So it gives me a little bit of a different perspective. And I agree there’s a misconception out there, in the sense of what PMI is. And there’s also a misconception, I think about discipline agile that people just and safe too. I mean in a sense, people talk about safety, they talk about these things, but they never actually dug deeper to understand, they never took a course. And it’s just the perception of the high level. What was interesting to me that up to December, end of 2018, in some ways, I don’t know if you did, but others described discipline agile as a framework, and you’ve moved away from calling it a Framework to calling it a toolkit. Could you maybe elaborate on that? What was the decision behind that or reasoning behind that decision?

Speaker: Scott Ambler  03:28

Yeah, so the interesting thing was that we were always being compared to safe and Scrum and less than others. And the comparison was never accurate. Because where the frameworks tend to be prescriptive, they have one way of doing things, and it’s good ways, right? Meaning there’s a lot of good things to be said about safe and less than Scrum and others. But they tend to have one way of doing things and there’s a lot of rhetoric around is the art of the possible and you can tailor it to your own needs, and all that sort of stuff. But then they give you exactly zero advice to do that, right? And they certainly give you no advice to improve away and do better than what they have in those frameworks. And more with that wouldn’t make any sense for them to do that, right? Whereas we were taking a completely different approach. We were not prescribing anything, what we were doing in DA is, we walk you through what you need to think about. And then we give you options, and then we walk you through the tradeoffs of those options. That way, you can make better choices, because you’re a unique person, you’re on a unique team in any organization. So there is no such thing as a best practice, right? So with the frameworks, their pitches, there are here as some best practices for solving a certain problem. And certainly, they’re good practices, but they might not be best for you because you might be in a different situation than what those practices are actually effective for, right? 

So our approach is to help you to understand, here’s the situation that we’re in. So instead of saying, here’s the one official best practice to rule more, we instead say well, here’s what you need to consider, here are some practices. So you do the best that you can in a situation  that you face. So you need to choose the right approach for you. And then as your situation changes over time, as you learn and get better, then you might make different choices over time and rightfully so. So for example, in Scrum, you manage your work in the form of a product backlog, that’s a great technique. There’s six or seven other different, very viable strategies for doing the same thing. Some of those strategies are generally better than a product backlog. And some of them are generally worse than a product backlog. But the scrum folks only talk about product backlogs. Cause that’s the best practice, right? That’s the one official way of doing things. No, it’s observably not true. And then, the Kanban folks, they’ve got their way of managing work. And then of course, you get all this head butting, my best practice wouldn’t be your best practice. And it’s like grow up, who cares? Choose the right strategy for you. And then and by the way, there’s far more than just those two approaches to, right? So, we don’t go down that road. That’s what  the frameworks do. DA is about helping you to improve and become a learning organization.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  06:17

But that’s a huge shift for PMI, right? PMI is all or used to be by the book, this is the pin book. This is the best way of doing things. So it’s a fundamentally, I mean, PMI has been on this I think transformation journey since probably 2010, 2012, especially, I’m talking about specifically agile, but how is it I mean, I’m interested all for PMI to actually acknowledge that there is no one best framework and that you have to contextualize things. It’s a big, I think, switch, because maybe just to add to that, I think good experience, project managers, and know that you have to contextualize things. But I think the marketing message generally that came out of PMI is, this the best way, this is the pin bock, this is when you take the exam. So what have you seen for the time that you’ve been with PMI? How’s the mindset of people that are leading the PMI? Because it’s a huge switch in my opinion.

Speaker: Scott Ambler  07:24

Yeah. Well, interestingly enough, one of the reasons why PMI purchased DA was because their mindset had shifted, right? They didn’t buy us for the shift. Well, I am awesome, and it’s awesome to work with me. So probably, they bought us just because I’m so cool. But what happened was, the mindset had already shifted within the executive leadership, and it was becoming like, if you just look at the membership of PMI, there’s a phenomenally wide range of stuff going on in the construction industry, obviously, but in the IT industry and software development and then in between, so, variable wide range of projects and non-projects, regulatory and not regulatory and others. So if you look at the 50th anniversary book from PMI, which listed the top 50 projects of all time, just those projects alone, this huge range of stuff going on and rightfully so, right? So one size does not fit all. So I think it’s pretty obvious. Now, having said that, the term best practices is a phenomenal marketing term. It’s what people want to hear, it just told me the best practice, because there are a lot of people that just want to be told what to do. They might not admit it, but I don’t want to be told what to do. But I would really like to hear about the five best practices to do this, right? 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  08:54

It’s easy thing to do, right? Give me the recipe, right?

Speaker: Scott Ambler  08:57

Yeah, give me the one recipe to feed me every meal for life. And say, because you adults tend to have a different meal, you might only have 20 things you know how to cook. But still, you don’t need the one meal. You don’t eat spaghetti every single night of your life, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  09:16

Exactly. Yeah, maybe. So this is a good segue into, I was listening to your podcast with Dave Pryor, who’s colleague of mine, and you describe the grocery shopping analogy and the challenges you’re trying to solve with that. So could you maybe share that analogy? And then I want to build on that analogy a little bit. 

Speaker: Scott Ambler  09:41

Yeah, so basically, the analogy is  you need to have a meal, right? So say you and I have dinner tonight. So you’ll go to the grocery store and you’ll buy the ingredients for that meal or you’ll go to your pantry and pick them off the shelf if you’ve already gone shopping, but what happened is the meal that I’m going to cook tonight is different than the meal that you’re going to cook. And the meal that I’ll cook tomorrow night will be different than what I cook tonight as well, right? So I need to be able to go to the grocery store, buy the ingredients I need to make the meals for my family, but I also need to have the skills. I need to know, what is mint? What is pasta? I need to use my hands on these ingredients and the skills to cook my own meal, right? So this is where it becomes a bit challenging, because it’s very easy. If I want to feed my family, I can take them to McDonald’s time, right? 

And I could do that every night for the rest of their lives. And I suspect that wouldn’t work out so well. But if I want to have a healthy meal and I can even change up restaurants, right? You can’t eat at a restaurant, right? So you’ve got to have the skills to cook your own meal. And that implies you better have also the knowledge to pick the right ingredients in order to make those meals and to experiment sometimes to, right? So it’s a really wonderful metaphor for learning. Because, I do a lot of the cooking in my family and sometimes experiment and sometimes those experiments don’t go so well. But I always learned something. And sometimes the experiments are awesome. But certainly often not. But anyways, but you always learn and I’ve also learned to be a bit humble, and I will reap the joy of cooking every so often and watch cooking shows and stuff like that to actually pick up skills from other people. But yeah, so it’s a fairly decent metaphor. So I think, I look at the frameworks is like the Big Mac deal, or the chicken bucket from Kentucky Fried Chicken or something, right? They’re solving a certain problem, they’ll feed you a hamburger and French fries and a coke for dinner. And that’s the solution sometimes but it’s not always so, whereas we’re teaching you how to cook.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  12:01

So to build on that teaching to cook, I use the analogy, and I first described like the differences between, cook by the book, somebody that takes a recipe and just doesn’t know much like myself unlike you or somebody else. I don’t know what I’m doing, right? So even when I tried to follow recipe, it usually doesn’t come out that great. Then there are cooks with unique style, right? And I say these are the most dangerous cooks, because they think they’re chefs and they try to do things. They are cooks with innovation, these are people that understand what they don’t know. And they’re inspiring to get better. And you have chefs that create recipes, that understand a chemical level, when you use parsley and another ingredient, how they’re going to interact at chemical level. A good chef knows that, right? So in Agile community, we also have a lot of people, we have customers demanding recipes yet we don’t have all the ingredients. So I joke around, I spent a lot of time here in New England. So I joke around like how New England Clam Chowder has about same amount of ingredients as Scrum. We doing daily stand ups every other day, our Scrum Master is our project manager and product owner, right? So instead of contextualizing things to their environment, we tend to blindly follow these recipes and frameworks. So now the challenge is and I don’t know from PMIs perspective, how do we get the full spectrum from cook by the book to Chef? We need all of them, right? But how do we get to that and to that spectrum?

Speaker: Scott Ambler  13:54

So that’s interesting, because I would argue with DA, we’re solving that problem. Because one thing we’ve done in our certification program for DA is, we’ve introduced cook, initial Cook, follow the recipe, character to Master Chef, we’ll teach you how to cook type of thing. And it takes time and we explicitly insist that you have experience, and if for some of the more senior certs, right? So it’s not just write us a check, and you by yourself assert. One of the great things about PMI is that we’ve always insisted that you earn your cert because it should be respectable and measurable and all those stuff. And actually, the DA or  the legacy DA organization, we adopt a lot of ideas from PMI on how to run a cert program, we always insist to the header in your cert and show experience for the higher-level ones. So the DA cert program, basically, we’ve got the discipline, the scrum master which is basically into agile and into Lean. You don’t need any experience for that but very good training. It’s effectively Scrum plus, when it gets down to it. We cover a lot of stuff that they won’t teach you in Scrum, because they want one of the technical practices, they don’t want to give you any sort of skills to go beyond scrum at all, right? Why would it? And discipline agile senior scrum master, basically teaches you how to improve.

Where the scrum master teaches you how to improve at the personal and team level and be involved with team level improvement. The senior scrum master teaches how to lead it within a team and across teams. So it’s really all about how do we help these teams learn and improve and get better. But discipline Agile Coach goes way beyond traditional agile coaching. And it’s all about answering the question, what do you do when you’re coaching a team and then you have to interact with another team, like a disparate team? So you say you’re coaching a software team, but then you need to get funding for the team, right? We have to work with finance for that. And finance has a very different mindset, very different set of priorities, very different way of working, they might not be so agile at the present moment. And frankly, they’re an impediment to you, from your point of view, they’re impediment. From their point of view, they’re making sure you’re going to stick with things, right? And they’re effectively dealing with the children on the agile teams, right? So two different very mindsets there. So how do you get them to work together? And how do you get them improving and to agree on things? Or how do you work with procurement, or all three of those teams at once? 

Because you’ve got to go off and buy something, you get funding for it. So anyways, this is what we teach in this financial coach, like, how do we improve across these disparate teams and convince them to experiment with a new way, a collaborative way of working across these teams that is different from all of them? Like the agile will get everything they want, the finance people will get everything they want, but they’ll experiment with potential new way of working, and to prove it out in their situation. And in the discipline [inaudible 17:03] stream consultant is all about, how do we improve across the value stream? How do we improve across the organization and optimize the whole? And that could be a collection of very disparate teams working together to bring products and services out to the customers. And that’s a very complex set of skills. And it’s mostly about Lean and flow as opposed to agile, but at the same time, what potential improvements do you have to say, improve upon what you’re currently doing with less? Or what you’re currently doing with safe? How do you solve some of the common challenges in the safe world? How do you solve some of the common challenges that we see with traditional approaches, right? So the philosophy in DA is you start where you are, so if you’re currently a safe shop or less shop, or scrum shop, great that’s where you’re starting, a traditional shop, great, that’s where you’re starting, and then let’s improve from there, let’s improve in small safe steps and over time and become better. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  18:10

So almost like Kanban, like evolutionary change type of stuff. Start where you are and work from there.

Speaker: Scott Ambler  18:15

Exactly, yeah. And we also support faster change methods. So I mean, we applied bright line in, so our transformation advice is, it basically boils down to it depends. But that’s the real transformation advice that you need. One size does not fit all. So, some people want to tell you just fall quarter because following and following steps in order. And that’s a good approach in some situations, but that’s not the situation you’re in, this is not going to work.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  18:48

Or you take a look at in this quarter, there’s ADKAR, there’s McCain, whatever. There’s a lot of frameworks out there and they do have general patterns, right? And I think when I started to dive in more and more into discipline agile, it’s like, the way that I understand discipline agile, it’s collection of patterns and practices. And you’re really just consulting with the client and saying, hey, here are some of the things, some of the options, I’m assuming you’re still getting them to make the decisions. But essentially, the toolkit is really to have some kind of baseline for discussion and saying, rather than here’s, let’s look at the ingredients that you have and let’s cook something that you can, delicious with what you have rather than blindly assuming that you’re going to cook up something that you don’t have ingredients for.

Speaker: Scott Ambler  19:45

That’s exactly it, right? You start where you are and I think that’s a really good analogy. So I live 45 minutes away from the nearest grocery store. So it is a decision for me to go grocery shopping. And so if I go to cook dinner tonight, and I have in my mind that I’m going to cook chicken parmesan. I go to the fridge and there’s no chicken, I got a serious problem, right? So what it really got to do is go to the cupboard, you say what have I got? Oh, it’s spaghetti night. That’s what it has come down to because I’m going shopping. And it is what it is, right? And that’s how you got to look at it. And I think what happens is, many organizations are looking for easy solutions because they want to get better, they want to be more effective, they want to become agile, whatever the story is, and they look for an easy solution. It’s just tell me the recipe, right? And the frameworks will, here’s a great recipe, but you know what? That’s a great recipe, but it solves a problem that this organization doesn’t have.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  20:50

Exactly, it doesn’t solve any problems. If we look at  last 20 years, and you’ve been around longer than that. Where has agile, people confuse popularity with Agile and Scrum in general, the whole movement versus the success rate of solving the problems. And it’s close to zero, and not many people talk about that. 

Speaker: Scott Ambler  21:15

Yeah, well, it has had some successes. But I think a couple things have happened, right? So if you step back from that question and instead ask yourself, what organizations are succeeding? Well, I can find organizations that are very agile; Amazon, Google, eBay, and all the ones that are doing very well during COVID right now, right? Because they were able to react and adapt to the environment. So the Agile organizations have become phenomenally clear in the marketplace, if you choose to look at them. So then ask the question, well, how did Amazon get as good as they got? Well, it wasn’t adopting one of the framework, sorry, just wasn’t. Let’s do a reality check on this one, what it was, was their learning organization, they do the things that I was talking about earlier, where they make small changes over time, they run experiments, they figure out what works for them in their situation, they adopt what works, they abandon what doesn’t work. And they improve over time, basic case type of approach. And because they’ve been doing it for so long and consistently doing it, that’s why they’ve gotten as awesome as they are, right? 

So there are some organizations and most of the techniques are very agile, very lean, very agile, like if you actually look at where they work, and they’re still doing some traditional stuff. So it’s all hybrid. So this is something that I think is absolutely critical. I think one of the reasons why the Agile community sort of struggled is because of their prejudices. And the purists have really taken the community for a ride. And so if you look at the successful agile enterprises out there, they’re actually hybrid enterprises. Because they adopt strategies that make sense for them in their situation. And sometimes those are reasonably traditional ways of working. So it’s exactly what we’ve been doing for years in DA. And what’s interesting, I remember like a year and a half ago, a lot of the purists, these purists coaches were telling us, we’re advising everybody, you can’t possibly be agile unless you’re collocated, right? If you’re trying to do remote agile, that’s not really agile. When you’re filthy, I wash my hands of you, I’m too good to interact with you because you’re trying to be real and agile, nobody is spinning that ignorant nonsense anymore. Nobody.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  23:23

Because people don’t fully understand. If you understand the underlying pattern and it’s about communication, collaboration shows, so if you can figure out to better communicate and collaborate, doesn’t matter what, physical is great audit, but it’s not the only way. And I think that’s kind of…

Speaker: Scott Ambler  23:39

That’s it, right? So it gets back to do the best that you can in situations that you face. And you got to be flexible, right? So what was interesting was, when COVID hit, all these organizations had to scramble to go to remote working and put the infrastructure in place sometimes because people didn’t have machines and whatever else, let alone the ability to have a zoom call and all those sorts of things. So it was it and they had to learn, they had to invent techniques, because most of them didn’t even understand that people have been doing this for many years. And that these were solved problems, right? So the discipline agile organizations, probably are still doing remote already, but they just shifted techniques, right? 

Because we were already talking [inaudible 24:26] because we were always open to remote work from the very beginning. We are open to large teams, remote work and regulatory environments and addressing architecture and technical practices and governance and many of these concepts which are swear words for some of the purists, right? Or the advice from the purist gets down to well, you’re smart, you can figure it out on your own. Well, okay, yeah, you’re smart and yes, you could figure it on your own. But that’s an incredibly expensive and slow way of doing things. When you’re dealing with problems that have known solutions and often many known solutions. So why don’t leverage learnings of others, right? So have a little bit humility. And so this is what we teach you at DA is to leverage learnings of others. So that way when you go to experiment with a new technique, like a technique that’s new for you, you can make a better choice with what you choose to experiment with, and thereby have a greater chance of success. And so then you end up improving faster and basically you have fewer failures, which means more successes, fewer failures. So you end up improving faster and cheaper. So it’s a very good thing. But it takes just a little bit of learning to pick up on this sort of stuff. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  25:44

The organization should have the desire to develop cooks and chefs, right? Because we can’t just go and say, hey, give us this recipe so we can all follow, but you won’t use them. If you’ve been, as I said, you’ve seen this probably many, many times, but like you go to the Lloyd, people want to do one of the bigger companies that give you their playbook. They leave you with a big bill and they have. And your people have no clue what to do with the playbooks and things that they left after and I think that’s…

Speaker: Scott Ambler  26:17

And they won’t even read them. It’s a big assumption that people will follow and understand recipe, just like you were saying, right? You’ll read a recipe, and you’ll be going along, and they’ll say, well, Fracassi that this is, what the heck is Fracassi? Or you discover that you need a certain type of pan to really get the heat, right? And you don’t have that pan or anything close to it, right? So suddenly, you’re microwaving things when you really shouldn’t be, but you’re substituting hotdogs and fried chicken, because that’s what you’ve got.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  26:52

And that’s what happens in organizations. The sad thing is, when I work as a coach with these organizations, sides of these organizations, so many people are hurt, so many people are suffering because of this, right? So it’s like you almost poisoning people in a way. You either intentionally or unintentionally. But there’s a lot of people I mean, over the years you just see the stress that people are going through, people that have been in companies for 20, 30 years feeling like shit, like, I don’t feel like I’m worth anything like, I’m replaceable. They just walked out my peer that’s worked here 20 years ago, they just walked him out to the front door, right? So when you start seeing things like that, you start realizing that this is much bigger. Like what that type of role it has, it plays in people’s personal life. But that’s a separate topic. I want to come back to certifications and maybe give you a little bit of hard time, I have couple of things then. So if we look at, I think Scrum Alliance, what Ken did with the Certified Scrum Master was, just copy PMI certification, if you apply it to Scrum, in my opinion, and that has worked really well. And PMI has been kind of the gold standard when it comes to certifications. Now , the PMI offers five certification. So when I was looking at, there’s still PMI, ACP. And then we have four discipline agile certifications. So I kind of chuckled a little bit when I saw the scrum master, advanced scrum master. And I know sometimes you have to go with the sales and we’ll be looking for and where the demand is, versus the reality. So obviously discipline Agile is much bigger than Scrum. It’s context driven, right? So could you talk about it a little bit? What kind of discussions did you guys have when you talked about coming up with whether those two certifications, Scrum Masters? This is an agile scrum master and advanced Scrum Master?

Speaker: Scott Ambler  29:08

Yeah, so we had a lot of heartburn for that. And so the reasoning was that, the [inaudible 29:15] has something called certified discipline agilest and certified discipline agile practitioner. And now those are relatively what scrum master and senior scrum master are. And what happened though was, if you go to the LinkedIn and indeed and anywhere people are posting jobs, they’re looking for Scrum Masters, they’re looking for senior Scrum Masters, it is what it is, right? It’s just the hardcore reality of the marketplace. And so what we wanted to do was provide people with a career path. So where the ACP was great and still is great. It’s sort of an add on to the PMP, right? So you want to get some knowledge and agile and lean and it’s a great way to do it. Got a really solid basis in it, but it didn’t really take you anywhere. Whereas the discipline agile certs, there’s a career path there, there’s a learning path there. And it’s a multi-year path, right? It’s not just a buy, buy, buy a type of thing, you better earn it. So that’s one of the big benefits for people is that there’s a very clear career path. And it’s all about improving, helping you to learn how to improve, so we help you get better at getting better. And that is at different levels, right? So as you gain more experience, it’s more viable for you to try to improve within your team or across teams or across the organization. 

And the certs and level of experience required, knowledge required reflects that sort of learning and improvement path. So I think it’s really coherent and it’s exactly, right? It’s about far more than just Scrum. So it’s a bit unfortunate that we use the term, disciplined agile, scrum master and disciplined agile, senior scrum master for very good marketing purposes. Bu then it unfortunately doesn’t easily describe just the wealth of material that you’ll learn and how we go far beyond Scrum. And it’s interesting, we’ll have people that’ll, the company will have like an existing Certified Scrum Master. And like, I’ve literally taught workshops were at the very beginning of the first day, the guy sitting here like this and you know I’m a Certified Scrum Master. I know everything there is to know about agile, and I said, okay. Yeah, right? And then literally, by the end of the first day, the same person will be coming up to me and say, oh, this is the most awesome course I’ve ever had. You’re talking about issues that we’ve been struggling with for months. And not only do you solve them, you show several ways to solve them. And it’s like, I never heard of any of this in the scrum community. So yeah, of course not because they’re teaching you Scrum. And it’s great, don’t get me wrong, Scrum is great. But it’s very limited. It’s a 13 page. The scrum guide is 13 pages of awesomeness. But it’s only 13 pages. So you’re hanging your hat on a 13-page body of knowledge.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  32:18

Yeah, there are some, being part of both communities, right? It gives me a little bit of perspective on both ends. And I think there are some people that are private scrum Alliance community that have been advocating for, I don’t know if you remember when Ron Jeffries, and chat and agile Baker started agile Atlas. And there’s still in a way, I think the underlying thing and what I like about discipline agile is, moving away from frameworks, right? Moving away from frameworks, contextualizing things, looking at patterns, practices. And I think, just alone during the interviews that I’ve done over the last month or so, people that I respect in the industry and when I asked them, what’s coming after this whole agile and agile to agility. Everybody’s saying we’re moving towards context driven patterns, practices and contextualizing. And that’s kind of what you’re describing, currently [inaudible 33:34]. Yeah, so…

Speaker: Scott Ambler  33:38

Yeah. So I would argue. My experiences is, the frameworks have a lot of value to add and a good starting points. Right. So when you’re first learning how to cook, yeah, you learn how to follow a couple recipes, right? Why not like? And that’s basic way you get taught how to cook, but then start learning the techniques and start learning, after a while, start learning to experiment. But yeah, you’re actually right, your context counts. And it’s good that the community is figuring that out. I think it’s a moving experience, figures that out, right? And other consultants will say well, it depends, well, yes, it does depends, context counts. But in DA, one of our fundamental principles is context counts. And we start from that very basis, because we chose…so we took a very different approach. So I’ll tell you a history. So in the mid-2000s, I joined IBM and I was there, at IBM Rational, I was the chief methodologist for IT. And I led a group of people who, we were going out to customers and helping to understand agile and lean and applying at scale in a phenomenally wide range of situations. And when I joined IBM, I was very clear, I had absolutely no intention of ever creating another framework or method because I’d done several in the past and all the arrows in my back had exactly zero interest in it based on actual experience. But then after a couple of years, we started noticing things. 

And some things we noticed was that everybody was doing Agile differently. Nobody can really tell us what they were doing, right? [inaudible 35:17] scrum shop, which is meaningless, absolutely meaningless, right? Now, you might be doing Scrum, but you’re doing 50 other things and you haven’t pulled them out there, so you don’t really know what you’re doing. And sure enough, you go and you look, and then you go in and yeah, they’re doing little scrum. They’re doing calm on over here and you’re doing that over there, and so on. But they’re only focused on Scrum, because they’ve been overwhelmed with the marketing. So fair enough, right? And everyone’s struggling. That was the other thing too, everybody was struggling figuring out this agile stuff to apply it in their own situation. So it was interesting. So we basically came to the conclusion that there was a need for advice, there was a need for some sort of what we believe to be a framework at the time to tell people how to actually do this agile stuff in the real world, as opposed to what was being preached by the methodologist. But at the same time, everybody’s doing it differently. So those were two phenomenally different observations. And I just want to say…I would like to be able to say that we figured it out really quickly. We thrash for months on this, because it’s like, it’s black and it’s white, right? And I was finally reticent to get into the framework. And rightfully so, right? So then it was this, the  light bulb goes on. And we realized we really need a context driven approach. And that’s where dismantle delivery came from, which explained how do you do Agile solution delivery from beginning to end. How to do projects? And really, how do you initiate things? 

Where some people still thrash on Sprint Zero, we just said explicitly, first, you got to get going on it, there’s got to be some sort of initiation effort, it’s going to integrate, and everybody’s doing it. So let’s just talk about it coherently and discuss to do it. So we developed that, and then we brought DevOps into play, and then IT and then the rest of the organization. And that’s how the discipline agile toolkit evolved over time. Because we started realizing context counts in every part of the organization, and you need to be able to choose your own way of working in every part of the organization, and there’s opportunity to improve in every part of the organization. And if you don’t improve in every part of the organization, you’ve got a problem, right? So if you view your organization as a complex adaptive system, and effectively as a fleet of ships, right? Every team is a team, you’re a fleet, your organization’s a fleet, then if all these ships are going in different directions, then you’re not really a fleet, right? It’s just a bunch of teams doing their own thing. But if you’re a fleet, you’re basically going in the same direction, it wouldn’t be nice if you could actually work together and do whatever fleets do. 

And so you do it effectively and get better at it overtime, right? [inaudible 38:02] I guess. So that’s the idea there. So context definitely, we need to contextualize approach. But here’s the hard lesson for all my colleagues in the Agile community, I invite you to have the humility to recognize that other people have solved problems, similar problems than what you’re currently facing today. So instead of making stuff up, which is a lot of fun, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel on everything, you really don’t. So all this random experimentation, all this rhetoric around failing fast and all that sort of stuff, sure, it’s better to fail fast than fail slowly. But it’s still failure. And yes, you’re learning something from the failures. But you know what? I don’t need to be stupid about these experiments that we’re running. And this is the problem with most coaches, is they’re not being smart about these experiments. You don’t need to experiment with the wrong thing, right? So if you know how to make choice, if you know you’ve got several choices, and you can identify a better choice, then you got a much better chance of succeeding. So just be smart.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  39:11

Well, it goes back to the analogy of cooks and chefs, right? It’s almost like throwing stuff in and just blindly hoping that something delicious is going to come out like you got to understand what you’re throwing in. And when you’re experimenting, you’re basing it on your knowledge and previous experiences. Can you mix these two things? There are certain things that just don’t mix, right? There were a lot of times if you mix them, you might get poisoned or you might get an upset stomach. And I think probably that’s what you’re saying like, in a sense, there are a lot of things out there that we know that we shouldn’t mix. And there are things that we know that go well together. So just be more cognizant about.

Speaker: Scott Ambler  39:58

Yeah, exactly. And also be aware, I guess the thing, so the Amazons of the world often run into issues that nobody else has actually solved. So then they’re going to be experiment if they’re going to be doing true experimentation. But if your organization is not at the Amazon level, and the vast majority of organizations are not, then it gets back to the humility, just realize other people have figured out a lot of this stuff already. So why don’t you leverage their learnings? Let’s experiment with things that have a shot at working. And, why fail? And you’ll fail every so often, like, you’re still going to make mistakes and you’ll burn the food accidentally but you don’t need to experiment with silly things. And I think is the big challenge that the community faces right now is that first of all, understanding that the frameworks are only a good starting point, that you need to look beyond the framework. So one of things we’ve done in DA is we purposely don’t use Scrum terminology. 

So  if you remember Scrum, when they first came up with Scrum, they purposely chose silly terminology like spring [inaudible 41:15] and other things. To send a very clear message to everybody that this is different. And that was a great decision. That’s a wonderful marketing decision. It worked out really well for them. So we’re doing the same thing now. So we’re using older more accurate terminology because we want to send a message to the scrum community that there’s a lot more to the world than just Scrum and you need to wake up. So we’ll use the term iteration rather than sprint and we get a lot of Scrum people. Oh, my God, it’s really a sprint. Why would you use that? Why would you use this meetup term? Well, if you think that’s a made-up term, it’s because you don’t have a background. But also, we want you to think outside of the scrum box. Because scrum in many ways, it has done a lot of great things, but it’s really narrowed the conversation. And the people really struggle to realize it. There’s stuff that happens outside of Scrum that is very good.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  42:12

And I think, you just made me agree, 100%. And you made me think of a couple of things. You made me think of extreme programming, right? And how extreme programming, you can’t do Scrum, or you can’t really deliver without extreme programming practices, it’s very difficult, right? But Scrum is really good at marketing or specifically, Ken really had a vision of understanding. I feel the same way for discipline agile, over the years and I think from the content and like your message and the idea is spot on. But marketing wise, I think, from the graphics, right? And people judge a lot of times oh, safe has this nice, polished thing, less has. And I think people a lot of times, like I said at the beginning, they don’t take a course with Scott or anybody else from the community, they’re  just basing it on a rough idea by skipping through a couple of pages and saying like, oh, this is a bunch of BS, right? So yeah, marketing is big part. I think that’s something probably with Kanban, not as much but definitely experience and discipline agile reminds me of that where it’s the message is right but the marketing is not at the par where it needs to be. So I don’t know if you agree with that. And like what…

Speaker: Scott Ambler  43:38

I do, we’re actively working on that very issue. It’s easier said than done. One of the challenges is that DA is, there’s some complexities, it’s a complicated solution because we do complicated things. The fundamental problem in the industry right now is that, VUCA, right? It’s getting more complex, rapidly changing, all this good sort of stuff, all this great uncertainty, and then we look for the absolutely simplistic answers, right? And it’s crazy. And what happens is, and we’ve been [inaudible 44:18] and it’s a Twitter world where everybody wants to read things and 280 bytes and stuff like that, right? They want to read books, they don’t want any video that’s longer than five minutes, it’s pretty, pretty hard to get anybody to watch it these days. So they’re looking for these absolute simplistic answers for their exact problem. It gets back to just give me the recipe or better yet, give me the Big Mac deal. They just want the solution hand to them. And it’s no, you’ve got to unfortunately learn how to cook, so you’re right. 

We have struggled with marketing, [inaudible 44:50] organization, we focused on content, we focused on actually dealing with helping organizations to do this and to teach people, we didn’t focus on marketing. So we got totally out of market and you’re absolutely right. I would say the exact same thing the XP guys. They completely got it marketed. It was strange, like in the late 90s I was hanging out with Kent Beck’s and the Ken Swaber’s, the world and all these guys and XP was very popular at the time because it spoke to people. But then they got out of market by Ken, by Scrum. Scrum was dead in the water in the water when the Agile Manifesto was written. And it wasn’t until Ken came along with a really great marketing strategy, the CSM strategy that scrum took off other than that, it was dead in the water, absolutely dead in the water. And XP was the thing, the really agile conferences was the Extreme Programming conference. It wasn’t an agile conference, it wasn’t until the third or fourth year that it became agile.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  45:48

Yeah. And now you go to conferences, it’s getting a little bit better. But it’s all about, yeah.

Speaker: Scott Ambler  45:54

Well, Brahmins XP is hard, right? You’ve got to be skilled. And you can’t just take a two-day certification course and master it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  46:04

So I’m talking to [unsure word 46:05] after this one at 11:30. So it’ll be interesting. I really will say, I really enjoyed this. Maybe to switch topic a little bit. We have about 10 more minutes. So when it comes to the partners programs in training, like to scrum Alliance, we have CSDs and CC’s. I was looking at the traditional registered education provider to PMI that was updated this year to authorize training partner program. I was looking through it and I was wondering, first of all, I was looking at the names, just people that were training and maybe it’s just me but I didn’t recognize a lot of people so that could be a lot of them were PMI already, trainers. Then I looked at the pricing too, it’s a lot more than we maybe I don’t know, depends, like when you look at it specifically from scrum Alliance. But it’s more than what maybe I paid through scrum Alliance. So I was interested and this just goes out to people that might be interested in becoming trainers. And I know scrum alliance is put a lot of effort in setting the bar for the similar program to authorized training partner. So I want to maybe just spend a couple of minutes and talk about from your perspective, what is your vision specifically for the PMI a training program for discipline agile practitioners? And how could somebody that’s interested in becoming a partner training partner? So maybe first, what was the reasoning behind it? What is your goal with that and then how can somebody join that?

Speaker: Scott Ambler  48:04

Yeah, definitely still. So a couple things. So first, keep in mind that the ATP program, the authorized training partner program is about more than just DA, right? So there’s more organizations that trained for PNP and the ACP and different certs. And it’s basically two concepts, your accompany becomes an authorized training partner. And then they can have instructors to teach specific courses. So I could have an instructor that teaches PMP courses for example, I have an instructor that teaches DASM and DASSM for whatever reason. So to become an instructor, you have to work for an ATP or be socialized. So you could be a consultant or you could be contracting through an ATP, for example, but you’ve got to be sponsored by an ATP to become an instructor. The second thing is you’ve got to be qualified to teach the workshop. So if you want it, for example, say you wanted to become a DASSM trainer. You have to have DASSM certification you earned, you got to take the course before you teach it everything. You’ve got to be qualified to be an instructor. So there’s a training program for that. But you’ve got to be certified in what you’re teaching as well. So if you want to teach SSM, you got to be certified in SSM and well actually for anything, DA, the minimum now is you’ve got to at least be an SSM because as a senior scrum master, because that requires several years of experience and to be good instructor, you’ve got to be experienced in what you’re teaching. So that’s absolutely critical. And then becoming [inaudible 49:52] teach the DAC, you got to be a DAC first and so on.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  49:57

Okay, so yeah, I guess the way that I understand now you clarify for me. So the partner is more like a company that can hire trainers to do that. So it is almost rap. You pay one fee, and you can have two three different trainers that training under that license.

Speaker: Scott Ambler  50:24

Exactly. Yeah. So that’s exactly what it is. So the training partners allowed to offer workshops, basically. And then they have qualified instructors to deliver the workshops. Yeah.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  50:35

Okay. Yeah, because that’s a little bit different and scrum Alliance has reps that serve the similar role. But that was really helpful to clarify, because the price now makes more sense.

Speaker: Scott Ambler  50:50

Yeah. So what we found is, particularly with DA instructors, we’ve seen either existing ATPs hire instructors, and they’re also doing to PNP and other things. Or we’ve seen groups of instructors basically come together to form a company. Or, well, what they do is they work for an existing company and they all decide to hey, we’re all going to get, this company becomes…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  51:18

Chip in a little bit. Yeah.

Speaker: Scott Ambler  51:21

Yeah, stuff like that’s going on. What’s also interesting what ATP is, you have to be in business for at least three years, you’ve got to meet certain qualifications. So it’s got to be a real company. So you can’t just start a company tomorrow and  [inaudible 51:35]. So yeah, so all the ATPs get any instructors, they have to be qualified because your reputation’s on the line. 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  51:52

Yeah. No, that makes sense. So I was trying to look at how does the discipline agile deal with mindset and culture. And I ran across the discipline agile mindset and the set of principles, promises and guidelines. Could you please maybe just elaborate on that a little bit? Because I thought maybe that was the, from my understanding, the weakest part like was something that maybe DA hasn’t really evolved and developed. Because a lot of times, we talked about the need to understand the psychology and especially at the coach level, understand the culture. And the more I dug into it, the more that I saw, but it wasn’t like right in front of me, so I think it exists. But I don’t understand it. Well, I haven’t seen it. So could you maybe just talk about what is this discipline agile mindset and how does DA with mindset and culture?

Speaker: Scott Ambler  52:52

So yeah, so DA there’s an obvious focus on process, because we fill in the blank, the frameworks don’t want to deal with. So we believe in, you have to have the mindset, you have to know how to be agile, you also have to know how to do Agile, you have to have the skills as well, right? And it’s still like 85% on mindset. But without the skills, the mindset doesn’t really matter. And so, originally, we based the mindset on the Agile Manifesto. And very quickly, though, we realized that there, because our scope was bigger than software development, we realized that there was issues with the Agile Manifesto years before. So if you remember a couple months ago, in one February, the 20th anniversary manifesto, there was a lot of sessions how do we extend, how do we rewrite the manifesto, right? We were there 10 years ago. And so it’s happening because was blatantly obviously need to be done. But the manifesto authors didn’t want to update the manifestos, that’s the problems. So we weren’t constrained by that. So we started working on something called the discipline Agile Manifesto, we started addressing business agility, right? So as the toolkit grew to have greater scope, we also evolved the mindset in parallel, reflect that. And then about a year and a half, two years ago, we started realizing that the format of the manifesto, the values and principles was really clunky. It was great 20 years ago, but it just wasn’t getting the job done. And so we stepped back. And we asked the question, if we were to rewrite the manifesto today, how would we capture it? And it was a lot of effort, actually. 

But we came up with now what we call the DA mindset, so it’s based on a collection of principles which we all always had, right? So one of the weird things with the DA manifesto was we had a collection of high-level principles, then the reworked values from the Agile Manifesto and then reworked principles from the Agile Manifesto. So two levels of principle of total mass, so I was one of our motivators to rethink things. But we basically captured in this format of a collection of principles, we believe in these principles that context counts, and we want to optimize flow and we want to be enterprise aware. So beyond the team, fundamental ideas, right? And those just pervade the toolkit. And then because we believe in these principles, we make promises to ourselves and to others that we work with, that we collaborate with. So we believe in psychological safety and we embrace diversity, we believe in making all work and workflow visible and much other stuff. And it’s mostly lean. 

That’s it, that’s the one interesting thing about the DA mindset is, it’s mostly lean. [inaudible 55:51]. And then in order to fulfill these promises, we follow guidelines, we take a validated learning approach, we change culture by changing the system, fundamentally. We try to improve, one of the promises is we improve continuously. So this mindset pervades, I would argue, pervades the toolkit. And if you go poking around in the seat, we actually then for the various process blades, like marketing for example, or finance or vendor management, we then extend the mindset with philosophies because the marketing folks have or in a different world have different priorities than the finance folks and the IT folks, right? So there’s different mindset, so we extend the mindset with philosophies that are specific to that process area within your organization, and sometimes there’s some similarities between the philosophies, sometimes not, often not. But it captures the fact that you’re marketing and this is observable, right? This is very observable, the marketing people in your company will have a different mindset than the finance people, right?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  57:03

So I think that’s the case for everybody. Because to some extent, we’re all been conditioned certain ways, right? So like, through company as well as outside. So I think that’s one of the, going back to the underlying principle, like context matters. And you do have to understand that and meet people where they are, and then all from there, because it’s easy to say, one size fits all. 

Speaker: Scott Ambler  57:33

And that’s absolutely true of mindset. So I think that’s an important observation. So where everybody will point it, the Agile Manifesto as that’s the agile mindset, those are great ideas about software development that solve the issues 20 years ago from a bunch of middle-aged white guys in North America.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  57:57

Couple from Europe, but yeah.

Speaker: Scott Ambler  58:00

Yeah. But I was on a panel with Kent Beck about a month ago. And he asked me, what do you regret about the manifesto? And the very first thing out of his mouth was, he regrets that it was a bunch of middle-aged white guys that wrote it. Fair enough, not exactly the most diverse community [inaudible 58:20] different times. But yeah, so the mindset pervades but I think we have for a long time had a focus on process just because the rest of the community was just so weak on the process after that and so focused and so strong on mindset, that we filled in the blanks in DA that everybody was very weak. And still, I would argue, still as weak on. So I think that’s the difference. But the mindset just pervades the toolkit. And I think we’re a lot more advanced than everybody else in the community, because we explicitly follow our own guidelines content. We believe in context. That means we have to respect the fact that different contexts mean different mindsets for people and that’s okay. There’s some [cross talk 59: 13] 

Speaker: Miljan Bajic  59:13

Yeah, I think. Exactly. And I think what one of those things that you probably heard too is like, there are multiple truths, right? And that goes back to the mindset, so maybe as a last thing, what message or invitation do you have for Agile community or anybody for that matter that wants to learn more about display agile maybe either has doubts or doesn’t, what would you like to say as we finish here?

Speaker: Scott Ambler  59:41

Yeah. So I think give us the benefit out, go and check out the site pmi.org/discipline agile, or just Google being disciplined agile. You’ll find it fast enough and just give us a bit of time, right? And I appreciate there’s some density there. And we take on a lot of issues that maybe you don’t appreciate. But if you just step back and ask yourself, ss my organization dealing with these issues? I might not be, but is my organization dealing with these issues? And would it be nice to have some help? Then I think suddenly your mind will open up. And yeah, we use different terminology, but that’s on purpose. Because we do want to send the message out loud and clear that this is different. But you I think if you believe, if you can observe that people are unique and your team is unique, that context counts, then I think DA is something you should look at, particularly if you also have the humility to understand that you really are dealing with issues that other people probably solve. So they solve very similar problems. So I would invite you to learn from other first, right? Like, experiment wisely and it’d be much better for you, it’ll be much better for your organization. And it’s eye opening. I think, like I said earlier, the we run into all these agile experts, and then they first are learning DA and pretty quickly, they realize, wow, I really needed this a long time ago, because you’re solving some really serious problems that we can’t do, that we’re struggling to deal with right now. And that is a phenomenally common experience. But they had to give it a day, a day of learning. Some are few hours of learning sometimes in order to just open up to the idea that other people are dealing with these issues already.