In Action With Wendy

Josh Bigelow is the founder, CSO and janitor at Synchromatics. Engineer by training, entrepreneur by heart. Started Synchromatics in his garage and its now has 15 employees, 34 clients across the country and healthy revenue. Josh shares how he brought Synchromatics clarity, unity and purpose by analyzing competitors, creating campaigns and dropping distractions. A great show to get an understanding of what a viable strategy looks like, how to create one and the benefits that come with its execution. Notes from Interview   Symptoms that something needed to change: lack of progress on core initiatives people frustrated that they weren’t heard vision wasn’t clear lack of unity and mission in company   where were the efforts lost people didn’t understand the why behind initiatives people just finishing the task at hand without connection to the why working really hard and getting nowhere   "if you are facing the wrong direction every step, how could you possibly get to destination?"   Formula look at enemies, det

Dan Mezick is a management consultant, author & keynote speaker. His work includes The Culture Game, a book based on five years of experience coaching 119 Agile teams across 25 different organizations. He is also the cultivator of Open Space Agile Adoption. Notes From Show Coaching — help organizations learn They need to be willing to receive. Litmus test for willing customers — used a variety over the years, these days openness to use open space to kick off agile adoption Open Space — authorize people to be great What does that look like? 1. Theme around agile — what are we solving — needs to be in service to something “In Service” — businesses are slow to respond to change — service is about solving a problem or improving performance — specific — not just “we want to be better”  2. Invitational event — willing people show up Harrison Owen (founder of open space) — bring all the people who are passionate about topic to get movement — developed in the 80s because the best part of conferences is usually th

Ilio is the Executive Director of Agile at Kaplan Test Prep. with about 10 years agile experience.  Five years ago, Kaplan was almost entirely waterfall. Over the course of two years, he introduced agile in some pilot projects with good outcomes. These proved the case for an organization wide roll out. To date, all 12 development teams work in agile. Several non-development teams do as well - 8 total including marketing, publishing, and content. Wendy's Notes From Interview After first year of rollouts across development teams, non-tech teams started agile adoption. Introduction of agile to complete autonomy varies depending on size and culture of team. Average 3 months non-software teams. “Processes are meant to serve you and not control you.”  Identify problems and baseline to improve before adoption and measure improvements as a result.  Use of surveys to measure more subtle points such as trust and happiness. Working with team gives the best sense — watching communication, collaboration, etc.  Most impor