Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and talk to their former leader Jeff Smith, EVP and COO at World Fuel Services and former CEO of Suncorp Business Services:

• Australian Agile journey took him from Telstra, to a small startup and then to Suncorp, and later IBM and World Fuel Services
• Scale of thought is more important than scale of people
• The Suncorp Agile Academy was born out of the fact that learning matters, but the idea was for other companies to create content that could be shared in the Agile community which did not happen
• Suncorp Building Quality In program
• It all comes down to great people and working through problem
• It’s hard for companies to build great leaders that are interested in building great teams
• Jeff Smith keynote “Leading an Agile Company“
• Availability is not a skillset
• Thinking from a team point…

Craig is at YOW! Hong Kong and is sitting with Nigel Dalton, Chief Inventor at REA Group and the Australian “Godfather of Agile” and they reminisce about:

• Anita Sengupta’s YOW! Hong Kong keynote “The Future of Mars Exploration“
• Akin’s Rules of Spacecraft Design – “don’t mess it up, there are people involved”
• Nigel Dalton’s YOW! Hong Kong talk “Agile is the Last Thing You Need“
• The two early experiments of Agile in Australia – Lonely Planet and Suncorp
• The success of the REA technology teams today was the move into multidisciplinary teams where the influence comes from product – it was a difficult decision and chaos at the time
• John Sullivan’s YOW! Hong Kong talk “A Presentation to Myself on Organisational Agile Transformations“
• ANZ is disrupting the power base of senior management – Shayne Elliott video about their way of working and Bluenotes…

Craig and Renee are both in Sydney and catch up around the kitchen table to discuss a bunch of things happening in the Agile universe:

• Renee is watching “The Leftovers” while Craig has been binge watching “Mad Men” and they talk about TV show podcasts such as “The West Wing Weekly“
• ANZ (one of Australia’s big four banks) is diving into Agile (everywhere but bank branches)
• Silicon Valley Agile (Scrum) reference (NSFW!)
• UK is wasting 37 million pounds per year on failed Agile projects (but the devil is in the detail not the headline)
• IBM calling remote workers back to the office – is it about trust, staff reductions or something else?
• The Thomas Allen Curve
• 17 Essential Hacks Every Scrum Master Should Know