Software Process And Measurement Cast

SPaMCAST 836 celebrates Halloween. Over the years instead of just one night, people decorate their houses and celebrate for at least a month - we love a party. In celebration of what has become the seventh-largest retail holiday in the United States, let's take a spooky look at the outcome of poor work intake and celebrate that we can banish the spooks and shades of poor work intake. We also hear from  in his Evolutionary Agilist column. In this episode, we discuss the impact of adding new team members to a long-lived, high-performing team when the new person wants to strike out in a new direction.  Master Work Intake! Join one of two upcoming Mastering Work Intake Workshops to help you learn to address IT’s nastiest, dirtiest little secret…poor work intake. The next two workshops are taking a compressed approach to help kickstart 2025!  Seats are available on: November 9th 9 AM EST - Noon EST  December 6th 9 AM EST   Noon EST More information and registration at  Simply put if you don’t control work intake I

SPaMCAST 835 features our conversation with  Elizabeth Bieniek. Elizabeth and I will discuss her new book, , and explore the basics of innovation and leadership. The insights into innovation and intrapreneurship will help all enterprises compete and deliver value to their stakeholders.  Elizabeth Bieniek is an author, speaker, and consultant focused on “good peopling” as the secret to exceptional execution. As a founder and Fortune 100 innovation and engineering leadership veteran, her expertise lies in challenging assumptions, embracing diverse perspectives, and leading through ambiguity to build empowered, resilient teams that last. Named one of Toptal’s 10 most influential “Female Pioneers in Technology,” she has spoken on bridging the gap between human connection and innovation at EmTech NEXT, Chatham House, ITEXPO, AWE, and the Global AI Community. Her leadership and innovation philosophy have been featured in Forbes, Bloomberg, Inc., International Business Times, and Women in Business. Elizabeth’s Profi

SPaMCAST 834 features our essay titled Battling The Walls Of Denial. The essay begins: One of the problems change agents face is promoting change when individuals, teams, and even organizations fail to recognize how their behavior hurts them and therefore don’t see the need for change. In these circumstances, you often hear fatalistic rationalizations such as, “This is just how we always do it.” Or the equally problematic, “You just don’t understand; we are special.”  Just running away is not the only option.  We also have a visit from Jon M. Quigley (https://valuetransform.com/) and his Alpha and Omega of Product Development.  Master Work Intake! Mastering Work Intake by and myself is your path to addressing IT’s nasty, dirty little secret…poor work intake. Simply put if you don’t control work intake IT CONTROLS YOU!  Buy a copy and begin to control the flow of work for your team and organization.  Order a copy of the book from JRoss Publishing -  or via Amazon -     Re-read Saturday News The first concept

SPaMCAST 833 features our interview with Brian Vallelunga, founder & CEO at Doppler. Brian and I discuss the importance of managing secrets. Brian states, “Secrets are the keys to the kingdom.” Today any organization that does not secure the data they manage is asking for trouble (with a capital T)..  Brian Vallelunga is the Founder and CEO of Doppler, the first secrets management platform for developers. Doppler empowers tens of thousands of engineering and DevOps teams to seamlessly orchestrate, govern, and manage their secrets across environments at scale. Brian has been featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 and worked at improving overall safety at Uber. Social: Website:    Master Work Intake! Mastering Work Intake by and myself is your path to addressing IT’s nasty, dirty little secret…poor work intake. Simply put if you don’t control work intake IT CONTROLS YOU!  Buy a copy and begin to control the flow of work for your team and organization.  Order a copy of the book from JRoss Publishing -  or via Amaz

SPaMCAST 832 is a later summer-early fall rerun!  In July 2019, SPaMCAST 550 premiered.  The cast included an essay titled, Intertwining Conway’s Law And Agile and an episode of the QA Corner with Jeremy Berriault.  Jeremy discussed the differences between test engineers and testers. These topics are favorites of mine, so…while I am hiking and camping I would like to reshare the core content of SPaMCAST 550 with you.  Remember all 18 years of content are available at .  We will be back next week with new programming.  Master Work Intake! Mastering Work Intake by and myself is your path to addressing IT’s most nefarious dirty little secret…poor work intake. Simply put if you don’t control work intake IT CONTROLS YOU!  Buy a copy and begin to control the flow of work for your team and organization.  Order a copy of the book from JRoss Publishing -  or via Amazon -   Next SPaMCAST  SPaMCAST 833 will feature our interview with Brian Vallelunga. Brian and I will discuss the importance of managing secrets. This wi

SPaMCAST 831 features our essay, Cracking Groupthink - Solutions When Balancing Urgency and Importance. Issues occur when groupthink affects the balance between urgency and importance in decision-making. This leads to inefficiencies, risk aversion, and misaligned priorities. The key challenge is that groups tend to perceive urgency and importance differently from individuals, often influenced by psychological and social dynamics such as the diffusion of responsibility, conformity, and shared information bias. There are solutions!   We also have a visit from Keis Kostaqi who brings her You Are Not Alone column to the podcast.  Master Work Intake! Mastering Work Intake by and myself is your path to addressing IT’s most nefarious dirty little secret…poor work intake. Simply put if you don’t control work intake IT CONTROLS YOU!  Buy a copy and begin to control the flow of work for your team and organization.  Order a copy of the book from JRoss Publishing -  or via Amazon -   Re-read Saturday News Chapter 6 of

SPaMCAST 830 features a conversation with Jeremy Berriault. Jeremy has a new book, “Beyond The Framework: Cultivating Agile Growth.” The back cover states, “Organizations that fail to embrace agility (small a-agiity) risk fading into obscurity.” we discussed the basic assumptions of agile and why business agility differs from adopting any specific agile framework.   Buy a copy of the book:  Check out Jeremy’s Company website:   Master Work Intake! This episode is brought to you by Mastering Work Intake by and myself. Buy a copy and begin to control the flow of work for your team and organization. Simply put if you don’t control work intake IT CONTROLS YOU! Order a copy of the book from the publisher -   or  via Amazon -   Re-read Saturday News Chapter 5 of (buy a copy and read along) is titled Playing Ball With Socrates. The author uses a sports analogy in the chapter to illustrate why we can be indifferent towards something and that something is still important. This chapter dives into the thorny concepts

In SPaMCAST 829 we will continue to expose the sometimes insidious impact of groupthink. Groupthink can lead a team to accept less challenging work, be misaligned with priorities, and poorly assess urgency and importance. The pressure to conform and maintain agreement can result in suboptimal decision-making, hampering effectiveness. We will also have a visit from Susan Parente who will bring her Not A Scrumdmentalist column to the podcast. In this installment, Susan tackles the need for core hours for teams of all types. Master Work Intake! This episode is brought to you by Mastering Work Intake by and myself. Buy a copy and begin to control the flow of work for your team and organization. Simply put if you don’t control work intake IT CONTROLS YOU! Order a copy of the book from the publisher -   or Amazon -   Re-read Saturday News Chapter 4 of (buy a copy and read along) is titled “Living According To Nature.”  Nature is defined as the community and world. In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius states, ”Even cha

The SPaMCast 828 spotlights Arash Parsania. We talk about his exciting new methodology, HYPERID. The method builds on and integrates pragmatic ideas from many disciplines to create something new. HYPERID is a flexible hybrid method that fits a wide range of different types of work.  Arash Parsania is the creator of HYPERID, a hybrid methodology for project management and product development. He brings over 20 years of experience in project management, consulting, and digital business transformation. His expertise spans Software Engineering, Retail, Travel & Hospitality, Automotive, Telecommunications, Consumer Products, and Insurance industries. Throughout his career, he has advised numerous organizations on digital business transformation, process definition and optimization for project and product development, and project portfolio management. He has worked with global leaders to enhance project and product management quality, develop and establish specialized project management frameworks and methodol

In the SPaMCast 827, we will begin cracking groupthink in prioritization with a discussion of urgency vs. importance Evaluating the interplay between urgency and importance is a powerful work intake approach. Teams and project management offices regularly use an Eisenhower Matrix or variant to visualize the relationship between these two factors. The bottom line in this approach is that you should prioritize work that is important and urgent above work that is just urgent. We also have a visit from  who brings her You Are Not Alone column to the podcast.  Keis and I discuss the career path of a Scrum Master. Is there a career path or is the role a life avocation? Master Work Intake! Mastering Work Intake by and I hit the bookshelves earlier this year. We have also been running cohort-based workshops to help expose and solve this dirty little secret. Two of the questions we have gotten as we have promoted the workshops are: What is a cohort-based workshop? What value will I get if I join? Both are grea

The SPaMCAST 825 features our conversation with Richmond Alake. During our conversation, we discussed AI, Machine Learning, and most importantly why being a lifelong learner is important (really important). Need more? We also will discuss what comes next now that AI Chat has been done.   Richmond’s bio: Richmond Alake is an AI/ML Practitioner with an academic background in computer vision, robotics, and machine learning. He has worked in software development and machine learning roles since 2016. Richmond has also taught online AI/ML/Data courses and written over 200 technical articles with over 1 million views. He is passionate about using technology to solve real-world problems. Try out MongoDB for free:  Get hands-on code for AI Agents: Connect with Richmond:   Master Work Intake! Mastering Work Intake by and I hit the bookshelves earlier this year. We have also been running cohort-based workshops to help expose and solve this dirty little secret. Two of the questions we have gotten as we have promote

The SPaMCAST 824 compares the Great Avon Lake Tornado and power outage with the purported death of Agile. Cap that off with many in the industry doubling down on Agile purity to put the blush back on the rose. My upcoming high school reunion suggests you can never cross the same river twice but crossing any river is a challenge..  Also Jon M Quigley and I talk about who is the most important person on a team.  This is a counterpoint to my recent conversation with on SPaMCAST 822. They agree but it…depends. Master Work Intake! Mastering Work Intake by and I hit the bookshelves earlier this year. We have also been running cohort-based workshops to help expose and solve this dirty little secret. Two of the questions we have gotten as we have promoted the workshops are: What is a cohort-based workshop? What value will I get if I join? Both are greater questions and we have an answer! Join us for a one-hour open house to explore how to diagnose and solve work intake challenges, the most critical issue faci

The introduction and outro words are abbreviated this week. I will regale you with the tale of the Avon Lake Toronado next. Now I need to find a way of making everything work without electricity and the Internet.  I am not sure which is making me crazier.  The SPaMCAST 823 features a discussion with Kirk Marple, Technical Founder and CEO at Graphit, by Unstruk Data. What is a technical founder you might ask?  No?  Well, I did. More importantly, we discussed  AI, knowledge graphs, leadership, and how organizations learn as they understand their data.  Check out Graphit at  Check out Kirk on LinkedIn at Re-read Saturday News This week we have the concluding thoughts of Flow.  We will begin the re-read of (buy a copy and read along) next week.  Buy a copy of Flow and read along –   Week 1: –   Week 2: –   Week 3: –   Week 4: –   Week 5:   Week 6: Week 7: Week 8: Week 9: Week 10: Week 11: Next SPaMCAST  The SPaMCAST 824 will include the story of the Avon Lake tornado, the sound of and smell of generat

The Software Process and Measurement Cast 822 features a discussion that and I had during the Work Intake Summer Camp. The tyranny of the urgent often eclipses work that is merely important. Not understanding the difference between the two concepts and the long-term implications of ignoring what is important can be catastrophic.  We will also have a visit from Jeremy Berriault, the Evolutionary Agilist. We discussed why teams exist. The answer can be simplified into four words. Getting to those words is a wild ride.  Learn To Tame Your Work Intake Beast! Work Intake Summer Camp is in session!  Like a swimming pool, there is always time to join the fun. Jeremy Willets and I are celebrating summer in the northern hemisphere with a summer camp. We’ll look at the primary causes of work intake problems… and how to solve them! Join us for an entertaining and informative LinkedIn Live event. The last weekly session begins at 12:30 EDT on August 7th ().   Each session will: Define one work intake problem per sess

The Software Process and Measurement Cast 821 features our interview with Alex Natskovich. We talk about the attributes of a leader when building a business but even more importantly learning to be a leader. Success requires knowing how to handle the transitions. Alex’s Bio Alex is a seasoned engineering leader and CEO. Born in Belarus, he harbored a lifelong dream of becoming an engineer. After graduating from university, he moved to the USA. During the initial years, he resided in New York, working as a software engineer in various companies. One of the most notable was the startup Conductor, where he joined as the 5th employee. It has now evolved into the leading global SEO and content intelligence platform. During his tenure there, Alex was responsible for building and maintaining an industry-leading link-building system. Simultaneously, he embarked on building his own company, MEV (named after the mega-electron-volt) – a strategic software development partner for fast-growing companies. Afterward, he dec

The Software Process and Measurement Cast 820 continues the story of Innovatech. In this installment, Emma “sells” baselining the flow to generate ideas for improvement and a starting point. The story of Innovatech is an allegory for how a data-driven improvement initiative can be bootstrapped with courage and perseverance. We also have a visit from  whose “Not a Scrumdamentalist” column delivers insights and advice. Susan and I discussed who the most important person on a team is and who isn’t. Learn To Tame Your Work Intake Beast! Work Intake Summer Camp is in session!  Like a swimming pool, there is always time to join the fun. Jeremy Willets and I are celebrating summer in the northern hemisphere with a summer camp. We’ll look at the primary causes of work intake problems… and how to solve them! Join us for an entertaining and informative LinkedIn Live event. The next weekly session begins at 12:30 EDT on July 24th (). Each session will: Define one work intake problem per session,  Identify how to re

The Sofware Process and Measurement Cast 819 features our conversation with Soumyadeb Mitra, Founder and CEO of Rudderstack. We discuss the trials and tribulations of consolidating and effectively using customer data. Tools like machine learning and generative AI make generating insights easier but “easier” does not mean easy. We also discuss entrepreneurship and trust.  Soumyadeb Mitra is the Founder and CEO of RudderStack, the Warehouse Native Customer Data Platform (CDP). RudderStack helps data leaders drive revenue by making it easy to collect, unify and activate customer data for every team and tool. With a strong background in software engineering and data analytics, Soumyadeb is passionate about helping data leaders and teams make data valuable in their companies.  Before founding RudderStack in 2018, Soumyadeb worked in various technical roles at leading technology companies, where he gained valuable experience in big data, machine learning, and cloud computing. While Head of Machine Learning at 8×8

This week we continue with the story of Innovatech, the business novella David Herron and I are writing. Innovatech, the once a tech darling is struggling. The delivery of new functionality used to be so easy. Now it isn’t, leading to all sorts of unproductive behaviors. Emma, the Director of Residential Construction Technology Products, leads a one-person crusade to wake the organization up before it approaches a death spiral.  We also have a visit from Keis Kostaqi. In this installment of her You Are Not Alone column we discuss how Scrum Masters need to adapt when organizations “start over”. Learn To Tame Your Work Intake Beast! Work Intake Summer Camp is in session!  Jeremy Willets and I are celebrating summer in the northern hemisphere with a summer camp. We’ll look at the primary causes of work intake problems… and how to solve them! Join us for an entertaining and informative LinkedIn Live event. The next weekly session begins at 11:30 EDT on July 10th ().   Each session will: Define one work intake

The Software Process and Measurement Cast 817 features our conversation with Artem Koren, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Sembly AI. We talk about AI, the role of AI, and the impact of agents on the workplace.   Artem Koren grew up in New York City. He graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Computer Science and later attended the NYU Stern School of Business where he earned his MBA. Artem is passionate about using AI to enrich humanity and create positive change. He combines his experience as a systems engineer, product manager, management consultant, and entrepreneur to create innovative products, bringing to life new ways that technology can help us reach our goals. Sembly AI, which he co-founded with Gil Makleff in 2019, is at the forefront of augmented worker intelligence, empowering hundreds of organizations around the world with AI agent solutions that bridge the gap between meetings and results. Website: Sembly’s LinkedIn:   Artem’s LinkedIn: Learn To Tame Your Work Intake Beast

A funny thing happened on the way to SPaMCAST 816, I had so much fun during our first Summer Camp session I talked Jeremy into letting me share the audio of our discussion on the podcast. We discussed goal conflicts, the first of eight work intake problems, from our book, Mastering Work Intake. If the video is more your style check out the video on LinkedIn and then join us at 11:30 EDT on June 16th. This week we also have a visit from . Jon and I discussed the question “If all work is collaborative, when do you find time to concentrate?” Learn To Tame Your Work Intake Beast! Jeremy Willets and I are celebrating summer in the northern hemisphere with a summer camp. We’ll look at the primary causes of work intake problems… and how to solve them! Join us for an entertaining and informative LinkedIn Live event. The next weekly session begins at 11:30 EDT on June 16th. Each session will: Define one work intake problem per session,  Identify how to recognize the problem,  Offer a pragmatic approach to tackl