Agile Unplugged EP04 | Mike Cottmeyer and Matt Van Vleet

Welcome to our latest episode of the Agile Unplugged podcast with host Mike Cottmeyer, LeadingAgile's CEO. In each episode of Unplugged, Mike and a special guest explore LeadingAgile's freshest ideas, mental models, frameworks, and solutions with the people that are actually doing the work of leading large-scale Agile Transformation in the real world. We’ll hear about Matt’s background and reveal our roadmap for building the new LeadingAgile Studios, our newest offerings to enable clients to use their capabilities to gain the strength, Agility, and craftsmanship to take on digitally native organizations in the marketplace. Remember to subscribe and listen to Agile Unplugged on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Podbean—and watch each and every episode on YouTube, IGTV, and Facebook. Transcript - Everybody welcome. We are doing a LeadingAgile Unplugged and I have a special guest here, Matt Van Vleet. Welcome Matt, how are you doing? - Great. - Yeah. Awesome. So Matt just recently joined us. He is helping us build our technology transformation studio. And we're gonna explore a little bit about what that is going to look like. And, but what I want to talk about a little bit is, let's just talk about your background. Like what have you been up to for the last 10 years since we worked together? - Yep. Yeah, so I, I spent about 18 years at Pillar and eventually sold the company to Accenture. And in that we grew the company where originally, we did a mixture, as you know, between transformation and building custom software solutions. Over time, we grew to focus more, mainly on customer soft, custom software solutions, and eventually Accenture purchased us. And then I was, helped for a couple of years and in that transformation and getting them up to speed on what we did and I was out exploring what to do next and we reconnected. So--- - We reconnected, yeah. So we first worked together, I guess it was probably back in like late 2009, 2010. I had joined Pillar for a little bit. 'Cause that was when Pillar was thinking, that I guess I wanted to be a transformation company. - Yeah, one of the challenges we had is we wanted to do, be a transformation company, but a lot of what we did was from the bottom up and we really weren't in position to affect some of the things we needed to, for transformations to be successful. We could affect in our, in our pocket. So we could set the conditions so that we could deliver a great product, but it wouldn't continue to change the overall organization without being engaged at the right level of the organization. - So let's explore that a little bit because that was actually one of the things that I struggle with a little bit back in that time was trying to figure out because I've been, as everybody probably knows, like super passionate about this space of transformation and trying to figure out how to get companies from A to B and really always kind of took what I called, like a top down, bottom up approach, right? Where you have to have engagement at the lower level, right? But if you're not doing it with like executive support and with an integrated strategy from beginning to end, it's really difficult to sustain momentum. Talk to me about some of the challenges that you had taking it straight from a software development perspective. - Well, when you're trying to build software and the software we were building was, was very innovative and kind of leading edge for organizations. So sometimes when you were on the proper project, you could get some of the dependencies and constraints or some of the rules, you know, waived for your project, which is great for certain projects. But if the, if you're always breaking the way the organization is designed in order to effectively write software, then it's very hard for it to be sustainable. So things like, you know, dependencies on other departments or groups where we may have been allowed to do that work ourselves and just review it with them, that wasn't standard operating procedure or our project was important enough that it had the funding set up such that it could make decisions around where to move and how to do things in the marketplace without needing to fit into the overall portfolio directly. There were a lot of exceptions that were needed in order to put software out quickly. - Interesting. So basically if you tie it back to like the talk that I gave, what seven, eight years ago, "Why Agile Fails and What You Can Do About It", one of the things I hypothesized was that one of the reasons why Agile was failing in a lot of transformations was because you would do this thing off to the side and you'd give it all of the conditions that needed to be successful, dedic