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Hello, welcome to my stream. This is episode six and I’m here with a gentleman called Russell Miller who I have known for an incredibly much longer than you would think, a long time. Russell, wouldn’t you introduce yourself?
Hi, I’m Russell Miller. I live in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. I’m a product development specialist and scrum dad or a professional trainer. Cool, and we spent a little bit of time working together this week. We facilitated a virtual live virtual classroom on Monday and Tuesday of the professional agile leadership. Is there anything you want to say about the course itself?
Of course, it’s geared toward those who want to see agility grow and thrive in their organisations and want to know how leaders can positively or sometimes negatively influence that.
Yeah, for me, the courses are trying to move people from the ideas of management of people to leading people. So you’re no longer really managing people anymore, you’re creating environments within which people can thrive.
Yes, and we’re also disciplines that those things aren’t needed once you move to more agile ways of working because they are very much needed. They are very much needed. Organisations have definitely functioning without somebody if we’re focused on delivering value in a product. It’s difficult to spend the time that you need on making changes to the way we deliver that product, the way we interact with people, and you need somebody with that dedicated focus.
Yes, oh, so we had a good time. We had six students, so we broke them into two teams. The course is very exercise-driven, so we kind of went back and forth. What do you think kind of worked well in the class?
I think that the students had the ability to communicate their own experiences, especially in their group, but also in the larger group. It’s good to be able to express some of your thoughts because that’s actually a bit of a learning exercise. You know, when you express your thoughts, you have to formulate them and it helps you really more with a greater focus, examine your own experiences, and then you can get feedback on those experiences. So that was good for the students.
When we do have a smaller class size of six, you can get a lot of your specific questions answered. So that was a big positive for this. I mean, we’d love to have, you know, 20 people or 15 and, you know, give our agile goodness to as many people as possible, but for the students who attended with a smaller class size, that was really beneficial for them. I thought it was super great.
Since we’re relatively new in the world of live virtual training, it’s good for the students to be able to join quickly from the comfort of their own home or office. Those are a highlight of some of the pieces.
Yes, there’s a little bit of a delay. That’s why I was waiting there. I was waiting for your voice to finish. So we spent quite a lot of time working together in the class as well as having, since we were working in two teams, we had two trainers. So a trainer could go with each team and make sure that they didn’t feel left out and alone. I think that is the difficulty with live virtual classrooms. The students don’t feel the love from the trainer and have difficulty getting attention.
On the upside to that, because of the electronic means, students can summon the trainer to their breakout area regardless of which tool you’re using. All the tools have the ability, most of the tools that we’re using, I’m sorry, all the tools that we’re using have the ability to summon the instructor or one of the instructors to the small group. So that’s a bit of a positive because in a larger classroom setting, the students may be inhibited to, you know, to ask for help. They may look up and see the instructor talking to somebody else, but through the electronic means, since there’s only one way to summon the instructor, I think people are less inhibited when they want some attention to ask for it. So it works both ways, and both in the negative end, I see it more as a positive. We just tell people if you need help, here’s the way you can help and don’t be bashful.
So it’s quite a lot of delay in the audio. That was my wait there. For some reason, the video is in sync, but the audio wasn’t, which seems a little bit weird to me. Usually, it’s the other way around, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles sometimes. I really enjoyed that aspect of making sure that the students had somebody to talk to.
It’s difficult with facilitating the exercises, and I think that one of the things that was very difficult for me was getting attention back from the breakout rooms from the exercises. Did you find that as well?
That was the challenge. We have a blinker that says come back, but herding the cats isn’t always as easy as in a live in-person classroom.
Yes, exactly. I think it’s a bit of a neat five-second delay, something like that. It’s super fun. So I’m just working around it as we are in need to do. I think definitely having the two facilitators for the exercises is going to be much better. I’m actually teaching private PSF for 20 people with four teams on Monday, which is going to be interesting. I’ve managed to organise a couple of extra trainers, but we’ll see how that goes with two people in the room.
Something that I think did work well was we were using Microsoft Teams as our technical environment for running the event, and we were able to very easily create team-based breakout and have a call continuously running in that breakout room and then easily switch between those two things.
I was shocked. I expected it to be a hurdle, and it wasn’t. Yep, I thought Teams worked very well with that, better than I was expecting. Being able to switch between things, I know that I had a lot of problems with Zoom, and I think you didn’t. You had everything was super snappy and fast.
Yeah, zero problems. What I did find after some significant Googling after the event was that I have a Surface Book One, and Surface Book One has a performance problem if you attach a second monitor. There is also 60 Hertz, so I’ve actually moved my 60 Hertz monitor off to another machine, and I’m using a much cheaper, not very good monitor, but that I can set to 50 Hertz, and I’m not having the same performance problems on my machine that I was having with that. I’m going to try and upgrade my machine at some point, but it’s difficult to do in lockdown because there’s nothing left. The whole world is buying electronics.
Yes, and I found that my webcams are impossible to get. I managed to get my microphone upgrade. I got a TX microphone, which was fine, and I got a stream deck for manipulating the interwebs, but ya know, webcams can be difficult to get some of the other PCs, and I think even my microphones I can’t get. I wouldn’t be able to get another one if I wanted in my life. It pays to be prepared.
At least we have sound and a consistent internet connection this time. Last time we did this, we tried to do it on Tuesday, or was it Wednesday? It was Tuesday, and it was a complete cluster with internet not being very good. I think we left it a little bit late, and we had Netflix traffic in Europe, but it was still the problem. I need to work on why my Skype over here, which the system is not particularly taxed, 60% usage, which is not too bad, but we’ll need to see over time if I can fix that and repair it for these types of chats.
Are there any other things? Feel free to talk for a little bit longer because we have a seven or eight-second delay anyway, so may as well talk about that longer, and then I can just wait.
What saw any other things that you felt you wanted to add to the experience during this?
Well, a couple of things that I think people should bear in mind if they’re thinking about either delivering live virtual training because we have a lot of the world that we live in and the product development space, especially software product development space, requires some specialised skills and specialised training. There are a lot of trainers in the world that are trying to learn how to deliver their great training content virtually, and then there are students who are trying to up their skills, especially those who have been economically impacted by the worldwide economic impact. Those people are, you know, some of those find themselves suddenly furloughed or laid off or downsized, and people are trying to up their skills, and they’re looking at their backlog of training.
A couple of things I think are worthy of consideration that after having delivered several of these are more at the forefront of my mind than ever. Students that travel to my in-person classes, if they travel from outside the city in which I’m delivering, those people incur often airfare costs, lodging costs, or their employers, and meal costs, and those are zero for live virtual training. I think that’s a big deal. I’ve had people travel, as I view, I mean, on multiple occasions, I mean, a lot of vacations. People travel internationally even to attend courses that I’m delivering, and not only do you not expend the resources, the financial resources to make the travel trip, but you don’t have the long time that you have to. It’s not really a waste because you’re getting training at the end of it, but you would like to be able to have a transporter and just go from wherever you are to the training locale and not spend 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 hours travel, maybe even, you know, one-way sometimes. So that’s a huge advantage, and you don’t spend that travel time away from your loved ones or family or exercise routine or favourite pastime. So these are not insignificant advantages.
Some of the training that we’re doing live now, and we don’t know what the future holds, but it may not be the same. Some ways may be better, but some of the training that’s now offered virtually, once we go back to the old way of working, you might not be able to get it virtually. So you might consider it’s much, you know, if you need some training and have the resources and the time, then you might want to get, I’m serious, you might want to get some of it now because you don’t have to incur the expense and effort to travel to a location.
I totally agree, and I have, it’s sometimes a little bit different training in the US than it is training in some other parts of the world just because I think I trained in 32 different countries over the last 10 years. I’m usually about 12 countries a year on average, and that means 12 different languages, 12 different cultures. Although I know the culture, for example, between Atlanta, where you are, and Seattle is very different as well, but at least there’s less of a language barrier. Everybody’s supposed to speak English, and usually, it’s bad English, but okay, that’s generally an American thing.
But I found that when you’re dealing with radically different cultures, like I could be teaching one week in Saudi Arabia, another week in the Netherlands, another week in Norway, and people’s attitude and outlook and the way they react to things can be very different as well. Even things are an interesting one, and I’ve mentioned information in my class. Sometimes when I’m in Norway, we have an expression in English where you might say you don’t want to look like you’ve got egg on your face, and I think that translates to American as well. That’s a common phrase, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to Norway, to Denmark, to Sweden, to Saudi Arabia. While Saudi Arabians, they’re British anyway, that was a British colony, it seems to have. But that’s saying, but for example, in Norway, it’s you don’t want to look like you’ve caught your beard in the mailbox, which, so who knew? And another one is everybody’s on the same page, which is a common English expression. In the Netherlands, it’s everybody’s noses are pointed in the same direction. So you kind of have to learn a lot of different idioms, I think that might be the right word.
Yes, they’re different videos that people talk about things in different countries and what it means because words can make a big difference to how you interpret the material that we’re presenting. Even though a lot of the work that happens inside of the class is interactions between the students rather than just interactions between the, like a one-way communication between the trainer and the students, I think there’s still a lot of things that we need to take care of in that setting.
I guess my question for you would be how you, we had in our class, we had two Germans, one from Slovakia, I think, no, we’re split. Well, it’s not Slovakia. I’ve got my countries mixed up, as I am apt to do, and my brain has died. But we had two from Eastern Europe, two from Germany, one from Leeds in the UK, which is kind of middle England, and one from London, but who wasn’t from anywhere near London, just worked there. How did you find that different group of people?
I found that that particular mix of students worked well, and you touched on or circled around something I think is a bit of an advantage to the training, whether it be live or sorry, live and in person or live and virtual, is that you get to expand a little bit of your cultural horizons. I don’t mean just for the entertainment value. I mean it causes you to reconsider some of your outlook and the way you approach situations. If you’re constantly around people from your own culture, then you don’t really have the same reason to examine your own stance and your own perspective. But when I find fun, I find that I’m around people from other cultures, I’m more conscious of what I’m thinking. I’m more conscious of my idioms, and I’m more conscious of the way that I look at the person. You know, artists or those who have art training realise that you might have a still life, but there are multiple perspectives from which you can draw or sketch or paint that still life. I find that when students or people, professionals are immersed in their own culture, they don’t have the same reason to take a different perspective.
That’s one of the things that when I teach people about the scrum master role, if I could segue just a moment, is that one of the things that I try to get students to understand about the scrum master role is that it’s not only about the specific accountabilities of the scrum master role, but we need someone that has a different perspective. Like you suggested that the people doing the work need the perspective of someone in a different position in the organisation looking down, not down, but up at the work from a different point of view. That’s one of the powers of the scrum master role because that person often has different daily activities than some of the people that are on the development team creating the increment. That difference of perspective provides a lot of valuable information that often scrum teams don’t appreciate. They don’t understand why, oh, well, you need the scrum master to do this or this or this. Well, yeah, he or she does, but he or she also needs to have a perspective that’s different, focusing on different things in their minds. I think that’s a powerful thing that students who attend class with multiple cultures represent get a little bit of a benefit from.
I totally agree, and that I taught classes in Africa, in the Middle East, in Eastern Europe, the UK, and the US as well. I even taught, I might as well teach a class in Canada. You can’t get better than that. That was good.
I think that it’s going to be difficult to put the training genie, online training genie, back in the bottle. The feedback from many of the students is that while they might prefer an in-person experience, students that have gone through both an in-person class and an online class, because of the quality that is required by Scrum.org and the pursuit of that quality by the trainers, the students are not seeing a discernible quality decrease from the interactions. But again, absolutely, we were worried that the quality of training that you could deliver remotely would be substantially less. But I think the ideas behind that are behind that notion that it would be sustained.
Alas, I come from maybe five or more years ago where some of the technologies that are available to us, like Mural, which we were using in the class, was not as mature, not as able to provide that experience for students. The video conferencing technology necessarily wasn’t. I mean, it was there, but it potentially wasn’t as good as it is now. I mean, in most cases, apart from obviously our problem with Skype here and delay, it’s generally flawless. You made the comment that during the class you felt like some of the students were in the same room as you because of the quality of the video that they were able to push.
You bring up a good point, Martin. Students are not only learning about Scrum and agile leadership in our professional scrum master courses and product ownership and using Scrum and user experience design approaches, but they’re also learning about some very modern technologies for remote work. For people who work two days a week or three days a week from home, these technologies that we’re using, so it’s a bit of a, I’m going to go off and get some leadership training, but I’m also going to go off and for a bonus, I’m going to get some experience and training using electronic recording tools and learning how to break a larger team out into multiple groups. So you’re getting, I always want to look at the value that we’re delivering to students, and that’s a value that, again, before I began delivering this training, I wasn’t really perceiving that as a value. I was more focused on trying to maintain the quality of the experience, and now I’m realising that there’s some bonuses that students are getting that I had originally thought about.
I’m still trying to fix that delay, but I will see if I can get it. I think to go, but yes, I agree, and I think I also agree with what you said before about this is a good time for people to think about live virtual training. I know that the number of people now unemployed in the US is incredibly high. Part of that is the system within which your economy operates, and in the UK, there are more people who are on furlough than made unemployed. Part of the furlough rules in the UK are that you can receive training while you’re on furlough, and your company can pay for it. That’s the one thing that you’re allowed to do. So it’s even a government recommendation that you do or put people on training that are furloughed to just keep people doing stuff, keep people learning, and figuring out what’s next. I think things like agile leadership are good for that cater of middle management that maybe feel like they have difficulty in justifying their existence, maybe more so at this time when the teams are all off doing something separately, and you just end up in meetings all day.
I think that there’s this space for people to learn a lot more during this time, not that they have to.
Yeah, you bring up a good point, Martin. One of the powers of the agile leadership training, the major upside to that agile leadership training is you’ve got two or three things going on in organisations that are moving to more agile ways of solution or product or service development. One of the things that the teams are beginning to get a taste of what we call self-organisation. In other words, getting to use more of their influence because they’re closer to the work. When teams begin to get a taste of that, then they have some newfound needs, some needs that they didn’t have before. Teaching leaders what those needs are and a little bit about how to meet those needs is powerful. But in addition, the teams themselves sometimes fail to appreciate, if I can be blunt, the contribution that managers at various levels sometimes crowd appreciate, the contribution that managers at different levels in the organisation have to offer or the contribution they have to make. We want to teach both of those things. We want to say, look, you have to, a leader, a person in a management level in the organisation, you have some new responsibilities. There’s some care and feeding that these teams and individuals need that’s different, but also there’s an opportunity there to also try to communicate back to the larger organisation not only their needs but also the upside of, okay, great, they have these needs, and we want to meet those needs, but what is the goodness and the upside? What’s coming out of these teams, like the identification of organisational impediments, for example, and the view now that scrum masters have across the organisation of, I say, some synergies and also some impediments, and how do we get that goodness out? You know, that information, that rich flow of information that we, the teams are getting now that maybe they didn’t have before. How do we read that across the organisation? So we talk about communities of practice for engineering practitioners and designers and scrum masters and product owners, but we really, we really, the same concept of sharing of information needs to happen at the middle management layers, and so that’s an opportunity as well.
Agreed, and I think that, and it’s also the, nope, I was practicing active listening, and the thing that I thought I was going to say is now gone. There are a lot of teams in organisations now that are being forced to work remotely when they would have preferred to work co-located. I think that word co-located is very important here because it’s really just a metaphor for people working closely together. It’s trying to say that if you’re in the same building but on different floors, then that’s not good for you being able to work together effectively. I think online technology, modern technology can kind of allow us to have a level of co-location as long as everybody in the team that’s communicating digitally is in the same time zone. We may be able to practice some of those co-location skills from this perspective because there are a lot of people who work from home as well. There are a lot of people who don’t want to live in the big city, don’t want to commute into work. I don’t know what it’s like in cities in the US, but London commutes can be three hours plus to get from your home to wherever your office is, and people do that because they have to, not because they should be doing that.
Yes, and people don’t have to be in the same exact time zone, but I think it’s when you have, you know, a six-hour time shift or greater, or maybe five, that you begin running into the challenge, especially if you have an even larger time shift. So I’m liking the idea of having a select number of people in a video team meeting when working remotely. Maybe they’re on mute, maybe they’re sometimes on mute, but having a small group or even with some of the technologies, you can have an even larger group. What research has found is that a lack of line of sight is a barrier for communication. So in some ways, depending on how you set your groups up, you can actually have improved line of sight over in-person work.
Yeah, I think Microsoft did a study that with the judicious use of modern technology, you can get higher levels of communication and co-location bonuses for teams that are working together. They were using ridiculous levels of technology because they can and they have lots of money to figure it out and do that. But for most of us, there’s the tools like Skype and Zoom, when they get the security problems fixed, and Teams and I don’t know, WebEx and whatever else you want to use. There’s a plethora of choices out there that can help us get closer together while we’re far away.
One that I’d noticed, the families are using something called Houseparty, which allows you to see when people mark themselves at home, i.e. I’m open for a chat, and you can just have a room with many people having a chat, talking about stuff, and it handles the multiple people talking at once problem very well, whereas other tools are not so concerned with that because you want one person talking at once. They handle that a room as a party, and you can kind of drop in and out of different channels and groups very quickly.
I actually, I have, because I used to live in the US, I lived in Seattle for three years. I started using Amazon for books and audible books and stuff super, super early on at that time because I couldn’t take all of my physical media across the ocean with me. So I’ve ended up with all of my accounts or US-based, which poses some problems. For example, I have to buy my Xbox in the living room, runs off our proxy, effectively a proxy, so that it thinks it’s in the US. So I, in order to buy US stuff, you have to have a US credit card, which I have. You have to have a US address, which I have. So it’s perfectly legitimate. I just can’t get access to that content because I travel so much.
Actually, if you think about it, apart from now, I was spending 300 days a year travelling, regardless of where I physically lived. My time was spent in hotel rooms. I think that the thing that I noticed was I have some channels on Amazon that have advertising, and it’s all American advertising, which is something laughable. You can’t have the funniest thing. My wife and I talk about it all the time when the adverts come on is American drug adverts. When they talk about all of the crap at the end that is going to basically kill you or deform you in some way, we’re sitting there thinking there’s no way we would ever take any drug advertised in the news. There are now a lot of adverts about social distancing, about companies providing services and new, either new companies or existing companies providing services around that. The ability to take advantage of opportunities when they arise is kind of the whole purpose of this thing we’re trying to do in the first place.
Another thing that, if I could just segue a bit to suggest, is that there are some downsides, not downsides, some things students should know if they’re considering online training. The camera in your laptop will work. If you have a better camera, by all means, use it. It’s not required to have a better camera than the one in your laptop. If you have a second monitor and do intend to take some live virtual training, then by all means, have the second monitor hooked up because it does add a lot to the experience. If you don’t have a second monitor, it’s not an insurmountable barrier by any means. There is technology that will allow you to use your tablet or iPad or Android tablet as a second display. So if you aren’t already using that and don’t have a second display otherwise, then look into that.
But prior to taking some virtual training, your earbuds with the mic will likely work adequately for a live virtual training. If you have a headset, then that’s likely better because headsets oftentimes have, not always, but oftentimes have a little bit of features that help with cancelling out external noise. These are some things for those who are considering laboratory training that you might want to think about, especially think about a little bit before your training because if there’s some things you decide you want to purchase, then you can’t get them quite as easily now. You might want to make the purchase now, even if you’re considering some of these things are quite reasonably priced. These headsets are not expensive. If you buy a small display, small monitor, you can get those at not an exorbitant cost, and those are readily available. The larger ones are a little bit more in demand, but some of these things you might consider putting on your ordering backlog. But it’s just proof or thumb, and hopefully for most folks, their company will be helping them out with some of these purchases.
Certainly, I had trouble getting a second webcam just because there are none available anymore because everybody’s bought that, and the ships were coming from China anyway with the stock, and there was a shutdown for about three months in China. So there’s going to be an undue procurement delay there.
That is more unusual, but for example, I have our video camera. I have a doorknob EP, it’s a Canon. Yes, I have our Canon video camera that I bought many years ago, and that has an HDMI out. Then I bought a dongle, which was available, to be able to plug it into my computer to use that as a second camera, and that’s the one that I’m on just now. It is significantly better quality than the one that’s built into my laptop, and that type of thing is definitely well worth it. I would agree on a second monitor so that you can have the video, the pictures of people up all the time and then do work on the other screen. I think that would be important.
Cool, so it’s giving you enough time to interject there. I don’t know how bad that is. I think the delay is pretty short for me to you because you react to things that I say very close to what I’m saying. It’s just the reverse that is not true, and I will need to figure out how to fix that for future sessions. Was there anything else that we wanted to add to our list of things today?
A bit of encouragement to those who are reviewing in two ways and two aspects, I should say. The training at participating in the training is usually a very stimulating and invigorating activity. So for those who find themselves suddenly remote, that’s an upside. But the encouragement I want to give to those who are watching who are suddenly remote is to take advantage of meetup groups in your local area. Often those meetup groups are now having virtual meetups, so use this as an opportunity to network with your peers or groups of people that you haven’t taken advantage of in the past. I say that because personally, in the Atlanta area, there are a lot of meetups that I’ve had interest in but not the time to travel to them. Now that we’re, everyone in Atlanta is suddenly, well, not everyone, everyone except essential services are suddenly remote, then I’m getting to spend some time learning about communities that I couldn’t learn about in the past, meeting people I couldn’t meet in the past because I didn’t have the time to physically go. But now that those people are meeting virtually, I’ve made several very enriching professional connections just in the last few weeks via meetups that have a live virtual component.
Most of the meetups in Scotland that I actually found definitely getting to as well because I’m in Glasgow, and many of the meetups are in Edinburgh. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to get between the two, especially at the moment, but they’ve gone all online. I spoke at one of the meetups, and I did it as a live stream for them, which they have now continued to do live streaming the event, which I think is good as well. They’ve found that they’re actually getting more people coming because it’s a live-streamed event, and they’re getting more people from much further away. They’re getting people from other countries dialing in because they just think the topic’s interesting. You know, my local meetup has topic A, and this one, no, that is much more interesting than the one that I was thinking of going to, and you’re getting that higher levels of diversity, which I think is super, super good.
I think we’re pretty close to time. I don’t want to ramble on too long. We can always do this again sometime. We’ve got some more classes that Russell and I have planned to do together, and I know I have a public PSM in Oslo. Obviously, I’ll be doing it remotely, a public PSM Oslo, a public PSK that I’m teaching with Daniel Vacanti from the UK time zone. I think I have our PAL E in Mexico City, which will be interesting between my private classes. Do you have anything coming up, Russell, that you want to add?
I have some public classes here in the Eastern time zone in the US, both professional scrum master and professional scrum product owners. So those who live in the Atlanta area or select other cities in the Southeast United States, I’d be happy to have you reach out. My LinkedIn connect is Russell A. Miller, so you can message me through LinkedIn. That’s a good way to contact me, or you can also find me on the Scrum.org website. Those are two methods people can use to reach out.
Oh, absolutely. I think that we both are going to be working together over the next few months, and hopefully, we’ll have even more learnings. The next ones that we’re working together on are going to be our professional scrum foundations, but not the next one I’m doing, which is on Monday and Tuesday because you’re busy. Hopefully, that will all work out well, and we’ll both know a little bit more about how to do this crazy thing, a live virtual classroom when we get there.
Okay, thanks very much, Russell, for coming on.
Martin, it was a pleasure to help you facilitate that professional agile leadership course. That was great to do that, and I’m looking forward to our upcoming collaborations.
Awesome, so I will speak to you.
