Many leaders assume Agile breaks down in highly regulated environments. John Holmes has spent years proving the opposite inside aerospace, defense, and space programs where the cost of failure is extremely high.

Overview

In this episode, Brian Milner talks with Scrum Inc. Fellow John Holmes about what it actually takes to apply Scrum in complex defense and aerospace organizations. From military programs to space systems, John explains why Agile is often less about moving faster and more about creating visibility, improving communication, and reducing the risk of major surprises late in delivery.

John also shares practical lessons from coaching teams inside highly disciplined environments where command-and-control leadership has traditionally dominated. The conversation explores how Agile can strengthen discipline rather than weaken it, why trust and training matter more than process compliance, and how small operational changes can create meaningful improvements in delivery, alignment, and team effectiveness.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

John Holmes
#107: Transforming Organizational Mindsets with Bernie Maloney
#108: Adaptive Organizations with Ken Rickard
There Is No End State When Transitioning to Agile by Mike Cohn
Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast

Want to get involved?

This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input.

• Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one.
• Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at podcast@mountaingoatsoftware.com

This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

John Holmes is a Scrum Inc. Fellow who has spent decades helping aerospace, defense, and government organizations apply Agile and Scrum in some of the world’s most complex environments. From launching Scrum for Space at Lockheed Martin to training thousands of leaders and teams since 2005, John brings a practical, field-tested perspective on what it really takes to make Agile work where the stakes are high.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian Milner (00:03) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm here as always with you, Brian Milner. And today I have a very special guest with us. I Mr. John Holmes with us. John, welcome in.

John Holmes (00:16) Hey, Brian, nice to meet you. Thanks for having me.

Brian Milner (00:20) Yeah, really excited to have John here with us. ⁓ If you're not familiar with John, let me give you a brief little introduction here of him. ⁓ John is a fellow, one of the few fellows with Scrum Inc. And he particularly has done a lot of work in the defense area. So that comes with it all sorts of different kind of experiences, I'm sure, as far as. ⁓

implementing Scrum in those kind of areas. So let's dive into that. Let's talk about that a little bit here, John. When you do work in the defense area, obviously it's highly regulated. It's a complex work environment. what's the core kind of elements of that that make it really unique in implementing Scrum?

being in such a complex environment.

John Holmes (01:20) Well, know, the strange thing is people when they hear Scrum or they hear Agile, the first thing they kind of go is toward that's for software. And what they don't realize is that it really is a product management resource for you. So what I try to explain to my customers is, and I really stay with the Scrum side of it. So as you can see, I have some Scrum for space stuff back there, Scrum for aerospace type of stuff back there.

They say, listen, what we're trying to do is we're trying to really communicate better. We're really trying to show you something in a regular cadence rather than, you we go do these different type of gated reviews and we go disappear for a year and you don't see it. So what we're trying to do is, is ensure that they, you know, they understand, you know, what Scrum really is. And one of my requirements is when I work with a government agency or government contractor or company such as like Boeing.

is that everybody gets trained and we have our own training course so that we're, as I like to say, you know, not only reading from the same page, but reading from the same book. Because way back when, when I got my first Scrum certification, the guy next to me was saying, what does the acronym Scrum stand for? And it was quite an interesting class. So at that point I'm like, you know, we're going to, we're going to really talk about this and show you how this will, you know, will, you know,

relate to a good product. Now you might not always love the outcomes, but I promise them you'll never be blindsided. You'll never go into something and say, okay, why are we so far behind? Because like every two weeks you'll see an increment of progress or an increment of failure. So you'll know where you have to adjust. So it's really kind of dispelling what they think that their pre notions of what they think it could be.

Brian Milner (03:08) Yeah, yeah, that's great. No, no. And ⁓ I get what you mean by that. I remember teaching a class years ago where I had somebody come in and, you know, we got through some of very basics in the class, but then, you know, not too far into it, one of the guys was not having any of it. And he kind of spoke up and said, you know, this is all great in theory, but if we did this in real life, planes would fall out of the sky. And I'm like,

You know, they actually do use this to build planes, so not quite true. Well, what kind of special accommodations or differences do you think we need to take into consideration when you're doing work in this kind of an environment that's highly regulated, very complex work, has to be perfect?

How does that change how we do scrum?

John Holmes (04:09) Well, in our cases, what happens is we'll actually put it into the contract. We're writing the contract to work an agreement. It actually goes in there. So now it becomes part of the statement of work of how we're going to do these things. And ironically, when you go to the people that are writing the contractual agreements, they're like, you know something, this is not really anything different than what we already do. It just said it's more structured. We do things every two weeks compared to when everybody could get together.

That's the hardest part when you have like a critical design review or a preliminary design review or a software requirements review or capabilities requirements review. Getting everybody in the same room or all on the same call is very difficult. And what I found with Scrum is that every two weeks you're demonstrating and the key is that you have to really emphasize there's a customer that they are, you they're a part of this.

that it only works if they come to the demonstrations and be a part of that in retrospectives. And then they see the value because the fact they start to see, well, we can make small changes or we can make comments on different things. Or when we go into release planning, we'll have an idea of where some of the features, like right now, the budgets are all over the place because of everything that's happening. So they're saying, hey, can you guys pivot and do these things? And it's like, sure, we can do that. And then they're surprised.

how quickly we can come back and get back on track. So we have what we call a contract line item number that says, hey, just in case you have to pivot, we just go to this and invoke that. So it's really not that different per se. It really comes down to just getting people used to what a daily standup should be, what a user story is supposed to be, what a demonstration looks like, these things.

when we start off, it's usually a little sloppy, ⁓ but you you stick with it and the best thing is you want to coach and mentor those people and we get them up to speed. So I have people start slow. Yeah. So.

Brian Milner (06:15) Yeah, I mean, I know some of the objections I hear sometimes in class from people who come to classes from government work and other things is, know, like government work often has, you know, these very complex bid processes and, you know, you have to be very precise about here's what we're delivering by this date. So how do you balance that? How do you balance that kind of precision that is often there with government work? ⁓

you know, regulated work like this with still the ability to be adaptive and change and pivot when needed.

John Holmes (06:55) Well, you know, every government contract, even if even let's say a firm fixed price, right. And in the old days, we said what we call cost plus, right. Where we would build something if it costs a little more than, you than it would be accommodated for if it costs a lot more, it would be accommodated for. But now as we get closer to these firm fixed prices, we don't have as much deviation in there.

What I found is you take a large epic or a feature and you kind of reverse engineer it to say, these are the things that we need to do to get to this point. So we're still, you know, we're still contractly obligated to deliver something in 18 months. You know, 18 months seems like a ton of time. You know, it's like Parkinson's law. It's like, you you're talking about your students. I mean, how many of your students wait to the very last minute to write their paper, right?

So what I like about it is, is you can still meet the contractual agreements, even if you have a contract that was not written in an agile way. You just have to go to your leadership and your customer and say, Hey, this is what we're going to do. And, know, one of things that we get to do a lot of times in all of aerospace and all of space is these IRAD, these independent research and development type of contracts or special studies, things like that. It's.

It's like when you look now at the Iran event that's going on right now, we've pivoted very quickly in drones. mean, drones two years ago for warfare wasn't even being talked about. Now it is like the number one topic. And a lot of those things are built in a scrum agile way where a drone that does a specific type of thing could be a minimal viable product, just good enough to say, okay,

How does this operate in the battlefield? And we learn from that. The other thing which really has helped out is all the military academies, they are teaching Agile, they're teaching Scrum, they're teaching Lean. So before when you'd go in and like I I teach people all over the companies that I work with. When you go in and say on a scale of one to five, what's your familiar area with Scrum and Agile? It used to be a lot of ones and twos. Now there's a lot more threes and fours.

And it allows you to accelerate, even do the classes a little bit faster because you're not having to go through and explain what some of the strange vocabulary that we have is. So again, it really comes down to say, what problem do you want to solve? And here's an idea for how we could solve it. And there's even a military planning and I'm former Navy. There was a lot of agile inspect and adapt, Scrum inspect and adapt that would happen on an everyday basis. We just didn't have a term for it.

Brian Milner (09:32) Yeah. Yeah, isn't that fascinating that that's shifted that way? I I agree that that's kind of what I've seen as well is that there is more and more familiarity and ⁓ more and more demand coming from that area as well because they see the value and see that it really does ⁓ produce the best results. So, you know, we have these plans, we have these very complex plans and you talk about things like,

John Holmes (09:52) Right.

Brian Milner (10:00) space programs like it, I see in your background and other things. We have launch windows that are three years out and you're trying to plan for something that's gonna launch, that's gotta be ultra precise. ⁓ But we're trying to allow for this, never wanna miss a window, yeah, right. ⁓ But we're trying to also allow for adaptability and flexibility so that we can change and evolve and do what's most important. How does...

John Holmes (10:13) You never want to miss your window. So yeah.

Brian Milner (10:29) How do you balance that in such a way that it, ⁓ people don't lose alignment. People don't lose momentum throughout the project because we might just kind of start to drift off into one of these side areas.

John Holmes (10:44) Yeah. The nice thing about working in the space arena is the fact that it is a very motivated workforce. You know, there's a lot of really good dedicated people that are, and many of them are coming from former military where they're used to all of a sudden something changed. Right. ⁓ So that's helpful from the standpoint is you got good people that are really mission sensitive.

The other thing now is because Elon and his fleet of delivery vehicles is we have more options. know, before if we missed something because we had a defect on one of the launch vehicles, you know, we'd have to wait for that launch vehicle to be, you know, reassembled or whatnot. Now we can swap them out a lot easier. So that gives us a lot more flexibility.

in that arena and he's done some great work. I it's nice to have a private space company with no shareholders to have to accommodate because you could just throw stuff up and blow it up and learn from it. And ironically, that standard behind me, that's a lot of how we built rockets in the 50s and 60s. There were a lot of failures that happened. But the first act in learning is the fail. So that's nice. have a lot more.

We have a lot more people saying we got to do things faster and if we don't get it completely right, that's okay. ⁓ the other thing is, like I said, it's, it's, ⁓ it's an environment of learning. so, you know, doing a podcast like this that people say, Hey, I never really thought about doing scrum for something like this. ⁓ we do what we call agile for Alpine race. My daughters were very competitive skiers. We use scrum and agile to make their training program better.

because you only had X amount of time on the hill. So we had to get as many times in. we got so efficient. We got basically a free training day by doing things differently, like making sure that the kids were, we were doing our, we would have a mountain pre-brief before we go up. We didn't do it in the clubhouse anymore. We did it right in front of the lift and they had to be there. And when they were there, we could jump right on the lift.

Brian Milner (12:54) Yeah.

John Holmes (13:00) Now that doesn't sound like a lot, but that's 10 minutes of time that you get on the Hill. So, ⁓ and that's the same thing with, you know, with space in a lot of things, it comes down to seconds of being accurate, you know, testing and whatnot. So I've, you know, I've, I have yet to find anybody that says, you know, I'm not sure if we can do agile, but once they do it or they do scrum, they're like, well, maybe this doesn't work, but we're going to keep this, this and this.

Brian Milner (13:29) Yeah.

John Holmes (13:29) The daily

retrospective is really good. And I have some teams that do a, like they do a morning retrospective, what they're going to do for the day. And then they do an afternoon retrospective saying, okay, what did we learn today? So they can kind of fix it overnight.

Brian Milner (13:45) Wow, that's fascinating. Yeah. And I love the example using it in training. There's a, one of our team and mountain goat here is a ⁓ part-time ⁓ swim coach for a high school swim team. And then he's been using it to coach the swim team and having a lot of great success with their workout routines and everything there as well. ⁓ I mean, I think one of the misconceptions I feel like I hear a lot in these

⁓ regulated environments like this is they require a certain level of discipline and there's a need. I mean, it's kind of baked in that there's kind of a high level of discipline that's required. And I sort of feel like people assume that maybe Agile is kind of an absence of discipline or...

that it's undisciplined in its approach or something. Have you encountered that and how do you counter that narrative?

John Holmes (14:46) Well, you know, I always tell people, that's, that's number one, it's a myth. That's a team that's not really doing agile. ⁓ when I used to work at the Boeing company, ⁓ we didn't allow teams to just to say that they were agile. had coaches and mentors and, people who would go work with them and they had to get to basically five levels before they could say they were agile because we didn't want teams saying, that's an agile team. And then we're going out to bid a contract and they say, well,

Brian Milner (14:53) Yeah.

John Holmes (15:13) That team didn't do agile very well, so you can't use them as a proof of concept. What I like to tell people is this, agile has a very good discipline because you do things on a daily cadence. Everything is the same. You start off with your daily standup, your daily scrum. You have conversations with people. It's a great place if somebody is stuck with something to say, I need some help. And then someone can say,

You know, our standup started at the bottom of the hour. will be done in a little bit. I don't have a meeting between now and the top of the hour. Let's see what we can figure out really quickly. The other thing is the user stories. If you write your user stories correctly using kind of that card mentality of something small, right? The conversation between a couple of people, you know, or at least one other person, and then that confirmation of that's right step. That gives you a superior path of product development.

Because in the past, was just in somebody's head, I'll go do this. And then they go do it and they're like, when did that change? Or you'd be surprised, I started off my career on GPS 2F, I work now with GPS 3F, there are requirements that are written almost identical, they have a completely different meaning. So that statement really fleshes out what we're supposed to have. It's like, if you said, hey, I want something red.

You know, I'm okay. Well, what kind of red do you want? want it? The Hastings maroon red, or do you want the, the, the Ohio state Scarlet red, or do you want it? The Stanford caught Cardinal red. You know, and I would tell them if you're really doing agile, right. There's a lot more discipline and there's a lot more planning. It's just done in a more concise way because we really go for time boxes. I encourage teams to do 45 minute meetings because of this.

Most people I know have at least four meetings a day. If you do a 45 minute meeting, number one, you're coming to the meeting more prepared. Number two, you have that time box. Then you get 15 minutes back to go through and maybe grab an email or check your team's thing or whatever it may be. And then you start your next meeting. If you do that every day, you get one hour of productivity back every day. Five hours a week, 20 hours a month, 240 hours a year.

that's enough to take a yellow program and make it green because you get 240 free labor hours just by shortening your meetings. So those are the little things that I try to say that is what Swalman Agile will do for you. And that's usually a pretty good seller. Now, when you do it, you have to have a good coach. You have to have a good mentor to get a team there because and have to have experience because where I've seen is, is you have people that, you know, they'll go to Mike's class, they'll get certified, but they've never really done it.

Brian Milner (17:53) Yeah.

John Holmes (18:07) Yes, so you have to have that time on the hill as I like to say.

Brian Milner (18:12) Yeah. Yeah, those are great tips. And I agree, right? It's small little changes like that. It's not massive changes, but that small changes add up and they can become really, important. Well, I would be remiss if we didn't touch on this area as well to think about kind of the leadership component of this because the disciplined environment, you know,

is there a lot of times because these environments are prevalent with very command and control kind of leadership structures, nothing more so than military kind of work. ⁓ So how does the command and control leader ⁓ enable and interact with something like Agile?

John Holmes (19:05) Well, know, one of the nice things that I like about working with Jeff Southerland and Scrum Inc. is I can take my training decks and modify it to the audience, right? So when I'm going in and I'm working with someone from ⁓ Space Systems Command, right? Or ⁓ someone from one of their contractors. One of the guys I work with is a former Navy top gun fighter pilot. I mean, like a real top, real

badass guy, right? You know, and, and when I sat down and explained to him, said, listen, when you're doing your mission, did you have somebody in your, in your headset squawk into you of how to fly the mission? You know, of when to deploy chaff, you know, or flares or when to fire. He's like, well, no, that would never work. said, well, that's the mentality you have to have with your team. You have to trust them. Right. Every good, every good officer that I know will trust them to say,

we need you to take that hill, you decide how to take it. Do you want to have an aerial bombardment ahead of time? Do you guys want to set up some surveys, whatever they would need before you do it? It wasn't just go run up the hill and take it. So while it is a mindset that needs to be corrected, fortunately,

the new military that's coming out, the new officers coming out, like a good friend of mine, Kevin Lombardo, who's a full bird colonel who worked his way up through the ranks, is more of a less of a command and control. They still want the standards, they still want the results, but they want their non-commissioned officers and their sergeants and those other people in their grouping to make the decisions which is right for them. So that's a lot easier way.

The other thing is on all of my teams that I work with, we usually have veterans. So we get together and say, this is what we need to do to kind of break the command and control methodology that's out there. And when you have successes, that's a lot easier. When you're delivering well, they tend to get out of your way. So that's been the success. again, it really comes down to the training and the coaching prior to starting it.

And even to say, there are going to be some people that don't like it. There are going be some people that are going be frustrated. And we may have a couple of failures, but those failures are going to happen within 10 working days. And then we can inspect and adapt. And unfortunately, there might be just like in any military unit, there might be just the wrong person in that grouping. And you have to find a different place for them because they could bring the entire team down. So it's, but like I said, it's.

The command and control is getting better and I am finding that a lot more executives have actually been trained in agile. It's really nice to see. We even have a six hour agile for executives type of class that they go through and they really understand where it comes from. And again, what we do is we tailor it. Like for example, Boeing of how they changed the way they built aircraft with the 737, the 777 back in the nineties.

Brian Milner (22:21) Hmm.

John Holmes (22:21) They

used to have them kind of stacked side by side, and then they went through the assembly line process. Yeah, and I was, when I first got there, I was like, really? You guys didn't do this until 1996? Yeah, that's how we've been building cars since, you 1904. know, ⁓ Lockheed Martin, it's really interesting when you look at what they do, there's a group that they have called Skunk Works, which works on the really cool stuff, right? If you're familiar with the new Top Gun Maverick,

Brian Milner (22:34) Yeah.

John Holmes (22:49) that plane that he flew in there was a Lockheed Martin prototype. And there was a guy that had Kelly Johnson that had these 14 principles of how his team worked. They are eerily similar to the Scrum principles, right? And when I talked to Jeff Sutherland last October, I said, Jeff, is this a question for you that Kelly Johnson inspire you because you were at the Military Academy at West Point when we were building or they were building these planes. And he said, well, let me just say this.

Brian Milner (23:03) Ha ha.

John Holmes (23:18) I didn't create Scrum. I invented it from things that I discovered, such as white papers. Which I think was Jeff's response to, yeah, I think I stole some of those things from Skunk Works, because they are very similar. So, yeah.

Brian Milner (23:32) Wow,

that's incredible. Yeah, I mean, I think that those leaders who are trying to make that transition from the command and control into ⁓ kind of more of an agile leader, ⁓ it seems like it's always the pressure moments that are the testing point, right? It's like when the pressure starts to heat up,

What are they going to do? Are they going to revert back to what they know? Or are they going to trust the process and kind of move forward? yeah, yeah. So let's talk about that. mean, what kind of behaviors would you, if you're working with one of those kind of leaders and their teams are starting to feel the pressure, they're starting to feel the pressure.

John Holmes (24:10) That's still the hard part.

Brian Milner (24:29) What kind of behaviors do you encourage them to kind of ⁓ really latch onto to maintain it ⁓ as an agile way of working?

John Holmes (24:40) You know, those things happen in two scenarios. Number one, you know, if you have a brand new team that's starting off, you don't have those same type of pressures and those same type of fallbacks because they weren't doing it before. So they have nothing to fall back to, right? This is how we started. This is what we'll do, right? If you go into a team and a lot of times where Agile and Scrum gets inserted is, is it's, it's as a process improvement. It's we're not delivering on time.

It's the type of program that cannot be canceled, right? ⁓ But I'll give you an example. Boeing has really struggled with the brand new Air Force One, right? There are years and years and years and billions and billions of billions of dollars behind it, but it's not like they're gonna cancel it, right? So what happens when you go into that type of situation, that's where you get the kind of the pushback of...

Well, we really don't like it. We're go back to way it were. it's like, okay, well, how were you delivering before? You know, it's like, you gotta give it some time. It's like, if my doctor said, John, hey, you your blood pressure's up a little bit and your triglycerides are bad, you need to go exercise. And I go over to a CrossFit class. I am not, can be very successful. So we have to start small and do things, you know, and figure out. And one of the best things I do with all my new teams like that,

is I go and say, retrospective, what are we doing well? And ⁓ literally with Post-it notes, what are we doing well? Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I usually get a really good stenographer type of person that's recording this as they're putting those things up. OK, these are the things we do well. What do we need to improve on? And you see a lot of the same things. And you see there are too many meetings. There are too many change requests. We don't have enough people. ⁓

very chaotic type of thing. it's like, okay, well, and it's the same four type of things with every failing program. So at some point you got to get like a break and say, okay, you know, are you in, how far do you want to go? Where do we start? You know, do we, we're not going to throw you in the deep end of the pool, but maybe if nothing else, can we at least start doing this? Now there is a team years ago that I went into and they said, yeah, we want to make them an agile team. But if you say agile,

Oh, they're just going to fight you tooth and nail. So I never said it. I said, Hey, here's what we're to do. We're going have a, we're going have a, we're going have a daily muster because they were kind of military. So we're have a daily muster. It'll be over in the break room. It'll be 20 minutes. And, you know, I had my wife bake some cookies or I'd bring some donuts and, and we, you we had a little board in there and we talked about, you know, what was going well that day and what, what their plan was and, and boom.

Brian Milner (27:03) Hahaha

John Holmes (27:29) And then I said, you know, here's what we're going to do every two weeks at three o'clock. want to have a short show and tell, and we're going to show what we've been doing. And at four o'clock, we're all going to go happy hour. Oh, okay. Cool. Hey, it's beginning of month. Let's, let's try to, let's try to plan out a month of things that we need to do. All right. All right. Let's, let's show that again. Let's start. Is that a small medium large?

So what happened was they were doing agile, I just didn't name it because they can't get mad and they can't tell you to stop doing something if they don't name it. So then I went to them about two months into it and I said, you know, let's do agile, let's do Scrum. And they're like, oh no, no, no. I said, you know, they asked for a 15 minute daily standup. I can probably still with 20. Oh, okay, yeah, we can do that. Well, they do a demonstration. We could just, you know, do our pre happy hour thing. Oh yeah, we could do that.

They have these things called story points. They start off small, medium, large, and all of sudden someone goes, bastard, we've been doing Agile the whole time, haven't we? I'm like, yeah, you have it. I just didn't tell you. So.

Brian Milner (28:29) Hahaha.

⁓

That's a great coaching trick for sure. ⁓ Well, I really appreciate everything you've been sharing with us. And I want to be respectful of everybody's time who's listening. ⁓ But on our way out here, ⁓ if we have listeners here that are leaders that are trying to improve delivery in a complex organization, ⁓ complex work environments, you have

John Holmes (28:37) Yeah.

Brian Milner (28:59) maybe one piece of advice you'd give them for a place to start here.

John Holmes (29:05) Well, I'll give you two, right? First of all, everybody wants to know what's in it for them, right? The with them, what's in it for me, right? So the promise is this, when you like, you have a good football team or a good baseball team going to practice and playing games is really easy, right? It's the teams that struggle. It's really hard to have a bad locker room. You don't want to be there. So the what's in it for me is, is we want to really improve our work environment. We really want to do better.

You know, if you have a profit sharing, you're going to get more money. If you do it right, the main thing is this, you're going be happier. You'll be less stressed. You know, you'll have more time. You won't have to stay up late. You don't want to do weekends. I'm not saying all the time, but you should get a better working environment. So the what's in it for me type of thing is the first thing I want to figure out, you know, because everybody, you know, we said one time we're going to wipe out overtime and everybody's like, oh, but I need that money. You know, so the second thing is this, go slow.

Right. Train everybody. Make sure that the training is there and then train everyone with that same enthusiasm. Because what happens is you kick something off and everybody gets a book and we do all the training and everybody gets certified and we go out for happy hour and have lunch brought in and all these great things. And then new people come in and we hand them a book and say, you're off. Go, go ahead. You know, so I think that's the importance of having people like ourselves that, that this is what we do.

because we have all of the kind of the history. We've learned through other failures and different things and we've seen it. No difference if you're coaching something, you're saying, hey, you're a little bit on your outside edge on these skis. You got to really bring that in or you got to keep your head down for first 10 yards of the 100 yard dash. Those type of things, we can see those things and we can help correct it. But they really want to have to do agile and scrum. That's the thing. If they don't want to do it, doesn't...

Whatever methodology you have, doesn't matter. Even if it's just our old methodology with a brand new name, if they don't want to do it, you're not going to have success. Just like my daughter, Reagan will never run the 800 again because she could feel her heart beating in her lips. So now she does the two, the four and the one.

Brian Milner (31:18) Yeah. ⁓

That's awesome. Well, John, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us here. I know that the listeners are gonna love this and ⁓ really get a lot out of this conversation. ⁓ if people wanna find you any place they should go to find, to connect with you.

John Holmes (31:40) I am I do have a LinkedIn profile. It's very very it's very very miniscule It's like it's like it's like me Mike Cohn one or two other people Being in this business. We have a lot of clearances that we have to go through So social media is very tough because anytime I have to have a you know someone from another country I have to justify why I'm talking to them But if you go if you go to that LinkedIn and you can message me and then we can decide from there Yeah

I don't, I love talking this, know, and Brian, if there's any other topic you want to talk about or, or, know, agile horror stories or good story, whatever it is, just, just let me know. do these things all the time. And, uh, and it's, uh, you know, I love sharing the stuff because, know, why not? I I've been doing this since I met Jeff Southerner in 1998. Learn your failures through me. All right. I haven't seen it all, but very few things surprised me.

Brian Milner (32:29) Ha ha ha.

Yeah,

I identify very strongly with that comment for sure. Well, thanks again, John. I really appreciate you coming on. ⁓ yeah, people want to reach out, they can reach out to you on LinkedIn. ⁓ thanks for making the time for the show.

John Holmes (32:52) Anytime. Thank you.