Audio Version

Our first guest on the 334Cast is Jamie Smith. Jamie is the CIO at the University of Phoenix and a leader in the digital transformation space. His focus on creating an organizational culture that encourages agility and adaptability has helped him drive change at organizations like ServiceMaster, American Home Shield, and Nissan Motors.

In this episode, Jamie and I discuss the roots of Lean Manufacturing in Agile Software Development and Business Agility. We also discuss the role of Portfolio Steering in strategic agility and how the concept is applied at The University of Phoenix. Jamie shares with us how the world of education is reacting to the challenges in the current climate and how higher education is changing to react. We then go on to discuss strategies for successful agile transformations and the impact of culture on those initiatives. Jamie talks about the Scaled Agile Framework as a “gateway drug” to agility and how they’ve moved past those concepts in developing product teams at the University of Phoenix. We discuss the need to treat Product Management as a discipline and how his team is helping to develop those skills in the organization. We close by talking about where Jamie finds inspiration and what he’s reading in his quest for the “unified theory of business agility.”