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  • Focusing on Business Outcomes at Barclays: Overcoming the "Urgency Paradox"

    Jonathan Smart, head of working ways, and Morag McCall, PMO at Barclays, spoke last month at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in London about re-thinking the entire flow of work, from initial idea triage until releasing to production. This means introducing agility into how the application and services portfolio is managed, as well as changing the role of the PMO and finance departments.

  • Spark the Change: Building Tomorrow’s Company

    Tomorrow’s company has to invest in well being, should move away from individual silos to team delivery, needs to have psychological space and safety, and must be able to deal with uncertainty. To build such companies we can use gamification, pretotyping, IoT, artificial intelligence, robots, chatbots and other conversational interfaces. We should focus on teams and question how we work together.

  • Driving Innovation at Switzerland's Largest Bank

    Jelena Laketic, head of asset management SWAT (SoftWare Action Team) at UBS, spoke at the DevOps Enterprise Summit London about some of the lessons she has learned driving innovation at the largest bank in Switzerland. InfoQ reached out to Laketic in order to get her view on the particular challenges and successes around her SWAT journey and what innovation means at UBS.

  • Too Many Scripts Can Kill Your Continuous Delivery

    Avantika Mathur spoke at Continuous Lifecycle London last month on the costs associated with an ever increasing number of scripts in a Continuous Delivery pipeline. Besides the cost of maintaining the scripts, the lack of visibility and auditability on exactly what activities are being carried out before deploying a change to production is another major cost not many organizations are aware of.

  • Enabling Continuous Delivery with a Dedicated Team

    Robin Weston describes how an external enablement team was able to introduce continuous delivery practices in an organization with high resistance to change and siloed teams. Rather than just bringing in new technology and tools, the team focused on sharing and educating teams. Practices ranged from continuous integration, to following the test pyramid, or reducing cycle time by identifying waste.

  • Happy Cultures and How They Grow High Performers

    ITV's Tom Clark spoke at DOXLON in February, proposing the hypothesis that high performance is a side-effect of creating happy teams. Andy Flemming, contributor to Deliberately Developmental Organization, also recently spoke about how to reap business and strategic benefits by creating a culture with an intentional focus on transparency, and the learning, growth and happiness of individuals.

  • Great Engineering Cultures and Organizations - Afternoon Sessions from QCon London

    The Building Great Engineering Cultures and Organizations track at QCon London 2018 contained talks from practitioners representing digital leaders of the consumer internet as well as transformational corporates from “traditional” sectors. Previously InfoQ published a summary of the morning sessions; this is the summary of the afternoon sessions of this track.

  • Using Agile Principles with Scrum Studio to Increase Organizational Responsiveness

    Using a change approach based on agile principles with Scrum Studio helped a Dutch pension and investment management company to become more responsive at structurally lower costs. The change team practiced what they preached by applying transparent and iterative change with similar characteristics as the intended end result. They established a culture where people are taking responsibility.

  • Game Changing Beliefs for Knowledge Working Organizations

    Game changing beliefs carry the strength of the strongest walls to shape our behavior. The beliefs we choose to take on in our professional work are a leverage point. They can help us to change the culture and behavior in organizations to increase agility.

  • Game Changers for Organizations

    We want to approach strategy using choices, direction, and iterative experiments, establish a growth mindset in organizations, and work towards a common purpose or goal with leaders and teams sharing the same values, principles, and mindset; these are some of the game changers for organizations to become more innovative, deliver faster and better, and have happier and more engaged employees.

  • The Future of Work - Afternoon Sessions from Agile People Sweden

    The future of work is about microlearning and unlearning, freedom by technology, agile companies, alignment for autonomy, and self-organized groups of people around common goals and interests; these are some of the ideas that were discussed at Agile People Sweden.

  • The Industry Just Can't Decide about DevOps Teams

    The incidence of DevOps teams is on the rise according to reports, but the industry remains divided on whether a DevOps team should even exist. Some are wary of creating additional silos, or are of the opinion that DevOps is a methodology that everyone should subscribe to in an organisation; others point to DevOps teams as an effective way of transitioning to a new way of working.

  • Paradoxes in Culture Change

    Organizations should realize that organizational culture is an important factor in increasing agility, and then act on this realization. The desired organizational culture must be promoted by example top down; what is happening at the top of the organization concerning values, communication and customer involvement will predict what will happen in the "underlying" layers of the organization.

  • Treating Shared Databases Like APIs in a DevOps World

    Simon Sabin, principal consultant at Sabin.io, spoke at WinOps 2017 conference on how to include database changes in a continuous deployment model. A key aspect when sharing databases across multiple services or applications is to treat them as APIs, from the perspective of the database owners.

  • Adopting Agile and DevOps at Wyndham Vacation Rentals UK

    Embedding agile and DevOps had a positive impact on the role of QA at Wyndham; focusing effort in the earlier lifecycle stages has led to smoother releases with fewer bugs and post-production issues. Business colleagues and customers are more involved throughout the delivery cycle, making testing a shared responsibility .

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