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Culture & Methods

Decision Making in a Company with No Managers

Self-managed companies are emerging as a viable option for the future of work. The transformation from standard hierarchical organisation to a flat structure is definitely beneficial, but obviously a challenging process. This article explores how SoftwareMill, a Polish software house, did it.

Jan Zborowski
on Apr 07, 2018
Culture & Methods

Distributed Agile Leadership

Even with the best of planning for your distributed Agile team, without good leadership in place, all of that planning can come to naught. With that in mind we look at some leadership trends that are relevant to self-organizing distributed Agile teams. Instead of proposing a new “Distributed Agile Leadership Framework”, our goal here is to inform you of important and relevant trends.

John Okoro
on Feb 25, 2018
Culture & Methods

How AI Will Revolutionize These Five Job Roles by 2022

AI is altering major job roles in the tech industry. From developers to managers to CIOs, established industry positions are being disrupted already. In five years many will be unrecognizable. What changes are coming? This article examines five key roles in tech and show how AI will remake them in the next five years.

Eugene Rudenko
on Nov 16, 2017
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Book Working with Coders

The book Working with Coders is a practical guide to managing teams of software developers aimed at a non-technical audience. In the book, Patrick Gleeson explores how the software development process works and what managers can do to support it effectively and build solid working relationships with coders.

Ben Linders
on Sep 04, 2017
Culture & Methods

Transcend the “Feature Factory” Mindset Using Modern Agile and OKR

Using Agile with waterfall goals turns teams into "feature factories" with no focus on delivering value. To transcend this mindset, companies can apply Modern Agile’s four principles by using OKR (Objectives and Key Results). Combining Modern Agile with the proper use of OKR can be a lightweight way for organizations to give teams the autonomy to experiment and achieve awesome results.

Felipe Castro Alexandre Freire Kawakami
on Aug 27, 2017
Culture & Methods

A View from the Trenches: the C-Suite’s Role in Organizational Transformation

The attributes of an Agile approach – flexibility, predictability, quality, and speed to market are priorities for all successful businesses. Why then, are organizational transformations a challenge for most? The answer often lies with company leadership and an inability to lead the massive cultural shift necessary for a successful company-wide transformation.

Peter Karlson
on Jul 12, 2017
Culture & Methods

Q&A on The Manager‘s Path with Camille Fournier

In the book The Manager’s Path, Camille Fournier explores managing engineers and what it takes to be a technical manager. She describes the different roles which form the path from mentors and tech leads to senior engineering management, discusses the challenges of technical leadership and provides advice on how to deal with them.

Ben Linders
on Apr 18, 2017
Culture & Methods

Predictable Agile Delivery: The Executive Challenge

As agile grows-out of its years of self-obsession and teenage petulance into a post-agile state, ‘Predictable Agile Delivery’ feels like a realistic goal that advantages both the business sponsor and their development stakeholders. This article shares some ‘good, bad and ugly’ examples of practices that often work and some that always fail at improving large organizations.

Russ Lewis
on Mar 27, 2017
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Book Scaling Teams

The book Scaling Teams by Alexander Grosse and David Loftesness provides strategies and practices for managing teams in fast growing organizations. It explores five areas which often pose challenges when organizations need to scale -- hiring, people management, organization, culture and communication -- and gives solutions for recognizing and dealing with those challenges.

Ben Linders
on Feb 07, 2017
Culture & Methods

The Misaligned Middle and Getting off the Hamster Wheel Using Kanban

At the Agile 2016 conference, Dominica DeGrandis and Julia Wester of Leankit gave talks on helping middle managers adapt to change and how Kanban can be used to identify problems in workflows, which people need to address.

Shane Hastie
on Jan 31, 2017
Culture & Methods

Predictable Agile Delivery

Human teams are unique, non-linear and unpredictable, but given the right conditions, their output can become linear, scaled and predictable. Managers have an enabling role to play: encouraging the development of predictability; understanding the needs of their teams; and rolling-up their sleeves to clear the blockages themselves or by escalating the problem promptly and responsibly.

Russ Lewis
on Nov 09, 2016
Culture & Methods

Adaptable or Predictable? Strive for Both – Be Predictably Adaptable!

Our efforts to improve software development face the question of what to focus on. Should we govern for predictability without concern of value, maximizing cost-efficiency without concern for end-to-end responsiveness? Or maybe do the opposite and govern for value over predictability, focus on responsiveness over cost efficiency? What we really need is to be predictably adaptable.

Dimitar Bakardzhiev
on Sep 06, 2016