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Shifting to Asynchronous Communication in Software Teams
As some companies begin to go back to the office and embrace hybrid working, they are at risk of alienating those who wish to remain remote, which is looking to be a considerable number of workers in our industry. James Stanier suggests using more asynchronous means of communication and spending more time writing to each other rather than speaking in meetings.
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Virtualizing Design Sprint and UX Workshops
Design sprint and UX workshops can be done virtually using a combination of remote whiteboards and communication platforms. It brings advantages like being able to invite international experts, having remote participants attend, less travelling, smaller carbon footprint, and lower costs.
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Manuel Pais on Team Topologies during COVID-19
Manuel Pais, co-author of Team Topologies, recently spoke alongside leaders of Capra Consulting who have used the topologies to move from hierarchical structures to empowered teams. We report on the journey and speak to Pais about team topologies in the context of COVID-19.
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Paving the Road to Production at Coinbase: QCon Plus Q&A
As Coinbase scaled both their number of engineers and customers, they needed more projects, faster iteration, and more control over their growing infrastructure. In developing their in-house deployment tool by looking at what developers were doing and trying to help them, they created a culture of self-service.
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Characteristics of Agile Leaders
Agile leaders are passionate about agile practices. They look to instill trust in their people, create transparency and are open to constructive criticism so that great work can be achieved. They focus on the vision and customers. Understanding what agile means, they give autonomy to the people, support them, and encourage them to develop and grow through learning and experimentation.
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Agile Approaches for Building in Quality
Built-in quality is a core pillar in agile. However, if we want to build in quality at scale, we need to look at the whole development life cycle. Quality awareness needs to be increased at multiple layers of the organization; agile coaches can help by boosting quality thinking by embracing an agile way of working.
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Using Agile with a Data Science Team
Agile helped a data science team to better collaborate with their stakeholders and increase their productivity. As priorities became clear, the team was able to focus and deliver. Buy-in of the data science team by taking them through a journey of agile was crucial to making it work.
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Product Owner Is a Bad Bad Idea
The question of whether the product owner role is good or not clearly depends on a lot of factors, including team maturity, organisational maturity, organisational type, organisational complexity, and the product owner themselves. Some thought leaders are challenging the function of the role especially in these VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) times.
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The Role of Business Analysts in Agile
Business analysts have a role in agile organizations; they can become a product owner, join a team, or work across products where they collaborate with product owners and teams. The BA role brings incredible value in any framework; it is about making sure that you are confident in your own skills.
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Optimizing for Speed with Continuous Organizational Transformation
A rapidly scaling company needs different structures at different sizes. You’re continuously reinventing yourself as your company grows by iterating on structures, processes, and roles. Continuous learning is critical for organizational transformations to succeed and it requires a high level of organizational agility.
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How to Supercharge a Team with Delegation: QCon London Q&A
Delegating work can result in getting it done better and faster; it increases team autonomy and creates opportunities for learning. Delegation is a continuum: it begins by doing a task yourself and ends by having somebody else take on that task. James Stanier, VP of engineering at Brandwatch, spoke about delegating to self-organizing teams at QCon London 2020.
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Trust in High Performing Teams: QCon London Q&A
High-performing teams flourish in a culture of trust and safety. It’s important that trust come both from within and outside of the team, in order to avoid isolating teams from their stakeholders. Stephen Janaway shared his experience with trust in high performing teams at Qcon London 2020.
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How Leaders Can Foster High-Performing Teams
A leader can act as a coach, provide opportunities for ownership, and find out what motivates people to foster high performing teams. It also helps teams if leaders have powerful and meaningful conversations with team members and give vocal feedback face to face to team members.
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Avoiding Loneliness as a Servant Leader
Team success is often celebrated without recognizing or acknowledging the role the servant leader has played. A lot of what they do can go undocumented or is not always visible to others. To avoid loneliness, servant leaders can create support networks to share what they do, celebrate successes with peers, blog about how they do it, and give demos to management about their accomplishments.
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Collaborative Decision-Making in Self-Organizing Teams
Giving people the opportunity to express their full potential in self-organizing teams is the best way to make an organization thrive today, argued Lorenzo Massacci. At Agile Business Day 2019, he presented how teams that organize themselves can continuously make decisions effectively and efficiently.