InfoQ Homepage Agile Conferences Content on InfoQ
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How the Dutch Railways Applies Agile and Lean
The mindset that goes with agile and lean philosophies is quite similar; lean amplifies agile and vice versa. Agile practices are suitable for the development of complex products, and lean practices help to look for opportunities to reduce waste in your processes. Lean helps to see results from the customer's point of view, from start to delivery, whereas agile supports delivering optimal value.
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Testing Lessons from Animals
We can learn from how animals search for food to understand testing better, argued James Bach. Over time testers find out where the buggy parts of a product are, but then it might be effective to occasionally wander off and explore other areas. Stop hoping that automation will save you, and learn to hunt for bugs.
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Supporting Digital Leadership with Agile
Digitization can no longer be stopped; with customers who increasingly act digitally and mobile it is important to show digital leadership. IT is taking over traditional services and is leading the way for new digital connected products. An organization applied agile to change the way teams are funded and to establish teams of owners who take responsibility to put good products in the market.
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Unblocking Middle Management Using Personas
Personas of roles like middle managers can be useful when you going through an agile transformation. It’s easier to get something from middle managers if you understand the position that they are in. A persona helps in knowing what to ask or not ask a manager, increasing your chances of getting what you need from them.
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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.
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Using Self-Selection to Create Teams
At one company, self-selection was applied to redistribute people over teams. It provided the opportunity for developers to get involved in strategic decisions and understand the needs of the business. Using self-selection, they learned that by giving people the power to take difficult and informed decisions, they will become motivated, no matter how tough the decision is.
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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.
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Making Our Language and Behaviour More Inclusive
To avoid excluding people, we need to gain more awareness when we are in the wrong and be introspective to find out why someone is upset or offended by what we have said or done. By being excluded, people will eventually leave their jobs, communities or profession, which is something that we need to prevent. Peter Aitken suggested taking a positive approach when addressing inclusion issues.
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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.
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The Future of Work - Morning Sessions from Agile People Sweden
The fifth Agile People Sweden Conference is being held on October 23 and 24 in Stockholm. The 2017 conference theme is: The Future of Work - Scaling Agile to Improve Worklife. The Monday morning sessions explored agility scales, enterprise wide agility with sociocracy, and self organization.
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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.
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The Spotify Model is No "Agile Nirvana"
At Spotify, management and the way the organization works support teams and agile practices by growing people. But Spotify isn’t an “Agile Nirvana”, it’s hard to reach high performance with teams that are constantly growing, changing, and splitting into new teams.
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Experimenting with Self-Organisation
Self-organising teams are much more effective, engaged and happier. Not everyone is comfortable with self-organising; people are conditioned to do what they are told and mainly to work on their own. You need modern leadership approaches like intent-based leadership, sociocracy, and holacracy, to enable self-organising teams.
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How Blogging Empowers Agile Teams
Moving the thinking and decisions a team makes from people’s inboxes onto a blog can make it accessible to all, findable in the future, and referenceable by everyone. Instead of writing documentation, you can use blogumentation to transfer knowledge and document the history of projects that provide context to the code.
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Agile at LEGO
Agile has been part of LEGO for more than a decade, but it is still spreading seeds and finding applications in business areas outside digital and IT. Some of LEGO's core values are play and learning which resonate very well with the agile principle of iterations, experimentation, and retrospectives.