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What Is Leading Self-Organising Teams All About?

What exactly do we have to do to capitalise on self-organisation? How can we best support our teams? What special kind of leadership is needed? The third article from a series on Leading Self-Organising Teams covers what it means to lead a self-organising team.

Peter Hundermark Sigi Kaltenecker
on Aug 25, 2014
Culture is the True North - Scaling at Jimdo

A lot of the pain that large and medium-sized organizations are facing boils down to scaling. It is not difficult to have 5-10 people working together in one room. However, as your business becomes more successful and your hiring increases, you will start to see problems. At Jimdo, the approach to scaling relies on three major factors: culture, communication, and kaizen.

Arne Roock
on Apr 24, 2014
Q&A with Robert Pankowecki on his book Developers Oriented Project Management

Self-organized teams manage their work, the processes that they use and the way that they work together as a team and with their stakeholders. Robert Pankowecki is writing a book on Developers Oriented Project Management which aims to help programmers, product owners, project managers and agile company owners to improve their project management practices and move towards more flat organizations.

Ben Linders
on Apr 10, 2014
Solving the Gordian Knot of Chronic Overcommittment in Development Organizations

Why do we promise more than we can deliver? Why do we say yes when we are already too busy? Chronic Overcommitment is a pervasive problem in the IT industry. In this article we take a look at the behaviors that drive over commitment and the dynamics at play in your organization the make it a difficult problem to solve. Finally, we offer some advice to those who suffer from this affliction.

Morgan Ahlström Rolf Häsänen
on Feb 13, 2014
Intelligent Evolution: Making Change Work

Some 80% of all improvement and change programmes fail: they did not achieve the expected results, the investment in the change programme was greater than the value achieved, “improvements” were seen as mostly bureaucratic, or changes were abandoned soon after the implementation. Intelligent Evolution ensures long-term business success rather than short-term satisfaction of a standard or theory.

Peter Leeson
on Jan 13, 2014
I’d Rather Be Coding – Writing Things Down

For lots of reasons, most developers hate writing down anything that isn’t code. The Agile Manifesto deemphasizes documentation, but there are times on a project when a little documentation can go a long way. In this article, we will explore why collaboration over comprehensive documentation shouldn’t mean “NO” documentation – and when you should stop coding and start writing things down.

Nate McKie
on Dec 31, 2013
Virtual Panel: Specification by Example, Executable Specifications, Scenarios and Feature Injection

In the last couple of years terms like Specification by Example, Executable Specifications and Feature Injection have showed up quite frequently in the community, often in relation to Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) or tools like Cucumber or SpecFlow. InfoQ have talked to some of the leading experts in this domain about what these practices are and how they relate to BDD.

Jon Arild Tørresdal
on Nov 10, 2011
New book - Individuals and Interactions: An Agile Guide

Ken Howard and Barry Rogers have written a book that focuses on the first value from the Agile Manifesto. They provide advice, tools and techniques to help teams and individuals improve their communications and interpersonal interactions. The book presents a set of tools that work together more effectively. They provide guidelines for a workshop to put the techniques into practice.

Shane Hastie
on Jul 18, 2011
Book Excerpt: Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins

Very little in our education or experience properly prepares a ScrumMaster or project manager for the role of agile coach. This leaves most wondering, "What is my role in a self-organized team? How do I help the team yet stay hands-off?" This chapter, excerpted from the book Coaching Agile Teams, shows you how to activate the journey toward high performance in both provocative and practical ways.

Lyssa Adkins
on Jun 15, 2010
Learnings from Five Years as a Skype Architect

Too often in our work as architects and designers we focus on the task at hand, seldom reflecting on the past. We should really know better, how else do we improve? This article by Andres Kutt summarizes six learnings from 55 months as an architecture team lead at Skype. Some of them are technical while some focus upon the softer aspects of an architect's work.

Andres Kutt
on Apr 28, 2010
"Flirting" With Your Customers

All over the world, there are classes that teach people how to flirt. A German university even requires their IT engineers take a flirting class—not to attract a partner, but to learn how to interact more effectively in the workplace. Flirting means connecting with others, and connecting is the key to good communication. That is what the first principal of the Agile Manifesto is all about.

Jenni (Dow) Jepsen
on Nov 20, 2009
Book Review: Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision Making

One of the responsibilities of self-organizing teams is to take decisions that respect everyone’s opinion. This book has some great examples in coaching the team to navigate through difficult discussions so they can maintain their speed without endangering their success by suspending or ignoring critical issues.

Nick Oostvogels
on Jul 06, 2009

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