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Culture & Methods

How to Optimize for Fast Flow Using Alignment and Autonomy: the Journey of a Large Bureaucracy

This article describes how NAV (Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration), Norway's largest bureaucracy, has achieved alignment in over 100 autonomous teams. It shows the techniques it uses to align teams with respect to technology: two descriptive techniques - the technology radar and the weekly deep dive, and two normative techniques - the technical direction and internal platforms.

Truls Jørgensen Audun Fauchald Strand
on Jun 17, 2022
Culture & Methods

How to Accelerate Your Staff+ Career through Open Source Engagement

It takes many factors for an engineer to land a Staff+ position. In this article, you’ll find how contributing and engaging to open-source can help you sharpen critical Staff+ skills like writing communication, while helping increase your visibility and the odds of landing in such a position.

Alex Porcelli
on Jun 09, 2022
Culture & Methods

How Psychological Safety at Work Creates Effective Software Tech Teams That Learn and Grow

This article provides the foundations of psychological safety and shows how it has been applied for team effectiveness. It explores how psychological safety supports learning and improvement and how we can foster a psychologically safe culture in tech teams.

Ben Linders
on Apr 12, 2022
Culture & Methods

Talking Like a Suit - Communicating the Importance of Engineering Work in Business Terms

This article explores how to construct engineering work as a story, including clearly presenting a problem, offering a solution, and showing the business a path to success that solves their problem and avoids failure. By presenting your case in this way, you significantly increase your chances of getting these engineering problems addressed, while also becoming a better partner for the business.

David Van Couvering
on Feb 08, 2022
Culture & Methods

Creating Psychological Safety in Your Teams

Psychological safety is a work climate where employees feel free to express their questions, concerns, ideas and mistakes. We cannot have high-performing teams without psychological safety. In this article, you will learn practical ideas, interesting stories, and powerful approaches to boost psychological safety in your team.

Mehmet Baha
on Jan 17, 2022
Culture & Methods

How Space Shapes Collaboration: Using Anthropology to Break Silos

Software companies strive to keep innovating and changing the rules of the market. These companies are made of people who, unlike smartphones, personal computers or smart watches, have not evolved as much in recent years. This article proposes an analysis of workspaces from anthropology to solve one of the most common problems: the appearance of silos instead of a culture of collaboration.

Patricia Salgado
on Dec 27, 2021
Culture & Methods

Avoiding Technical Bankruptcy: a Whole-Organization Perspective on Technical Debt

Technical debt is not primarily caused by clumsy programming, and hence we cannot hope to fix it by more skilled programming alone. Rather, technical debt is a third-order effect of poor communication. What we observe and label “technical debt” is the by-product of a dysfunctional process. To fix the problem of accumulating technical debt, we need to fix this broken process.

Einar Høst
on Dec 24, 2021
Culture & Methods

How to Decide in Self-Managed Projects - a Lean Approach to Governance

Whether self-managed or self-governed as a project, the power still needs to be distributed internally. If the project is open to decide how things are done, how do we decide? A solid but flexible set of tools and practices like sociocracy is a great starting point for projects to have clear but lean processes that can grow as we grow.

Ted Rau
on Sep 30, 2021
Culture & Methods

Improving Testability: Removing Anti-Patterns through Joint Conversations

Code is always testable, but the cost may be high, and the effort exhausting. We can change code to be highly testable by identifying anti-patterns and fixing them. And developers can make the code fit the test requirements, by having discussions with the testers who actually test it.

Gil Zilberfeld
on Aug 10, 2021
Culture & Methods

How to Recognise and Reduce HumanDebt

We know TechDebt is bad; chances are HumanDebt is worse, and once you’ve seen it, you can’t “unsee” or ignore it. What is now needed is a focus on the humans who do the work. Psychological safety in teams is key. The “people work” -both at an individual, but especially at a team level- is the key to sustainability and growth of high-performing tech teams.

Duena Blomstrom
on Aug 06, 2021
Culture & Methods

Facilitating Feedback That's Psychologically Safe

This article focuses on feedback with regards to a plan or proposal - ways to make it easier to give and receive feedback, so the psychological safety of the team can increase. The aim is to give you insights, models, structures and practical things to try, in order to facilitate feedback that boosts psychological safety in your team(s).

Roy Marriott
on Jul 12, 2021
Culture & Methods

Building Stronger Human Teams by Managing the Inner Lizards

Each of us has an inner lizard that frets constantly about our safety. People come with brains that are pre-configured to scan everything you say for threats to their safety. Learning to recognize when you're operating under reptilian influence is a great start. This article introduces some techniques to help you manage the lizard within you along with those around you.

Mike Duskis
on Jul 01, 2021

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