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Focusing on Business Outcomes at Barclays: Overcoming the "Urgency Paradox"
Jonathan Smart, head of working ways, and Morag McCall, PMO at Barclays, spoke last month at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in London about re-thinking the entire flow of work, from initial idea triage until releasing to production. This means introducing agility into how the application and services portfolio is managed, as well as changing the role of the PMO and finance departments.
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Fin Goulding Injects Agility into the Management of Everything
Fin Goulding, international CIO at Aviva, recently spoke at the DevOps Enterprise Summit London about using flow principles to advance agile capabilities throughout an organisation. InfoQ asked Goulding to expand on some of the points that he made during his talk.
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Breaking Codes, Designing Jets and Building Teams: Randy Shoup Discusses High Performing Teams
At QCon NY, Randy Shoup, VP Engineering at WeWork, presented “Breaking Codes, Designing Jets and Building Teams”. He began the talk by quoting Mark Twain, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”, and stated that throughout history he believes the most effective teams have focused on purpose, organisational culture, people, and engineering excellence.
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The New CIO: Leading IT the Mark Schwartz Way
Mark Schwartz, formerly CIO at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services and now enterprise strategist at AWS, spoke at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in London about what it means to lead IT.
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Driving Innovation at Switzerland's Largest Bank
Jelena Laketic, head of asset management SWAT (SoftWare Action Team) at UBS, spoke at the DevOps Enterprise Summit London about some of the lessons she has learned driving innovation at the largest bank in Switzerland. InfoQ reached out to Laketic in order to get her view on the particular challenges and successes around her SWAT journey and what innovation means at UBS.
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Ron Jeffries Says Developers Should Abandon "Agile"
Ron Jeffries, author, speaker, one of the creators of Extreme Programming (XP) and a signatory of the Agile Manifesto back in 2001, shared a post on his blog in which he advocates that developers should abandon “Agile”, meaning they should stay away from the “Faux Agile” or “Dark Agile” forms and get closer to the values and principles of the Manifesto.
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From "Doing the Things Right" to "Doing the Right Things"
Peter Jacobs, CIO of ING Netherlands, gave a talk at Agile India 2018 in which he explained how fostering and practicing an Agile approach has been helping the organization do things right, and the challenges they are currently facing to guarantee that they actually do the right things.
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Lean-Agile Procurement for Outsourcing
One of the last barriers to organisations becoming agile in their operations is the procurement process. At the recent Agilia Conference, Mirko Kleiner presented on Lean-Agile Procurement, an approach to negotiating service contracts which involves procurement specialists, IT teams and suppliers, to move from a combative stance to a collaborative approach to addressing the customers’ needs.
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Updates in the Nexus Guide Stress the Importance of Integration and Transparency
The major changes in the updated Nexus Guide include clarifications to the role of the Nexus Integration team, an explanation on how transparency at scale looks, and alignment with the 2017 Scrum Guide. The Nexus Guide is a framework that helps organizations to scale Scrum.
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GitHub Introduces Multiple Commit Authors
GitHub has started supporting multiple commit authors. The new feature is meant to improve collaboration from several developers on the same commits or pulls requests and ensures every author gets attribution of their commits in their profile contributions graph and the repository’s statistics.
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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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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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Q&A with Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland about Scrum Guide Updates
The Scrum guide has been updated to better reflect what Scrum is and clear up misconceptions. Scrum can be used for building software products, and it can be applied to many other areas outside of software as well. Scrum is a framework based on empiricism for continuous improvement. Having a potentially shippable product increment at least every sprint or more often is a key element of Scrum.
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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.