InfoQ Homepage Coaching and Mentoring Content on InfoQ
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Q&A with John Sonmez on His Book on Soft Skills
The book “Soft Skills - The software developer's life manual” addresses interesting topics for professional software developers. The book aims to help developers to become better programmers, more valuable employees, and happier and healthier people. An interview with John Sonmez on managing careers, remote working, mentoring, getting more work done, negotiating salaries and positive thinking.
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Q&A with Jeff Sutherland on Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
In his new book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, Jeff Sutherland explains how the Scrum framework can be used as a general business practice to accelerate work of all kinds. An interview with Jeff about using Scrum outside software development, characteristics of great teams, increasing happiness, product owner teams, and on experiences from applying Scrum for education.
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The Agile Coaches' Coach Shares Her View on SAFe
This article conveys one agile coach’s journey coming to terms with Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Lyssa Adkins shares her thoughts about SAFe and the Agile Manifesto from the viewpoint of the discipline of agile coaching. She explains how using biased views can help us to look out wider and farther to develop a "Yes AND" approach, combining SAFe with Scrum.
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Q&A with Jurgen Appelo on Management 3.0 Workout
The book Management 3.0 Workout by Jurgen Appelo contains games, practices, stories and tools that can be used to improve management in organizations. Managers can use the book to develop skills for servant leadership and increase employee engagement. Agile teams can adopt management practices described in the book to improve team work and collaboration helping them to become self-organizing.
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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.
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Q&A with Sander Hoogendoorn on This is Agile
The book This is Agile: Beyond the basics. Beyond the Hype. Beyond Scrum by Sander Hoogendoorn covers situations that enterprises can encounter when adopting agile, and provides solutions on how to deal with them. It is a translation of the Dutch book Dit is Agile. InfoQ interviewed Sander about managing agile projects, balancing the work in iterations, and different kinds of agile approaches.
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Q&A with Nadja Macht on Innovation, Flow and Continuous Improvement
Retrospectives help teams to learn from their experiences and improve continuously. In this interview Nadja Macht, Flow Manager and Coach at Jimdo, talks about how to balance flow and slack time in teams, doing visual management with Kanban boards and deploying agile retrospectives for continuous improvement.
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Q&A on the Book: The Agile Culture - Leading through Trust and Ownership
Developing an agile culture is something that enterprises often do when they adopt agile. Such a culture change involves changing the way that managers lead people to help them to become self-organized. The book "The Agile Culture" describes how you can develop a culture of energy and innovation, and provides tools to build trust, take ownership and deal with walls and resistance in organizations.
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Author Q&A: Portia Tung on The Dream Team Nightmare
Portia Tung answers questions about her "build your own adventure" book - The Dream Team Nightmare. Aimed at agile coaches and teams it presents a variety of scenarios for the reader to navigate by making choices at the end of each section. Some of these choices result in success and some expose various failure modes which the reader can examine and learn from.
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Coaching the CxO
Agile coaches are not unfamiliar in working with management roles such as project managers and team managers to facilitate changes on team level. But now they need to facilitate change on management level, which completely changes the scope of the agile coach. This article helps agile coaches to understand the context of their target audience and formulate a coaching message matching that context.
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Author Q&A – The Lean Mindset by Tom and Mary Poppendieck
The Lean Mindset is a collection of research results and case studies from companies applying lean in product development and delivery. A lean mindset according to Mary and Tom Poppendieck is about “developing the expertise to ask the right questions, solve the right problems, and do the right thing in the situation at hand”.
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Interview with Jan de Baere about the Rise and Fall of an Agile Company
What happens when a director of a consulting company decides to drastically change the culture? At the Agile Tour Brussels conference Jan de Baere presented the why and how of a company that adopted agile, the journey that they went through, and how it came to a sudden end. InfoQ interviewed him about the agile change approach, culture and trust, and the lessons learned from an agile journey.