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Culture & Methods

Continuous Learning as a Tool for Adaptation

The fifth and capstone article in a series on how software companies adapted and continue to adapt to enhance their resilience explores key themes with a special view on the practicality of organizational resilience. It also provides practical guidance to engineering leadership and recommendations on how to create this investment.

Nora Jones
on May 07, 2021
Culture & Methods

Put the Feedback back into “Demo & Feedback”

As agilists, we know the importance of showing our work and getting feedback as early as we possibly can. That feedback guides what we do next. To get what you need to meet the desires of your stakeholders, this article looks at the demo and the feedback part of that session and provides suggestions for creating amazing demo & feedback sessions.

Jenni Jepsen Ole Jepsen
on Mar 18, 2021
Culture & Methods

Surviving Zombie Scrum

The book Zombie Scrum Survival Guide by Christiaan Verwijs, Johannes Schartau, and Barry Overeem aims to support teams that are stuck in Zombie Scrum. It helps them to understand why things are the way they are and provide them with experiments to get out of this state of Zombie Scrum by enabling collaboration with stakeholders, working increments, autonomy for teams, and continuous improvement.

Ben Linders Christiaan Verwijs Johannes Schartau Barry Overeem
on Mar 15, 2021
Culture & Methods

Becoming an Exceptional Manager

The book Manager in Shorts by Gal Zellermayer describes principles of management in hi-tech, focusing on people, processes, and culture. It provides tips and ideas that readers can use to develop their leadership skills and learn how to manage technical people and become an exceptional manager.

Ben Linders Gal Zellermayer
on Mar 01, 2021
Culture & Methods

Leading during Times of High Uncertainty and Change

To help teams succeed during uncertain times, leaders need to navigate different horizons; managing themselves and building strong relationships with their teams. Organisations need leadership at all levels. In order to be successful, leaders should develop skills for self-management, delegation, dealing with ambiguity, managing in all directions, systems thinking, and leading through context.

Ben Linders Lena Reinhard
on Feb 24, 2021
Culture & Methods

Improving Organizational Agility with Self-Management

This article presents "self-management" as a possibility to natively support agility to plant seeds and let both institutions and people thrive and benefit from it. Agility may go hand-in-hand with self-management as a way to shift mindsets and open a conversation to really find new ways of working in organizations.

Massimo Lavelli Pietro Antolini
on Feb 10, 2021
Culture & Methods

Adaptive Frontline Incident Response: Human-Centered Incident Management

The third article in a series on how software companies adapted and continue to adapt to enhance their resilience zeros in on the sources that comprise most of your company’s adaptive resources: your frontline responders. In this article, we draw on our experiences as incident commanders with Twilio to share our reflections on what it means to cultivate resilient people.

Emily Ruppe Ryan McDonald
on Feb 05, 2021
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Book The Rise of the Agile Leader

The book The Rise of the Agile Leader by Chuck Mollor is a blueprint for leaders navigating change in the pursuit of success. Mollor shares his story of self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-development, while demonstrating a leadership paradigm, a roadmap of what makes a great leader, and what organizations can do to develop great leaders.

Ben Linders Chuck Mollor
on Jan 07, 2021
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Book Retrospectives Antipatterns

Using the familiar “patterns” approach, the book Retrospectives Antipatterns by Aino Vonge Corry describes unfortunate situations that can sometimes happen in retrospectives. For each situation, described as an antipattern, it also provides solutions for dealing with the situation; this can be a way to solve the problem directly or avoid similar problems in future retrospectives.

Ben Linders Aino Vonge Corry
on Dec 25, 2020
Culture & Methods

Changes in the 2020 Scrum Guide: Q&A with Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland

The Scrum Guide has been updated to make it less prescriptive, using simpler language to address a wider audience. These changes have been done to make Scrum a “lightweight framework that helps people, teams and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems”. An interview with Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland about the changes to the guide.

Ben Linders Ken Schwaber Jeff Sutherland
on Dec 24, 2020
Culture & Methods

Dealing with Remote Team Challenges

Remote working provides challenges such as providing equitable access, ensuring adequate resources and tooling, addressing social isolation and issues of trust. Remote-first and truly asynchronous teams tend to consistently perform better. In the future, organisations will continue to have remote on their agenda. Fully realising the benefits of remote teams requires trust building and intent.

Ben Linders Jeremy Lu
on Dec 09, 2020
Culture & Methods

Kick-off Your Transformation by Imagining It Had Failed

Large scale change initiatives have a worryingly high failure rate, the chief reason for which is that serious risks are not identified early. One way to create the safety needed for everyone to speak openly about the risks they see is by running a pre-mortem. In a pre-mortem, we assume that the transformation had already failed and walk backward from there to investigate what led to the failure.

Ayman Idris
on Nov 27, 2020