InfoQ Homepage Continuous Improvement Content on InfoQ
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Optimizing for Speed with Continuous Organizational Transformation
A rapidly scaling company needs different structures at different sizes. You’re continuously reinventing yourself as your company grows by iterating on structures, processes, and roles. Continuous learning is critical for organizational transformations to succeed and it requires a high level of organizational agility.
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Making Distributed Organizations More Effective
An autonomous team model with teams organized around geographical or time-zone proximity can make a distributed organization more effective. With the Reverse Conway Maneuver you can deliberately add or remove bottlenecks to better support the designs you are trying to build.
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GitLab Annual DevOps Survey Shows Emerging Trends and Changing Roles
Completed by over 3500 developers from 21 countries, GitLab's DevOps survey encompasses three major areas, development and release, security, and testing. The survey hints at faster release cycles and improved quality, with the more recent DevSecOps area requiring more organizational fine-tuning. InfoQ has taken the chance to speak with GitLab's senior developer evangelist, Brendan O'Leary.
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What Will the Next 10 Years of Continuous Delivery Look Like?
Dave Farley and Jez Humble talked at the DeliveryConf about their expectations for the next ten years of Continous Delivery (CD). For CD to succeed, the IT industry needs to focus on three performance aspects: technical, organizational, and cultural–all profoundly interrelated. DORA's report has shown that technical practices can lead the change, but they alone aren't enough.
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Simulating Agile Strategies with the Lazy Stopping Model
Simulation can be used to compare agile strategies and increase understanding of their strengths and weaknesses in different organisational and project contexts. The Lazy Stopping Model derived from the idea that we often fail to gather sufficient information to get an optimal result. Agile strategies can be simulated in the model as more or less effective defences against this “lazy stopping.”
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How Lean Has Helped the IT Team Take Pride in Their Work
More teamwork, a better vision of daily work, a team that works in a concentrated way, and more pride in doing a job well; these are the benefits that Mélanie Noyel mentioned that their IT team at Acta gained from using Lean. At the Lean Digital Summit 2019 she presented on how they applied Lean to improve the IT team’s daily work.
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Refactoring Organizations to Reduce Organizational Debt
Organizations can accumulate organizational debt when adopting new ways of working. An agile mindset can be a driving force to remove organizational impediments and promote continuous improvement, said Jess Long, enterprise Agile coach at LeanDog. At the ACE Conference 2019, she presented how we can reduce organizational debt by refactoring organizations.
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DevOps Needs Continuous Improvement to Succeed
Continuous improvement is not a new thing and is often misunderstood. To be successful, we can take guidance from agile principles and apply them to the DevOps world, argued Mirco Hering, managing director at Accenture. At Agile Portugal 2019 he spoke about DevOps leadership in the age of agile.
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Experience Building a QA Team in a Growing Organization
Shifting the test team to the left brought the whole team closer together, enabled faster learning, and improved collaboration, claimed Neven Matas, QA team lead at Infinum. He spoke at TestCon Moscow 2019 where he shared the lessons learned from building a QA team in a growing organization.
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Retrospective 3.0 at Ocado Technology
Toni Tassani identifies retrospective pitfalls, such as stale and repetitive activities and raises risks: the retrospective as an excuse for not solving issues on the spot, identifying an experiment but not driving the impediment to resolution, Post-it theater. He suggests looking at retrospectives radically differently, leveraging continuous improvement techniques borrowed from Kanban.
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What Can We Learn from the Digital Natives Using Lean
Fabrice Bernhard, co-founder and CEO of Theodo UK, presented "what lean can learn from digital natives" at Lean Digital Summit 2018. Digital natives are familiar with the lean startup and agile practices. They go further by combining Agile with the Toyota Production System which enables them to experiment with ideas, spread innovations, and scale fast.
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Psychological Safety in Post-Mortems
Emotions often come to the fore when there is an incident; psychological safety in blameless post-mortems is essential for the learning process to happen. The post-mortem session must be fairly moderated, preferably by an outsider, giving everyone a turn to speak without criticism. Don’t start the analysis of the incident before there is a clear and common understanding of what actually happened.
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Think in Products, Not Projects: Q&A with Ardita Karaj
Organizations structured around products oversee their work end-to-end. Reversing Conway’s law to establish long-lived teams around the products brings stability and makes it easier to manage and prioritize work. Retrospectives are a powerful tool for product management; they give confidence to continue and help you pivote quickly on what might become high risk or loss for the organization.
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Incorporating Improv into Agile with Games
The rules of Improv provide a short-hand to enhance active listening, collaboration, and mutual reinforcement skills, all of which are integral to Agility. You can incorporate Improv activities and games to reinforce Agile mindset. The game debrief is where the value of the game becomes sustainable, as it explicitly ties emotions and aha-moments from the game experience to working scenarios.
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From Darwin to DevOps: John Willis and Gene Kim Talk about Life after The Phoenix Project
IT Revolution recently published an audiobook with nearly eight hours of conversation between Gene Kim and John Willis; Beyond the Phoenix Project – the Origins and Evolution of DevOps.