InfoQ Homepage Continuous Improvement Content on InfoQ
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Key Takeaways from the 'Agile on the Beach' Conference: Day One
At the fifth ‘Agile on the Beach’ conference, held in Cornwall, UK, several leading practitioners of agile software delivery presented the state-of-the-art and emerging trends within this domain. Key messages included the need for the more rigorous use of the scientific method throughout the software delivery lifecycle, and the benefits provided by applying agile principles to product development.
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Driving Transformational Behavior with Core Work Systems
Mike Orzen will talk about using core work systems to drive transformational behavior at the Lean IT Summit 2015. An interview on the benefits that organizations aim for with lean IT, why adopting and reinforcing new behaviors is essential to create sustained change, core work systems and work processes for IT organizations, and common missteps in lean IT transformations and how to prevent them.
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Getting Actions Done to Make Change Happen
Even with best intentions it can be challenging for people to follow up on actions that they agreed to do. They can start to doubt if they can do the actions and become afraid to fail. Several authors have recognized this and came up with suggestions for dealing with it and making change happen.
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Improving Quality and Delivery Speed with DevOps Teams
You can increase the quality of products by constantly increasing the level of automation of the delivery process and working with DevOps teams who constantly deliver small features to get quick customer feedback. A case story from ING Lease explaining the problems they had, experiences from the first steps of their agile and DevOps journey and exploring what they want to achieve in the future.
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Using Pairing for Experimenting in Presentations
In the closing keynote of the Agile Eastern Europe 2015 conference Yves Hanoulle did an experiment together with his son Joppe in pair presenting. InfoQ interviewed Joppe and Yves Hanoulle about doing experiments, checking the safety of the environment and ways to make it safer, learning from failure, and presenting in pairs at conferences.
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Leadership and Management Approaches from Radical Companies
Introducing and managing change in organizations can be challenging. InfoQ interviewed Jason Little who is involved in organizing the Spark the Change Canada 2015 conference about the leadership and management approaches that radical companies use, on finding better ways to manage people and about what will happen to management in the near future.
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How Agile Can Learn from Behavioral Economics
People often don’t decide and act rationally, according to studies from the area of behavioral economics. Pierre Hervouet describes how our brain takes decisions, talks about experiments on using personas and the IKEA effect and explains what we can learn from these experiments for agile software development.
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Agile Teams and Managers can Collaborate to Solve Impediments
Impediments are issues that hinder agile teams. They are problems that teams are facing, which they need to solve. Managers can help agile teams in several ways to solve impediments.
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Q&A with Andreas Schliep on ScALeD – Scaled Agile and Lean Development
The introduction and integration of agile approaches to an organization should be regarded and treated as an agile project itself says Andreas Schliep. An interview with Andreas about pitfalls when trying to scale agile, on ScALeD and how it compares to Agility Path, LeSS, SAFe and DaD, and on continuous improvement and scaling retrospectives.
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Deploying Transparency and Self Regulating Management to Get Actions Done
At the Lean Kanban France 2014 conference Bjarte Bogsnes gave a keynote presentation about beyond budgeting. In his presentation he talked about the problems with traditional management and how transparency and self regulating management comes to the rescue, and the principles and practices of beyond budgeting.
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Use Your Blockades to Sustainably Improve
Blockades in work, like insufficient information, unclear requirements or having to wait for tools or systems to become available can have a systematic cause. It could be the case that similar problems that block the team keep happening until the underlying causes are addressed. You can use your blockades as treasures of improvement to sustainably improve the way work is done.
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Maturity Model for Continuous Performance Improvement
Martin Fowler, described Maturity Model as a tool that helps people assess the current effectiveness of a person or group and supports figuring out what capabilities they need to acquire next in order to improve their performance.
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Huge Retrospectives with Online Games
Agile retrospectives are mostly done at the team level or at a project level. What if you need to conduct a retrospective with 50 teams or more? Luke Hohmann describes how a large scale agile transformation project did a huge retrospective to create insight on what was going well and what needed to be improved.
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Agile and Lean Service Management for Enterprises
Agile software development or Scrum is not enough to make your enterprise truly deliver on the Agile promises, says Dave van Herpen. He suggests that IT service management should apply agile and lean practices combined with DevOps to improve collaboration throughout the entire enterprise.
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Role of Managers in Agile Retrospectives
Agile teams use retrospectives to reflect upon their way of working. Since it’s the team’s own responsibility to continuously improve themselves they have to decide upon the actions that they will do. What can managers do to support their teams when they are doing agile retrospectives?