InfoQ Homepage Continuous Improvement Content on InfoQ
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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?
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Concerns about Measuring Velocity for Team Improvement
Agile teams measure the velocity of their sprints. It helps them to plan and track their progress and provides insight for product owners to plan product releases. Can teams also use velocity data when they want to improve themselves? Several authors have written about velocity and shared their concerns on measuring velocity to improve the productivity of teams.
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Having Actions Done from Retrospectives
Agile retrospectives help teams to find and do actions to improve continuously. There are different ways to do follow up on the actions and to evaluate if actions are leading to better team performance and more value delivered to customers.
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The Habit of Improving
Agile is about a mindset and a contiguous improvement of everything said Yves Hanoulle. InfoQ did an interview with him about the habits that people have and what you can do to get into the habit of improving.
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Supporting Personal Development in a Learning Organization
Organizations learn through their employees. To enable adoption of agile ways of working, organization have to support the personal development of their employees.
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Benefits-led Process Improvement Using the CMMI
Achieving a maturity level is a target often used in CMMI based process improvement programs. It can be important for organizations to have insight in the relation between a maturity level and business goals, and to know the business benefits. An interview with Michelle Krupa on changing an improvement program from being CMMI Maturity Level based to a benefits led approach.
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Interview with Kevin Behr on Continuous Improvement Kung-Fu
At the recent DevOps Days in New York, Kevin Behr, co-author of “The Visible Ops Handbook” and ”The Phoenix Project”, and Jesse Palmer gave a talk on how they instilled a continuous improvement culture into an operations team. InfoQ interviewed Kevin Behr to know more about the approach that was taken.
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Using Retrospectives for Personal Improvement
Agile retrospectives are used by teams to improve their performance, by reflecting on the way of working and defining improvement actions. But retrospectives can also be used for personal improvement, additional to or as a replacement of performance appraisals. Such retrospectives can be done as a one-on-one by a manager and an employee, individually by an employee, or in a team.
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Agile Retrospectives, Can You Skip Them?
Teams sometimes consider to skip a retrospective meeting, when they feel time pressure, or do not see direct benefits of doing one. Next they question themselves if they have to keep doing retrospectives? Agile retrospectives help teams to learn and improve continuously, and there are valid reasons to keep doing them also with mature teams.
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Sustainable Pace, How to Achieve and Improve it?
Being one of the principles of the agile manifesto, sustainable pace is considered important by many to deploy agile. But achieving a sustainable pace can be difficult, and teams are often asked to improve their velocity. What did you do to adopt sustainable pace with your team? And how did you improve the speed in which your team delivers, and establish a new sustainable level?