InfoQ Homepage Continuous Improvement Content on InfoQ
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Organizing Improvements with Lean Leadership at ING Bank
It’s the manager’s job to organize improvements and to make sure that real learnings take place. For real learnings you must accept the unknown and move outside of your knowledge boundary. Agile, lean and continuous delivery help to boost your learning capabilities.
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Making Distributed Development Work
Distributed development depends on effective communication: you need to look for ways to have robust and diverse communication, build empathy towards each other to encourage feedback, and keep an eye on motivation. Team members are more engaged and creative when there’s shared ownership and responsibility for complete delivery from idea to production in distributed teams.
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Overcoming Self-Imposed Limitations
People can feel limited when challenged, which slows them down or keeps them from trying. It can be a real problem, but their fear might actually be in their imagination. Sometimes the only thing that's holding you back is yourself. Survival rules can hinder us- sometimes you have to break them.
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Experimenting with Peer Feedback in Tech Teams
Feedback can be used to build trust in teams and help individuals improve their skills and grow in their craft. Emily Page and Doug Talbot shared their experiences from experimenting with peer feedback at Ocado Technology at Spark the Change London 2016. An interview with Emily Page, Organizational Catalyst at Ocado Technology.
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Managing in the Networked Society
More and more now value is created through connected organizations and individuals using seamless collaboration across boundaries. At the same time however, many companies are still influenced by management practices invented in 19th century. A paradigm shift is needed to successfully manage in the networked society.
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Increase Learning with 10% Autonomy Time
Giving teams autonomy to spend 10% of their time for learning reduces delivery time, increases quality, and increases motivation. The 10% rule gives teams full autonomy to work on things they consider important. It results in freeing up people's creativity and letting teams grow their potential.
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Don't Copy the Spotify Model
The Spotify model can help you to understand how things are done at Spotify, but you shouldn’t copy it in your own organization. It changes all the time as people at Spotify learn and discover new things. There is no one way in which software is developed at Spotify.
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Continuous Improvement Beyond Retrospectives
If you want continuous improvement you can start with retrospectives, but you must go far beyond that with change management, culture change, and innovation. The most important thing in order to make change happen in organizations is creating new habits and changing your culture.
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Rethink Leadership: Being Ordinary to Accomplish Extraordinary Results
Ordinariness in leadership can help us to accomplish extraordinary results, argues agile/lean coach Katherine Kirk. Several more people have explored approaches that suggest to rethink leadership and go back to behaviour basics for leading people. Although these approaches are about small ordinary things, their effect may cause a revolution in the way organizations are being managed.
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Getting the Data Needed for Data Science
Data science is about the data that you need; deciding which data to collect, create, or keep is fundamental argues Lukas Vermeer, an experienced Data Science professional and Product Owner for Experimentation at Booking.com. True innovation starts with asking big questions, then it becomes apparent which data is needed to find the answers you seek.
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How GlobalLogic Used a Bottom-up Approach to Become More Agile
Yuriy Koziy, delivery manager at GlobalLogic, argued at the Agile Eastern Europe 2016 conference that organizational change should start at the team level rather than in senior management. He formed a group of like-minded engineering managers and agile coaches who act as change agents, transforming the organization bottom-up from the inside.
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Growing Agility
Andrea Tomasini will give a keynote talk titled "Stop Scaling, Start Growing an Agile Organization" at the Agile Eastern Europe 2016 Conference. InfoQ interviewed him about growing agility.
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Marketing Communications Chapter by Agile Consortium
The Agile Consortium has launched the MarComs chapter which aims to exchange knowledge on agile among marketing and communication professionals. InfoQ interviewed Jeremy Curtin, one of the founders and chair of this initiative.
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Applying Feedback Techniques
Dan North talked about models and techniques for giving and receiving feedback and how to apply them effectively at the QCon London 2016 conference.
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Shane Hastie on Applying the Agile Mindset to Tough Business Challenges at Agile Tour Singapore
Shane Hastie gave a keynote talk at Agile Tour Singapore Conference 2015 in which he discussed Agile mindset and how it can be helpful in solving tough business problems.