InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ

Articles

RSS Feed

Newer Older

Kanban on Track - Evolutionary Change Management at the Swiss Railways

Swiss Railways (Schweizerische Bundesbahnen, SBB) employed Kanban to transform a department from disappointing performance to predictable efficiency through a series of incremental improvements. The evolutionary nature of Kanban gained traction with early quick wins and resulted in better management and greater responsiveness to change. This is a brief report of their two year journey.

Mike Beyer Sigi Kaltenecker
on Apr 28, 2014
Culture is the True North - Scaling at Jimdo

A lot of the pain that large and medium-sized organizations are facing boils down to scaling. It is not difficult to have 5-10 people working together in one room. However, as your business becomes more successful and your hiring increases, you will start to see problems. At Jimdo, the approach to scaling relies on three major factors: culture, communication, and kaizen.

Arne Roock
on Apr 24, 2014
Stake Holder Leadership - Bear in Mind: Loving the Champion Bear

In an extract from his book "Project Management: Influence and Leadership Building Rapport in Teams" Michael Nir talks about the importance of effective stakeholder management on projects. He discusses the various categories of stakeholders and provides some advice for approaches to interacting with different stakeholder groups.

Michael Nir
on Apr 23, 2014
Q&A with Ignace and Yves Hanoulle about the Leadership Game

People have different ideas about what a leader can and should do, and personal leadership preferences. The book The Leadership Game is the manual for a three-hour game in which different leadership styles are practiced. InfoQ did an interview with Ignace and Yves Hanoulle about leadership styles, pair training and observing and giving feedback.

Ben Linders
on Apr 18, 2014
Untangling the Enterprise With Continuous Delivery

John Kordyback explains why you should and how you can introduce Continuous Delivery into a typical enterprise, where dozens of systems adopted over the years generate massive complexity. Learn how value-stream mapping and Lean Startup thinking help to create a deployment process which serves as a solid foundation for further improvements on the whole software change lifecycle.

John Kordyback
on Apr 16, 2014
Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) @ J.P. Morgan

Experiences of large group in tier-one financial services firm adopting Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS). “Scrum-But” and agile techniques had been applied mainly in development, but there had been no significant change in existing power or group structures, or in interaction with business - which was still “contract negotiation” rather than “customer collaboration”. Here meaningful change is described

Matt Winn Craig Larman
on Apr 14, 2014
Q&A with Robert Pankowecki on his book Developers Oriented Project Management

Self-organized teams manage their work, the processes that they use and the way that they work together as a team and with their stakeholders. Robert Pankowecki is writing a book on Developers Oriented Project Management which aims to help programmers, product owners, project managers and agile company owners to improve their project management practices and move towards more flat organizations.

Ben Linders
on Apr 10, 2014
Bug Fixing Vs. Problem Solving - From Agile to Lean

Lean has proved to be instrumental in moving beyond Agile to set up a practice of continuous improvement with direct effects on team performance and engagement. Making a clear distinction between bugs and problems has proved to be instrumental in this improvement.

Cecil Dijoux
on Apr 07, 2014
Key Takeaway Points and Lessons Learned from QCon London 2014

This article summarizes the key takeaways and highlights from QCon London 2014 as blogged and tweeted by attendees. Over the course of the next 4 months, InfoQ will be publishing most of the conference sessions online, including 27 video interviews that were recorded by the InfoQ editorial team. The publishing schedule can be found on the QCon London web site.

Abel Avram
on Apr 03, 2014
eXtreme Programming The Methodology

A practical approach to implementing eXtreme Programming as a methodology. This article first sets the stage regarding the values, roles, plan & manage, and design & development principles of XP are. Then it discusses a personal experience from an Agile Coach perspective implementing eXtreme Programming followed by recommendations, and conclusion.

Sanjeev Raman
on Apr 02, 2014
Interview with Tobias Mayer about the People’s Scrum and AgileLib

The people’s Scrum by Tobias Mayer is a collection of essays covering topics like self-organizing, team working, craftsmanship, technical debt, estimation, retrospectives, culture and Scrum adoption. InfoQ interviewed Tobias about the importance of people, teams and self organization with Scrum and about AgileLib.net, a new initiative for sharing agile resources.

Ben Linders
on Mar 31, 2014
Pair Painting

Victoria was painting her kitchen last week and it got her thinking about pair programming. She and her partner have painted rooms together before, and they've ended up with something they've been really proud of, but when she did this alone, even though she has the skills and the knowledge, it didn't end up as good. She wondered why?

Victoria Morgan-Smith
on Mar 27, 2014