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Highlights from JAFAC 2019 - Day 1: Leadership, Disruption, Ethics, and Social Good
JAFAC (Just Another F&#k!ng Agile Conference) 2019 was held in Wellington, New Zealand on 5 and 6 September, 2019. The conference brings different voices to the fore, avoiding the usual suspects, and also highlighting ways that agile ideas are being applied in a wide variety of contexts. Important themes that emerged were leadership, disruption, ethics and the application of tech for social good
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Creating a Startup outside of Silicon Valley - Q&A with Rachel Carlson of Guild Education
Rachel Carlson spoke at Develop Denver about her decision to create a tech startup outside the expected location in San Francisco. Although the idea was initially met with resistance by her investors, she believes having the headquarters for Guild Education in Denver, Colorado, has provided many benefits.
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Effectiveness or Efficiency: Agile Shouldn't Feel Like a Fight
Have you ever felt like the “agile” you’re advocating for is completely different from the “agile” your organisation or managers wants? If so, you need to stop and reassess, argued Tony O'Halloran in his talk at Agile Business Day 2019. Having a mismatch in these fundamental goals causes stress and anxiety in change agents and can put you in an isolating and lonely place professionally.
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Using VR and AR for Pain Management
Immersive technologies have been used for the past 30 years to treat pain, PTSD, phobia, anxiety, and phantom limb syndrome. The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, and 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual. Since we are visual by nature, we can use VR and AR in pain management.
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Changing How We Think about Work-Life Balance
The term “work-life balance” is outdated; what we now associate with work and life are not always the same as they were traditionally, said Jennifer Cox at Women in Tech Dublin 2019. In many cases they overlap or clash from time to time, making it even harder to mentally separate the two. “We have to shift our thinking more towards integration and alignment, than balance,” she argued.
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Training Your Managers to Support the Mental Health of Your Team
We still do not offer clear advice for our organizations and managers on the best ways to raise awareness of and manage mental health in the workplace, according to a recent review of the literature on mental health awareness training.
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The Importance of Leadership and Management in Hypergrowth
At QCon New York 2019, Patrick Kua shared lessons learned sowing the seeds and fertilising an environment to cultivate high performing teams in a startup fintech company. This article explores how to manage technical managers in a fast growing company.
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Inclusive Leadership Supports Collaboration and Diversity In Teams
Research on Inclusive leadership shows it can provide gains in team performance, including being 29% more likely to show collaborative behaviour. Inclusive leadership showed it was effective at activating the value of diversity in a team. It required leaders to show humility, cultural intelligence and awareness of bias as key attributes.
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How Artificial Intelligence Impacts Designing Products
Artificial intelligence is changing the way that we interact with technology; eliminating unnecessary interfaces makes interaction with machines more humane, argued Agnieszka Walorska at ACE conference 2019. The expectations towards customer experience have changed, and one factor that is becoming more and more important to this change is machine learning.
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Agile 2019 Keynote Talks Available to View
The Agile Alliance has published keynote talks from the recent Agile 2019 conference. The keynote speakers were Chris Bailey on retaining focus, Lynne Cazaly on accepting good enough and Portia Tung on playful leadership.
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QCon San Francisco '19: Track Hosts from WeWork, Microsoft, Tesla Focus on Architecture, ML, Culture
Registrations for the 13th annual QCon San Francisco (Nov 11-15, 2019) are off to a great start. With less than 15 weeks until the conference, and savings of $645 before the early bird ends on August 24th, there is no better time to reserve your spot for this professional software development conference.
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Design Sprints at LEGO: Q&A with Eik Thyrsted Brandsgård
Design sprints have led to a high level of energy and motivation at LEGO. You need to discuss the ideas and learnings coming out of each sprint to decide if there’s a solution or if you need to go deeper in the next sprint. Design sprints have created a sense of pride; a belief that teams can tackle any challenge, and the feeling that individuals can add value that exceeds their expected roles.
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14th State of Agile Report Open
The 14th State of Agile survey is now open and software professionals are invited to take the survey.
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Why Self-Organisation is Intuitive, Yet Challenging to Adopt
Self-organisation can be challenging; you need to understand what's required to achieve, and success needs to be visible, said Mirco Hering, managing director at Accenture. He suggested to create boundaries in which to self-organise and enrich the team’s context, showing how well they are doing.
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Achieving Predictability in a Complex World
Predictability is the precursor and enabler for other important things people are looking for, like doing things faster and cheaper, argued Jose Casal at Agile Portugal 2019. He presented how to achieve predictability in three steps: focus on work in progress, reduce time to get work done, and consider how to get more done.