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Agile Stalwart David Hussman Passed away on 18 August
Product development expert and agile practitioner, community builder and stalwart David Hussman ("The Dude") passed away on 18 August, 2018. Hussman was the founder of DevJam, known among many things for devising Dude's Law to succinctly express the value in a product or idea. He was a musician, father, entrepreneur and community builder who will be sorely missed.
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QCon New York 2018: Better Developer Experience at Netflix: Polyglot and Containers
Mike McGarr, manager of developer productivity at Netflix, recently presented Better DexEx at Netflix: Polyglot and Containers at QCon New York 2018. He described how Netflix evolved from operating as a Java shop to supporting developer tools built with multiple languages. This has ultimately provided a better development experience. McGarr spoke to InfoQ about centralized teams at Netflix.
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Think in Products, Not Projects: Q&A with Ardita Karaj
Organizations structured around products oversee their work end-to-end. Reversing Conway’s law to establish long-lived teams around the products brings stability and makes it easier to manage and prioritize work. Retrospectives are a powerful tool for product management; they give confidence to continue and help you pivote quickly on what might become high risk or loss for the organization.
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Gartner Updates Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Agile Planning Tools
In 2017, Gartner replaced their study on “Application Development Lifecycle Management” with new research on “Enterprise Agile Planning Tools”. According to the analysts, by leveraging customer centric and business outcome driven practices with continual feedback, Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP) tools help organizations establish agile practices at scale
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Heidi Helfand on Listening for Maximum Impact
Leadership starts with listening and it can amplify your impact! Heidi Helfand presented at Agile2018 on developing our listening skills to be a better leader. Leaders who listen have a big impact on their teams. Slowing down and paying attention, actually listening vs. jumping to give answers, is where the impact is. It may seem slower, but it has lasting results.
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Arthur Purnama on Integrated IT and Organizational Transformation
Arthur Purnama will talk at the upcoming Agile Impact conference in Indonesia about his experiences helping organisations move towards integrated IT, and how the importance of understanding how people think, comprehend, and receive the message of change is crucial to the success of any transformation program.
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Keeping Distributed Teams in Sync
The biggest challenge of distributed teams is communication, which is essential for establishing ground rules on collaboration. Shifting working hours to accommodate each other and team liaisons help to communicate and synchronize work. Teams based on trust, respect, and openness will encourage themselves to help people throughout the organization and foster a culture that keeps teams in sync.
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Author, Teacher, and Consultant Jerry Weinberg Passed Away
Gerald M. “Jerry” Weinberg, author, teacher, and consultant, passed away August 7, 2018, at the age of 84. Weinberg published about 100 books on computer programming, systems thinking, leadership, change, consulting, and writing.
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Spark the Change: Unleashing People’s Talent
Make curiosity our priority, fundamentally question how and when work should happen, enable fragmentation with technology to become a task-based society, maximize the possibility of authentic human connection in recruiting, ask questions to spark the change, and look for ways to integrate refugees into the workforce: These are some of the conclusions and suggestions to unleash people’s talent.
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Digital Disruption via Space: High-Speed Internet Access through Satellites
Satellites are enabling high speed access to the internet in rural areas, on airplanes, and for internet service providers to the core network. Space technology innovations like electric propulsion, digitalization revolutionize telecommunications and new entrants like SpaceX are forcing launch costs down. These developments will enable new services and lower the costs of existing ones.
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Focusing on Business Outcomes at Barclays: Overcoming the "Urgency Paradox"
Jonathan Smart, head of working ways, and Morag McCall, PMO at Barclays, spoke last month at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in London about re-thinking the entire flow of work, from initial idea triage until releasing to production. This means introducing agility into how the application and services portfolio is managed, as well as changing the role of the PMO and finance departments.
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Brain Based Learning: Applying Training From The Back Of The Room
The human brain learns in many different ways; a training mode must fit the purpose and desired outcome. Practices from Training From the BACK of the Room! can be used to make training stick. Forcing big changes on people can be perceived as a threat; it’s better to create psychological safety, foster curiosity, and give feedback in ways that continue the dialogue instead of shutting down.
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Fin Goulding Injects Agility into the Management of Everything
Fin Goulding, international CIO at Aviva, recently spoke at the DevOps Enterprise Summit London about using flow principles to advance agile capabilities throughout an organisation. InfoQ asked Goulding to expand on some of the points that he made during his talk.
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Spark the Change: Building Tomorrow’s Company
Tomorrow’s company has to invest in well being, should move away from individual silos to team delivery, needs to have psychological space and safety, and must be able to deal with uncertainty. To build such companies we can use gamification, pretotyping, IoT, artificial intelligence, robots, chatbots and other conversational interfaces. We should focus on teams and question how we work together.
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Ben Gracewood on Learning from an Organisational Train Wreck
At the recent JAFAC conference, Ben Gracewood told the story of how POS developer Vend transformed their development organisation following catastrophic disruption and losses. He explored what happened after they reduced headcount by over 30%, what they had in place that enabled them to survive, and what they did differently as a result of the changes.