InfoQ Homepage Culture & Methods Content on InfoQ
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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.
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How No and Low Code Approaches Support Business Users and Professional Developers
No code approaches aim to support business users in developing and maintaining their own applications, where low code simplifies the developer’s work and makes them more productive. Both approaches enable faster development at lower costs. As the distinction between these approaches is becoming smaller, business users and developers can team up and use them together.
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DevSecOps Grows Up and Finds Itself a Community
On June 28th, the first DevSecOps Days event came to London following a similar event in San Francisco in April. It kicked off with a welcome address from event founders, Mark Miller and John Willis, who explained that the intention is to replicate the DevOpsDays model and empower communities worldwide to stand up their own events.
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Breaking Codes, Designing Jets and Building Teams: Randy Shoup Discusses High Performing Teams
At QCon NY, Randy Shoup, VP Engineering at WeWork, presented “Breaking Codes, Designing Jets and Building Teams”. He began the talk by quoting Mark Twain, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”, and stated that throughout history he believes the most effective teams have focused on purpose, organisational culture, people, and engineering excellence.
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The New CIO: Leading IT the Mark Schwartz Way
Mark Schwartz, formerly CIO at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services and now enterprise strategist at AWS, spoke at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in London about what it means to lead IT.
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Getting More Work Done in Fewer Working Hours
When Jason Lengstorf’s body was actively falling apart due of the way he was working, he decided to limit his computer usage and create pockets of high-focus effort. Working fewer hours prevents you from becoming overtired or unfocused. We need to treat downtime with the same level of care as we treat our uptime, using breaks to make creative connections, recharge, and to remember why we work.
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Driving Innovation at Switzerland's Largest Bank
Jelena Laketic, head of asset management SWAT (SoftWare Action Team) at UBS, spoke at the DevOps Enterprise Summit London about some of the lessons she has learned driving innovation at the largest bank in Switzerland. InfoQ reached out to Laketic in order to get her view on the particular challenges and successes around her SWAT journey and what innovation means at UBS.
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Challenges of Moving from Projects to Products
Carmen DeArdo, former DevOps technology director at Nationwide Insurance, and Nicole Bryan, vice-president of product management at Tasktop, recently spoke at the DevOps Enterprise Summit London on the importance of moving from a project-based to a product-based organization.
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Miki Szikszai on Growing Technical Talent at Snapper
At the JAFAC conference Snapper CEO Miki Szikszai gave a talk on how the company overcame some of the challenges of growing their technical team in an environment of perceived skills shortage. Their approach of employing teams of graduates and giving them real customer facing work to do rather than interspersing them into existing teams results in better outcomes and enabled rapid growth.
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Spark the Change: Sparkling Disruptions
A new transportation system that enables people to live and work anywhere, networking through an app to share stories and get ideas that change your company, and high-speed internet through space to connect people everywhere on the planet; these are sparkling disruptions which were presented at the Spark the Change conference.
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Chatbots 101 for Developers: Q&A with Anamita Guha
Chatbots are becoming more critical to developers in their daily lives – from understanding how the technology operates, to creating better code. Developers tend to have a natural curiosity about bots and the tech behind it. Artificial intelligence tools exist to address emotional intelligence with chatbots in conversational interfaces.