InfoQ Homepage Management Content on InfoQ
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The Misaligned Middle and Getting off the Hamster Wheel Using Kanban
At the Agile 2016 conference, Dominica DeGrandis and Julia Wester of Leankit gave talks on helping middle managers adapt to change and how Kanban can be used to identify problems in workflows, which people need to address.
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Predictable Agile Delivery
Human teams are unique, non-linear and unpredictable, but given the right conditions, their output can become linear, scaled and predictable. Managers have an enabling role to play: encouraging the development of predictability; understanding the needs of their teams; and rolling-up their sleeves to clear the blockages themselves or by escalating the problem promptly and responsibly.
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Adaptable or Predictable? Strive for Both – Be Predictably Adaptable!
Our efforts to improve software development face the question of what to focus on. Should we govern for predictability without concern of value, maximizing cost-efficiency without concern for end-to-end responsiveness? Or maybe do the opposite and govern for value over predictability, focus on responsiveness over cost efficiency? What we really need is to be predictably adaptable.
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Stop Measuring Turn Around Time
Are you patting yourself on the back for remarkable turn around times while simultaneously neglecting your customers? It's tempting to think that timeliness matters when in fact it rarely does. Stop measuring turn around time and start learning what matters to customers.
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Don't Break Your Silos - Push Out the Silo Mentality
Organizational silos are a serious hurdle for many companies out there. They may cause a wide variety of problems if not dealt with accordingly. Silos may not need to be broken if you manage to push out the mentality that comes with them by creating ventilators. The first step towards dealing with the silos is to learn more about them and familiarize yourself with the best practices against them.
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A Letter to the Manager: Release the Power of Your Agile Teams
Agile is both simple and hard – and success depends on managers creating a suitable environment for their teams. Here a coach’s experiences from several agile transformations are made into concrete recommendations for strengthening agile teams. To create and sustain high-performing agile teams, these points are fundamental.
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Q&A with Shawn Callahan on Putting Stories to Work
The book Putting Stories to Work by Shawn Callahan provides a process with a practical approach to master business storytelling; a leadership skill that helps to achieve results. It contains many stories that can help you to use storytelling for business communication and culture change.
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Test Management Revisited
The concept of test management sits awkwardly in agile, mostly because it’s a construct derived from the time when testing was a post-development phase, performed by independent testing teams. Agile, with its focus on cross functional teams, has sounded the death knell for many test managers. While test management is largely irrelevant in agile, there is still a desperate need for test leadership.
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Voys Learns to Play the Holacracy Game
Holacracy removes power from a management hierarchy and distributes it across teams that have a clear set of roles, responsibilities, and expectations. This new organizational system with no managers or titles is often misunderstood. Learn about holacracy from the Dutch telecom company Voys who implemented this new way of running organizations.
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Connect Agile Teams to Organizational Hierarchy: A Sociocratic Solution
Many agile teams suffer from the mismatch of agile and organizational leadership with the latter being reflected by the organizational hierarchy. This article suggests using sociocracy as a solution that leaves the hierarchies in place yet still allows teams to act in an agile way.
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The CTO’s New Innovation Playbook
In a time of rapid business and technological change, CTOs and other technology leaders are increasingly looking to new methods to drive their digital technology agendas. Creating a new innovation playbook for innovation requires an understanding of the widening disjuncture that disconnects corporate R&D spending from innovation - while also harnessing the rise of new “innovation enablers.”
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Q&A on Kanban Change Leadership
In the book Kanban Change Leadership Klaus Leopold and Sigi Kaltenecker explore how Kanban can be deployed to get change done in organizations and to build a culture of continuous improvement. An interview on doing change in small steps, solving problems, using WIP limits, priorities and classes of service in Kanban, using the Theory of Constraints with Kanban, and getting results with Kanban.